God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  There were now two clear slogans in religious debate: the Protestation was a totemic expression of defence of the doctrine (but not the discipline) of the Church of England, and a bulwark against popery. The Prayer Book, by contrast, expressed both the doctrine and the discipline of the Church of England, and was therefore a bulwark against both sectarianism and popery, so long as it could be agreed that it was not itself popish. These Prayer Book petitions were driven not just by fear of course, but by an attachment to the forms of religion currently established. Nonetheless, the necessity of petitioning in order to sustain the status quo reflected anxiety that that settlement was not safe. In at least sixteen counties there were clashes between those promoting rival petitions, and those clashes were related to opposition to the Protestation.100 Anti-Laudians, of whom there seems to have been no shortage, might sign up for either.

  Successive drafts of one of these petitions survive from Essex and they reveal the tensions that might lie behind these campaigns. The drafts survive among the papers of Henry Nevill, a prominent supporter of the Personal Rule in Essex and an opponent of the Puritan networks protected by the Earl of Warwick. It told of the need to protect the Prayer Book in the light of local disorders. The detail and the way in which the stories were redrafted suggest that, although the petition was addressed to the King, the audience for the petition was as much opinion in the county. It highlighted not only how the Protestation had been used as a pretext for religious disorder, but also how attempts to restore order had been obstructed by the Grand Jury. Close analysis of who was on the Grand Jury suggests that it had indeed been captured by the local godly. Actual desecrations of the Prayer Book and disruptions of the observance of the liturgy bear testimony to local support for the view (stated in the first Root and Branch petition) that the Prayer Book was ‘a plain device to usher in the mass’.101 In Essex, as elsewhere, there was a developing battle between rival fears of popery and religious anarchy – emblematically expressed in attachment to the Protestation or the Prayer Book.102

  The anti-sectarian pamphlets of September point to a further change in the means by which political debate was being conducted. A consequence of the abolition of High Commission and Star Chamber in July was not only to further reduce the effective influence of church discipline, but also to end controls on printing. George Thomason, the London bookseller, had been collecting pamphlets since early 1640. Prior to the meeting of the Long Parliament he had collected seventeen, over nine months. Between November 1640 and May 1641, the month of the attainder of Strafford, he had amassed a further 116. From May onwards he was collecting around sixty per month, and in September amassed eighty. There was more to come, but the rising political temperature, the collapse of effective censorship and the increasing willingness to resort to print were transforming the market for print.103 Parliamentary declarations and speeches were printed, partly it seems to satisfy the country that MPs were active on their behalf. The open expression of religious and political differences now spilt onto the streets, not only in the form of crowd actions and the circulation of partisan statements. In Cornwall the promotion of the Prayer Book petition was linked explicitly to ill-affected pamphlets, ‘which fly abroad in such swarms as are able to cloud the pure air of truth and present a dark ignorance to those who have not the two wings of justice and knowledge to fly above them’.104

  This growth of publicity was troubling for a monarch who felt, probably correctly, that the security of the monarchy lay ultimately in the deference of his subjects. Charles’s refined sense of his regality emphasized respect for the King, and entailed an extensive, perhaps jealous, view of the arcana imperii. He was not alone in feeling uneasy about the growing publicity afforded to fundamental political and religious controversy. By late 1641 religious and political anxieties were finding regular expression in print: this was no longer a matter simply of parliamentary politics and the politics of the day were reported in an increasingly luxuriant print culture.

  In debate and in practice it was proving difficult to foster a positive alliance around the promotion of the true religion or to maintain a negative alliance on the basis of a ragbag of grievances such as those expressed in the opening months of the parliament. As reformers took advantage of their position of strength not only to dismantle Laudian innovation but also to mark out the new boundaries of the true church, fundamental questions were publicly raised but not resolved. Polemically this gave great prominence to anti-popery; practically it centred on matters of church decoration and ritual practice. Here, though, was a potential problem of order – the thought that groups of individual Christians could take it upon themselves to mark out these new boundaries could bring little comfort to many people. The resonances of this pressure for reform on the streets of London and in the provinces were not always welcome. As in the 1630s, shifts in national policy preferences could be taken up by willing local parties, but in the early 1640s those responding sometimes came from outside the ranks of the ‘natural governors’. It was not just the content but also the conditions of religious and political debate which had been transformed in the first year of the Long Parliament: the mobilization of opinion for partisan purposes in crowds, petitions and now print.

  In both secular and religious matters the debate during 1640-41 was moving from particularities to general principles: from the policies of the 1630s to the constitution; from attacks on Laudianism to the problem of reformation. In November 1640 the Covenanters had been useful to a broad coalition of English people – not simply admirers of Scottish Presbyterianism but also those who wanted reformation of a different kind, as well as those with the more modest hope of rolling back Laudianism or those who wanted to force Charles to summon, and listen to, a parliament. Everyone in November 1640 was a monarchist, but almost everyone was also opposed to at least one of the following: Laudianism; financial devices based on the prerogative; court Catholicism; some of the leading royal counsellors. In its first year the Long Parliament produced no clear programme of redress and no definitive text on which such a thing could be built. Instead debate escalated without resolution, and the political process became increasingly public, as demands relating to political principle were made by crowds and petitioners and were debated in print.

