National subscription to the Protestation was not uncontroversial, but it was very successful – so successful in fact that the extant returns are one of the most complete English population listings for the seventeenth century. The Protestation had already become a token of allegiance and now 11,000 copies were printed to be circulated with a letter expressly tying the defence of English Protestantism to the defence of parliamentary liberties. Subscription was required as a sign of ‘good concurrence with the Parliament’ and was more urgent than ever because of the discovery of ‘many dangerous designs plotted against Parliament’. Parliament required the names of refusers as well as of subscribers, and many local returns obliged, with explanations for refusals or absences. Although the clearly partisan nature of this national subscription prompted new debate about the propriety of subscription, and many took the subscription with some mental reservation or explicit limitation, there is ample local evidence of widespread subscription and of the great pains that were taken to achieve that. On the other hand, the evidence of the reservations with which people might subscribe suggests that some could still separate subscription from a partisan parliamentarianism.53
Anti-popery was a powerful means to mobilize opinion in favour of Parliament’s actions, and it was promoted in the press, petitions and the Protestation campaign. It also involved the institutions of local government in partisan politics. Given the wide purchase of the call to defend English Protestantism it is not surprising that proto-royalists did not tackle anti-popery. Instead, they played on fears about religious and political order. For example, those who expressed more restrained views of the Irish rebellion did not distance themselves from anti-popery, but did place greater emphasis on the evils of disorder and rebellion.54 This concern for order resonated more widely. As we have seen, religious debate could now be expressed in terms of a choice between totems: the Protestation and the Prayer Book. The Commons vote of 21 January, which attributed the ills of the kingdom to the want of good reformation in church government and liturgy, had lent official weight to attacks on the Prayer Book, and reinforced attempts to rally to its support.55
Standard metaphors and literary forms were put to service in this mobilization too – God’s judgements were detected in the misfortunes of sectarians as well as popish plotters. One such was Richard Stichberry, churchwarden in Towcester in Northamptonshire, whose punishments were reported in a pamphlet of June 1642. He had broken a stained-glass window, ‘fairly painted’, leaving ‘God’s house so miserable mangled and torn, which ought to be used with an holy respect’. The patron of the church refused to make good the damage, insisting instead that those who had done it make the repair. God could not see such sins unpunished and within two days of the iconoclasm Stichberry’s wife ‘was exceedingly tormented on a sudden in her limbs, raging and crying most fearfully with the extreme anguish and pain she did endure, that she could not rest till such time as the violence thereof brought her to her last end’. Stichberry himself suffered an agonizing death shortly afterwards, ‘raving’ in such a way that five or six men could not control him, ‘howling and making a noise until he died’. Stichberry’s sister, Anne, had made scorn of the Prayer Book for the previous ‘two years’: in other words, more or less since the failure of the Short Parliament. She too was punished when she tore her Prayer Book out of a volume in which it was bound up with her Bible. God dealt harshly with this ‘poor silly creature’. Her hands began to rot ‘in a most strange manner… the flesh flying from the bones: and so continues to this present, rotting in a most fearful and loathsome manner’. Something of a local attraction, large crowds of onlookers came to see her, and ‘being so extreme loathsome’ she had been moved a mile out of town by her neighbours. The lesson was clear, that it was rash to attempt anything against sacred places, or to ‘vilify those things which have any part of holy Writ in them’. It was clearly unwise to attempt to alter anything in church, or about the Prayer Book established by ‘Authority’ until Parliament should determine otherwise. To that end the pamphlet reproduced the Lords order of 16 January 1641 calling for worship to be performed according to the statutes currently in force.56
