by Simon Schama
Money was raised. The wheels of local government cooperated with the Crown. The men who ran England and Wales – from lord-lieutenants, through their deputies, to sheriffs, justices of the peace and constables and beadles – even if they had been critics in the stormy days of the 1620s, settled back into the role of political and social leaders of their communities, presiding at quarter sessions, leading the hunt, dominating the pews. But what does this resumption of local leadership really mean? That their criticisms had now been put to sleep by their self-interest or that they could without much difficulty administer justice and government without necessarily abandoning their strong reservations about the court?
Some of them, it is true, became partners in Charles’s agenda of modernizing reform and renewal, which often resembles nothing so much as the Puritan programme in towns like Dorchester: extended poor relief, the suppression of unlicensed alehouses, the foundation of schools and colleges, and projects designed to improve agriculture like the Earl of Bedford’s famous drainage of the Fens in the 1630s. But the intense hostility to the Dutch drainage programme on the part of the affected Fenland population is a good instance of the reaction of some local communities to the obsessive intervention of government in their own backyard, however well-intentioned. And the manner in which those ‘improvements’ were carried out was not always calculated to allay suspicions that, beneath grandiose declarations about the government promoting the welfare of the commonwealth, there lurked something that smelled of a scam. In the Fens the medieval Court of Sewers had been absurdly revived to move local populations off boggy land. Once conveniently vacated, the land could be transferred to the drainage syndicates, which profited from the enormous capital appreciation of the drained land.
To avoid this kind of odium, Charles’s administration did its best to co-opt the county gentry and nobility in its projects. But there were still some schemes in which the intrusiveness of government was bound to be felt much more keenly than its good intentions, never more so perhaps than in the notorious project for the production and conservation of a strategic supply of gunpowder. This was not a trivial issue. The gunpowder shortage was a Europe-wide problem in an age of constant warfare, and a stockpile could make the difference between victory and defeat. What, then, could be a more laudable or necessary patriotic enterprise? In practice, though, what the scheme entailed was the creation of a national store of saltpetre. And the cheapest and most readily available source of nitrous saltpetre was the excreta of animals and humans. Only a monarch as solemnly bereft of a sense of humour as Charles I could possibly have asked his subjects, in all seriousness, to preserve a year’s supply of their own urine as a major contribution to the national defence. (This would not, in fact, be the most outrageous attempt to turn body waste into munitions. During the Irish rebellion and wars of the Confederacy in the 1640s and 1650s, the remains of corpses were recycled into gunpowder – the most perfect example, I suppose, of a self-sustaining industry.) But the very energy of Charles’s ‘petre-men’ quickly turned them into enemies of liberty and private property, as armed with warrants they entered barnyards and private households, digging up floors if necessary to get their hands on the precious and strategically important deposits of dove-droppings or sheep shit. Given the unusual working conditions of this assignment, it seems unlikely that, when confronted by householders understandably displeased at having their floors dug up without a by-your-leave, the petre-men would have made much of an effort to appease them.
Likewise, Charles’s support for Archbishop Laud’s programme for the Church was, while perfectly well intentioned, easily open to misinterpretation. The heart of Laudian doctrine was nothing more than the endorsement of ceremony and sacrament that had certainly been upheld by James I and his own favoured ministers and bishops, including Lancelot Andrewes. But James’s Scottish apprenticeship had made him in practice, if not in principle, a grudging pluralist. He had spoken for uniformity (and in Scotland pushed it through in 1618), but in England he was more judicious and circumspect. Charles, on the other hand, saw in Laudian theology a way to bring the congregation of Christians together within an orderly hierarchy of the Church. The obsession with sermons and preaching, the privileging of individual reading of the scripture, the harping on the unbridgeable chasm between the saved and the damned he felt to be profoundly divisive. With the débâcle of Laudianism in 1640–1 came the assumption that somehow it was, indeed, an alien growth on the body of the native Church. But there were plenty of adherents in the 1630s who saw as a national duty, for example, Laud’s levy for the repair and restoration of the ruinously neglected and profaned St Paul’s Cathedral.
