Connecting centre and locality: Political communication in early modern England [1 ed.] 1526147157, 9781526147158

Citation preview

Connecting centre and locality

-

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 1

26/02/2020 08:57

Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain General Editors professor alastair bellany dr alexandra gajda professor peter lake professor anthony milton professor jason peacey

This important series publishes monographs that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in Britain between 1500 and the mid-eighteenth century. It counteracts the fragmentation of current historiography through encouraging a variety of approaches which attempt to redefine the political, social and cultural worlds, and to explore their interconnection in a flexible and creative fashion. All the volumes in the series question and transcend traditional interdisciplinary boundaries, such as those between political history and literary studies, social history and divinity, urban history and anthropology. They thus contribute to a broader understanding of crucial developments in early modern Britain. Recently published in the series Chaplains in early modern England: Patronage, literature and religion hugh adlington, tom lockwood and gillian wright (eds) The Cooke sisters: Education, piety and patronage in early modern England  gemma allen Black Bartholomew’s Day  david j. appleby Insular Christianity  robert armstrong and tadhg ó hannrachain (eds) Reading and politics in early modern England  geoff baker ‘No historie so meete’  jan broadway Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England paul cavill and alexandra gajda (eds) Republican learning  justin champion News and rumour in Jacobean England: Information, court politics and diplomacy, 1618–25 david coast

This England  patrick collinson Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and the patriotic monarch  cesare cuttica Doubtful and dangerous: The question of succession in late Elizabethan England susan doran and paulina kewes (eds) Brave community  john gurney ‘Black Tom’  andrew hopper Reformation without end: Religion, politics and the past in post-revolutionary England robert g. ingram Revolution remembered: Seditious memories after the British Civil Wars  edward james legon Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum  jason mcelligott and david l. smith Laudian and Royalist polemic in Stuart England  anthony milton The crisis of British Protestantism: Church power in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–44 hunter powell

Lollards in the English Reformation: History, radicalism, and John Foxe  susan royal The gentlewoman’s remembrance: Patriarchy, piety, and singlehood in early Stuart England isaac stephens

Exploring Russia in the Elizabethan Commonwealth: The Muscovy Company and Giles Fletcher, the elder (1546–1611)  felicity jane stout Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658–1727  edward vallance Church polity and politics in the British Atlantic world, c. 1635–66 elliot vernon and hunter powell (eds) Full details of the series are available at www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk.

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 2

26/02/2020 08:57

-

Connecting centre and locality Political communication in early modern England

EDITED BY CHRIS R. KYLE AND JASON PEACEY

Manchester University Press

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 3

26/02/2020 08:57

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4715 8 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10/12 Scala by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 4

26/02/2020 08:57

For Dympna and Annette

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 5

26/02/2020 08:57

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 6

26/02/2020 08:57

Contents

-

acknowledgements—ix notes on contributors—x abbreviations and conventions—xii



1 Introduction Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey

1

2 ‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’: the politics of Lent in early modern England Chris R. Kyle

22

3 The Lord Admiral, the Parliament-men and the narrow seas, 1625–27 Thomas Cogswell

44



4 Space, place and Laudianism in early Stuart Ipswich Noah Millstone

66

5 ‘Written according to my usual way’: political communication and the rise of the agent in seventeenth-century England Jason Peacey

94

6 Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts: central initiatives and local agency in the English civil war Ann Hughes

116

7 Provincial ‘Levellers’ and the coming of the regicide in the southwest David R. Como

133

8 Sovereignty by the book: English corporations, Atlantic plantations and literate order, 1557–1650 Dan Beaver

157 vii

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 7

26/02/2020 08:57

Contents

9 Local expertise in hostile territory: state building in Cromwellian Ireland Jennifer Wells

174

10 News and the personal letter, or the news education of Theophilus Hastings, 7th Earl of Huntingdon, 1660–71 Lindsay O’Neill

193

11 The news out of Newgate after the 1715 Jacobite rebellion Rachel Weil

209

index—229

viii

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 8

26/02/2020 08:57

Acknowledgements

-

We would like to offer profound thanks to the Henry E. Huntington Library during the development of this project and volume. Particular thanks are due to Steve Hindle and Juan Gomez.

ix

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 9

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Notes on contributors

-

Dan Beaver is Associate Professor of History and English at Penn State University. He is the author of Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590–1690 (1998) and Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War (2008) and editor of the Giles Geast Charity Book, Tewkesbury, 1558–1891 (2017). Thomas Cogswell is a Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. Having written several books, most recently James I: The Phoenix King (2018) and, with Alastair Bellany, The Murder of King James I (2015), he is now interested in the Dunkirkers and Britain, 1625–1714. David R. Como is Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (2018) and Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-war England (2004). Ann Hughes is Professor of Early Modern History (Emerita) at Keele University. She has published extensively on the English Revolution, including Gender and Politics in the English Revolution (2012), and (as co-editor) The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2009). She is now working on a biography of the Presbyterian activist Walter Boothby, and on responses to preaching in the 1640s. Chris R. Kyle is Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University. He is the author of Theatre of State (2012) and most recently the editor of Managing Tudor and Stuart Parliaments (2015). He is currently writing a book on the promulgation and reception of early modern proclamations. Noah Millstone is a Birmingham Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (2016) as well as a number of articles and essays on early modern politics and culture. x

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 10

26/02/2020 08:57

Notes on contributors

Lindsay O’Neill is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the history department at the University of Southern California and the author of The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (2014). Jason Peacey is Professor of Early Modern British History at University College London. Having published on print and political culture in the seventeenth century, he is now working on a microhistory relating to litigation and conflict in early modern Britain and on Anglo-Dutch relations between 1609 and 1689. Rachel Weil is Professor of History at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. She is the author of A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III’s England (2013) and Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680–1714 (2009). She is currently writing a book on early modern English prisons. Jennifer Wells is Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at The George Washington University. She has published widely on British and Irish history, the British Empire, statecraft and international law.

xi

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 11

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Abbreviations and conventions

-

C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait (eds), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 (3 vols, London, 1911) Add. Additional Manuscript AHR American Historical Review Al. Cant. John and J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses (4 vols, Cambridge, 1922–54) Al. Oxon. J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses (4 vols, Oxford, 1891–92) APC Acts of the Privy Council of England BIHR Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research BL British Library, London Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford CCC M.A.E. Green (ed.), Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding, 1643–1660 (5 vols, London, 1889–92) CJ Journals of the House of Commons CSPD Calendar of State Papers Domestic CSPV Calendar of State Papers Venetian CUL Cambridge University Library Cust, ‘Parliamentary Richard Cust, ‘Parliamentary elections in   elections’ the 1620s: the case of Great Yarmouth’, Parliamentary History, 11 (1992), 179–91 ECCO Eighteenth Century Collections Online EcHR Economic History Review EEBO Early English Books Online Eg. Egerton Manuscript EHR English Historical Review Fletcher, ‘National and local’ Anthony Fletcher, ‘National and local A&O

xii

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 12

26/02/2020 08:57

Abbreviations and conventions

FSL GA GL HEH HJ HLQ HMC HoP 1604–1629

HR JBS KHLC Lake and Pincus (eds),   Public Sphere Lans. LJ LMA LPL Millstone, Manuscript   Circulation n.d. n.p. ODNB P&P PCSM Peacey, Print and Public   Politics PH Procs 1626 RO Russell, Parliaments Sharpe, ‘Communication’

awareness in the county communities’, in H. Tomlinson (ed.), Before the English Civil War (Basingstoke, 1983), 151–74 Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC Gloucestershire Archives Guildhall Library Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino Historical Journal Huntington Library Quarterly Historical Manuscripts Commission Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris (eds), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1604–1629 (6 vols, Cambridge, 2010) Historical Research Journal of British Studies Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007) Lansdowne Manuscript Journal of the House of Lords London Metropolitan Archives Lambeth Palace Library Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2016) no date of publication no place of publication Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn, 2004–) Past and Present Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013) Parliamentary History William B. Bidwell and Maija Jansson (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1626 (4 vols, New Haven, 1991–96) Record Office Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979) Kevin Sharpe, ‘Crown, Parliament and locality: government and communication in xiii

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 13

26/02/2020 08:57

Abbreviations and conventions

SP STC TNA TRHS TWAS

early Stuart England’, EHR, 101:399 (1986), 321–50 State Papers Short Title Catalogue The National Archives, Kew Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Tyne and Wear Archive Service, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

All dates used are Old Style unless otherwise indicated, but the New Year is taken to begin on 1 January rather than 25 March. Original spelling has been retained throughout except that contractions have been expanded. Unless otherwise stated, London is the place of publication for works printed before 1750.

xiv

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 14

26/02/2020 08:57

Introduction

Chapter 1

Introduction Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey

I

n 1986, Kevin Sharpe noted that ‘communication to the king and from the king was the binding thread of government’.1 It was an important corrective for historians focused solely on the machinations of Westminster politics or the daily operation of village communities. For Sharpe the early Stuart period saw a fragmenting of the lines of political communication between centre and locality as the monarch, aristocracy and Privy Council became increasingly isolated from the politics of the ‘periphery’ and a steadily building distrust of central government. In this move, Sharpe highlighted questions about the relationship between political and social history, and the possibility that this kind of communication ought to be central to debates about the political dynamic of the early Stuart period.2 If this was conceived as a call to arms then few were willing to take up the cudgels. Given that the dust has settled on the debate over revisionism, now is the time to revisit the value of communication as a means of addressing fragmentation within the discipline and the political tensions of the age. What is required is recovering these lines of communication and interrogating how they operated, not least with a view to tracing change and continuity over an extended period beyond the 1620s and 1630s. It might also require investigating a variety of forms and methods beyond that of just court and Council. Thus, this collection of chapters is set up to explore the dynamics of local/national political culture in seventeenth-century England, with particular reference to political communication. It examines the degree to which connections were forged between politics in London, Whitehall and Westminster, and politics in the localities, and the patterns and processes that can be recovered. The fundamental goal is to foster a dialogue between two prominent strands within recent historiography, and between the work of social and political historians of the early modern period. The primary focus of this volume is the long seventeenth century, which reflects in part the areas where work is being done on political communication 1

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 1

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

and matters addressing the relationship between centre and locality. But also it is in this period that the social, political, economic and religious dynamics foregrounded these issues in unprecedented ways for contemporaries. We need to be alive to the fact that England confronted profound changes in all aspects of life, from confessionalisation to Europe’s religious wars, economic transformation, an agrarian revolution and a communications revolution marked by the rise of the newspaper and professional newsletter writers, the development of the newsbook and the creation of a partisan print culture, to name but a few of the most important developments. All of these revolutions have an impact on centre/locality relations, and yet all too often the dots have not been connected. As such, one of the aims of this volume is to start the process of thinking about how various early modern revolutions were connected and to suggest that political communication provides a useful way of achieving this. One volume cannot hope to address adequately all these seemingly disparate revolutions and fundamental changes in society. However, its long seventeenth-century focus also reflects the opportunities to build upon some of the most exciting work being done in this field. In future, research undertaken by Tudor scholars may well alter this meta-narrative and analysis, and perhaps even shift the focus to an earlier period and emphasise different aspects of communication, but with some notable exceptions this research has not yet begun in earnest.3 In recent decades social historians have gone a long way towards revolutionising our understanding of the politics of local communities, whether in terms of parish life, industrial communities or civic corporations. This has been particularly apparent, for example, in the work of Andy Wood, Phil Withington and Keith Wrightson, and in research into the local dynamics of state formation and office-holding, and into what has been dubbed the ‘unacknowledged republic’.4 Likewise, our understanding of the potential for political engagement outside the capital has also been transformed by the work of scholars such as Tessa Watt, Adam Fox and Alastair Bellany, who have done so much to shed light on the textual and material culture of public life, and on the ways in which both printed and scribal texts impinged upon the consciousness of even the most humble individuals.5 It is clear, in other words, not just that there was a vibrant politics within specific localities but also that this was predicated in no small part on the fact that people lived in a literate environment, even if they were illiterate themselves. At the same time, of course, equally important strides have been made towards rethinking the nature of political life at a national level, not least on the part of those who might be described as ‘post-revisionists’. Central to this strand within recent historiography have been attempts to emphasise how far our appreciation of conflict and consensus can be enhanced by focusing on print culture, the news revolution and communicative practices. This has involved everything from analysis of cheap print (and indeed the popular stage) to the development of newsbooks and the contemporary pre2

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 2

26/02/2020 08:57

Introduction

occupation with ‘popularity’, and indeed with the possibility of detecting a ‘post-­reformation’ or indeed Habermasian ‘public sphere’. This is evident, therefore, in the work of Tom Cogswell, Richard Cust, Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, as well as that of Tim Harris and Mark Knights, and considerable attention has been paid to the relationship between elite and popular politics, and to the ways in which politicians of various hues became increasingly conscious of the need to consider ‘public opinion’.6 This could involve either propaganda or censorship, or indeed attempts to protect the arcana imperii, to clampdown on ‘lavish and licentious discourse’, and to punish seditious speech. The problem, however, is that these two hugely fruitful strands within the historiography of early modern Britain have not yet been connected as successfully as they might have been, and that they have not often been brought into dialogue with one another. The perils of such fragmentation of scholarship are that local communities can seem disconnected from national politics, while, on the other hand, historians of central government are in danger of imposing a top-down model of political communication, and one which leaves little room for considering the agency and authority of specific localities, or indeed their impact on the wider political landscape. The risk is that historians fail to question persistent assumptions and ideas about the pervasiveness of localism and fail to consider the degree to which the early modern period witnessed the emergence of something much closer to a shared political landscape. This is not to say that such issues have not been addressed. From debates about the ‘county community’ and ‘state formation’ to work on ‘negotiating power’ and ‘mobilisation’, it has become clear that historians are beginning to think about ways of recovering the communicative links between the centre and the localities. Nevertheless, the issue can scarcely be said to have achieved the degree of prominence that it deserves.

THE DEBATE OVER THE COUNTY COMMUNITY The issue of how best to understand the relationship between ‘centre and locality’ has been a live one for generations, although in certain ways it has been­­ – ­­and perhaps continues to be­ – ­dominated by the reverberations caused by the work of scholars like Alan Everitt, not least his account of The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion.7 Grounded as it was in the possibilities offered by the opening up of gentry family archives and the development of a network of county record offices in the 1950s and 1960s, Everitt’s book offered a provocative interpretation of the relationship between centre and locality, which conjured the notion that local communities were insular, self-contained and uninterested in political affairs beyond their boundaries, especially those at court and Parliament. This idea about the prevalence and importance of the ‘county community’­– ­and of national politics as involving something like a ‘confederation of county commonwealths’­– ­may well have 3

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 3

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

provided a necessary corrective to an old-fashioned political history which focused solely on the goings-on in Westminster and Whitehall, and yet the idea of the county community was a controversial one, not least because it became central to the ‘revisionist’ assault on the idea of there being a high road to civil war, involving profound and pervasive ideological division. In no small part, therefore, revisionism was grounded in the work of historians who were indebted to Everitt, not least Anthony Fletcher (on Sussex), and perhaps also David Underdown (on Somerset). Fletcher certainly insisted on the ‘inherent tension’ between centre and locality, and on ingrained localism in the face of the ‘growing pretensions of the state’.8 More particularly, such ideas were evident in the work of John Morrill, in terms both of his monograph on Cheshire and of his subsequent account of the ‘revolt of the provinces’, in which he detected evidence about a reaction against the intrusion of political discord into the otherwise consensual world of a provincial ‘silent majority’ from outside, manifested most obviously in terms of neutralism and later of hostility towards the parliamentarian state, and the disruption that this brought to traditional forms of local government.9 Obviously, the idea of a county community was subjected to powerful critiques from a number of directions almost immediately, not least in terms of other studies of particular counties, which raised a series of methodological and evidential issues, and which argued that more needed to be done to do justice to both local affairs and national politics, and indeed to the connections between them. In part, of course, the challenge came from scholars who defended older ideas, rooted in the work of historians like Christopher Hill, not least in terms of William Hunt’s The Puritan Moment.10 It was also possible to argue that a focus on localism ran the risk of underplaying the impact of government attempts to enforce national policies.11 Hassell Smith, of course, insisted on the need to recognise a complex relationship between local and national politics, partly in relation to financial exactions, partly in relation to local factionalism and partly in relation to the ways in which institutions like Parliament were regarded as useful means of solving local problems.12 Most obviously, perhaps, the response came from those whose work became central to the so-called ‘post-revisionist’ turn, and studies of Warwickshire (Ann Hughes), East Anglia (Clive Holmes) and Herefordshire (Jackie Eales) made it clear that English counties were not all insular and not all the same.13 They did not all have natural boundaries or dominant urban centres, and they were only more or less economically and socially self-contained, and evidence was found to suggest that familiarity with the outside world­– ­through education, domestic service and military experience, as well as through time spent in London­ – ­acted as a powerful solvent of localist customs, traditions and mentalities. It was demonstrated convincingly that the picture of political life within individual counties could look very different depending upon who was made the focus of attention. Within Cheshire, therefore, Sir Richard Grosvenor did 4

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 4

26/02/2020 08:57

Introduction

not look like William Davenport, and elsewhere the picture of local politics looked rather different when attention was turned to the aristocracy, whose members very often had strong ties to Whitehall and Westminster, not to mention through the lens of post-reformation Catholics.14 It certainly looked different through the lens of parochial elites and the ‘middling sort’, a point which began to emerge with Underdown’s study of Somerset, and which certainly came through in Peter Clark’s account of English Provincial Society.15 What emerged from a range of studies, indeed, was the need to recognise the significance of religion and ideology, not least in terms of the strength of godly communities, and it became clear that the divisions that would lie at the heart of the civil war could and did emerge from within counties. More importantly, perhaps, it was argued that politics within local communities was rarely distinct from national politics, and that the categories of ‘local’ and ‘national’ were not mutually exclusive, much less ‘distinct and usually antagonist spheres’. This made it possible to move beyond ideas about national politics intruding into local affairs and enforcing its policies, and about an ‘extractive and coercive centre’, and to develop instead an ‘integrationist’ approach which recognised that local and national politics overlapped, intersected and interacted in interesting ways. This involved arguing that local politics could be seen as reflecting, expressing and responding to, as well as speaking the language of, national politics, and that it was possible to discern national expressions of local concerns, as well as the filtering of national issues through local interests. It also involved arguing that local interests could be harnessed at the centre in a somewhat co-operative fashion, and that there was a complex relationship between local affairs and national politics, in which local divisions did not map neatly on to national alignments and in which all sides could appeal to the centre.16 What emerged was a picture of an ‘integrated system of government’, in which ‘politics and administration had become fused in a unitary process of political management and the balance of interest groups’, and the fact that a term like ‘country’ could refer to both local and national communities serves to question ‘the polarity between centre and locality’. This was clear in Peter Lake’s studies of Cheshire, in terms of how the collection of Ship Money revealed the ‘interdependence’ of, and ‘fruitful tension’ between, centre and locality, and in terms of how petitioning in the early 1640s involved much more than merely local politics, and the mediation of local opinion and national events.17 It was clear in Tom Cogswell’s account of the complexities of relations between the centre and locality in Home Divisions.18 And it was also clear in Mike Braddick’s response to the rather under-developed study of the relationship between central and local politics during the Restoration, in which he argued that, rather than thinking in terms of neat divisions between centre and locality, it was important to recognise that the institutions of the ‘centre’ could provide resources for rival interest groups within the ‘locality’, not least in terms of lobbying. ‘Political power’, in other words, ‘was not 5

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 5

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

necessarily a zero-sum game between centre and locality’, and local problems sometimes ‘enhanced the penetration of national into local politics and thus heightened the interrelation between the community and the state’.19 In a variety of different ways, moreover, it was argued that the county might not provide the ideal scale on which to analyse early modern political culture. This was true not least because of what could be observed by ‘zooming in’ to observe particular provincial towns­– ­whether Richard Cust’s Great Yarmouth or David Underdown’s Dorchester.20 However, it was also true because of the potential for recognising that differences in political and religious culture might more obviously map on to pays or regions which cut across administrative boundaries, and which could be differentiated by geographical features and land use. This kind of analysis, pioneered by Joan Thirsk, and even Everitt, was expressed most powerfully in Underdown’s controversial argument about the economic, social, cultural, political and religious differences between ‘chalk’ and ‘cheese’ areas of western England.21 None of this is to say, of course, that the county­ – ­and even the ‘county community’­– ­has become irrelevant. A series of essays reflecting on Everitt’s contribution, edited by Jacqueline Eales and Andrew Hopper, re-evaluated the idea of the county community and suggested that a turn to a regional framework offered one fruitful way forward, while Stephen Roberts in his concluding remarks to the volume noted the need to understand more about the role of the sheriff in the county and of the militia.22 There may still be mileage, in other words, in focusing on politics at county levels, even if this will almost certainly involve recognising that the county offered only one amongst many ways in which contemporaries thought about their political lives, and about their geographical frame of reference, interest and influence. This would seem to be the direction being pursued by Peter Lake and Richard Cust, in their study of Cheshire in the early Stuart period, which will insist that the county continued to exert some kind of hold upon at least some contemporaries, even if only as an ‘imagined community’.23

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY Nevertheless, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the heyday of the debate about the county community passed some time ago, not least because, as Tom Cogswell noted, ‘rather than defend or modify their position’ in the face of scholarly criticism, ‘the “localists” simply abandoned it altogether’.24 The result, however, has arguably been that, following the period in which county studies proliferated, the ways in which ‘local’ and ‘national’ politics were studied came to be rather fragmented, and that more often than not this has involved rather different approaches by social and political historians. Under the influence of Keith Wrightson, therefore, it is noticeable that social historians increasingly turned their attention to a different kind of local politics, in terms of the ‘social distribution and uses of power’, and 6

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 6

26/02/2020 08:57

Introduction

in terms of ‘micropolitics’, ‘local level politics’ and ‘the history of social relationships and of the culture which informs them’, as well as in terms of ‘the political dimensions of everyday life’. This has involved revolutionising our understanding of the politics of local communities, in terms of parish life, industrial communities or civic corporations, and in terms of the politics of patriarchy, neighbourliness and custom, and it has involved focusing on a variety of different kinds of local community, from the village of Terling (Wrightson and Levine) to the vale of Gloucester (Beaver), the city of York (Withington) and the lead mining districts of Derbyshire (Wood).25 The result has unquestionably been that we have achieved a much deeper understanding of piety, poverty and poor relief, of the politics of religion and of the politics of enclosure riots and food riots. Very clearly, therefore, the ‘new social history’ has transformed our understanding of the ‘social depth of politics’ within local communities.26 At the same time, of course, equally important strides have been made towards rethinking the nature of political life at a national level, not least on the part of those who might be described as ‘post-revisionists’. In no small part this sprang from dissatisfaction with the ways in which Elton and Russell dealt with the relationship between centre and locality. This is not to say that they denied the need for historians of politics at the centre­– ­and in Parliament­ – ­to recognise the ‘world beyond Westminster’, but rather that this was explored only in limited ways. In Elton’s case this involved a somewhat limited notion of ‘points of contact’ between the political elite and the country at large.27 In Russell’s case, meanwhile, the appreciation of the need to set 1620s parliamentary history in the context of a ‘wider world’ felt like background scene-setting, and for both scholars there was also a danger that the interactions between centre and locality, and the involvement of localities in parliamentary affairs, were regarded as being largely free from ideological division.28 Parliament, in other words, came to be seen as a place where business was done, rather than where ideological conflicts were played out. To the extent that this was challenged, historians have obviously focused in part on the need to gain a better understanding of how local politics could impinge on Parliament. Very often, of course, this involved debating the extent to which parliamentary elections were contested, but there have also been broader discussions of the nature of parliamentary representation, in terms of the possibility that MPs were doing more than representing a locality or a county, and representing instead a national or an ideological community.29 In addition, a significant body of work has explored the issue of lobbying and parliamentary legislation in a more or less conscious attempt to analyse the ‘interplay’ and reciprocity between centre and locality.30 David Harris Sacks’s study of Bristol was significant for showing that the city’s ‘little businesses’ indicated ‘not localism but the need of the local community to call upon the state to help it perform necessary services or cope with its own internal problems’, and he concluded that local problems sometimes 7

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 7

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

‘enhanced the penetration of national into local politics and thus heightened the interrelation between the community and the state’.31 Nevertheless, and despite calls for ‘much more work’ to be done on such topics, it also seems clear that political historians moved on from discussions of the relationship between centre and locality, not least during debates over the so-called British problem­ – ­a rather different revisionist project to reconfigure politics at the ‘centre’­ – ­and more recently as part of moves to think about the European and transnational dimensions of ‘England’s troubles’.32 For historians of the Restoration, of course, national, international and imperial politics­– ­whether elite or popular­– ­never faced quite the same challenge to rethink the relationship between the centre and the localities that marked scholarship on earlier periods. Of course, this is not to deny that there have been signs of how social and political historians can usefully enter into dialogue. After all, Keith Wrightson’s account of the ‘politics of the parish’ posited the existence of a ‘parochial public sphere’ and a complex interaction of, and refraction of, local and national issues, and the development of a ‘single political society’. It made clear, in other words, that while the ‘infrastructural reach’ of the state had become more powerful, this reflected in part the ‘willingness of individuals and groups in local society to employ the resources of state power for their own particular purposes’. As such, it was necessary to explore agency, negotiation, participation and mediation within local communities, and Wrightson insisted that vibrant local politics was not necessarily insular, and that more work was needed on the relationship between local communities and national culture.33 This might involve thinking about how urban citizenship set the tone for national political culture and discourse, as Withington argued in the Politics of Commonwealth, or connecting ‘micro-politics’ and ‘high politics’, not least through petitioning and popular legalism, whether in terms of the ‘voices of Radwinter’, the activities of the ‘Colchester plunderers’ in the late 1630s and early 1640s or the repercussions of disputes that centred on specific individuals.34 Similarly, as scholars move away from rather simplistic models of political allegiance and religious belief, there is scope to develop further Mike Braddick’s ideas about the possibility for exploring political mobilisation.35 Most obviously, the impulse to reconnect studies of ‘centre and locality’ has emerged as a result of interest in ‘state formation’ and state building, something which is, as Braddick pointed out, inherently related to ‘the relationship between centre and locality’.36 Likewise, both Joan Kent and Steve Hindle have argued that it is impossible to explore the history of the ‘state’ while overlooking the localities, given that, while the early modern state may have been centralised, it was less obviously bureaucratised, and as such it is important to recognise the degree to which it was predicated upon the participation of agencies, officers, institutions at many social levels and in many geographical locations. This means that, rather than thinking about 8

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 8

26/02/2020 08:57

Introduction

state formation as a ‘one-sided drive towards ever greater penetration or acculturation’, it is necessary to recognise that it was a ‘dynamic process of communication between centre and localities’.37 Rather than thinking about ‘government’ in terms of central institutions and their impact on the localities, therefore, it is possible to think about governance as a process, which was predicated upon activities across a ‘diffused state’ and within the ‘local state’ and the ‘parish state’, and about the state as something that involved a network of power relations. And what this requires is an exploration of the negotiation of power and the social depth of governance, and an integration of local structures into an appreciation of an early modern state in which active participation was vital.38 That popular politics, mobilisation and state formation have created opportunities for reconnecting social and political history, and revisiting the relationship between centre and locality, is clear not just from protests regarding the ‘enclosure’ of social history, and regret that ‘social, political and intellectual history have become entirely separate enterprises’,39 but also from the attention that political historians have paid to the so-called ‘unacknowledged republic’ of office-holding, and from the way in which scholars from a variety of backgrounds can share an interest in documents like the Swallowfield articles. The latter provided an example of how political ideas were embedded within everyday practice, and of the point where the politics of neighbourhood and local custom intersected with the state, not least as authority was delegated to people in the localities, who were able to interpret, rather than merely implement, national initiatives.40

COMMUNICATION There are, in other words, clear signs of convergence between the ‘new political history’, with its interest in the social depth of politics, and the ‘new social history’, with its determination to study the politics of people of ‘less exalted social standing’. However, if we are to look beyond either central institutions or county communities in order to explore ‘more inclusive and dynamic situations’, then it will be necessary to turn our attention to ‘participatory situations’ and to ‘governance in motion’, and this will mean thinking about the ‘mechanisms of interaction between Westminster and the localities’ and the culture of communication.41 In some ways historians have explored the ­infrastructure of communication from road systems and waterways to the politics of postal networks but this has not often extended to, or involved thinking about, communicative practices.42 But the most obvious way that this has occurred is in the well-established field of scholarship related to government management and interference in the pulpit as a way of conveying messages to the general population, whether through set prayers, the distribution of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, or indeed sermons. More recently this has involved interesting work on the dissemination of state prayers and the 9

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 9

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

use of the pulpit as a means of conveying news.43 Less well-travelled paths that could also be very fruitful include the prevalence of, and response to, travelling players in the localities in both civic and private settings, the significance of royal progresses and state visits, and the communicative purposes of the legal circuit and the reading of texts at the assizes. In other ways, of course, communicative practices have become a central topic in recent scholarship, for both so-called ‘post-revisionist’ political historians and social historians. Thus, having been overlooked­ – ­or more accurately dismissed­– ­by revisionists, printed and scribal texts have become an increasingly important means of recovering the nature and importance of public culture, the interest in and dissemination of news and the value of a range of texts­– ­including ballads and libels­– ­for gauging the social depth and geographical reach of information, ideas and opinions, as well as the politics surrounding the control and secrecy of information.44 Indeed, in addition to enriching our understanding of early modern public discourse, and offering the possibility of detecting the emergence of a public sphere­ – ­either in its post-reformation or Habermasian guises­ – ­social and political historians have also analysed texts in a more dynamic fashion. This means recognising the need to explore barriers to communication (not least linguistic ones) rather than merely channels of communication, and it means recognising that texts­ – ­like news, indeed­ – ­could move not just from the centre to the localities but also from the localities to the centre, whether as libels, petitions or lobby documents. As such, there has been some recognition that studying practices and processes relating to texts and publicity is vital for understanding the dynamic of early modern politics. The comments by Kevin Sharpe with which we began were actually prefigured by Ann Hughes’s work on Warwickshire, which suggested that a poor understanding of the importance of communication may have been more important than ‘localism’ in generating political difficulties in the 1620s and 1630s.45 Thereafter, a number of scholars began to integrate communicative practices into their analysis of political tensions and the relationship between centre and locality, and indeed to make it the focus of their work. In his study of Caroline financial policies, therefore, Richard Cust emphasised not just the enforcement of national measures but also the importance of communication, and of a variety of different texts, in relation to the mobilisation of both support for, and opposition to, the Forced Loan. Importantly, these included texts addressed to ‘all true-hearted Englishmen’.46 Likewise, in exploring the mobilisation for war in Elizabethan England, Neil Younger emphasised the importance of communication as a means of ensuring local compliance, while also recognising failures of communication and the fact that an ‘intensive web of communication’ made it possible for local communities to ‘talk back’.47 Both David Cressy and John Walter have tried to assess the impact of texts like the 1641 Protestation across the country and below the level of the elite.48 Ann Hughes has demonstrated how contemporary discus10

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 10

26/02/2020 08:57

Introduction

sions of religious radicalism in the 1640s could be constructed through the active involvement of local informers.49 And, as already noted, Peter Lake has demonstrated that by carefully contextualising local petitioning it is possible to complicate simplistic depictions of the relationship between local and national politics, as Sir Thomas Aston became a ‘one man point of contact’, who used his influence at the centre to enhance his local position, and his local standing to enhance his status at the centre, and who sought to ‘coordinate and interconnect events at the centre and in the localities’.50 Among social historians, meanwhile, Andy Wood has emphasised the growing trend for ideas about ‘custom’ to be recorded, and communicated, in writing and in print, while Steve Hindle has noted the role of libels, ‘bills’ and broadsides during the Midland Revolt, not just as mobilising devices but also as means of engaging with, and eliciting responses from, national authorities.51 What seems clear, indeed, is that a range of textual genres, both scribal and printed, were used in increasingly creative ways, and by people representing different perspectives and interest groups, in order to address a variety of audiences, both national and local.52

NEW PERSPECTIVES Nevertheless, as scholars begin to use print culture to explore transnational and supranational phenomena, and grapple with the idea of multiple publics­ – ­both socially and geographically­– ­there remains more to be done in terms of thinking about how the study of communicative practices might enhance our understanding of the relationship between ‘centre and locality’, and about what value­ – ­if any­ – ­such terms may have.53 In other words, in fascinating ways work has been done on these certain strands but rarely have they been brought together. One notable exception is the work of John Walter, a social historian who has explored how politics and religion in local communities reacted to national developments, not least in terms of the link between Laudian reforms and popular violence.54 The aim of this volume, therefore, is to build upon this work, which means thinking about some questions that are crucial to understanding the issues at stake: What were the practices and mechanisms involved in communicating between centre and locality? What kinds of texts were involved, and by whom were they deployed and distributed, and for what ends? How and why did the state communicate with citizens; when, where and with what intensity did this take place; and what was the impact on political participation? To what extent was state formation­ – ­and political culture more broadly­ – ­predicated upon enhanced interaction between centre and locality through communicative channels, in terms of news, ideas or political information, as well as bureaucratic data? Was there dynamic interplay between the politics of communication at both national and local levels? What phenomena and patterns can be observed in relation to the ways in which communicative practices were used as a means 11

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 11

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

of exerting local agency and influencing politics and administration at the centre? Although what follows is not meant to be an exhaustive study of all forms of political communication, it nevertheless highlights a variety of ways in which this agenda can be addressed. One thing that emerges from these chapters is that, after a long period in which historians stressed the need to complicate overly polarised depictions of ‘centre’ and ‘locality’ by stressing interconnectedness and interdependency, the use of the centre to advance local interests (thereby enhancing the power of the state), and a participatory model of governance, there may now be scope to return our attention to the intrusive state, or the intrusive aspects of state power. This is not to say that there emerges a clear or unifying model in terms of how to characterise the relationship between localities and the centre. Beaver (Chapter 8), therefore, highlights novel ways of demonstrating the kinds of local autonomy that persisted in this period, and focuses on modes of communication which did not involve the subordination of locality to centre. Indeed, in relation to provincial Gloucestershire, as well as New England, he uses charters and charter-like texts that relate to local powers to stress the ‘integrative power of the written word’, and the ways in which it was possible to exercise de facto agency in specific localities. Such documents involve, he argues, the communication of ‘centreless’ political agency, and created a ‘sovereign affect’, or what he calls ‘sovereignty by the book’. What might also need to be recognised, however, is that contemporary political culture involved both local autonomy and pressure from the centre at the same time; that it is possible to identify episodes where the centre sought to intrude into local affairs; and that these need to be studied very carefully. Millstone (Chapter 4), therefore, revisits what might be thought to be familiar territory, in terms of attempts to impose Laudian reforms on a provincial town, not least in reaction to what were thought to be undesirable communicative practices, in terms of the impact of local Puritan ministers like Samuel Ward. The contributions by Kyle (Chapter 2) and Hughes (Chapter 6), meanwhile, both draw attention to the structures of communication between the centre and locality, in terms of the ways in which the state sought to undertake ‘outreach’ through proclamations about Lent (Kyle), and sought to elicit evidence from the localities, in terms of information with which to account for public money (Hughes). Both chapters are thus suggestive of the power of the state to intrude into everyday life, or at least attempts to exert power, and in both cases communicative practices­– ­and indeed uses of print­ – ­are one of the ways in which such aims and power are brought to light and brought into focus. Wells (Chapter 9), meanwhile, uses unexpected and intriguing evidence about the use of local knowledge and expertise­ – ­i.e. Catholic expertise­ – ­to re-examine the ways in which the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland involved the exercise of state power by Whitehall and Westminster during the early 1650s. That said, the chapters by Millstone, Kyle, Hughes and Wells also suggest 12

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 12

26/02/2020 08:57

Introduction

that care is needed when discussing what was happening in these episodes, in terms of the dynamic of centre-locality relations, and in terms of the power of the state that is revealed, not least by communicative practices. Millstone complicates matters by emphasising that the chief means of effecting reform in Ipswich­– ­Bishop Matthew Wren­– ­was not really an outsider, but someone with powerful local connections, and he also emphasises that Samuel Ward was a threat not just because of his use of pulpits, lectureships and indeed printing but also as someone with powerful allies in London. He also stresses that the underlying issue for both Wren and Laud was the existence of local privileges, which ensured not just local influence over the appointment of clerics but also local control over their activities, in ways which made clerics beholden to the views and interests of local elites. The campaign in Ipswich, in other words, was predicated on sophisticated local knowledge. In Cromwellian Ireland too, local knowledge proved to be vital, but it was provided by local powerbrokers, whose interventions and initiatives were crucial in a situation where effective direction from the centre was perhaps lacking. Indeed, what emerges from these chapters is not a straightforward story of a lack of communication, but rather unexpected problems with the ways in which communication from the centre happened, albeit in ways which did not really involve localist impulses. For Wells, therefore, there were problems in terms of how initiatives were communicated from London to Dublin, as well as internal communications problems within Ireland. Underpinning these, however, was not straightforwardly resentment regarding the power of the English government in London. Thus, while the authorities in London regarded Dublin as a periphery, authorities in Dublin regarded themselves as working in partnership with Whitehall and Westminster, which justified local pragmatism, and in that sense contemporaries were confronting asymmetrical understandings of what constituted the ‘centre’ and the ‘locality’. Kyle, meanwhile, demonstrates that even the development of a sophisticated bureaucratic system to enforce Lenten regulations, involving a serious administrative and surveillance system, did not work in practice, such that proclamations proved unenforceable. This reflected a series of issues, from the availability of fish to the possibility for counterfeiting the recognisances that were central to the process of enforcement, as well as the methods for gaining exemption, not to mention opposition to the cost and indeed to the use of proclamations as regulatory devices. None of this involved localism. Meanwhile, in the case of civil war accounts­ – ­another issue where it is important to recognise that texts flowed both outwards and inwards­ – ­Hughes argues that the state got more than it bargained for, in the sense that people responded to demands for information in ways that blended financial accounts with personal reflections and commentary on the experiences of civil war, thereby transforming or even undermining the government’s intentions. This can be recognised, indeed, without resorting 13

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 13

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

to notions of opposition to state power within the localities, although, if this is because it makes sense to recognise that state power was being negotiated, then it must also be recognised that this involved an ideological framing of responses, and one which reflected national debates. This perspective is also shared by Millstone, who notes that Laudian initiatives in Ipswich provoked a concerted and indeed violent backlash, and one that fed very clearly into national debates, not least through the pen of William Prynne. Hughes also demonstrates, however, that ideological divisions existed within local communities, rather than simply between localities and the centre, and like Millstone she recognises that different groups in the localities were also well connected to like-minded people in London and Westminster. What these chapters highlight, in other words, are new ways of complicating relationships between the political centre and the localities in the early modern period, and this can also be achieved by examining the behaviour of individuals from within the political elite. In part, as Cogswell (Chapter 3) demonstrates, this involves re-evaluating controversial grandees like the Duke of Buckingham, in ways which suggest that he was more responsive to provincial pressure than might once have been assumed, not least in his capacity as Lord Admiral. What is well known, therefore, is that Buckingham became an increasingly controversial figure in the period leading up to his impeachment and assassination, and it is also well known­– ­not least through the work of Cogswell himself­ – ­that the duke also courted ‘popularity’, and sought to be an effective communicator, in order to explain himself before the reading public, and in order to mould popular perceptions of him, whether through print or patronage of the stage. What Cogswell highlights here, however, is that Buckingham faced complaints about the threat to shipping in the narrow seas, and to the livelihoods of coastal towns, as a result of continental warfare and the threat from Dunkirkers, which took the form of parliamentary speeches by MPs on behalf of their constituencies, as well as petitions from the localities. He also demonstrates that, by paying attention to official warrants rather than merely official statements, it becomes possible to appreciate that Buckingham was remarkably responsive. In other words, as someone who sought approval, Buckingham also felt compelled to react to the pressure communicated to him from the localities, even if this merely placed him in the awkward position of wanting to pursue incompatible strategies­ – ­the protection of coastal shipping and a new foreign expedition­ – ­simultaneously. Even a ‘warlord’ like Buckingham, in other words, was not immune to pressure from the provinces, even if this was more obviously true while Parliament was sitting than when it was not. Individual grandees­– ­of varying degrees of prominence and importance­ – ­are also at the centre of the chapters by Peacey and O’Neill, both of whom recognise the need to complicate existing narratives of how print, and indeed commercial scribal newsletters, transformed the relationship between centre and localities. For O’Neill (Chapter 10) this involves the 14

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 14

26/02/2020 08:57

Introduction

need to recognise that a vital means of circulating news in the early modern period involved personal letters­ – ­letters with, rather than of, news­ – ­that passed through the epistolary networks of prominent individuals. For the 7th Earl of Huntingdon, therefore, who can be shown to have been educated in the arts of news very thoughtfully, and to have been a member of an increasingly mobile elite, local news was at a premium when he was away from home. However, while the nurturing of epistolary networks can be shown to have been a solution to this problem, O’Neill also argues that the growing importance of local news was actually faciliated by centralising forces, in terms of the development of a national postal system, even if this very system in some ways also proved threatening, to the extent that it became easier to intercept private correspondence for the purposes of political surveillance. For Peacey (Chapter 5), meanwhile, the need to acknowledge the role of print in breaking down barriers between centre and localities does not preclude the need to recognise that individuals in the localities still faced profound challenges, and that they needed help in knowing about and acquiring printed texts. Such mediation, however, is highlighted not in order to suggest that the localities remained remote in important ways but rather to suggest that, on this issue as on others, contemporaries turned to a new breed of ‘freelance fixers’­– ­or professional agents­– ­whose role was to provide resources such as time and expertise for those who sought to navigate the contemporary world, whether politically, administratively or culturally, and who were intimately involved in communicative practices. Ultimately, what this suggests is that the ‘distance’ between ordinary members of the public and the ‘centre’ was less a matter of geography or indeed mentality than of practical know-how. Finally, what this collection suggests is that the process of using communicative practices and print culture as a means of rethinking the relationship between, and the binary division of, ‘centre and locality’, extends to the recovery of hitherto neglected phenomena that were specific to certain locations; that were, for the want of a better term, ‘popular’; and that involved interesting links with things that might be thought to have pertained to affairs at a national or ‘central’ level. As in Peacey’s chapter, therefore, Weil (Chapter 11) uses print culture both of and about Newgate prison in order to complicate the relationship between ‘locality’ and geographical remoteness. For Weil, therefore, Newgate was a focal point for print, as well as a place from which print emerged, and in that sense it was both a locality­– ­a specific place with specific issues, albeit within London­ – ­and a centre, in terms of being a hub for discussion and authoritative textual production. What such texts also reveal, moreover, is a capacity to address both national issues and specific­– ­‘local’­– ­audiences at the same time. Finally, Como (Chapter 7)­– ­in another chapter that takes its lead from a printed text relating to communication between locality and centre­ – ­teases out the relations between popular Leveller agitation that is sometimes thought to be exclusive to London, 15

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 15

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

and local agitation and mobilisation in Wiltshire. What this suggests is the ­capacity for a key Leveller text to make an impact in the provinces, not least in places that had suffered from war and economic hardship, and that the Leveller petition become a focal point for localised mobilisation, which even extended to the delegation of authority to local commissioners. Moreover, while the ideological alignment of Wiltshire and London Levellers was not precise, there were strong links­ – ­‘a thick and tangled web’­ – ­between local people and political figures who were part of the Leveller movement nationally. However, since these links did not extend to the Wiltshire agitators doing the bidding of friends in London, it makes sense to use the episode to demonstrate that the relationship between mobilisation centrally and locally was ‘reshaped and intensified’ by civil war. Taken together, therefore, these chapters address the key issues of this project and this topic. They examine what mechanisms and what kinds of texts were involved in communication between different places, as well as the different types of people that were involved in their production, and the impact that they could have, and also not have. They highlight the attempted use of state power, and ways in which the state underwent change, but they also reveal the limitations of such power, and the possibilities for local autonomy, agency and mobilisation, and that the development of state power did not necessarily come at the expense of the localities, and could even enhance the possibilities for local action. They demonstrate that communicative practices represent a valuable lens through which to scrutinise such issues, and the relationship between phenomena in different locations; that texts moved in both directions and that such texts were sometimes successful and sometimes less so; and that responsiveness to such texts, and to the pressures that they brought to bear on their chosen audiences, occurred in surprising ways. Indeed, the impact­ – ­or otherwise­ – ­of such texts indicates that it is possible to show things like resistance to, or negotiation of, central power without resorting to ideas of localism, and also possible to demonstrate ideological as well as personal links between people who mobilised resources both centrally and locally. The end result is to complicate notions of ‘centre’ and ‘locality’­– ­not least in terms of whether what separated them were things other than geographical distance and mental outlooks, whether people and places in London could also be local, and whether certain phenomena, people and locales were local and national at the same time­ – ­without necessarily rendering such terms entirely redundant. As such, this book picks up nascent themes and ideas within the best recent scholarship, and offers important new insights and perspectives, without in any way exhausting the subject. Ongoing research work will add many more insights, not least in relation to subscriptional culture across the nation, including petitioning and loyal addresses, as well as lobbying and litigation. Nevertheless, this volume will, it is hoped, provide a reminder of the gains to be made by placing political communication at the heart of both 16

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 16

26/02/2020 08:57

Introduction

social and political history, and provide an impetus for further scholarship that brings these two sub-disciplines closer together.