This pamphlet invested a local event with cosmic significance and used it to underline the importance of order in worship, and of legitimate authority in achieving religious change. It also offered God’s special providence as a source of authority in uncertain times.57 Another, published by Richard Harper later in the summer, told of the punishment of those who resisted harmless ceremonies on the basis of ignorant zeal.58 Mary Wilmore, wife of John Wilmore, a rough mason in Mears Ashby (Northants.), had become concerned about the religious rituals that attended a birth while expecting a baby. In particular, she was concerned about the use of the sign of the cross during baptism, a ritual moment subject to some criticism in these months. In Essex, attacks on the practice, like attacks on the Prayer Book and the use of surplices, had been justified with reference to the Protestation and the obligation it imposed on people to resist popery.59 Mary persuaded her husband to visit one Master Barnard, a ‘reverend Divine’ in the village of Hardwick, not far away. Barnard’s answer was a learned and moderate one: the use of the sign of the cross ‘was in no ways necessary to salvation, but an ancient, laudable and decent ceremony of the Church of England’. On hearing this verdict Mary apparently declared that ‘I had rather my child should be born without a head than to have a head to be signed with the sign of the Cross’. Tragically, this wish was granted, and she gave birth to a child with no head and a sign of the cross on its chest.60
According to the author, John Locke, cleric, the responsibility for this tragedy lay either in Mary’s ‘weakness’ or in her ‘too much confiding in the conventicling Sectaries’, whose claims that the practice was a ‘pernicious, popish and idolatrous ceremony’ were refuted with scriptural citations. The judgement was set in the context of the fate of Julian the apostate, who pissed on the altar in Antioch to demonstrate his belief that ‘Divine providence took no care of outward ceremonies’. His punishment was ‘a disease that rotted his bowels [so that] his excrements leaving their wonted course, ran through his throat and blasphemous mouth in as stinking a manner as the poisoned trash and beggarly rudiments are fomented nowadays from the impudent mouths of unlearned and ignorant Teachers’. The fruits of their ‘pernicious and illiterate doctrine’ were exemplified in the terrible fate of Mary’s child, which reflected ‘God’s wrath and judgments to over curious and nice zealots of our times’. Locke’s own learning was evident not just in his command of scripture, and his knowing awareness of the danger of pursuing ‘unprofitable questions’ in public disputations, but in the Latin phrases which pepper the text.61
Religious contention in Northamptonshire was not restricted to pamphlet wars. On 28 June a party of volunteers raised for Parliament entered the village of Isham and destroyed its cross. This led to a charge of riot, prosecuted by Thomas Jenison, a neighbouring Justice. But the two men most likely to judge the case at a special sessions called to consider the matter were also likely to sympathize with the iconoclasm, and the commander of the troop was himself a JPs. On 6 July, Jenison went to Wellingborough and found Puritan JPs at lunch in the Hind, after the regular lecture, discussing the incident. Their conclusion was that it was not a riot and that he was interfering unnecessarily. A heated argument ensued but the matter was eventually brought before a special sessions on 11 July. There the men were found guilty, but not without problems. The foreman of the jury had apparently disheartened the jury, and as they withdrew to consider their verdict one of the presiding magistrates, Mr Sawyer, lectured them about the superstitious nature of crosses, citing the Commons order of 8 September 1641 as justification for the action of the volunteers. This led to an argument between Jenison and Sawyer in which Jenison accused him of seeking to pervert the jury. The Commons order had mentioned crucifixes not crosses, but Isham Cross was not the last victim of this zeal.62
Defence of the liturg
y in pamphlets like those describing the torments of Stichberry and the Wilmores supported a programme of order based around the dignity of the clergy, learned divinity, and a nuanced approach to the authority of scripture and tradition in liturgical matters. The zeal of the humble, Puritan scriptural preciseness and public contestation were in this view not means to promote reformation, but a threat to the faith. Again, this seems to represent a modulation and radicalization of longer-standing polemics. Since the reign of Elizabeth at least there had been anti-Puritan polemic, which had often focused on the hypocrisy and self-love of Puritans. Starting with the line of anti-sectarian writing in the autumn of 1641, however, anti-Puritanism seemed to concentrate almost exclusively on the question of order, the dangers of schism and the folly of unlearned preachers.63
This anti-Puritanism was not necessarily the same as support for Laudianism, but it was certainly beginning to play better for the royalists than for Parliament. It was reflected, for example, in Ludlow, on 1 May, where a maypole was adorned with the head of a Roundhead and pelted with stones. Puritan excess in suppressing communal festivities was harnessed to attacks on Parliament’s partisans. Wallington noted, alongside ‘God’s judgements on them that set up the cursed maypole’, judgements on ‘mockers especially that new reproachful name… Round heads’.64 At Croft images were shot at ‘in derision of roundheads’ and a ‘Roundhead sermon’ in Hereford Cathedral was silenced. It was a term now juxtaposed to loyalty and constitutional royalism and it began to erode deference to the godly elite. Lady Brilliana Harvey wrote to her husband in June 1642 that:
