Their work began immediately – windows were smashed and idols defaced in Westminster Abbey and St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 25 April and a regular team subsequently carried out an orderly and systematic purgation of the royal chapels at Whitehall, Greenwich and Hampton Court, as well as at St Paul’s. The Common Council of London took up the campaign and on 27 April ordered the destruction of Cheapside Cross, which was begun on 2 May, and, on 27 May, Temple church was purged. This was a prelude to a sustained round of iconoclasm in the capital, lasting into 1644.30
This amounted to official backing for zealous reformation which went far beyond the anti-Laudian iconoclasm of 1640-41. It embraced ‘all superstitious and idolatrous images and pictures’ which were ‘inconsistent with, and scandalous to the true Protestant reformed religion’. Purgation of St Margaret’s, Westminster, and of the Abbey, intended that ‘no Roman relics may remain to attract the simple devotions of ignorant and illiterate Popish people’. Crosses, windows and images were all now legitimate objects of attack, and there is evidence of enthusiasm for this work. Sir Robert Harley had called for the demolition of Cheapside Cross in 1626 and had confiscated and destroyed a picture of God belonging to one of his tenants in 1639. Emboldened by the Commons order of September 1641 he had championed the attack on images in his native Herefordshire during the parliamentary recess of that month. At Wigmore a church cross was not simply removed, but ‘caused to be beaten in pieces, even to dust with a sledge, and then laid… in the footpath to be trodden on in the churchyard’. At Leintwardine offensive windows were ‘broke small with a hammer’ and thrown into the River Teme, ‘in imitation of King Asa 2 Chronicles 15:16: who threw the images into the brook Kidron’.31 But this zeal was empowered, and therefore restrained, by law: radical reformation by committee.
Purgation took other forms. Since its first meeting Parliament had been flooded with complaints about scandalous clergy, charges which ranged across the board from insufficiency (a predilection for drink and adulterous or lecherous behaviour) to religious error and malignancy (hostility to Parliament). In December 1640 a committee for scandalous ministers had been established in order to try to deal with this business, but it struggled to do so. Perhaps 800 petitions were received in its first few months of business and its capacity to deal with this volume of complaint was hampered by constant interruptions. The committee was dissolved at least five times only to be revived again following revelation of some new outrage. It was not clear if the committee was intended to actually deal with all these grievances, or to propose legislation that would do so, but in either case it failed. Legislation was introduced in June 1641 but made slow progress before being forgotten in the crisis of that autumn and winter. There was no progress either on particular cases.32
After this slow start there is clear evidence of greater urgency in 1643. There was an immediate political interest in this oversight of the clergy, of course, since the pulpit was crucial to publicizing the rival causes, and this may have had something to do with it. In any case, key procedural changes speeded up the process. Initially the committee had proceeded case by case – having heard the details the committee recommended a decision to the Commons and it was then passed on to the Lords, who heard it all again. Rather than submit to this painful doubling of effort, the Commons after June 1643 proceeded by orders for sequestration rather than by ordinance of both Houses. Moreover, the criteria for starting the process were relaxed and the definition of malignancy was broadened. Initially only ministers who had joined the King needed to fear the committee, but now those who had spoken in his favour, or read his proclamations, could be charged as malignants. Ministers were accused of betraying their hostility to Parliament by reading its publications ‘with a low voice’ or confusedly, but those of the King ‘very audibly’, or ‘with great carriage and seeming joy’. In December 1642 the work had been handed over to a new Committee for Plundered Ministers – something of an Orwellian name, since much of its work consisted of ejecting ministers from their benefices. The measure was proposed by the Lords as a means to provide for ministers ousted by Cavaliers by ejecting unfit ministers from other benefices. During 1643 scores of clergy were ejected, although the Commons remained unsatisfied with the rate of progress in July 1643. Even as the definition of malignancy was being enlarged, the committee also began to authorize proceedings against popish and scandalous ministers, even if they were not malignant.33 Reformation was therefore in the hands of committees: on superstitious monuments and on scandalous or plundered ministers.
