God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  45. For special providences see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999). For some other examples of sky battles and similar atmospheric phenomena see Irelands Amazement, or the Heavens armado (London, 1641); A Signe From Heaven (London, 12 August 1642); Severall apparitions Seene in the Ayre (London, 1646), Thomason date 18 June; Wallington collected examples too: BL, Sloane MS 1457, fos. 5r, 56r–58r; and, more generally, Vladimir Jankovic, ‘The Politics of Sky Battles in Early Hanoverian Britain’, JBS, 41 (2002), 429–459, esp. pp. 432, 438, 452. Title searches are a crude measure, of course, but they do reflect the means by which a pamphlet was sold. The whole database of titles in Early English Books Online contains forty items with ‘wonder’ prominent in the title. They date mainly from before 1644, and fall particularly heavily in 1641 and 1642. For the ambiguous place of ghosts in reformed religion see Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002).

  46. The New Yeares wonder, p. 8. For the complexity of attitudes towards these phenomena see Jankovic, ‘Sky Battles’, and more generally Walsham, Providence.

  47. A great vvonder, p. 4. For an example from Austria during the Thirty Years War see Jankovic, ‘Sky battles’, p. 432.

  48. A great vvonder, p. 4; The New Yeares wonder, p. 4.

  49. A great vvonder, p. 4.

  50. Ibid., p. 7.

  51. Richard Williams, Peace, and No Peace (London, 1643), Thomason date 5 January 1643.

  52. David Wootton, ‘From Rebellion to Revolution: The Crisis of the Winter of 1642/3 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, reprinted in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), The English Civil War (London, 1997), pp. 340–56. For Baxter’s views see pp. 341–3, 347–8. For Baxter’s career see N. H. Keeble, ‘Baxter, Richard (1615–1691)’, ODNB, 4, pp. 418–33.

  53. Wootton, ‘Rebellion to Revolution’, pp. 345–6.

  54. Ibid., p. 346.

  55. Ibid., pp. 347–9.

  56. Ibid., p. 351.

  57. Quentin Skinner, ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006), 156–70; and more generally, Quentin Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War’, in Martin Van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 2: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 9–28.

  58. Quoted in Patricia Crawford, ‘Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood’, reprinted in Peter Gaunt (ed.), The English Civil War (Oxford, 2000), pp. 303–23, at p. 310.

  59. Gardiner, I, ch. 4; Smith, Constitutional Royalism, pp. 112–13. For the text see Gardiner, CD, pp. 262–7.

  60. Smith, Constitutional Royalism, pp. 113–15.

  61. Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 177–9, 345–8; See also Gardiner, I, pp. 82–3.

  62. Gardiner, I, pp. 98–103.

  63. Wootton, ‘Rebellion to Revolution’, p. 353 n. 9, citing the distinction made by Skinner, between motives and intentions: Quentin Skinner, ‘Motives, Intentions and the Interpretation of Texts’, reprinted in James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, NJ, 1988), pp. 68–78.

  9. Military Escalation, Loyalty and Honour

  1. David Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2000), ch. 14, quotations at pp. 247, 248. See also Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm in the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 42–6; Nicola Smith, The Royal Image and the English People (Aldershot, 2001), ch. 2; Margaret Aston, ‘Iconoclasm in England: Official and Clandestine’, reprinted in Peter Marshall (ed.), The Impact of the English Reformation 1500–1640 (London, 1997), pp. 167–92, esp. pp. 183–5.

  2. Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, quotations at pp. 238, 239. For the social geography of Cheapside and the politics of its physical appearance See also Paul Griffiths, ‘Politics Made Visible: Order, Residence and Uniformity in Cheapside, 1600–45’, in Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester, 2000), pp. 176–96

  3. Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, quotation at p. 246. For the controversy in 1641 see above, p. 145.

  4. Peter Young and Richard Holmes, The English Civil War: A Military History of the Three Civil Wars 1642–1651 (Ware, 2000), pp. 91–4.