They are grown exceeding rude in these parts. Every Thursday some of Ludlow, as they go through the town, wish all the puritans of Brampton [the home of the Harleys] hanged, and as I was walking one day in the garden… they looked upon me and wished all the puritans and Roundheads at Brampton hanged.65
Another sign of irreverence is in the spread of the nickname King Pym. It apparently arose from the publication of an order of the House of Commons in a form resembling that of a royal publication, appearing over the name of John Pym.66 It became a means of ridiculing the presumption of the parliamentary leadership. On 15 March 1642 the Commons sent for Mr Shawbery, who was reported by two witnesses as having said in the Spread Eagle in Gracechurch Street ‘That he would cut [Pym’s] throat, and his sinews in pieces’, and referring to him as ‘King Pym, and Rascal’. Another witness reported him as saying that ‘he could find in his heart to cut King Pym in pieces’.67
It was in these months that Prayer Book petitioning was widespread. These campaigns were clearly partisan, related to local mobilizations against parliamentary radicalism.68 The best known was that in Kent. At the assizes on 25 March, Sir Edward Dering, the disgraced MP, successfully engineered a confrontation with a rival Puritan and parliamentary faction, associated with Sir Anthony Weldon and Sir Michael Livesey. As chairman of the Grand Jury, Dering managed to steer through the assizes, after three drafts, a petition in defence of the existing liturgy and church government, and against sectarianism. The Grand Jury had been empanelled by Justice Malet rather than the sheriff, and was clearly managed, but even so nine members of the jury disowned it. One of the grounds for speaking against it was that it contradicted petitions previously sent up – clearly a tactical argument but one that arose from the increasingly partisan use of institutions previously understood to serve as the ‘voice of the county’. These struggles were revisited at quarter sessions in Maidstone in April, and at the summer assizes in July. The Commons sent a committee to sit on the bench at the summer assizes, but this was resented by those on the bench legally, and there was even some jostling as they tried to take their seats and their colleagues failed to make room for them. At another point rival groups ‘hummed’ each other as they tried to speak. Henry Oxinden complained that ‘I have heard foul language and desperate quarrellings even between old and entire friends’. This partisan struggle was very public too: it was said that 2,000 people witnessed the reading of the petition on 25 March.69
In these partisan battles standard metaphors – such as providence or natural wonders – were deployed with precise partisan purposes, and some of the staple elements of local life – the history of Protestant sufferings or the Prayer Book – became invested with partisan meaning. Newsbooks inhabited this same world of polemic and were often produced by men with a record of contentious pamphleteering and a line in other kinds of writing: Richard Harper was soon to launch an apparently very successful line in prophecy pamphlets, having published ‘pleasant histories’ during the 1630s. John Thomas and Bernard Alsop, both associated with newsbooks and publication of parliamentary news, had also been up before Parliament for publishing scandalous pamphlets.70 Unsurprisingly, therefore, news stories were often explicitly intended as moral or religious exempla. Nathaniel Butter, better known to posterity as a newspaper pioneer, published a number of wonder pamphlets, including the story of a giant toad fish caught at Woolwich and displayed at Glove Alley in London in 1642. Its appearance was attested by many witnesses, among them gentlemen, and that it meant something was attested by classical sources including Pliny and Josephus as well as more contemporary examples: large fish coming ashore had meant, throughout history, trouble for reigning monarchs. ‘These unnatural accidents though dumb, do notwithstanding speak the supernatural intentions and purposes of the Divine powers, chiefly when they meet just at that time when distractions, jars, and distempers are afoot in a Common-weale or Kingdom’. ‘It is further observed by those that profess skill in prognostication, that of how much the monster is of feature or fashion, hateful and odious, so much it portends danger the more dreadful and universal’. Appended to the story is news of a more conventional kind – a skirmish outside Hull.71 News was partisan and reports of human and natural events were of equal value in coming to terms with the times.
