God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  70. For early signs of awareness in Scotland of the possibility of a common cause with the godly in England see Donald, Uncounselled King, p. 37; Russell, Fall, pp. 60–61.

  71. Macinnes, British Revolution, p. 114; Macinnes, Charles I, pp. 163–73; Makey, Church of the Covenant, identifies the social significance of this organization slightly differently: pp. 22–5. For Henderson see John Coffey, ‘Henderson, Alexander (c. 1583–1646)’, ODNB, 26, pp. 288–93; and for Johnston see John Coffey, ‘Johnston, Sir Archibald, Lord Wariston (bap. 1611, d. 1663)’, ODNB, 30, pp. 338–46.

  72. ‘The Scottish National Covenant’, reprinted in Gardiner, CD, pp. 124–34, quotations at pp. 125, 131.

  73. Ibid., p. 132.

  74. Ibid.

  75. Skinner, Foundations, ch. 7.

  76. Macinnes, Charles I, esp. p. 177; Macinnes, British Revolution, pp. 114–16. See also Edward J. Cowan, ‘The Making of the National Covenant’, in Morrill, Scottish National Covenant, pp. 68–89.

  77. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp. 83–7, 97.

  78. For this reading of the text see ibid., pp. 84–6; Morrill also finds it an ambivalent document: ‘National Covenant’, pp. 11–12, reflecting a genuine failure to realize the full implications of their position. Stevenson’s view of its practical significance is similar to that of Macinnes.

  79. Macinnes, British Revolution, p. 116.

  80. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, p. 87.

  81. John J. Scally, ‘Hamilton, James, First Duke of Hamilton (1606–1649)’, ODNB, 24, pp. 839–46; See also Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, p. 94.

  82. For the limits on Hamilton’s powers see Donald, Scottish Revolution, pp. 72–5, 78–9; Makey, Church of the Covenant, pp. 32–4.

  83. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp. 88–95; Donald, Uncounselled King, pp. 79–87.

  84. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, p. 96.

  85. Ibid., pp. 18, 24; population estimate Laura Stewart, personal communication.

  86. Quoted in Scally, ‘Hamilton’.

  87. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp. 100–101.

  88. Ibid., pp. 104–9.

  89. Ibid., pp. 109–12; Donald, Uncounselled King, ch. 3, narrates Hamilton’s mission in greater detail and with more attention to the possibilities for settlement.

  90. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp. 116–26; Donald, Uncounselled King, pp. 109–12.

  2. Self-Government at the King’s Command

  1. The most detailed account of the murder is contained in the letter from Dudley Carlton to the Queen, reprinted in Henry Ellis (ed.), Original Letters Illustrative of English History, 3 vols. (London, 1824), III, pp. 254–60. For some additional material see Frederick W. Fairholt (ed.), Poems and Songs Relating to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham: and his assassination by John Felton, August 23, 1628, Percy Society, Vol. 29, No. 40 (London, 1850), pp. i-xxxi. Much of this material is also gathered in Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, 12th edn (London, 1841), pp. 307–10. It is discussed in James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London, 2000); Alastair Bellany, ‘“Rayling Rymes and Vaunting Verse”: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–1628’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 285–310, esp. pp. 304–9. For a brief description of the assassination in the context of problematic military mobilization see Thomas G. Barnes, ‘Deputies not Principals, Lieutenants not Captains: The Institutional Failure of Lieutenancy in the 1620s’, in Mark Charles Fissel (ed.), War and Government in Britain, 1598–1650 (Manchester, 1991), pp. 58–86, esp. pp. 82–3.

  2. Fairholt, Poems and Songs, p. xxi. For other versions see Ellis, Original Letters, pp. 259–60.

  3. Ellis, Original Letters, pp. 257–8. See also CSPD, 1628–9, pp. 268, 271.

  4. Ellis, Original Letters, p. 258; for the grievances about pay and place see CSPD, 1628–9, pp. 274, 277–8. For the relationship between Felton’s personal frustrations and the broader hostility to Buckingham see Thomas Cogswell, ‘John Felton, Popular Political Culture, and the Assassination of the Duke of Buckingham’, HJ, 49 (2006), 357–83.