  As Parliament went into recess for the harvest after a year of parliamentary activity, the King was in Scotland finalizing a settlement there, and substantial measures of reform had been achieved in England with (grudging) royal assent. Although some did not trust this particular king, no-one seems to have advocated a political settlement that was not monarchical. In the autumn of 1641 everyone was still a monarchist and more or less everyone believed in the necessity of a national church. Laudianism and the unpopular financial policies of the 1630s were dead, and the counsellors of the 1630s were out of power. But new dangers seemed to have arisen in their place. Differences were emerging between those afraid of the King’s role in relation to the true religion and those afraid of the corrosive effects on church and monarchy of a populist Puritan campaign for further reformation. The latter was a principled position and one which underpinned the commitment of some of Charles’s supporters when war broke out. It was not simply, or necessarily, a reactionary position since it sought a balance, not a retreat to the 1630s; and it was not simply aristocratic – it too found support on the streets and in the provinces, just as influential peers were pushing policies of radical reform. Petitions and pamphlets sought to mobilize opinion among wider publics. Their appeal was overlapping, not mutually exclusive, and therein lay the problem. What the English lacked in 1640, by comparison with the much more successful campaign of the Covenanters in Scotland, was a rallying point for a settlement – a text like the National Covenant, around which a coalition could mobilize and on the basis of which specific measures could have been agreed. What they had instead, by the summer of 1641, was the Protestation, seen by some as a shibboleth, intended to sort the sheep from the goats. Against that stood the Prayer B
ook, seen by some as a threat to the true religion. Many were able to support both. As they were urged as alternatives, however, the possibility of a deep divide had emerged, and one that might run through not just the heart of government but also through the towns and villages of England.

  5

  Barbarous Catholics and Puritan Populists

  The Irish Rising and the Politics of Fear

  Parliament reassembled on 20 October 1641 and soon after it was presented with a utopian tract called A description of the famous kingdome of Macaria. It was consciously modelled on Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and took the form of a dialogue in which a traveller, someone with practical knowledge, described Macaria to a scholar in straightforward terms, in the course of a walk from the Exchange – centre of news and trade – out into Moorfields. The traveller’s spare description of the institutions and political practices of Macaria made it clear how political arrangements could be made to deliver fundamental social reform. Some of the institutional practices in Macaria were of direct topical interest in England – for example, that the ruler’s council met annually, and heard complaints only about ministers, judges and officers, whom ‘they trounce soundly, if there be cause’. Others were less immediately topical, but were intended to help ‘this honourable court [to] lay the cornerstone of the world’s happiness’. Five under-councils sat briefly each year, dealing with economic matters (agriculture, fishing, land and maritime trade, and new colonies, or plantations). Any divine who published a new doctrine was considered a disturber of the peace, and suffered death for it, but in order to prevent the persistence of error, a Great Council met each year to debate new opinions. Those that won out in argument were adopted; those that did not were declared false. A college of experience took responsibility for new medicines, and those who produced them were rewarded out of the public purse. These features of life in Macaria, and the enlightened laws passed by the councils, promised not just political peace, but ‘plenty, prosperity, health, peace, and happiness, and… not half so much trouble as they have in these European countries’.1

  This was an indirect, and belated, product of the high hopes of the previous autumn. Soon after the Long Parliament had instituted fast days, John Gauden and George Morley were invited to preach. They had both spoken on the theme of the need to pursue peaceful reformation and Gauden had made very positive mention of two leading figures in European Protestantism: John Dury and Jan Komensky (better known to posterity as Comenius). These two were already in correspondence with Samuel Hartlib, a Protestant refugee from the Thirty Years War. Hartlib was, like Comenius and Dury, well-connected with John Pym. He also had the support of Elizabeth of Bohemia and many other prominent politicians. These connections linked parliamentary pressure for the redress of English grievances with the larger European struggle for religious reform and Hartlib was asked to invite Dury and Comenius to London. As with so many other schemes in the first year of the Long Parliament’s life, nothing much had happened to deliver on these high ideals. In the summer of 1641, however, as the political logjam appeared to move and hopes rose, Dury and Comenius finally arrived. Dury had arrived by the end of June, and Comenius came on 21 September, in time for the re-assembly of Parliament.2

  Dury was the son of a Scottish minister who was banished to the Netherlands when Dury was ten years old. Dury himself became minister to the Scottish and English Presbyterian community in Leiden and had, therefore, good credentials as a Calvinist involved in the international cause. He had made his name as a campaigner for religious unity, an irenic approach to religious difference intended to produce solidarity in the face of irreligion. Comenius was a victim of the Thirty Years War, a Bohemian exiled repeatedly by the military advance of Catholicism in central Europe. His distinctive contribution to Protestant thinking had been an emphasis on education: appropriate socialization would create good Christians and, therefore, a good society. For him, the pursuit of God entailed, and was promoted by, the pursuit of understanding. In the Garden of Eden, Adam had been blessed with a perfect knowledge of nature, knowledge which was lost at the Fall. To recover that knowledge of nature was therefore to undo some of the effects of the Fall and to come closer to God. Here he was influenced by Francis Bacon’s vision of a unified human knowledge based on experience, tried and proved using the powers of reason.3