  5. Quoted in ibid., p. 102.

  6. Ibid., pp. 102–11, 122.

  7. Ibid., pp. 113–14.

  8. Ibid., pp. 115–22.

  9. Gardiner, I, p. 67; Young and Holmes accepted the case: English Civil War, p. 98, and for the royalist command see pp. 54–7. For scepticism about royal strategy, and a more positive view of parliamentary strategy, see Ian Roy, ‘The Royalist Army in the First Civil War’, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford (1963), ch. 2, esp. p. 74; Malcolm Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War, 1642–1646: Strategy and Tactics (Harlow, 2005), pp. 23, 43, 82, 92–4.

  10. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven, Conn., 1994), p. 64. Bruno Ryves noted, apparently neutrally, that Brooke was shot in the eye on St Chad’s Day. The cathedral is named for St Chad, the first holder of the see: [Bruno Ryves], Micro-chronicon (London, 1647), unpaginated, under the heading 21 April 1643.

  11. Young and Holmes, English Civil War, p. 103.

  12. See above, pp. 253–4.

  13. Clive Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 62–3; A&O, I, pp. 49–80, passim. See also Clive Holmes (ed.), The Suffolk Committees for Scandalous Ministers 1644–1646, Suffolk Records Society, XIII (Ipswich, 1970), pp. 20–21.

  14. Holmes, Eastern Association, pp. 62–7, quotations at p. 63. See also J. H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), esp. pp. 28–9, and, for the measures discussed in this chapter more generally, ch. 1.

  15. John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War 1630–1648, 2nd edn (Harlow, 1999), pp. 102–4; Holmes, Eastern Association, esp. pp. 67–8.

  16. A&O, I, pp. 73–4, 76–7, 104–5, 123–4.

  17. See above, pp. 392–3.

  18. For these forms of taxation in general see Michael J. Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England: Local Administration and Response (Woodbridge, 1994), chs. 3, 4; Michael J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester, 1996), ch. 5. For the Assessment Ordinance see A&O, I, pp. 85–100. For the excise proposal see Gardiner, I, pp. 101–2. For Hunstanton and Hanworth see Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation, p. 139. For influential studies of the escalating local burden of taxation see Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640–60 (Leicester, 1966), esp. pp. 155–72; Holmes, Eastern Association, esp. ch. 7; Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660 (London, 1975), esp. pp. 336–9; Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), esp. pp. 255–71; J. S. Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974), ch. 3.

  19. A&O, I, pp. 106–117.

  20. Ibid., pp. 145–55 (7 May 1643).

  21. For the development of this strand of opinion see Robert Ashton, ‘From Cavalier to Roundhead Tyranny, 1642–9’, in John Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War 1642–1649 (Basingstoke, 1982), pp. 185–207; Robert Ashton, Counter-Revolution: The Second Civil War and Its Origins, 1646–1648 (New Haven, Conn., 1994).

  22. Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces, 2nd edn, pp. 79–80. For a general account see Gerald Aylmer, The State’s Servants: The Civil Service of the English Republic 1649–1660 (London, 1973), esp. pp. 9–24.

  23. Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces, 2nd edn, pp. 83–4; Lotte Glow, ‘The Committee of Safety’, EHR, 80 (1965), 289–313; Wallace Notestein, ‘The Establishment of the Committee of Both Kingdoms’, AHR, 17 (1912), 477–95; John Adamson, ‘The Triumph of Oligarchy: The Management of War and the Com
mittee of Both Kingdoms, 1644–1645’, in Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey (eds.), Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 101–27.

  24. Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces, 2nd edn, pp. 79–89. For the civilian committees See also Aylmer, State’s Servants, pp. 8–29.

  25. Edward Husbands, An exact collection of all Remonstrances… (London, 1643). On 5 August 1644 the Commons ordered Husbands to print ‘all the Ordinances and Declarations that have passed since the Setting-forth the last Volume of Ordinances and Declarations, set forth by him: And, that he do take care diligently to compare his Copies with the Originals’. This latter provision suggests that he had met some criticism. He was once again given copyright: CJ, iii, p. 580. For the original order see CJ, iii, p. 16 (reproduced in Husbands, Exact collection, p. 956). Husbands also published as Husband – I have followed the spelling on this publication since it is the one which I have discussed in detail. I am grateful to Jason Peacey, on whose knowledge much of this paragraph is based, for discussing Husbands with me.