NOTES



1 Sharpe, ‘Communication’, 324. 2 Ibid., 335–40. 3 See for example, Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2016). 4 Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999); Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005); Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (New York, 1979); Mark Goldie, ‘The unacknowledged republic: officeholding in early modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94. 5 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991); Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2001); Alastair Bellany, ‘“Raylinge rymes and vaunting verse”: libellous politics in early Stuart England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford, 1993), pp. 285–310; Alastair Bellany, ‘Railing rhymes revisited: libels, scandals, and early Stuart politics’, History Compass, 5:4 (2007), 1136–79. 6 Lake and Pincus (eds), Public Sphere; Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion, and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002); Thomas Cogswell, ‘Underground verse and the transformation of early Stuart political culture’, HLQ, 60 (1998), 303–26; Thomas Cogswell, ‘The politics of propaganda: Charles I and the people in the 1620s’, JBS, 29:3 (1990), 187–215; Richard Cust, ‘News and politics in early ­seventeenth-century England’, P&P, 112 (1986), 60–90; Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics From the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987); Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge, 1994); Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2004). 7 Charles Phythian-Adams, Re-thinking English Local History (Leicester, 1987); Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640–60 (Leicester, 1966). 8 Phythian-Adams, Re-thinking English Local History, p. 13; Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600–1660 (London, 1975); David Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973); Anthony Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986), pp. 356, 362, 372. 9 John Morrill, Cheshire, 1630–60: County Government and Society During the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974); Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (London, 1976); Fletcher, ‘National and local’. 10 Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1958); William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA, 1983). 17

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 17

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 11 Derek Hirst, ‘The Privy Council and the problems of enforcement in the 1620s’, JBS, 18:1 (1978), 46–66. 12 A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974). 13 Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England (London, 1989); Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (New York, 1987); Clive Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (New York, 1974); Clive Holmes, ‘The county community in Stuart historiography’, JBS, 19:2 (1980), 54–73; Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (New York, 1990). 14 Richard Cust and Peter Lake, ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor and the rhetoric of magistracy’, BIHR, 54 (1981), 40–53: Thomas Cogswell, Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State and Provincial Conflict (Stanford, 1998); Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996). 15 Underdown, Somerset; Peter Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics, and Society in Kent, 1550–1640 (Cranbury, NJ, 1978). 16 Ann Hughes, ‘The king, the parliament and the localities during the English civil war’, JBS, 24 (1985), 237–9; Ann Hughes, ‘Militancy and localism: Warwickshire politics and Westminster politics, 1643–1647’, TRHS, 5th series, 31 (1981), 51–68. See also: Clive Holmes, ‘Centre and locality in civil war England’, in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 153–74. 17 Cust and Lake, ‘Grosvenor’, 50; Peter Lake, ‘The collection of Ship Money in Cheshire during the sixteen-thirties’, Northern History, 17 (1981), 58, 70; Peter Lake, ‘Puritans, popularity and petitions: local politics in national context, Cheshire, 1641’, in Cogswell, Cust and Lake (eds), Politics, Religion, and Popularity, pp. 259–89. 18 Cogswell, Home Divisions. 19 Michael J. Braddick, ‘Resistance to the royal aid and further supply in Chester, 1664–1672: relations between centre and locality in Restoration England’, Northern History, 33:1 (1997), 114, 135–6. For different perspectives on centralising pressures and the independence of local elites, see: Fletcher, Reform; A.M. Coleby, Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire 1649–89 (Cambridge, 1987). 20 Cust, ‘Parliamentary elections’, 179–91; David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 1994). 21 Phythian-Adams, Re-thinking English Local History, pp. 9–13; David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1987); David Underdown, ‘The chalk and the cheese: contrasts among the English Clubmen’, P&P, 85 (1979), 25–48. 22 Jacqueline Eales and Andrew Hopper (eds), The County Community in Seventeenthcentury England and Wales (Hatfield, 2012), pp. 13, 125–6. 23 Lake, ‘Puritans, popularity and petitions’, p. 282; Peter Lake and Richard Cust, Gentry culture and the politics of religion: Cheshire on the eve of civil war (Manchester, 2020). 24 Cogswell, Home Divisions, p. 7. 18

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 18

26/02/2020 08:57

Introduction 25 Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and Piety; Daniel Beaver, Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590–1690 (Cambridge, MA, 1998); Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth; Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict. 26 Patrick Collinson, ‘De republica anglorum, or, history with the politics put back in’, in Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 1–29. 27 Geoffrey R. Elton, ‘Tudor government: the points of contact: I. Parliament’, TRHS, 5th series, 24 (1974), 183–200; Geoffrey R. Elton, ‘Tudor government: the points of contact: II. the Council’, TRHS, 5th series, 25 (1975), 195–211; Geoffrey R. Elton, ‘Tudor government: the points of contact: III. the Court’, TRHS, 5th series, 26 (1976), 211–28. 28 Russell, Parliaments. 29 Christopher Thompson, Parliamentary Selection and the Essex Election of 1604 (Wivenhoe, 1995); Kevin Sharpe (ed.), Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford, 1978); Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986); Richard Cust, ‘Politics and the electorate in the 1620s’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England (Harlow, 1989), pp. 134–67; Jacqueline Eales, ‘The rise of ideological politics in Kent, 1558–1640’, in Michael Zell (ed.), Early Modern Kent, 1540–1640 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 279–313; Paul Hunneyball, ‘Prince Charles’ Council as electoral agent, 1620–24’, PH, 23:3 (2004), 316–35; Andrew Thrush, ‘Commons v. Chancery: the 1604 Buckinghamshire election dispute revisited’, PH, 26:3 (2007), 301–9; Andrew Barclay, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Cambridge elections of 1640’, PH, 29:2 (2010), 155–70; HoP 1604–1629; Thomas Cogswell, ‘The human comedy in Westminster: the House of Commons, 1604–1629’, JBS, 52:2 (2013), 370–89. 30 Chris R. Kyle, Theater of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England (Stanford, 2012); Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey, ‘“Under cover of so much coming and going”: public access to Parliament and the political process in early modern England’, in Kyle and Peacey (eds), Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 1–23; Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People?: Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (New York, 1975); Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection; John K. Gruenfelder, Influence in Early Stuart Elections, 1604–1640 (Columbus, OH, 1981); Jason Peacey, ‘Tactical organization in a contested election: Sir Edward Dering and the Spring election at Kent, 1640’, in Chris R. Kyle (ed.), Parliament, Politics and Elections, 1604–1648 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 237–72; Aaron Graham, ‘Finance, localism, and military representation in the army of the Earl of Essex’, HJ, 52:4 (2009), 879–98. 31 David Harris Sacks, ‘The corporate town and the English state: Bristol’s “little businesses”’, P&P, 110 (1986), 70. 32 Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (New York, 2007); David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (New York, 2004). 33 Keith Wrightson, ‘The politics of the parish in early modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 27–31. See also: Steve Hindle, 19

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 19

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

34

35 36 37

38

39

40 41 42

43

‘Persuasion and protest in the Caddington common enclosure dispute, 1635– 1639’, P&P, 158 (1998), 37–78. Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth; John Walter, ‘“Affronts & Insolencies”: the voices of Radwinter and opposition to Laudianism’, EHR, 122:495 (2007), 35–60; John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999); Steve Hindle, ‘The shaming of Margaret Knowsley: gossip, gender and the experience of authority in early modern England’, Continuity and Change, 9:3 (1994), 391–419. Braddick, State Formation. Ibid., p. 433. Joan R. Kent, ‘The centre and the localities: state formation and parish government in England, circa 1640–1740’, HJ, 38:2 (1995), 363–404; Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 16; Joan Kent, The English Village Constable, 1580–1642: A Social and Administrative Study (Oxford, 1986); Michael J. Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-century England: Local Administration and Response (Rochester, NY, 1994); Michael J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester, 1996). This might mean thinking about the role of litigation in fostering a national political culture, or about the ways in which local experimentation, rather than ‘governmental ambition’ was central to the development of things like the Elizabethan poor laws. Patrick Collinson, ‘The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays, pp. 31–57; John F. McDiarmid, The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot, 2007); Peter Lake, ‘The “political thought” of the “monarchical republic of Elizabeth I” discovered and anatomized’, JBS, 54:2 (2015), 257–87; Cynthia Herrup, ‘The counties and the country: some thoughts on seventeenth-century historiography’, Social History, 8:2 (1983), 169–81. Keith Wrightson, ‘The enclosure of English social history’, Rural History, 1 (1990), 73–81; Braddick, State Formation, p. 431; Andy Wood, ‘The place of custom in plebeian political culture’, Social History, 22 (1997), 46–60. Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged republic’; Steve Hindle, ‘Hierarchy and community in the Elizabethan parish: the Swallowfield articles of 1596’, HJ, 42 (1999), 835–51. Herrup, ‘Counties’, 172. Braddick, State Formation, pp. 432–3. See for example, Mark Brayshay, ‘Conveying correspondence: early modern letter bearers, carriers, and posts’, in James Daybell and Andrew Gordon (eds), Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia, 2016), pp. 48–65, 263–6; Mark Brayshay, Land Travel and Communications in Tudor and Stuart England: Achieving a Joined-up Realm (Liverpool, 2014); T.S. Willan, The Inland Trade: Studies in English Internal Trade in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Manchester, 1976). Natalie Mears, Alasdair Raffe, Stephen Taylor and Philip Williamson with Lucy Bates (eds), National Prayers: Special Worship Since the Reformation (2 vols, Woodbridge, 2013–17); Ann Hughes, ‘Preachers and hearers in revolutionary London: contextualizing parliamentary Fast Sermons’, TRHS, 24 (2014), 57–77; Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–1642 (Oxford, 2011); Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in

20

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 20

26/02/2020 08:57

Introduction

44

45

46

47 48

9 4 50 51

52 53 54

Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (Cambridge, 2011). Thomas Cogswell, ‘Underground verse and the transformation of early Stuart political culture’, in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995), pp. 277–300; Bellany, ‘Railing rhymes’; Adam Fox, ‘Rumour, news and popular political opinion in Elizabethan and early Stuart England’, HJ, 40:3 (1997), 597–620; Ian Atherton, ‘The itch grown a disease: manuscript transmission of news in the seventeenth century’, Prose Studies, 21:2 (1998), 39–65; Millstone, Manuscript Circulation. Lloyd Bowen, ‘Information, language and political culture in early modern Wales’, P&P, 228 (2015), 125–58; Lloyd Bowen, ‘News networks in early modern Wales’, History, 102:349 (2017), 24–44; Ann Hughes, ‘Warwickshire on the eve of the civil war: a county community?’, Midland History, 7 (1982), 42–72. Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987); Holmes, ‘County community’, 68. See also: 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 (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 113–34. Neil Younger, War and Politics in the Elizabethan Counties (Manchester, 2012), pp. 60–73, 234. John Walter, Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Culture in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2017); David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006). Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004). Lake, ‘Puritans, popularity and petitions’, pp. 280–2. Wood, ‘Place of custom’; Steve Hindle, ‘Imaging insurrection in seventeenth-­ century England: representations of the Midland Rising of 1607’, History Workshop Journal, 66 (2008), 21–61. Jason Peacey, ‘Sir Edward Dering, popularity and the public’, HJ, 54:4 (2011), 955–83. See Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (New Haven, 2015). Walter, ‘Radwinter’; Walter, Colchester Plunderers; Walter, ‘The public sphere and the parish pump: finding politics in churchwardens’ accounts, 1639–1643’, in Valerie Hitchman and Andrew Foster (eds), Views from the Parish: Churchwardens’ Accounts c.1500–c.1800 (Newcastle, 2015), pp. 157–78; Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006).

21

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 21

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Chapter 2

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’: the politics of Lent in early modern England1 Chris R. Kyle

I

n 1538, in the midst of the reformation in England, Henry VIII, now Supreme Head of the Church, decided to intervene in the ecclesiastical calendar and provide new Lenten regulations. His intervention which relaxed some of the more stringent dietary prohibitions was not hastened by any religious change of heart but born out of a socio-economic problem­ – ­the skyrocketing price of fish during Lent and the consequent starvation of the poor. From here on in, until the last Lenten proclamation of 1662, the matter of Lent became a battleground of warring economic and regional factions, disruptive religious ideologues, exasperated government officials and parliamentary intervention. Adding to the problem was the widespread evasion of the regulations both by the lower classes priced out of the Lenten market and the wealthier segment of society able to buy their way out. This chapter traces the changing nature of Lenten proclamations, Privy Council orders and local regulations. In doing so it highlights the inability of the state to enforce its will on a reluctant population despite incessant cajoling, the evolving severity of Lenten punishments, failed attempts to devolve authority to the localities and the clash between the remnants of ‘Popish’ rituals and the new Protestant emphasis on state-sanctioned fast days. Furthermore, it examines the utilisation of specific forms of language by the Privy Council in order to assert its authority and that of the Crown while recognising the futility inherent in trying to prevent the entire population from consuming meat for forty days.

Like so many previously ecclesiastical matters, Henry VIII’s reformation tipped Lent into the purview of the monarch and as a result started the centralised and secular aspects which would come to define the forty days of supposed abstinence in the following years.2 While the history of Lenten proclamations at times emphasises and at others de-emphasises the religious significance of Lent, the proclamations all to varying degrees concentrate on 22

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 22

26/02/2020 08:57

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’

economic benefits, the maritime safety of England and the impact of Lent on the lower classes of English society. The season of Lent coincided with the seasonal dearth of fresh meat as winter stocks had been depleted and the advent of spring heralded little but a forthcoming supply of newly minted livestock. The staple diet in this time of dearth and prohibition then was fish­ – ­fresh white fish for those who could afford it and, for those who could not, as much salted herring as finances would allow. Fish though was well established as having no nutritional value whatsoever and, in the form of English salted herring, having the taste and consistency of chewing on old leather.3 Although this had been the case for centuries, what tipped the hand of Henry VIII in 1538 was the increasing problem of supply and demand. Lent was the season for fishmongers, and the prohibition on flesh saw the price of fish rise and quite possibly double at times. The scarcity of fish in 1538 and rising prices led Henry to allow the eating of previously prohibited foodstuffs, such as white meat, eggs, butter, milk and cheese during Lent. He was careful, however, to note that as Lent was ‘a mere positive law of the Church and used by custom within this realm’ it was within his prerogative as the King (he did not mention his role as Supreme Head of the Church) to offer this dispensation.4 However, he was also quick to add that the privilege should not be abused by gluttony, and other Lenten restraints such as avoiding sexual intercourse remained in force.5 This did not satisfy some however, and the vicar of Tysherst, who admittedly the bishop of Chichester noted was a ‘very fool’, ranted from his pulpit, ‘I wot never what I shall say unto you, for ye will not fast Lent, ye will eat white meat, yea, and it were not for shame, ye would eat a piece of bacon instead of a red herring’.6 In 1548 Lenten regulations entered the statute book and were reinforced by proclamation.7 Edward’s proclamation emphasised the religious aspect of Lent but also ‘to spare flesh and use fish for the benefit of the commonwealth and profit of his Majesty’s realm, whereof many be fishers and men using that trade of living’. Edward also remembered Henry VIII’s allowance of white meat, butter and so on. Sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs and other officers were commanded to follow the rubric of the proclamation and commit those who offended to prison where they would await the ‘King’s high indignation’ and be ‘grievously punished at his Majesty’s will and pleasure’.8 The scope of future proclamations though was really determined in the next major amendment to Lenten proclamations in 1551. By this time the government realised that, while the individual Lent breaker was still in need of a reminder of the spiritual importance of fasting, the real problem lay not with the consumer but with suppliers. Thus while the proclamation rehashed its predecessors, it really turned attention to those involved in the meat trade: butchers, victuallers and keepers of alehouses, taverns and inns. Lenten ‘enemies’ now became corporate and commercial in order to halt supply.9 The proclamations also imposed fixed penalties for Lent breakers echoing the Edwardian 23

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 23

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

statute of a 10s fine, ten days’ imprisonment and a prohibition on eating meat while in prison.10 The next significant refinement occurred early in Elizabeth’s reign in 1560 when an emphasis was placed on enforcement in London and Westminster and a system devised in which aldermen were to patrol the wards and report back to the government.11 This was expanded further the following year with additional penalties including the draconian provision that any victualler or anyone involved in the service of food, if found guilty, would be ‘immediately forever disenfranchised’ of their status as a citizen and forbidden to ply their trade or, if not a citizen, fined (or pilloried) and imprisoned. Political communication too was expanded as orders were sent down that sermons should concentrate on the importance of keeping Lent. The political merged with the religious in the critique of ‘rebellious and obstinate people that more regard their bellies and appetites than temperance and obedience’.12 After this flurry of Lenten activity centred on the various religious reformations of the sixteenth century, the baton of a new royal proclamation on Lent was not picked up again until 1619. Proclamations were issued frequently during the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign, whilst in years in which proclamations were not issued the authority devolved to Privy Council orders and local authorities.13 With the Stuart accession this practice of local delegation continued and no proclamation was issued before 1619. Essentially the Privy Council orders reminded the country that the last proclamation and the statutes remained in force and their strictures were once again to be followed. Two Lenten proclamations were issued in early 1619, which would in subsequent years when combined form the basis of annual proclamations up until 1640. The first proclamation dramatically increased to £100 the bonds required by innholders and victuallers etc. not to dress or serve meat. The abuses of Lenten regulations in London and the lax enforcement thereof seem to have been the motivation behind the reimposition of royal proclamations ordering ‘that a more severe & strict course shalbe now used’. Mayors, JPs and other officials were now strictly forbidden from licensing butchers; the servants of innholders, alehouse keepers and others were to be rounded up, intimidated and questioned as to whether they had seen any flesh in their establishments, and a watch was to be placed at the city gates to search for meat. The February proclamation was even more draconian and introduced, for the first time, the punishment of Lent breakers, which included those who had merely partaken of meat, who were to appear in the Star Chamber. In addition, licences to be exempt from the proclamation could now be issued only by bishops, and it also set up a system in which all recognisances not to serve or dress flesh in Lent were required to be enrolled in the Exchequer. In contrast to the period before 1619 the royal imprimatur of a proclamation was now deemed to be an annual necessity to avoid ‘the inveterate growth of this evill custome’ as the February proclamation noted.14 The last Lenten proclamation of Charles I was issued in February 164015 24

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 24

26/02/2020 08:57

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’

but as late as 1642 one pamphlet, A Briefe Note of the the Benefits that grow to this Realm by the observation of Fish-dayes by John Erswicke and printed by Thomas Bankes, and claimed to have been authorised by the Privy Council in February 1642, made the argument that all fish days (including Lent) were important to keep to benefit the commonweal and so ordered by the prince and Parliament.16 After this, in the midst of civil war, republic and Puritan government, Lenten regulations seem to have been quietly forgotten about although, unlike Christmas, Lent does not seem to have been formally abolished. There are, however, tantalising hints that at least some people retained the observance. In March 1645 the Lord Admiral, the Earl of Warwick, issued a licence to the commander of the pinnace Maria to eat flesh for two days a week during Lent.17 However, the Council of State in 1649 abolished the compulsory observance of Lent for all mariners.18 After the Restoration the practice was reinstated at least briefly. In 1661 the proclamation was modelled upon its Jacobean and Caroline successors as was that of 1662, the last royal proclamation that concerned Lent.19 In 1661 as well an enterprising publisher, Robert Pawley, who specialised in separates relating to Parliament, took notice of the proclamation and printed a singlesheet guide to the relevant statutes in force regarding Lent and fish days in general. In this he was joined by the printer Robert White, who published a lengthier pamphlet containing the statutes and annotated to show the benefits to the commonweal of the clauses.20 The circumstances surrounding the government’s desire to impose a Lenten diet once again may well have been simply to restore the normal practice pre-1640. But the impetus may have come from the City of London, and most likely the Fishmongers’ Company. On 16 January 1661 the Privy Council ordered that the proclamation for Lent drafted and sent to the Council by the City of London should be forwarded to the Attorney General ‘to peruse & p[re]pare the same according to forme’.21 Given the problems that the Lenten season had always caused in London and the difficulties the City had in fulfilling its duty, that it was partly respons­ ible for the renewing of Lenten proclamations is surprising but perhaps the Fishmongers had persuaded the City to reinstate the practice. Lenten practices did not die away with the last proclamation however­– ­the statutes of 2 & 3 Edward VI and 5 Elizabeth were still in force and licences for eating meat continued to be petitioned for and granted by bishops and others.22 But, as a matter of royal instruction through the medium of a proclamation, a 124-year-old tradition ended in 1662. The administrative system set up by statute and proclamation was intensive, burdensome and expensive and both London and York sought in vain to be exempted from the provisions.23 In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries much of the annual provisions rested upon local authorities with the occasional reminder via proclamation or Privy Council letter. But in most cases local authorities were expected to act without prompting. In Exeter, John Hooker listed this as part of the Mayor’s regular duties.24 After 25

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 25

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

the ­publication of orders, a jury was impanelled; all butchers, and other victuallers such as poulterers, and innkeepers were required to provide recognisances, and fortnightly searches were set up.25 From 1589 a chart was produced that was ordered to be displayed in all eating establishments.26 That year, it also seems that the Privy Council started to recognise the unnecessary duplication of these recognisances and a printed form was made available. How widespread its use was is unclear. The printed form, of which one copy is extant in the Exchequer records, does not appear to have survived in local archives.27 And certainly the post-1589 recognisances that do exist are still handwritten, in Latin on the recto and English on the dorso, some even on much more expensive parchment or vellum.28 Returns were then sent to London, almost all of which claimed that no flesh had been consumed in Lent. The bureaucracy involved was time-consuming and expensive. Some towns and cities had dozens of recognisances. Each butcher or victualler required two sureties so each victualler needed to be brought in, the bonds posted (perhaps involving sixty or so further citizens), the jury panel of twelve needed to be found, a clerk paid to enrol the documents, the results of which then had to be sent to London, and a further fee paid to enrol them there. Furthermore, the Lenten period required searches to be carried out weekly or fortnightly. And although most searches reported no Lenten breakers, a few did. For example, in Newark, Nottinghamshire, in the 1590s the search discovered John Swift with ‘a goose pye and broken pye crusts, and a bare fleshe boone in the cupboard, having no flesh on it’. The same search discovered that Robert Hunton had a piece of raw mutton, but also a licence to eat flesh, and that Urien Shoesmith possessed an illegal stash of six sausages.29 Few mayors can have looked forward to the administration of Lent in addition to their diet of dried herrings. Nevertheless, rules were followed (the penalty for a town’s non-compliance with the regulations was £100) and whilst the system was cumbersome it does illustrate the outreach of central government into local life and the compliance that this engendered. In the aftermath of the strict Lenten proclamation of 1619 the escalation of punishments and the use of prerogative courts did not go unnoticed. Shortly after the opening of the 1621 Parliament, Edward Alford, who had made a study of Lenten proclamations, and who had already made a name for himself as the scourge of ‘rule by proclamation’, complained about the severity of the recognisances forced upon those in the victualling trade who could scarcely afford them, the fees of clerks for registering the recognisances and the imposition of prerogative court justice. As he noted ‘and if now any kill or eat it is a Star Chamber matter’.30 In this he was joined by Sir Edward Montagu, Sir Dudley Digges and others, all of whom forced the Secretary of State, Sir George Calvert, into a robust defence of the King’s care for Lent and the need to restrain victuallers.31 After this initial outburst, little further was heard of Lenten proclamations specifically, although one proposal in May 1621 was to repeal all previous Lenten statutes and draft a new one, and the 26

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 26

26/02/2020 08:57

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’

forestalling sheepskins bill also complained of the surreptitious nature of butchery during Lent.32 The matter arose again in 1624 when some consideration was given to repealing the Elizabethan statute especially as fees had increased for licences of dispensation to eat meat in Lent.33 In the end the committee for repeal and continuance of statutes, in which the matter was under consideration, decided not to move ahead with a new law, but complaints resurfaced in 1626 about the proclamation. According to the Commons reading of the proclamation, it was possible to argue that it required recognisances to be taken from everyone not to eat flesh in Lent and not just those who dressed flesh.34 This reading of what was pretty much the by now standard Lenten proclamation seems to be a case of scaremongering rather than a deliberate government intention to extend recognisances, not that it would have been administratively possible to take recognisances from the entire population anyway. Alford was again to the fore in 1628 when parliamentary complaints about the Lenten proclamation escalated to the point of being declared a formal grievance. By now the pattern was familiar­ – ­the use of Star Chamber for Lenten transgressions, the excessive number of the recognisances and the fees that needed to be paid to Exchequer clerks to record the recognisances. However, in contrast to previous Parliaments, Alford waited and picked his moment. In mid-June as the Commons debated the remonstrance, the forced loan and the future of Parliaments, he tied in ‘rule by proclamation’ as epitomised by those for Lent as the end of parliamentary government: ‘and then what need we be here’.35 Sir John Eliot was reluctant to add proclamations to the remonstrance but he did agree that the Lenten proclamations should be presented as a grievance and Alford also received support from Sir Thomas Hoby, Sir Edward Coke and John Selden among others. Finally, at the suggestion of Sir Nathaniel Rich, proclamations were left out of the remonstrance but were to move forward separately. They were as many opined ‘an innovation in government’.36 The reasoning behind the Commons’ judgement was sound. In ten years Lenten enforcement had gone from a rote series of seemingly barely enforced Privy Council orders to a matter that placed a considerable financial burden on victuallers, created a new set of government fees, the threat of an appearance in Star Chamber and, as the Commons also complained about in 1628, an onerous patent to one Mr Reynolds who had the authority to license victuallers to sell meat in Lent.37 The motives behind this escalation remain murky. It is certainly possible that after nearly twenty years without a proclamation on Lent the Privy Council, perhaps because of widespread abuse, decided it was time to act. Certainly in the years leading up to 1619 there had been a number of complaints from the Privy Council that focused on the wanton disregard of Lent in London. In 1618 the City received the standard Privy Council order with a letter which noted 27

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 27

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality his Majestie’s express pleasure that the same be published within that citty and the libertyes thereof and better observed then in theise former yeares they have been. The execution whereof, as it must now wholy depend upon your care and endevour, soe will the contrary be imputed unto yow as a great neglect of his Majestie’s commaundment, who for soe many reasons importing the good of this commonwealth, hath soe seriously and soe often recommended the same unto yow and your predecessors, but hath not found the effects considerable to his expectation.38

Despite the threatening nature of this letter and its clear imputation of recent failure the narrative differs little from many predecessors. As the Privy Council informed the Lord Mayor of London in 1601, ‘the licentious liberty is growne so common both in those that breake the lawe, and the want of care so general in those that should see the same observed, as there is no accompt made eyther of her Majesty’s proclamation, the orders sett downe by her direccion or of the penalty of the lawe’.39 Little had changed by 1616 when the Council hoped the orders would be ‘better observed then in theese former yeares it hath beene’ and that the king ‘hath not found the effects answerable to his expectacion’.40 As we shall examine later as well, the Privy Council hardly expected its edicts to be followed but it did have an efficient secretariat. In 1617 the Privy Council sent exactly the same letter to London, which suggests both an expectation that Lent would always be a troublesome period of enforcement and an efficient system of record-keeping that enabled dipping back into the archives to find previous correspondence.41 It is also clear that the proclamation was designed to assist the fishing industry and the navy. This dated back, as we have seen, to the first Lenten proclamations, and in Elizabethan England, one of William Cecil, Lord Burghley’s, main economic platforms was the enforcement of the period of religious Lent and the creation of what has come to be called ‘political Lent’. This involved the establishment of fish days on Wednesdays and Fridays of every week by a controversial act of 1563.42 In fishery areas from the Levant to Iceland, Ireland, Newfoundland and even off the coast of England, English fishermen and merchants were being eclipsed by their continental neighbours. Thus, for Cecil, increasing the demand for fish would help both the economy by increasing the number of merchant vessels and by dint of this help maintain and improve the navy, especially through the provision of experienced mariners. The measure passed into the statute books but not without considerable difficulty. A clause was added to provide exemptions from fish days and the Commons divided on this clause (179 yea and 97 nay) and on the entire bill (149 yea and 77 nay). Its controversy stemmed from the same reasons that were at times applied to Lent itself: the impossibility of enforcement, the lack of nutritional value from fish and the notion that abstinence from flesh was a remnant of Popish superstition. The measure was soon caught up in a major dispute between competing English fish interests in what Geoffrey Elton was the first to term ‘piscatorial politics’.43 On one side stood the English fishers led by the interests of the herring 28

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 28

26/02/2020 08:57

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’

fleet that operated out of Great Yarmouth while opposition came from the London Fishmongers’ Company which relied upon the importation and sale of imported fish almost totally in strangers’ bottoms (foreign ships). As Elton, Sgroi and Dean have outlined, throughout the next few sessions of Parliament many attempts were made to amend or repeal the great navigation act of 1563 until eventually in 1585, as the act came up for renewal, MPs allowed the clause to lapse­– ­Cecil’s fast, as it was often called, had starved to death within his lifetime. If statutory enforcement of weekly fish days had died out, the idea that Lenten fish consumption benefited England had not. Indeed, it was most likely that the Yarmouth industry implanted the idea of Star Chamber into the minds of the Privy Council. In February 1618 Yarmouth and other (unspecified) coast towns petitioned the Council for relief from ‘the inordinate and unlawfull dressing and eating of flesh in tyme of Lent, and the request they make for directions to be addressed … to prefer a Bill in His Majestie’s High Courte of Starr Chamber against some capitall offendors in that kinde’. The idea was seized upon with alacrity by the Council, who informed Sir Henry Yelverton, the Attorney General, to make an example of three or four innholders or victuallers who transgressed during Lent and bring them before the Star Chamber in the next term. This it was hoped, although too late to make a difference in the disorders of the coming Lent, would serve as a severe warning and ‘doubtles worke that reformacion for the future as is hoped and expected’.44 In this the Council were to be disappointed. No doubt too the outbreak of the Thirty Years War heightened the need for mariners and the maintenance of the navy which made stricter enforcement of Lent and more consumption of fish important for the nation. What is noticeably absent from the increasing emphasis placed on post1619 Lenten enforcement is any discussion of a religious motivation. Despite James’s heightened theological disposition at this exact time given his intervention and interest in the Synod of Dort and the national issue of the Book of Sports, no discernible trace of Lenten religiosity is obvious. The Venetian ambassador called it ‘not so much a matter of religion as of policy, to increase the number of fishermen and consequently the population on the coast, develop the fish trade and augment the number of sailors, of whom there is not great abundance. They hope in this way to furnish their ships and by economizing meat to make it easier to provision the fleets.’45 This was also true of the way the Commons debated Lenten proclamations in the 1620s. Richard Dyott scrawled in his diary that Lent was ‘a politic constitution by reason E.6’ and ‘5. Eliz’.46 John Pym’s recollection of the debate was even more specific: ‘By 3 Ed. 6 all ecclesiastical constitutions concerning Lent were abrogated … so Lent stands a mere temporal constitution.’47 Specifically, in 5 Elizabeth cap. 5 it was enacted ‘that whosoever by preaching, teaching, writing, or open speaking notifie, that any eating of Fish, or forbearing of Flesh mentioned in this statute is of any necessity for the saving of the soul of man or that it is 29

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 29

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

for service of God, or otherwise then as other Politick Lawes are, and be, that then such persons shall be punished as spreaders of false Newes are, and ought to be’. This too was a position taken by the Puritan rector of Broughton, Northamptonshire, Robert Bolton. In A Threefold Treatise he noted ‘here I do condemne not the Lent fast among us, so it be observed only as a civill and politicke ordinance, and not as any religious fast or observation’.48 Similar attitudes can be traced in the works of other noted Puritans. Henry Scudder in 1631 added a lengthy section on fasting to his devotional tract The Christians Daily Walke. Here he noted ‘I forbeare to write of the many kinds of Fasts, and of keeping Wednesday, Friday, and Lent Fasts; Onely this much, It is evident, both by the profession and practise of our Church and State in England, that with us they are held to be Civill, observed for the good of the Common-weale … they have their lawfull use, so farre forth as they conduce to their civill end, and are freed from Popish abuse and superstition.’49 In attacking Popish rituals William Gouge in The Whole-Armor of God (1619) commented that while the Church of England held fasts such as the Lenten fast, just like the Catholic Church, ‘they are retained by us onely as politicke and civill fasts, for the better preservation of flesh, but maintained by them as religious fasts’.50 Henry Burton in 1628 specifically referred to proclamations as one of the reasons Lent was a civil matter in England: ‘doth not the King’s Proclamation inioyne forbearance of Flesh during that time of Spring, and that expressly for the increase of Cattle?’51 Or as Andrew Willet noted, ‘The Lenten fast then now observed, not as a spirituall tenth of time in respect of any religious use, but as a politicall interdiction and time of restraint for the good of the Common-wealth’.52 Neither did Lent cause much religious controversy later in the 1620s although it could remain delicately balanced in the minds of individuals between a matter of temporal and spiritual observance. As Daniel Featley stated in The Handmaid to Private Devotion, Lent and other days designated as ‘fish days’ were ‘a mixed constitution; partly civill, appointed by the King or State, to preserve young catell, spend fish, and encourage fishermen: Partly Ecclesiasticall ordered by the Church for Religious ends’.53 This was a sentiment shared by the Dorset preacher John Mayo in his sermon on fasting: ‘the end and purpose why and wherefore Lent was first ordained, was, not onely to preserve the breede of Cattell, to maintaine the Princes Navie, and the Calling of the Fishermen, but especially for the worthy receiving of the blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist or Lords Supper’.54 And certain Laudians sought to further highlight the original religious nature of Lent. John Browning lamented in 1636 that Lent had been taken away in England,55 whilst Henry Mason in maintaining the Lenten tradition noted that ‘it is too much violence now to abolish all times of fasting and humiliation for the superstition that some men have placed in them’.56 John Cosin’s controversial Collection of Private Devotions (1627) praised ‘the calendar of the Church ‘as full of benefit and delight … it hath in it a very 30

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 30

26/02/2020 08:57

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’

beautiful distinction of the days and seasons’, and particularly emphasised the religious nature of Lenten fasting.57 But even Laud himself adhered to the public, secular line as he noted in 1633 ‘Keeping of Lent and fish days; fishermen in maritime towns to be encouraged by the judges’.58 If James and his Privy Council thought the threat of Star Chamber and the greater authority of a royal proclamation would improve Lenten behaviour then they were to be sorely disappointed. From the moment the proclamation emerged it was accompanied by a chiding letter circulated in London and the neighbouring counties. Unlike in the further reaches of England and Wales, the Privy Council ordered the king’s messengers to supervise the implementation and enforcement of the stricter policy. The letters, like the Privy Council orders that marked the period pre-1619, were virtually identical year after year. The lord mayor and the city as a whole were perpetually chided: ‘it is not unknowne unto you what care his Majestie has taken for reforming the lycentious libertie that by neglect of his officers and mynisters hath in former tymes ben used in killing and eating of flesh in tyme of Lent’. The warrant to the messengers repeated the formula ‘notwithstanding there hath ben of late yeares greater lybertie taken in killing and selling of fleash then at any tyme heretofore’. While it is certainly possible that the letters were simply a rhetorical trope that admitted either an administrative efficiency of filing previous missives or a matter of lazy recopying divorced from the reality on the ground, Lenten enforcement in London was difficult. On 24 February 1621 fifty-eight butchers were recorded as killing meat without a licence in London.59 By 6 March this number had risen to seventy-two with another twenty ‘suppressed’.60 A further two butchers were also under investigation­– ­one claimed to have a licence from the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster while the other claimed immunity as he was within the liberty of the duchy and thus outside Council jurisdiction.61 Few London mayors can have looked forward to the Lenten season. Not only were they tasked with enforcing the regulations, monitoring the price of fish, checking licences and appointing butchers and poulterers but they came under pressure from individuals and especially peers who wished to have their personal butcher licensed.62 In 1579 the Bishop of London, John Aylmer, asked for his butcher, as did Charles Lord Howard of Effingham in 1582, Sir Francis Walsingham in 1587, the Lord Chamberlain in 1591, the queen herself the same year, the Earl of Essex in 1595 along with the queen’s musicians, the Lord High Admiral in 1602, whilst various physicians in London said to the lord mayor in 1615 that meat broth needed to be made available for all.63 The situation was clearly so bad that the mayor in 1587 begged the Council to take the licensing into their own hands as ‘a number of honorable persons usually made request to have certain persons licensed, who were dissatisfied upon refusal’.64 The seeming widespread availability of meat and continual chiding by the Privy Council stands in stark contrast to the official Lenten returns that have survived from London. By authority of proclamations, London wards 31

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 31

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

were required to conduct tours to investigate any breaches of Lent but the vast majority of the returns, although it must be admitted many are illegible, follow a set formula: ‘they have not founde any persons offending in killeing selling dressing & eating of flesh within the said ward in the said time of Lent’.65 Admittedly also these are few in number but they suggest a disparity between the returns furnished to Chancery and the reality on the ground. In late 1630 the government rather cleverly or desperately decided that the system of the king’s messengers acting alone or in concert with London officials was not working and so roped the Fishmongers’ Company into the fortnightly searches of all victualling houses in London. This it was hoped would increase the vigilance and work ‘by a gentle way’. But it also came with a warning that if Charles ‘finde not some speedie effect hereof he will thinke of a sharper course to bring such wilfull contemners of the lawes and of his Commandement to better conformitie’. The Fishmongers were also warned that this privilege should not provide an excuse to engross fish and artificially raise the prices as ‘the reforming of one abuse give no advantage to the practicing of another’.66 What this highlights is one of the intractable problems of every Lenten season­ – ­a shortage of fish. The English fishing industry was simply incapable of providing sufficient fish for all the population during Lent. This situation was exacerbated by a bitterly cold winter in 1621. The Thames was frozen, rivers were impassable, and the Mayor begged for more butchers’ licences and promised to try to control the price of meat. The number of butchers licensed in London ranged between three and six, the latter number being increasingly common as the population grew and it became clear that the number authorised by the Council was woefully inadequate. Obviously the mayoral plea was successful but despite the nearly threefold increase a large number of butchers clearly risked the wrath of the Council in 1621. By 1632 the matter of both a scarcity of fish in London and the general evasion of Lent regulations was severe enough to warrant a special charge to the judges about to ride circuits that Lenten breakers ‘shalbe strictlie dealt withal, both here [Star Chamber] and in other Courts, and you in your assizes are to deale strictlie with them’.67 The Lord Keeper also blamed the lack of fish on those who ate meat and thus discouraged the fishing industry as well as on the ‘unsufferable resort and residence of multitudes to the Citty of London’ which pressured the supply of fish even further.68 The problems of fish shortages continued though. In 1642 the Mayor of Chester petitioned Parliament for Lenten relief. The city had no stocks of herrings or other fish available and requested licences for six butchers to maintain the town and anyone who might be billeted there.69 The lack of fish may also have contributed to Restoration government’s decision to abandon Lent in the early 1660s. In 1661 three fish days in Lent were forsworn and meat was allowed to be consumed on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.70 The restrictions were relaxed even further the following year, ‘because there cannot be fish 32

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 32

26/02/2020 08:57

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’

sufficient to serve half the city in time of Lent, and therefore it is reported only Wednesdays and Fridays will be enjoined strictly to be deemed for fish days’.71 Samuel Pepys certainly suspected that these restrictions would not work. He noted in his diary on 14 February that ‘the talk of the town now is, who the King is like to have for his Queen: and whether Lent shall be kept with the strictness of the King’s proclamation; which it is thought cannot be, because the poor, who cannot buy fish’.72 Pepys at least made an attempt to keep the Lenten restrictions­ – ­On 27 February ‘I called for a dish of fish, which we had for dinner, this being the first day of Lent; and I do intend to try whether I can keep it or no’. His resolve was short lived­– ­on 28 February he wrote in his diary ‘notwithstanding my resolution, yet for want of other victuals, I did eat flesh this Lent, but am resolved to eat as little as I can’.73 Apart from the shortage of fish, market forces were at play and in the time of Lenten scarcity all victuals became more expensive, not the least fish. As Mary Markham wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury when trying to lay in stocks for Lent, she ‘rewls [rues] the price in this Contrie’.74 William Harrison’s Description of England memorably stated in 1587 that fish ‘brought from the easterly coast to Saffron Walden in Lent, when for want of flesh, stale stinking fish and welked mussels are thought to be good meat; for other fish is too dear amongst us, when law doth bind us to use it’.75 In an earlier edition of 1577 he made the marginal annotation ‘never was our salted and fresh fishe so deare as now sith men must neds have it’.76 Although the price of fish in the sixteenth century did not increase as much as those of many other staple products, it took a sharp turn later in the century and prices in London rose by 67 per cent between 1570 and early in James’s reign.77 Furthermore, this was the average price for the year and not a reflection on Lent when prices were higher. The Council tried in vain to combat this problem. In 1599 the Council complained not only that fish prices were excessive but that the butchers licensed by the City to cater for those with licences had increased the price of meat above the regularised rates ‘to the great burthen and charg of the lawfull buyers’.78 However, one enterprising fishmonger in Maldon, Essex, petitioned for a reduction in his town rates as so much flesh was consumed in Lent 1620 that his business had suffered.79 The enforcement of Lent was further inhibited by the ease of obtaining a licence of dispensation and some evident confusion about who exactly could issue licences. Whilst Lent had been shorn of religious overtones, dispensations were still in the power of ecclesiastical authorities in the form of diocesan bishops. In practice this meant every clergyman as authorised by the 1563 act and a range of other authorities, although these had not been mentioned in the act. But, for example, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, William James, in 1590 provided a licence for one Cromwell Lee to eat flesh during Lent.80 There was certainly some confusion over who could issue licences. Various liberties and ‘exempt and privileged’ places in London and Middlesex seem to have issued licences, and the Privy Council ordered 33

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 33

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

a search for these places that had ‘no sufficient and lawfull authorety so to do’.81 In 1618 it was discovered that Sir Henry Rich (later the Earl of Holland) in his capacity as Captain of the Guard, the Dean of Westminster, Robert Toulson, and Thomas, Lord Wentworth, were all issuing licences to butchers, and quite possibly some of the Privy Council may have been guilty as well. The Council was forced to state ‘that noe person of what degree or quality soever can graunt any lycence’.82 In Diss, Norfolk, the citizens considered that a local JP was sufficient to issue a licence.83 In the instance of Sir Henry Rich though, the Council were wrong. Edward VI’s statute authorised both deputy lieutenants and captains to eat meat and permitted them to license their soldiers to do so as well. The standard licences of dispensation all related to the supposed lack of nutritional value in fish. Those who were infirm, aged, ill, imprisoned or pregnant were eligible for licences. These proliferated across the country to the extent that it is likely that every parish had some people licensed to eat flesh during Lent. Thus Joan Conocke of North Curry, Somerset, received a series of licences being ‘about 90 years of age’.84 In Egloskerry, Cornwall, Paul Speccot was able to eat meat in 1632 ‘by reason of his late sicknesse beinge unable to eate ffish’.85 Katherine Lady Petre’s 1619 licence noted ‘for the eating of fish is very dangerous and hurtful for her body by reason of her infirmities and sickness’.86 The inhabitants of Diss in 1600 petitioned for a blanket licence to provide meat ‘for women with childe & in childebed and for the sicke folks’.87 Some came with strict provisions. In 1632 Samuel Lindsell, the rector of Stratford St Mary, Suffolk, gave permission for Elizabeth Bragge to eat meat during her time of sickness. However, this did not extend to beef or veal. Other licences such as those customarily issued in St Mary Newington, Southwark, allowed meat ‘other than beife, veale, porke, mutton or bacon’.88 The 1563 statute on which the proclamations were based had a proviso that those licensed to eat meat were to pay for the privilege. In this instance Elizabeth Bragge was required to pay into the poor box of the church the rather hefty sum of 6s 8d as was laid down in the 1563 statute.89 The exact same sum is recorded in a dispensation of 1599 in the accounts of the churchwardens of St Michael, Cornhill. And in 1620 Gabriele Lyvessey of Hollingbourne, Kent, paid the same amount, split across eighteen poor parishioners, ‘he not beinge well’.90 Likewise in St Mary the Less, Cambridge, John Standish distributed his licence money among the poor.91 And in a 1615 sermon by Roger Fenton, he specifically referred to the typicality of these payments: ‘When a man shall give a Commissarie so much towards the poore mans boxe, for a licence to eat flesh in Lent, as he gives to his Pastor for feeding of his soule all the yeere long.’92 Clearly though such a sum would have been impossible for the majority of the population and it may be that those impoverished were exempted from payment or unlicensed but quietly and unofficially ignored, at least by local authorities. Further increasing the sum owed was 34

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 34

26/02/2020 08:57

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’

a payment of 4d for registering the licence in the church book as per the statute 5 Elizabeth cap. 5.93 For those higher up the social scale licences were available that covered guests as well. For example, in 1631 Robert Devereaux, the 3rd Earl of Essex, purchased what appears to be a multi-year dispensation for himself and his wife along with six others at his table for the sum of £1 6s 8d per annum.94 This was the going rate as laid down by 5 Elizabeth cap. 5 for a lord of the Parliament.95 William Lord Petre in 1632 obtained a licence from George Abbot that included six members of his household.96 In Gloucestershire Nathaniel Stephens obtained a licence for himself, his wife and guests around his table in 1621.97 George Abbot’s licence to Peter Courthope of Cranbrook included his entire family as did that for William Crymes of Buckland Monachorum in west Devon.98 When the Lenten restrictions resumed after the Restoration, Secretary Nicholas was quick to obtain a licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury for the sum of 13s 4d to the poor box of his parish. This sum included his wife and ten guests ‘to be chosen by him’ to eat meat around his table at Lent.99 The sheer number of surviving licences tends to indicate that the elite were free to exempt themselves from Lenten restrictions at will. In 1555 Cardinal Pole issued a licence to eat meat in Lent, except on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, to Anne, Duchess of Somerset, the widow of the Lord Protector.100 Sir Edward Littleton obtained an exemption in 1640 from Archbishop Laud, and Lionel, 1st Earl of Middlesex, was granted a licence by Archbishop Abbot in 1631.101 And at least according to William Camden, Queen Elizabeth ‘least she shoulde breake the Ecclesiasticall fast in Lent, shee solemnly asked licence every yeere of the Archbishop of Canterbury, for eating of flesh’.102 Sir Edward Warner during Edward VI’s reign was actually granted a licence to eat flesh in Lent for life.103 When in 1619 the Jacobean government reintroduced Lenten proclamations and extended their severity, John Chamberlain was sceptical about its effectiveness, and the open way in which the elite circumvented the season: the strictness of the proclamations ‘makes us all get licences; wherein we follow the example of the Lords of Council’.104 Within the confines of the Tower of London, at least in 1616 and 1617, it was thought fit to provide one butcher ‘such that the necessarie provision of flesh bee made for persons of quallitie now prisoners in the Tower’.105 Also exempted from the provisions were foreign ambassadors and visiting dignitaries.106 In 1601 the Council ordered the Lord Mayor to appoint a butcher to serve the Scottish ambassador, the Earl of Mar, and even to enable him to slaughter cattle, which, as they noted, was a privilege generally reserved for the navy alone.107 The Earl of Gondomar received a specific licence that his personal butcher, Symon Richardson, of Cheston Nunnery (Cheshunt), Hertfordshire, should be allowed to bring weekly to the earl’s house eight calves and eight sheep without molestation.108 In one of the Lenten sermons preached before James in 1622, Lancelot Andrewes specifically mocked 35

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 35

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

those who sought Lenten licences claiming their availability was a test from God ‘not to keepe; to keepe what diet we will’.109 At least one enterprising yeoman, William Mendlove, decided there was sufficient demand for licences that it was worth counterfeiting letters, spuriously signed in the name of Henry Viscount Falkland, and selling them to butchers. One John Bill was found in possession of such a letter which contained the rather obvious flaw that Mendlove had made­ – ­namely that Falkland was referred to as an earl rather than a viscount. Unfortunately, no record of what happened to Mendlove appears to exist but Bill was forced to stand in the pillory with the paper affixed to his head and placed in surety for his good behaviour.110 Most of those, however, hauled before the Middlesex sessions tended to be guilty of large-scale butchery. For example, John Borne of Leicester was found in Islington attempting to sell eighty sheep for slaughter.111 In 1575 John Chaunterell of Clerkenwell was indicted for the sale of twenty sheep, six lambs and six calves that he had killed and dressed without licence.112 Ralph Shelton of St John’s Street was hauled up for killing eighty sheep, one hundred lambs and forty calves.113 In Rye, one Thomas Cort smuggled sheep under cover of darkness, meeting on the highway at 11 pm with ‘a taule fellowe w[i]th a black beard cut short w[i]th a canvas dublet & a russet payre of breeches’ to purchase the sheep and then he drove them to the getty at Rye, bound and hid them ready for transportation to one ‘Chyverells’ where they would be slaughtered.114 It is certainly possible to make the argument that Cecil’s ‘political Lent’ of the 1560s and 1570s had turned into a Lenten period in the seventeenth century which was a new ‘political Lent’ and that was for many wholly political and shorn of its religious origins. Those who could buy or cajole their way out felt little compunction in evading the harsh stricture laid down by proclamations. As George Hakewill noted in 1627: But I much maruell that so great a Clearke should be so easily carried away with so vaine a shew, and by making men beleeue that they were not able to obserue the Canons, make them vnable indeed: which together with the greedy desire of gaine, hath beene no doubt the ground, or at least the pretence of such a multiplicity of dispensations in latter ages; men choosing rather to stretch their purse strings, and to buy out a dispensation for their money then to improue their endeavours for the doing of that which the Canon requires. And hence the Lenten fast duly kept with much ease by our Predecessors, is with most men now adayes made so impossible, notwithstanding the observation thereof conduce so much to the publique good.115

