God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  46. Fox, Oral and Literate, esp. chs. 6–7 and the works cited there.

  47. For an overview of court politics see Kevin Sharpe, ‘The Image of Virtue: The Court and Household of Charles I 1625–1642’, in David Starkey and D. A. L. Morgan, John Murphy, Pam Wright, Neil Cuddy and Kevin Sharpe (eds.), The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London, 1987), pp. 226–60. For the politics of Buckingham’s bridging of two reigns see Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, esp. pp. 107–8, 145–8, 202–3; Cust, Forced Loan, esp. pp. 27–35. For the rumours about the poisoning of James I, which persisted into the 1640s, see Cogswell, ‘John Felton’, pp. 366–8; Alastair Bellany, ‘The Murder of James I: Mutations and Meanings of a Political Myth, c. 1625–1660’ (unpublished paper).

  48. Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, JBS, 45 (2006), 270–92; Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Puritanism’; Peter Lake, ‘“The monarchical republic of Elizabeth I” Revisited (by Its Victims) as a Conspiracy’, in Coward and Swann (eds.), Conspiracies, pp. 87–111. For a similar analysis see Richard Cust, ‘“Patriots” and “popular spirits”: Narratives of Conflict in Early Stuart Politics’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c. 1590-1720 (Manchester, 2007/8).

  49. CSPD, 1628–9, pp. 343, 363.

  50. Ibid., p. 274. See also ibid., p. 359.

  51. Cogswell, ‘Politics of Propaganda’.

  52. Cromartie, Constitutionalist Revolution, pp. 1–3, ch. 8.

  53. See, in particular, Blair Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (eds.), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981), pp. 182–200; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995); Markku Peltonen, ‘Citizenship and Republicanism in Elizabethan England’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 1: Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 85–106. For the practical importance of these ideas see Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Harris (ed.), Politics of the Excluded, pp. 153–94; Richard Cust, ‘The “public man” in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, forthcoming); Richard Cust and Peter G. Lake, ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor and the Rhetoric of Magistracy’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 54 (1981), 40–53; Philip Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), esp. chs. 3, 7, 8.

  54. Quentin Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War’, in Van Gelderen and Skinner (eds.), Republicanism, vol. 2: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe, pp. 9–28.

  55. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, ch. 1; See also David Norbrook, ‘Lucan, Thomas May, and the Creation of a Republican Literary Culture’, in Sharpe and Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics, pp. 45–66. Republican values were not necessarily anti-monarchical: ‘In general English republicanism defined itself in relation not to constitutional structures but moral principles’: Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Stability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 14, quotation at p. 317. See also Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004). Significantly, perhaps, there was a strong imperial theme in representations of Charles during the Personal Rule: John Peacock, ‘The Image of Charles I as a Roman Emperor’, in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (Manchester, 2006), pp. 50–73.

  56. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, esp. pp. 54–5.

  57. Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, ch. 7.

  58. Quoted in Kevin Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Sharpe and Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics, pp. 117–38, at p. 133.

  59. The classic cutting-down-to-size of Stuart parliaments is Conrad Russell, ‘Parliamentary History in Perspective, 1604–1629’, reprinted in Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London, 1990), pp. 31–57. See also Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, ch. 1. For the frequency of meetings see Michael A. R. Graves, Tudor Parliaments: Crown, Lords and Commons, 1485–1603 (Harlow, 1985), p. 7; Cogswell, ‘Low Road’, p. 285. For a crisp overview see David L. Smith, The Stuart Parliaments 1603–1689 (London, 1999), pt 1.

  60. Much of the literature relating to this and the next paragraph is cited and summarized in Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 48–56, 104–7. For a fuller survey see Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, Conn., 2000), chs. 5–9; and for the lives of the poor, Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004). For 1623 see Andrew B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Liverpool, 1978), chs. 8–9. For famine and the social practices which limited the effects of harvest failure see John Walter and Roger Schofield, ‘Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality in Early Modern Society’, in John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds.), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 1–73; and John Walter, ‘The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England’, reprinted in John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 124–80.

  61. The classic account is Keith Wrightson, ‘Aspects of Social Differentiation in Rural England, c.1580–1660’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 5:1 (1977), 33–47; See also Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London, 1982), ch. 5.

  62. Braddick, State Formation, ch. 3. Essential reading includes: Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988); Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), chs. 1–2; Hindle, On the Parish?.

  63. Michael J. Braddick, ‘State Formation and Social Change: A Problem Stated and Approaches Suggested’, Social History, 16:1 (1991), 1–17; Braddick, State Formation, pp. 27–38, 68–85, 101–35; Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), esp. chs. 2, 6.