Herefordshire may have been home to the Harleys of Brampton Bryan, who turned their castle into a magnet for Puritan teachers and preachers and an asylum for those suffering from the enforcers of the Laudian Church. But it was also home to the Scudamores of Holme Lacy. The Scudamores had been in the business of supplying knights for the royal tilts right into the reign of James, and they took special pride in their horses, kept not just for the hunt but to be at the disposal of the king. As deputy-lieutenant for Herefordshire, the first Viscount Scudamore made public exhortations to the Herefordshire gentry to improve the quality and quantity of the horses they could bring to the service of the king. Arthurian chivalry was not, it seems, quite dead on the Welsh borderlands. But Scudamore was not just a loyal preux chevalier; he was also a genuinely learned country gentleman with an Oxford education. And like so many of the post-Baconian generation, he was an enthusiastic amateur scientist, a manipulator of nature. Scudamore’s pride and joy was the Red Streak apple, said to produce the best and most commercially sought-after cider in England. All of Scudamore’s passions – his veneration of the past, his vision of a Christian monarchy, his instinctive feeling for beauty – came together in a project that must have seemed as though it were the very justification for his authority in the Herefordshire countryside: the restoration of Abbey Dore.
The abbey was a Cistercian ruin. The Scudamores had acquired it along with its land in the mid-sixteenth century and had it reconsecrated, but by the time the viscount came to its rescue it was, like so many monastic wrecks all over Britain, at the point of collapse. The roof was so badly fallen in that the curate was forced to read the service from the shelter of an arch to avoid rain falling on the prayer book. And when Scudamore went looking for the old stone altar slab he found it being used to salt meat and press cheese.
Scudamore, doubtless encouraged by Matthew Wren, Bishop of Hereford and one of the most ardent Laudians, evidently thought of himself as the Hezekiah of Herefordshire: the patron who would rebuild the ruined temple to the greater glory of God. The restoration of decayed churches and abbeys seems to have been a passion among the antiquarian community of the counties, so much so that the earliest date of the ‘Gothic revival’ might well be pushed back to the 1640s, when the antiquary and genealogist William Dugdale, in the depths of Puritan Warwickshire, began his monumental work of describing and chronicling all the church monuments of the country. Dugdale also produced the first great illustrated history of St Paul’s Cathedral, a crucial weapon in Laud’s campaign to cleanse and restore the polluted building and churchyard (freely used as a latrine) and to have the church thought of, as much as Westminster Abbey, as a national temple.
Scudamore busied himself locally much as Laud busied himself nationally. The desecrated altar was returned to Abbey Dore (according to a local story, crushing a servant who tried to make off with it, its surface running with blood). The beautiful green-glazed tiles of the medieval church scattered around farms and hamlets were reused where possible, replaced where not. And from the surviving in situ remnant of the crossing of the old abbey church, Scudamore had the Herefordshire craftsman John Abel (who had also designed a gloriously ornamental town hall at Leominster) carve a spectacular chancel screen in the authentic style of the Palladian revival, complete with Ionic columns. On Palm Sunday 1635, the date cho
sen not just for its place in the sacred calendar but as the anniversary of Scudamore’s baptism, Dore was reconsecrated with a full day of prayers and processions, and much kneeling and bowing, the congregation commanded to remember that henceforth Dore was to be considered a ‘Holie Habitation’.