Even Cecil acknowledged as much in his 1563 speech. The speech clearly lays down his arguments in favour of more fish days but there is also a realisation that many would evade the regulation. Cecil bemoaned the fact that he could remember when even the king did not have a licence and when his secretary, Sir Brian Tuke, was mocked for obtaining one. He noted that ‘no small nombre will by license or without licenss breake it, which may be gessed by the humors of men in this Howse that ar so ernest ageynst it’.116 36

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 36

26/02/2020 08:57

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’

The theory of political Lent was certainly not without merit, had conditions allowed it to succeed. Certainly the consumption of more fish would have helped more cattle survive for breeding, increased the number of mariners and the number of ships and helped maintain the navy. However, it foundered on two simple facts: a substantial part of the population could not afford to eat fish (Cecil estimated that this was one-third of the population in 1563) and, for the most part, those who could afford to did not want to. The end point though was that despite the efficient bureaucracy the Lenten orders of the central government were widely ignored and by and large unenforceable even if there had been will in London and the countryside to do so. The escalation of punishments and return of the royal proclamations did little if anything to resolve the problem. In fact, it could be argued that market forces and the weather were more effective in curbing the eating of meat than anything ordered by Whitehall. And the same was true of fish as well. What this examination of Lent reveals about structures of communication is that the state had very successfully implemented an expensive, timeconsuming, cumbersome and intrusive administrative and surveillance system. It demanded and received loyalty and obedience to this structure. The paper trail flowed out into the localities through proclamations and Privy Council orders and returned via letters, recognisances and depositions. These piscatorial politics were local politics played out on a national stage and national politics performed in regions, cities, towns and villages. What had once been under the administrative control of various diocesan bishops was now a matter of state control, centralised in Westminster, backed by the machinery of government, the authority of Parliament and visibly displayed through proclamations in marketplaces and other public thoroughfares and by printed orders tacked up in every victualling establishment in the land. Government orders ensnared into public participation not only local officials but the entire food and victualling trade along with other citizens as jurors, bondsmen and searchers. What it could not do, however, when faced with a population unable to comply through economic circumstances, problems of supply, serial Lenten evaders, widespread Lenten breaking and religious opposition to the ecclesiastical calendar, was to ensure that the edicts of the state were followed. Local authorities did conform to the structure but not the will of the monarchy. It is important to note that where the Privy Council chided the inhabitants and attempted to enforce restrictions was in London and the surrounding counties; only occasional reports filtered in and a few chiding letters sent out to other parts of the country. By and large those who sent their recognisances to London and reported no Lenten breakers, whether this was true or not, did not catch the attention of the Privy Council. London and the Home Counties, though, could not escape. In many ways the reasons are obvious: this area was the most visible, populous, the home of King, court and Council and the site of many shambles, especially around 37

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 37

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Smithfields market. But, in total, according to Maurice Beresford’s work on informers and economic legislation only one per cent of all cases that came before the courts related to Lent breaking or the failure to keep other fish days of political Lent.117 The government’s attempts to enforce Lent did little more than set up a series of conflicts from the low-level non-compliance of the population to fishmongers’ complaints that asking them to carry out searches in London was too great a burden on the company, to the City’s protests that searches by royal messengers impinged upon their right of self-governance, to the excessive use of prerogative courts for minor offences; the sale of Lenten licences, rights of search and enrolment of recognisances to patentees were yet another manifestation of a corrupt, mismanaged government. John Taylor the Water-Poet may have named the three main enemies of Lent as ‘a dog, a butcher, and a puritan’ but in reality Lent found few friends.118 The attitude of the people of England can pretty much be summed up in Mistress Quickly’s words in 2 Henry IV: ‘what’s a joint of mutton or two in a whole Lent.’119

NOTES

1 I would like to thank Michael Britton for his research assistance and John Morrill and Elliot Vernon for answering various queries. 2 On Lent in general see Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford, 1996), pp. 169–81. On fasting see Alec Ryrie, ‘The fall and rise of fasting in the British reformations’, in Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie (eds), Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Farnham, 2013), pp. 89–108; Christopher Durston, ‘“For the better humiliation of the people”: public days of fasting and thanksgiving during the English revolution’, The Seventeenth Century, 8 (1992), 129–49; H.R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The fast sermons of the Long Parliament’, in H.R. Trevor-Roper (ed.), Essays in British History: Presented to Sir Keith Feiling (London, 1964), pp. 85–138; Peter Iver Kaufman, ‘Fasting in England in the 1560s: “A Thinge of Nought”?’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 94 (2003), 176–93; C.J. Kitching, ‘“Prayers fit for the time”: fasting and prayer in response to national crises in the reign of Elizabeth I’, in W.J. Sheils (ed.), Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition (Studies in Church History, 22, Oxford, 1985), pp. 241–50; Ann Hughes, ‘Preachers and hearers in revolutionary London: contextualizing parliamentary fast sermons’, TRHS, 24 (2014), 55–77. 3 On fish in general see Brian Fagan, Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World (New York, 2005); Charles Cutting, Fish Saving: A History of Fish Processing from Ancient to Modern Times (New York, 1955); A.R. Michell, ‘The European fisheries in early modern history’, in E. Rich and C.H. Wilson (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (8 vols, Cambridge, 1977), V, The Economic Organization of Europe, pp. 135–40; Justin Colson, ‘London’s forgotten company? Fishmongers: their trade and their networks in

38

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 38

26/02/2020 08:57

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’

4

5



6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19

20

21

later medieval London’, in Caroline Barron and Anne Sutton (eds), The Medieval Merchant: Proceedings of the 2012 Harlaxton Symposium (Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 24, Donington, 2014), pp. 20–40. Lent or Quadragesima came into the ecclesiastical calendar in the fourth century as a fast of thirty-six days. In the seventh century it was extended to forty days. As Caroline Walker Bynum states, ‘throughout the Middle Ages, the Lenten fasts and weekly fast days, especially Fridays, remained the basic marks of the Christian’. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 37, 40–1. Quotation from p. 40. See also J.A. MacCullough, ‘Fasting’ in James Hastings, John A. Selbie and Louis H. Gray (eds), Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (13 vols, New York, 1908–27), 5, pp. 759–65. Paul Hughes and Francis Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations (3 vols, New Haven, 1964–69), I, pp. 260–1; James Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII (London, 1892), 13:1, no. 385; BL, Harl. 442, fo. 151. The same proclamation was issued in 1542 and 1543. In 1541 the city of Canterbury erected a board to place the Lenten proclamation on prominent display, HMC Ninth Report, p. 153. TNA, SP 1/133, fo. 50, 17 June 1538. 2&3 Edward VI, cap. 19, An Acte for Abstinence from Fleshe. Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, I, pp. 413–15. Exceptions were made for those who held licences to kill or obtain meat under the Great Seal. Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, I, pp. 510–12. See also the 1553 proclamation, pp. 539–41. Ibid., II, pp. 139–40. Ibid., II, pp. 163–5. Ibid., II, pp. 181, 293, 367, 381, 390, 438, 503, 510, 535; III, pp. 3, 36, 134, 143, 188, 204. For Privy Council orders (Elizabeth and James until 1618) see STC 8181, 8182, 8201, 8217, 8226, 8241, 8247.8, 8256, 8263, 8268, 8272, 8282, 8289, 8296, 8342, 8412, 8427, 8461, 8476, 8483, 8493. 8494, 8511, 8535, 8547, 8558. James F. Larkin and Paul Hughes (eds), Stuart Royal Proclamations: James I (Oxford, 1973), pp. 413–16, 424–6. James F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations: Charles I (Oxford, 1983), pp. 701–3. Wing E3250. CSPD 1643–45, p. 635, 27 March 1645. CSPD 1649–50, p. 44. A Proclamation, for restraint of killing, dressing and eating of flesh in Lent or on fish-days appointed by the law to be observed (1661) Wing C3421, C3421A, C3422, C3422A, C 3423; (1662) Wing C3424. The Several Statutes in Force for the Observation of Lent (Robert White, 1661) Wing E923C; A Collection of such Statutes as do Enjoyn the Observation of Lent (Richard Pawley, 1661) Wing E894. See also an allegorical engraving with verses published the same year, entitled Lent (M.S. for Thomas Jenner, 1661) Wing L1056. TNA, PC 2/55, 2, fo. 55v. For various licences issued to butchers in London and the surrounding counties see ibid., fos 65, 68, 70, 76, 77, 78v. 39

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 39

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 22 Numerous licences are extant. See for example, LMA, ACC/1876/G/07/01/1–2, Licence Archbishop of Canterbury to Master of Charterhouse (1660); Hampshire RO, Jervoise Family Papers, 44M69/C/791, Licence Bishop of Winchester to Thomas Jervoise and his wife (1662). 23 LMA, COL/RMD/PA/01/001, Remembrancia, 1, no. 332; York City Archives, YC/A 23, fo. 140v. 24 Frederic A. Youngs Jr, The Proclamations of the Tudor Queens (Cambridge, 1976), p. 123, n. 116. 25 Canterbury Cathedral Archives, U/4/17/17, Inquisition on eating flesh in Lent (1563); U/4/4/136–7, Forwich Borough Inquisitions (1608, 1615); U/4/4/90, Verdict of jury in Fordwich Borough that no butcher has killed, dressed or sold meat during Lent (1583); KHLC, Inquisitions and returns on Lent, Faversham (1592); Gravesend Burgmote Minutes, Gr/AAm/1, Appointment of a panel to survey town during Lent and notes on searches for Lent breakers (1590); Surrey History Centre, More Losely Papers, 6729/11/63/2, JPs ordered to meet every fourteen days in Lent and take bonds from butchers not to kill or sell flesh (1586). 26 TNA, SP 12/185/100. 27 TNA, E 180/104–5. 28 See for example, KHLC, Faversham, Fa/J/Q/r/2/7 (1577); Queenborough, QB/ A2z/1–5 (1613, 1629, 1634); The Keep, Rye 14/2–23 (1586); Surrey History Centre, LM/1039/1–4. 29 Nottinghamshire Archives, DC/NW/7/7/16. A list of the jury empanelled to hear these cases is in ibid., DC/NW/7/7/15. 30 Wallace Notestein, Francis Helen Relf and Hartley Simpson (eds), Commons Debates 1621 (7 vols, New Haven, 1935), II, p. 120. 31 Ibid., II, pp. 119–20. 32 Ibid., VII, pp. 176–9. 33 BL, Add. 18,597, Diary of Sir Walter Earle, fo. 107v, 1 April 1624; Northamptonshire RO, FH/N/C/0050, Diary of John Pym, fo. 81v, 27 April 1628; ibid., fo. 82, 28 April 1624; Staffordshire RO, MS D661/11/1/2, fo. 107v, Diary of Richard Dyott, 28 April 1624. 34 Procs 1626, III, pp. 331, 333, 335, 336, 25 May 1626. 35 Robert C. Johnson, Maija Jansson Cole, Mary Frear Keeler and William B. Bidwell (eds), Commons Debates 1628 and Lords Proceedings 1628 (6 vols, New Haven, 1977–83), IV, p. 243, 11 June 1628. 36 Ibid., IV, pp. 243, 244, 258, 270, 271, 272, 275. 37 Ibid., II, pp. 49, 50. 38 APC 1617–18, p. 21, 21 January 1618. 39 APC 1600–1601, pp. 176–7. 40 APC 1615–1616, pp. 380–1. 41 APC 1616–1617, p. 156. 42 5 Elizabeth I cap. 5, Acte towching certayne politique constitutions made for the maintenance of the navye. In contrast a Scottish act of Parliament passed in 1594 did not mention fish at all only because of the scarcity of ‘all kind of butcher meat’. K.M. Brown, Gillian H. MacIntosh, Alastair J. Mann, Pamela E. Ritchie and Roland J. Tanner (eds), Records 40

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 40

26/02/2020 08:57

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’

43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57

58 59 60 61 62

63

of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707 (St Andrews, 2007–16), 1594/4/ 42. G.R. Elton, ‘Piscatorial politics in the early parliaments of Elizabeth I’, in N.  McKendrick and R.B. Outhwaite (eds), Business Life and Public Policy: Essays in Honour of D.C. Coleman (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 1–20; D.M. Dean, ‘Parliament, Privy Council and local politics in Elizabethan England’, Albion, 22 (1990), 39–64; R.C.L. Sgroi, ‘Piscatorial politics revisited: the language of economic debate and the evolution of fishing policy in Elizabethan England’, Albion, 35:1 (2003), 1–24; Robert Tittler, ‘The English fishing industry in the sixteenth century: the case of Great Yarmouth’, Albion, 9 (1977), 40–60. APC 1617–1618, pp. 42–3. CSPV, no. 466, 13 February 1626. Diary of Richard Dyott, fo. 107v. Diary of John Pym, fo. 81v. Robert Bolton, A Three-fold Treatise (1634), p. 47 (third pagination). On this matter in general see Ryrie, ‘Fasting’, passim. Henry Scudder, The Christian Daily Walke in Securitie and Peace (4th edition, 1631), pp. 68–9. William Gouge, The Whole-armor of God (1619), p. 456. Henry Burton, A Tryall of Private Devotions. Or a Diall for the Hours of Prayer (1628), Preface, unpag. Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Genesin & Exodum (1633), Commentary of Exodus, ch. 22, p. 437. Daniel Featley, Ancilla Pietatas: Or, a Hand-Maid to Private Devotion (1626), pp. 542–3. Quoted in Ryrie, ‘Fasting’, p. 107. John Mayo, A Sermon of fasting, and of Lent (1609), p. 34. John Browning, Concerning publike-prayer and the Fast of the Church (1636), pp. 169, 172–3. Henry Mason, Christian Humiliation, or The Christians Fast (1625), p. 148. For further examples on differing attitudes towards fasting see Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement c.1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 60–74. Preface and Rules to know the Movable Feasts, unpag. See also David Cressy, ‘The Protestant calendar and the vocabulary of celebration in early modern England’, JBS, 29:1 (1990), 47. LPL, Laud Miscellany MS 943, p. 221. CSPD 1619–1623, p. 225. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid. However, in the 1620s a petition to Parliament from one butcher, John Hughes, claimed that the mayors personally profited from these licences, openly selling them to the highest bidder. Despite his naming names and the actual amounts pocketed by various lord mayors (Sir Francis Jones was alleged to have made £420 from six butchers’ licences and a further £10 apiece from poulterers), no trace of the petition appears in the records of the 1621 or 1624 Parliament. Bodl., MS Rawl. D. 1009, fos 66–9. W.H. Overall and H.C. Overall (eds), Analytical Index to the Series of Records 41

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 41

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94 95

known as the Remembrancia, 1579–1664 (London, 1878), I, pp. 88, 468, 580, 613, 625, 642; II, pp. 146, 148, 226; IV, p. 19. Ibid., I, p. 580. TNA, C265/5, 1621–5. Quotation from Towerward. I am grateful to Paul Hunneyball for his assistance with these documents. APC 1630, pp. 111–12. The same letter was also sent to the Sheriffs and JPs of Westminster, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey. S.R. Gardiner (ed.), Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission (Camden Society, new series, XXXIX, 1886), p. 180. Ibid., p. 179. HMC Fifth Report, Pt 1, p. 352. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 170. R. Latham and W. Matthews (eds), The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Berkeley, 1970), II, p. 37. Ibid., pp. 44–5. Sheffield City Archives, BFM/2/289. Quoted in Sgroi, ‘Piscatorial politics revisited’, p. 9. Ibid., pp. 9–10, n. 34. Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth Century London (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 143–4, 406–7. APC 1598–1599, p. 580. Essex RO, Maldon Court Papers, D/B3/3/397/1(b). HMC Fifth Report Pt 1, p. 368. For other examples of the Vice Chancellor licensing butchers and innholders, see Bodl., Rawl. MS C 421, fos 78–98. APC 1597–1598, p. 366, 19 March 1598. APC 1617–1618, p. 56. CUL, Buxton Papers, 96/1. Somerset Heritage Centre, D/P/cur.n/2/2/1. Cornwall RO, Egloskerry Parish Register, P 53/1/1. Essex RO, Petre Family, D/DP F159. CUL, Buxton Papers, 96/1. LMA, Register St Mary Newington, Southwark, P92/MRY/3. Charles Partridge, ‘Licences to eat flesh in Lent, 1614–1636’, Notes and Queries, 183:3, 20 March 1948, p. 117. KHLC, MS p187/28/1. Cambridgeshire Archives, P31/1/1, June 1621. Roger Fenton, A Sermon preached at St Mary Spittle on Easter Tuesday 1613 (1616), p. 73. See also Richard Younge, The Pastors Advocate (1651), p. 12: ‘Yea a Player, Fidler, or Dauncer is better maintained than a Preacher. And as if the better part were least to be cared for, men could be content, it need were, to bestow more upon a licence to eat flesh in Lent, then upon their souls all year.’ For a letter enquiring about the cost of a licence see Henry Ley to George Peel, 14 May 1663, Lancashire Archives, DDKE/9/15/32. 5 Eliz. I, cap. 5. Longleat House, DE/Box VIII, 114. 5 Eliz. I, cap. 5 cl. 13.

42

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 42

26/02/2020 08:57

‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’ 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

Essex RO, Petre Family, D/DP F159. GA, D547a/F6. The Keep, DAN/1/2/9. CSPD 1660–1661, p. 509, 11 February 1660. Longleat House, Seymour Papers, SE/vol. IV, 32. TNA, SP 17/E/21; KHLC, U269/Q20. William Camden, Annales of Princess Elizabeth (1635), pp. 7–8. See also Sgroi, ‘Piscatorial politics revisited’, p. 6, n.17. S.T. Bindoff (ed.), The History of Parliament: House of Commons 1509–1558 (3 vols, London, 1982), III, ‘Warner, Sir Edward’. McClure, Chamberlain Letters, II, p. 217. APC 1615–1616, p. 409. For example, Privy Council to the Lord Mayor of London, 28 January 1618. APC 1617–1618, pp. 22–3. These orders were repeated in other years. APC 1600–1601, p. 199. APC 1621–1622, pp. 166–7. XCVI sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes (1629), p. 231. For an example of a letter asking for a licence because of gout and other infirmities ‘w[hi]ch cannot book fishe’ see Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Parker Correspondence, MS 114A, p. 147, Henry Neville, Earl of Westmorland, to Matthew Parker. John Cordy Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, III (London, 1974), pp. 57–8. Ibid., II, p. 50. 7 James I. Ibid., I, p. 90. Ibid. I, p. 91. The Keep, RYE/7/47/45/9, 19 March 1591. George Hakewill, An Apologie of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World (1627), p. 12. Hartley, Procs., I, p. 107. Maurice Beresford, ‘The common informer, the penal statutes and economic regulation’, EcHR, 10:2 (1957), 221–38. John Taylor, Jack a Lent (1620), sig. C2. William Shakespeare, The History of Henry IV, Part II, II.4.

43

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 43

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Chapter 3

The Lord Admiral, the Parliament-men and the narrow seas, 1625–271 Thomas Cogswell

I

n May 1627, the Duke of Buckingham seemed every inch a warlord. Statues of celebrated generals like Prince Maurice of Orange and Henri IV adorned his desk, and he paraded around in a hat with a large feather and a pair of leather belts across his chest. As he prepared to relieve the hard-pressed Huguenots of La Rochelle, he dazzled many Londoners, some of whom aped his garb. Yet notwithstanding his public confidence, Buckingham was plagued with doubts. To the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Allen Apsley, he confessed that what most worried him was neither weather conditions in the Bay of Biscay nor French defences there. Instead it was that ‘amongst the many great businesses now under your Care there is none more particularly concernes the kings service and the welfare of his Majesties subiects and domynions and my honor then the ordinary guard of the narrow seas [i.e., the English Channel and the North Sea]’. He added that ‘if it should be at this time neglected when the greate fleete is gone, I foresee a great Clamour … that will ensue’. Therefore, he needed Apsley’s assistance, because ‘this service at this time so much importeinge makes me presse this farre on you’.2 Grandees like Buckingham could safely ignore most public clamour. Parliamentary clamour, however, was another matter, especially after the Spanish war had begun in 1625. Because he needed generous funding, he had to respond to any clamour in the Lower House. We can deduce connections between hostile parliamentary commentary and major policy changes. Late in 1625, for example, Charles I decided to enforce the penal laws. This decision, although nearly rupturing the Anglo-French alliance, brought the regime into line with Parliament. We also can see similar connections by carefully examining two volumes of the Lord Admiral’s detailed naval warrant books and his reaction to parliamentary attacks on his care of the narrow seas. Scholars have long known about BL, Add. MSS 37,816–7, but most have left this dense collection of orders about victualling and appointments to 44

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 44

26/02/2020 08:57

The Lord Admiral and the narrow seas

naval specialists. Yet these warrant books merit close study. This material affords us a unique vantage point on the 1626 Parliament, from which we can watch the Lord Admiral respond to a growing furore over his administration of the navy. Furthermore, these volumes reflect Buckingham’s personality and highlight the strategic dilemma at the heart of his war effort. We rightly tend to think of the duke as the classic ‘court mushroom’, an arriviste who used his intimate relationship with James I and Charles I to gather titles, land, offices and money for himself, his family and his clients. Yet here, thanks to the diligence of Edward Nicholas, his naval secretary, we also can see, and sometimes even hear, him as a dutiful administrator. In October 1626, for example, when Lord Willoughby’s expedition staggered back to England having accomplished nothing, Buckingham consoled him: ‘I am sorry for the fleetes disaster but it is god doinge and we may not repine at it.’ Likewise, earlier in June, he ordered two Dutch merchantmen to be arrested; he suspected them of carrying not contraband but ‘some pictures or carved stones brought for me’. Finally, this study provides new details about Buckingham’s dogged pursuit for parliamentary approval.3 His efforts ultimately failed, partly due to bad luck and partly to the strategic tensions. He began the war with two major failures, first with the Mansfelt and then the Cadiz expeditions. To recover his lost acclaim, he needed a victory overseas. However, to attempt such a triumph, he had to concentrate his naval assets on a foreign expedition, which necessarily left maritime shipping and coastal communities vulnerable and produced a storm in Parliament. This chapter connects parliamentary complaints about the care of the narrow seas with Buckingham’s tactical responses, and reveals the fundamental conundrum he never really resolved. His resources allowed him either to defend coastal shipping and towns or to launch another foreign expedition. But it was difficult for him to do both well. Although the chapter discusses the period before and after the 1626 Parliament, it focuses on the first half of 1626 when he struggled to silence his critics by repositioning the fleet and when he wrestled with possibly causing a clamour if he neglected the narrow seas ‘when the greate fleete is gone’. In September 1625, two dozen Dunkirker warships slowly slipped out of harbour and rode at anchor, protected by the extensive sandbars in front of Dunkirk. Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador in The Hague, was not alarmed: ‘there is no danger as long as the Dunkerke fleet is wayted on by a greater number’ of blockading ships. His confident assessment glossed over some disturbing details. While this might seem a rerun of a scene a quarter century earlier, there were differences. In the intervening years, the Spanish had steadily developed the artificial port at Dunkirk, which was almost immediately astride major Anglo-Dutch shipping lanes. In 1588, the harbour entrance was so narrow that a Dutch squadron had easily blocked the Duke of Parma from deploying his warships to assist the Armada. Yet 45

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 45

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

the completion of several forts in 1622 covering the offshore anchorage made it easier for a flotilla to gather there. The Spaniards, Carleton noted, could ‘bring out a whole fleete under favor of it to sett sayle all at once, whereas heretofore they could come out but by couples or threes or fower at the most’. They had also replaced galleys, their wonder weapon in the 1590s, with frigates, a new class of fast, shallow-draught warship ideally suited for the North Sea’s numerous shoals. In 1621, after the Dutch resumed their war with the Habsburgs, they discovered the lethality of these commerce raiders, which promptly decimated Dutch fishing fleets. The Flemish frigates concerned Buckingham enough that he sent five English vessels to join the Dutch blockade of the port. Meanwhile, Flemish expectations steadily rose, and in October, when Spinola, the celebrated commander of the army of Flanders, and Archduchess Isabella, the ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, came to inspect the ships, they lingered, ‘as if … to see a sea fight’.4 While Spinola and Isabella watched the flotilla, Buckingham had his eyes fixed much further afield. He wanted to open his own awaited war against the Habsburgs with a dramatic coup d’éclat. King James’s dogged pursuit of peace was buried with him in April 1625, leaving the way for Buckingham’s attack on the House of Austria. After considering a possible strike in the Mediterranean or in the West Indies, he finally decided to send a massive Anglo-Dutch flotilla to attack Spain and intercept the plate fleet. Over the summer of 1625, as much of the fleet and some eighty merchantmen prepared in Plymouth, Buckingham left the home waters weakly defended. The  numbers of ships available for home defence dwindled further after James I offered France a royal warship and seven merchantmen to help suppress the revolt of the Duc de Soubise, a Huguenot noble whose actions the French Protestant community had initially denounced. Yet, as the conflict soon became an open Huguenot revolt, James’s offer became much more controversial, and Buckingham repeatedly delayed the transfer until July when Louis XIII apparently agreed to a Huguenot peace.5 The risk of sending the greater part of the fleet overseas seemed minimal. Admittedly Moroccan pirates were an issue for unlucky merchantmen, particularly in the West Country and Ireland. In addition, the Dutch had reminded Buckingham of the danger that Dunkirk posed. At the end of Elizabeth’s long war against Spain, Philip III had based some galleys in Flemish ports, which decimated English shipping. Late in 1601, Thomas Damnet, a burgess from Great Yarmouth, told the Commons that in his long experience ‘all the warres of her Majestie are warres offensive’. Nevertheless ‘seacostemen’ have regularly been ‘spoyled, robbed, beaten, wounded, themselves taken, used with suche extreame torture, racked, carried awaye, ymprisoned, ransomed, fyned and some executed’. According to Damnet, recent losses exceeded all the damage the French had inflicted since 1485, and all of it had come from ‘two base townes’ in the Spanish Netherlands­ – ­Ostend and Dunkirk. The situation was so bad that Damnet insisted coastal residents would ‘have given 46

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 46

26/02/2020 08:57

The Lord Admiral and the narrow seas

the Queene an hundred subsedies that they [the Dunkirkers] had bene longe since suppressed’. Among these seconding him, one noted that ‘there is no man but understandeth the greefe, and noe man which readilye knoweth a remedye’. In response, the regime ordered its own galleys. But the Peace of London in 1604 ended the naval arms race.6 By March 1625, war clouds were gathering over England, and in the summer, between preparing the fleet for sea, organising James’s burial, welcoming the new Queen and organising a new administration, Buckingham did not pay much attention to the Parliament assembling in June 1625. It had not seemed necessary, given that the previous Parliament had lionised Buckingham for ending the Anglo-Spanish marriage talks. Consequently, he naturally assumed that Parliament would continue to support him. The outbreak of the plague left no one in a chatty mood during the Westminster session. But Parliament was noticeably tightfisted; it approved only two subsidies and voted Tonnage and Poundage merely for a year, not for the entire reign as had been customary. Eager to persuade the House to be more generous, Charles summoned a second session at Oxford in August, and there uneasiness with Buckingham’s administration became obvious. Some questioned his competence. On 5 August Sir Edward Coke announced that ‘a kingdom can never be well governed where unskillful and unfitting men are placed in great offices’ because ‘if they are inexperienced and unskillful themselves, they cannot execute them or make choice of fit men’. More pointedly, Coke observed that the post of Admiral, ‘the greatest office of trust about the king’, required ‘a man of great experience and judgment (which he cannot attain unto in a few years)’. He volunteered that if he went to sea, ‘he had rather go with a man that had been once on the seas and able to guide and manage a ship or fleet than with him that had been 10 times at the haven’. Buckingham obviously was in the latter category. Sir John Coke, a naval commissioner, sought to soothe concerns by insisting that ‘the King’s navy is the most potent navy in Christendom’, an accomplishment that ‘is all due to my Lord Admiral’. On 9 August ‘Buckingham himself tried to dispel anxieties by proclaiming ‘he did assuredly believe his ability and will to serve the King and the state’ and by urging the Commons to ‘judge by the event’.7 The mood quickly darkened. On 10 August Sir Robert Phelips underscored Buckingham’s lack of counsel by calling for Sir Robert Mansell to testify about Buckingham’s infrequent meetings with the Council of War, and, while somewhat coy, Mansell did offer that Buckingham had not attended the Council since February 1625. Meanwhile serious complaints emerged. Between the Catholic quasi-toleration, the danger to La Rochelle and ‘the interruption of the fishing trade … by pirates’, Mr Delbridge (Barnstaple) thought his colleagues should return home ‘with sack and ashes’. More ominously, Henry Rolle, a prominent London attorney who sat for Truro, wondered if the navy could possibly do any good against Spain when it ‘cannot keep our own coast from being infected’ by pirates.8 The next day, 47

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 47

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

the Sallee rovers and the Dunkirkers made their appearance. ‘The wrongs by the Dunkirke[r]s’ prompted John Lister (Hull) to urge the House to consider ‘the danger and means of safety of all the ports’. The Commons then heard a Bristol merchant’s letter reporting the loss of fifty ships and ten thousand men in the two months and explaining ‘scarce any dare put to sea, to go from port to port’. Muslim freebooters were part of the problem. So too were those who ‘gave themselves out to be Dunkirkers’. As Sir John Eliot (Newport) recalled, the debate centred on the fact that ‘The Turks were still roving in the west; the Dunkirks in the east; the cries came out of all parts, their losses great, their fears exceeding all, that no merchant dared venture on the seas’.9 The criticism soon focused on Buckingham. Sir Francis Seymour (Wiltshire) moved that since ‘the Lord Admiral has the care of these things’, he was responsible. To relieve anxieties, Sir Humphry Mildmay, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, moved that there be ‘a navy appointed to secure our coasts at home as soon as this great fleet’ sailed, and Sir John Coke announced that Buckingham had just ordered ten warships ‘to scour the Channel’.10 Yet Charles, displeased by the criticism, dissolved the Parliament. Buckingham’s confident assurance that the Parliament-men should judge by results would haunt him, but first he reacted to the criticism. After the Cadiz expedition put to sea, the duke hurried to an anti-Habsburg conference in The Hague where Charles I instructed him to stress ‘the great prejudice and scorne which his Majesty and the state do suffer by the shipping of Flanders’. Between unauthorised attacks by individual Dunkirkers and Spanish plans to erect a new Admiralty in Dunkirk to dominate the North Sea, Charles thought there was only one possible response; before the Spaniards could initiate ‘their designe of Admiralty’, the English and the Dutch had to make ‘some vigorous attempt by land’, thus ‘winning the townes of Dunkirk, Ostend and Mardyke on the coast’.11 Before he left for the Netherlands, a great storm underscored the need for action against Dunkirk by sinking or disabling the Anglo-Dutch blockading squadron. In the confusion, two dozen Dunkirkers sailed up the North Sea, devastating Anglo-Dutch fishermen and merchants. Open war between the Stuarts and the Habsburgs soon followed, vaulting the Dunkirkers to the head of any threat assessment list. More bad news followed. The Huguenot peace suddenly collapsed, and the French used the English loan ships to defeat the Huguenot flotilla. Worse still, the descent on Cadiz proved a national embarrassment, and many of the surviving vessels found refuge in south-western Ireland, where they remained effectively out of service for several months. In the wake of these debacles, Buckingham knew he would soon face querulous Parliament-men. The duke appreciated the political danger of the Dunkirkers, and he spoke about them to Frederick Henry, the Prince of Orange. Buckingham wanted to discuss ‘how to unnest the Spaniards of their Ports of flanders’ from which ‘they dayly fly abroad and made prey in these Seas of our poor fishers 48

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 48

26/02/2020 08:57

The Lord Admiral and the narrow seas

and marchants’. His preferred option was characteristically ambitious­ – ­an immediate attack on Dunkirk by a joint Anglo-Dutch army because, ‘the Dunkerkers fleet being then gon abroad’, the town itself was ‘more disfurnished both of men and victuals’. When the prince politely rejected the idea, Buckingham presented ‘a better course’ for ‘the guard of these narrow seas’, proposing that the English would maintain ‘a fleet to lye upon the entrance of the Sleeve toward the Spanish Seas’, while the Dutch patrolled the North Sea. Unfortunately, he dampened any co-operative spirit by telling the prince about ‘the Negligence of their sea Captaines and ill managing of their shipps’.12 These reverses and the imminent parliamentary opening sent the duke into high gear. In late 1625, he ordered three armed merchantmen to ‘guard the coast against the Dunkerkers’. In mid-January he commanded warships ‘to ply upp and downe about Yarmouth to secure those partes from the depradations of the Dunkerkers who frequent that coast’. At the same time, driven by ‘many petitions for the release of divers of his Maiesties subiects’, he had Sir John Hippesley in Dover begin quietly exploring possible prisoner exchanges with Brussels.13 He complained to Sir Henry Palmer, the Vice Admiral guarding the mouth of the Thames, that ‘there is daily advertisement given of English and Scots ships taken by the Enemy between Yarmouth and the Downes with sight of the shoare’, and he reiterated orders ‘to send out shipps to scoure the narrow seas and preserve his Maiesties Subiects from being made a prey to the Enemy’. Unfortunately because ‘there are none that have done service in that kinde, nor used any diligence to preserve his Majestie and their Country from damage and dishonor’ and because there was only ‘remissnes and slothe of those who command’, he ordered Palmer, ‘as you tender the honor and good of his Majesties service’, to see that all available ships ‘gow forthright to sea and to spread themselves in such good order as that they may by force or by feare chase away’ the Dunkirkers. Above all else, it was essential that Palmer’s ships were not ‘lyinge still and doing nothinge’. To find the enemy, Palmer had only to ask the merchant captains ‘where the Dunkerkers nowe frequent or shall haunt’. The following day, Buckingham commanded Palmer to ‘lye about Dunkerke’ and then ‘way lay them as they cannot escape’, adding that he relied on Palmer’s ‘Care and vigilancy in these stirring tymes’.14 On 9 February 1626, after learning that ‘the shipps at Harwich lye still in harbor and suffer the Dunkerkers to commit spoyle’, Buckingham told Palmer that ‘it seems verie strange to me that in all the time of the imployment of the shippes under your charge there have bin nothing effected by them on the enemy’. Therefore ‘I pray you quicken and awaken them and let them understand that I expect a better accounte from them’. For good measure, he refused a requested shore leave since ‘I cannot possible [sic] in these stirring times dispense with your absence because I cannot with confidence rely on the Care of any other in your place’. In the circumstances, 49

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 49

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

the duke was delighted that Palmer soon captured a Dunkirker, albeit a small one of only forty tons.15 If the duke had concentrated all available ships on the southern and eastern coasts, he might have restored some confidence in his administration. But he could not do so. First, the ships returning from Cadiz all badly needed resupply, which would take months to arrange. In April 1626, for instance, the Constant Reformation was still in Kinsale waiting for masts, sails and additional seamen. Second, over the winter of 1625–26, La Rochelle, not Dunkirk, was atop the duke’s priorities. He was being disingenuous when he told Frederick Henry of plans for an English fleet in the western end of the Channel. That flotilla was actually to assist the Huguenots. In November while still in The Hague, after learning of the Dunkirkers’ plan to attack English shipping near Bordeaux, he ordered Palmer’s ships to join with another group guarding the North Sea ‘to the end, that the two fleets ioyning together upon the Downs, they may without any long stay there, expressly goe to Rochell’. Sir John Pennington commanded the operation, and in January 1626 Buckingham directed him to resupply the small Huguenot flotilla, then in Cornwall, because ‘I intend myself to convoye them, and to see them safe (God willing) into Rochel’. This operation was clearly designed to encourage Louis XIII to make peace with his Protestant subjects, which he did in February. Unfortunately for the duke, since the treaty was not ratified until weeks later, he found himself at the opening uncertain if England was at war or peace with France.16 Needless to say, to prepare for a possible expedition to La Rochelle, he had to shift down available ships to Plymouth and to allow the Dunkirkers their choice of English shipping. Strategically, Buckingham’s decisions make sense. Politically, however, they were a recipe for chaos in the Commons, and, because no one hitherto has noticed the extensive commentary on Buckingham’s care of the narrow seas, it is worth considering the highlights of the Commons’ complaints here. On 16 February 1626, a week after the opening, Mr Whitby (Chester) reported from the committee investigating ‘the restraint of all trading by sea’ that ‘the power of the Dunkirkers [was] so great that they do not only rob and take our ships at sea but adventure to the ports to the great terror and loss of the inhabitants’. The situation was so bad that ‘if the Dunkirkers be let alone 2- months later we shall have no ships left in the kingdom’. Sir Peter Riddell (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) urged his colleagues to ‘look up what was done in this case against the Dunkirkers of Q. Elizabeth’, whilst Edward Kirton (Marlborough) bitterly noted that at Oxford there had been ‘no speech but of our invincible navy’, but now ‘he is sure it gives no content to be thus managed’.17 The criticism intensified, and on 24 February Sir Robert Mansell (Lostwithiel), a prominent critic of Buckingham in 1625, renewed his campaign by lamenting ‘the shameful harms done us by one town of our 50

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 50

26/02/2020 08:57

The Lord Admiral and the narrow seas

enemies’ and encouraging more reticent members to join him. Sir John Evelyn (Wilton) highlighted ‘the grievances of the Dunkirkers’ who had twenty-six ships prowling the coast with ‘no course taken’ against them. Sir George More (Surrey) reported ‘we hear of the complaint frequently: the enemy on our coast’. The same threat made Mr Coryton (Cornwall) propose that the House ‘consider the harm done in the Narrow Seas’ and Sir Thomas Hoby (Ripon) demand that the regime ‘secure the coast’. Edward Bysshe (Bletchingley) and Mr Haynes (Exeter) agreed, and Sir Thomas Grantham (Lincoln) added they should ‘petition the King for the defence of the Narrow Seas’.18 The following day, Sir John Eliot (St Germains) called for a discussion of ‘the guard of the coast and kingdom’, a motion widely supported. Sir Walter Erle (Lyme Regis) denounced ‘the not safeguarding of the Narrow Seas’; Peter Riddell (Newcastle) spoke of ‘great interruption in the Newcastle trade’; and Christopher Brooke (York) proposed they ‘petition the King that his ships may defend us’. To counter ‘the Dunkirk[er] and the Spaniard’, Roger Mathew (Dartmouth) called for better officers to replace those ‘that cannot stand upon their feet at sea’. Sir Dudley Digges (Tewkesbury) noted ‘our ships are not upon our coast’ and asked details on ‘what strength we have at sea’.19 These complaints soon formed a critical tidal wave on 27 and 28 February. Sir Thomas Hoby (Ripon) announced that ‘we cannot have commerce from port to port’. Thomas Grosvenor (Cheshire) maintained that the Dunkirkers ‘stay our ships, so hinder our trade, spoil and take our ships; they come to our doors; they threaten an invasion and utter subversion’. Likewise, Giles Greene (Weymouth and Melcombe Regis) pointed to ‘the decay of trade wherein the discontent of our merchants; mariners, farmers, clothiers and spinsters, etc do suffer’. Thanks to the Dunkirkers, Dover had lost three ships, Newcastle had to cope with four hundred ships which ‘dare not venture to sea’, and in Yorkshire thirty thousand workers were unemployed. In addition, Sir Henry Anderson (Newcastle) reported that Flemish jails held some 2500 English and Scottish prisoners, whose ‘allowance [was] very poor and charge great’. The contrast with the situation a quarter century earlier appalled some. ‘Dare an enemy’, Mr Delbridge (Barnstaple) asked, ‘come near our coast in the time of Queen Elizabeth?’ Nathaniel Tomkins (Christchurch) recalled that ‘in Queen Elizabeth’s time the majesty of England did walk in the seas, all ships vailed the bonnet [i.e. dipped their flags]’ to English warships. Consequently, Samuel Turner (Shaftesbury) lamented ‘we that in former times were fearful are now a prey’.20 Parliament-men advanced various explanations. Sir John Strangways (Weymouth and Melcombe Regis) blamed the loan ships: ‘the ships that we should have stayed at home for our defense … went to Rochelle’. More broadly, Mr Kirton attributed ‘the sending away our ships and leaving the coast undefended’ to the Cadiz expedition and the loan ships. Hence, Sir Henry Whitehead (Winchester) identified ‘the want of our coasts defended at 51

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 51

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

sea and land’, and Mr Greene complained about the ‘want of ships to defend the coast’. Robert Bateman (London) called for ‘the defense of the rivers’, while John Lowther (Westmorland) was anxious only about ‘the evil of the river of Trent’. Others blamed the navy’s large and comparatively immobile warships. They were, Christopher Herris (Harwich) insisted, ‘not fit for those places, the vessels that infest us are quick of sail’. Another member opined: ‘we must have ships made fit to sail and fight’. The will, not the ability, to fight concerned Sir Henry Anderson (Newcastle), who cited a recent incident when two naval vessels causally watched as ‘a ship [was] taken at Newcastle’. Such troubles naturally followed, Mr Wilde maintained, ‘where great things are managed by single counsel or private respects’, and Mr. Coryton fingered ‘many unexperienced men being employed with command’.21 Buckingham had defenders. Sir Richard Weston, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, challenged the notion that ‘our ships were ill provided’, and Sir Robert Harley, Secretary Conway’s son-in-law, observed that ‘we have not lost either sea, or land, or money, or honor, but we suffer a diminution’. Nevertheless, these two could not stop Sir John Eliot from asking ‘whether the Council of War did meet­ – ­when, how often, whether they did resolve, and what, and whether it was put in execution’.22 The next day began badly for the regime. Mansell returned to his old theme­ – ­‘the Dunkirkers molest our coast’­ – ­and attacked Secretary Coke, whose plan for defending the home waters was ‘rather an invitation to an enemy’ than a deterrent.23 No one else that day followed Mansell. But they did on 6 March. Hoby argued ‘the want of ships to keep the Narrow Seas is the cause that the Dunkirkers do infest us’. After Coke corrected him, noting the Council had ordered ‘a certain number of ships for keeping of the Narrow Seas’, Eliot retorted that this plan had not been implemented, and ‘by reason of the want of those ships the country sustained great loss’. Sir Humphry May, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, then maintained that the lack of money, not skill, had sabotaged the plans, an idea Sir John Strangways rejected, asking ‘if for want of money the coasts were not secured, what became of the money we gave for that end?’24 The debate then shifted to ships. The Parliament-men generally assumed the loan ships had weakened coastal defence. Richard Spencer (Northamptonshire) argued that ‘the ships were sent against Rochelle … should have been sent to the Western parts’, and Sir Richard Buller (Saltash) wondered ‘whether the ships which should have defended the coast were not sent to Rochelle’. When William Cage (Ipswich) insisted that ‘there is no fleet at sea to defend the coasts’, Sir John Hippesley, the Lieutenant of Dover Castle, corrected him: ‘there is a fleet there’. But John Pringle (Dover) insisted that ‘the great ships … riding in the Downs not fit to keep the coasts’, while Sir Nathaniel Rich asked ‘what number of our ships ride now in the Narrow Seas, whether they are serviceable or not, and how commanded’. This question made Giles Greene (Weymouth and Melcombe Regis) ‘inquire 52

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 52

26/02/2020 08:57

The Lord Admiral and the narrow seas

whether there have been a fleet heretofore in the Narrow Seas’. After Sir Walter Erle then recalled Secretary Coke’s confident statement at Oxford that ‘6 ships were already sent to guard the coast’ and after Robert Bateman (London) lamented ‘our merchants cannot pass’, the Commons resolved that ‘the coasts have not been sufficiently guarded nor the seas secured’.25 The government bench scrambled to respond, and on 10 March Sir Richard Weston announced preparation for a new fleet of forty ships. Christopher Wandesford (Richmond) simply observed that ‘to look abroad till we be right at home will be to little purpose’. William Coryton agreed: ‘if we do not take care of things at home, we shall do little good abroad’. The following day, Dr Samuel Turner posed six queries, two of which concerned the narrow seas. The first of these was ‘whether the Lord Duke being Admiral be not the cause of the loss of the King’s regality of the Narrow Seas’, and the second ‘whether the multiplicity of offices upon the Duke and others depending upon him, whereof they were not capable, be not the cause of the evil government of the kingdom’. Buckingham’s impeachment had effectively begun.26 Debates in the following week returned to the Dunkirkers. On 13 March, Erle announced that in Norfolk and Suffolk ‘the inhabitants now so impoverished that shortly they shall not be able to sustain themselves’. Three days later Anderson reported that after five more captures near Newcastle ‘no ships dare stir for fear of the Dunkirkers’. On 18 March Sir Robert Crane (Suffolk) said that at Great Yarmouth three hundred herring ships ‘now dare not go out for fear of the Dunkirks’, and according to William Cage the same situation applied in Ipswich. After Eliot blamed ‘the diminution of our honor and safety’ on ‘the sending away of our ships into foreign parts … which should have been our guards at home’, the House appointed a committee to consider whether ‘unexperienced and unfit officers and commanders by sea and land employed’.27 The same topics loomed large on 20–4 March. ‘The interruption of the merchants’ trade’, Mr Lister (Hull) explained, was due to ‘the want of wafters and convoy for merchants’ ships’. The grim situation, claimed William Walter (Ludgershall), called for ‘men of courage such as will execute their own places … elders, not young men’. Sir Robert Crane found it impossible to remain calm when thirty-two Dunkirkers were ‘upon the coasts, which take away our ships and shoot into our towns and may, if they will, burn them’. Peter Heyman called for a petition, begging the king ‘to secure the coasts’. In response, Secretary Coke defended his patron. Parliamentary turmoil, he insisted, only gave Spinola opportunity to invade, and, after stressing the Dunkirkers’ unprecedented attacks, he ‘wishes us to consider how unjustly these things are laid upon the Lord Admiral’. Sir William Beecher seconded him, emphasising that ‘The shipping of the Dunkirkers [was] at least 6 times more than in Queen Elizabeth’s time’. Few were persuaded. Mansell thought there were ‘more complaints of want in providence, in execution of grievances, in miscarriage of sea business, this parliament than ever since the 53