  64. Paul Slack, ‘Books of Orders: The Making of English Social Policy, 1577–1631’, TRHS, 5th ser., 30 (1980), 1–22; B. W. Quintrell, ‘The Making of Charles I’s Book of Orders’, EHR, 95 (1980), 553–72; Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 456–87; Thomas G. Barnes, Somerset 1625–1640: A County’s Government during the ‘Personal Rule’ (Chicago, 1961), ch. 7. In Kent there was no conflict, but compliance was not complete: Peter Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent, 1500–1640 (Hassocks, 1977), pp. 350–53; Henrik Langelüddecke, ‘Law and Order in Seventeenth-Century England: The Organization of Local Administration during the Personal Rule of Charles I’, Law and History Review, 15 (1997), 49–76; Henrik Langelüddecke, ‘“Patchy and spasmodic”?: The Response of Justices of the Peace to Charles I’s Book of Orders’, EHR, 113 (1998), 1231–48. For Manchester see Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), p. 6. For the 1640s see Anthony Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, Conn., 1986), esp. p. 187; Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 51–8. Steve Hindle argues that the extent of rates has been overstated and that magistrates intervening in the grain market during the 1640s were not so much self-activating as prompted from below: Hindle, On the Parish?, pp. 253–4; Steve Hindle, ‘Dearth and the English Revolution: The Harvest Crisis of 1647–50 Revisited’, EcHR (forthcoming).

  65. Mark Brayshay, Philip Harrison and Brian Chalkley, ‘Knowledge, Nationhood and Govern
ance: The Speed of the Royal Post in Early-Modern England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 24 (1998), 265–88.

  66. David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), p. 311; Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 116–18; for the density of communication see Michael Frearson, ‘Communications and the Continuity of Dissent in the Chiltern Hundreds during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Spufford (ed.), World of Rural Dissenters, pp. 273–87.

  67. Figures for population and age profile derived from E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981), table A3.1.

  68. For studies of the officeholding population of particular villages see Joan R. Kent, The English Village Constable, 1580–1642 (Oxford, 1986), ch. 4; Jan Pitman, ‘Tradition and Exclusion: Parochial Officeholding in Early Modern England, a Case Study from North Norfolk, 1580–1640’, Rural History, 15 (2004), 27–45. The point about influence over government is also made by Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged’.

  69. Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, for numbers see table 2.1; Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged’; Pitman, ‘Tradition and Exclusion’, esp. pp. 38–40.

  70. This was particularly true in the mid sixteenth century: Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 5th edn (Harlow, 2004), pp. 12–13; Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 1996), esp. ch. 1. But the language persisted into the seventeenth century: John Walter, ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England’, reprinted in Walter, Crowds, pp. 196–222, esp. pp. 198–9.

  71. For this approach see Quentin Skinner, ‘Language and Social Action’, reprinted in James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, NJ, 1988), pp. 119–32.

  72. John Walter and Keith Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England’, reprinted in Paul Slack (ed.), Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 108–28; Walter, ‘Public Transcripts’; John Walter, ‘A “rising of the people”?: The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596’, in Walter, Crowds, pp. 73–123; Walter, ‘Social Economy of Dearth’, in ibid., pp. 124–80; Steve Hindle, ‘Exhortation and Entitlement: Negotiating Inequality in English Rural Communities, 1550–1650’, in Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 102–22.

  73. Hindle, ‘Dearth and the English Revolution’.

  74. For a summary and further references see Braddick, State Formation, pp. 30–41, 137–40.

  75. For a summary and further references see ibid. For some influential studies see Keith Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-Century England’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People?: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1980), pp. 21–46; Cynthia Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987); Hindle, State and Social Change, ch. 5.

  76. Clive Holmes, ‘The County Community in Stuart Historiography’, JBS, 19:2 (1980), 54–73.

  77. Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), ch. 4.

  78. Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700, rev. edn (Oxford, 1995); David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1992); Cust and Lake, ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor’.

  79. For more indulgent paternalism see David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985), ch. 3. For social control without Puritanism see Margaret Spufford, ‘Puritanism and Social Control’, in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (eds.), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 41–57; Martin Ingram, ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 47–88.

  80. Sharpe, ‘Image of Virtue’.

  81. Braddick, State Formation, pp. 181–96.

  82. Ibid., esp. pp. 181–4.

  83. For summaries and further references see Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 487–505; Braddick, State Formation, pp. 187–8, 192–5.

  84. For a full account see Michael J. Braddick, ‘Administrative Performance: The Representation of Political Authority in Early Modern England’, in Braddick and Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power, pp. 166–87. See also Esther Cope, ‘Politics without Parliament: The Dispute about Muster Masters’ Fees in Shropshire in the 1630s’, HLQ, 45 (1982), 271–84; Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 495, 496–7.

  85. The sense of occasion is evoked by A. H. Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 87–8.

  86. Braddick, ‘Administrative Performance’, p. 168. For Burton’s attitude in the 1620s see ibid., p. 182; Sharpe, Personal Rule, p. 497.