  26. Quoted from Husbands, Exact collection, p. 932. See A&O, I, p. 85.

  27. See above, p. 414.

  28. Gardiner, I, pp. 100–102.

  29. CJ, iii, p. 57; Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, pp. 71–3.

  30. Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, pp. 73–5, 83–98; Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), esp. pp. 256–60; Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, ch. 14; Gardiner, I, p. 132.

  31. Certaine informations (24 April-1 May 1643), p. 119; Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, pp. 83–5; for Harley see Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), esp. pp. 56–60, 108–16.

  32. For the administrative history see Holmes, Suffolk Committees, pp. 9–12. See also Ian Green, ‘The Persecution of “Scandalous” and “Malignant” Parish Clergy during the English Civil War’, EHR, 94 (1979), 507–31, esp. pp. 512–15.

  33. Holmes, Suffolk Committees, pp. 9–12; Green, ‘Persecution of “Scandalous” and “Malignant” Parish Clergy’, esp. pp. 512–16; for an earlier example see David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 259–60.

  34. Holmes, Suffolk Committees, pp. 9–10; CJ, ii, p. 54.

  35. Holmes, Suffolk Committees, pp. 9–10, 115–19, quotation at p. 118.

  36. Certaine informations (24 April-1 May 1643), p. 118.

  37. David Cressy, ‘Book Burning in Tudor and Stuart England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 36 (2005), 359–74, esp. pp. 361–8; Cyndia Clegg, ‘Burning Books as Propaganda in Jacobean England’, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 165–86.

  38. Cressy, ‘Book Burning’, pp. 369–70; for Prynne and Histrio-Mastix see William Lamont, ‘Prynne, William (1600–1669)’, ODNB, 45, pp. 489–94.

  39. Quoted in Cressy, ‘Book Burning’, pp. 370–71.I am also very grateful to Ariel Hessayon for allowing me to see his forthcoming paper ‘Incendiary Texts: Radicalism and Book Burning in England, c. 1640–c. 1660’.

  40. Cressy, ‘Book Burning’, p. 373. For Dering, the press and the wider public See also Jason Peacey, ‘Popularity and the Politician: An MP and His Public, 1640–1644’ (forthcoming).

  41. Certaine informations (24 April-1 May 1643), p. 118.

  42. For the Somerset controversy see Thomas G. Barnes, ‘County Politics and a Puritan Cause Célèbre: Somerset Church Ales, 1633’, TRHS, 5th ser., 9 (1959), 103–22. For the Book of Sports and its local reception see Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 196–8; Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn., 1992), pp. 353–9; Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the English Church (Oxford, 1992), ch. 5.

  43. Hutton, Merry England, pp. 200–201, 205–6; A&O, I, pp. 81–3, quotations at pp. 81, 82.

  44. Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, p. 249. For examples of maypoles and anti-Puritanism see David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985), esp. pp. 177, 269, 274–5; and see above, p. 204.

  45. For this range of responses see Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, p. 247. For concern about iconoclasm and disorder see John Walter, ‘“Abolishing superstition with sedition”? The Politics of Popular Iconoclasm in England 1640–1642’, PP, 183 (2004), 79–123.

  46. See above, pp. 312–13.

  47. William Cliftlands, ‘The “Well-Affected” and the “Country”: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Society, c. 1640–1654’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Essex (1987), esp. chs. 2, 4.

  48. Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 26–7.

  49. The text has a relatively complicated history. Thomason collected several numbers as a serial up to December 1643. The ninth edition in Thomason’s collection is numbered 18, suggesting a continuous weekly production, although it was interrupted in the autumn. These separate issues were included in an omnibus published in 1646, along with other material. This was largely reprinted in 1685 as a warning to a new generation. The 1685 edition is reset, with a new pagination, and seems to have introduced some errors. Another edition published as Angliae Ruina in 1648 has a completely new preface and includes some material not in the 1646 and 1685 editions, excluding some of the component parts. I have used and cited the 1685 edition, which is easily accessible, checking it where possible with the 1646 edition. For the publishing history See also Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, vol. 1: Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988), p. 71 n. 26.