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 53

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Conquest’. Mr Sherfield agreed: ‘we have lost more within this year and half by the Dunkirkers and Turks than we did in all Queen Elizabeth’s time’. Just as Hannibal had been at the gates of Rome, so too, Christopher Brooke insisted, ‘it is even so now with us, the Dunkirkers coming to our gates and ports’. Not surprisingly, a majority agreed that ‘the Lord Admirall is the cause that the Narrow Seas have not been sufficiently guarded ports’.28 By late March, six weeks after the opening, the Commons had essentially exhausted the debate about the narrow seas and instead focused on other charges against Buckingham. But fury over the Dunkirkers and Buckingham’s incompetence occupied the centre stage on 8 May when the Commons presented the full indictment to the Lords. ‘By a fatal and universal concurrence of complaints from all the sea-bordering part of this kingdom’, Buckingham was responsible for ‘a great interruption and stopping of trade’ and for corsairs who ‘did as it were block up and besiege our ports and river mouths’. The litany of complaints included ‘the prevention of trade which gives life and increase to the wealth of the kingdom’ and ‘the weakening of the naval strength­– ­for while the sea is so kept and open, trade is safely exercised and the naval strength increased; when not, that presently diminishes, the merchant being so discouraged from building ships which they cannot use’. Hence, the Lower House alleged the Lord Admiral ‘neglected the just performance of his said office and duty … in so much that by reason of his neglect and default therein not only the trade and strength of kingdom of England has been during the said time much decayed, but the same seas also have been infested by pirates and enemies, to the loss both of very many ships and goods and of many of the subjects of our sovereign lord the King’.29 Buckingham defended himself on 8 June, but said little about the narrow seas. The Dunkirkers had only evaded the blockade in October 1625 thanks to ‘a sudden storm’, which ‘being the immediate hand of God, could not by any policy of man be prevented’. While he skated over the ships captured by Dunkirkers, he insisted that ‘the loss of the enemy’s part has been as much, if not more, than what has happened unto us’. Their successes were due to their design, ‘fit for flight as for fight and so they pilfer upon our coasts’. To check them, ‘there is already order for the building of some ships which shall be of the like mold, light and quick of sail, to meet the adverse party in their own way’.30 Beyond that, he hurried on to answer graver charges like that of his involvement in James I’s death. Having seen what he said about this tsunami of complaints, let us to turn to see what he did about them. The speed and vehemence of the attack on Buckingham’s care of the narrow seas astonished the duke and his supporters. In his analysis of the 1625 Parliament, Secretary Conway blamed a handful of wreckers for its failure. Some of those­– ­Digges, Mansell and Seymour­– ­were prominent in the 1626 debates. But many were largely unknown figures from coastal towns, men 54

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 54

26/02/2020 08:57

The Lord Admiral and the narrow seas

like Anderson, Bateman, Cage, Delbridge, Greene, Heyman, Lister, Pringle and Wilde. Those without a humanistic education were well advised to sit silently in the Commons.31 Nevertheless, the chaos on home waters in the preceding six months brought these men and others to their feet. Some of their complaints were unfair, given the unprecedented attacks from Dunkirk. Yet no matter how exaggerated or even false, these reports demanded a response from Buckingham who, while angry in private, tried to please in public. On 6 March, for example, he thanked the Commons for their criticism because ‘they have done him that which he accounts a favor, for so Privy to the integrity of his own heart in this that he is most desirous to give all satisfaction to this House’. On the following day came the announcement that the admiral was gathering another fleet, which ‘may assist and secure out our coasts from these catching Dunkirkers’. On 22 March Buckingham defended his ‘care of the seas’. First, he pointed out that a blockade of a lee shore was difficult since it was a ‘danger for them to lie at anchor before Dunkirk’. Although he had money for only four guardships, he had somehow funded twelve of them. Unfortunately, the Dunkirkers ‘are too swift for our ships to follow’. Indeed, ‘our ships not so good for swiftness as theirs, ours being strong (but heavy), theirs light and swift’. But a few Dunkirkers had been captured, and Buckingham had sent these prizes back to sea and ‘built others after their form’. The resulting losses, however, should not be exaggerated; ‘we have not lost the seas’. Indeed ‘we have taken more of their ships than they have of ours’. Finally, the best solution to the Dunkirkers was Parliament, which alone could increase funding. As he explained, ‘the redress must be here’.32 To be sure, his defence sometimes verged on fantasy; did he actually believe that the English had captured many Dunkirkers? Yet here it was best to pay careful attention to Buckingham’s deeds rather than his words, and his deeds as recorded in the warrant book spoke eloquently. Even at the height of his impeachment, the duke remained gracious. Irritated with John Glanville’s criticism in the Oxford session, Buckingham had sent the distinguished lawyer, who was famously prone to seasickness, with the Cadiz expedition as a secretary. But in February, on learning that Glanville, then stranded in Ireland, ‘have not had your health in such measure as I wishe it’, the duke allowed him to return to England since ‘the constitution of your body which it seems agrees not with that ayre’. He was equally receptive to petitions. When merchants petitioned about ships impounded in France, Buckingham ordered the English ambassadors there to intervene in ‘a worke of charitie for the poore men’ which would prevent ‘clamour’. Later, after receiving ‘the fishermen’s petition’ from Great Yarmouth begging for guardships, he ordered Lord Treasurer Marlborough to find money for them. Three days later, he sent two armed merchantmen to ‘waft’ the fishermen, a number he soon increased to six.33 While responsive to reasonable requests, he could be stern with lax 55

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 55

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

­ fficials. In February he asked Sir Francis Howard to explain his behaviour o as Vice Admiral of Kent; and in March, he ordered Luke Fox, the Marshall of the Admiralty Court in York, to set out for Whitehall ‘on sight hereof … all excuses aparte’ in order to answer ‘credible information of many abuses by you … tending to the vexation of his Maesties subiects and my dishonor’. After the Fox case appeared in ‘the Parliament house’ and ‘many several witnesses’ testified against him, Buckingham washed his hands. The charges, he explained to Sir Henry Marten, ‘tend soe far to my dishonor … that I may not permit it to passe with impunity’. His handling of the Fox case illustrated his administrative mantra: ‘as I shalbe ready to encourage all officers under me in their good courses, soe may I not permit the abuses of others to passe without punishment’.34 He was equally stern with negligent commanders. In March, he launched an investigation of Captain Driver of the Bonadventure, who allegedly rescued a Dunkirker from an English privateer. When Driver was slow to co-operate, Buckingham rebuked him, explaining ‘the consequence of such abuses complained off, is of such importance, as that I proposed to have heard it my selfe’. But when pressed by ‘other greater affaires of his Maiestie’, he delegated the case to Sir John Hippesley. To discourage further cowardice, Buckingham told other captains about Driver’s fate that ‘they may looke better to their charge and permit not the shipps and vessels of his Maiesties subjects to be dayly taken even within sight of them as it is informed’. Naturally he was upset to learn from ‘Marchants of good Credit’ that the ships guarding the east coast ‘doe lye still in roade at anchor and not ply upp and downe at Sea for the guard of shipps and the coast, notwithstanding the many stricte commands and instructions I have still from time to time give you’. Likewise, when horrified that a warship patrolling off Calais had refused to save an English merchantman from a Dunkirker, he demanded a full report ‘as I am verie sensible of the preiudice and dishonor that by the carelessness and remisnes which is used doth fall on his Majestie, the State and myself [italics added]’. Plainly parliamentary criticism had stung him. He ordered Palmer to keep a daily journal of his squadron’s actions ‘that I may the better perceive your diligence and in hope to receive a good Accompt thereof from you’.35 Zealous officers, however, could do little against the Dunkirkers without smaller, faster warships. Once his captains began capturing a few Dunkirkers­ – ­although never in the numbers the duke told Parliament­ – ­each capture was an administrative celebration. In February when Captain Button caught a small forty-ton vessel, proudly announcing he was ‘the first Captain that hath boarded a Dunkerker in the narrow seas’, the duke recommended him for an award, and in May, when Lieutenant Young had captured the Redharte of Dunkirk, he gave him £10.36 Dunkirker prizes were invariably refitted for English service. After the capture of the St George, a Flemish ship, Buckingham wanted to send it out against other Dunkirkers, being ‘a fit ship 56

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 56

26/02/2020 08:57

The Lord Admiral and the narrow seas

to be imployed to the Northward, guarding the herring fleets to and from Iceland’. The admiral could retain any English merchantmen, but, because few of them had the speed and agility to catch a frigate, Buckingham used prize ships, which ‘are of better service against the Dunkerkers by reason of theire sayle than any of the Marchants shipps’.37 In April, lest he overlooked any likely vessels, he ordered a survey of all prizes, hoping to identify ones easily ‘rigged and fitted’ and ‘better able to annoy the enemy than any English shippes which nowe are to be had’. Imagine Buckingham’s delight when his agents spotted the Falcon, ‘an excellent sayler’ which was promptly pressed into royal service. Unfortunately its Dutch owners had other ideas, and, after the Dutch ambassador intervened, the duke released it.38 He never found enough light, fast ships. Therefore, in April, fascinated with ‘Bylanders’, small vessels ‘which drawne little water and goeth with both sayle and oares’, the Admiral ordered ‘that there be some vessels made to meete with those of the Enemy’. Captain George Gifford, who had advocated such a building project, was given the task of working with experienced shipwrights to produce six ‘tartanes’. Buckingham had only one requirement: ‘I pray you use all possible expedition.’ We know little about this project, but we can trace the growing number of small fast ships used against Dunkirkers, ketches like the Prosperous and Myniken, the pinnaces the Cork and the Desire, former Dunkirkers, the St Peter, the St George, the St James, the Fortune, the Esperance and the Redhart. Nevertheless, Buckingham wanted more, and in late May he reminded the Naval Commissioners of their earlier promise to prepare ‘five smale vessels to sayle and rowe’.39 Whilst few English merchantmen could overtake a Dunkirker, they could all be better defended, and, to do so, Buckingham began a programme of arming them. What started as a one-off project on 18 January when he ordered cannons for two merchantmen become a general policy, and by midMarch the Ordnance staff at the Tower had armed no fewer than thirty more warships, a number that would steadily grow. At the same time, the Tower staff also began arming privateers. While hard, if not impossible, to control, they could carry the fight to the Spaniards and counterbalance the heavy losses to Dunkirkers. ‘It is held fit’, Buckingham announced, ‘that to encourage all men that will imploy their shipps to weakening and impoverishinge the kinge of Spaine or his subiects’. This order initiated the expansion of English privateers.40 The Parliament-men had also highlighted the plight of English ­prisoners in Flemish jails. Notwithstanding Buckingham’s insistence that the Dunkirkers had suffered just as much as the English had, he conceded that the Dunkirkers had many more prisoners, and their release was hard to arrange. Consequently, he discovered a burning interest in the welfare of the few captive Spaniards and Flemings. In May, anxious about those in Marshalsea Prison who ‘lye in miserable want for lack of reliefe and meanes to buy them victuals’, he used some prize money to assist ‘those poore 57

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 57

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

prisoners’ so that ‘such of his Maiesties subiects as are in prison with the enemy may not be the worse used for the mysery that these without relief are like to (and doe now) suffer’. Later, when an exchange seemed possible, these Marshalsea prisoners became invaluable. He ordered them to be readied for release, adding ‘I pray use the most care that may be for that it is a worke of much pietie and charitie’.41 By June, the numbers involved were so lopsided that the Infanta could afford to be generous, exchanging a Flemish captain and four of his men for forty-five British captives. The duke was delighted­– ­until he realised these five were in the Dover town jail. He warned the keepers against charging ‘unreasonable fees’. He granted that these enemy prisoners ‘are nothinge loved or compassionated here’, but he reminded the jailers that ‘it is the exaction soe farre beyond measure and the proportion used to his Maiesties subiects prisoners in Flanders as that every man exclaimed against the same’. Therefore reasonable fees were ‘so charitable and soe iust a worke’. Given his concern for prisoners, when Nicholas Vanderberg requested reimbursal for the 30,000 guilders he had spent helping English prisoners in Flanders, Buckingham immediately ordered his repayment.42 Above all else, Buckingham focused on checking the Dunkirkers. In late February, with twenty Dunkirkers prowling the Essex coast, he ordered Sir Henry Palmer and Sir Thomas Love to co-ordinate their squadrons to drive them away. A fortnight later, he ordered them to execute a similar manoeuvre. By mid-March his frustration was evident in a letter to Palmer: ‘I shall expecte that they keepe still playing upp and downe at Sea, for I heare thre are many Dunkerkers abroad, and it seems verie strange that in all this time none hath bene mett with by any of the shippes’. He exhorted Palmer to ‘continue your diligence and vigilancy to intercept the shipps of the Enemy’.43 By the end of March Palmer received another testy dispatch after Buckingham heard ‘still dayly and lamentable complaints of the spoyles committed by the Dunkerkers’. Further investigation revealed that Palmer’s reports of scant victuals ‘are only counterfeited and pretended by the Pursers and officers’. Therefore, Palmer had to remain at sea and to ‘finde out, apprehend and in hostile manner to assault spoyle and take any of the Enemyes shippes and bringe the same in for his Maiesties service’. Hence, it was vital for ‘some good shippes to ply those partes where the Dunkerkers frequente and never to come into any roade or harbor, until they shalbe forced by distresse of weather’. Further, Palmer’s captains were to ‘inquire at Sea of all passengers and informe them selves where anie Dunkerkers … frequent’. Finally, in good weather, Palmer’s squadron should ride before Dunkirk itself so ‘that they seeing your number may be deterred from coming forth and doubt that you have some enterprise or designe upon them and soe not dare to to goe a broade’. A week later, reports that ‘the Dunkirkers hover still about the Isle of Wight’ made Buckingham order Palmer ‘for the preservation of his Maiesties honour’ to take his squadron and either ‘sinke the Dunkerke shipps within those partes or free the coast of them’. In late April, when rampant sickness 58

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 58

26/02/2020 08:57

The Lord Admiral and the narrow seas

forced Pennington to move his fleet from Plymouth, Buckingham sent him to Portsmouth­ – ­but only after he had ‘spreade your fleete as to meete with all shippes that passe’.44 If English warships had trouble overtaking Dunkirkers, they could at least convoy, or ‘waft’, merchants and fishermen, and on 14 March, impressed with ‘the fishermen’s petition’ from Great Yarmouth, Buckingham ordered the Naval Commissioners to ‘consider some course howe the petitioners may be satisfied’ and Lord Treasurer Marlborough to find money for waftage. Soon Captain Harris commanding the Hector and Captain Button the Althea were sent to convoy the East Anglian herring fleet to northern Scotland and then to return, cruising off Harwich for Dunkirkers, ‘which nowe frequent the same and doe much dayly spoile’. This apparently mundane mission was so important that the captains ‘may not faile to use all possible care and vigilance as you will answere the contrary at your perill’. Victuals being essential for this assignment, he directed Sir Allen Apsley, the Lieutenant of the Tower, to find them adequate food supplies, ‘this beinge a business of consequence and not to be delayed on any excuse’.45 Soon Buckingham was arranging escorts for the annual cloth fleet across the North Sea, for herring fishermen along the east coast and all the way out to Iceland, and even for the ship carrying supplies to the Constant Reformation in Ireland since ‘it may be dangerous for that shippe to goe hither without a convoy’. ‘I thought good’, he told the Navy Commissioners, ‘to give you notice to thend [the end] that understanding the importance and consequence of the several services … you may with the more Care and expedition hasten the furnishing and fitting of them’. Yet orders sometimes changed abruptly. In early June, anxious to intercept Spanish ships headed up the Channel, the duke took two escort squadrons, one ‘to waft the fyshermen’ and the other ‘to waft the shipps trading from Hull’, and instead set them patrolling between Dunkirk and the Thames with orders to ‘shoote of ordnance day and night to give notice to such other shipps and men of warre as I have appointed … to meete with and apprehend them’.46 Amid these grand designs, Buckingham fussed over details. When the Antelope and the Phoenix required a refit, he sent them to Bristol with orders that ‘noe delay is to be used least the enemy (who hath good intelligence from the parts) take his opportunitie’. When he learned that the George guarding the Thames had run out of ammunition, he promptly sent a new supply. When organising convoy escorts, he was not too busy to listen to a request and appointed a specific captain ‘desired by the northern merchants’. When he and the Earl of Warwick were both eyeing the same ship, he graciously stepped aside and let Warwick hire the Hector. When the Admiralty Court could not reach a judgement about a fisherman whose boat a royal warship had accidently sunk, he unilaterally offered a settlement of £40. When he noticed that the cannons at Deal, Sandown and Walmer needed immediate repairs, he immediately paid the artificers £100 in cash. Amid these details, 59

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 59

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Buckingham never lost sight of what was most important, repeatedly emphasising ‘how important it is to augment rather then diminish the guard in the Narrow Seas’.47 In these actions, it is easy to surmise a connection between parliamentary criticism of the Lord Admiral and Buckingham’s orders. But, in several cases, that connection was crystal clear. When John Harris, for example, was arrested after having been impressed as pilot assisting Palmer, Buckingham ordered his release. ‘Since Parliament time, it is free for the servants and others (imployed by the members of the howse of Commons) to goe and passe without danger of arrests’, the duke told the Naval Commissioners that ‘I cannot conceive why those that are in the king’s service should be in a worse Condition’.48 Much more important for his political future was the speedy return of the loan ships from La Rochelle, a matter of intense parliamentary concern. The French, however, were in no hurry to send them back. On 6 April Buckingham excitedly wrote to Palmer in Portsmouth that the loan ships had just sailed, and he ordered Sir Henry to have four of his best ships to go out and meet them. Once in port, he was to show the French every kindness and above all else he wanted to ‘see all well and quietly performed and ordered, taking care and usinge such discretion and moderation’ with the French. It was vitally important for Palmer to be gracious ‘for the contentment of the French and the best advantage of his Maiesties service’. Unfortunately for the duke, delay followed delay, and only on 6 May did he write to Palmer that ‘I am glad’ the ships were finally back in England, news he eagerly reported to Parliament.49 But it was too late to stop the duke’s impeachment in which the loan ships bulked large. Therefore, he marshalled defence witnesses, chiefly among them Pennington, then commanding a fleet in Plymouth. ‘Upon the question and inquirie made in Parliament’ about the loan ships, he explained, ‘I have thought it verie necessary that you should be here, not only to produce his Maiesties warrants to you in that behalf, but to testifie your knowledge [of] that business’. He was to make ‘your speedy repaire hither’, and he should bring with him ‘all warrants, letters and papers’. Yet Pennington was so indebted to Portsmouth merchants that he could not leave, a fact that had Buckingham scrambling to find ready cash, which he hoped would allow Pennington to ‘settle your businesses there that you may be here by Thursday next and bring with you all warrants and papers concerning the loane of those ships’.50 Two days later Buckingham thought he needed testimonials as well as witnesses. Towards that end, he wrote to Sir Henry Palmer, informing him that ‘it is here pressed in the accusations against me that the lending of the kings ship the Vantguard [sic] was a principall cause of the Overthrowe of the Rochellers fleete for that when she came amongst them she mowed them down like grasse’. For his part, he added ‘I am sure I heard otherwise, that she never shott against them’. Instead the Dutch loan ships had done all the 60

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 60

26/02/2020 08:57

The Lord Admiral and the narrow seas

damage to the Huguenot fleet. ‘I Pray therefore,’ Buckingham continued, ‘gett the generall, Captaines and principall officers of the English shippes to certifie under their hands what spoyle or hurte either the Vantguard or other of the shipps (lent by us to the French) did unto those of Rochell, to thend [sic] that I may shewe the same for satisfaction’, evidence that could form a ‘speedy, true and full relation’.51 The connection with Parliament was again clear in late May when Buckingham requested a full account of all naval expenditures ‘since the dissolution of the treaty with Spayne’, which was precisely the time frame used in Buckingham’s impeachment.52 Forty years ago, Conrad Russell initiated a protracted historiographical controversy in early Stuart history by challenging the received wisdom that ‘Parliament was a power in the State’. Yet Russell’s argument would likely have been more measured, and the ensuing furore much shorter, if he had carefully analysed Buckingham’s naval warrant books. Of the two Houses of Parliament, the Lords, he thought, had some importance: ‘so shrewd a manager of men as Buckingham was more concerned about his critics among the Lords than among the Commons’. Granted the duke wooed various peers to his side in 1625, and he succeeded with the Earl of Pembroke by marrying his daughter to Pembroke’s niece. That much has long been known. In contrast, we have known nothing about the long raft of complaints about the narrow seas; Russell, for example, made exactly one mention of the Dunkirkers.53 Likewise we have known nothing of Buckingham’s repeated and varied efforts to respond to these complaints, nothing about helping prisoners in Dunkirk, nothing about accelerating the return of the loan ships, nothing about his search for smaller warships, nothing about his efforts at organising waftage and, above all, nothing about his determination ‘to augment rather then diminish the guard in the Narrow Seas’. Without question, Buckingham was deeply concerned about the Commons. Pace Russell, the admiral had to be, given the institution’s tight control over taxation. Understandably the duke and his clients sometimes mocked this awkward constitutional arrangement. Later in the decade, Sir Francis Kynaston imagined the king as a ‘blind, lame, impotent’ beggar who requested assistance from a Parliament-man who, before, considering any grant, ‘must know how he became poore, whether by Chance or Unthriftines, how lame whether by Gods Visitation or by playing at foote-ball’.54 This witticism would have made Buckingham laugh­– ­in private. In public, however, he was eager to gain credibility­ – ­and a generous subsidy­ – ­from the Lower House. What makes his efforts in the first half of 1626 so striking is the speed with which the duke shifted his priorities after the dissolution. Afterwards it is possible to find Buckingham talking tough about Dunkirk. In January 1627, for example, he assured the Suffolk Deputy Lieutenants that ‘I shall never be wanting in my Care to preserve (as much as in me lyes) soe shippes 61

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 61

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

and goods of his Maiesties subiects from being made a pray to the enemy’. But such sentiments are hard to find. Gone was the obsession with building and acquiring smaller warships. Much of the burden of wafting fell to the ‘loan ships’ initiated in the summer of 1626, but these were largely armed merchantmen with little hope of overtaking a Dunkirker. Only early in 1628­ – ­significantly on the eve of a new Parliament­– ­did the regime commission the Whelp class of ten fast warships, which were the equal of a Dunkirker. Until then, the Admiral’s attention shifted to other projects after the 1626 dissolution.55 Buckingham’s administrative labours immediately before and during his impeachment were indeed impressive. Nevertheless, Buckingham’s detailed orders moving ships across the map was only intermittently related to operational reality because some commanders regarded his orders as advisory. In April 1627, for instance, Buckingham was dumbfounded to learn that, notwithstanding repeated orders, a Vice Admiral responsible for coastal defence had ‘never bene a shipboard’ for ‘now neere 12 monthes’. Likewise the dispatch of convoy escorts, an operation that seems so straightforward from the Naval Warrant Books, was in practice a lengthy operation in which fishermen and merchants bitterly complained about tardy and sparsely supplied guardships.56 Consequently, Buckingham’s energy in directing the navy in the first half of 1626 was exemplary, while the execution of his orders sometimes left much to be desired. This fact partly explains why the duke’s energetic actions did not appreciably change the situation in the narrow seas. So does the duke’s strategic dilemma. If he had concentrated his naval assets in coastal waters, he might have saved some merchantmen and herring buses and soothed some Parliamentmen. But stronger coastal defence could not win the war. To do that, Buckingham needed to send most of the available royal warships hundreds of miles away. Unfortunately, that would have necessarily diverted resources away from home waters and let the Dunkirkers take their pick of British shipping. This is effectively what happened after the 1626 dissolution. In July, after observing that ‘it hath bene the auncient use when the Lord Admirall goeth to sea in a Royal Fleete, he should carry the standard of England and have flagges and Pendants for his shippe of silke’, Buckingham ordered massive silk flags to be prepared and sent aboard the Triumph, his command ship in a new expedition. But where should it go? On 3 June, he told the Council of War that against the Spaniards, who had possibly two hundred ships and forty thousand men poised to invade England, he had six royal warships and twenty-four merchant-men being outfitted in Portsmouth. Then he asked the vital strategic question, ‘whether the said Shipps might bee more advantageously imployed for his Maiesties service in defending the Coasts of his dominions, or in some attempt by way of diversion in offending the king of Spaine in his owne territories’. The answer soon emerged: Buckingham would do both. On 1 July the Council of War ordered the fleet in Portsmouth 62

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 62

26/02/2020 08:57

The Lord Admiral and the narrow seas

to be dispatched to Spain while a second fleet handled ‘the guarding of the Narrow Seas and securing the Coasts’. Theoretically this might have worked, but in practice the second fleet, largely comprised of ‘loan ships’ set out by various port towns at their own expense, was plagued by delays and disputes, and it did little to check the Dunkirkers. This result was not what the duke intended, but it ineluctably followed from the Admiral’s need to project power overseas.57 In the end, Buckingham sent Lord Willoughby out in his place, and, notwithstanding an impressive set of flags, the expedition did nothing except confirm the duke’s reputation for incompetence. He faced the same dilemma again in 1627. But this time, thanks to the revenue from the Forced Loan, Buckingham prepared another fleet, some three times the size of Willoughby’s. He could of course have kept it at home ‘defending the Coasts’. The temptation, however, to roll the strategic dice again and to send everything to the Île de Ré, proved irresistible. The decision, while somewhat logical, left him hopelessly exposed domestically in the event of another failure. In that case, Buckingham rightly was anxious about a ‘great Clamour’ if he was seen as weakening ‘the ordinary guard of the Narrow Seas’.

NOTES 1 I am grateful to Richard Cust, Ann Hughes, Peter Lake, Christopher Thompson and especially Andrew Thrush for many conversations about the navy and the Dunkirkers. 2 Buckingham to Apsley, 26 May 1627, BL, Add. 37,817, fo. 103. See also Bodl., MS Rawlinson A 341, fo. 36; and Parkeshowse to anon., 29 August 1628, Staffordshire RO, Littleton of Teddesley MS D1178/5; and Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (London, 1981). 3 Buckingham to Willoughby, 19 October 1626; and same to Gilles, 23 June 1626, BL, Add. 37,816, fos 175 and 125v. See also Thomas Cogswell, ‘The people’s love: the Duke of Buckingham and popularity’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 211–34. 4 Carleton to Conway, 13 and 29 September and 16 October 1625, TNA, SP 84/129/72, 123 and 179. See also Thomas Cogswell, ‘Ten demi-culverins for Aldeburgh: Whitehall, the Dunkirkers and a Suffolk fishing community, 1625–30’, JBS, 58 (2019), 315–37; R.A. Stradling, The Armada of Flanders: Spanish Maritime Policy and European War, 1568–1668 (Cambridge, 1992); J. Alcala-Zamora y Quiepo de Llano, Espana, Flandres y el Mar del Norte, 1618–1639: la ultima ofensiva europeade los Austrias madrilenos (Barcelona, 1975); A. Dominguez Ortiz, ‘El Almirantazgo de los paises septentrionales y la politica economica de Felipe IV’, Hispania, 7 (1947), 272–90; and R. Baetens, ‘The organization and effects of Flemish privateers in the seventeenth century’, Acta Historiae Neerlandica, 9 (1978), 48–75. 5 Thomas Cogswell, ‘Foreign policy and Parliament: the case of La Rochelle’, EHR, 63

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 63

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 99 (1984), 241–67; Roger Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms: The Origins of the British Army, 1585–1702 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 94–158; and Mark Fissel, English Warfare, 1511–1642 (London, 2001), pp. 255–81. 6 T.E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I (3 vols, Leicester, 1981–95), III, pp. 430–1. See also Paul Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars (London, 2003), pp. 223–35. 7 Maija Jansson and William B. Bidwell (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1625 (New Haven, 1987), pp. 403–4, 414 and 438–9. See also Russell, Parliaments, pp. 204–59. 8 Jansson and Bidwell, Procs 1625, pp. 448–9 and 451. 9 Ibid., pp. 458, 460 and 562. 10 Ibid., pp. 445, 458 and 468. 11 TNA, SP 84/129/188v, Instructions to Buckingham et al., 17 October 1625. 12 TNA, SP 84/130/30–31v, Buckingham et al. to Conway, 14 November 1625. 13 BL, Add. 37,816, fos 53, 55 and 57v, Buckingham to Palmer, [late December 1625] and 15 January 1626; and same to Hippesley, 23 January 1626. 14 Ibid., fos 60–v, Buckingham to Palmer, 28 and 29 January 1626. 15 Ibid., fos 66–v, Buckingham to Palmer, 9 and 13 February 1626. 16 TNA, SP 84/130/66, Buckingham to Commissioners, 21 April 1626; BL, Add. 37,816, fos 94v and 58v; same to Conway, 23 November 1625; and same to Pennington, 23 January 1626, See also T. Cogswell, ‘Foreign policy and Parliament’. 17 Procs 1626, II, pp. 54–6. 18 Ibid., II, pp. 115, 120 and 122–3. 19 Ibid., II, pp. 129–32. 20 Ibid., II, pp. 136, 140–2, 149 and 154. 21 Ibid., II, pp. 136, 142 and 149–50. 22 Ibid., II. pp. 149–50 and 154. 23 Ibid., II, p. 167. 24 Ibid., II, pp. 203–4. 25 Ibid., II, pp. 203–4 and 208–9. 26 Ibid., II, pp. 249–50 and 268. 27 Ibid., II, pp. 273, 298, 313 and 315. 28 Ibid., II, pp. 323, 323, 341, 359–60 and 380. 29 Ibid., I, pp. 408, 417 and 466. 30 Ibid., I, p. 571. 31 For a poorly educated Parliament-man’s view of debates, see ABCD, ‘A Post Caution’, BL, Add. 4,155, fos 77–83v. 32 Procs 1626, II, pp. 195, 210, 220 and 241–2. 33 BL, Add. 37,816, fos 65, 64 and 73, Buckingham to Glanville, 6 February 1626; same to Holland and Carleton, 2 February 1626; same to Marlborough, 14 March 1626. See also fos 78 and 82v. 34 Ibid., fos 131–v, Buckingham to Marten, 14 June 1626, See also Informations against Luke Fox [1625–26?], TNA, SP 16/13/147. Unfortunately there is no mention of the Fox case in Procs 1626. 35 BL, Add. 37,816, fos 70v, 79v, 82v and 85. 36 Ibid., fos 66v, 92, 111v and 122v, Buckingham to Palmer, 13 February and 27 May 64

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 64

26/02/2020 08:57

The Lord Admiral and the narrow seas

37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

1626; and same to Commissioners, 18 April 1626; and Button’s petition, 17 June 1626. See also Thrush, ‘Frigate’. BL, Add. 37,816, fos 112v and 77v, Buckingham to Commissioners, 28 May 1626; and Buckingham to Palmer, 17 May 1626, Ibid., fos 87v–8, 115 and 120v, Buckingham to Commissioners, 5 April and 7 and 12 June 1626; and Buckingham’s warrant, 8 June 1626, ibid., fo. 119. Ibid., fos 93v and 112v, Buckingham to Gifford, 18 April 1626; and same to Commissioners, 28 May 1626. Ibid., fo. 82, Buckingham to Pennington, 24 March 1626. For orders to arm merchantmen, see 18, 24 and 28 January, 28 February, and 7 and 14 March 1626, ibid., fos 55, 57, 71, 74 and 77v. Ibid., fos 100 and 107v, Buckingham to Russell, 4 May 1626; and same to Hippesley, 17 May 1626. Ibid., fos 126 and 127v, Buckingham to the Mayor of Dover et al., 25 June 1626; and Buckingham’s warrant, 28 June 1626. Ibid., fos 76v–77v, Buckingham to Palmer, 14 March 1626. Ibid., fos 82–v, 86 and 96, Buckingham to Palmer, 26 March and 2 April; same to Pennington, 27 April 1626. Ibid., fos 76v–7v, Buckingham to Palmer, 14 March; same to Commissioners, 14 March; same to Harris and Button, 17 March; and same to Apsley, 17 March 1626. Ibid., fo. 116, Buckingham to Commissioners, 16 April and 6 May; and same to Herman et al., 8 June 1626. Ibid., fos 88, 99–v, 103, 107, 108v and 111, Buckingham to Commissioners, 5 April, 4, 6 and 15 May 1626; same to Totnes, 16 May 1626; and same to Burrell, 26 May 1626. Ibid., fo. 83, Buckingham to the Navy Commissioners, 29 March 1626. Ibid., fos 89 and 101, Buckingham to Palmer, 6 April and 6 May 1626. Ibid., fos 101v–2 and 105, Buckingham to Pennington, 6 and 12 May 1626, I am extremely grateful to Michael Britton for assistance with these items. Ibid., fo. 105v, Buckingham to Palmer, 14 May 1626. Ibid., fos 105v and 112v, Buckingham to Palmer, 14 May; and same to Commissioners, 28 May 1626. Conrad Russell, ‘Parliamentary history in perspective’, History, 61 (1976), 1–2. See also Russell, Parliaments, p. 261. [Sir Francis Kynaston], A True Presentation of Fore-past Parlaments, FSL, V.b.189, p. 55. BL, Add. 37,817, fo. 1, Buckingham to Suffolk DLs, 9 January 1627. See also Thrush, ‘Frigate’, 38–42. BL, Add. 37,817, fo. 76v, Buckingham to Mervin, 29 April 1627. BL, Add. 37,816, fo. 131v, Buckingham to Commissioners, 6 July 1626; and 3 June and I July 1626, Minutes of the Council of War, TNA, SP 16/28, fos 3v and 16.

65

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 65

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Chapter 4

Space, place and Laudianism in early Stuart Ipswich Noah Millstone

A

t eight in the evening of 11 August 1636, approximately a hundred persons assembled in the East Anglian port of Ipswich. The crowd, reportedly ‘armed’ with long staves and guns, ‘march[ed]’ through the town until they reached a residence belonging to Matthew Wren, Bishop of Norwich. Finding their entry barred, the crowd ‘riotously’ invaded the house, injuring several of Wren’s servants and demanding to speak with Wren himself. The group lingered outside for much of the night, threatening that, had the town’s ‘mariners’ been home, ‘they would have pulled the house upon his Lordship’s head’. Worse still, as the Attorney General later claimed, the Ipswich authorities did nothing to disperse the crowd: the town’s watchmen merely watched, while the constables and even the bailiffs ‘animated & encouraged’ the crowd instead of calming them.1 What was happening here? According to Patrick Collinson, the Ipswich riot represented a conflict between locality and centre; the locality in this case being Puritan Ipswich, an organic, conservative-minded bulwark of magistracy and ministry; with the centre represented by innovating Laudian radicals, outsiders supported by the royal court.2 Collinson’s essay was selfconsciously revisionist; and, indeed, the analytic terminology of ‘centre’ and ‘locality’ was central to the then-ongoing revisionist project. During the 1970s and 1980s, John Morrill, Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe made a breakdown in ‘communication’ between ‘centre’ and ‘locality’ crucial to their accounts of early Stuart political and religious dynamics.3 Few scholars would now describe the era in those terms. Instead, the field has had thirty years of post-revisionist scholarship, arguing for the emergence of some form of national political consciousness. The tendency in post-revisionist scholarship has generally been towards greater and greater reach, greater and greater social and geographic penetration: it seems a given place was isolated or a given issue was all about local conditions, but if you look more closely you can see them as deeply permeated by news culture.4 These developments 66

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 66

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

were salutary; but the logic of the turn towards ‘public’ politics and the public sphere has tempted scholars to downplay the importance of geography and geographic heterogeneity. Evidence that rumours or manuscript separates or printed pamphlets went to remote places was interesting because it seemed to confirm arguments that there was a national public.5 The collapse of the revisionism debate has made it possible to revisit old problems, more bracketed than solved; and one of these is the problem of spatial politics, of communication, government and power at a distance.6 This chapter uses Ipswich and its struggle with Wren to investigate the spatial politics of Laudianism, the Caroline Personal Rule and early Stuart England more generally. What follows has five parts. The first two discuss how Ipswich fitted into early Stuart England’s geographies of power, and briefly narrate the troubles of the early 1630s­ – ­the visitations of Corbett (1633) and Brent (1635) and the deprivation of the town preacher, Samuel Ward, by the High Commission (1634–35). The third section discusses the impact of the Laudian reforms on the interior space of Ipswich’s churches, as well as on a particular place, the corporate church of St Mary-le-Tower. The fourth returns to Wren, seeking to explain his deep interest in and connection to the town, and his efforts to fundamentally transform its structure. The fifth section re-examines the riot through the lens of the town as a whole­ – ­the streets, the marketplace­ – ­and asks what happens when a Puritan town is temporarily filled with Laudian clergymen. The chapter concludes by stepping back to consider the relationship between the spatial politics of Laudianism and the larger agendas animating the reform programmes of the Personal Rule. Early seventeenth-century Ipswich was a dynamic port town, playing an outsize role both in the growing coal trade between London and Newcastle and in the Baltic expeditions of the Eastland Company. Ipswich was wealthy, paying the seventh highest subsidy assessment of any city or town in the kingdom excepting London and Westminster. It was also growing: Reed estimates that Ipswich’s population increased 75 per cent between 1600 and 1640 (from around four thousand to around seven thousand inhabitants), with even faster population turnover.7 Despite these changes, the town’s government remained in the hands of a relatively closed oligarchy. Although some power was vested in a general court of all freemen, practically speaking the town was governed by a tightly knit group of thirty-six men: twelve ‘portmen’, who served life terms; a larger group called the ‘24’, who also served for life; and two bailiffs, chosen each year at Michaelmas, generally from among the portmen. The meeting of the portmen, the 24, and the bailiffs was termed the ‘Assembly’, and it was the Assembly who generally ran the affairs of the town. The men belonging to this magisterial oligarchy were connected to one another by marriage, and membership was often inherited. The same surnames­ – ­Cage, Sparrow, 67

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 67

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Bloyse, Cutler, Sicklemore and Brownrigg­ – ­appear in town records again and again.8 How did the government dominated by these men work? It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least among early modern historians, that the ‘unitary sovereignty’ championed by Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes was a myth, perhaps even an early modern fantasy of order. Real, existing sovereignty was everywhere composite, hybrid and fragmentary, characterised by overlapping jurisdictions, contested boundaries and what Phil Stern calls ‘fuzzy tension’.9 This ‘fuzzy’ quality was nowhere more visible than in urban corporations. Cathedral towns struggled with chapters, and university towns with universities.10 Even without such independent institutions, authority was often splintered. The corporate borough of Grantham in Lincolnshire, for example, served many masters. The underlying manor formed part of the queen’s jointure, giving the queen’s revenue commissioners considerable influence. The town militia was mustered by the deputy lieutenants of Lincolnshire; any but the smallest crimes required the intervention of a Justice of the Peace; and taxation and legal processes were handled by the Lincolnshire sheriff­ – ­all posts supplied by gentlemen living out of town. Grantham’s ecclesiastical affairs were overseen by even more remote authorities. The right to appoint its two vicars rested in prebendaries of distant Salisbury Cathedral, while regulation of the church and the worship conducted there rested first with the Archdeacon of Lincoln, and then with the Bishop.11 In Ipswich, things were very different: Ipswich owned itself, and its magistrates were justices of the peace; they oversaw the musters as deputy lieutenants; served writs as the local deputy sheriffs; and even acted as the local admiralty court, with jurisdiction all the way to Harwich. In a series of feuds against agents of the Suffolk Vice Admiralty, Deputy Lieutenants, and other officials who claimed to represent the king, Ipswich continually insisted that the corporation itself was the primary local representative of royal power.12 Whilst we are accustomed to thinking of local people standing up for their localities, in this case such contests were often about who had the largest share of royal authority, and therefore who spoke in the authentic voice of the centre. The most spectacular, and unusual, locally vested power was Ipswich’s peculiar parochial system. Before the reformation, eleven of Ipswich’s twelve parishes had been controlled by monastic foundations; the dissolution hopelessly alienated the income streams once devoted to supporting priests in those parishes. By the middle of the sixteenth century, it was said, only two priests remained to serve the entire town. The eventual Elizabethan solution had two elements. First, at least six parishes, including some of the wealthiest and most central, came to be served by stipendiary curates nominated­– ­and sometimes dismissed­– ­by the parishioners. Second, by a statute of 1572, the right to set rates for the curates’ salaries was vested in the corporation. When 68

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 68

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

they chose, the bailiffs could assemble a parish’s churchwardens and other chief inhabitants, assess the inhabitants and assign a portion of the total for paying the minister.13 Ipswich’s religious style veered towards Puritanism. In the late sixteenth century, Ipswich developed a reputation for austere worship and nonconformity, what MacCulloch and Blatchly term a culture of ‘entrenched unorthodoxy’. The perpetuation of this culture was not automatic. The right to nominate the curates of St Matthew, St Margaret, St Mary Stoke and St Stephen lay in the hands of more or less remote patrons, while St Clement was a rectory whose incumbent was difficult to oust. At least in the seventeenth century, the maintenance of Ipswich’s Puritan culture required active discipline. However, rather than vesting a disciplinary power in a pseudoPresbyterian ministerial classis, as one might have expected, in Ipswich the role largely fell to a single individual: the highly paid Ipswich town preacher, who was chosen and employed by the corporation.14 From 1605, this position was held by a Cambridge-educated divine named Samuel Ward. Ward was a charismatic preacher with a wide reputation, an author of devotional literature and a talented cartoonist.15 But he was also a vicious infighter who came to dominate Ipswich’s devotional life. Though the evidence is patchy, between 1605 and 1630 it appears Ward was involved in sacking as many as eight ministers, as well as the town’s schoolmaster. A verse libel against Ward, composed in 1621 by one of the expelled ministers, attacked the role he had assumed in disciplining the local clergy. Ward, the ‘sturdy Ram’ of ‘famous Ipswich’, ‘feeling his strength of head & horns’, had asserted dominance over the neighbouring clergy, ‘his fellow Rams’, and proved so strong that they were all ‘fain to yield, / And do him homage’. Those who resisted faced Ward’s wrath, and were ejected from the flock. Thomas Garthwait, the libel’s author, had himself been curate of St Lawrence­– ­and, as we shall see, remained in the area, nursing a grievance against Ward.16 This system, with its parish elections and informal but almost quasiepiscopal discipline, flourished under Bishop John Jegon (1603–18). Jegon was regarded by some of his subordinates as soft on nonconformity, but the bishop’s support for the Ipswich system went beyond tacit acceptance: the bishop specifically authorised the town to remove at least two of the ejected men, and perhaps provided cover for the other removals as well.17 After Jegon’s death, bishops of Norwich often seemed to be chosen for their anti-Puritan bona fides, the better to bridle the notorious nonconformity of East Anglia. Jegon’s successor was the anti-Calvinist theologian John Overall; his replacement, Samuel Harsnett, learned practical anti-Puritanism from a decade spent as a top lieutenant to Richard Bancroft in London. After ten further years as Bishop of Chichester, Harsnett became Bishop of Norwich in 1619, soon coming to blows with the cathedral city’s Puritan establishment.18 Harsnett took advantage of Ward’s brief imprisonment during the general clampdown on anti-popery in 1621–22 to try to remodel the Ipswich system. 69

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 69

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

In July 1622 King James wrote to Harsnett, ordering him to convert the Ipswich lecture into a lecture by combination; Harsnett, fast becoming the Church of England’s leading critic of sole lectures, had probably drafted the letter himself.19 According to the letter, sole lectures misled people into overvaluing the lecturers relative to other ministers, ‘reputing & styling the one solely holy the other unholy men’, creating resentment among the clergy and ‘dissention’ in the Church. This misapprehension also led to a particularly bad form of sermon-gadding, almost a form of ‘separation’: since the lecturers were not pastors in the ordinary sense, with a geographically defined parish, ‘flock[ing]’ to the lecturer meant abandoning the ordinary unit of worship in the Church of England for something like a gathered congregation. In towns, the letter continued, corporate sponsorship of a sole lectureship might be a sign, not of a town’s godly devotion, but rather of its overweening ambition. Corporations should be asked to redistribute the sole lecturer’s salary to other preaching ministers in the town; any refusal would show that ‘their maintenance’ of the lectureship derived not from ‘piety & devotion’, ‘since God’s words is the same preached by a lecturer or a beneficed minister’, but rather ‘from pride singularity and faction’. With regard to ‘Ipswich’ in particular, the letter commanded Harsnett to see that the bailiffs redistributed Ward’s salary to a rota of six preaching ministers, ‘nominated by the bishop’ rather than chosen by the town. Ward, described as the ‘former lecturer’, was acknowledged to be ‘a man endowed with many good parts of learning & understanding’; James had resolved ‘to carry him in our special remembrance’ and urged Harsnett to do the same, ‘always provided that he conform himself to peace order & moderation’. He was, however, to be excluded from the lecture by combination.20 As Reynolds has shown, Harsnett used the letter to begin converting sole lectures into lectures-by-combination across the diocese.21 In Ipswich, the oligarchy regarded the order of July 1622 as an assault. Between 1 August and 2 September 1622 four meetings of the Assembly and one of the General Court were largely devoted to framing petitions to King James and Bishop Harsnett ‘that the Towne may enjoy their free election & nomination of a Town preacher … according to their ancient Custom’. In November, James referred the town’s petition to Archbishop George Abbot and Lord Keeper John Williams, leaving the corporation optimistic that ‘a final end’ was in sight. But Harsnett proved obstinate, refusing four successive petitions over twelve months. The town’s victory came only in 1624, after the town managed to find Ward a cure of souls within the city (which immediately formed the basis of a fifth petition to the bishop for Ward’s restoration), and perhaps after Harsnett’s censure in the 1624 Parliament for his treatment of preachers and lecturers. Certainly nothing more was heard of the matter. All told, in travel expenses, advice and bribery, keeping their lecturer cost the corporation more than £200.22 70

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 70

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

Informal arrangements aside, Ipswich’s churches were supervised by a set of nested authorities: archdeacon, bishop and archbishop. The bishops of Norwich were certainly influential, but their oversight was irregular; by custom, bishops of Norwich visited immediately after consecration (the ‘primary visitation’) and thereafter at seven-year intervals. More immediately, Ipswich was under the supervision of the Archdeacon of Suffolk, who visited twice yearly. Much, then, depended on the archdeacon. Between 1613 and 1639, the Archdeacon of Suffolk was Dr Robert Pearson. Pearson had spent nearly two decades at Queens’ College, Cambridge, held a living in Norfolk, was appointed Archdeacon of Suffolk by Bishop Jegon, and remained in post until his death.23 Little else is known about him. Much more, however, is known about his commissary, who served as judge in the Archdeaconry Court and was probably responsible for prosecuting the visitations. This was Henry Dade, a Suffolk native, civil lawyer and Trinity Hall graduate. After serving for some years as a proctor in the Court of Arches, Dade returned to Suffolk in the late 1610s, armed with a recommendation from Sir Ralph Winwood. Dade also became a judge for the Suffolk Vice Admiralty; he was, in other words, the local civilian for eastern Suffolk, representing different jurisdictions in different capacities at different times but remaining the same man.24 Dade did not, it seems, find Ipswich’s religious climate congenial. Dade quarrelled with visiting preachers, and spent £20 per annum to maintain a ‘very worthy Conformable man’­– ­perhaps Thomas Garthwait­– ­as a minister within Ipswich. In 1633, visitors working on behalf of the new bishop, Richard Corbet, began to pose questions about placing the communion table on the east side of the chancel; in Ipswich, these initiatives were met by obstruction and delay.25 This seems to have frustrated Dade, and towards the end of 1633 Dade prepared articles against Ward intended for the High Commission. His friends, however, dissuaded him from filing the articles, ‘for fear’ that ‘the puritans’ would retaliate.26 In early February 1634, Dade wrote a secret letter to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The occasion was a set of upcoming voyages to New England, which Dade wished to halt; more generally, it discussed what Dade saw as the ecclesiastical problems of Ipswich and its environs. According to Dade, the main problem was Ward, ‘chief in our parts’ of those who bred dislike for the Church of England. Protected by his ‘adherents who are very potent in London & about Ipswich’, Ward habitually preached ‘against the Contents of the Book of Common Prayer’ and promoted ‘a fear of altering religion’. The resulting culture made orthodoxy itself disreputable: the mere ‘conformity of a minister, howsoever otherwise able & pious’, Dade wrote, was ‘enough to make a man odious amongst the people about Ipswich’. Dade begged Laud to make enquiries, equally begging him not to reveal Dade as his informant.27 Laud did make enquiries, and whatever he found seemed serious enough 71