Just across the county at Brampton Bryan Sir Robert and Lady Brilliana Harley would have seen the reconsecration of the Cistercian abbey as the most horrifying and damning evidence that the Popish Antichrist had already made a successful conquest of England, and that his Laudian minions were abusing their office to re-institute the full monstrous servitude of Rome. But to the Laudians, their work was not in any sense an act of spiritual or ecclesiastical subjugation. On the contrary, they saw the restoration of spectacle and mystery as a way of bringing back to the Church those who had been alienated by its obsession with the Word. To feast the eye rather than tire the ear was a way of appealing to all those whom the Calvinists had told were either damned or saved, a way of giving hope to sinners that they might yet be among the flock of those who would see salvation. So the restoration of propriety was not, in their minds, an affectation but a genuine mission. How could the flock be properly reminded of the redeeming sacrifice of the Saviour at a mean little table on which worshippers were accustomed to deposit their hats and from which dogs made off with the communion wafers? Reverence, order and obedience would make the congregation of the faithful whole again.
The Laudian emphasis on inclusiveness fitted neatly with Charles’s own innocent concept of his monarchy as an office for the entirety of his subjects. The trouble, though, was that by entirety he meant Scotland as well as England. For if the object of the Laudian reforms was to create an orderly harmony within the Church of England, any kind of exceptions to its uniformity would, by definition, sabotage the whole project. Thus, thoroughly convinced of the rightness of his convictions, Charles planned to introduce the Laudian prayer book to Scotland. In 1634, a year after his coronation in Edinburgh, it must have seemed a good, a necessary project. How was he supposed to know that it was the beginning of his end?
CHAPTER 2
GIVE CAESAR HIS DUE?
THE BRITISH WARS began on the morning of 23 July 1637, and the first missiles launched were foot stools. They flew down the nave of St Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh (the kirk of St Giles until the east and west walls had been removed to enlarge the church to proportions compatible with its new dignity), and their targets were the dean and the Bishop of Edinburgh. The reverend gentlemen had just begun to read from a new royally authorized Prayer Book. Even before the hurling of the stools, the attempt to read the liturgy had triggered a deafening outburst of shouting and wailing, especially from the many women gathered in the church. The minister John Row, who called the detestable object ‘this Popish-English-Scottish-Mass-Service-Book’, described keening cries of ‘Woe, woe’ and ‘Sorrow, sorrow, for this doleful day, that they are bringing in Popery among us’ ringing round the church. Terrified, the dean and bishop beat a swift retreat, but not before hands reached out in an attempt to strip the white surplices from their backs. In other churches in the city, such as the Old Kirk close by St Giles, the minister was barracked into silence; at Greyfriars the Bishop-designate of Argyll surrendered to a storm of abuse. In the afternoon the appearance of bishops and clergy was a sign for crowds to appear from nowhere, surrounding the nervous ministers, jostling and yelling their undying hatred of the ‘Popish’ liturgy.
The Prayer Book riots were not, of course, a spontaneous protest by the outraged common people of Scotland. The royal council had conveniently let it be known, months in advance, that the Prayer Book would be introduced by Easter 1637, which gave its opponents – Calvinist preachers and lords – time to organize their demonstration. Printing delays had postponed the date further, so that by July the trap was well set, and Archbishop Laud, his bishops, the council and the king innocently fell right in. They were caught completely off guard. As far as Charles I could see, Scotland was likely to be perfectly obedient to his ambition to create a single Arminian Church throughout Britain. Had not the Scottish parliament obliged him, if reluctantly, in 1633 when he had come to Edinburgh for his coronation (eight years after being crowned in Westminster)? To be sure, there had been some fuss in 1626 when he had revoked the land titles and grants of the Scottish nobility, but it was customary to do this every twenty-five years, before regranting them on terms spelled out by the new sovereign. What Charles had failed to notice was the intense resentment caused when it was made clear that some of those land grants transferred by the Reformation from Church to lay hands were now to be given back to establish endowments for the bishops. And the king had been much too complacent about the apparent lack of resistance to his ‘book of canons’, introduced in 1636, restricting preaching and giving dominant authority to the bishoprics.