  50. Mercurius Rusticus (1685 edn), p. 70. Early orders had protected funerary monuments, but from August 1643 onwards they were included in the remit of the legislation: Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, pp. 75–7. The legislation had sought to protect monuments, including coats of arms, of all those not ‘commonly reputed or taken for’ a saint. Wallington’s notes record a kind of mirror-image version of a grossly transgressive Cavalierism: BL, Sloane MS 1457, esp. 27v ff., and Add MS 21935.

  51. Young and Holmes, English Civil War, pp. 54–6; Wanklyn and Jones, Military History, p. 41; Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces, 2nd edn, pp. 77–9; Roy, ‘Royalist Army’, ch. 2, esp. pp. 51–85. For the conflict between military men and moderates See also Ronald Hutton, ‘The Structure of the Royalist Party, 1642–1646’, HJ, 24 (1981), 553–69.

  52. Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces, 2nd edn, pp. 116–18; Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, 2005), pp. 384–5; Martyn Bennett, ‘Between Scylla and Charybdis: The Creation of Rival Administrations at the Beginning of the English Civil War’, reprinted in Peter Gaunt (ed.), The English Civil War (Oxford, 2000), pp. 167–83.

  53. Roy, ‘Royalist Army’, pp. 220–47; Jens Engberg, ‘Royalist Finances during the English Civil War, 1642–6’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 14:2 (1966), 73–96; Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces, 2nd edn, pp. 111–15, 116. For the Earl of Pembroke see Young and Holmes, English Civil War, p. 116.

  54. Gardiner, I, pp. 132–3.

  55. Ibid., pp. 57, 66, 107: at Birmingham the destruction occurred despite an order from Rupert. The general point is also made by Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, pp. 152–3.

  56. Young and Holmes, English Civil War, pp. 113–14.

  57. Barbara Donagan, ‘Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War’, PP, 118 (1988), pp. 65–95, esp. pp. 73–80.

  58. Andrew Hopper, ‘“Fitted for desperation”: Honour and Treachery in Parliament’s Yorkshire Command, 1642–1643’, History, 86 (2001), 138–54, at pp. 140–41.

  59. Certaine informations (24 April-1 May 1643), pp. 117–18. For the accepted view of royalist severity in dealing with civilians see Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces, 2nd edn, pp. 117–18.

  60. Young and Holmes, English Civil War, p. 122.

  61. Ibid., pp. 94–7
, 122–4; Gardiner, I, pp. 155–6. For the Vow and Covenant see above, pp. 293–4. Hampden may have lost a hand when his pistol burst. Hampden’s death is lyrically treated in Gardiner, I, pp. 152–5.

  62. Young and Holmes, English Civil War, ch. 8, quotation at p. 137, and See also p. 142; Patrick McGrath, ‘Bristol and the Civil War’, reprinted in R. C. Richardson (ed.), The English Civil Wars: Local Aspects (Stroud, 1997), pp. 91–128, at pp. 101–11.

  63. Young and Holmes, English Civil War, pp. 111–13.

  64. Ibid., pp. 142–3, 151–4.

  65. Gardiner, I, pp. 194–6, quotation at p. 195; Wanklyn and Jones, Military History, chs. 9–10. See also Cust, Charles I, pp. 378–81.

  66. Young and Holmes, English Civil War, pp. 142–3; Gardiner, I, p. 207.

  67. Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 257–8, quotation at p. 258; Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 348–51; Gardiner, I, pp. 144–9.

  68. Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 304–19; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 443–59; Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics 1625–1643 (Oxford, 1961), pp. 257–73.

  69. Gardiner, I, pp. 183–8; Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 351–2.

  70. LJ, vi, pp. 86–7; Edward Vallance, ‘Protestation, Vow, Covenant and Engagement: Swearing Allegiance in the English Civil War’, Historical Research, 75 (2002), 408–424, esp. pp. 415–17. See also Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism and the Political Nation, 1553–1682 (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 56–7, 69–70; David Martin Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Woodbridge, 1999), esp. pp. 119–25, 274–5.