  87. For the abuse of tax collectors and the intersection with local reputation see Michael J. Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England: Local Administration and Response (Woodbridge, 1994), esp. pp. 39–54, 117–24, 154–6; Michael J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester, 1996), esp. pp. 196–7.

  88. Braddick, ‘Administrative Performance’, quotations at pp. 170, 174.

  89. Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 494–5.

  90. Thomas Cogswell, Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State and Provincial Conflict (Manchester, 1998), esp. ch. 11; See also Sharpe, Personal Rule, p. 499.

  91. For the most sympathetic account of these fiscal policies see Sharpe, Personal Rule, ch. 3; and, for a longer-term perspective on their logic and politics, Braddick, Nerves of State, ch. 4, which also contains a guide to further reading. For the longer-term perspective see Holmes, ‘Parliament, Liberty, Taxation, and Property’. For the burdens of these various devices in Leicestershire see Cogswell, Home Divisions, pp. 194–200, 230–36, 245–50, 255–60. For knighthood fines See also Derek Hirst, England in Conflict 1603–1660: Kingdom Community, Commonwealth (London, 1999), pp. 140, 142.

  92. Hirst, England in Conflict, quotation at p. 142.

  93. For an overview see Sharpe, Personal Rule, ch. 9; A. A. M. Gill, ‘Ship Money during the Personal Rule of Charles I: Politics, Ideology and Law 1634 to 1640’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Sheffield (1990).

  94. Kenneth Fincham, ‘The Judges’ Decision on Ship Money in February 1637: The Reaction of Kent’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 57:136 (1984), 230–37.

  95. Sharpe, Personal Rule, p. 721.

  96. For a clear account see ibid., pp. 721–5.

  97. Ibid. For Bramston and Davenport see Conrad Russell, ‘The Ship-Money Judgments of Bramston and Davenport’, reprinted in Russell, Unrevolutionary England, pp. 137–44; Clarendon quoted in R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War: A Portrait of a Society in Conflict (London, 1969), p. 91.

  98. Clarendon, I, p. 86. Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 727–9, points to the slight improvement over the summer of 1638, as those waiting for the verdict paid up; for places where receipts held up see C. A. Clifford, ‘Ship Money in Hampshire: Collection and Collapse’, Southern History, 4 (1982), 91–106, at p. 102; Clark, Kent, pp. 358–61; John T. Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich: Politics, Religion and Government, 1620–1690 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 80–84. For those with worsening records of payment or difficulties in getting officials to serve from 1637 onwards see Barnes, Somerset, ch. 8, esp. pp. 228–33; M. A. Faraday, ‘Shipmoney in Herefordshire’, in Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, 41 (1974), 219–29, esp. pp. 226–7; Clive Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire (
Lincoln, 1980), p. 131; Ketton-Cremer, Norfolk, p. 94; Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter, 1994), pp. 172–6.

  99. For the politics of Star Chamber see Sharpe, Personal Rule, esp. pp. 665–82; for its wider history see Hindle, State and Social Change, ch. 3 and the references therein.

  100. Quoted in Marshall, Reformation England, p. 197.

  101. For religious policies in the 1630s see ibid., ch. 8; Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke, 1993). Sharpe, Personal Rule, ch. 6, is, as always, full and informative and sympathetic to the views and aims of the regime.

  102. Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of Holiness in the 1630s’, in Fincham (ed.), Early Stuart Church, pp. 161–85, quotation at p. 167; Andrew Foster, ‘The Clerical Estate Revitalised’, in ibid., pp. 93–113; Holmes, Lincolnshire, pp. 112–21. For the argument that fears for the doctrine of predestination were not at the heart of the controversies, at least outside the universities, and that there had been other periods when it had been more threatened, see Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992). For a good overview and further references see Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 133–41.

  103. For the local appeal of Laudianism among Catholics and anti- or non-Puritans see Michael Questier, ‘Arminianism, Catholicism and Puritanism in England during the 1630s’, HJ, 49 (2006), 53–28; Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited: Catholics, Anti-Calvinists and “Parish Anglicans” in Early Stuart England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 49 (1988), 620–51; and for the ‘multiple realities’ of parish life see Christopher Haigh, ‘The Troubles of Thomas Pestell: Parish Squabbles and Ecclesiastical Politics in Caroline England’, JBS, 41 (2002), 403–28. For a judicious overview of the academic debate about the origins and appeal of ‘Laudianism’ see Marshall, Reformation England, pp. 199–205, which contains the key references. For examples of local enforcement see Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660 (London, 1975), ch. 4; Holmes, Lincolnshire, pp. 112–21; Evans, Norwich, pp. 84–104; Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, pp. 84–8; Hughes, Warwickshire, pp. 104-11; J. F. Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community, 1525–1640 (Manchester, 2005), pp. 343–51.