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 71

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

to merit the attention of King Charles, who, unusually, decided to investigate via the Privy Council. In late October 1634, the Council accordingly summoned Ward, Dade, two other Ipswich ministers (Reynolds and Sotherby, about whom I have been able to learn nothing) and a man named Thomas Cutler to attend the board. On 7 November, ‘having heard [Ward] at large’, the Council decided the matter would be better dealt with in High Commission. Given the involvement of king, archbishop and Privy Council, Dade was persuaded to change his mind about involvement in the case, and accordingly lodged thirty-nine articles against Ward some time before 20 November; two additional articles were added in February 1635.28 This is not the place for a full reconstruction of the case against Ward, but a few points are worth observing. On the basis of the testimony of, among others, Thomas Garthwait and Jonathan Skinner, two ministers whom he had driven from their cures, Ward was charged with encouraging a fear of alteration in religion and speaking disparagingly of set forms of prayer. In one sermon, Ward had alluded to those who were ‘ready to ring the Changes in matter of discipline’; in another, he had used the phrase ‘the gospel stood on tiptoes’; while in a third Ward had described set prayers as ‘a confining of the spirit’; suggested that ‘it would trouble a man to carry a portass or manual of set forms of prayer for all occasions’; and claimed ‘that a parrot might be taught to repeat forms without affection’. Ward was also accused of preaching against the Book of Sports; of slighting ceremonies by relating the anecdote of Cardinal Aldobrandini’s ape, who learned to cringe and gesture like the papists around him; and of preaching on doctrines in controversy between Laudian and orthodox Calvinist divines, including the real presence and Christ’s descent into hell. Most spectacularly, on 10 October 1634­– ­two weeks before he was summoned to attend the Privy Council –  Ward had apparently preached that offices, both ecclesiastical and civil, had all once been elective; that popular assent still had a role, albeit vestigial, to play in episcopal appointments; and that, when it came to commonwealths, the role of ‘elections’ by the ‘people’ had been lost, but he knew not how or when.29 Ward’s answers to the articles reveal him to be a classic moderate Puritan, suspicious of formalism and the theological speculation of avant-garde conformists, but also concerned to combat the allure of separation that might tempt the godly to abandon the Church of England. Ward claimed that he had discussed set prayers and homilies as part of a sermon devoted to proving that set forms of prayer and homilies were, in fact, lawful. The reference to alterations in religion were supposedly vented in response to questions ‘put unto him’ by ‘New Englanders’ and others ‘that affected to go beyond the seas’; Ward himself had argued that things were not so bad as to require separation or flight. These slight defences were not enough, and on 26 November 1635, almost exactly a year after the case began, Ward was suspended from the ministry and enjoined to submit both at Lambeth and in Ipswich, which he did not do.30 72

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 72

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

In the spring of 1635, while the case against Ward was pending but before it had concluded, Laud launched a metropolitical visitation of the Norwich diocese under the oversight of his Vicar General, Sir Nathaniel Brent. Brent spent three days in Ipswich. He found the town ‘exceeding factious’ and reported that Ward was ‘thought to be the chief author of their inconformity’, although he judged ‘the better sort … conformable in a reasonable good measure’. Brent ‘ordered many things in their churches’; excommunicated Thomas Cave, rector of St Helen’s, for administering the Eucharist to nonkneelants; and battled with churchwardens ‘so precise’ that many refused even to take their oaths. These conflicts were short-lived. Cave was quickly absolved­ – ­Brent even granted him a preaching licence­ – ­and the churchwardens’ excommunications were rescinded. Brent left feeling hopeful that ‘a good reformation will follow’.31 By October 1635, as the Ward case was coming to a conclusion, King Charles decided to consolidate the recent changes by naming the court cleric and avant-garde conformist Matthew Wren as the new Bishop of Norwich. Wren quickly appointed commissioners for his primary visitation, directing them to begin in Suffolk.32 After the false starts of Corbet’s visitation in 1633 and Brent’s in 1635, Ipswich’s Laudian moment had finally begun. To a large extent, Ipswich experienced Laudianism as an appropriation of space. This was partly due to the Laudians’ interest in transforming church interiors, particularly their commitment to emphasising the distinct holiness of various parts of the church. The most important of these was the chancel. Raising the chancel, eliminating chancel seats and, most famously, shifting the communion table to a permanent, railed, position against the eastern wall, were some of the most visible parts of the Laudian reform programme.33 Many Laudians also prescribed physical motions by which worshippers and celebrants were meant to navigate the differentiated church spaces: standing, bowing, kneeling and moving to particular places at particular times. Space, orientation and comportment­ – ­what the theologian Paul Micklethwaite called ‘posture’ and ‘gesture’ – were, Micklethwaite argued, important ways to organise worship. The model Laudian church interior created nested spaces of increasing sacrality­– ­from the outside world to the church and its interior, to the chancel, and finally to the altar. This progression was justified by reference to biblical and patristic practice, as well as by analogy to civil reverence: one ought to show the altar, God’s mercy seat, at least the same respect one would show a king seated on his throne.34 The progress of this programme in Ipswich was uneven. At Corbet’s 1633 visitation, Ipswich parishes were directed to reorder their church interiors­ – ­an early manifestation of the emerging Laudian altar policy. Surviving accounts suggest that most parishes preferred to spend money fighting the orders rather than comply. The churchwardens of St Matthew were told to move the communion table and establish a clearer ‘partition’ between 73

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 73

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

nave and chancel; their response was to pay 5s ‘to Mr Chancellors man for not removing the Table’. This was classed as a fee, but may have been a fine, or a bribe, as the accounts record no significant costs for altering the church fabric. Similarly, the churchwardens of St Mary-le-Tower were told to remove the seats along the east end of the chancel and place the communion table there instead. The churchwardens asserted they had received no proper direction, and ultimately spent nearly twice as much money fighting the admonition (£1 17s 6d) as they spent constructing the new communion table they ultimately agreed to buy (£1); one churchwarden was excommunicated the following year, partly for ignoring the direction. Similar patterns of ­spending at St Clement suggest the parish may have received similar orders and responded in similar ways.35 When Corbet’s visitation ended, Ipswich returned to the benign supervision of Archdeacon Pearson, whose surviving visitation articles evince little interest in the Laudian reforms. As late as 1637, Pearson asked merely if the communion table was ‘placed conveniently as it ought’, mentioning neither rails nor the east end of the church; regarding the chancel, Pearson asked merely if it was well maintained and clean, mentioning neither seats nor the chancel’s level. There was some contemporary confusion about whether or not Laud’s 1635 metropolitical visitation, conducted by Brent, involved an admonition or an order to set the communion tables under the east wall of the chancel; certainly Brent did sometimes issue such orders, as in Great Yarmouth; and Dade, the Ipswich commissary, interpreted Brent’s remarks as binding directions.36 Perhaps the very multiplicity of visiting authorities­ – ­archidiaconal commissaries, episcopal commissioners, metropolitical vicars-general­ – ­made it difficult to track who had been ordered to do what, by whom. (A task not eased by the visitors’ apparently limited interest in record-keeping.) Only during Wren’s extended visitation in 1636 did the Ipswich parishes actually reform their interiors. At first, the parishes attempted their old strategy of delay. The visitors responded as Brent had, by threatening the churchwardens of St Peter, St Mary-le-Tower, St Stephen, St Helen, St Nicholas, St Matthew, St Clement and St Lawrence with collective excommunication. But while Brent had relaxed the excommunications almost immediately, in 1636 the pressure was kept on; by mid-March 1637, when the excommunications were finished and ready to be denounced, only the churchwardens of St Nicholas, St Matthews, St Clement and St Lawrence continued recalcitrant.37 In other places there was substantial money spent: the churchwardens of the poor parish of St Stephen, for example, paid £3 1s 6d for a new rail and £1 19s 10d for material and labour associated with raising the chancel.38 St Mary-le-Tower spent £1 11s 11d on a new hood for graduate preachers; £2 15s for a chancel rail; and £2 10s for wainscotting in the chancel.39 After paying over £3 in fines and fees (including £1 6s 8d for ‘being excommunicated for not doings of those things enjoined by our Bishop to be done in our Church’), 74

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 74

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

the churchwardens of St Clement ultimately sold their old communion table for 7s and paid a joiner £1 2s to build a new one. They also commissioned rails (£4 11s 6d), took down the stools in the chancel (1s) and paid a mason to raise the chancel and make steps leading to the font (12s for labour, plus 18s for materials).40 After years of avoidance, the Laudian reforms had come to Ipswich. Nowhere was this spatial transformation more salient than in St Maryle-Tower. Prior to 1635, St Mary-le-Tower had been the particular domain of Samuel Ward. Since 1605, it had been the site of his public ministry­ – ­the pulpit from which, three times a week, Ward had preached. Since 1624, Ward had also been the primary curate, and, although the services were generally conducted by a sub-curate, such men were chosen and dismissed by Ward; between 1633 and 1636, the sub-curate had been John Ashburn, Ward’s sonin-law. The parish’s ‘great Church Bible’ had even been ‘lent’ to Ward back in the autumn of 1625, remaining in his possession for ten years.41 But from 1633, the frequency and vehemence of the visitations and consistory courts transformed St Mary-le-Tower into a site of episcopal discipline. Ward’s church became the place where recalcitrant ministers were interviewed and suspended, and where Henry Dade and the other visitors sat in judgement. This appropriation of the Tower church was particularly ill taken by a parishioner named Ferdinando Adam. Adam was­– ­naturally­– ­a shoemaker, and a respectable member of the town’s middling sort: although not as wealthy as the corporate oligarchs, Adam lived alongside several of them, socialised with them, paid a relatively high church rate, was assigned a prominent seat ‘next the Pulpit’ and regularly held parish office. In 1635, while serving as churchwarden for St Mary-le-Tower­– ­a position to which he was elected by the nearly unanimous vote of the chief parishioners­ – ­Adam fell afoul of Henry Dade.42 As he would insist, Adam was presented and ultimately excommunicated merely for performing one of his duties, ensuring that the church’s walls were adorned with sentences of scripture. But the sentence Adam had chosen, Mark 11:17­– ­‘Is it not written my house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer but ye have made it a den of thieves’­– ­and the place he had chosen to paint it­– ­directly ‘over the place’ where Dade habitually ‘sat in Court’­– ­made it clear that Adam was twisting the injunction into a mode of protest.43 Whilst Adam was perhaps protesting against the ongoing visitation in general or the exactly contemporaneous proceedings against Ward, the scriptural passage he chose suggests that Adam saw the invasion of the church itself as particularly grievous. Adam’s conduct the next year supports this impression. When Wren’s episcopal visitors arrived in Ipswich on 4 April 1636, they found the doors of St Mary-le-Tower locked. This ‘barricado’, wrote one visitor, Thomas Goad, ‘held us almost 2 hours’. The keys, it transpired, were in Adam’s possession, and, when the commissioners went to ask Adam to unlock the doors, Adam refused to appear. Instead, as was later alleged, Adam’s daughter and 75

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 75

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

servant ‘in a violent and outrageous manner revile[d] and assault[ed]’ the commissioners ‘with Muskets charged, swords stones and other weapons … ­demanding if they had brought the great seal of England for the keys’. Abandoning efforts to secure the keys, the bailiffs sent for a smith named John Baddison, who regularly worked for the church, to break open the doors. But Baddison was reluctant; ‘if yow will save me harmless’, he told Dade, ‘I will do it; otherwise, not’. Dade refused to ‘meddle’ with the question, and Baddison refused to break the lock.44 The visitors finally sent for a second smith, this one ‘a popish recusant’ named Martin, who broke open the doors; ‘we think’, Goad wrote to Wren, ‘no other of the town durst’.45 Adam’s efforts were ultimately fruitless. Once inside, the visitors began looking for ministers who would perform divine service ‘according’ to Wren’s ‘injunctions’. These specified that a minister ought to read the whole service in surplice and hood ‘without addition, alteration or innovation’; read the second service from ‘the north end of the Communion table’ placed along the east wall of the chancel; strictly limit prayers before and after the sermon to those canonically prescribed; and bow at the name of Jesus.46 This demand to perform conformity at least during the visitation was comparatively mild, a Jacobean workaround designed to separate principled nonconformists from ‘conformable’ ministers, who might prefer not to use the regular service or wear vestments, but who would nevertheless do so on occasion when required by authority. The future Presbyterian activist Edmund Calamy, for example, then a lecturer at Bury St Edmunds, was called on by Wren’s visitors to do precisely this, proclaimed himself ‘very willing’ and performed it the next day.47 In Ipswich, however, this demand amounted to transforming St Maryle-Tower from one of the kingdom’s most prominent Puritan pulpits­ – ­‘so long ward [to] Father Warde’, as the diocesan chancellor, Clement Corbett, put it­– ­into a showcase for Laudian ceremonialism. Accordingly, the visitors encountered a ‘general refusal’. On 4 April Thomas Scott of St Clement and Nicholas Beard of St Peter both flatly refused to read the service according to the injunctions, and were suspended two days later. Thomas Warren (St Lawrence) and William Kerrington (St Nicholas) also refused, were suspended and were given until early June to conform; instead, both resigned their cures. Thomas Cave at St Helen’s refused and was admonished; John Ashburn, who had been serving St Mary-le-Tower as Ward’s sub-curate and continued after Ward’s suspension, had never been formally instituted and was simply dismissed.48 So many ministers were suspended that the visitors worried that the town would have no one left to perform divine service. One of the 24, Edmund Day, said that he could not recall the churches being ‘so shut up since Queen Mary’s days’, a comment he repeated at council meetings to discuss the suspensions, to Bishop Wren himself and ‘at other times’. With Easter fast approaching, the visitors began ‘suspend[ing] the … suspensions’, delaying them for fifteen days so the churches might not go unserved during the 76

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 76

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

holiday. Ashburn and Beard immediately returned to their ‘irregular’ habits of worship: Ashburn, recorded one visitor, preached a sermon that cited John Foxe’s celebrated words when he resigned from Oxford in 1545, ‘take you heed of Superstition & popery’; he then administered the communion wine unconsecrated, while Beard continued administering communion to non-kneelants. The suspensions, warned Edmund Mapletoft, had become something of a badge of ‘honour’ for both: ‘their lips drop honey; people do so flock into them’. Scott actually managed to obtain an absolution on 17 July; however, as Wren was informed, ‘the very same day’ Scott officiated at a funeral without a surplice, and neglected to kneel when he read prayers at the grave. Ten days later, preaching at a town fair before the corporate governors and with several suspended ministers in attendance, Scott disobeyed nearly every injunction: rather than reading the service himself, he sent up a local conformist, William Hubbard of St Stephen’s, who read the service ‘very confusedly’; when Hubbard pronounced the name of Jesus, Scott neglected to bow; when Hubbard read the prayers and collects, Scott neglected to kneel. Scott then mounted into the pulpit without his surplice; ‘used a Long prayer of his own framing before his Sermon’ instead of the words prescribed in the fifty-fifth canon; and, rather than concluding his sermon with a gloria patri and a prayer for the church delivered from the communion table, delivered a ‘prayer of his own’ which recapitulated ‘the substance of his Sermon’, pronounced a blessing from the pulpit and departed.49 There was, however, no rescuing St Mary-le-Tower. The services there were now conducted in the new ceremonial style: to have their suspensions revoked, ministers were asked to perform service as it had been ‘performed in the parish Church of St Marie Tower’, that is, according to Wren’s directions.50 The visitation court continued sitting in Ipswich, on and off, for months, hearing cases from throughout the archdeaconry of Suffolk. Robert Stansby, parson of Westhorpe, claimed to have been ‘dealt with’ by ‘many’ successive bishops of Norwich to conform, starting with John Jegon, ‘but his Conscience was always against it’; Stansby’s cause was heard, and his suspension issued, in mid-July 1636 at St Mary-le-Tower.51 When Wren ordained ministers, he conducted the service himself: when he came to consecrate the elements he did stand on the West side of the table placed Altarwise with his back to the people, and when he came to read these words (That the Lord Jesus in the same night he was betrayed took bread) he then took the Bread in his hand and elevated it higher then his shoulder and so held it until he came to read these words (This is my Bodie) at which words he set the bread down and making a small pause bowed very lowly to it and so likewise to the consecration of the Cup, and when those that received the Sacrament came to offer their alms they kneeled down before the Table and offered them upon their knees.

This elaborate ceremonial, with ‘all Canonical Rites’, Wren observed with satisfaction, had ‘never been there observed before’. It was performed­ – ­where else? at St Mary-le-Tower.52 77

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 77

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

It is tempting to view Ipswich Puritanism as a home-grown, almost organic force, and Laudianism as something foreign, imposed from the outside. This is probably how some Ipswichians perceived it; in August 1636, the Ipswich resident John Witham suggested that Wren had been rooted out of Norwich, and could be driven from Ipswich as well.53 But what was Wren doing in Ipswich, anyway? How was it that he even had a house there to be attacked? As this section argues, it is impossible to understand the intensity of Wren’s oversight of Ipswich without understanding his own deep connection to the town. Matthew Wren was a Londoner, educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he overlapped with both Lancelot Andrewes and Samuel Harsnett. In 1623, Wren was chosen, probably on the advice of Andrewes and Richard Neile, to accompany Prince Charles during his sojourn in Spain. Charles clearly liked Wren, and after the prince’s accession Wren received a series of appointments marking him as a court cleric: Dean of Windsor, Dean of the Chapel Royal, Clerk of the Closet. Wren was perhaps even more Laudian than Laud himself­ – ­the very type of what Peter Lake sometimes calls a ‘headbanging’ Laudian.54 Appointing Wren to the diocese of Norwich was hardly a conciliatory gesture, and Wren himself was clearly steeled for a fight. It is therefore instructive that Wren chose to begin his primary visitation in Suffolk. Wren visited by commission, and it is sometimes suggested that bishops who visited by commission, rather than personally, might have been disengaged from the visitation process. In the particular case of Wren and Ipswich, this could not be further from the truth. An early set of ‘remembrances’ Wren drew up for Henry Dade mentioned not only the bailiffs’ attempts to re-establish the town lecturer but also issues arising at the parish level that, Wren wrote, had been ‘reported to me’: about whether John Ashburn, Ward’s son-in-law, had really been chosen curate of St Maryle-Tower by the ‘public vote of the parish’, or whether he had simply taken over from Ward after the latter’s suspension; about the continued neglect of divine service in St Stephen; even about a reported clandestine marriage ‘within this month’ at St Lawrence. Wren’s close engagement with Ipswich affairs is also evident from the visitation correspondence. The letters to Wren give enormous detail; more importantly, Wren’s replies, which survive only as notes in his informal register, demonstrate the bishop’s interest in that detail. On 31 March 1636 Wren sent one of the commissioners thorough instructions about matters to pursue: ‘look to the Registrars of St Matthews & St Mary Elms / The Chancels of St Mary Towers, & St Margarets / How far to admit Mr Ashburne’.55 Why was Wren so well informed? Ipswich, it turns out, was probably the part of the Norwich diocese that Wren knew best. Wren had married into an Ipswich family; owned property there; and had at least one child born in Ipswich and baptised in St Mary-le-Tower. The two laymen who testified against Ward in 1635, Thomas Cutler and John Lany the younger, both 78

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 78

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

had strong connections to Wren. Cutler was, in fact, Wren’s father-in-law; his daughter Elizabeth (‘Betty’), the widow of another Ipswich oligarch, had married Wren in 1628. Cutler had accompanied the visitors to St Mary-leTower church on 4 April; it was to Cutler’s house, the largest in the parish, that the visitors had resorted when they found the door locked; and it was Cutler who summoned the second smith when Baddison refused to break the lock. Cutler was a direct line to Wren, and his close involvement in both the case against Ward in 1635 and the visitation in 1636 was the farthest thing from an accident. Wren had, perhaps, met the Cutlers through John Lany, or rather through Lany’s younger brother Dr Benjamin Lany, who had overlapped for ten years with Wren at Pembroke College, where the two shared both religious preferences and the same Durham House patronage network.56 Thus, when he became Bishop of Norwich, Wren took a special interest in Ipswich­ – ­not only because of its reputation for Puritan nonconformity but also because, thanks to his local connections, Wren had quite a lot of detailed information about what went on there. We cannot be sure when or why Wren decided to spend the summer of 1636 in Ipswich. Certainly the plans were already in motion by the April visitation: correspondence in March and April found Wren justifying his decision to stay in the house he and Betty owned, rather than at Cutler’s, where he had stayed before (‘Thanks for his offer … Done in respect to him / And, his will not hold us / And, once before I troubled him long’) and directing his local acquaintances to make the house habitable, mending locks and laying in beer, wine and fuel. Wren cleared his plans with Archbishop Laud and King Charles, explaining that he had decided to spend the summer in Ipswich, ‘partly because’, Laud wrote, ‘that side of his diocese did most need his presence’; but Betty was also pregnant, and perhaps wished to visit her family. By 10 June Wren and his family were installed in the town, and, aside from occasional visits to the court when it was nearby at Newmarket, that is where they stayed until nearly the end of August.57 Thus, although Wren and his household were treated by some Ipswichians as an alien presence, in fact Wren was deeply connected to the town elite and familiar with the problems posed by Ipswich religion. When Thomas Scott of St Clement was reported to have relapsed from his promised conformity, Wren personally drafted a set of inquiry articles to determine whether Scott had conformed to Wren’s conception of the service. In his subsequent correspondence with Scott, Wren took responsibility for framing both his own fatherly letters and the more chiding letters that were sent as though they came from Wren’s chaplains or subordinates, allowing Wren to speak in multiple registers. And Wren’s interest in Ipswich’s particular parishes continued throughout his tenure in the Norwich diocese. Even after departing from the town in the late summer, Wren continued to correspond with his officers about Ipswich parish matters, discussing the affairs of St Clement, St Peter, St Helen, St Mary Stoke and St Mary Key. On 8 December 1636, 79

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 79

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Wren asked Corbet to look into ‘defaults’ in a service held at St Mary-le-Tower ‘on Sunday last’ (it seems a guest officiant had carried the communion ‘up & down to every seat, notwithstanding the chancel is railed & prepared’); in April 1637, he asked the chancellor to resolve a seat dispute in St Nicholas involving the wife of the Ipswich oligarch William Cage.58 Perhaps because of this familiarity, but also partly because of developments within Laudianism itself, Wren had a different understanding of the roots of the town’s nonconformity, and therefore a different theory about what ought to be done, than earlier critcs. Earlier explanations for Ipswich’s peculiar religious climate had blamed either the lectureship as an institution (this was Harsnett’s position) or Ward himself (this was Dade’s and Brent’s position). During the mid-1630s, however, Laudians developed a more robust account of the problems posed by lay control. The affair of the so-called Feoffees of Impropriations, prosecuted in the Exchequer in 1633–34, had raised the spectre that Puritans might take advantage of the Church of England’s byzantine financing and patronage arrangements to ‘tune’ particular parishes. In 1635–36, this drove the Commission on Fees and the Star Chamber to embark on a wide-ranging survey of London’s parish government, inquiring particularly into the role of vestries. Peter Heylyn’s 1636 Coale from the Altar­– ­which Heylyn later claimed was written at Wren’s request specifically to counter the ‘obstinacy’ he encountered in Ipswich­– ­included an extended diatribe against ‘the Vestry-doctrine of these days’ by which ‘the Church-wardens, and other Elders of the Vestry … in Townes Corporate especially’, would assume ‘the Supreme disposing of all Ecclesiastical matters in their several Parishes, leaving their Minister … to his Meditations’.59 Lay financial support was particularly dangerous, because it might tempt a minister, instead of railing against the sins of his congregants, rather to flatter them in hope of retaining their favour. In a letter to the town of Haverill, which wished to establish a lecture, Wren warned that a ‘Preacher’ who owed his maintenance to lay supporters would ‘be forced to suit his Discourse to the fancy of his Auditors, and to say nothing but what pleases them, at leastwise, nothing that may displease them. And this needs he must do, if his means have not such competency in it’ or if his livelihood were ‘wholly depending on ye will & pleasure of the Hearers’. From a man in such a state of dependence, Wren wrote, ‘I dare promise myself nothing’. The solution, Wren concluded, was to insist that preachers should preach only in places where they had cure of souls; this would ‘put a straighter tie upon him, to observe & justify the Rites & Ceremonies’ of the Church of England.60 In Ipswich, however, the problem of lay control and financial dependence went beyond the lectureship: it structured Ipswich’s entire parish system. Wren, with his detailed inside information, understood Ipswich better than any bishop of Norwich since John Jegon. In an early direction to Dade, Wren asked for ‘a perfect Note of all the parishes & churches’ in Ipswich, ‘who are Incumbents there; who Patrons of the same; and what stipends belong to 80

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 80

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

them’.61 Wren was probably already preparing his master-stroke against the Ipswich Puritans. Passed under the great seal in early June (but in progress much earlier), a royal patent commissioned Wren and a number of others to examine the implementation of Ipswich’s 1571 statute. The commissioners were empowered to take testimony from bailiffs and churchwardens on their corporal oaths regarding what rates had been set and how the money had been collected and allocated. Wherever the commissioners detected ‘defect, omission, or negligence’, the commissioners were to work with the bailiffs to set new rates and make new allocations. More strikingly and subtly, the commissioners were directed to inquire into who held the authority to nominate the Ipswich parishes’ stipendiary curates ‘and by what right’. Any who resisted the inquiry­ – ­who were ‘rebellious, contumacious, opposed, deficient or guilty’­– ­were to be cited to the king. The named commissioners were Wren himself; the diocesan chancellor, Dr Clement Corbet; Dr Thomas Goad, one of Wren’s visitors; the civil lawyer Dr Thomas Eden, commissary for Sudbury and also one of Wren’s visitors; a resident baronet, Sir Anthony Wingfield; Henry Dade; John Lany the younger; and Thomas Cutler.62 Even more than the removal of Ward, the commission really did promise to alter the ecclesiastical system in Ipswich. Corbet hoped that the commission would work a structural change, not only in Ipswich but elsewhere. ‘The business for the better allowance to the poor Levites in Ipswich and many other Corporate Townes & Villages’, Corbet told Wren, is opus pium, Regium & Augustissimum. The Laic Contribution & support hath made the Ecclesiastic Persons & Ceremonies wag & dance after their pipe from whom they receive, the livelihood, which is stopped or runs as the Levites popularise. And if His Majesty shall in his Princely care abolish that Ratsbane of Lecturing out of his Church the virulence whereof hath intoxicated many thousands of this Kingdom we shall have such a uniform & orthodox Church, as the Christian world cannot shew the like, Your Lordship will excuse my silly zeal.63

The problem with lectureships, as Corbet outlined, was not merely lay patronage­ – ­almost all livings in the kingdom had lay patrons with quite wide powers of presentation. The problem was that the sort of lay ‘support’ offered in Ipswich was revocable, and could be discontinued if the minister began to displease his financial backers; it was ‘stopped or runs as the Levites popularise’. Financial dependence incentivised the ministers to concentrate on cultivating their congregants, ‘wag[ing] & danc[ing] after their pipe fro[m] whom they receive’, rather than representing an independent force of moral and spiritual correction. Ipswich’s magisterial oligarchy was suitably unhappy, and on 21 July an Assembly met to decide what to do about the commission, ‘the Rates … the nomination of ministers to such parishes as the parishioners have heretofore had the nomination of, the great Charges & other Inconveniences likely to 81

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 81

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

fall upon the parishioners enjoined in the several Churches, the liberty of the ministers of this Town & such other things as doe any ways Concern the same several things’. This was to be a general protest against Wren’s conduct towards the town’s religious settlement. After some debate, one magistrate cautioned the Assembly that there might be ‘false brethren among us’ and moved for the matter to be committed to a smaller group, which accordingly framed a petition to the king. The petition made three complaints: against Wren’s injunctions, with their senseless requirements to move back and forth from desk to communion table to pulpit, and the ministerial suspensions they had occasioned; against the orders to raise chancels and take down chancel seating; and against the commission. They recited the conditions which made the town pursue the statute of 13 Elizabeth; and the custom, observed ‘time out of mind’, for those parishes to ‘elect and choose’ their own ministers (of course with the ‘allowance’ of the bishop). The threatened commission, they worried, would not only arrogate to the bishop the right to make rates but also ‘question the right and power of the parishioners nomination’. They wanted the commission quashed. Carefully, the petition made no protest against the altar-wise movement of the communion table; and, while it pleaded for Scott, Beard, Warren and Kerrington, it made no mention of Ward.64 Nevertheless, the Ipswich petition did not meet with a friendly reception at court. Instead, after receiving petition, King Charles immediately sent it to Wren, commanding him to continue ‘enforcing all Canonical Observance with his gracious promise that he would support me’.65 Charles was, in fact, immensely angry, for during Wren’s residence Ipswich had turned riotous. Neither the petitions, the parish delays nor Adam’s efforts could ultimately keep out the Laudians, and so in the spring and summer of 1636 Ipswich experienced a third sort of spatial appropriation. During the visitation, during Wren’s residence there during the summer and in the months and years that followed, Ipswich found itself filled with Laudians. In the godly East Anglian town of Ipswich, one could now encounter avant-garde conformist clergymen, their servants and their out-of-town visitors at the market or on the street. This generated a large number of negative encounters between the Laudians and the locals, characterised by ‘menacing & threatening words’, ‘uncivil language’ and outright violence. Some were relatively comic. On 8 April 1636 Thomas Cutler, Thomas Goad and several other visitors encountered a bricklayer named Edward Parsley ‘in the open street’. Parsley, ‘armed with a long staff’, demanded ‘in an audacious and insolent manner … by what authority they came thither’. When Goad asked by what authority he posed the question, Parsley replied that he was ‘sent unto you from god’ and was ‘full of the spirit of God’. Parsley then embarked on a long rant. To begin with, King Charles knew nothing of what the visitors were doing; King James 82

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 82

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

had been against altars; and anyway the king could ‘doe nothing in these things without a Parliament’ (even ‘proclamations’, Parsley added, ‘must have authority from the Parliament’). One of the conformist ministers who had read divine service during the visitation, Parsley continued, had prayed ‘that the king’s subjects might be the Queen’s subjects’ (‘this he spake twice over with earnest assertation’). ‘What dost thou mean,’ asked one of the other visitors, ‘that the king’s subjects should turn papists? to which Parsley answered it may be so’. Finally, Parsley offered to ‘dispute’ with Goad on the legitimacy of the altar policy (affirming ‘that there ought to be no altars since Aaron’s priests’) and whether or not keeping the Sabbath was part of the moral law.66 Others encounters were more hostile. One Sunday during the summer, John Duncon, Wren’s household chaplain, officiated and preached at St Nicholas, whose cure had been vacant since Kerrington’s resignation in April. Returning to the bishop’s house afterward, Duncon was confronted by an ‘enraged’ woman he did not know, who ‘in a clamorous & railing manner … asked him who sent him thither to rail upon them’. Duncon escaped into a neighbouring house, but later ‘heard it reported in that parish’ that had he not made a timely exit ‘he should have heard or felt it in a worse manner’. When Wren briefly left Ipswich in June, ‘diverse persons in the street did curse him & pray God he might never come back again’. Another of Wren’s servants, Richard Holland, deposed that when ‘the boys in the streets … saw him [they] would bow their knees & say Jesus’.67 Jonathan Skinner, who had briefly been Ward’s sub-curate before the two quarrelled, became a major target for the inhabitants’ ire. At a funeral at St Peter, Skinner was reproved by John Blomfield, one of the portmen, for bowing at the name of Jesus; when Skinner threatened to bring the man before Bishop Wren, Blomfield (whom one witness thought was ‘Cracked in his wits’) replied that he cared neither for Skinner nor the bishop, adding that ‘there hath not been a good sermon in the town since the Bishop came’. In mid-June, Skinner himself reproached an Ipswichian called Thurston Ashley for ‘reviling speeches’ Ashley had supposedly used against Bishop Wren (Ashley had blamed Wren for ‘these popish orders’, ‘publicly wished his Lordship Confusion’ and hoped that he should ‘ere long … see him come to ruin’). Ashley retorted by calling Skinner ‘drunken parson, base knave & many other reproachful terms’, nearly ‘provok[ing]’ Skinner ‘to Combat’. The prospect of violence was never far off; Skinner had in fact already been assaulted in the street, early in the visitation, by Philip Courtnall, a longtime town official. Courtnall, the town crier and deputy clerk of the market, struck Skinner ‘with a Cudgel and did also then & there with his naked knife drawn violently assault the said Mr Skinner and swore a great oath he would stab him & would then have murdered him if he had not suddenly escaped’. Skinner refused to make a formal complaint against Courtnall, so no action was taken; nevertheless, Skinner thereafter ‘went in fear of his life’; when 83

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 83

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Skinner later encountered Courtnall at a county sessions, ‘Courntall outfaced him, nodded & laughed at him’.68 Some of the language used by the Puritan clergy seemed to condone this physical confrontation. At a sermon preached at St Mary-le-Tower on 23 April, after the string of suspensions, a visiting Essex minister named Henry Holton expounded on the ‘people’s duty’ to ‘maintain the gospel & the liberty of their ministers’. This duty was especially incumbent, Holton argued, in Ipswich. ‘There is no town under the sun’, Holton told his auditors, ‘to be compared with this town in knowledge & the means of knowledge, which it hath long time enjoyed.’ Holton did not directly apply his words to recent events, but hinted broadly that such applications ought to be made. ‘I speak to wise men’, he said; ‘judge ye what I say & the Lord give you understanding in all things.’ In Ipswich, he concluded, ‘there was never any time when there was more need then [than] now for the people to pray for their ministers’­ – ­or, indeed, to do more than pray. It was necessary, Holton continued, ‘with might & main & all the power they have’ to ‘fight for the gospel & purity of it’ (this last phrase Holton ‘repeat[ed] diverse times’). ‘Now’, Holton urged, was the ‘time of fighting’, or else the town would find ‘superstition’ and ‘idolatry’ ‘thrust upon you’.69 Violence loomed over the proceedings throughout the spring and summer. When Wren walked to his local parish church, St Peter, the local ‘boys’ sometimes tried to intimidate him, ‘star[ing] in his face very uncivilly & when he was past them they would run past him again & stare in his face again in an insolent & uncivil manner’. Several of the bishop’s servants deposed that stones were thrown at them as they went ‘about the streets’, and one of Wren’s servants was badly beaten by a group of sailors. ‘Sirra’, they said to him (as he deposed), ‘you are one of the Bishop’s servants’; then they ‘took him by the throat beat him threw him to the ground & kicked him’. The victim cried out ‘murder’, but ‘the neighbours’ merely ‘laughed at him’. This time the bailiffs did investigate, and an offender, Richard Baldwyn, was duly arrested, convicted and fined £5.70 Most worrisome of all were the death threats. As George Eastlowe, a young Oxford student, passed through St Nicholas’s churchyard, he overheard three ‘fellows discoursing’ on how best to assault the bishop; suggestions included ‘pluck[ing] his smock as he Called it over his ears’ or ‘pistoling him in his Coach’ or ‘as he went to Church’; but all agreed ‘it was their own fault they were not rid of him’.71 Other reports were at greater removes: Skinner, for example, told several people that he had heard threats to kill the bishop; when the magistrates asked him to account for these rumours, Skinner said that he had heard Roger Seely say that one Harper of the nearby village of Washbrook had been told by an unnamed woman of St Clement that ‘the Sailors threatened if Mr Scott & the rest of the ministers which were suspended were not restored when they came home they would either knock the Bishops brains out or pull his house down over his head’. This was quadruple 84

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 84

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

hearsay, but the Ipswich magistrates did interview Seely, whose version was somewhat less threatening, and there they let the matter drop.72 This extreme distancing in oral transmission recurs throughout the evidence. John Cole deposed that Elizabeth Clarke of Tannington told him that her husband told her that he, William Clarke, had heard someone he didn’t name say ‘it was pity’ Wren ‘was not served as the duke of Buckingham was’­ – ­that is, assassinated. Clarke also supposedly told his wife that he had heard similar words at Ipswich ‘about the market place’. One of the bishop’s servants reported hearing a similar threat in very similar words, suggesting that we are here seeing the vestiges of a widespread underground discourse.73 Indeed, one effect of the investigation eventually launched into these events was to make visible the underground oral circulation of particular phrases and ideas, mentioned repeatedly by different witnesses in different contexts. The notion that the power of visitation could be conferred only by a warrant under the king’s great seal­– ­a critique floated in print the same year by Henry Burton­– ­was mentioned by both Ferdinando Adam’s daughter and Edmund Parsley; several others seemed fixated on Wren’s ‘new orders’ or ‘popish orders’; while others suggested that Wren should be ‘served’ as the duke of Buckingham had been.74 The most dramatic incident was, undoubtedly, the riot itself. Only a handful of the forty-seven examinations taken after the riot survive in any form; and there were no successful convictions, so what follows should be taken with several grains of salt. However, a fairly consistent picture begins to emerge. The riot began as an attempt to present a petition to Bishop Wren requesting the reinstatement of Nicholas Beard, the suspended curate of St Peter. The core of the crowd were a group of shipwrights, the servants and apprentices of Jeremy Cole­ – ­who was, perhaps not incidentally, a tenant of the bishop­ – ­though at least some suspected that the real animating force was Cole’s wife. Cole’s servants had apparently gone round to the shops of other tradesmen asking them to join in the assembly, and assuring them that ‘they were set on’ by ‘very good and sufficient men nay the best in their parish’ who would ‘bear them out’. In some ways the parish, rather than the town, was the critical site of the action. Both Cole and Wren were residents of the parish of St Peter. On the evening of 11 August, the ringing of the bells of St Peter was the signal for the around a hundred ‘Apprentices Ship Carpenters Sailors’ and assorted ‘young fellows’ to assemble. The crowd then made a short procession to Wren’s house­– ­the same route along which the parish youths sometimes tried to stare Wren down (and indeed some of these may have been the same people). Once arrived, elements of the assembly forced their way into the entry hall and demanded to speak with the bishop about the restitution of Nicholas Beard, recently suspended from his ministry in St Peter. As one of Wren’s servants reported, they argued that ‘as they had earthly food so they wanted their heavenly food, in which cause they would spend their blood but they would have Mr Beard restored’. 85

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 85

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

When the servants refused to allow them to speak to Wren, they delivered ‘a paper or petition’ outlining the demand, ‘requir[ing] an answer that night’. Eventually perceiving the petitioners would not leave, Wren’s servants drew their swords and forced them out. Many lingered outside the house until midnight, still demanding the restoration of the minister, rejecting the ‘new orders’ and saying they would not ‘be domineered over by a Bishop’. The town’s investigation came to slightly different conclusions: the petition was never a mass project, and had been managed orderly enough, if unwisely, by at most ten ‘green-headed, rude, and indiscreet youths’; the subsequent confrontation between the petitioners and the bishop’s servants brought a crowd into the streets, and it was this crowd that was responsible for the worst of the language and violence.75 The boys, the sailors, the apprentice shipwrights, the larger crowd and even Courtnall appear to have been drawing on what Alexandra Shepard has described as an almost plebeian masculinity, emphasising physical strength and fearlessness.76 Whilst the magistrates petitioned, the less powerful men and women of Ipswich contested the very streets of the town. Both Wren and Charles were incensed by the failure of the Ipswich magistrates to adequately suppress the riots and the other misdemeanours committed in the town; a remonstrance submitted by the town in November 1636 defending their conduct had little impact; as Wren complained in December the ‘false & scandalous clamours’ had begun to ‘ring all the Land over’. Indeed, just as the Ipswich Puritans had drawn some of their ideas from the printed sermons of Henry Burton, so were some of their experiences translated into print; perhaps in Heylyn’s Coale from the Altar, but certainly in William Prynne’s notorious Newes from Ipswich. Although mostly given over to denunciations of bishops in general and complaints from the London diocese, Newes from Ipswich exhibited a number of distinct Ipswichian elements. Edmond Day’s comment about the suspensions leading to a shortage of ministers reminiscent of Queen Mary’s days was quoted nearly verbatim. After attacking the conduct of ‘little Pope Regulus’­ – ­regulus being the Latin term for a wren­ – ­Newes from Ipswich promised a follow-up ‘Coranto’ that would detail how ‘Mr. Dade’ had excommunicated ‘Ferdinando Adams … for not blotting out of this sentence of Scripture written on Mr. Wards Churchwall over his bawdy thievish Court It is written, My house shall be called an house of Prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves’; how a similar order had required the sentence ‘Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel’ out of ‘Mr. Scots Church’; and further details from across the diocese.77 In early March 1637, as the Attorney General was preparing a case against Henry Burton, William Prynne and others for their scandalous pamphlets and conduct, Wren reminded King Charles of the ‘outrages’ committed against him and his allies and of the corporation’s ‘express refusal to submit’ to the royal commission for ordering the town clergy. This was no longer 86

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 86

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

merely a diocesan matter, to be solved through the application of spiritual discipline; instead, Wren, requested, the Attorney General ought to review ‘all those passages which have befallen within this year, in the said town’ to see what they might ‘amount unto in Law’.78 The results were a Star Chamber suit (depositions collected for the suit in 1638 form a large part of the source base for this chapter) and a fateful Privy Council meeting. On 29 March 1637, in the presence of both Charles and Wren, and after arguments advanced by counsel on both sides, the board concluded that ‘no Title at all, could be showed by the said Townsmen, & their Counsel, for their Nomination of the Stipendiary Ministers, of the said parishes’. The right to present to those churches had belonged to the religious houses before the dissolution; and therefore, with the rest of the monastic property, must have ‘wholly devolved to the Crown … the Right of Nomination of all the said Stipendiary Ministers’, the Privy Council concluded, ‘is solely in the kings Majesty as he shall be pleased to dispose of the same’.79 In the end, the power to set rates was left to the corporation, but the presentation rights were seized. This, the Ipswich corporation later complained, meant that Wren could ‘get into the said Churches such Curates as were for his own mind’. Sure enough, Wren and Charles began appointing conformist clergy to serve the Ipswich cures. Despite his harassment in St Nicholas, Wren’s chaplain John Duncon accepted the cure of St Mary Stoke in September 1637; Duncon was a fellow of Pembroke College and the younger brother of the Laudian theologian Eleazar Duncon. The appointee for St Mary-le-Tower, another Pembroke fellow, Gawin Nash (‘God grant’, joked Corbet, ‘they doe not gnash upon Nash as the Jews did upon [St] Stephen’), was ‘very contentious’, used ‘ambiguous and doubtful words & phrases’ in discussing the real presence, suggested there were more sacraments than two, and asserted that kings owed their crowns to bishops and ought not to meddle in Church affairs. Edmund Baldero­ – ­who in 1663 would become Master of Jesus College, Cambridge­ – ­was installed as curate in St Lawrence. Not only was Baldero ‘scandalous in his life and conversation’, the Ipswichians complained, but also­ – ­breaking with ‘the use’ of ‘thirty years’­ – ­he refused to administer communion even to kneeling parishioners unless they came right up to the rail, claiming ‘he had taken an Oath to Bishop Wren when he came thither to observe all his Orders & Injunctions’. Duncon, Nash and Baldero joined a handful of conformists who had survived the Ward years: William Hubbard, the long-serving curate of St Matthew; Thomas Foster; and William Geast, appointed to the cure of St Margaret by the lay patron, Sir William Withypoll. Geast had testified against Ward and had made himself a reliable ally of Wren’s diocesan administration. Perhaps an important sign of the new climate in Ipswich was this: even after being appointed to wealthy cures elsewhere in the diocese, Geast remained in Ipswich, serving the other livings by curates but officiating at St Margaret himself. Geast was allegedly 87

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 87

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

‘superstitious’ in his style of worship, ‘bowing & cringing at or before the Communion Table’, holding up two fingers when reading the absolution, and making the sign of the cross not only at baptism but also on the bread and cup at the administration of the Eucharist; he remained in Ipswich ‘only’, the inhabitants complained, ‘to trouble & molest’ them.80 Wren’s translation to Ely in 1638 cheered the Ipswich godly­ – ­indeed, Wren’s thirty months in the diocese gave rise to an entire genre of Suffolk joke, ‘Bishop Wren and an Ipswich Puritan’­– ­and the Ipswichians petitioned heartily against Wren and the changes he had wrought in the opening months of the Long Parliament. In January 1641, as part of a wave of concessions, King Charles and the Privy Council vacated the orders of March 1637, allowing ‘the nomination of the stipendiary ministers’ to ‘stand and remain as they were before’.81 Ipswich’s experience with Laudianism was not unique­ – ­Shrewsbury went through something quite similar­ – ­but it is instructive.82 The sheer extent to which the rulers of Ipswich had arrogated ecclesiastical jurisdiction to themselves made the Laudians focus heavily on diminishing corporate power; or, more precisely, in subordinating local institutions to intermediate layers of control. Rather than Ipswich’s magistrates exercising powers directly on behalf of the king, Ipswich would be placed under layers of oversight that gradually wended their way to the king. This perspective is important because it clarifies how closely Laudianism resembled the many other Caroline projects that equally sought to reorganise the geography of power. The most famous such attempts are the 1631 Book of Orders. These not only offered JPs direction on solving problems from vagabonds to dearth and plague but also set up potentially onerous meeting and reporting requirements, at least notionally establishing lines of oversight that ran from high constables, through JPs, sheriffs and assize judges all the way to the Privy Council itself. As was usual for early modern reforms, uptake was patchy: the production of certificates was never a priority for most JPs and non-production was never a priority for the Privy Council. But the attempt to use reporting requirements to monitor and prod JPs, and thus to reorder the relationships of power and communication between centre and locality, was, as Quintrell showed, the heart of the project. Under a Caroline ‘politics of space’ we might also class the conversion of sheriffs into ship-money collectors, personally liable for the contributions of their country; the establishment of post systems; the revival of forest law in Essex and Gloucestershire; the creation of new arable land through fen drainage in Somerset and the east; and the attempts to convert London into a royal capital by regulating construction and pollution.83 Indeed, a surprisingly similar story to the one recounted in this chapter can be told about Ipswich’s claim to exercise vice-admiralty jurisdiction­– ­not the subject to launch a thousand book contracts. According to the town, the corporation itself was the vice-admiral, and the bailiffs were the local admiralty judges; a position the Admiralty official Thomas Aylesbury in 1625 thought 88

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 88

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich

tenuous. Not only ‘Ipswich’ but many ‘other towns Corporate … pretend’ to ‘Admiralty Jurisdiction’, Aylesbury wrote; ‘few’, however, had ‘yet proved’ it. In late 1632, an Admiralty investigation into encroachments on Admiralty jurisdiction found that ‘the greatest part’ of England’s coasts, including almost the entire coast of East Anglia, had been ‘appropriated’ by ‘Towns Corporate’ or private manorial lords; if nothing were done, the revenue and power of the admiralty would ‘in short time … utterly be lost’. Their proposed solution was simple: quo warranto. By quo warranto actions in the court of Exchequer, both corporate towns and private landlords might be made to demonstrate the ground of their claims; under such scrutiny, wrote the civil lawyer Thomas Rives and his coadjutors, ‘we believe that very few of those pretended grants will prove to be any value’. The Admiralty commissioners agreed, and after consulting with the king, requested Attorney General Noy to begin proceedings. Ipswich would pursue its traditional course of petitioning and litigation, eventually paying £423 to settle the claim.84 In fact Ipswich faced a barrage of quo warranto proceedings beginning in June 1631. It is not always possible to learn what exactly was being questioned, but throughout the 1630s the corporation spent huge amounts of time and money sending representatives to London, carrying ‘Charters & books & writings’, to answer this or that ‘quo warranto’.85 Even in July 1640, the closing moments of Charles I’s Personal Rule, the courtiers George Kirke and Henry Jermyn petitioned the king for a commission to enquire into Ipswich’s charter violations. An attached schedule of fourteen ‘privileges usurped’ alleged that almost every part of the government of the town­ – ­the regulation of fairs and markets, the court of record, the nomination of the town recorder, the conduct of the magistrates­ – ­had been conducted improperly, according to ‘prescription and custom’ rather than by ‘warrant’ or ‘Charter’. The commission Kirke and Jermyn requested would examine these violations and compound with the town for decades’ worth of ‘profits unjustly obtained’, offering Charles a quarter of the proceeds. Charles referred the petition to Attorney General Bankes on 31 July 1640.86 Kirke and Jermyn were courtiers with no Ipswich connections; they almost certainly had a silent partner, a local who hoped to profit by bringing trouble on his neighbours. In other words, the ecclesiastical government of the town parishes was only one of the many state functions that the logic of Caroline projecting and reform was trying to claw back from town corporations and allot to different parts of the state. Rather than being vice-admirals, deputy lieutenants, deputy sheriffs and even ecclesiastical ordinaries, the governors of Ipswich would become subject to the Vice Admiral of Suffolk, the Deputy Lieutenants of Suffolk, the Sheriff of Suffolk and the Bishop of Norwich. What we see emerging in the 1630s, then, was perhaps not merely a set of disconnected reform programmes but a particular Personal-Rule reforming style: a preference for fragmented over consolidated jurisdiction; a concern to reintegrate privileged localities into lines of vertical authority; and, above all, a careful attention to 89

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 89

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

the geographies of power, to the ways that space and place could create, or close down, room for rebellion.