But this literature too was open to satire. In January 1642 a marine monster was reported to have appeared to six sailors near the mouth of the Thames. The monster ‘was very terrible; having broad fiery eyes, hair black and curled, his breast armed with shining scales, so that by the reflection of the sun they became so blind and dazzled, that he might have taken or slain every man of them, he having a musket in one hand, and a large paper in the other hand, which seemed to them a petition’. Able to travel at miraculous speeds he left the sailors to observe the French fleet on its way to Catalonia, returning within minutes with news of it. In discussion with the amazed sailors the monster emphasized to them the dangers faced by the kingdom, a clear warning about the consequences of divisions. Appended was a report of a minor victory in Ireland, a providence of God and an encouragement to the Protestants. The six sailors were named, and the story was said to have been taken down by a gentleman – a contemporary code for the reliability of the testimony. The names of the witnesses, however, suggest a satirical intent.72 Perhaps the point was to make fun of the influence of rumour on menacing petitioners. In January fear of the crowd was certainly vying with fear of armed Catholic conspiracy. In any case, this subverted more than just the use of monsters to tell political tales, since a plain, factual style was in itself a persuasive technique. The bloody plot in Derbyshire was reported with the full apparatus of sober reporting, for a clearly identifiable political purpose but in the hope that it would be inoculated against the charges of fantasy and exaggeration being levelled against some of the pamphlets about the Irish rebellion. There does not seem to have been a parish called Bingley, though, and there is no independent evidence of the existence of this plot. This was not uncommon: in such publications ‘moral verisimilitude’ was as important as ‘circumstantial accuracy’.73 But at this juncture such ambiguities made it even more difficult to know not only what to believe, but also whom to believe.
A substantial number of pamphlets sought to expound the fundamental issues using the common metaphors of political life, but in these increasingly polarized political conditions their meaning was elusive. F
or example, an important metaphor for contemporaries in understanding political relationships, and dysfunctions within them, was that of the body politic. Over the summer of 1640 the court had been afflicted by disease, as had the Earl of Strafford. In August, after this summer of disease, uncertainty and discontent, John Castle prayed for his patron’s ‘safety and health in these valetudinous times, when all is sick and ill at ease’.74 Where did the sickness lie? In Parliament, following the revelation of the Irish rising and the suspicion that it was prompted from above, Pym had said ‘diseases which proceed from the inward parts, as the liver, the heart or the brains, the more noble parts, it is a hard thing to apply cure to such diseases’.75 In December, William Montagu wrote to his father that ‘sects in the body and factions in the head are dangerous diseases and do desperately threaten the dissolution of a well governed estate’.76 A shared language did not enable the resolution of the conflict, but it might be a means to express it. Thomas Knyvett wrote to his wife on 31 May 1642 about the paper war, expressing his frustration that both sides claimed to be seeking the maintenance of the laws: ‘the question is not so much how to be governed by them, as who shall be master and judge of them’. ‘A lamentable condition’, he continued:
to consume the wealth and treasure of such a kingdom, perhaps the blood too, upon a few nice wilful quibbles. Out of these prints you may feel how the pulse of the King and kingdom beats, both highly distempered, and if God doth not please to raise up skilful physicians that may apply lenatives and cooling Julips, phlebotomy [blood letting] will be a desperate cure to abate this heat.77
God’s FURY, England’s FIRE Page 27
