Oxford was briefly occupied by Parliament in 1642, before the troops were forced to withdraw. As they did so, they struck a last blow:
The London troopers went out about noon; and as they came along down the high street, the Mayor presented them with wine at his door freely; and passing by St Mary’s church, one of them discharged a brace of bullets at the stone image of Our Lady over the church porch and at one shot struck off her head and the head of her child which she held in her right arm; another discharged at the image of our Saviour, over All Souls gate … some townsmen entreated them to forbear; they replying that they had not been so well entertained here at Oxford as they expected.
The mixture of religious motivation and vindictiveness is striking. It is the same mixture as in Wharton’s letters. The porch statue the trooper’s shot disfigured was not medieval, but brand-new. It was the work of Laud’s chaplain Dr Morgan Owen. And it was a symbol not of medieval ideas that needed to be swept away, but of a terrifying novelty, a new cult.
Ideas varied on what an icon was: the vague notion was of something visual and symbolic that could be an object of worship or adoration, but individuals differed in where they drew the line. The cross, for example, was controversial. James I had complained about ‘those that worship a piece of a stick’, but the very Puritan Earl of Leicester kept one in his house. Later generations were stricter, debarring any attempt to bind God by making an image; the word and the word alone could be used to teach and explain. Consequently, even market crosses, which might not have been likely to provoke any actual worship, came under attack. The Civil War simply created opportunities for more widespread outbreaks of the strife which had been a constant of parish life since the Reformation. Nor were the iconoclasts always sanctioned by law and order; indeed, there was something of a tradition in some locales of icon-breaking as a bit of healthy political protest of an evening. Many churchyard crosses were destroyed in daring midnight raids by local youths. The famous Banbury Cross – to which one might once have ridden a cock horse – was demolished by workmen who began their task at dawn, but nevertheless attracted an angry crowd of objectors. ‘I am glad for my part, they are scoured of their gay gazing’, wrote a preacher to Parliament in 1645. The eye, said George Hakewill, ‘is the instrument of wantonness, gluttony and covetousness’ and especially the spectacle of ‘the magnific and pompous fabric of churches’. Hakewill was writing to console a blind woman for her loss of sight. Conversely, iconoclasm was often presented as traditional; it united the image-breakers with their forefathers.
Just as some very dedicated Nazis saw their goal as the destruction of the Jews rather than the defeat of the Western allies, so some very godly Parliamentarians came to see the papists as their true target, and by this they meant not just Roman Catholics, recusants, or such groupings, but anyone or anything that violated their idea of true religion. Their aim was simple, spare and strict: a bare church room, with no stained glass, no altar, no hangings or paintings or any kind of colour or representation, a blank space in which to listen and receive. There could be no Laudian worship in such a space. For the strictest, even tomb monuments – especially the tombs of bishops and nobles – were a violation of this severity enjoined upon them by God. Anything outside this gauntness could be viewed with contempt as well as anxiety.
The reformers like Hugh Latimer had used ridicule and abuse to make people laugh at what they had once worshipped, but that laughter could easily turn into contemptuous violence. Like all violence, especially holy violence, iconoclasm could become a way of having a shamelessly good time doing something shocking while patting oneself on the back for holiness. Breaking things – when licensed – can be a considerable pleasure, especially when you are under stress.
What made all the resentment towards icons and symbols far more intense were the Laudian reforms that had overturned the Church of England in the 1630s. One of Parliament’s main missions was to remedy all this. In Suffolk, William Dowsing led a campaign which destroyed decorations in 150 churches. Dowsing was careful, meticulous, a keeper of long lists and records. Though not a combatant, Dowsing believed his activities had a direct relation to the course of the war: he thought Fairfax was given victory at Nantwich because on that day images were destroyed at Orford, Snape and Saxmundham. Dowsing had removed the protective carapace of one side and thus strengthened the other. In Suffolk, Dowsing often arrived to find his work already done for him by parishioners eager to rid themselves of the hallmarks of Laud’s reforms. At Haverhill, two hundred ‘superstitious pictures’ had been broken before Dowsing got there, and the same was true of altar-rails throughout the region.