NOTES 1 Suffolk RO, Ipswich branch (hereafter SRO), C/1/6/8/1, fos 3–4; Frank Grace, ‘“Schismaticall and Factious Humours”: opposition in Ipswich to Laudian church government in the 1630s’, in David Chadd (ed.), Religious Dissent in East Anglia III (Norwich, 1996), pp. 97–120. 2 Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559– 1625 (Oxford, 1982), ch. 4, esp. pp. 147–50, 170–8. 3 John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (London, 1976); Russell, Parliaments, ch. 1; Sharpe, ‘Communication’. 4 E.g. Peter Lake, ‘The collection of Ship Money in Cheshire during the sixteenthirties’, Northern History, 17 (1981), 44–71; Cust, ‘Parliamentary elections’; more generally, Fletcher, ‘National and local’. 5 Lake and Pincus (eds), Public Sphere; Peacey, Print and Public Politics; Millstone, Manuscript Circulation. 6 For a piece that takes distance seriously, see William J. Bulman, ‘The practice of politics: the English Civil War and the “resolution” of Henrietta Maria and Charles I’, P&P, 206 (2010), 43–79. 7 TNA, SP 14/130/130; Michael Reed, ‘Economic structure and change in seventeenth-century Ipswich’, in Peter Clark (ed.), Country Towns in Pre-industrial England (Leicester, 1981), pp. 92–6. 8 Reed, ‘Economic structure and change’, pp. 89–92; Nathaniell Bacon, The Annalls of Ipswche, ed. William H. Richardson (Ipswich, 1884). 9 Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2011), pp. 9, 213–14. 10 Catherine F. Patterson, ‘Corporations, cathedrals and the crown: local dispute and royal interest in the early Stuart England’, History, 85 (2000), 546–71. 11 Lincolnshire Archives, Grantham Borough 5/1; HoP 1604–1629, II, pp. 233–4. 12 BL, Add. 39,245, fos 10v, 43 etc.; TNA, SP 16/34/58; SP 16/105/109. 13 Diarmaid MacCulloch and John Blatchly, ‘Pastoral provision in the parishes of Tudor Ipswich’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 22 (1991), 458–70. 14 Ibid., 471–4. 15 J.M. Blatchly, ‘Ward, Samuel (1577–1640)’, ODNB. 16 Beinecke Library, Yale, Osborn b197, 177–9; for Garthwait, see SRO, C/3/2/2/2, fo. 27v. 17 Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), pp. 157–8; SRO, C/3/3/2/41; BL, Add. 25,344, fo. 58. 18 Nicholas W.S. Cranfield, ‘Harsnett, Samuel’, ODNB. 19 TNA, SO 3/7, unfol.; Bodl. MS Tanner 265, fo. 28; Matthew Reynolds, Godly Reformers and Their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c.1560–1643 (Woodbridge, 2005), p. 118. 20 Bodl., MS Tanner 265, fo. 28. 21 Reynolds, Godly Reformers, pp. 118–20. 90

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 90

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich 22 SRO, C/4/3/1/5, fos 36, 38v, 42, 43–5, 54; C/3/4/1/46, fo. 5; Reynolds, Godly Reformers, ch. 7. 23 Al. Cant., III, p. 331. 24 Ibid., II, p. 2; FSL, G.b.10, fos 58, 62v; TNA, SP 16/34/58. 25 For Ipswich, see below; for elsewhere in the diocese, see Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, c.1547–c.1700 (Oxford, 2007), p. 187; Norfolk RO (hereafter NRO), DN/VIS 6/4. 26 NRO, DN/VIS 6/4; TNA, SP 16/262/17. 27 TNA, SP 16/262/17. 28 TNA, PC 2/44, fos 78, 96; SP 16/261, fos 132v, 176v; SP 16/280/71. 29 TNA, SP 16/261, fos 304v–5; SP 16/302/89 I; SP 16/278/65, fos 147v–8. 30 TNA, SP 16/278, fos 65, 140, 146–7; SP 16/215, fos 304v–5. 31 TNA, SP 16/293, fos 128, 265–v; NRO, DN/VSC 2/3a. 32 TNA, SO 3/11, unfol.; Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fo. 20. 33 Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian style: order, uniformity and the pursuit of the beauty of holiness in the 1630s’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church (London, 1993), pp. 164–77; Louise Durning and Clare Tilbury, ‘“Looking unto Jesus”: image and belief in a seventeenth-century English chancel’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 60 (2009), 490–513. 34 E.g., CUL, MS Dd.5.31, fos 181–2v; John Pocklington, Altare Christianum (2nd edn, 1637), p. 175. 35 Fincham and Tyacke, Altars, p. 187; NRO, DN/VIS 6/4; SRO, FB 95/A2/1, fo. 94v; SRO, E91/E1/1, p. 105; FB 98 E3/1; TNA, SP 16/346/26. 36 Articles to be Enquired of in the Ordinary Visitation of the Right Worshipfull Master Doctor Pearson (1637), sigs A2–v; NRO, DN/VSC 2/3b; TNA, SP 16/346/26. 37 Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fo. 198. 38 SRO, FB 107/A1/1, fo. 24. 39 SRO, FB 91/E1/1, pp. 113–14. 40 SRO, FB 98/E3/1, unfol. 41 SRO, FB 91/E1/1, pp. 61, 65, 71, 75, 79, 85, 91, 97, 103, 107, 110. In 1636 the bible was listed as ‘formerly lent’ to Ward: p. 116. 42 SRO, FB 91/A1/1, fos 2, 13. 43 Dade also claimed that Adam had ignored Brent’s injunction to rail the altar. TNA, SP 16/308/23; SP 16/346/26. 44 SRO, C/1/6/8/1, fo. 6; for Baddison’s work with St Mary-le-Tower, see FB91/E1/1, passim. 45 Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fos 45–v; SRO, C/1/6/8/1, fos 1–2, 11. For the significance of requiring the ‘great seal of England’, see below. 46 Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fos 24–v, 33. 47 Ibid., fos 29–v, 45. 48 Ibid., fos 236v, 45v, 50; MS Tanner 314, fos 138–v. 49 SRO, C/1/6/8/1, fos 3, 16; Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fos 49, 50, 57, 288. 50 Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fos 30v, 293; MS Tanner 314, fo. 127. 51 Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fos 134–v. 52 Bodl., MS Tanner 220, fos 15–17; TNA, SP 16/339/19. 53 SRO, C/1/6/8/1, fo. 21. 54 Nicholas W.S. Cranfield, ‘Wren, Matthew’, ODNB. 91

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 91

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 55 Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fo. 173; MS Rawlinson C 368, fo. 2. 56 Cranfield, ‘Wren’; SRO, C/3/2/2/2, fo. 58v; FB 91/D1/1, fo. 31v; C/1/6/8/1, fos 1–2, 11; TNA, SP 16/302/89 I; Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fos 45–v; Elizabeth Allen, ‘Lany, Benjamin’, ODNB. 57 Bodl., MS Rawlinson C 368, fos 2–3; MS Tanner 68, fo. 207; TNA, SP 16/337, fos 19, 37–8v. 58 Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fos 287, 295, 296, 301–2, 210v; MS Rawlinson C 368, fos 2–10. 59 J.F. Merritt, ‘Contested legitimacy and the ambiguous rise of vestries in early modern London’, HJ, 54 (2011), 33–43; [Peter Heylyn,] A Coale from the Altar (1636), p. 10; Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (1668), pp. 313–14. 60 Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fo. 92–v. 61 Ibid., fo. 173. 62 TNA, C 66/2745, mm18–19. 63 Bodl., MS Tanner 265, fo. 113–v. 64 SRO, C/1/6/8/1, fos 16, 26–7; C/1/6/8/2, fo. 6; C/4/3/1/5, fo. 136. 65 SRO, C/1/6/8/2, fo. 6; Bodl., MS Tanner 70, fo. 104. 66 SRO, C/1/6/8/2, fo. 4; C/1/6/8/1, fo. 13. 67 C/1/6/8/1, fo. 13, fos 22–3. 68 Ibid., fos 4, 22–3. 69 Ibid., fos 2, 14–15. 70 Ibid., fos 22–3; C/1/6/8/2, fo. 4. 71 SRO, C/1/6/8/1, fo. 22; Al. Oxon., s.v. Eastlowe, George. 72 SRO, C/1/6/8/1, fo. 23. 73 Ibid., fo. 22. 74 See above; Henry Burton, For God, and the King (1636), pp. 68–9. 75 SRO, C/1/6/8/2, fo. 3; C/1/6/8/1, fos 9, 17–19; C/3/2/2/2, fo. 56v; C/1/6/8/1, fos 19–26. 76 Alexandra Shepard, ‘Manhood, credit and patriarchy in early modern England c.1580–1640’, P&P, 167 (2000), 98–105; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), pp. 140–50. 77 TNA, SP 16/337, fos 19, 38v; [William Prynne,] Newes from Ipswich (1636), sigs ¶3v–¶4v. Regarding Heylyn’s allegations about the origins of the Coale, see above. 78 Bodl., MS Bankes 58/9, fo. 15. 79 TNA, PC 2/47, fo. 287. 80 Bodl., MS Tanner 220, fos 28, 31–6; Al. Cant., II, pp. 74, 204, III, p. 233; Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fo. 236v; TNA, SP 16/407, fos 6, 11. 81 Bodl., MS Tanner 68, fos 327, 11v; BL, Harl. 6,395, fos 50–3, 61; SRO, C/4/3/1/5, fos 156v, 159v; Bodl., MS Tanner 220, fos 7–43; Maija Jansson (ed.) Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament (7 vols, Rochester, NY, 2000), I, pp. 667–78, II, pp. 17–20, 145–6; TNA, SP 16/476/27. 82 Barbara Coulton, ‘Rivalry and religion: the borough of Shrewsbury in the early Stuart period’, Midland History, 28 (2003), 28–50. 83 B.W. Quintrell, ‘The making of Charles I’s Book of Orders’, EHR, 95 (1980), 553–72; Paul Slack, ‘Books of Orders: the making of English social policy, 1577– 1631’, TRHS, 30 (1980), 1–22; Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New 92

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 92

26/02/2020 08:57

Space, place and Laudianism in Ipswich Haven, 1992), ch. 7; R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘The court and its neighbourhood: royal policy and urban growth in the early Stuart West End’, JBS, 30 (1991), 117–49; William M. Cavert, ‘The environmental policy of Charles I: coal smoke and the English monarchy, 1624–40’, JBS, 53 (2014), 310–33. 84 TNA, SP 14/183/53 I; SP 16/34/58; SP 16/105/109; SP 16/231/33, III; SP 16/238/38; SP 16/228, fos 55a–6, 63a–4; SP 16/241/1; Bacon, Annalls, 507–8; SRO C/4/3/1/5, fos 128, 131. 85 SRO C/4/3/1/5, fos 103, 106–7, 108–v, 113v, 115v, 121v–2, 127, 128, 130v, 131, 143, 147v, 150v. Both more generally, and for an Ipswich case involving Lady Blount, see Catherine Patterson, ‘Quo Warranto and borough corporations in early Stuart England: royal prerogative and local privileges in the central courts’, EHR, 120 (2005), 899–900. 6 SRO, C/1/6/9; C/1/6/10. 8

93

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 93

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Chapter 5

‘Written according to my usual way’: political communication and the rise of the agent in seventeenth-century England Jason Peacey ‘

E

nclosed are the gazettes’. This is the ubiquitous phrase in the well-known but poorly understood letters­ – ­hundreds of them­ – ­sent by Richard Lapthorne of Hatton Garden in London to Richard Coffin of Portledge in Devon in the 1680s and 1690s. In itself, such a phrase seems unremarkable, similar as it is to how so many other contemporaries referred to the circulation of printed news from London, a process that can be traced back to the early seventeenth century. The aim of this chapter, however, is to suggest that in the case of Lapthorne this phrase meant something very particular, that it was indicative of an important development within contemporary culture and society and that it highlights the role of political communication in connecting centre and locality. Communication, of course, has already provided historians with a useful lens through which to deal with this topic, not least in addressing debates between revisionists and post-revisionists in the wake of provocative claims about the importance of the ‘county community’ and of localism. Scribal documents and printed pamphlets have been used to demonstrate the degree to which national issues penetrated into local cultures and society, the degree to which people across the country were engaged with, and able to follow, national affairs and the degree to which local people could influence national affairs, as authors, petitioners and lobbyists. Recent work on political communication, in other words, has detected important shifts in the kinds of information that flowed to different kinds of people, and how this was done. It has also indicated that people from all walks of life and all parts of the country became increasingly familiar with texts that originated in London; that communicative practices became less reliant on having friends who could circulate such material, thereby making national affairs accessible to people from different social groups; and that the development of a commercial print industry facilitated individual engagement and participation with current affairs. As such, a useful way has been found to challenge overly polarised accounts of local and national

94

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 94

26/02/2020 08:57

‘Written according to my usual way’

politics, and to argue that print became a central mechanism for fostering integration­– ­both socially and geographically­– ­into a shared political culture, if not necessarily into a Habermasian public sphere. Thinking about political communication, in other words, makes it harder to sustain the idea that the geographical distance between ‘centre’ and ‘locality’ was associated with different mentalities.1 Naturally, debates continue about the degree to which scholarship on communicative practices involves overly simplistic narratives and teleological trajectories, which emphasise the declining importance of sociable networks as commercial networks became more significant, and which connects this to the decline of scribal culture in the face of a print revolution. It is now widely appreciated that scribal culture was more vibrant and accessible than was once thought, that print culture did not ‘kill off’ manuscript separates, and that scribal news remained an important part of everyday life into the late seventeenth century, even if only in modified forms.2 There is certainly scope, therefore, for further work on the relative importance of scribal and print genres, as well as on the impact of the commercial or ‘bourgeois’ revolution. Indeed, this chapter seeks to engage with such debates, albeit by taking a somewhat different tack. Rather than focusing on different textual genres, and on the shifting fortunes of sociable and commercial transactions, it complicates claims regarding the transformative power of new communicative practices by accepting that the availability of print was revolutionised during the seventeenth century, while also recognising that such material might not have been accessible without mediation. It highlights persistent obstacles to the accessibility of ideas and information, and suggests that observing how these were overcome­ – ­not least through a close reading of the Portledge papers­ – ­makes it possible to revise our understanding of the challenges faced in connecting centre and locality in the early modern period. Central to my argument will be the role of agents and brokers, an issue on which scholars have done too little to recognise significant changes that took place across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This reflects the fact that, although it is widely appreciated that intermediaries played a vital role in forging and maintaining networks, in dealing with issues relating to access and proximity, and in transmitting and disseminating information, these things have generally been analysed in terms of functions, rather than professions, and attention has focused on agency and brokerage within patronage networks, often involving people who had ‘independent resources’ and ‘large clienteles’ of their own, or who were involved in more or less entrepreneurial activities within diplomatic and political networks.3 Much less attention has been paid to the kind of agency and brokerage that has been analysed by anthropologists, which recognises how such communicative work could be undertaken more or less professionally, and that the people involved were both agents of, and reflections of, social change.4 The aim here, therefore, is to build upon a relatively small and disparate body of scholarship that has 95

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 95

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

engaged with anthropological literature, that has been open to the idea that the nature of agency and agents changed fairly dramatically in the socioeconomic as well as political conditions of the early modern period, and that has explicitly reflected on the art of political communication, on how people gained access to political life and on how this impacted upon relations between ‘local life and wider life’.5 As such, while this chapter seeks to consider the availability of texts, and uses Richard Lapthorne as an example of the importance of professional agents within the communications circuit, it also places him within a wider context in which such brokers became a vital means for navigating legal and political systems, by brokering access to information and facilitating engagement with institutions in London, Whitehall and Westminster. Indeed, the aim is to suggest that by highlighting the importance of professional agents it is possible both to acknowledge and to rethink the nature of the ‘distance’ between centre and locality. My argument will be that contemporaries certainly faced challenges in engaging with the ‘centre’, but that these were not peculiar to people in the provinces, and revolved less around different mentalities than around prosaic logistical issues such as ‘time’ and ‘expertise’. The latter, of course, has become an increasingly important area of enquiry in the context of institutional change and state formation, but it often involves a rather narrow conceptualisation of the ‘expert’, not least as an agent of state power, which this chapter seeks to challenge.6 In seventeenth-century Britain the concept of the ‘agent’ was widely recognised, and whilst the term was not always used very precisely the ‘political’ overtones were perfectly apparent. Sometimes, this involved vague references to individuals serving the political interests of others: royalist agents on the continent and recusants at home during the civil wars; lawyers and propagandists like William Prynne acting as the ‘agent’ of Viscount Saye; and MPs being the ‘agents’ of peers during the Long Parliament, or indeed the ‘creatures and agents’ of regicides like Sir Michael Livesey.7 The term is most recognisable, of course, in relation to the agitators and new agents elected by New Model Army regiments in 1647, in order to represent ordinary soldiers at army councils. However, the term could also be used to denote political activity in ways that were rather clearer, in relation to a range of important roles within contemporary society. This involved diplomatic agents who served in an official capacity overseas, and those who travelled to London­ – ­and to Parliament­ – ­to defend or advance the interests of Irish Protestants and Londonderry planters, as well as colonial governors and assemblies.8 Moreover, political services came to be seen as being more or less intimately connected even to those forms of agency that were primarily ­concerned with other matters. This was true for those agents (or ‘factors’) fr­om the world of trade, in terms of merchants who served the interests of colleagues and companies, both domestically and overseas, and who formed key nodes in 96

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 96

26/02/2020 08:57

‘Written according to my usual way’

financial and credit networks, as well as those scriveners who played an important role in the evolution of banking services. Some of these­ – ­like John Milton senior and Robert Abbott­ – ­had formal training and served as both legal and financial intermediaries, and Abbott was sufficiently well connected to become involved in the abortive ‘Waller plot’ of 1643.9 Likewise, the London tailor William Perkins was involved not just in providing financial services but also in other forms of agency, and he was described as the Earl of Cork’s London agent, and as ‘my Lord Say’s tailor’, in ways which suggested that his work for political grandees involved more than merely making new suits.10 Much the same can also be said of stewards who worked for individual nobles and gentlemen, particularly to the extent that this involved not just precise and formal duties relating to the running of an estate but also mediation between absentee landlords and their tenants and local communities, and the ‘ambassadorial’ and legal services that men like John Smyth of Nibley could provide.11 In the case of the MP Henry Marten, therefore, it seems clear that stewards like Thomas Deane doubled up as election agents.12 Frequent reference is also made, of course, to agents who were connected to members of the political elite, whether from the aristocracy or the greater gentry: William Lynne, referred to by the Earl of Bath as ‘my agent in London’ in 1648, and Mr Bridges, ‘solicitor’ or agent to Lord Brooke, as well as the agents who represented Sir Justinian Isham (Henry Perian), served the executors of the 3rd Earl of Essex and John Pym (William Jessop and John Cox), and looked after Cromwell’s property interests.13 The work of such men involved both estate business and legal matters, but it very obviously extended to political lobbying, of the kind undertaken by the man who attended Parliament in 1645 as an agent from the Earl of Devonshire.14 As such, many of these ‘agents’ could legitimately be described as ‘men of business’, including those who fulfilled political duties for the Earl of Strafford (William Raylton) or George Monck (Thomas Clarges), perhaps at the same time as being minor officials within Whitehall, and perhaps even in Parliament.15 Such evidence about the expansive and political nature of the work done by men who were explicitly described as agents, factors and brokers makes it clear that their roles were analogous to the activities performed by other contemporaries who were rarely given such names, and almost synonymous with some of those who had formal legal training. These included officeholders within civic corporations­– ­recorders, town clerks and chamberlains­ – ­who often promoted the interests of their towns, not least in London and Westminster, and they also included lawyers who were paid as retained counsel by civic authorities and mercantile bodies, as well as ‘solicitors’ from the lower branch of the legal profession, many of whom had private practices, acted as manorial stewards and held minor offices locally and nationally, and who were sometimes difficult to distinguish from other kinds of ‘agent’. A typical example is Anthony Langstone, a member of Clement’s Inn whose 97

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 97

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

other roles included being a capital burgess at Evesham, a borough for which he performed unspecified services in London, before eventually being made deputy recorder and then the town’s MP.16 Understanding the world of the early modern agent is admittedly fraught with difficulties, because of terminological imprecision and because mediation took a variety of forms. The roles of those involved were only more or less formal and more or less specific, and their relationships with clients, patrons and employers may only have been more or less stable, more or less exclusive and more or less hierarchical, and it would be naive to discount the possibility that ‘agents’ and ‘brokers’ were able to leverage power and influence for their own purposes.17 Nevertheless, ‘agents’ of all kinds were involved in specific pieces of business wherein ‘principals’ required assistance, bridging the geographical gap between centre and locality, navigating the jurisdictional boundaries between different institutions and dealing with the practical and technical challenges involved. Indeed, all of these different kinds of agency involved the likelihood that the tasks involved would have political dimensions, either in terms of creating the possibility for political brokerage or in terms of requiring engagement with political processes. ‘Agents’, in other words, were a more or less important part of early modern society, and valuable because of their ‘expertise’. However, while this issue of expertise has generated considerable­ – ­if disparate­ – ­scholarly interest, it is poorly understood in relation to those whose services were more or less occasional and informal, whose abilities may have involved tacit knowledge as much as formal skills, and who were not necessarily accredited in explicit ways, as well as those who did not necessarily serve the state and enable it to extend its ‘reach’ in one way or another.18 Part of the interest here, indeed, is that this was arguably the kind of expertise that witnessed most significant change across the early modern period. What also needs to be recognised, therefore, is a more humble or everyday kind of commissioned, paid and even salaried service, which certainly related to processes of state formation, but which also reflected the need to deal with everyday challenges, and with the kinds of political and administrative processes that were transformed not just by civil war and revolution but also by broader forces of social and economic change. This means acknowledging that the demographic and socio-economic forces which generated the massive growth of civil litigation and the ‘rise of the barristers’, and which can also be associated with the period’s educational revolution, also led to the rise of the professional agent, and that many such men engaged in work that intersected with, and overlapped with, the work of attorneys and solicitors who formed the lower branch of the legal profession, as well as of estate stewards, and of the kind of minor functionaries who would eventually staff the burgeoning bureaucracy of the seventeenth-century state. It is certainly worth noting that an array of ‘agents’ were used­– ­even if only 98

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 98

26/02/2020 08:57

‘Written according to my usual way’

sometimes formally employed­– ­by a range of different committees and commissions that were based both in Westminster and the localities, as part of a rapidly developing centralised state. During the 1640s and 1650s, therefore, men like Edward West worked as agents for county committees, and mediated between central and local sequestrators, including William Eccleston, whose accounts survive in relation to Leyland hundred in Lancashire in 1652.19 We might also highlight Mr Powell, who worked with the sequestrators in Middlesex, and Richard Nunnelley, who was paid £10 for six months as an agent of the army committee in 1648, as well as Richard Boughton, who worked as an agent for bringing in assessments in Sussex in the late 1640s, at a rate of 6s 8d per day.20 These men were vital to the efficient working of the parliamentarian state, and to the way in which local and national bodies dealt with each other, but they have not received adequate attention in studies of seventeenth-century bureaucracy because they­ – ­like some other ‘agents’­ – ­are hard to give clear labels, often being referred to by names like ‘usher’, ‘messenger’ or ‘solicitor’. Nevertheless, they were appointed in vast numbers, and, however vague their roles may have been, they certainly included service­– ­and considerable time­– ­in London as well as in the localities, and their work raised profound questions about the relationship between central authorities and local administration.21 It is possible, therefore, to observe local committees asking to be able to appoint agents in ever-larger numbers in order to undertake tasks that had been assigned to them, and recommending or even appointing particular men.22 At the same time, it is also possible to demonstrate that while central committees were sometimes willing to delegate their authority in such areas, they also insisted on their power to appoint, commission and regulate agents, in relation to their salaries as well as their behaviour, and to hold them to account.23 This could result in uncertainty over whether specific individuals were agents of central or local bodies, as well as tension over the suitability and performance of particular men, although it seems clear that there was a general move towards central control, with national bodies becoming the places to which individual agents applied and appealed.24 Such evidence certainly supports the idea that agents and brokers form part of the story of state formation and the evolution of early modern bureaucracies.25 Nevertheless, perhaps more interesting are those ‘agents’ whose emergence may well have reflected the processes of state formation, but who also made it possible for people to approach the state rather than to work for it. Civic corporations, for example, began to rely on more than just their formal officers for such tasks, perhaps because these men tended to have busy careers in the law courts or were somewhat preoccupied with formal duties in their towns and cities, meaning that there was value in employing men who could perform important but tedious services in London and Westminster, perhaps in rather ad hoc ways that involved specific commissions. The phenomenon of the London agent of provincial boroughs can be observed from at least the 99

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 99

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

late sixteenth century, involving men like Thomas Treffry, a Middle Temple lawyer who served as agent for Fowey before becoming the town’s MP in 1597, and George Parkins, an Inner Temple lawyer who was active in promoting the interests of Leicester, not least in relation to the town’s petition for a new charter in the 1590s. He too moved from being a London agent to serving as an MP. The role of such men was clearly distinguished from those of retained counsel and borough officials. The City of London, for example, sometimes used men like William Dyos and Clement Mosse as ‘solicitors’ in relation to particular matters in the early seventeenth century, and on one occasion used a scrivener called Mr Stanley to promote a parliamentary bill.26 The corporation’s ‘cash accounts’, moreover, clearly distinguish fees that were paid to retained counsel, and to officials like the ‘remembrancer’ and ‘recorder’, from those given to men like Robert Marsh, who was referred to as a ‘solicitor’. Marsh evidently served as an agent who could be used to solicit particular matters, as reflected in ‘charges by him disbursed at Westminster’ relating to specific petitions and bills, and to ‘diverse extraordinary services’.27 Such agents not only had a distinctive role, but they also became much more numerous over time, not least in response to the existence of long and increasingly regular parliaments.28 From at least October 1640, therefore, the corporation at Yarmouth referred to its agent in London and Westminster, while in 1643, Gloucester corporation sent an agent to London to seek money from Parliament, and in 1654 the MP Harbert Morley mentioned in his correspondence with the corporation at Rye the role of ‘your agent’­– ­one Mr Miller­– ­in relation to the business of the town’s harbour.29 During the 1650s, meanwhile, the MP for Norwich, Thomas Atkin, made repeated references in his letters to the corporation to the progress of parliamentary business, by referring to ‘your agents’ who attended upon committees. He explained that ‘we have your agents’ daily remembrances at the parliament door’, adding that he was ‘very sensible of their long attendance’, and that ‘I wish I could get their despatch’.30 Likewise, the corporation at Leeds sought a ‘solicitor or agent to attend … during the session of the parliament’, and considered appointing both Major Greathead and Colonel Gill.31 A particularly rich picture of the men, the money and the work involved in such agency relates to the boroughs of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Berwick-upon-Tweed, both of which used agents to ‘agitate the town’s occasions’ and to ‘solicit Parliament men’ from the 1630s onwards.32 Here the evidence is revealing for four reasons. First, it reveals the importance of hiring men who were based in London, like the clothworker William Stacie, who might be able to devote time to petitioning, lobbying and other forms of brokerage. Second, it reveals how well remunerated such men could be: Basil Sprigge was paid £20 per annum at Berwick, while William Maddison received £40 per annum at Newcastle. Third, it makes clear the value of using men who were well-connected and familiar with the corridors of power at Westminster, like Samuel Hartlib junior and John Rushworth, 100

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 100

26/02/2020 08:57

‘Written according to my usual way’

the latter of whom is well known for his association with the New Model Army and his Historical Collections, but who also worked as an agent from the late 1630s until the late 1660s. Fourth, it reveals how valued such men could be, in the sense that Rushworth was employed by both towns, while Hartlib worked for both boroughs as well as for the corporation at Bristol, and perhaps others.33 Such men appear to indicate the existence of a pool of ambitious, talented and more or less specialist freelance agents looking for commissions. Many probably had some legal and clerical training, and some of them may have regarded such work as a career move. Some moved into professional agency from jobs like postmaster, and some progressed into the world of the estate steward.34 Boughton had been at Clifford’s Inn, and served as an ‘agent’ while training at the Inner Temple; like others he would go on to greater things, as a Master in Chancery and an MP. However, many such men may also have had something equally valuable, in terms of connections and on-the-job expertise as political fixers, and it is noteworthy that in 1651 the former Leveller John Wildman sought substantial fees as part of a consortium that proposed to lobby Parliament on behalf of the Gloucester corporation. Although their terms proved unacceptable, Clarendon recognised that Wildman sought to set himself up as a professional agent ‘in the solicitation of suits depending in the Parliament or before committees, where he had much credit with those who had most power to do right or wrong’.35 Moreover, the men who worked for­ – ­or sought to work for­ – ­civic corporations formed merely a tiny part of a bigger and more diverse world of professional agents from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, and others were paid for particular services by a range of other corporate bodies, including London livery companies. In 1604 the Brewers gave £5 to one George Whitton­– ­who had experience at Westminster as a former MP­– ­‘to help us prefer our bill in the Parliament house’, while in 1626 the Bakers paid £15 to a ‘solicitor’ called Thomas Reading to prefer a petition to Parliament.36 Rushworth, Maddison and Hartlib all worked for the Merchant Adventurers in Newcastle as well as for the civic authorities, in order to ‘procure friends’ and lobby MPs.37 The ‘adventurers’ for fen drainage schemes not only identified which MPs to target, and then wined and dined them assiduously, but also employed agents to lobby ‘friends in the House’ and to ensure that they were ‘better informed’. The agents for the Clothworkers, meanwhile, gathered signatures for petitions, introduced legislation into Parliament and secured specific MPs as ‘friends’, and indeed boasted about their ‘vigilant attendance’ and ‘constant endeavours’, and about the time they spent ‘at the House of Commons door’.38 Similarly, it is interesting to note the reference made to Andrew Kynaston as the solicitor for a group of provincial counties during a parliamentary investigation into the jurisdiction of the Council of the Marches in 1641, alongside a range of other ‘agents’.39 The result of such developments was that freelance fixers became available 101

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 101

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

on a more or less contractual basis for people from beyond the political, propertied and mercantile elite, enabling many more people­ – ­and perhaps even humble provincial citizens­ – ­to navigate political and legal systems. Obviously, this is another area fraught with difficulties, because of a lack of clarity regarding the roles performed by particular individuals. Thus, while it is possible that this kind of agent first emerged in relation to the buying and selling of monastic and Crown lands in the mid-sixteenth century, and then flourished once Crown and church lands were sold in the mid-seventeenth century, these ‘land’ agents were rather ‘shadowy figures’, not to mention minor officials, and they are hard to distinguish from property speculators or usurers.40 Similarly, an ‘emigration agent’ like William Haveland, who operated in London in the late seventeenth century, may have been little more than a criminal kidnapper.41 More importantly, many of those who appear to have been working as agents for royalists and Catholics during the 1640s and 1650s, in order to protect their estates from sequestration, may have been motivated by personal ties­ – ­the need to help relatives­ – ­rather than professional interests. This certainly seems to have been true of the parliamentarian officer John Lambert, and it may also have been true of Wildman, who became a ‘speculator or agent’ for a range of Catholic families, and ‘a great manager of papists’s interests’, as well as for financially embattled figures like Sir John Barrington.42 Indeed, the same may also have been true of Rushworth, whose involvement in murky land transactions raised suspicions that fraud was taking place.43 Nevertheless, it seems clear that during the 1640s and 1650s agents came to be employed by a range of individuals. When the pamphleteer Henry Parker petitioned the Committee for Advance of Money from Hamburg in the late 1640s, he referred to having ‘maintained several agents for above five years to prosecute the business and bring the same to expedition, as well before other committees’.44 In the 1650s Vincent Gookin used one Mr Burniston as an agent to promote a petition to the Council of State, upon the advice of Henry Cromwell.45 Meanwhile, the royalist gentleman Jonathan Rashleigh sought help in locating ‘a little red-bearded man that sold books between the Devil tavern door and Temple Bar’, because he was known to have expertise relating to the committee at Haberdashers’ Hall.46 Usually, the employers of such agents­ – ­sometimes involving ‘contracts’ that survive­ – ­were from the elite, although such agents also began to serve much more humble citizens, and men like Gilbert Mabbott, John Warr and Adam Baynes were appointed as agents for particular army regiments, not least in the debentures market. Baynes thus became a general factotum for individual soldiers and their families, who lacked the opportunity and the skills to lobby Parliament in pursuit of their financial claims against the state.47 He attended committee hearings on their behalf, presented their papers and procured official orders, and at least some of those who used his services­ – ­such as Ann Lilburne­ – ­effectively treated him as a hired agent, who could be dismissed once he had 102

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 102

26/02/2020 08:57

‘Written according to my usual way’

achieved their goal.48 Similarly, the Dorset Clubmen were served by ‘agents’ in 1645, while one ‘J.D.’ worked as agent for poor tobacco planters in 1654, and Daniel Noddel advised the commoners who challenged fen drainers in the late 1640s. Indeed, in the early 1650s both John Lilburne and John Wildman became advisers to Noddel and his associates, and perhaps even sought election to Parliament as their agents, at least partly for pecuniary reasons.49 What is particularly intriguing about such agents is that, at a time when Parliament had become a focal point for citizens and corporate bodies alike, their activity was intimately bound up not just with the practical skills involved in navigating political processes but also with the arts of political communication. This may help to explain the overlap between brokerage and scrivening, and why Rashleigh’s red-bearded agent was also a bookseller. Moreover, as the eyes and ears of their clients and employers, agents of all kinds were involved in gathering and disseminating intelligence, not least political news, something that was obviously true of ambassadors and consuls, but that was also true of estate stewards and men of business, including John Langley, who spent long periods in London during the 1650s in order to provide detailed news on current affairs for his employer, Sir Richard Leveson.50 Similarly, William Perkins provided newsletters for the Earl of Cork, while another London tailor, John Dillingham, acted as an agent for a range of godly grandees in the late 1630s and early 1640s, and supplied newsletters to Lord Montagu of Boughton, before becoming a print journalist.51 It is clearly not coincidental, moreover, that prominent agents like Rushworth and Mabbott were intimately involved in the news industry, in terms of writing scribal newsletters and editing or licensing newsbooks. Mabbott, therefore, worked as an agent not just for the army but also for boroughs like Hull and Leith, for whom he produced petitions and liaised with the Council of State, and he was also a prolific producer of scribal newsletters for a range of clients, and a press licenser, and he too combined such work with employment as a land agent for royalists who faced sequestration.52 A corporation like Hull, indeed, made a habit of employing men who could act as ‘intelligencer’ in later decades.53 At least some of the time, moreover, this link between political brokerage and political communication extended to the production of texts, and while it is now well-known that printed petitions and breviates became an increasingly important device for lobbyists from the 1620s onwards, it also seems clear that by the late 1640s these were often produced by professional agents for paying clients.54 It is hard to avoid the conclusion that nimble writers and pamphleteers­– ­like Warr and Wildman­– ­were thought to make good agents, and it is probably no coincidence that the merchant and pamphleteer Henry Robinson, whose early life had involved providing news from Italy, possessed literary skills that were considered valuable in relation to the ­lobbying 103

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 103

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

and petitioning of Charles, Lord Stanhope, in the 1650s, in pursuit of his claims to the Post Office.55 Indeed, any number of agents became involved in the production and circulation of texts, printed or otherwise. It is possible that the agent of the Derbyshire miners, Thomas Bushell, was involved in creating rather than merely distributing his clients’ pamphlets,56 and agents for the clothiers and clothworkers­ – ­including Nathaniel Bedle, Edmund Rozer and William Talbott­ – ­all deployed printed texts for their ­employers, and ‘did constantly attend with printed arguments’. They publicised at least one breviate in a newspaper, Perfect Occurrences, and provided MPs with longer memorials, not least by referring to their ‘trouble, diligence and cost’ as lobbyists ‘before this honourable committee’.57 Similarly, the printed petition of a group of merchants from London and Bristol was produced by their three agents, Thomas Short, John Batten and Hills Whittingham, not least for distribution to MPs like Bulstrode Whitelocke.58 Daniel Nodell used printed petitions and pamphlets to advance the interests of the fenland commoners, and like Christopher Cheesman, sometime agent for sequestrations in Berkshire, he used such texts to highlight the difficulties, time and money required to engage in lobbying, as well as to decry corrupt practices at Westminster.59 If agents provided a valuable means of getting things done in the courts and at Westminster, not least through the medium of print, then such mediation was also vital to how individuals outside London navigated the world of print as consumers, and what follows represents an attempt to build upon the ways in which scholars have thought about the role of print culture in connecting centre and locality. Attention has obviously been paid to the importance of provincial bookselling, book advertisements and the emergence of ‘term catalogues’ as means for facilitating access to print; to evidence of ­customers dealing directly with London booksellers over extended periods; and to other ways in which provincial citizens were drawn into the world of print, from the process by which Thomas Edwards created Gangraena to the way in which editors of the London Gazette traded subscriptions for local intelligence. However, little attention has been paid to the role of agents and mediators in facilitating access to print, not least printers and booksellers themselves.60 In part, this requires recognising that booksellers often served as intelligence hubs, in terms of advertising calls for information about lost property, runaway servants and even crimes, and acting as estate agents.61 More obviously, it involves examining how provincial readers employed the services of intermediaries to secure regular supplies of printed material, particularly newspapers. This had obviously been done by friends and family­– ­as in the case of a newshound like John Fitzjames in the 1640s­ – ­and by agents who were connected to prominent grandees, including Dillingham.62 However, it also involved more novel forms of agency. Writing to the Bishop of Hereford 104

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 104

26/02/2020 08:57

‘Written according to my usual way’

in May 1642, for example, Edward Reed explained the methods he had employed to secure copies of printed gazettes, indicating that he sent every week to one Mr Poole for material, and complaining that ‘my agent which heretofore furnish[ed] me hath given over sending for them’.63 On this occasion, the identity and role of Poole and his ‘agent’ are somewhat unclear, and it is also difficult to know the nature of the relationship between the Barrington family and Captain Clement, who supplied them with news on numerous occasions in the 1650s, for which he was paid every few months.64 Nevertheless, it is clear that the supply and circulation of newspapers was often effected through the mediation of agents, not least local carriers, in a contractual fashion. The stewards to both the Lowther family and the Savilles of Rufford paid local carriers for newspapers, and the same was also true of Giles Moore, minister of Lindfield and Horsted Keynes in Sussex. Between July 1656 and July 1669 Moore’s accounts reveal quarterly, half-yearly or annual payments to the carrier John Morley for ‘newes books’, at rates of between 1s 6d and 2s per quarter, which seems to have included a fee for carriage, with newspapers being added to parcels of other goods ordered from London. In October 1661, for example, Moore recorded that he paid Morley 2s in the kitchen at the parsonage in Horsted Keynes for ‘quarterdge’ ending at Michelmas, and similar arrangements also existed with other local men, including Mr Board, Mr Culpeper and Mr Dobell. Moore, indeed, used a succession of carriers­ – ­Thomas Beaumont, Bartholemew Ferriman and Richard Thomas­ – ­until at least 1680, by which stage he was spending 13s per year on such a service.65 Such mediated consumption can even be demonstrated to have been practised by provincial readers who are considered to have been particularly assiduous in dealing with London booksellers, including Sir William Boothby of Ashbourne Hall, Derbyshire, who engaged in extensive correspondence with London booksellers like Richard Chiswell and Joseph Watts in the late 1670s and 1680s. This involved the regular supply of London gazettes, and grumbling if issues were missed,66 and Boothby also approached booksellers who might be able to supply him ‘constantly weekly with all the printed pamphlets, sermons and discourses which come out’. This did not prove easy, however, and having insisted that his suppliers should be ‘careful and constant’ Boothby often found them wanting, to such an extent that he moved his business between a succession of men.67 In 1685, for example, Boothby used Mr Lake as a supplier of newspapers and gazettes, informing him that ‘I desire you will take care that all pamphlets and prints which come out may be constantly collected and sent’, although he quickly reprimanded him about the late arrival of his parcels, adding ‘pray take care to prevent this for the time to come, or else I will free you from this trouble’.68 Subsequently, he complained to another supplier, Watts, about items that he had seen in the hands of others but that he had not received, about the issues of various newspapers that had not arrived and about the price charged for carriage. In 105

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 105

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

September 1688 he exclaimed: ‘pray take particular and great care herein that it may never be so again while you and I have to do with one another upon books accounts; this time is extraordinary, and I would not live in greater darkness than others’. In October 1688 he added that ‘I find many pamphlets in the country which you have not sent me … spare no cost to collect all, which I know at this time are various’. In the following December, meanwhile, Boothby complained about not receiving a parcel by the carrier, telling Watts that ‘I expect you should be diligent and constant, and if it be not worth your time, I shall order some other person in it’, and even offering a fee of 5s per quarter ‘to lay out extraordinary for satisfying this my curiosity’.69 He once complained that ‘I am not so well served as I desire with all the pamphlets’, adding that ‘these great traders look on it as not worth their pains’.70 However, while Boothby commands attention as a demanding and obsessive consumer of print, he was also dependent on his booksellers in a range of interesting ways. Thus, while he evidently read newspaper advertisements and catalogues fairly closely, in order to identify specific items for which he placed direct orders, his arrangements with Chiswell and Watts were often predicated on the fact that he did not know what material was available, and he relied heavily upon the judgement of his suppliers.71 More importantly, he also used Chiswell as a kind of agent: to arrange a subscription to a new edition of Foxe’s ‘book of martyrs’; to acquire items from book auctions; and to liaise with other men, such as Mr Lake, who could ‘collect all the stitched pamphlets (at this time) and send me’.72 Indeed, in 1689 Boothby suggested that, if Watts was unable to satisfy his demand, it might be possible to ‘order a hawker or two to deliver you the prints as they come out’, adding that ‘they would be glad of such custom’.73 At least for a while, moreover, Boothby employed one Mr Spence, who is not known to have been a bookseller, as his ‘news man’, in order to acquire regular supplies of the latest material.74 In other words, even for the most well-informed, enthusiastic and deeppocketed readers, mediation and brokerage proved to be more or less essential, which brings me back­ – ­finally­ – ­to the correspondence between Richard Lapthorne and Richard Coffin. Here too it is interesting that, while Devon was well supplied with booksellers, Coffin was heavily reliant on supplies from London, and that insufficient attention has been paid to his use of a London agent. Indeed, the editors of the Portledge Papers used a process of selection and abridgement that creates the inaccurate impression that Lapthorne and Coffin’s relationship involved the sociable reporting of news from London.75 Thus, while Lapthorne certainly relayed news in his letters­– ­ranging from the Rye House Plot to parliamentary elections and judicial proceedings and the execution of a French midwife for murdering her husband­ – ­this was rarely his main purpose.76 What actually makes the letters interesting is the light they shed on how Coffin received printed material, as well as a range of 106

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 106

26/02/2020 08:57

‘Written according to my usual way’

other goods, from London, in terms of the logistical issues involved and the power of intermediaries. This meant being reliant on the ‘penny postman’ who collected letters by passing through the streets three times each night ‘with his bell’, and on the ‘Exeter wagon’ and the ‘Torrington carrier’ to transport books and letters, as well as on various London porters, who sometimes proved to be ‘surly’ and money-grabbing.77 More importantly, the letters also reveal that Lapthorne was a paid agent, who was recompensed not just for the things he acquired­ – ­as listed in his ‘bill of disbursement’­ – ­but also for his ‘pains’, as someone that Coffin was ‘pleased to entrust’.78 Coffin certainly resented any implication that he was under-performing, and at one point anticipated the end of their arrangement by offering to find another to ‘serve you in my room’, and also touted for business among Coffin’s neighbours.79 Moreover, Lapthorne’s role as an agent was clear from the way in which he helped to supply Coffin with books and newspapers. In part this involved book auctions, for which Lapthorne prepared by forwarding catalogues, so that Coffin could identify ‘the numbers of those books you design for buying’.80 Lapthorne responded to such instructions by promising to ‘take all possible care’ therein, which meant attending ‘the course of the auction’­ – ­which could last for weeks on end­ – ­bidding for books that were thought to be affordable, and then engaging in the tortuous process of liaising with clerks and porters to pay for and deliver what had been acquired.81 Lapthorne bemoaned that ‘in these great auctions is much confusion’, adding that ‘I sweat to think on’t’, and exclaiming that ‘I never had such a hurry in my life as in this last auction’.82 He once ‘waited two nights … till nine at night to buy the small books … which are all bought but one or two but at too dear a rate’.83 Less well recognised is that Lapthorne also supplied other material, forwarding things ‘I believe you will like’ alongside the term catalogues, and adding that ‘such care shall be taken for buying these books marked and all else you shall write for’.84 Even this simple service was not always straightforward, however, and Lapthorne explained that term catalogues could be very hard to find, such that he was forced to go ‘from bookseller to bookseller making inquiry’.85 More importantly, Lapthorne spent a great deal of time locating individual items at various London bookshops, according to Coffin’s ‘directions’ and ‘positive commands’, a process that could be challenging in terms of both availability and affordability.86 In June 1692 he noted having ‘applied myself … to the booksellers, and find by them that the general price of that third part of Rushworth … is 45s, and the lowest is 42s, and that is but at one place, to wit Mr Daniel Browne’s at Temple Bar, where I often buy books’.87 In August 1692, he reported that, armed with ‘the particular of the term catalogue’ he had enquired ‘at 20 booksellers’ shops for Philpot and can have it but at one and that is at the elder Mr Bateman in Holborn and not very fair’.88 Lapthorne was also charged with securing supplies of pamphlets and ‘stitched books’, including proclamations, sessions papers, parliamentary 107

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 107

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

speeches and trial proceedings, as well as a history of Oliver Cromwell, and here too he both searched for books himself and liaised with individual stationers.89 In October 1689, for example, he approached ‘a very careful collector’­ – ­Mr Watts­ – ­who ‘promised that all such as are extant should be collected against this day’, and, although many items could not be found, Lapthorne was eventually able to forward to Coffin various bills for material supplied by booksellers like Daniel Brown of the Black Swan and Bible near Temple Bar.90 Ultimately, it was by liaising with such booksellers that Lapthorne was able to ensure that a high proportion of his letters enclosed gazettes, ‘according to custom’; that his weekly letters served ‘only for a cover for the gazettes’; and that these were acquired on a contract which was paid for every three or six months.91 The ‘agents’ with whom this chapter has been dealing clearly present a range of difficulties in terms of how clearly their roles and relationships can be defined. Many had multiple and shifting roles, and for some this kind of work may have been occasional and temporary, or else a phase in a developing career. Some went on to bigger and better things, although others appear more like professional agents. Some of the time it is difficult to work out the basis and terms on which they worked, or their motivations, and there was evidently a fine or only hazily discernible line between being a legal adviser and an ‘agent’. Nevertheless, this chapter has argued that there is mileage in picking up on the ideas and insights of anthropologists who have studied the topic of agents, in terms of combining an interest in the functions that they performed with anaylsis of their status as a distinct ‘profession’, and thus looking beyond sociable and patronage networks, and indeed to broader patterns of social change. Following this lead makes it possible to recognise that the period from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century marked the emergence­ – ­and dramatic growth in importance­ – ­of a role that was more or less distinct from those of estate stewards, civic and corporate officials and retained counsel, or indeed aristocratic ‘men of business’. Agents who were more or less professional tended to work on specific tasks for limited periods, and were paid in a piecemeal fashion, and they tended to work for a range of clients, the relationships with whom may have been informal and transactional, even if they persisted over time. They are important not just as a means of thinking about the processes involved in, and the impact of, state formation, but also as a means of reflecting on broader processes of social change, and of revisiting the fraught historiographical issues relating to ‘centre and locality’. They were men with particular skills, but whose roles were not clearly defined, much less formally legitimated and publicly acknowledged, and only some of them showed signs of having distilled theory from practice in terms of their function. As such, they do not fit neatly within the existing scholarship on ‘expertise’ in the early modern world, for whilst they possessed knowledge and demonstrated skills they were not 108

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 108

26/02/2020 08:57

‘Written according to my usual way’

necessarily ‘experts’. Indeed, central to their role was the ability­ – ­acquired through tacit knowledge, contacts and experience as much as formal training­ – ­to deal with institutional formalities and arcane processes, not least on behalf of those who sought to navigate political, bureaucratic and judicial systems, rather than on behalf of the authorities or the ‘state’. In other words, they were fixers, and rather than making it possible to think about how the state extended its reach across geographical distances, they make it possible to think about ‘centre and locality’ in different ways, not least through the lens of political communication. Indeed, in the light of scholarship that has challenged the idea of persistent localism, agents­ – ­and especially those agents whose activities related to political communication­– ­indicate that the ‘centre’ could indeed be distant from ordinary citizens, albeit in senses that have not properly been appreciated hitherto. The ‘gap’ between centre and localities which agents serve to illustrate, and which contemporaries needed to navigate, was certainly one which involved problems of accessibility and remoteness, but in relation to practical issues rather than political attitudes. They highlight, in other words, that the problems facing contemporaries tended to involve dealing with jurisdictional and institutional boundaries, as well as challenging processes more broadly, which could certainly be difficult to confront when people were physically removed from the capital, but which could pose a significant challenge even for people who lived and worked within London. For civic officials, livery companies and individual citizens who needed to deal with Westminster, Whitehall and the law courts, as well as for even the most enthusiastic and well-informed readers who needed to grapple with the London book trade, what was needed was time and expertise, and this was what ‘agents’ of all kinds were able to provide. In other words, by recognising the role of professional agents, not least as brokers of information, news and texts, it is possible to reconceptualise the problem of centre and locality as something involving logistical hurdles rather than geographical entities, and to identify previously neglected ways in which people engaged with national issues and national institutions.