These measures gave parishioners the power to denounce their minister on political grounds and to secure his removal by Parliament, not a bishop. It had been immediately apparent that there was a local appetite for such powers. The committee had its origins in a sub-committee of the Committee of Religion, established on 12 December 1640, to investigate the scarcity of preaching ministers. On 19 December the Commons renewed the order to the committee to investigate the scarcity of preaching, but added to it the power ‘to consider of some Way of removing of scandalous Ministers, and putting others in their Places’. To this end, MPs were to report within six weeks on ‘the State and Condition of their Counties, concerning preaching Ministers, and whence it arises, that there is such a Want of preaching Ministers, through the whole Kingdom’. A pirate edition of this order was published, suggesting that the Commons would welcome certificates from the public too, of ‘persecuting, innovating or scandalous ministers, that they may be put out’. The publisher was mildly rebuked, but the pamphlet enjoyed a wide circulation.34
By 1644 the lid was completely off, and ministers around the country were being forced to defend themselves against disapproving parishioners. Maptid Violet, for example, had to answer charges about his drinking habits, and the suggestion that he was an antinomian (someone who denied the reality of ‘sin’ for those who were pure in heart). He also expressed the dangers of this new aspect of parishioners” power, asking that those hearing his case ‘would be pleased to take into their consideration in this time of distractions how easy a thing it is for men abounding in malice to find witnesses to accuse men of our profession to accomplish their own ends’.35 Fostering the parliamentary cause and further reformation here went hand in hand, but with profound implications for local social relations: the boundary between radical reformation and social levelling seemed to many contemporaries difficult to discern.
This was not all. On the day that the Common Council ordered the destruction of Cheapside Cross, the House of Commons ordered that Charles I’s Book of Sports should be burnt ‘in several places in the City of London by the common Hangman’.36 Such burning punctuated the life of the capital, from the reign of Henry VIII onwards, but the Stuarts seem to have elaborated on the ritual at the same time that they employed it more frequently. Prior to 1640 it had often been associated with the physical punishment of the author as well as the destruction of books, but there had always been books burned without their authors. James I ordered a dozen or so books to be burned, many of them obscure foreign publications: this was a statement of disgust rather than a coherent act of censorship.37
Under Charles I, Alexander Leighton and William Prynne suffered alongside their books. In fact Prynne suffered the revival of burnings by the public hangman, in 1634. His Histrio-Mastix had denounced stage plays, and included attacks on female actors, at just about the time that Henrietta Maria appeared in a court masque. The timing was ambiguous – the criticism might have predated knowledge of the Queen’s participation – but the implication was a damaging one. However, Histrio-Mastix was dangerous as much for its tone – highly intemperate and disrespectful – as its content and this earned it special treatment. Lord Cottington, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, ordered it to be ‘burnt in the most public manner that can be. The manner in other countries is… to be burnt by the hangman, though not used in England. Yet I wish it may, in respect of the strangeness and heinousness of the matter contained in it, to have a
strange manner of burning, therefore I shall desire it may be so burnt by the hand of the hangman’. It was on this occasion that Prynne lost the first parts of his ears: set in a pillory at Westminster and Cheapside, one of his ears cropped in each place and copies of his book burned before him. It was said that he nearly suffocated from the smoke.38
Burnings characteristically took place in large public spaces – Westminster, St Paul’s Churchyard (heart of the book trade), Smithfield, Cheapside. A pamphlet of 1642 describes one such ritual. Scottish texts were burned in 1640, presumably some of those that cultivated support for the Covenanters and thereby encouraged the King to issue a proclamation declaring it treason to assist them. If it was these texts, the point was reinforced with some dramatic theatre:
the common hangman,… came in great state, as if he had been to bishop or brand Bastwick or Burton again, to the palace yard (alias the prelates purgatory) with a halter in each hand and with two trumpeters before him, and two men with a few loose papers following him; where after reading of the proclamation, Gregory very ceremoniously put fire to the faggots, and so the poor innocent papers paid for it. When he had done he cried, ‘God save the king’, and flourished his ropes, [adding] ‘if any man conceal any such papers, he shall be hanged in these halters’; with which words I was so afraid, that I ran home and burnt all my papers, and so saved him a labour.39