‘Images’, writes Margaret Aston, ‘were surrogates or dummies on which were vented some of the anger felt toward inaccessible human agents.’ All iconoclasm was ‘a process of scapegoating’. ‘This present Parliament began, as the fruit of many prayers, for when the people of God in this land were full of fears and troubles, their hearts failing them … the Lord gave to them the spirit of supplication … The late lamentable Wars began, yet God was good to us in discovering many secret treacheries … And many superstitious relics were abolished, which neither we nor our godly fathers (as ye have heard) were able to bear.’ There was an effort to make something new by cleansing, by destruction.
Iconoclasm also resembled atrocities, and was often described as if it were an atrocity; it offered the same chance to organize the terrified self by attacking the helplessly mysterious and powerful: soldiers attacking a figure of Christ might have been attacking any feminized target: ‘another said “here is Christ”, and swore that he would rip up his bowels: which they accordingly did, as far as the figures were capable thereof, besides many other villanies. And not content therewith, finding another statue of Christ in the frontispiece of the Southgate, they discharged against it forty shot at the least, triumphing much, when they did hit it in the head or face.’
Men overwhelmed by war and fighting against other men could vent their fear and rage on a helpless image that could not fight back. But to the soldiers, the image might not have seemed helpless: iconoclasts could hardly help endowing the statues they destroyed with the same power as combatants. If they were worth such destructive energy, then they almost had the kind of supernatural power ascribed to them by the superstitious.
The irony was that it was this Laudian increase in icons that provoked attacks on older works. When Henry Sherfield attacked and broke a stained-glass window in Salisbury Cathedral in 1633, he was especially affronted by its image of God the Father, ‘a little old man in a blue and red coat’. Sherfield said he’d been motivated by the parish council’s wish for more light to allow people to read their prayer books. But that was not good enough for Laud, who wanted to make the point that only bishops had the authority to enact reformation; it wasn’t acceptable for every Tom, Dick and Harry to ‘make batteries at glass windows in churches at their pleasure’. He was fined £500.
The violence makes more sense when we grasp the fact that the godly had every reason to feel themselves menaced. In the summer of 1637 Prynne, the most famous prisoner of his day, was being moved to Caernarvon Castle on charges related to his pamphlet Newes from Ipswich; his ears had already been cropped in London. The men of Chester had turned out to cheer for him, helped him on a shopping trip to palliate the austerity of his Welsh gaol, and (in supporter John Bruern’s case) joined him in prayer. Prynne’s pamphlet had attacked ‘certain late detestable practices of some domineering lordly prelates’ and ‘their Romish innovations’. The crowd that cheered Prynne had seen the altar restored, ‘used in times of Popery’ which Laud ‘caused to be digged up out of the ground where it was formerly buried’. The idea that Laudian clerics were literally digging up the buried past of popery was a powerful symbol.
So was Prynne himself; ironically, the man who condemned stage plays at voluminous length had himself a fine sense of drama. He first appeared as himself a kind of icon of anti-Laudian activism when
the government ordered that his ears be cropped in the pillory and his book Histrio-Mastix burnt. This entirely excessive punishment was probably because of an entry in the index which said ‘Women actors notorious whores’, an equation taken rather personally by Henrietta Maria, but the general attack on theatricals was aimed squarely at the court and everybody knew it was, especially since Prynne also condemned almost everything else they enjoyed, including hunting, public festivals, Christmas-keeping, dances, and even the decking of a hall with green ivy.
It was Laud, however, who was most determined to prosecute Prynne and who combed his work for seditious ideas. The Star Chamber wanted to mark it as unusually awful: it ‘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.’ Prynne was also to be placed in the pillory at Westminster, with a paper on his head declaring the nature of his offence, and have one of his ears there cut off, and then to be held in Cheapside pillory, and have the other ear lopped. Prynne’s punishment wasn’t enough for some people; Lord Dorset thought he should also be branded in the forehead and have his nose slit. Others thought St Paul’s pillory would be a better spot for it, as a warning to the London booktrade, but Laud said this would be a misuse of a consecrated place.