NOTES 1 Peacey, Print and Public Politics. 2 Millstone, Manuscript Circulation. 3 Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-century France (Oxford, 1986); Marika Keblusek, ‘Cultural and political brokerage in seventeenth century England: the case of Balthazar Gerbier’, in I. Roding (ed.), Dutch and Flemish Artists in Britain, 1550–1800 (Leiden, 2003), pp. 73–82; Marika Keblusek and Badeloch Vera Noldus (eds), Double Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2011), pp. 3–8; Herman Cools (ed.), Your Humble Servant: Agents in Early Modern Europe (Hilversum, 2006), pp. 9–15. 4 Eric Wolf, ‘Aspects of group relations in a complex society’, American Anthropologist, 58 (1956), 1065–78; Clifford Geertz, ‘The Javanese kijaji: the 109

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 109

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

changing role of a cultural broker’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2 (1960), 228–49; F. Bailey, Politics and Social Change (Berkeley, 1963); F. Bailey, Strategies and Spoils (Oxford, 1969); J. Boissevain, Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions (Oxford, 1974), ch. 6. D.R. Hainsworth, ‘The mediator: a link between national and provincial society in seventeenth-century England’, Parergon, 6 (1988), 89–102; Clive Holmes, Seventeenth Century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1980), pp. 47, 72, 79. Eric H. Ash, ‘Expertise and the early modern state’, Osiris, 25 (2010), 1–24; H.M. Collins and R. Evans, ‘The third wave of science studies: studies of expertise and experience’, Social Studies of Science, 32:2 (2002), 235–96. On the importance of practical wisdom, see also: Eric H. Ash, ‘“A note and a caveat for the merchant”: mercantile advisors in Elizabethan England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 33:1 (2002), 1–31; Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (Chicago, 2014). TNA, SP 84/159, fo. 187; SP 29/43, fo. 217; CCC, pp. 240, 505; A Letter to the Earl of Manchester (1648), p. 6; J. Lilburne, A Whip for the Present House of Lords (1648), p. 20. CSPD 1625–49, pp. 683–4; BL, Add. 31,116, p. 282; R.P. Stearns, ‘The WeldPeter mission to England’, PCSM, 32 (1934), 188–246; B.W. Bond, ‘The colonial agent as popular representative’, Political Science Quarterly, 35:3 (1920), 372–92; E. Tanner, ‘Colonial agents in England during the eighteenth century’, Political Science Quarterly, 16:1 (1901), 24–49; C. Higham, ‘The accounts of a colonial governor’s agent in the seventeenth century’, AHR, 28:2 (1923), 263–85; K. Murdock, ‘A note on Increase Mather’s expenses as colonial agent’, PCSM, 27 (1932), 200–4; The Humble Petition of the Agents (1642). TNA, SP 84/133, fo. 120; P. Riden, ‘An English factor at Stockholm in the 1680s’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 35:2 (1987), 191–207; T.C. Smout, ‘Letters from Dumfries to a Scottish factor at Rotterdam, 1676–1683’, Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, 3:38 (1961), 157–67; E. Kerridge, Trade and Banking in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1988); D.C. Coleman, ‘London scriveners and the estate market in the late seventeenth century’, EcHR, 4:2 (1951), 221–30; R. Munday, ‘A legal history of the factor’, Anglo-American Law Review, 6:4 (1977), 221–60; M.G. Davies, ‘Country gentry and payments to London, 1650–1714’, EcHR, 24:1 (1977) 15–36; J. Abbott, ‘Robert Abbott, city money scrivener and his account book 1646–1652’, Guildhall Miscellany, 7 (1956), 31–9. N. Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, 1566–1643 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 71; P.R. Seddon (ed.), The Letters of John Holles, 1587–1637 (Nottingham, 1983), p. 333; Letter from Mercurius Civicus to Mercurius Rusticus (1643), p. 11; BL, Add. 46,189, fo. 110. D.R. Hainsworth, Stewards, Lords and People: The Estate Steward and His World in Later Stuart England (Cambridge, 1992); J. Broadway, ‘John Smyth of Nibley: a Jacobean man of business and his service to the Berkeley family’, Midland History, 24:1 (1999), 79–97. HMC Thirteenth Report, Appendix 4, pp. 392, 398; S. Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Stroud, 2000), pp. 40–1, 86, 98,

110

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 110

26/02/2020 08:57

‘Written according to my usual way’

13

14 15

16

17

18 19 20

21

22

23

24 25

26

102–11, 116–18, 146. For references to election agents later in the seventeenth century, see: HEH, STT1802; STT478. Northamptonshire RO, IC275; HMC Twelfth Report, Appendix 9, pp. 175–6; Bedfordshire RO, X/171: To the Parliament … the Humble representation of Captaine John Harris (1651); BL, Add. 70,007, fo. 8; CCC, pp. 5, 10, 130, 278–9, 319, 321–2, 400, 542. CSPD 1631–3, pp. 283, 287, 294; KHLC, U269/C294; Perfect Occurrences, 39 (12–19 September 1645), sig. Qq3. E. Hughes, ‘The eighteenth century estate agent’, in H. Cronne (ed.), Essays in British and Irish History (London, 1949), pp. 185–99; F. Pogson, ‘Public and private service at the early Stuart court: the career of William Raylton, Strafford’s agent’, HR, 84:223 (2011), 53–66; J. Merritt, ‘Power and communication: Thomas Wentworth and government at a distance during the personal rule, 1629–1635’, in J. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621– 1641 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 109–32; G. Aylmer, The State’s Servants (London, 1973), p. 126. David Harris Sacks, ‘The corporate town and the English state: Bristol’s “little businesses”, 1625–1641’, P&P, 110 (1986), 69–105; C. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth (Cambridge, 1986); W.R. Prest, The Rise of the Barristers (Oxford, 1986); HoP 1604–1629, V, pp. 73–5. K. Daemen-de Gelder and J.P. Vander Motten, ‘A broken broker in Antwerp’, in P. Major (ed.), Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1640–1690 (London, 2010), pp. 65–78. Ash, ‘Expertise’, 1, 7, 9, 12–13, 16. KHLC, A350/1/08/2; BL, Add. 15,750, fo. 23; TNA, SP 28/307, unfol. TNA, SP 46/108, fo. 184; SP 28/57, fo. 334; SP 28/50, fo. 83; SP 28/53, fo. 246; SP 28/55, fo. 57; SP 28/56, fos 101, 103; SP 28/59, fo. 412; SP 28/61, fo. 505; SP 28/62, fo. 713; SP 28/64, fo. 570; SP 28/68, fo. 265; SP 28/71, fo. 211, 255; SP 28/76, fo. 420. TNA, SP 28/57, fo. 334; Aylmer, State’s Servants, pp. 278, 420; TNA, SP 18/100/72; CCC, pp. 1502, 2292; TNA, SP 20/1, p. 6; E 113/13. For such agents, and the number of people involved, see also: CCC, pp. 162, 165, 213, 266, 390, 740. CCC, pp. 175, 179, 181, 186–8, 194, 197, 206, 210, 214, 215, 218, 239, 247, 248–9, 256, 259, 262, 266, 278, 282–4, 290, 291, 293, 319, 331–2, 352–4, 361, 368–9, 377–8, 384–5, 389, 392, 407, 416, 419, 428, 463–4, 468, 481, 489, 545, 671, 766, 771. Ibid., pp. 168, 177–8, 183, 189, 198, 216, 218, 224, 229–30, 234, 243, 264, 274, 280, 286, 289, 295, 296, 325, 337, 340, 343, 345, 362, 370, 388, 390, 393, 395, 397, 400, 401, 407, 422, 427, 454, 473, 488, 507–9, 545–6, 575, 579, 580, 582, 585, 589, 590, 636, 663, 694, 707, 747, 767, 768. Ibid., pp. 192, 345, 363, 365, 381, 387, 393, 395, 398, 408, 410, 481–2, 544, 582, 590, 663, 708, 727. Ash, ‘Expertise’, 10, 12–13; W.. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production and Consumption in England, 1640–1845 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 117–30; Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients, pp. 225–9. LMA, Rep. 29, fo. 238v; P.W. Hasler (ed.) The House of Commons, 1558–1603 (3 vols, London, 1981), III, p. 176; M. Bateson (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester 111

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 111

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

27 28

29

30 31 32 33

34 35

36 37 38

39 40

41

42

43

(7 vols, London, 1899–1974), III, pp. 219, 336, 345–7, 350–1, 389, 390–2, 435, 460. LMA, COL/CHD/CT/1/5, fos 46v, 53v, 59, 154, 155, 159. For a brief mention of such work, see: Michael J. Braddick, ‘Resistance to the royal aid and further supply in Chester, 1664–1672: relations between centre and locality in Restoration England’, Northern History, 33:1 (1997), 118–19. Norfolk RO, YC 19/6 Yarmouth Assembly Book 1625–42, fo. 469; YC 19/7 Yarmouth Assembly Book 1642–62, fo. 76v; HMC Twelfth Report, Appendix 9, p. 463; GA, GBR/B3/2, fo. 238; The Keep, Rye 47/151/4. BL, Add. 22,620, fos 113, 117, 131, 154. BL, Add. 21,422, fo. 381. Berwick RO, B1/11, fo. 21; B9/1, fo. 45v. Berwick RO, B1/9, fos 115, 134v, 148, 172, 198, 260; B1/10, fos 150v, 153, 156, 164v; B1/11, fos 20v, 21, 84, 100v, 142, 195v; B9/1, fos 40v, 45v, 46; TWAS, MD/NC/1/1, p. 333; MD/NC/2/2, pp. 168, 337; MS 543/35, fo. 231; MD/NC/1/2, fo. 264v; MS 543/37, fos 205v, 201, 195v, 186; MS 543/38, fo. 219v; MD/NC/1/3, fos 104, 170; CSPD 1667, p. 290; Bristol RO, F/Au/1/27, p. 53. For a list of sheriff’s agents, with their addresses, often in London, see: TNA, SP 23/116, p. 945. CCC, pp. 233, 308, 641. HMC Twelfth Report, Appendix 9, pp. 491, 506–7; GA, GBR/H2/3, pp. 131–2; Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion, ed. W. Dunn Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), V, pp. 303–4. GL, MS 5542/5, unfol.; MS 5174/4, fos 6v, 7v. TWAS, GU/MA/3/3, fos 108, 119v. TWAS, MD/NC/2/1, p. 10; Berwick RO, B1/10, fos 108v, 136v, 146v–7, 150v, 155, 156, 184v; B1/11, fos 20v–21, 56v, 84, 100v; B9/1, fo. 45v; King’s Lynn RO, KL/ C7/10, fo. 494; BL, Add. 22,620, fos 113, 117, 131, 154; Arundel Castle, A90, p. 74; Cambridgeshire RO, R.59.31/9/5, fos 163v, 165; BL, Add. 21,422, fos 40, 80, 106, 125, 146; Add. 21,426, fo. 168; To the Generall Clothiers (1647), sigs A2–3; W. Talbott, A Briefe Answer (1647), p. 4; J.T. Rutt (ed.), Diary of Thomas Burton (4 vols, London, 1828), I, pp. 115–17, 174–5, 221. Shropshire Archives, 212/364/42a. See also: HEH, EL7537. D. Whomsley, ‘William Ramsden of Longley, gentleman, 1514–1580: agent in monastic property’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 42:166 (1968), 143–50; M. Gray, ‘Mr Auditor’s man: the career of Richard Budd, estate agent and Exchequer official’, Welsh History Review, 12:3 (1985), 307–23; R.B. Outhwaite, ‘Who bought crown lands? The pattern of purchases, 1589–1603’, BIHR, 44 (1971), 18–33. J. Wareing, ‘The regulation and organisation of the trade in indentured servants for the American colonies, 1645–1718’ (University of London PhD, 2000), pp. 195–222. D. Farr, ‘Kin, cash, Catholics and cavaliers: the role of kinship in the financial management of Major-General John Lambert’, HR, 78:183 (2001), 51, 53; CCC, pp. 1118, 1449, 1602, 1625, 1715, 1722, 1769, 1835, 1876, 1896, 1955, 2140, 2194, 2201, 2203, 2247, 2258, 2282, 2293, 2321, 2405, 2573, 2590, 2637, 2662, 2807, 2859, 3028, 3032, 3100, 3127, 3130, 3151, 3298; BL, Eg. 2,648, fo. 258. Farr, ‘Kin’, 51, 53, 58; Peter Roebuck, ‘The constables of Everingham: the fortunes

112

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 112

26/02/2020 08:57

‘Written according to my usual way’

44 45 46 47

48 49

50 51

52

53 54

55 56 57

58 59

of a Catholic Royalist family during the Civil War and Interregnum’, Recusant History, 9:2 (1967), 75–87; William Sheils, ‘English Catholics at war and peace’, in C. Durston and J. Eales (eds), Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006), p. 143. TNA, SP 19/106, fo. 125. BL, Lans. 822, fos 43–4. Cornwall RO, R(S)/1/33, 673. Farr, ‘Kin’, 45–6; BL, Add. 21,419, fo. 5; CSPD 1658–9, pp. 54, 64, 66; TNA, SP 18/181, fos 140–3; BL, Add. 21,420, fo. 24. For Baynes, see: D. Hirst, ‘The fracturing of the Cromwellian alliance: Leeds and Adam Baynes’, EHR, 108 (1993), 868–94. For surviving contracts, see: HEH, HM80253, 80255. BL, Add. 21,417, fos 108v, 113, 120, 128, 204, 213, 217; Add. 21,419, fos 125, 139; Add. 21,420, fos 55, 64, 230; Add. 21,421, fos 122, 196; Add. 21,422, fo. 93. BL, Add. 33,596, fos 9–10; Several Proceedings, 240 (27 April­ – ­4 May 1654), p. 3808; K. Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London, 1982), pp. 152–6, 188–222; CSPD 1652–3, pp. 373–6; CSPD 1654, pp. 309–10; TNA, SP 18/37, fos 14–86; SP 18/74, fos 164, 166; To the Parliament of the Commonwealth … The Declaration of Daniel Noddel (1653), pp. 17–19. Staffordshire RO, D868/5; D593/P/8/2/2. A.B. Grosart (ed.), Lismore Papers, series 2 (10 vols, London, 1886–88), IV, p. 16; HMC Montagu of Beaulieu, pp. 118–21, 132–4, 138–54; E. Cope, The Life of a Public Man (Philadelphia, 1981), pp. 157, 158, 168–9, 184–5, 197; HMC Buccleuch, I, pp. 280, 283, 289; iii. 382; J. Fielding (ed.), The Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637–1641 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 141, 267; A.N.B. Cotton, ‘John Dillingham, journalist of the Middle Group’, EHR, 93:369 (1978), 817–34. Interestingly, in the early 1640s, Dillingham was used to convey £5 to Mr Sterry ‘for intelligence’: Warwickshire RO, CR1886/1, unfol. HMC Sixth Report, p. 198; F. Henderson (ed.), The Clarke Papers (Cambridge, 2005), p. 49; CSPD 1652–3, p. 376; FSL, X.d.483, fo. 197; P. Ludolph, ‘An anatomy of the London agent’, PH, 33:2 (2014), 277–99. H.M. Margoliouth (ed.), The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell (2 vols, Oxford, 1952), II, pp. 58, 61, 62, 79, 82–3, 97, 103, 337, 338, 342. BL, Add. 21,422, fos 40, 80, 106, 125; Add. 21,426, fo. 168; Add. 21,423, fo. 193; Berwick RO, B1/10, fos 155–6, 164v, 170v; B1/11, fo. 21; B9/1, fo. 46; Generall Clothiers, sigs A2v–3; Talbott, Briefe Answer, p. 3. CSPD 1650, p. 478. BL, Add. 6,677, fos 46, 51. A Breviate of the Weavers Business (1648), p.  8; E. Rozer, Reasons Shewing that the Desires of the Cloathiers (1649); Perfect Occurrences, 125 (18–25 May 1649), pp. 1052–3; W. Talbott, The Generall Cause (1648), pp. 1–6; E. Rozer, A Narrative (1651), pp. 1–4; sigs B–C4. Longleat House, Whitelocke Papers, Parcel 7/93. The Declaration of Daniel Noddel (1653); D. Noddel, The Great Complaint (1654); A Brief Remembrance (1653); Lindley, Fenland Riots, pp. 191–2; C. Cheesman, Berkshires Agent’s Humble Address (1651); C. Cheesman, The Oppressed Man’s Out-cry for Justice (1649), pp. 4–5. For Cheesman’s controversial career as a sequestrations agent, see: CCC, pp. 390–1, 417, 426, 436–7, 681. 113

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 113

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 60 K.S. Van Eerde, ‘Robert Waldegrave: the printer as agent and link between sixteenth-century England and Scotland’, Renaissance Quarterly, 34:1 (1981), 77. 61 Mercurius Politicus, 350 (19–26 February 1657), p. 7621; Mercurius Politicus, 396 (24–31 December 1657), p. 205; Mercurius Politicus, 407 (11–18 March 1658), p. 395; Several Proceedings, 274 (21–28 December 1654), p. 4344; Several Proceedings, 302 (5–12 July 1655), p. 4790; Several Proceedings, 306 (2–9 August 1655), p. 4859. 62 Alnwick Castle, MSS 547–9, passim. 63 HMC Cowper II, p. 317. 64 Essex RO, D/DBa/A4, fos 2, 5, 13v, 18, 27. 65 R. Bird (ed.), The Journal of Giles Moore (Lewes, 1971), pp. 305–12. 66 BL, Add. 71,689, fos 7, 8v, 17v; Add. 71,690, fos 43v, 63, 76, 82v, 90v, 94, 99, 109v, 115; Add. 71,691, fo. 3v. For Watts and Chiswell, see: H.R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers … 1668–1725 (Oxford, 1922), pp. 69, 304–5. 67 BL, Add. 71,690, fos 92v–3, 108v; Add. 71,691, fos 15v, 20, 56v–7, 66; Add. 71,692, fos 8v, 12v, 19, 39v, 49v, 57, 61v, 72, 73v. 68 BL, Add. 71,691, fos 56v–7, 66. 69 BL, Add. 71,692, fos 8v, 12v, 19, 39v, 49v, 57, 61v, 72, 73v. 70 Ibid., fos 77, 86. 71 BL, Add. 71,690, fos 34, 43v, 92–3, 112. 72 Ibid., fos 32v, 40v, 62v, 108; Add. 71,691, fo. 16v. 73 BL, Add. 71,692, fo. 73v. 74 Ibid., fo. 4v. 75 M. Treadwell, ‘Richard Lapthorne and the London retail book trade, 1683–1697’, in A. Hunt (ed.), The Book Trade and Its Customers, 1450–1900 (Winchester, 1997), pp. 205–6; R.J. Kerr and I.C. Duncan (eds), The Portledge Papers (London, 1928); HMC Fifth Report, pp. 378–86; D. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 164–7, 245, 347. On the wider issue, see: M. Keblusek, ‘Book agents: intermediaries in the early modern world of books’, in Cools (ed.), Your Humble Servant, pp. 97–108. 76 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (27 June 1683, 21 May 1685, 4 March 1687, 8 March 1688/9). 77 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (17 January 1690, 20 June 1683, 14 January 1687, 26 January 1688, 15 December 1688, 16 October 1688, 17 January 1690; Z19/40/4 (20 January 1690/1, 31 October 1691); Portledge Papers, p. 123. 78 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (20 June 1683, 28 January 1687, 10 December 1687, 6 August 1689); Z19/40/4 (30 January 1691/2, 17 December 1692); Z19/40/5 (31 March 1694); Z19/40/6 (19 September 1696); Portledge Papers, p. 24. 79 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (10 December 1687); Z19/40/4 (7 November 1691). 80 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (11 February 1687, 24 December 1687, 2 June 1688, September 1688); Z19/40/4 (7 November 1691, 18 August 1692). For Scott, see: Plomer, Dictionary, pp. 264–5. 81 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (11 February 1687, 19 February 1687, February 1687, 10 December 1687, 31 December 1687, 21 April 1688, 12 May 1688, 9 June 1688, 23 June 1688, 7 July 1688, 13 October 1688, 9 March 1688/9); Z19/40/4 (17 November 1691, 2 January 1691/2). 82 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (10 June 1688). 114

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 114

26/02/2020 08:57

‘Written according to my usual way’ 83 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (15 December 1689); Portledge Papers, pp. 66, 97. 84 Devon RO, Z19/40/4 (17 December 1692, 6 January 1693/4, 7 November 1691, 30 January 1691/2, 6 September 1692); Z19/40/6 (19 December 1696). 85 Devon RO, Z19/40/4 (18 August 1692, 6 September 1692); Portledge Papers, 145. 86 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (24 November 1688, 30 November 1689, 3 January 1691, 17 January 1690). 87 Devon RO, Z19/40/4 (10 June 1688); Portledge Papers, p. 140. 88 Devon RO, Z19/40/4 (23 June 1688); Portledge Papers, p. 145. 89 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (September 1688, 26 October 1689, 4 October 1690); Z19/40/4 (2 January 1691/2, 30 January 1691/2, 17 December 1692, 6 January 1693/4); Z19/40/5 (31 March 1694); Z19/40/6 (12 December 1696). 90 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (2 November 1689, 16 November 1689, 30 November 1689); Z19/40/6 (19 December 1696, 12 December 1696, 26 June 1697; Portledge Papers, pp. 62–5. 91 Devon RO, Z19/40/3 (14 January 1687, 24 December 1687, 26 January 1688/9, 9 June 1688, 23 June 1688, 3 August 1688, 7 September 1688, 16 October 1688, 24 November 1688, 8 December 1688, 6 August 1689, 28 October 1689, 29 March 1690, 17 May 1690); Z19/40/4 (20 January 1690/1, 17 October 1691, 6 September 1692, 17 December 1692, 6 January 1693/4); Z19/40/5 (31 March 1694); Z19/40/6 (19 September 1696, 24 April 1697, 26 June 1697). Mention of these gazettes is almost invariably omitted from the edition of the Portledge Papers.

115

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 115

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Chapter 6

Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts: central initiatives and local agency in the English civil war Ann Hughes

I

n early July 1650, in the midst of war between the English republic and the Scots, the London bookseller George Thomason bought a pamphlet by Miles Hill, a Herefordshire parliamentarian official. Hill’s ‘true and impartiall account’ was both a narrative and a financial reckoning, recounting the ‘plunderings, losses and sufferings of the County of Hereford at the hands of the Scottish army’, then allies of the English parliament, as it marched south to besiege the royalist city of Hereford in the summer of 1645. The pamphlet provided ‘an abstract taken of the losses, dammages and plunderings of 106 small parishes within the county … which the poor inhabitants thereof lost, as by a true accompt ready to be attested upon oath, under the hands of the officers and chiefe of every parish’. These parish accounts had been delivered to Hill (who had been one of those charged with organising provision for the Scots) in September 1646, while some seventy more parishes that had suffered ‘in the like nature’ ‘brought not in their accompts to be put to publique view’, the work being impeded by ‘malignants’ and ‘Scottified persons’, ‘disaffected to the business’. In all the county had suffered, on these accounts, losses of at least £60,000.1 This pamphlet could be seen as part of a straightforward and efficient soliciting and later deployment of local information at the initiative of central authority, a further reminder that the increased capacity, scope and energy of central government in early modern England could be demonstrated as much as through the seeking of information from the localities as through its transmission to them.2 Parliament’s civil war regime was certainly energetic while its contested legitimacy and the unprecedented burdens of the war effort increased demands for credible information and generated spectacular amounts of paperwork. Most relevant to this chapter is the requirement in the mid-1640s for local communities to produce accounts of their civil war losses to parliament’s own forces and officials; there had clearly been widespread compliance in Herefordshire and the material collected was then used for national or indeed transnational pur116

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 116

26/02/2020 08:57

Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts

poses, perhaps initially connected to the financial negotiations (amounting to rival accounting) for the withdrawal of the Scottish army from England, and subsequently as evidence of what might happen if a Scottish army came south again. As the title page declared, the pamphlet was ‘published in this juncture of time for the undeceiving of the people, who may perhaps fancy to themselves, some imaginable advantage by stickling for the Scots and their Partizans in this Nation’. The pamphlet thus also demonstrates the ways in which printed and manuscript forms, official parliamentary processes and the press interacted to structure communication between centre and localities. The original accounts of the Herefordshire parishes do not survive, but some indication of what they must have been like can be given from the discursive sections of Hill’s pamphlet and from surviving accounts from other midland counties. In Herefordshire, wrote Hill, ‘divers houses [had been] rifled, doors, chests and trunks broken open … cattle, horses and goods taken from them, much mony, plate, jewels, and all kind of rich house-hold stuff, rings and other rich commodities, as wearing apparrel, linen, books, the plate and linnen of divers Churches, neer all the horses, mares, & colts that ever they set their eyes upon [taken] as wel from friends as others’.3 This might seem a rather over-heated deduction from books of accounts, but it is corroborated by material from original parish submissions of losses to Scots (and English) forces. These are rarely austere summaries or lists, but rich individual narratives of civilian–military encounters, and precise enumerations of possessions lost in the war. Hugh Pooler of Hartlebury in Worcestershire, for example, remembered very clearly what the Scots had taken from him in the same expedition, from the eighty sheep and a yoke of oxen to the hats, petticoats, waistcoats, three aprons, four pairs of stockings, ‘half a dozen napkins’ along with ‘divers other small things’, kettles, brooches and hooks.4 John Burton, a tiler from Coventry, had ‘lost by the Scots these goods following which they violently tooke from him’, two new hats, a hogshead of strong beer, a brass kettle and a woman’s gown (adding up to an improbable £8 4s).5 Some communities listed their losses to the Scots collectively rather than through individual accounts but even here more personal indignation emerges as in Atherstone, Warwickshire: ‘Item: sent out by the said towne nine horse and gears and two carts, the men abused and driven to leave horse, geares and carts, the losse at least to Ralph Drayton then constable £32 1s’.6 And the depredations of the Scots were not soon forgotten. In 1645 they had quartered on Alcester in Warwickshire for a total of fourteen days on their way to and then from Hereford, and the inhabitants claimed the soldiers had spoiled crops, seized horses and livestock, and plundered them of clothes, household linens and ready money. Almost twenty years later in 1674 during an inspection of churches in the diocese of Worcester, the churchwardens of Alcester reported that their ‘church Bible is imperfect, the Apocrypha being torne out by the Scots’.7 117

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 117

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

These very specific examples are neither superfluous nor self-indulgent; rather they demonstrate what Lena Orlin has called the ‘politics of detail’.8 The details mattered to the thousands upon thousands of people who gave in their accounts at the most local level; village accounts were personal, elaborate and locally specific, suggesting that they represented something more complex than a straightforward provincial response to an intrusive, disciplinary centre. When the Parliament asked local communities to draw up accounts of the costs of the war-effort, it got more than, or rather something different from, what it had expected. Financial accounting was deeply embedded in the culture and practice of English people at all social levels in ‘normal’ times, and during the upheavals of war and revolution it had urgent political relevance within all arenas from the village or parish to the transnational negotiations between England and Scotland in 1646. Accounting processes reveal very starkly that neither ‘centre’ not ‘locality’ are unitary or coherent concepts, but divided and contested arenas; this was particularly true as the parliamentarian coalition was tested under the pressures of war. Local agency might transform or subvert central or official priorities, not by open opposition or resistance but through the particular ways in which local communities co-operated with central demands for information. Accounting drew on emotional and personal responses to loss, and could become a means of political communication and political reflection. A substantial proportion of the English population was required to recollect and record the material burdens of civil war, and in the process they marked the broader political and emotional impact of the war, and came to reflect on the nature of the public service, and the state. This chapter provides an outline of how Parliament sought accounts of civil war losses before establishing the significance of accounting at the most local and personal level, and its role in rival political mobilisations amongst parliamentarians.9 The taking of accounts was enjoined by parliamentarian legislation; in other words it was initiated by a particular version of the parliamentarian ‘centre’ in the mid-1640s. A central accounts committee (from which MPs and other accountants were excluded) was established in February 1644, with power to establish local sub-committees. A crucial later ordinance of 27 June 1645, ‘For the better taking and expediting the Accompts of the whole Kingdome’, gave the local sub-committees authority to issue warrants to local officials to ‘make strict and diligent inquiry in every parish of this Kingdome’ into what ‘money, Plate, Horse, Arms, Ammunition, Householdstuff, Goods of all sorts, Rents and Profits of Lands, Wood, Provisions of all kinde, and free-quarter have been received, taken, collected, raised, seized, or sequestred’. Parish accounts were to list formal taxation from 1640, as well as voluntary contributions and enforced losses, particularly through free-quarter and plunder. Parliament was concerned with the conduct of its own soldiers and civilian officials so the legislation did not cover losses to the king’s forces. No overt promise of recompense was made in the legislation although 118

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 118

26/02/2020 08:57

Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts

anyone failing to co-operate would be denied any benefit of the ‘Publick Faith’ for their contributions.10 This ambitious initiative demonstrates the impact of a burdensome civil war on English state formation; moreover, given the important role played by local sub-committees, it suggests that a state characterised by the integration of central and local agency, and marked by negotiation as much as central direction, survived the pressures of war, albeit in ideologically freighted fashion.11 In any case, the legislation establishing accounts committees was not a straightforward bureaucratic initiative by a coherent central authority. Rather it was a product of intra-parliamentarian divisions. Within parliamentarianism, accounting was a fraught and partisan process from the start. The parliamentarians most concerned with drawing up authoritative accounts of the costs of civil war were those moderates (later usually dubbed ‘Presbyterians’) who were most sceptical about the measures taken to fight that war, and increasingly opposed to military dominance and autocratic committees. Local accounts were potential evidence for the misdeeds of rival parliamentarians rather than of royalist oppression.12 The chairman of the central or ‘Grand’ committee of accounts was the indefatigable critic of parliamentarian authoritarianism William Prynne, and the most active local sub-committees were usually found in counties, such as Warwickshire, where an energetic war regime had aroused much resentment. Military officers and others who had received parliamentarian levies were not meant to serve on sub-committees so their members tended to be men who had been little involved in the war effort. It is perhaps a little unfair to see accounts committees simply as ‘weapons in the counter-revolution’, but it is easy to understand why soldiers and civilian officials (whose accounts might be scrappy and incomplete) would suspect them.13 ‘Accounting’ as process and as metaphor had deep roots in English administrative, social and cultural life before the civil war. Encounters between local officials and ‘state’ bodies at county or national level often centred on the delivery and auditing of the accounts of constables, overseers and receivers. Churchwardens’ accounts were audited annually within the parish community, or at least by its most prominent male householders. Financial accounting, doubtless usually unsophisticated, was fundamental to the everyday survival of individuals and households across the social scale, while also underpinning a broader and pervasive culture of appraisal. As Craig Muldrew and Alexandra Shepard have demonstrated, English men and women were adept at assessing the ‘worth’ and credit of their neighbours for a variety of purposes, and these notions of credit and worth had both moral and financial connotations.14 Financial accounting, as much recent scholarship insists, had metaphorical, normative and emotional resonances beyond its obvious factual and financial utility. Holding people or authorities to account drew on expectations of justice, honesty and fair dealing; here it is worth noting that the passage of the legislation in itself tells us something about parliamentarianism’s concern with its reputation for disinterested public 119

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 119

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

service; the priority was not to demonstrate the oppressions of the enemy but to guard against the potential for corruption in its own military and civilian administration. In the counties also, the conscientious service of many subcommittees of accounts suggests they were not engaged in a straightforward technical exercise; rather, as we shall see, they were seeking to hold the local wartime regime to account in moral, and political, as well as financial terms.15 Such concerns no doubt also animated the individuals who gave in accounts, but in considering very local and personal responses it is also important to think about the broader meanings of ‘giving an account’, as not just offering columns of figures but as telling a story or recollecting personal experience. These associations with narrativity and subjectivity have encouraged Adam Smyth to see accounting potentially as a form of life-writing, whilst particularly relevant to the experience of civil war is Karen Newman’s suggestion that the always elusive quest for completely accurate numerical accounts can be linked to fears of trauma and death: ‘to memorialize means not only to remember the dead but to keep an account’.16 Deep-rooted social and cultural assumptions, as well as long-standing individual and collective practice facilitated the production of accounts of civil war losses; accounting was a fertile ground for assessment of and argument about the experience of civil war at many levels from the personal to the national. Of course, active sub-committees played an important part in soliciting village co-operation. In Warwickshire and Northamptonshire, with energetic sub-committees, at least three-quarters of the county’s parishes delivered in accounts.17 The enthusiastic local response, however, reflects the significance drawing up accounts had for local people, a significance that transcended parliamentarian factionalism, and immediate practical concerns. As already suggested, local agency was demonstrated most often not through resisting central instructions but in the ways in which the men and women who immediately created and delivered the accounts communicated their own priorities to the authorities, thereby adapting the process for their own ends. Most local accounts insisted, at length, on both the importance and the difficulty of drawing up accurate accounts of what had been paid or taken. Ravensthorpe and Teeton in Northamptonshire had ‘faithfully collected’ as much information as possible although they acknowledged ‘in many places they be defective yet have we done our utmost indeavour and cannot possibly supply the defects thereof by reason that many of the accounts of the townes are lost and many men have forgotten upon some occasions what sumes they payd and to whom’. Many explained that the necessary paperwork had been lost. In Wibtoft (Warwickshire) the constables could not be sure the early 1640s subsidies had been paid ‘by reason of the death of our then constable and the losse of many of our noates and papers by occasion of theis calamitous distractions’. Such responses suggest that the upheavals of civil war and the loss of a functional written record were, at some deep level, connected; 120

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 120

26/02/2020 08:57

Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts

conversely the connection reinforces Newman’s argument that constructing some plausibly comprehensive and accurate enumeration of loss offered some mitigation of the defects of memory and some consolation for bewildering loss.18 In trying to get it right, villagers, or at least the constables and other officials experienced in such matters, chose different material forms and scribal conventions, dependent, presumably, on existing local practice, or economic pressures. The Northamptonshire parish of Maxey could afford only cheap paper, but the accounts were decorated with elaborate inked patterns, which bled through the paper. In the more prosperous city of Coventry most wards delivered beautifully written accounts in bound volumes, whilst most villages ran only to flimsy paper books. The towns of Warwick and Rugby, however, were content to simply bind or pin together individual bills or presentments.19 In Northamptonshire, parishes had apparently received a printed questionnaire from the sub-committee, whilst this was certainly the practice in the counties of the Eastern Association, but local preferences or idiosyncrasies survived all attempts to tailor or restrict responses.20 References to ‘bills’ and presentments suggest how the accounts were compiled from individual or household responses. In many cases it is clear that the finished accounts were based on oral responses. The accounts of Lott Keyte of Great Wolford revealed his tribulations as a constable as well as an individual, and began in the third person, in the manner of a legal deposition: ‘item: he saith that upon the Lord Brooke his request a horse and furniture and sword and money’ cost him £6 5s. Soon, however Keyte’s account became a direct, first-person narrative: ‘Item in July 1645 by reason of my inability, and oft plunder by the kings side then having but three milch cowes for the maintenance of me and my family and being not able to pay contribution, John Ward [a corporal in the Warwickshire forces] tooke from me 2 milch cowes out of 3 worth £5, Although I did give him a particular of my losses and the necessities I and my family was in.’21 The taking of oral evidence helps explain the remarkable social inclusivity of many parish accounts; illiteracy was no barrier to giving in an account, whilst the extended reach of formal taxation, and the often random impact of plunder and free-quarter on all but the homeless or destitute ensured that civil war losses affected a significant proportion of the population.22 In Abbots Salford (Warwickshire), the accounts of ‘cottars and labouring men’ were overtly included, and several accounts included almost all households.23 In Rowington (Warwickshire) the losses of more than £500 claimed by the prosperous Catholic widow Ursula Betham were enumerated on the same page as those of her servant Henry Greswold who put his mark against a total of under £9.24 These archives are amongst the most socially inclusive we have for early modern England, where humble people offered narrations of their experiences alongside richer neighbours. Although some parishes delivered in collective totals, this was relatively unusual and there are many thousands of personal narratives within the 121

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 121

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

parish accounts. Three important themes within these narratives can be highlighted: the complex narrating of free-quarter; the frequent evocations of place and the offering of superfluous detail, particularly when listing lost possessions. The compulsory boarding of soldiers, mostly strangers, and often with hungry horses, was a particularly intimate disruption of ‘normal life’. In a general discussion, James C. Scott has described free-quarter as ‘a common form of fiscal punishment’, and in England during the 1640s it became an increasingly bitter grievance that divided soldiers and civilians.25 There is evidence of this bitterness in accounts of losses through ‘freequarter’, but there is an equally prevalent, countervailing trend, in which encounters between householders and soldiers are normalised through the addition of personal details or the narration of a broader social context. A Cheshire widow remembered that the footman who had stayed with her was a drummer, while the innkeeper in the same village included an estimated 5s for strong drink, explaining that the soldiers ‘would neither pay nor suffer others to pay’ it.26 Accountants frequently discriminated between different military ‘guests’: John Wildbore of Kings Cliffe in Northamptonshire noted that he ‘freely gave’ quarter to soldiers from the Eastern Association Army commanded by the Earl of Manchester, ‘passing to and from Yorke’, but was much more critical of men from nearby garrisons: ‘Captaine Harpers souldiers in Anno 1643 1644 came twice in the night with five horses and five men and put me in feare. And divers other times in the daie time and never paid any thinge to the damage of xxs.’27 Wildbore’s account located his Kings Cliffe home within a transformed and alarming wartime geography, on the road to and from York. All parish accounts are suffused with a powerful sense of place; of familiar locations made strange and dangerous by military demands, and of villages made vulnerable by their inescapable links to the general conflict, particularly through the passage of soldiers. Examples from the accounts of two Warwickshire widows demonstrate spatial transformations: Widow Crafts of Long Lawford, Warwickshire, had sent provision worth 3s ‘to the heath to the earle of Essex when he cam downe first from London, 8 gallons of drinke one lofe of Bread and 2 cheeses’. The local heath was changed by war, and London seemed nearer than in times of peace. Widow Eedes of Warwick was amongst many accountants who highlighted the depredations of her immediate environment: ‘she had a very great Elme tree grew in her back syde which did much shelter her house from the vyalence of the wynd which at the tyme of makeinge the Bulwarks was cut downe and taken away by the soulders whoe made her pay for the Chypps thereof (haveinge noe satisfaccon for the tree, which synce it hath cost her xxxs in repaires by reason of the wynd and wilbe a contynuall charge’. Fortifying garrison towns like Warwick caused havoc to homes and gardens, while marching troops damaged grass, fields and woods.28 Widow Crafts’s concern for her one loaf of bread, and Widow Eedes’s 122

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 122

26/02/2020 08:57

Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts

memory of having to pay for wood chips as well as of the loss of her great elm tree, are testimony to the minute detail in which people described their precious, lost possessions. The detail suggests, as many other studies have demonstrated, that losing material goods mattered emotionally as well as financially. Widow Eedes cared about her wood chips as well as her tree; Ursula Betham’s servant, Henry Greswold of Rowington, noted the loss of money in his purse, his clothes and his bed linen but he also mentioned the plunder of a bottle, and that his hat, valued at an improbable 6s 8d, had been taken directly from his head. Inhabitants of Long Lawford, Warwickshire, gave elaborate descriptions of the losses plundered by Sir William Waller’s troops: Thomas Webb listed ‘a boke the practis of pietie and a pare of spures and a table napkin a pare of gloves and a band and a handcarcheve’. His neighbour Edward Atkins had lost a copy of the same book along with ‘a hat and a jackit Coat and a new pare of stocings for a man’. 29 Atkins, like John Burton of Coventry mentioned earlier, was amongst the many accountants who emphasised proudly that some of their possessions were new, for much of the property of early modern people was second-hand. These individual accounts were not simply statements of fact; with their unnecessary detail, their asides and comments, and their common resort to narratives of painful encounters, men and women were seeking ways of communicating to the Parliament their experience of civil war. As we will see in conclusion, drawing up accounts could be a means through which humble men and women deployed more overt political language. Beyond the village, accounting featured largely in communication and conflict within parliamentarianism, but not simply between ‘centre’ and ‘locality’, for at all levels the parliamentarian coalition fragmented under the pressures and opportunities afforded by war. At Westminster and in the counties under Parliament’s control, parish accounts were deployed as weapons against rivals. This was not simply a case of central direction or manipulation of local officials and committees, for the initiative of the men who staffed the local sub-committees of accounts was crucial. Disputes in Warwickshire are particularly well documented. Almost immediately on their appointment the Warwickshire sub-committee picked an uncompromising quarrel with Rowland Wilson, a zealous parliamentarian Londoner, once a protégé of Lord Brooke, the early parliamentarian leader in the county, and more recently the muster-master and auditor of the county committees forces. Wilson might have been a particular target of the Presbyterian merchants who made up the majority of the central accounts committee but his sensitive role in Warwickshire made him an obvious priority for men suspicious of the accuracy of musters. Wilson was summoned to give in accounts and copies of muster rolls in October 1644 and imprisoned for contempt when he refused to co-operate.30 Another prominent target was John Bridges, the Governor of Warwick Castle, a former estate official of Brooke’s, and an unsuccessful candidate in the ‘recruiter election’ of MPs to 123

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 123

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Parliament in November 1645, in which open enemies of the county committee’s energetic military regime were ultimately elected.31 Apparently petty and obscure disputes ultimately drew on rival versions of the public good and of parliamentarianism. From the perspective of the Warwickshire county committee and its soldiers, pedantic challenges to their accounts sabotaged a war effort essential to the defence of the parliamentarian cause; while for the more moderate sub-committeemen, careless accounting procedures were evidence for the ways in which authoritarian military rule had overcome the legal, traditional forms of government for which Parliament was supposed to be fighting. Similar cleavages were found in many counties. In Sussex, for example, the radical Samuel Jeake denounced the local sub-committeemen as men ‘whose endevours are more to ensnare then to advance the publique good’, and similar accusations were made in Warwickshire. The Coventry sub-committee complained to London in February 1645 that Rowland Wilson ‘brands us with the phrase of being vehemently suspected of malignancie and have acted against the parliam[en]t … we beleive non suspect us of malignancye but them that are suspected accomptants’; it proceeded to a typical denunciation of an upstart military regime: ‘Be pleased to take notice that all of the committee of safetye but one are accountants, or officers, Assessors, Receivers, Judges in all Complaints against themselves or attendants, many of them (if not strangers) yet of small estate in or countie and of little payments, unwilling if not apprehensive of the countries’ burthens and slighting this buyssnesse of accounts though it hath beene and is much desyred by the country for theire satisfaction and incouragement for the future to supply the occasions of the parliament if neede should require’.32 Consequently the disputes in Warwickshire, as elsewhere, are marked by co-operation between rival groups in the county and their allies at Westminster. Thomas Boughton, MP, who had defeated Bridges in the recruiter election of 1645, was thereafter a crucial central contact for beleaguered sub-committeemen. Help flowed in both directions: Boughton supported the work of accounts in the face of obstructions from local officials and commanders, and the sub-committeemen sent up compromising evidence gleaned from the local accounts, for use in ‘Presbyterian’ attempts in the Parliament to limit the powers of county committees and to reduce provincial as well as national armies. These issues increasingly preoccupied the Parliament in 1646 and 1647, and, when the London accounts committee presented Parliament with complaints about obstruction of their business in January 1647, Warwickshire examples figured prominently.33 The initiative was as much local as central. The local sub-committees in Warwickshire were often more uncompromising than the central or ‘Grand’ Committee of Accounts in London, which was more susceptible to influence by parliamentary allies of the county committee; it was on the orders of London, for example, that Wilson was released from prison. Equally significant, as we found with the parish accounts, is the superfluity surrounding 124

