God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Edwards’s own contribution to the ensuing exchanges did not at the time elicit much by way of direct response. Antapologia, however, did wonders for his career as a hammer of the sectaries, for that is what this campaign meant to Edwards: his critique of Independency concentrated almost exclusively on the sectarian consequences of the dissolution of a national church. Antapologia probably helped to secure him a lectureship at Christ Church, in the heart of the City, where his lectures became major public events (at least, if he is to be believed). People flocked to hear him speak about the dangers of the sects, among them his opponents, who heckled and scuffled as he spoke. This notoriety seems also to have put him at the centre of a network of correspondents shocked by the proliferating problems of maintaining religious order and decency and anxious to give publicity to the excesses of the sects.17

  During 1646, exploiting this position, Edwards launched a massive publishing venture – Gangraena. Three parts were eventually produced, totalling over 800 pages, forming an ill-disciplined catalogue of errors, schism and heresy, lavishly and sensationally illustrated with reports of religious excess from around the country. The first instalment, produced in January and February, invited readers to write in with more material, and that helped to stuff the further instalments in May and December with more lurid stories. The timings were significant and each edition was apparently being added to up to the point of publication. This was a calculated appeal for public support for the Presbyterian cause: the first at a moment when renewal of the Solemn League and Covenant was being sought; the second coincided with the promotion of a remonstrance in London, very hostile to the sects, and in favour of the Solemn League and Covenant and a rapid peace settlement on Presbyterian terms; the third when hostility to the army was renewed. This mode of operation, Edwards’s own intemperance and the need to get the books out quickly contributed to their sprawling character. But that also helped to make their point – their very form communicated the sprawling, spiralling danger of the sects.18

  Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena

  This campaign was more or less purely negative. Edwards nowhere defended or described the correct form of Presbyterian discipline as he saw it. His only concern was with the monstrous profusion of sects, the deadly disease of the Christian body. In this he has been fabulously successful, mined for examples and evidence by his contemporary fellow travellers and by historians seeking to understand and evoke the chaotic profusion of religious experiments in this period. By the same token, however, the question of whether to believe Edwards has been equally persistent. He was immediately labelled as a liar, and his reputation has declined among historians in recent years, suspicious of his purposes and unable to verify his sources.

  Edwards probably did not make things up,19 but in any case counting sectaries does not really get at the heart of the problem of order – the issue was not a quantitative one. What was really new and radical about this was that fundamental questions were being debated before a public audience. It had become necessary to argue for, and defend, institutions which had previously been thought to be fundamental to spiritual and social order – learned ministry, a national church. In effect, public approval was being garnered for their place in a settlement even by those who, as a matter of principle, believed that their authority (and political settlement) did not depend on consent. Moreover, this was an escalating difficulty – those who sought to intervene were bound to try to establish the legitimacy of their intervention before a large public. Whatever their beliefs about public opinion, therefore, they courted it, and gave particular political arguments a public function. Radical reformation was now entrenched, cultural legitimacy had been eroded: English people confronted a world of competing certainties in which fundamental truths were no longer easily available.

  Gangraena was published as a catalogue, and has some value as such, but it was also a political intervention, offering a window onto the fraught politics of the fracturing parliamentary coalition in 1646. It was a publishing sensation – part one was reprinted three times before the appearance of part two. There were at least twenty direct replies (Walwyn was prominent among the critics) and it was incidentally mentioned in many more. The author became known to contemporaries as Gangraena Edwards, or simply as Gangraena, and he was immortalized by Milton as ‘Shallow Edwards’.20

  Like William Lilly, whose career had also been launched in 1644 and took off in 1646, Edwards was tapping into a large market, one characterized by anxiety. As in 1640–42, the future of a church liberated from episcopal control was easily expressed in terms of a problem of order, and discussion of that problem clearly sold well. Gangraena’s sprawling denunciation publicized the dangers, and in its very form demonstrated disorder, but it also offered some comforts. The desire to catalogue, count and categorize was an effort at rhetorical control – capturing the threat but also, by historicizing, taxonomizing and enumerating it, to make it more bounded and limited. It is a relief, in a way, to know that the festering affliction of the body that appears so worrying has a name, even if that name is gangrene.