During the 1640s book-burning took off, alongside publishing: perhaps with greater freedoms came greater anxiety and increased severity at the margins. Certainly books were burned in far greater numbers in these years: thirteen in 1642 alone, another nine during 1646. Alongside three newsbooks, sixty pamphlets, books and broadsheets were condemned between 1640 and 1660. It was now separated from the physical punishment of the author, and was much more clearly a dramatic statement of anathema. Sir Edward Dering, John Milton, Richard Overton and John Lilburne (the latter the most burned author of the period) all saw their books burned without suffering any physical mutilation themselves. This could not serve to censor, either: Dering noted that 4,500 copies of his speeches had already been printed, and more were on the way. The fires did not consume them all and, in fact, a number of contemporaries noted that a book-burning was good for sales.40 Burning the Book of Sports was political theatre as much as an act of censorship, and it made a very clear point.
Hostility to the Book of Sports was another touchstone of reformers, and another point at which concerns about religious decency intersected with questions of social order. ‘This book’, according to Certaine informations, was ‘first made and allowed in the reign of King James, and since his decease, it hath been pressed by the Bishops with such rigour, that many ministers, which refused only to read it in their Churches, have been [?] and deprived of their benefices, contrary to all laws both civil and ecclesiastical’.41
In 1635 controversy had broken out over church ales (a kind of fund-raising knees-up) in Somerset. An assize judge, motivated as much by personal animosity as religious conviction, had banned the ales on the grounds that they promoted disorder, but Charles and Laud took a different view. Enquiries made locally found evidence that they were harmless affairs, and that they encouraged attendance at church, and this led to the issue of a new Book of Sports. It defined those recreations that were lawful on the Lord’s Day but was seen as far too indulgent by advanced Protestants, among whom there were many with strict sabbatarian views. Although it appears that many ministers had been able to avoid condoning its provisions, the Caroline Book of Sports, first issued in 1634, was much disliked in certain circles. It allowed dancing, May games and archery, but not before the end of divine service, and disallowed more harmful pastimes such as bear- and bull-baiting. However, what was in one sense a measure of discipline – making it clear what forms of recreation were allowable-was in another a measure of licence, and it allied Laudian ceremonial with a relatively relaxed view of popular festive culture.42
Condemnation of the Book of Sports had been added to a Commons order on religion on the eve of the recess in 1641 by Simonds D’Ewes. While a law student D’Ewes had been disgusted by the spectacle of the Lords of Misrule – a ritual of inversion in the Christmas season in which someone was elected to preside over ‘revels’ in a great man’s house. A convinced Puritan hostile to such festive pastimes – not harmless sociability, but a celebration of sinfulness – D’Ewes was naturally opposed to the licence that the Book of Sports offered. The initiative to abolish it ran out of time before the harvest recess, however. In 1643 the Book was unrepealed, but also unenforced. Moves against it were recommenced in February, in the weeks of the crucial measures of financial and administrative reorganization. On 15 February an ordinance had been passed exhorting all good subjects in England and Wales to repent their sins, which were the cause of the war, so that ‘we may obtain a firm and happy peace both with God and Man’. Among the sins enumerated were ‘wicked prophanations of the Lord’s Day, by sports and gamings, formerly encouraged by authority’.43
Burning the Book of Sports was further testimony to the fact that the material and administrative radicalism of the parliamentary cause was in the support of a social and cultural reformation. It may have had a more immediate meaning too: one of the places at which the Book was burnt was the now empty site of Cheapside Cross. The destruction of both the cross and the Book took place in maypole season, and maypoles had become something of a rallying point for anti-Puritanism.44 What was aimed at here was an orderly but zealous reformation, the use of secular power to achieve godly aims. Iconoclasm by committee was allied to a godly reformation of manners, and the promotion of a more sober devotion. It was an assertion of the proper relationship between zeal, law and social order.