  5. Fairholt, Poems and Songs, p. xxviii.

  6. John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State…, 8 vols. (London, 1721 edn), vol. I, p. 641; Fairholt, Poems and Songs, p. xxvii.

  7. Rushworth, Historical Collections, I, p. 638; CSPD, 1628–9, p. 321.

  8. For the preparations before his examination see CSPD, 1628–9, pp. 321, 340. Once, having ‘received an injury from a gentleman, he cut off a piece of his little finger, and sent it with a challenge to the gentleman to fight with him, thereby to let him know that he valued not the exposing of his whole body to hazard so he might but have an opportunity to be revenged’: Rushworth, Historical Collections, I, p. 638. A number of those examined afterwards commented that he was a melancholy and angry man, and his family seem to have been pained and bewildered by his actions: CSPD, 1628–9, pp. 274, 277–8, 343, 349.

  9. Rushworth, Historical Collections, I, p. 638. According to one account it was Dorset who had threatened him with the rack, and it was to him that Felton made the threat in return: Fairholt, Poems and Songs, p. xxvin. Suspicion that leading parliamentarians were connected with the murder was not confined to the council: Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn., 1992), p. 48. For Laud and the Puritan plot see Jason Peacey, ‘The Paranoid Prelate: Archbishop Laud and the Puritan Plot’, in Barry Coward and Julian Swann (eds.), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 113–34.

  10. Rushworth, Historical Collections, I, pp. 638–9. Fairholt, Poems and Songs, also suggests that legal niceties did not always prevent the use of the rack: p. xxvin.

  11. Rushworth, Historical Collections, I, pp. 640–41. See also Ellis, Original Letters, pp. 279–81.

  12. James A. Sharpe, ‘“Last dying speeches”: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England’, PP, 107 (1985), 144–67.

  13. Anon., The Prayer and Confession of Mr Felton, word for word as hee it spake immediatly before his Execution, Novem 29 1628, ESTC 19762. It was published anonymously and bears no place and date of publication, or the publisher, as if it had been published clandestinely. Although this was a publication likely to play well with the crown, the subject matter was rather sensitive, of course. As a matter of general policy Charles and his advisers had turned their backs on propaganda in 1627, reversing a policy which Charles and Buckingham had pursued in 1623: Thomas Cogswell, ‘The Politics of Propaganda: Charles I and the People in the 1620s’, JBS, 29:3 (1990), 187–215; See also Richard Cust, ‘Charles I and Popularity’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 235–58.

  14. Sir Thomas Barrington reported that Felton ‘condemned and bewailed his fate, died penitently and disavowed all justification of the deed, desired all the people to pray for him and so ended his days’, Arthur Searle (ed.), Barrington Family Letters 1628–1632, Royal Historical Society, Camden Society, 4th ser., 28 (London, 1983), p. 39. See also Ellis, Original Letters, pp. 281–2.

  15. Thomas Laqueur, ‘Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 305–55; Peter Lake and Michael C. Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’, PP, 153 (1996), 64–107.

  16. Anon., Prayer and Confession.

  17. CSPD, 1628–9, p. 277; Ellis, Original Letters, pp. 260–61.

  18. Ibid., pp. 278–9. For an example of an execution rearranged in order to ‘avoid a crowd of people’ see Donald Woodward, ‘“Here comes a chopper to chop of
f his head”: The Execution of Three Priests at Newcastle and Gateshead, 1592–1594’, Recusant History, 22 (1994), 1–6, at p. 1.

  19. Ellis, Original Letters, p. 281.

  20. Fairholt, Poems and Songs, pp. xxix-xxx. See also Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, pp. 186–91; Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York, 1977), p. 28.