  In the polemical world inhabited by Edwards and his antagonists, an argument which had been postponed in 1641 was now in full spate. Where could the limits of decency be set once episcopacy had gone, and how could they be policed? In Scotland, when the shell of episcopal authority had cracked, there was a fully developed Presbyterian system ready to emerge – wanting only the abolition of bishops and the recognition of the authority of the General Assembly. In England nothing so complete had been growing within: what emerged was not formed and was, to Presbyterian eyes, monstrous. The world portrayed by Edwards, of dissolving limits and unpoliced religious experimentation, a world turned upside down, held appeal for the radicals of the 1960s.21 For contemporaries it was more or less inseparably connected with anxiety.

  In these pamphlet debates about war aims, and peace projects, standard metaphors and images were used for partisan purposes but in ways that became controversial, incomprehensible or straightforwardly incredible.22 The 1640s saw remarkable rhetorical creativity, the innovative use of familiar arguments and languages, as much as in more formal conceptual innovation.23 For example, resistance to Charles’s policies was couched in terms of loyalty to the monarch, even when that entailed raising an army through Parliament but without the King’s consent. Opponents claimed that they were protecting Charles from his evil advisers or from himself or, eventually, protecting the office from its present incumbent. By 1646 treason had been creatively reinterpreted to embrace, effectively, advising the King wrongly (Strafford, Laud) and surrendering a city to the royal army (Nathaniel Fiennes). In 1649 it was used to kill the King himself. Political battles were fought out on the scaffolds, where these novel claims were asserted and resisted, Laud and then Charles embracing martyrdom rather than the justice of their end. ‘Strained readings’ is a polite term for the often bizarre, incomprehensible or incredible uses to which standard terms were put. Many people had taken sides reluctantly and conditionally, and a number of people lapsed from activism into inactivity, or changed sides altogether, leading to public argument about what was more honourable – following an initial commitment to a cause, or the shifting dictates of the individual conscience.

  Unsurprisingly this was a great age of satire but there was also a very evident desire to uncover the truth. This operated at several levels: most fundamental of all, a desire to know what was actually going on. Newspapers and pamphlets offered true relations and authentic versions at the same time as they denounced the lies of others. It also prompted stylistic innovation. Denunciations of the sensationalist accounts of the Irish rebellion may have given an extra emphasis to the development of a more sober style. Men like John Thomas and W.B. had been keen to maximize fear of the dangers of armed popery, but in response to the charge of sensationalism Thomas at least seems to have adopted a plain style in his pamphlet on Derbyshire, which ‘performed’ reliability and authenticity on its title page, even th
ough it was probably untrue.24 But contemporary chronicling was unashamedly polemical even as it performed this simple reportage. For example, Josiah Ricraft’s account of England’s Champions, written towards the end of hostilities, reviewed the military history of Parliament’s campaigns from a shamelessly partisan angle. His purpose was to promote the reputation of those within the parliamentary coalition who were faithful to the Solemn League and Covenant, interpreted by him as a commitment to Presbyterianism. His account therefore rested on a clear view of which programme of political and religious reform God had favoured by delivering victories in battle. In seeking to establish his political and religious case Ricraft wrote a military history in which the heroes were Leslie, Manchester and Essex. In a manuscript version eighteen senior commanders were celebrated individually, a further twenty-seven given an important supporting role. Oliver Cromwell does not merit individual treatment and he appears in the chronology of Parliament’s military history only for his victory at Stamford and his seizure of Basing House in 1645. According to Ricraft the truth about the second battle of Newbury, so controversial in the parliamentary coalition, was simple: Manchester, ‘this noble General utterly routed [the royalists]’. When it appeared in print in 1647 Cromwell and others had been added, although the judgement on Newbury had remained unaltered.25