But then Charles talked to all the wrong people in all the wrong places, to deracinated silk-coated London-Scottish noblemen like the Duke of Hamilton, or to his tough-minded treasurer in Edinburgh, the Earl of Traquair, who for the most part told him what he wanted to hear. The king had been born in the ancient royal abbey town of Dunfermline, but he was an absentee monarch who knew virtually nothing about the reality of Scotland and fatally misjudged the depth and breadth of its impassioned Calvinism. What he ought to have done was go to one of the little granite-grey towns of the southwest, such as Irvine, on a Monday marketday, and hear the full trumpet blast of preachers like Robert Blair or David Dickson thundering against the iniquitous destruction of the godly Church by such as Archbishop Laud and his corrupt and tyrannical lackeys, the bishops. The mere notion that the Church of Rome (as the Arminians argued) was a ‘true’, if misguided, Church and not actually the abominable institution of Antichrist, sent them into a paroxysm of wrath. Hard-pressed by the official Church, often stripped of their livings, such men had become itinerant preachers, taking refuge with their equally fierce Presbyterian Scots brethren in Ulster, across the North Channel. There, they were embraced into like-minded communities of psalm-singers and scripture-readers. Despairing of the realm of the Stuarts, some of the godly ministers had even decided to build their Jerusalem in Massachusetts and had got as far as Newfoundland before being blown back by a tempest, which, needless to say, they interpreted as God’s design that they should, after all, do his work at home. Back in Scotland they turned into so many Jeremiahs and Ezekiels, calling on God’s children to resist such abominations as surplices and kneeling and stone altars as if they were the desecrations of Sodom.
Charles, however, was incapable of appreciating the power of Scottish Calvinism’s clarion call for a great purification. As far as the king was concerned, Scotland was not all that different from England, and if the one had been bent to the royal will by well-intentioned firmness, so might the other. But the Scottish Reformation, of course, had been nothing at all like the slow, staccato progress of England’s conversion to Protestantism. Its Calvinism had struck in great electrifying bursts of charismatic conversion, backed up by teachers, lecturers and ministers, and only forced into reluctant and periodic retreat by James I, who, unlike his son, had known when to stop. It was an irony in the great holy shouting match of 1637–8, that both sides imagined they represented continuity not change. Charles and Laud thought they were building on the Five Articles of Perth of 1618 and that the protesters were Presbyterian rebels who sought to overthrow the whole royal supremacy of the Church. But ministers like Samuel Rutherford, whose preaching at Anwoth had been so offensive that Bishop Sydserf of Galloway had him banished to the safely conservative confines of Aberdeen, believed that they were merely upholding a much more ancient covenant between Scotland and God. That covenant was in every respect like the one made between God and Israel but had specific roots in the (fictitious but immensely influential) history of Scotland’s conversion in the third century AD. According to those histories, the Church had been received by the community before ever the first king, Fergus, had
begun his reign in the year 310. His sovereignty, then, had been conditional on acceptance of the covenant made between God and Scotland, the original godly nation – before England and even before Rome.
This is what the likes of Blair and Dickson and Rutherford and countless other ministers preached, and this is what their flock fervently believed. Laud and the bishops were the filthy priests of Baal, who presumed to come between them and their covenant with the Almighty. For the moment, the king himself was given the benefit of the doubt, being led astray by ‘evil counsel’. The Prayer Book riots in July 1637 and the still more startling events that followed were not meant to herald the overthrow of the house of Stuart. On the contrary, they were intended to reaffirm its sovereignty in Scotland but only on the understanding that that kingdom could not, and would not, be treated as a mere appendage of England. The hope, especially among the more moderate nobility, was that the unenforceability of the Prayer Book would persuade the king to listen to wise advice and retreat from his policy of ‘innovations’. In fact, the Duke of Hamilton, who replaced Traquair as the king’s principal commissioner in Scotland, warned the king in June 1638 to back away from further confrontation. Hamilton even had the prescience to predict to Charles that if he persisted trouble would not be confined to Scotland but would inevitably spread to all three of his kingdoms.