  21. Fairholt, Poems and Songs, passim. Some of this material is discussed in David Nor-brook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 53–8; David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn (Oxford, 2002), pp. 211, 312–12; Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 48–9; Bellany, ‘“Rayling Rymes and Vaunting Verse”’, esp. pp. 304–9.

  22. Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church 1628–1688 (Oxford, 1988), p. 4 and n.

  23. For a clear overview of the order of events see Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts: A Political History 1603–1642 (London, 1989). Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), offers a detailed outline of the parliamentary politics, but is now criticized for underplaying the importance of ideological conflict and its resonances in the localities. For important studies which re-emphasize these things see Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987); Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989); Thomas Cogswell, ‘England and the Spanish Match’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (Harlow, 1989), pp. 107–33; Thomas Cogswell, ‘Phaeton’s Chariot: The Parliament Men and the Continental Crisis in 1621’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 24–46; Richard Cust, ‘Politics and the Electorate in the 1620s’, in ibid., pp. 134–67; Johann Sommerville, ‘Ideology, Property and the Constitution’, in ibid., pp. 47–71. For Russell’s response on foreign policy see Conrad Russell, ‘Sir Thomas Wentworth and anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1621–1624’, in Merritt (ed.), Political World, pp. 47–62. For the interconnection of threats to civil and religious liberties see Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge, 2006), esp. intr. and ch. 8. Thomas Cogswell, ‘A Low Road to Extinction? Supply and Redress of Grievances in the Parliaments of the 1620s’, HJ, 33 (1990), 283–303, argues that Parliament was effective both in securing redress and in granting supplies during the 1620s; for the royal perception that parliaments would not grant enough money see Cust, Forced Loan, pp. 30–31. For Arminianism see above, ch. 1, n. 43.

  24. Richard W. Stewart, ‘Arms and Expeditions: The Ordnance Office and the Assaults on Cadiz (1625) and the Isle of Rhé (1627)’, in Fissel (ed.), War and Government, pp. 112–32; Cogswell, ‘John Felton’, pp. 362–4; Cust, Forced Loan, esp. pp. 58–62; Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 334–76; John Guy, ‘The Origins of the Petition of Right Reconsidered’, HJ, 25 (1982), 289–312, esp. pp. 294–9. The reliability of the accusations on which Guy’s article is based is contested by Mark Kishlansky, ‘Tyranny Denied: Charles I, Attorney General Heath, and the Five Knights’ Case’, HJ, 42 (1999), 53–83. The point here is that they were made, and what that indicates about the political atmosphere of the late 1620s.

  25. Stewart, ‘Arms and Expeditions’.

  26. Barnes, ‘Deputies not Principals’; Thomas Cogswell, ‘War and the Liberties of the Subject’, in J. H. Hexter (ed.), Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War (Stanford, Calif., 1992), pp. 225–51.

  27. Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, ch. 8, esp. pp. 377–84, and for the subsequent dispute over publication, pp. 401–2. For the printing and legal status see L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge, 1989), esp. pp. 90–91; L. J. Reeve, ‘The Legal Status of the Petition of Right’, HJ, 29 (1986), 257–77, esp. pp. 261–3; E. R. Foster, ‘Printing the Petition of Right’, HLQ, 38 (1974–5), 81–3. The totemic significance of the Petition of Right for those anxious about English liberties is clear in Reeve, Charles I, esp. ch. 5.

  28. Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 391–2; Alastair Bellany, ‘Basting the Lambe: Witchcraft, Court Scandal and the Lynching of the Duke’s Devil, June 1628’, PP (forthcoming).

  29. Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1992); Clive Holmes, ‘Parliament, Liberty, Taxation, and Property’, in Hexter (ed.), Parliament and Liberty, pp. 122–54.

  30. For fundamental disagreements in Stuart political thought see Johann Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (rev. edn London, 1999); Cromartie, Constitutionalist Revolution. For the articulation of a fundamental view of political liberty in the debates about the Petition of Right see Quentin Skinner, ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’, History Workshop Journal, 61:1 (2006), 156–70, esp. pp. 156, 158; Guy, ‘Origins of the Petition of Right’; Cogswell, ‘War and the Liberties of the Subject’.