  Newsbooks also pilloried strained readings of the standard terms of contemporary political discourse: most notably perhaps in Bruno Ryves’s reporting on the actions of parliamentarian soldiers, crowds and religious radicals, which juxtaposed their behaviour with their claim to be acting to preserve religion and liberty. Political conflict in the 1640s was, in that sense, a battle over key words – treason, honour, allegiance, reformation, custom, popery, law – and over the relationship between political claims and real actions. These were closely related problems – definition of terms, accurate description of what was going on and authoritative interpretation of its meaning. For example, one of the texts published by Ryves in 1647 was the Micro-chronicon, a narrative of the battles of the civil war akin to that published by Ricraft. In this case, however, the text probably originated with George Wharton, on whose earlier publication Ryves’s version seems to have rested. Wharton, as we have seen, was better known as the royalist astrologer, the main political opponent of William Lilly.26 Given the bizarre interpretations of standard terms it is not surprising to find a pervasive and more practical concern to understand what important people were really up to, whatever they had said in public: private letters were often published in order to reveal underlying truths; cabinets were opened, and plots discovered.

  Even if the facts of the case could be agreed there was plenty of room for disagreement about what they meant. This was particularly true of providential stories – it was often clear that an event carried meaning, but it was not at all clear what that meaning was. For example, an established genre of writing, the warning piece, was put to work. A sinner told the sorry tale of their sin and punishment, which they accepted as just, in the hope that their sad experience would serve to discourage others from taking the same path. These warning pieces were now made partisan – recounting, for example, the punishments consequent on disobeying a royal order to lay down arms, or divine judgements against popish plotters.27 The language of providence, and of monstrosity and wonders, was ubiquitous, but if God’s judgements were plain, the identity of the culprit and the nature of the sin were far less so. In reporting the signs of God’s will in this world there was a double problem: to establish the truth of the phenomenon and then to come to an uncontested interpretation of its meaning. An effect of public discussion of these issues was to make the reading public arbiters of these fundamental questions.28

  Perhaps the most profound element of this crisis of authority was the collapse of spiritual authority. As early as October 1642 Thomas Case had attributed conflict to this question of truth: ‘And what is this quarrel all this while, is it not religion, and the truth of God? The truth of Doctrine?, the truth of discipline, the truth of worship?’29 Criticism of tradition and learned divinity made scripture ever more clearly the bedrock of religious knowledge, but scriptural texts were often opaque, ambiguous or apparently contradictory. These were in fact the reasons why unguided access to scripture was regarded as dangerous. Appeals to scripture were made for quite contrary purposes. The injunction in Psalm 105.15, for example, ‘Touch not mine anointed and do my prophets no harm’, became unstable in its meaning. The royalists claimed, on the basis of long practice, that the King was God’s anointed, and that this clearly ruled out the possibility of legitimate resistance. Prynne argued that the anointed were all God’s chosen ones, and that the injunction was directed at kings – more than a counter-blast since it in fact indicted Charles of already having breached the injunction.30 A veritable Babel of conflicting interpretations emerged, and was intimately connected to the debate about church government, since religious sects claimed spiritual warrant for their practices either from scripture or from personal revelation, liberated (to varying degrees) from tradition and learned divinity.