  It was these ideals which lay behind the utopian tract now before Parliament, proposing a college of experience, rational debate of doctrine and the use of government to make fuller use of economic resources. Macaria was almost certainly written by Gabriel Plattes, one of the ‘impecunious but ambitious innovators whose cause was taken up by Hartlib’.4 In 1639 Plattes had published treatises on mining and agriculture and he had a significant posthumous impact, but his immediate fate was perhaps symbolic of the disappointment of utopian hopes more generally: in December 1644 he was said to have been ‘suffered to fall down dead in the street for want of food, whose studies tended to no less than providing and preserving food for all nations’.5 Others took up these schemes for improving social conditions and knowledge of the natural world, and with some effect, but these hopes do not appear to have caught a very general mood during the years that followed.

  Certainly, in October 1641, many people would have been content with a more limited settlement than the extravagant promise of Macaria. The most significant secular grievances from the 1630s had been redressed the previous summer. Charles’s settlement with the Scots entailed the abandonment of his attempts at reform of the kirk in return for a withdrawal of their army. This not only drew some of the sting about Charles’s intentions for the English church, but in leading to the end of the occupation offered financial relief and the possibility of dissolving the English parliament. The Prayer Book was becoming a rallying point for those as worried (or even more worried) by sectarianism as they were by popery. Meanwhile, in Edinburgh the King had begun to present himself as a focus for loyalty, emphasizing his regality. He had even offered to touch approved legislation with his sceptre, imbuing it with his sacred royal authority. This was a gesture unlikely to endear him to his Scottish subjects, implying as it might that the legislation was not valid until it had been so touched. It was, therefore, one with powerful resonance, and his Scottish subjects managed to put him off.6

  In these circumstances the hopes of Pym and his allies may have had less potential appeal than their fears: anti-popery offered a better basis for a wider coalition than utopian hopes of the kind expressed in Macaria. Arguments about a popish plot found a ready audience, and were plausible in view of recent events. Charles had been seeking outside support throughout the last two years. He had seemed willing to do deals with Catholics, and against Covenanters and parliamentarians, and was now in Scotland perhaps conspiring against the people with whom he had just done a deal. This might seem to be the conduct of a king in the grip of a papistical conspiracy, or at least of a duplicitous or shifty individual, and many historians have taken essentially this latter view of him. But his behaviour seems more reasonable if we look at these things from a ‘three kingdoms’, or Stuart, perspective. It was not inherently unreasonable of Charles to seek support for his policies in all three of his kingdoms, and to try to use support in one kingdom to help him to govern the others. And he was, of course, acting out of principle, in defending the church and the crown from attack: he owed it to his successors to do exactly that. Nonetheless, it was not surprising that some at least of his English subjects regarded him as unreliable. The plot to get Strafford out of gaol had demonstrated that he was willing to resolve his political difficulties by unparliamentary means; reasonable enough from his point of view but not a welcome thought to parliamentarians. In June we know, although contemporaries did not, that he had considered a plan to use the northern army to overawe Parliament: the so-called second army plot. In July he had entertained discussion of the use of an Irish army to do the same thing. Thus, his negotiation in Scotland had certainly p
roceeded alongside discussions about how to do away with the English parliament; and those discussions had included consideration of some unconstitutional measures.7

  This had certainly been reflected in his actions in Scotland. In October he had tried to carry out a coup against his chief Scottish opponents, the ‘Incident’. How far the King was involved in the attempt to seize Argyll, Hamilton and Lanark is not clear; nor what was to be done with them once they were taken, although assassination was a possible intention. Hamilton’s misfortune here was considerable: a member of the English parliament working for settlement, he had established links with many of Charles’s leading critics; in Scotland he had good relations with Argyll. Rather than putting him in a strong position, as a close adviser of the King, this laid him open to a hostile whispering campaign at court. The man who as Charles’s representative had had to kick his way out of the Glasgow assembly, and whose own mother had threatened to shoot him if he landed in Scotland, may now have been the target of a royalist assassination plot in which the King himself had a hand. Amidst rumours of royalist plotting, Charles attended Parliament to explain himself, but unfortunately agreed to be accompanied by several hundred armed men. Hamilton and the others fled, although Charles strenuously denied that they had anything to fear, and claimed in fact that the plot was invented solely to discredit him. Amazingly, Hamilton seems to have believed him: he returned with the King to England in November.8 For others the Incident made Charles difficult to trust and it continued to be possible to claim that this pattern of behaviour reflected the machinations of international popery. Despite the revelation of the Incident, however, opinion in England was probably drifting in his favour in the autumn of 1641.