On 7 and 10 May 1634, Prynne was duly subjected to his ordeal. It made him an icon of godly martyrdom, a sign that Laud and his men were out to get the holy, the chosen. His supporters commented on his bravery. Nehemiah Wallington called him ‘a harmless lamb’ and godly people everywhere reached for Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to help them understand the scene.
Such praise made it certain that Prynne would not be deterred. Newes from Ipswich, even more intemperate than Histrio-Mastix, denounced bishops for popish innovations and for ‘tyrannising over bawdy thievish courts’. When Prynne and his fellow-authors Burton and Bastwick were sentenced to have their ears removed, the court asked whether Prynne had any ears left, and ordered that the remaining stumps be cut off. This was duly done on 30 June 1637. Prynne was especially ill-treated, burned on both cheeks, and burnt twice on one because the letter had not come out well. One cheek bore an S, the other an L, for Seditious Libeller; Prynne said it stood for stigmata laudis, the mark of praise – or, alternatively, the Sign of Laud. And then he was hacked savagely about the ears, allegedly because he had promised the hangman the previous time that if treated well he would give him five shillings, and only gave five sixpences. This may be a cruel joke at the expense of godly meanness, though.
The hangman may have been hostile, but almost everyone else in London was on the side of the men being punished. As they came from the gatehouse towards the Palace of Westminster, the crowd threw herbs and flowers before them. Even people entirely hostile to their cause were impressed by their courage. All beholders, said a Dorset draper visiting London, shed tears. There were some ironies in all this hero-worship. According to the Catholic Sir Kenelm Digby, the godly were, hilariously, keen to gather relics of the martyrdom, the bloody sponges and handkerchiefs: ‘you may see how nature leads men to respect relics of martyrs’. Prynne himself retold the story of those who dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood ‘as a thing most precious’ in New Discovery.
Horror at what had been done to Prynne as well as godly zeal inspired eagerness. Robert Harley’s daughter Brilliana, named for her mother, wrote to her brother Edward in 1639, describing her father’s zeal: ‘My father had lately brought him a most horrible picture of the great God of heaven [and] earth which he broke all to pieces.’
Brilliana herself had thrown the dust of the picture ‘upon the water’. She was ten years old. The picture was found in a stable on Harley’s estate in Buckton. By now Harley was breaking into private houses he controlled to find ecclesiastical objets d’art. As in the days of Edward VI, people were buying and then squirrelling away religious art, some perhaps hoping that better times would allow them to bring it out. Harley was having none of that, as Brilliana explained in a later letter: ‘The image that I writ you word of, it was found in Buckton in one Robert Mathiss’s house, he plucking up a plank in his stable, he found it there and did keep it a quarter of a year in his house, and it should have been sold for 7 pounds. Then somebody told my father of it and then my father sent for it and broke it in pieces and flung the dust of it upon the water.’
This childish glee reflects what the young Brilliana had been taught. Meanwhile, any children Robert Mathis had might have been learning different lessons; the find points to the continued existence of devotional images in homes, though doubtless this one had once been in a church. Someone was willing to buy it, and for a substantial sum.
Meanwhile churches were being reformed. Altar-rails and communion tables began to come under attack in the summer of 1640, but it was when the House of Commons decided to outlaw them that many people got to work: in the church of St Thomas the Apostle, on 11 June 1641, John Blackwell, grocer to the king, told the congregation frankly that the altar-rails were popish innovations. Not everyone agreed, and the result was a tussle between traditionalists and the godly that was a microcosm of larger and bloodier conflicts to come. Blackwell’s adherents won, and pulled down the rails, saying that the altar-rails were Dagon (the god of the Philistines) and should be burned like Dagon. The rector and eight others signed a petition asking the House of Lords to punish the wrongdoers.