  On the other hand, religious pluralism was denounced in terms of well-established idioms – as a disease or a rupture in the divine order – but exactly which forms of belief were pathogens, or threatened the organic moral order? There seemed to be no agreement as to how to answer this question. Those who took on these questions seemed to John Milton, and presumably to others, to be ‘in wandering mazes lost’. Many polemicists, rather than reasoning high ‘Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, / Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute’,31 simply cut to the chase: the boundaries of acceptable belief could surely be established on the basis of the behavioural consequences of a prophet’s teaching, rather than on the basis of scripture or authority. If there was a definitive text here it was Matthew vii, 20: ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’. False prophets led the flock to sin. Another response to the sectarian scare was taxonomical, and these taxonomies were also, frequently, historical in content, equating current errors with others in Christian history.32 This process of numbering and taxonomizing both captured the escalating threat and promised, by labelling and counting, to contain it. Ephraim Pagitt’s Heresiography of 1645 promised a description of the Heretickes and Sectaries of these latter times: numbering and historicizing at the same time.33

  This was not a war of religion in the sense that the two sides were members of a different church. Neither anti-popery nor anti-sectarianism marked the boundary between royalist and parliamentarian: people on all sides deployed both for polemical purposes. In fact the most vituperative exchanges about the church settlement were within the parliamentary coalition, not between royalists and parliamentarians. It was a war about the identity of a single church, of which all should be members, and which should be organically linked to the political order. Preaching the Word and administering the sacraments were at the core; but episcopal discipline had been broken before a replacement was in place. Church government, so divisive within the parliamentary alliance, and a non-negotiable for the King, was absent. No authoritative source of authority now existed to interpret scripture, and God’s signs in the world. John Benbrigge’s Gods Fury, in its attempt to convince by pre-war means, was a symptom as much as a cure.34

  Political cultures are probably best understood as ‘common sense systems’. Certainly, early Stuart political culture was not a coherent philosophical system but ‘a relatively organised body of considered thought’ consisting of heterogeneous, unsystematic, ‘down-to-earth, colloquial wisdom’, something more than ‘mere matter-of-fact apprehension of reality’ but something less than a fully coherent, consciously articulated world view.35 The crisis during the 1640s made plain some of the contradictions in Stuart common sense: for example, between law, custom, providence, prerogative, scripture and reason as sources of authority. Events were forcing people to choose between authorities which had not previously been seen to be in tension. In these circumstances i
t was clearly tempting to turn to established metaphors and languages as a means of making sense of the times. The language of tyranny, derived from learned works, was deployed by low-born balla-deers to explain current affairs,36 but who was the tyrant? The literature of monstrosity spoke of the ills of the body politic; that of heresiography spoke of the plague of sectarianism. Providentialism – the belief that the active hand of God was manifest in the world, and that it could offer direction in human affairs – was another staple element of contemporary thought which now provided a means to make sense of civil and religious Babel. Anti-popery, already an elastic term, was made to embrace ever wider areas of religious practice, both Catholic and Protestant. But the collapse of spiritual authority made all other forms of authority difficult to negotiate – this was the fundamental challenge posed by the crisis of Reformation politics.

  Just as political disruption was both crisis and opportunity, so too was this polemical morass. This intellectual crisis might offer new vistas onto the wilder shores of Reformation thought – the late 1640s in England seem to have been a time of creative and exhilarating religious experimentation. Others went beyond Reformation politics, seeking workable truths on other bases. For example, indeterminacy and uncertainty were the context for more fundamental reflection about language. Elsewhere in Europe, an active response to this indeterminacy of meaning was to seek a new, transparent language that did not occlude our access to key ideas. In Spinoza this was a disdain for the ‘language of men’, in Descartes an aspiration for a mathematical philosophy and in Hobbes a careful definition of terms. Many reformers were attracted to the study of Chinese and Arabic. Chinese was attractive as a pictographic language, which communicated ideas, not sounds, and which was comprehensible to those whose spoken languages were quite different. Arabic, while not pictographic, was also a written language shared by people whose spoken languages were quite different. Babel in England gave rise to an interest in universal languages. Josiah Ricraft, the partisan historian, may have shared this interest.37 There were more practically oriented responses too. William Lilly’s demotic astrology offered hope in the face of uncertainty – identifiable and verifiable things to look out for that would offer a guide as to what was going on, and where it would all end. By 1645 others saw more-bracing possibilities, to take charge of events, and sought to make the approaching parliamentary victory a means to realize their own visions.