  31. For the rise of Arminianism see above, ch. 1, n. 43; and for a summary see Peter Marshall, Reformation England, 1480–1642 (London, 2003), esp. pp. 195–7. For Maynwaring and Sibthorpe see, Cust, Forced Loan, esp. pp. 62–5; Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots, esp. pp. 119–24; Vivienne Larminie, ‘Maynwaring, Roger (1589/90?-1653)’, ODNB, 37, pp. 612–4. For Sibthorpe See also John Fielding, ‘Sibthorpe, Robert (d. 1662)’, ODNB, 50, pp. 500–501; Cromartie, Constitutionalist Revolution, esp. pp. 244–5.

  32. Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 404–12.

  33. Marshall, Reformation England, pp. 135, 196; Cromartie, Constitutionalist Revolution, pp. 172–4.

  34. The classic discussion is Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 1988), ch. 1.

  35. Cogswell, Blessed Revolution; Cogswell, ‘England and the Spanish Match’.

  36. The literature on this is very large. See, especially, Peter Lake, ‘Defining Puritanism – Again?’, in Francis J. Bremer (ed.), Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith (Boston, Mass., 1993), pp. 3–29. For the construction of Puritanism in public debate see, in particular, Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in post-Reformation England (New Haven, Conn., 2002); Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds.), Religious Politics in post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 80–97; Patrick Collinson, ‘The Theatre Constructs Puritanism’, in David L. Smith, Richard Strier and David Bevington (eds.), The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 157–69. Marshall, Reformation England, offers an excellent overview and further references: pp. 135–41.

  37. Esther S. Cope and Willson H. Coates (eds.), Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640, Camden 4th ser., 19 (London, 1977), p. 147.

  38. Cromartie, Constitutionalist Revolution, pp. 144–5; Marshall, Reformation England, pp. 194–5.

  39. Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 11. The figure for literacy is derived from David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), although most authorities agree that this is a minimum figure, and possibly much lower than the real size of the reading population. For a judicious review see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 16–19.

  40. Watt, Cheap Print, ch. 2; Angela McShane Jones, ‘“Rime and Reason”: The Political World of the English Broadside Ballad, 1640–1689’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Warwick (2004), esp. ch. 6.

  41. Ian M. Green, ‘“For children in yeeres and children in understanding”: The Emergence of th
e English Catechism under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37 (1986), 397–425, at p. 425; See also Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996); Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000). For instructional material See also Tessa Watt, ‘Piety in the Pedlar’s Pack: Continuity and Change, 1578–1630’, in Margaret Spufford (ed.), The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 235–72.

  42. Watt, Cheap Print, chs. 4–8; work on chapbooks is much indebted to Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, Ga., 1981).

  43. Matthias Adam Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England, 1476–1622 (Philadelphia, Penn., 1929), esp. chs. 1, 4.

  44. Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2001 edn); Lake with Questier, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, chs. 1-5; Peter Lake, ‘Popular Form, Puritan Content’: Two Puritan Appropriations of the Murder Pamphlet from mid-Seventeenth-Century London’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds.), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 313–34.

  45. For public awareness of politics more generally see Richard Cust, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, reprinted in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), The English Civil War (London, 1997), pp. 233–60; Cogswell, ‘Politics of Propaganda’; Thomas Cogswell, ‘Underground Verse and the Transformation of Early Stuart Political Culture’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995), pp. 277–300; Thomas Cogswell, ‘“Published by Authoritie”: Newsbooks and the Duke of Buckingham’s Expedition to the Île de Ré’, HLQ, 67:1 (2004), 1–25; Bellany, ‘“Rayling Rymes and Vaunting Verse”’; Alastair Bellany, ‘Libels in Action: Ritual, Subversion and the English Literary Underground, 1603–42’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 99–124; Fox, Oral and Literate, esp. chs. 6–7 and the works cited there.