You didn’t have to be concealing works of art to be wary of those who came to be called ‘the rooters’, after the satirically named Root and Branch petition, signed by 15,000 London citizens on 10 December 1640, which urged the abolition of bishops, deans and chapters. The Commons didn’t approve the bill that resulted from it, because some MPs were suspicious of its levelling tendencies. Similarly, when the House of Commons announced unilaterally that it was going to get rid of Laudian artefacts such as communion rails and altars, even some stoutly Puritan people like Sir Edward Dering became restive. ‘Oh, you make an idol of a name. I beseech you, Sir, paint me a voice, make a sound visible if you can: when you have taught mine ears to see, and mine eyes to hear, I may then perhaps understand this subtle argument. In the mean time reduce this dainty species of new idolatry, under its proper head (the second commandment) if you can.’ He went to gaol for ten days. But there were also plenty of people who leapt into a flurry of action. On 5 November in Chelmsford, there was an outbreak of violence: churchwardens had already taken down the Virgin and Crucifixion, but the iconoclasts beat down the whole window with long poles and stones. London’s parish churches also had their stained glass destroyed in October 1641. And the Harleys set to work personally, too; communion rails were removed and churchyard crosses destroyed. Harley personally crushed the cross at Wigmore with a sledgehammer, and threw the idols hammered out of church windows into the nearby River Teme at Leintwardine.
But the new rules still applied only to churches; the godly worked for their extension, and were rewarded by the ordinance of 28 August 1643, which allowed public crosses like Paul’s Cross, Cheapside Cross and Charing Cross to be taken down. Thus in May 1644, all images came under scrutiny, public and private. There was nowhere left for the Virgin and saints to hide. The new order had finally arrived; Church and state were one, and the Church was a godly Church.
There was a tradition of turning objects loved by those deemed idolators to degrading secular use as a radical way of annihilating their sacred aura. Altars and holy water stoups became kitchen sinks, and (in a manner that looks forward chillingly to some Nazi practices) altar stones became pavements, so that those who had worshipped at them were forced to walk on them. Alternatively, the reformers could choose to burn idols, like Josiah and Jehu had in Biblical times. These were bonfires of the vanities of religion.
Nehemiah Wallington describes iconoclasm in Radwinter in Essex, one fast day in 1640; the soldiers were heading for Scotland, pressed into service, and probably angry: ‘The Soldiers went int
o the church and pulled up the rails and pulled down the images (which as I hear cost the parson to set up thirty pounds) they tied the images to a tree and whipped them then they carried them 5 miles to Saffron Walden and burnt them and roasted the roast and heated the oven with it, and said if you be gods deliver yourselves.’
There’s a faint, very uneasy echo of words said by the Jews of Christ: ‘He trusted in the Lord, let him save him.’ These soldiers are putting relics and icons to the test, a process that carried to extremes can call all religion into question. There are also echoes of anti-Semitic acts in all this: the despoliation of others’ religion, forcing them to pray in order to prove that their God cannot help them. The one thing to be said in favour of the anti-popery hysteria is that it appears to have made anti-Semitism redundant. There are echoes of Isaiah and Baruch, but also of less elevated and authorized knowledge; fire was used to expurgate, to dispel miasmas caused by the Dog Star, and also to purify in the sight of the community, hence the burning of heretics. When heretics – or heretical books – were burned, crowds were present to see the errors turn into ashes. Conversely, legends told of objects so holy that they could not burn, such as the holy blood of Wilsnack, three hosts spattered with blood which survived a church fire in 1383. So burning the statues was a kind of anti-miracle, showing that nothing miraculous was happening. The Wilsnack hosts were themselves burned, successfully, in 1552. There was also something macho and defiant about the whole rite: it was saying to the icons, ‘come on, show us what you’ve got!’ and then celebrating when the answer turned out to be ‘nothing’. And yet this very bravado suggests an underlying fear that the holy object might react. In the church at Hasselt, at midnight, a crucifix was being destroyed; suddenly, all the torches went out at once, as did the bonfire lit to burn it. Another factor was that the dead idol was being punished for its own lies, a practice that paradoxically endowed it with the very sensibility which the reformers wished to deny it.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 25