Although there seems to be a connection between these reforming impulses and military fortunes in the war, it is difficult to know exactly what the connection was. The day before the order was given for the cross to be demolished the Earl of Essex had captured Reading. To some observers there was a direct connection – reformers had been emboldened by victory. Others thought that recent successes showed God’s favour for earlier measures of purgation – for example, the purging of Henrietta Maria’s chapel and the expulsion of the Capuchins -and hoped that renewed zeal would bring more victories. Robert Harley and Isaac Pennington seem to have thought the cross and similar symbols were an active impediment to victory, and their destruction a means of propitiating and assuaging God. For others orderly reformation like this might help to assure those concerned about social order that reformation could proceed by authority, without sedition.45 These measures might also have been intended to strengthen commitment, win God’s favour or, by the summer of 1643, to woo Scottish opinion by putting the parliamentary cause at the vanguard of advanced Protestantism.46 Among advanced Protestants, ensuring the preaching of the Word by purging the ministry, improving Sabbath observance, restricting the more ungodly elements of festive culture and combating idolatry were all more or less uncontroversial issues.
The burning of the Book of Sports at the site of Cheapside Cross
In the space of a few weeks in late spring and early summer Parliament had accepted the Weekly Assessment and Sequestration ordinances, and given serious consideration to an excise. These were no longer measures to defend the country from the innovations of the Personal Rule, but measures necessary to support Parliament in defensive arms – a case made at some length by Husbands” collection of declarations. But it was also a war in defence of the Reformation, something now given clearer official licence and put in the hands of committees. This pre-empted but did not defeat the polemical counter-case, that this was an ignorant zeal, associated with religious and social disorder. This debate about discipline centred on church government, which remained a potentially divisive issue within the parliamentary coalition – defined in these terms more by anti-episcopal views than by a positive vision of the proper constitution of the church. Progress on images and the Word avoided saying anything much abo
ut what changes in church government were necessary for the promotion of reformation – for the early reformers the Word and the sacraments had been the priority. But this remained an uneasy truce. Mechanic preachers and sectarians were no more welcome to Presbyterians than bishops.
Further reformation was the justification for vigorous military action by Parliament in defensive arms. But this identified the parliamentary cause ever more clearly with religious and constitutional innovation. Neither were these things abstract questions – they resonated deeply in parish conflicts about religious practice and in the material demands the war was now making. An increasingly clear identity as ‘well-affected’ took shape amongst those raising money, purging churches and ejecting scandalous ministers, in contrast to those identified as ‘malignants’.47 The royalists picked at these problems very effectively. Early in January, Mercurius Aulicus, a royalist newsbook, had begun to appear in Oxford. Authorized by the King himself, it represented quite a change of posture since the 1630s. The first editor, Peter Heylin, was succeeded by Sir John Berkenhead, but the approach was fairly consistent. It was written in a relatively plain style, but with substantial editorial comment, much of it bitingly satirical, and it was clearly intended as a counter-blast to the parliamentary press in London. It affected a higher literary style than the ‘Puritan’ papers and was also better produced. It asserted, in other words, the literary and cultural superiority of the royalist cause.48 In May, perhaps prompted by the new wave of iconoclasm, a second and equally scabrous newsbook appeared: Mercurius Rusticus, subtitled The Countries Complaint of the barbarous Outrages committed by the sectaries of this late flourishing kingdom.49 Much of the coverage was retrospective, and the first issue opened with the Stour Valley riots of August 1642. Eventually, it gave a very full catalogue of the depredations of crowds and soldiers, and of iconoclasm. Separate editions were produced covering attacks on the cathedrals and universities. It has proved an attractive source for subsequent generations, and it is unlikely that much of it was completely invented, but there was a consistent polemical purpose.
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