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 124

26/02/2020 08:57

Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts

the actions of the sub-committeemen, a conscientiousness amounting to manic excess, which transcends political strategy of a conventional kind. These men worked unceasingly to annotate, analyse, excerpt and crossreference the accounts they had so efficiently solicited. The receipts and arrears claimed by soldiers and civilian officials were cross-checked with the payments and losses in the parish accounts. On the account for Ashow (‘The Charge of Ashow’), for example, is written, ‘This is examined concerninge Colonel Purefoy, Colonel Barker, Colonel Bosvile, Captain Flower and Captaine Attaway’ with a note that it had been ‘Exam[ined] against all the rest and the charges entered in the second Booke of Alphabets July 1 1647’.34 Most ‘Alphabet books’ seem to have been compiled by the hyper-energetic Coventry committeeman Robert Wilcox: one attempt running to 134 pages analysed parishes from Knightlow and Hemlingford hundreds and listed charges against scores of commanders and officials from ‘Aylesbury men’ and Major Alford, to Captains Yates and Young and a sequestration collector Mr Yardley; under ‘S’ there was plunder and quarter taken by the Scots, along with losses to Major General Skippon, Captain Slade (from Warwick garrison) and two carefully distinguished Captain Smiths.35 Driving this process was a profound commitment to proper assessment of the ‘country’s charge’; as with the individual accounts submitted by parishes, this was an emotional and normative concept, marking deep resentment of the ruthless prosecution of the war, as much as a financial one; and it was of course, an obsession that could never be satisfied for no final reckoning was possible. None the less the sub-committees persisted. In June 1646 the Coventry members explained to their London superiors that they had sent up objections to the accounts of Godfrey Bosvile, a Colonel of foot, and MP for Warwick Borough, but needed more time to compare his account of receipts with the accounts of the villages who had contributed to his regiment: ‘the countrye’s charge being the probate and tryall of each Accomptants accounts, and if each mans oath and pretended honestye will serve for his owne discharge wee neede not examine any further then each Accomptants owne confession’.36 And the sub-committees continued working even when their power waned following a December 1646 order by the House of Commons, troubled by troops coming to London to get arrears, that all soldiers’ accounts should be audited by the committees under which they served.37 Disputes over accounting moved beyond English parliamentary institutions, to complicate the fraught negotiations over the withdrawal of the Scottish army from England at the end of the First Civil War. There was sharp disagreement over the final reckoning. The Scots accepted that they had received £219,937 in free-quarter, but the English calculated they had in fact taken £855,000 in unauthorised assessments and quarter.38 The English made no attempt to itemise Scottish plunder, and, given the nature of local accounts, this is understandable, but they mentioned plunder as a vague if threatening element in the bargaining: ‘Besides what the Scotts 125

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 125

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Army hath taken from the People of England, by Plunder of Merchandise, Householdstuff, Horses, Sheep, and other Cattle and Goods; which in Value doth amount unto, if not exceed, any Two of the Sums above mentioned’.39 This suggests they had seen one or two parish accounts, and despaired. None the less, as with their general attempts to assess the ‘country’s charge’, officials in Warwickshire and Worcestershire continued encouraging ­villagers to account for losses to the Scots long after it had become politically and practically irrelevant. I have found no direct central order to midlands officials to conduct specific investigations into losses by the Scots, although Hill’s initial analysis of the Herefordshire accounts, with which I began, may be connected with the negotiations for the Scots’ withdrawal. If this was the case, however, he took too long over it, for, by the time he had collected his evidence, agreement had been reached at Westminster. Again the immediate and local resentment of the burdens of war looks like the crucial spur to accounting; whilst local initiative here was not neatly connected with Westminster divisions, for by 1645–46 Presbyterians at Westminster, usually the allies of energetic sub-committees of accounts, were generally supportive of the Scots.40 The misdeeds of the Scots, as well as criticisms of the English Parliament’s civil war administration often highlighted through the auditing of accounts, featured regularly in the press from the mid-1640s. Two connected broadside ballads, collected by George Thomason in August 1647 shortly after the New Model Army had occupied London to defeat the Presbyterian mobilisation in the city, attacked oppressive committees and rapacious Scots. In the ironic voice of a ‘poore Committee Clerke’, the first began with ‘O Yes, Behold here’s my accompt / I’m ready for to make it’, and contrasted ship-money, ‘a hideous thing’, imposed by the king to stifle law and justice, with the ‘trifles’ exacted by the Parliament for the ‘Kingdomes freedome’. The second alleged that the Scots ‘out of Yorkshire carried more / Then would have bought two Scotlands’, yet again they had done it for the ‘Kingdomes freedome’.41 Sections of the press had long been concerned with parliamentarian divisions over accounts; one newsbook, The Scottish Dove, frequently praised the attempts of sub-committees of accounts to limit the exactions of soldiers and county committees, and at least one reader, the London artisan Nehemiah Wharton, approvingly copied some of the most lurid evidence of corruption into his own notebook. He bemoaned the ‘Cozenage and decaite that is among us even in these heavy and sadd times of Gods wrath which burns like fire: For in November 1645 I did read in the Scots Dove … in the Countie of Surrey’, before transcribing allegations of embezzlement by committeemen of the proceeds of sequestrations in the county.42 The concerns of the press, like the preoccupations of Parliament and local committees, suggest how the burdens of the war effort, or more precisely the call to enumerate and reflect on these burdens, animated parliamentarian politics from the mid-1640s. Accounting helped to construct potent discourses 126

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 126

26/02/2020 08:57

Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts

about the burdens of war and the necessity of recompense, political agendas that were often general or national in scope but certainly not set by central authority. A profound and bitter awareness of the costs of war prompted divergent political mobilisations; the best known are traditionalist or conservative denunciations of ‘parliamentary tyranny’ and calls for a return to familiar forms of government. Thus the Sussex clubmen complained of ‘the insufferable, insolent, arbitrary power that hath bin used amongst us, contrary to all our auncient knowne lawes’ and asked that gentlemen of the county be nominated ‘to speed the takeing of accounts’; and former Welsh parliamentarians, defecting to the king in April 1648, attacked the ‘intollerable charges’ laid on the country, with a poignant exclamation that ‘we have runne into those evils which wee fought against’.43 Reflections on the burdens of war also prompted radical political engagement, demanding recompense for all the blood and treasure spilt in the war, as when Edward Sexby at Putney wondered what the soldiers had fought for all this while, if their liberties and political rights were not to be considered. Similarly, the ‘Digger’ Gerrard Winstanley claimed that the ancient Israelites made sure the spoils of war were divided between ‘them who went to war, and them who stayd at home’; dubbing this ‘David’s Law’, Winstanley called for a social transformation that would benefit ‘the Laborers who staid at home to provide Victuals and Free-quarter’, as well as soldiers.44 Finally one young London woman wrote in 1654: ‘I lived with my mother till she died, which was about twenty years, then I kept house with the means my mother left me, and paid taxes towards maintaining of the army then in the field, and this I did not grudgingly, but freely and willingly; I sold my plate and rings, and gave the money to the public use.’ These records of financial contribution to the ‘public’ service, as much as scriptural authority, helped Anna Trapnel justify her own ‘publick-spiritedness’ through prophesying against Cromwell’s Protectorate.45 We will not find such eloquent or sophisticated political language within the parish accounts. None the less during the unglamorous process of accounting, many English people were able to place their experiences of war, of complex encounters with soldiers and the loss of livestock, food, pots, clothes and household linen, within broader normative or political contexts. Bitterness or scepticism about the validity of Parliament’s actions might be revealed. Prominent figures might be more confident in expressing resentment, as when the Countess of Sunderland claimed the loss of 1250 sheep, two oxen, twenty-four ‘mares, fillies, colts and nags’, and added that ‘Captaine Hawksworth of Warwick took out of these grounds in June 1643 by virtues of an order from the said Committee of Coventry (as he said)’; or the substantial Warwick man Mr John Walford claimed £12 ‘for quartering of one soldier 16 weeks under the command of the Earl of Essex which was maimed at Kineton fight, who spoiled my bedding, besides one to attend him continually, Mr Bryan promised I should be paid for what he had but doth not perform’.46 But the obscurer Northamptonshire man John Wildbore was 127

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 127

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

making political points when he gave his account a distinctly moderate and indignant heading in 1647, describing his contributions as ‘for the use and service of the Kings Majestie and Parliament … out of his small estate’.47 Local accountants deployed a pervasive but variable rhetoric of the public service, with contrasting designations of the authority to whom contributions were paid. Some accountants pondered the basis boundary or distinction between public and private life. In the course of conducting a minute investigation into the disorganised accounts of Colonel John Barker, foot commander, Coventry MP and county committeeman, the sub-committee for accounts solicited evidence from his former Lieutenant Colonel Robert Phipps, who agreed he had received £10 from Barker, but denied that it was part of his pay (as Barker claimed). Rather it was repayment of ‘interest money due to him from Colonel Barker and not from the state’.48 An understanding of the state as public authority is common within the accounts, in both the collective descriptions of payments and individual listings. In contrast to Wildbore’s hesitations, the accounts of several Warwickshire parishes claimed enthusiasm for the Parliament. Atherstone explained ‘how willing they have bin to serve the state with men and horses’; Binton headed some of their losses as ‘what wee have voluntarily sent in for the parliament service at the town’s charge in a general way’ whilst Birmingham insisted they had contributed freely for the service of the state.49 In more detached fashion, the people of Over in Cheshire accounted for their losses to the ‘parliament’s party’ rather than to the state.50 These descriptions may have been official or scribally imposed formulations but individual accounts from Warwick Borough indicate that near neighbours might understand public authority in contrasting ways. One man used the same moderate framework as Wildbore, derived from Parliament’s own description in the first years of the war in ‘A parfect noate of what Thomas Roe hath voluntarily lennt for the sarvice of the kinge and parliament’, while a more partisan version had ‘expences layd out Bye mee John Lathburie of the burrowe of Warwick in way of parlament servise as followeth as near as possible may bee Remembered’. Others listed ‘charges for the state’, or provided ‘A note to shew charges which John Drayton and George Drayton of Warwick have been at for the use of the common weale’.51 An individual might express resentment of parliamentary exaction while still accepting overall allegiance to the cause. In Gosford Street, Coventry, the men drawing up the accounts described them as ‘The Informacion of divers inhabitants … consarning such payments as have bin paid for the publick use of the states servis’. One of these inhabitants, William Worster, was a wagoner whose teams had been requisitioned frequently by parliamentarian commanders. He described in some bitter detail losses of £16 after his team were pressed into service by Essex for the Edgehill campaign and his wagon and gear all burnt, but he was clear what side he was on, complaining of further losses of wagon and gear and five horses to the (royalist) ‘Enemies at Banbury Castell’.52 128

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 128

26/02/2020 08:57

Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts

Individual charges in these socially inclusive local accounts were thus presented within a variety of national or general frameworks. This is further evidence for, in John Walter’s words, ‘a political culture within a public sphere in which … participation and political consciousness extended deep down into the social structure’.53 The accounts reveal awareness of a ‘public service’ divided between friends and enemies, contested by Parliament and the king, although this was rarely fully acknowledged. There is, for example, very little direct evidence of violent assault in the accounts; the accounting genre itself, of course, limited what could be listed, but there must also be a deliberate blurring of troubling memories. Rather accountants present hints and asides; amongst the examples used in this chapter, John Wildbore had been ‘put in feare’ by soldiers; in Rowington Henry Greswold’s hat had been taken directly from his head in what amounted to an assault; whilst the Scots had ‘violently’ seized the property of John Burton of Coventry. The term ‘civil war’ is found nowhere in these parish accounts, which prefer to use the simpler or evasive descriptors, ‘these wars’, ‘calamitous distractions’ or ‘troublesome times’. Discussion of the longer-term impact on popular political culture of participation in accounting for civil war losses must remain speculative. Civil war accounting tended to construct sharp distinctions between soldiers and civilians in a civil war context where roles were often blurred: the tiler Burton, for example, listed pay arrears as a part-time soldier in the Coventry garrison as well as his losses to the Scots; but he clearly did not regard the Scots as allies in a common cause. The later seventeenth-century hostility to high taxation and standing armies may be rooted not simply in memories of civil war but in the practice of itemising experience of that conflict in detail. Here it may be that recording losses to the Parliament, but not to the king, encouraged some of the population to associate a burdensome state specifically with Parliament. On the other hand, Parliament had itself invited the population under its control to participate in the auditing of its officials and commanders; this responsiveness, and the widespread local engagement it prompted, may have legitimated Parliament’s status as the representative of the people and the ‘country’. Accounts thus reveal the clear potential for partisan mobilisations of local people on party lines, within a political culture where division provoked both anxiety and resignation.

NOTES 1 Miles Hill, A True and Impartiall Account of the Plunderings, Losses and Sufferings of the County of Hereford by the Scottish Army (1650). Hill was nominated to assessment and militia committees for Herefordshire and the city of Hereford between May 1649 and January 1660: A&O, II, pp. 119, 299, 468, 664, 1070, 1325, 1369. He was apparently of relatively modest status, rarely described as ‘gentleman’ or 129

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 129

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15

‘Mr’ in the official lists, although the title page of the pamphlet described him as ‘gent’. Paul Slack, ‘Government and information in seventeenth-century England’, P&P, 184 (2004), 33–68. Hill, A True and Impartiall Account, p. 5. TNA, SP 28/187, December 1647. TNA, SP 28/174, Gosford Street Coventry. TNA, SP 28/183/25, Atherstone. TNA, SP 28/201 for Alcester’s sufferings at the hands of the Scots; for 1674: Paul Morgan (ed.), Inspections of Churches and Parsonage Houses in the Diocese of Worcester (Worcestershire Historical Society, new series, 12, 1986), p. 46. I owe this reference to Dr Maureen Harris. The damage to the Bible was not simple vandalism but a reasoned position on whether the Apocrypha was truly the word of God. Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford, 2007), p. 13. I have dealt with other aspects of accounting in ‘The Accounts of the kingdom: memory, community and the English Civil War’, in The Social History of the Archive: Record-keeping in Early Modern Europe, in Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters and Alexandra Walsham (eds), P&P Supplement, 11 (2016), pp. 311–29; and ‘Taking accounts and making memories in the English Civil War’, forthcoming in a special issue of Collection de la Casa de Velazquez. I hope to discuss the role of rival accountings in Anglo-Scottish divisions in a volume in memory of Mark Kishlansky. A&O, 1, pp. 387–91, 717–22. The term ‘parish’ accounts has been used for convenience, although in practice they were drawn up according to constabulary divisions of parishes and townships. Initial loans to the parliament under the ‘propositions’ were in theory to be repaid. For this view of English state formation see Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000); Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000). Donald Pennington, ‘The accounts of the kingdom, 1642–1649’, in F.J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1961); Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 6; Ann Hughes, ‘Parliamentary tyranny? Indemnity proceedings and the impact of the civil war’, Midland History, 11 (1986), 49–78. Jason Peacey, ‘Politics, accounts and propaganda in the Long Parliament’, in Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey (eds), Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2002), quotation at p. 68. Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2015); Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998). Compare D’Maris Coffman’s discussion of how ‘Parliament’s commitment to transparency, accountability and maintaining the “publike faith”’ influenced its conscientious regulation of the levying of the excise: Coffman, ‘Towards a new

130

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 130

26/02/2020 08:57

Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts

16

17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25

6 2 27 28 9 2 30

31 32

33 34 35 36

Jerusalem: the committee for regulating the excise, 1649–1653’, EHR, 128 (2013), 1418–50, at 1450. Jacob Soll, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Making and Breaking of Nations (London, 2014); Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 2; Karen Newman, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton, 2007, 2009 paperback), p. 132. Based on surviving accounts for Northamptonshire, mostly in TNA, SP 28/171–4, and Warwickshire in SP 28/182–6. Ravensthorpe and Teeton: TNA, SP 28/172, Part five; Wibtoft: SP 28/182, Part three; for Newman see n. 16. Maxey: TNA, SP 28/172, Part one; Coventry, Bishop Street Ward, with a parchment cover: SP 28/182; Gosford Street: SP 28/174, part one, with a cardboard cover; Warwick: SP 28/184, Part one; Rugby: SP 28/186, Part three. Descriptions of accounts also varied although Bubnell in Warwickshire chose the broad title of ‘information, answer and account’ to satisfy any readers. See, for example, Wood Newton (TNA, SP 28/171, Part four) where the accounts were claimed to rest on ‘diligent inquiry made in our said towne … of all the particulars in the printed directions … as concerne any of the Inhabitants’. See also Hughes, ‘The accounts of the kingdom’, p. 319. TNA, SP 28/182, Part three; Hughes, ‘The accounts of the kingdom’, pp. 320–1. In Bainton, Northamptonshire, two of the four men who delivered in the accounts could not sign their name: TNA, SP 28/172, Part five. TNA, SP 28/185, fo. 293 Abbots Salford; Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War, pp. 260–2. TNA, SP 28/185, fo. 49. James C. Scott, ‘State, simplifications: nature, space and people’, in Ian Shapiro and Russell Hardin (eds), Political Order, vol. XXXVIII of Year Book of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (1998), pp. 42–85 at 51. BL, Harleian 2,126, fos 10, 12. TNA, SP 28/171, Part four. TNA, SP 28/183/33; SP 28/184, Part one; Hughes, ‘The accounts of the kingdom’, pp. 325–6. TNA, SP 28/185, fo. 49; SP 28/183/33. For the disputes see Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War, pp. 245–51; for Wilson see also Ann Hughes, ‘A “lunatick revolter from loyalty”: the death of Rowland Wilson and the English revolution’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006), 192–204. Peacey, ‘Politics, accounts and propaganda’, pp. 71–2. Jeake quoted in Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660 (London, 1975), p. 336; TNA, SP 28/252/34–5 General Accounts Committee, Letter and Warrant Book; also in SP 28/254, fo. 15. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War, pp. 249–51. TNA, SP 28/201. TNA, SP 28/186, Part three; Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War, pp. 243–6; SP 28/136. Many working papers for the alphabet books are in SP 28/201. TNA, SP 28/38/607. 131

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 131

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 37 Peacey, ‘Politics, accounts and propaganda’, pp. 70, 77. There was something of a recovery in the powers of accounts committees during 1647. 38 Laura A.M. Stewart, ‘English funding of the Scottish armies in England and Ireland, 1640–1648’, HJ, 52 (2009), 573–93; especially Appendix 1, 590. 39 CJ, IV, pp. 653–6. 40 David Scott, ‘The “Northern Gentleman”, the parliamentary independents, and Anglo-Scottish relations in the Long Parliament’, HJ, 42 (1999), 347–75. 41 The poore Committee-mans Accompt, avouched by Britannicus (1647); The Committeemans Complaint, and the Scots Honest Usage (1647), Thomason’s copies (BL, 669 f.11/68 and 68a) are endorsed ‘London Aug 26 1647’. Both attack Marchamont Needham and his defunct newsbook Mercurius Britannicus, although he was on the point of endorsing the royalist cause (and was consistently hostile to the Scots). 42 For the Scottish Dove, see Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War, pp. 251–2; Peacey, ‘Politics, accounts and propaganda’, pp. 73–4; Wallington: Tatton Park MS 68.20, p. 317. 43 ‘The petitions of the Sussex Clubmen’ (September 1645), and The Declaration of Colonels Poyer and Powell (April 1648), quoted from John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (London, 1976), pp. 198, 202–3. 44 Andrew Sharp (ed.), The English Levellers (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 119–20, 124; Thomas Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein (eds), The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2 vols, Oxford, 2009), II, pp. 279, 300. 45 Anna Trapnel, Report and Plea (1654) p. 50. 46 TNA, SP 28/186, Napton and Wormleighton; SP 28/184, Part one, High Pavement Ward. Mr Bryan was the Treasurer to Warwick Garrison. 47 TNA, SP 28/171, Part four. 48 TNA, SP 28/201, notes on Barker’s accounts. 49 TNA, SP 28/183/25; SP 28/186 Birmingham and Binton. 50 BL, Harl. 2,126. 51 TNA, SP 28/184, examples are from High Pavement and Smith Street Wards. 52 TNA, SP 28/174. 53 John Walter, Covenanting Citizens. The Protestation Oath and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2017), p. 260.

132

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 132

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’

Chapter 7

Provincial ‘Levellers’ and the coming of the regicide in the south-west David R. Como

O

n 11 September 1648 a delegation arrived at the House of Commons to present a petition from the ‘well affected persons’ of London and the suburbs. The petition was inspired by outrage. Despite the bloodshed unleashed by the king in the Second Civil War, which had effectively ended at Preston three weeks earlier, Parliament had continued to negotiate with Charles. The 11 September petitioners thus denounced the personal treaty with the king. But they also called for a settlement along lines now familiar to the political public as ‘Leveller’ in inspiration. The House of Commons was the supreme power of the commonwealth, impervious to any negative voice of king or lords; the petition insisted that this was the principal crux of the entire struggle. The petition then conjured many standard demands of the Leveller programme: annual parliaments, legal reform, provision for the poor, along with abolition of compulsive religious authority, impressment, tithes and monopolies. The only foundational Leveller position absent was franchise reform­ – ­perhaps a nod to the divisive effect this subject had at Putney when An Agreement of the People was floated the previous October. The most eye-catching demand of the 11 September petition was its request that Parliament should do ‘Justice upon the Capitall Authors and Promoters of the … late Wars’, and above all that the Commons should consider ‘the … innocent bloud that hath bin spilt, and the infinite spoil and havock … made of peaceable harmeless people, by express Commission from the King; and seriously’ consider ‘whether the justice of God be likely to be satisfyed, or his continuing wrath appeased, by an Act of Oblivion’.1 Contemporaries took this as suggesting that the king should be brought to justice and punished for his crimes. The Commons, unsurprisingly, reacted with complete disdain, ignoring the petition and returning to the treaty with the king. But the tsunami that would sweep away monarchy was now rising. The petition of 11 September was clearly the handiwork of organisers who had come, over the previous nine months, to be styled ‘Levellers’. John 133

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 133

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Lilburne admitted he had a hand in it, and, in the following months, he and his collaborators routinely labelled themselves the ‘presenters and approvers of the late large petition of the eleventh of September. 1648’.2 Their willingness to wave the petition as a banner was partly a result of its smashing success. Promoters bragged of forty thousand signatories, claims that, even if inflated and exaggerated, mark the petition as one of the most impressive of the revolutionary period.3 And its reach extended far beyond the city. The historian Thomas May in 1655 correctly observed that the 11 September petition unleashed a wave of copycat petitions. The London petition ‘broke the Ice’ and ‘was followed, in the space of one month, by many other Petitions of the same kinde’, all of which agreed that ‘whosoever had offended against the Commonwealth, no persons excepted, might come to Judgement’, reacting against the personal treaty with the king by calling for Parliament ‘to take him quite away’.4 Beginning with a petition from Oxfordshire on 30 September, supplications flowed without pause to the House and Lord General Fairfax. By December 1648, dozens of petitions reached Parliament or Fairfax from counties, cities, garrisons and regiments of England and Wales.5 While these petitions differed in interesting ways, most echoed the call for justice on capital offenders, universally understood to refer to Charles. Thomas May perceived what many recent historians have forgotten: that the endgame for the king, and for monarchy itself, began with the Leveller petition of 11 September and the torrent of petitions it unleashed.6 This chapter explores the process by which the 11 September petition emanated into the countryside by looking at one of these local petitions, from Wiltshire. The chapter examines the complex, tight linkage between political mobilisation at the centre and in the localities, a relationship that was reshaped and intensified by the civil war. It seeks to elucidate the nature of the so-called Leveller movement, often understood as an exclusively urban phenomenon, but which in fact had substantial support in the countryside, support that has remained almost entirely overlooked by modern researchers. This local context is then used to analyse the relationship between the Levellers, the regicide and the creation of the republic. Finally, the Wiltshire petition offers an opportunity to illuminate the provincial basis of the interregnum regimes of the 1650s. Whilst it is universally accepted that the regicide and establishment of the republic marked a pivotal conjuncture of early modern British history, research into these events has remained recalcitrantly focused on high politics at the centre. The present chapter suggests that only by carefully reconstructing local political contexts­ – ­and in turn by examining political relationships between the provinces and Westminster, as transformed in the crucible of civil war­– ­can we fully understand the regicide and the regimes that followed it.

134

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 134

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’

THE WILTSHIRE PETITION OF OCTOBER 1648 On 30 October 1648, a detachment arrived at the Lower House to present a petition from the ‘well-affected’ of Wiltshire. The gentlemen were kept waiting. Three days later, on 2 November, the petition was finally conveyed into the House by John Long, Esq., a leader of the Wiltshire men. As with the 11 September petition, MPs withheld the customary thanks, responding curtly that they were ‘upon a Treaty; and therein they will take a special Care for Preserving and Settling of Religion, Law, and Liberties’, an answer directly contrary to the Wiltshiremen’s demands.7 Snubbed by the House, the petitioners turned to the public, printing the petition, along with supporting documents, in a broadside edition, thereby preserving the text for posterity.8 The petition reminded the Commons that ‘the Maine end of the Peoples entrusting you, is chiefly to remove Oppressions, that they may live in peace, freedome and safety’. However, this trust had been compromised, and ‘the Freedome of this Nation hath beene of late much violated; Petitions have beene burned … Petitioners imprisoned onely for petitioning; Petitions unanswered; yea, a Petition of Thousands in … London presented to this Honorable House, Sept. the 11. 1648. wholly sleighted’. The Wiltshire petitioners unambiguously endorsed the substance of the Leveller petition: it contained ‘such Foundations of Government … and such oppressions to be removed, that we verily believe, till the former be confirmed, and the latter banished this Nation, it will be impossible … to settle this Common-wealth in … peace and true freedome’. The Wiltshiremen then repeated several Leveller demands, before imploring the Commons ‘immediately to take the Petition of the 11th of Sept. 1648. into your serious consideration’.9 There is really only one way to describe this petition: it was a Wiltshire Leveller petition, recapitulating the 11 September London mass petition. Surprisingly, the petition has gone unnoticed. David Underdown, the region’s greatest historian, felt comfortable remarking that ‘the Levellers appear to have made little headway in the western counties’. Underdown knew that Bristol produced radical petitions in 1647 and 1648, but he regarded them as a kind of alien protuberance, ‘inspired by the soldiers’, and remarked that ‘apart from this, organized Leveller activity is almost invisible in the region’.10 The Wiltshire petition of 1648 renders this view untenable. Indeed, as we will see, the Bristol petitions mentioned by Underdown were not the result of exogenous imposition, but grew out of the same local political networks that produced the Wiltshire Leveller petition of 1648. Sadly, like most petitions of the period, no original copies survive, meaning that the names and numbers of the signatories are lost. It is uncertain whether this was a modest campaign backed by dozens, a mass remonstrance, endorsed by thousands, or something in between. However, the publisher of the broadside helpfully printed a statement of purpose, issued 135

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 135

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

on 26 October 1648, when the petitioners gathered to finalise their effort in Wiltshire. This statement expressed hope ‘That the people of this Nation may at length enjoy the happinesse of an equall Government’, and that ‘all oppressions may be removed’. The petitioners thus declared that ‘We the people of the County of Wilts, whose names are hereunto subscribed, doe nominate and entrust our lawfull Commissioners … To present our humble Remonstrance and Petition’. These commissioners were ‘authorised, to use their utmost endeavours … as shall seeme meete unto them, or any seven or more of them, to obtaine those foundations of Government to be established, and those oppressions removed, that are held forth in the large Petition presented to the Honourable House of Commons, upon the 11th of September, 1648’. The petitioners then decreed that ‘what our Commissioners, or any seven or more of them, shall doe in pursuance thereof, we shall esteeme it as our acts and deeds, as if we were personally present, and did the same’. This set of instructions was remarkable in its formality and underlying political assumptions, by which delegated authority and representative decision-making were linked to that favoured structure of civil war bureaucratic organisation­– ­the humble committee. The statement then named all twentytwo delegated commissioners: Walter South, William Eyre, John Long, Thomas Eyre, Edward Stokes, John Reade, William Ludlow, Nicholas Greene, Esquires; James Heely, Richard Crowch, Edward Frippe, William Adlam, William Mountjoy, George Dyer, Thomas Wansey, John Stephens of the Devises; J. James, Bennet Swaine, Christopher Merriweather, Henry White, Thomas Neate, Adam Gouleney, Gentlemen.

While we cannot be absolutely certain, it is exceedingly likely that these men were signatories of the petition; they were presumably present at the meeting in Wiltshire on 26 October. Some of them did unquestionably journey to Westminster, for the broadside also described the arrival of ‘divers Gent. (entrusted by the Well-affected … of Wilts)’ at the Commons’ door, providing a transcript of the speech the commissioner John Long gave when called into the House.11 The list of commissioners affords an invaluable opportunity to dissect the petitioning campaign. All but one of the commissioners can be identified with reasonable certainty. The details of their backgrounds and careers have been condensed into Appendix 7.1, which follows this chapter. Several described as ‘esquire’ were substantial gentlemen, including John Long of South Wraxall, Walter South of Swallowcliffe, Nicholas Greene of Winterbourn Stoke, and William Eyre of Neston. One commissioner, William Ludlow of Clarendon, was from a cadet branch of an important Wiltshire family – his uncle was Sir Henry Ludlow, Long Parliament knight of the shire, and his cousin was therefore the regicide Edmund Ludlow (a connection explored below). However, none was from the pinnacle of the county elite, and only one, William Eyre, sat as a JP prior to 1648. 136

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 136

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’

Others were far more obscure. A few were what might be called ‘town gentry’, such as Bennett Swayne of Salisbury, John Stephens of the Devizes, or Thomas Neate of Chippenham. Some are best seen as ‘parish gentry’: the neighbours George Dyer and Richard Crowch of Heytesbury, for instance, were apparently not landlords but direct farmers of compact holdings. Indeed, several commissioners did not personally label themselves gentlemen at all, including the self-described yeomen Christopher Meriweather of Chitterne and Adam Gouldney of Chippenham, or the clothier William Adlam of Crockerton. Thomas Wansey was the son of a Warminster yeoman. What distinguished these men was not exalted social status but a clear sense of ideological solidarity, often reinforced by devoted bureaucratic or military service to Parliament’s cause. Wiltshire was one of the counties most brutally affected by the wars. The region had seen constant strife, as armies marched up and down, demanding money and quarter, and laying siege to garrisoned strongholds. Almost all the commissioners showed signs, prior to 1648, of strong support for Parliament, often with serious consequences for their estates and lives. Predictably, this ideological solidarity translated into other forms of association­ – ­several commissioners shared, or soon established, ties of kinship, business partnership or demonstrable friendship (relationships outlined in the Appendix).12 Importantly, at least eight of the twenty-two commissioners served in Parliament’s armies prior to October 1648, chiefly in local forces, rather than the main battle armies. The movement to bring the king to justice, like the broader revolutionary turn of 1648, was driven by those who had suffered royalist depredations and violence, above all by combat veterans. Wiltshire was no exception. After beginning the war in Essex’s lifeguard, William Ludlow, for instance, served as cornet under his more famous cousin Edmund; in 1643, William was severely wounded in a royalist ambush, but survived to hold several commands in local Wiltshire forces. John Rede, a minor gentleman from Porton, likely served alongside the Ludlows in Wiltshire’s county forces, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before being captured at Salisbury in January 1645. In 1647, Rede became Governor of the Dorset coastal garrison of Poole. Thomas Eyre, gentleman of Bromham, served as a captain and garrison commander in the west and was twice captured by royalists. By October 1648 Thomas was Governor of Hurst Castle on the Hampshire coast. Eyre enlisted as his deputy at Hurst another commissioner, the Warminster native Lieutenant Thomas Wansey. Wansey was one of several Wansey brothers who were parliamentarian officers in the 1640s, the most prominent being Major Henry Wansey, a close associate of John Lilburne (a point elaborated below). These experiences of war, upheaval and captivity exerted a radicalising effect. Eyre, Rede and Thomas Wansey became uncompromising political extremists. When the army leadership ordered the king from the Isle of Wight for trial, Charles was brought first to Hurst Castle, to be overseen 137

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 137

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

by that ‘true Patriot, Col. Ayers of Wiltshire … whose fidelity can never be poysoned’, and who showed predictable disdain for ‘the King, to whom he gave (Switz-like) small observance’. This republican mien was shared by John Rede, who was denounced in August 1648 as having ‘often declared himselfe against Kingly power, saying, he thought this Kingdome might be governed better without a King’.13 John Rees, using evidence from 1649 and after, has recently argued for Rede as a strong, if peripheral, supporter of the Levellers.14 The material presented here confirms that picture, showing that Rede was notorious for doctrinaire republican leanings by mid-1648. As we will see, Eyre, Wansey and Rede would collaborate in subsequent agitation to bring the king to justice and to promote the Leveller programme. The petition commissioners thus appear to have constituted a kind of alternative local elite, determined not by blood or wealth but by militant commitment to the parliamentarian cause. They were presumably selected for their (relatively) high social status. But can the commissioners tell us anything about the broader appeal or demographics of the petition? The commissioners’ identities allow for rough inferences about the petition’s geography, revealing a clear pattern (see Figure 7.1). Many were based around the clothing centre of Chippenham. This is unsurprising: north-western Wiltshire was identified by Underdown as a parliamentarian enclave, a trait he ascribed to the peculiarities of upland, cloth-making communities, in accord with his ‘ecological’ model of civil war allegiance. Less predictably, however, the rest of the commissioners were from parishes in the south of the county, in particular from precincts around Warminster, and, to a lesser extent, along an axis from Warminster to Salisbury. Here, Underdown’s model proves less useful, for he identified the south Wiltshire ‘downland’ as preponderantly royalist, a picture complicated by this platoon of radical parliamentarian gentlemen organised in support of the Leveller programme.15 However, the Warminster area, like Chippenham, supported substantial cloth production, and was also a key grain-marketing centre for the whole region. These cloth-making districts suffered severe dearth and hardship in 1647–48. The straitened conditions provoked several politicised petitions to the Quarter Sessions in the name of the poor, pressuring magistrates to redress abuses in the grain market, and hinting that the JPs themselves had colluded in driving up food prices. These petitions made no mention of national issues, but Steve Hindle has suggested that the despair and organisation of west Wiltshire’s labourers offered fertile ground for broader political mobilisation.16 London Leveller leaders were demonstrably aware of the ‘tumults of the poore’ in Wiltshire. Possibly, efforts were made to target hungry weavers and textile labourers (a tactic Levellers certainly employed in London in 1647), which would explain the apparent geographic epicentre of the petitioning drive around the crisis-ridden parishes near Chippenham and Warminster.17 There are uncertainties here, since we cannot be sure there was close correspondence between the origin-points of the commissioners and 138

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 138

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’

Figure 7.1 Home Parishes of the Wiltshire ‘Leveller’ Petition Commissioners of October 1648, p. 248. Numbers correspond to the numeration provided in Appendix 7.1 (i.e., 1 = Walter South, 2 = William Eyre, etc.). Adapted by the author from map created by Nilfanion, under Creative Commons licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode.

the places where the petition drew heaviest support. Such a correlation likely existed, however – petitioners presumably delegated trusted neighbourhood men. If so, they were in effect authorising an alternative county elite, drawn from outside the bounds of traditional governing groups, but distinguished 139

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 139

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

by respectable social status, combined with zealous bureaucratic, military and ideological support for Parliament’s cause.

RELIGION, POLITICAL ORGANISATION AND THE WILTSHIRE RANT Undergirding this ideological solidarity was, of course, deep religious commitment, and many of the commissioners showed preferences for extreme forms of Puritan religiosity. John Rede, for instance, was or soon became an Anabaptist­ – ­indeed, an Anabaptist preacher, founder of a long-lived congregation in his home of Porton.18 William Adlam was also a Baptist by the 1670s. Thomas Neate, Adam Gouldney and Edward Stokes later became Quakers. None of this is startling; the Leveller movement was driven from its inception by people at the sectarian edge of the Puritan community. But whilst the London leadership of the Leveller agitation was concentrated in the hands of sectaries, the Wiltshire commissioners reveal a more nuanced picture. In the late 1640s and early 1650s, several commissioners participated in the ordinances of the national church. Despite his later Quakerism, Gouldney was married in London’s St Giles Cripplegate parish three months before the Wiltshire petition.19 Two other commissioners baptised children in their parishes in 1647–48, and another named a Presbyterian minister as a trustee for his son in 1652.20 Participation in the established church was not, of course, inconsistent with certain forms of congregationalism or ‘independency’, but such participation did suggest that these men had not, by 1648, embraced hardline variants of sectarian Puritanism, which insisted on strict separation from antichristian parochial assemblies. Most of the commissioners were surely godly in inclination­ – ­and several were clearly sympathetic to species of radical Puritanism­ – ­but not all were the diehard sectaries that inhabit histories of the Leveller movement. This is a point of considerable significance: whilst the Leveller groundswell was driven by fierce separatists and Anabaptists such as Lilburne and Richard Overton, no serious popular mobilisation could have relied on sectarian congregations alone. It has always been obvious that petitions such as the 11 September petition, with its claims of forty thousand backers, must have been subscribed by people of varying ecclesiological opinion, including many not overtly attached to gathered congregations. This is exactly what we see in the Wiltshire petition: a coalition, perhaps spearheaded by sectaries, but relying on a broader base, including many at least tenuously committed to a national church, albeit a church with considerable leeway for scrupling, godly consciences. The complexities of this religious landscape­ – ­as well as the relationship between religion and politics­ – ­can be explored by looking at two of the more colourful commissioners, Edward Stokes of Tytherton Lucas and Henry White of Langley Burrell. Both were implicated in one of the most notorious episodes of the period. In 1652, Stokes published The Wiltshire 140

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 140

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’

Rant, defending himself from libels cast at him by Thomas Webbe, minister of neighbouring Langley Burrell, an accused Ranter, and one of the most infamous troublemakers of the period. Webbe was repeatedly under scrutiny in London for his forthright antinomianism in the early 1640s.21 After the war, he occupied the pulpit of Langley Burrell, enjoying the support of Henry White, the resident manor lord, and one of the Wiltshire commissioners of 1648 (providing clear hints of White’s religious predilections).22 At Langley, Webbe continued to vent heterodox opinions, now moving into more dangerous territory: on Stokes’s account, Webbe embraced a crude libertinism, whereby his prior theological antinomianism turned him into a confirmed sexual predator. Webbe seduced Henry White’s wife, Mary, who became Webbe’s paramour. Stokes later hinted, however, that Henry White tolerated the lewd relations between his wife and Webbe, and continued to back the embattled preacher even after the sordid mess erupted into local scandal, landing in Stokes’s lap as a JP.23 In the ensuing row, Webbe lashed out at Stokes, publishing an attack on his supposedly persecuting judge, to which Stokes responded in kind. Stokes’s account has received much scholarly attention, mainly centring on Webbe’s alleged outrages, and whether in turn he qualified as a ‘Ranter’.24 Completely overlooked has been what The Wiltshire Rant tells us about Stokes’s own politico-religious activities. In his attack on Stokes, Webbe hinted that the Tytherton JP was possessed of very radical religious views. Webbe related an anecdote, in which, while the two men lodged together at an inn, Stokes performed a kind of anti-sacrament over his own chamber pot, ‘pointing to his dung’ and pronouncing ‘Here is the body of Christ’, before ‘Pointing to his urine’, and pronouncing ‘Here is the bloud of Christ’. Stokes vehemently denied the tale, but sheepishly admitted that he had indeed ‘been addicted to laughing and jearing at false and formall worshippers, both Papists and common Protestants, who make ignorance the mother of devotion’.25 This candid confession suggests that Stokes was immersed in an aggressive, antiformal brand of Puritanism, helping to explain his later move to the Society of Friends. Indeed, Francis Howgill and Edward Burrough, who confirmed Stokes in his Quakerism, claimed that he had been ‘A great notionist and a Teacher’ prior to his conversion in the mid-1650s.26 Moreover, The Wiltshire Rant showed that, despite their feud, Stokes and Webbe maintained cordial relations until a very late date, and that the two had collaborated closely on political matters. Stokes recalled that one Sunday ‘in the yeare 1647’, after Webbe’s sermon at Langley Burrell, a collection was taken at the parsonage house ‘by the honest party … to defray the charges of our Bristoll friends in carrying up a Petition to London’. The collection yielded some 29s, which Webbe handed to Stokes. Stokes in turn passed off 25s to William Coller, the man ‘appointed to receive the same’.27 This is clearly a reference to the radical Bristol petition of August 1647, dismissed by Underdown as ‘inspired by the soldiers’, but which, as this passage suggests, 141

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 141

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

had been mobilised by a tight network of parliamentarian militants across the south-west.28 Contributions were gathered at a parochial level (Webbe), then passed up to a local collector (Stokes) and then finally handed to a central collector (Coller), to be channelled to Bristol twenty-five miles away. Indeed, this ephemeral window on to the petitioning activities of 1647 offers tantalising evidence for how the Wiltshire petition of October 1648 likely coalesced, as existing networks were brought into play, with experienced organisers such as Stokes leading the campaign. The Wiltshire Rant also revealed that in 1648 Stokes, Webbe and another Wiltshire captain lodged together at Westminster’s Blue Boar inn, providing evidence of an otherwise inexplicable mutual holiday one hundred miles from home that may well refer to the Wiltshire commissioners’ journey to the capital to present the petition at the heart of this chapter.29 This leads to the broader questions of how Wiltshire and London were connected, and how news (and copies) of the 11 September petition filtered into the country, allowing it to become a focal point for organisation in the rural west. Obviously, there were people in Wiltshire, such as the flamboyant Webbe or the ‘great … Teacher’ Stokes, linked to wider networks of militant Puritans in London and beyond. But there were numerous interconnections tying the commissioners to the city, and indeed to the centres of politics in Westminster and London. As noted, one commissioner, Adam Gouldney, was married in London just weeks before the petition was mounted. The most likely conduit was, however, Thomas Wansey. He was the brother of Henry Wansey, an intimate ally of Lilburne, and one of a handful of Londoners unquestionably involved in the mobilisations surrounding the first Agreement of the People in 1647.30 It is reasonable to surmise that the Warminster natives Thomas and Henry Wansey were deeply implicated in the Wiltshire petitioning campaign. Yet there were other possible routes of interconnection. By October 1648 there had emerged a core of militant MPs at Westminster, working with the army to undermine negotiations with the king, and, ultimately, to force a republican settlement. Among the most prominent was Edmund Ludlow, who, although not overtly involved in the 11 September petition, was clearly pursuing similar aims; indeed, Lilburne later suggested that, in these weeks, he was in contact with Ludlow.31 Edmund also had connections to several involved in the 1648 Wiltshire petition. John Long of South Wraxall was his friend and correspondent.32 William Ludlow was Edmund’s cousin, having served as his cornet, and there were close, lasting bonds between the two men.33 John Rede had most likely also served beside Edmund. Ludlow’s military ties, together with his clout as a county gentleman and MP, meant he was well placed to exert influence in Wiltshire, and it is unlikely that the petitioning campaign unfolded without his approval. Indeed, Ludlow was trying to foster a kind of radical power base in the county in mid-1648, backing some of the same figures named by the peti142

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 142

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’

tioners as commissioners. In August, as the Scots were invading England, Ludlow moved the House that Wiltshire ‘might be put into a posture of defence; and to this end he named to be Commissioners one Read a Servingman, and … other paltry contemptible fellowes (all of them Sectaries;) for whom he desired an Ordinance, to impower them to raise what Forces they pleased, and to assese the poor County at 400.l. a week’. This was John Rede of Porton, Governor of Poole. Ludlow’s proposal drew opposition, his chosen men decried as having ‘no Estates in the County’, with Rede singled out for having ‘often declared himselfe against Kingly power’. Still, the ordinance passed, Ludlow and his ‘Faction pleading strongly, that [Rede] and rest were godly men’.34 In ensuing debate, the House divided over one man proposed, Edward Stokes, the petition commissioner and later author of The Wiltshire Rant, whose name was narrowly rejected.35 Despite this defeat, Stokes and another commissioner, Nicholas Greene, were entrusted in summer 1648 to raise horse units for the county, in effect creating a kind of radical militia in Wiltshire. In September 1648 their companies became sites of political resistance and organisation: ‘Capt. Stokes, and Capt. Greens Troops of Horse were lately ordered by the Committee to disband … thereupon Capt. Stokes his Troop marched towards Malborrough to make their Proposals in order to disbanding, desiring especially that they might see their security against their Capitall Enemy, and for their Freedom before they were disbanded’.36 In the weeks before the Wiltshire petition was mounted, there already existed a core of military men and functionaries, promoted partly through Ludlow’s efforts, including Stokes, Greene and Rede, who had begun to organise along the lines suggested by the 11 September petition. This is not to suggest that the Wiltshire petition was an invention of Ludlow, pulling strings from Westminster. Importantly, the interlinkages behind the petition were not simply between ‘centre’ and ‘locality’. As demonstrated, for instance, the Wiltshiremen were connected to Bristol, an alternative metropolis, closer to home. Moreover, the ideological ties forged in the 1640s, particularly networks of military association and patronage, also bound the Wiltshire petitioners to other localities and organisational nodes. Weeks later, as the king’s trial proceeded, three Wiltshire commissioners put their hands to a second petition. This one, circulated in the garrisons of the south coast, was submitted to Parliament on 17 January 1649. The petition reiterated cries for justice against Charles, repeated standard Leveller demands and called for Parliament to establish ‘the Peoples freedoms’ in accord with the ‘Petition of the 11th of September last’. It was signed by officers of seven garrisons, most conspicuously Colonel Thomas Eyre of Hurst Castle, Eyre’s Lieutenant, Thomas Wansey, and John Rede, Governor of Poole. All three had been commissioners for the Wiltshire petition eight weeks earlier.37 Their involvement hints at the ways the Wiltshire petition fed off, and then intensified, existing ties of military intercommunication, linking garrisons and provincial units, which in turn had deep connections 143

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 143

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

both to local society and to the hub of national political life in London and Westminster. The Wiltshire petition of October 1648 was thus built on a thick and tangled web of local, regional and national connections; locally, it was surely pushed forward by the likes of Stokes and the ‘Ranter’ Webbe, men experienced in prior petitioning campaigns, connected to Bristol.38 The document may perhaps have been circulated among the discontented labourers and poor of west Wiltshire, who had recently been involved in local action to alleviate economic hardships. Certainly, the petition was directly tied to a network of local soldiers and ex-soldiers, who were flexing their muscles over the county and more broadly across the interlinked garrisons and units of the west. More extensively still, this network had in Thomas Wansey an overt connection to a prominent London Leveller organiser, but was also linked back to Parliament’s most radical faction, anchored by Edmund Ludlow. The Wiltshire petition testified to the extent to which the peculiar conditions of crisis and war had remade the political circuitry of England, linking localities, regional networks of association and the capital in new and potent ways, and allowing for rapid and escalating mobilisations that vibrated from London to the provinces and back with formidable speed and efficiency.

THE LEVELLERS, THE REGICIDE AND THE LOCAL ROOTS OF THE ENGLISH REPUBLIC What was the relationship between these activists and the political groundswell we traditionally call the Leveller movement, and what can the petitioning campaign tell us about this movement? Can we label these people Levellers? If anyone merits the name, it must be individuals who endorsed petitions built around the principles of the Leveller propaganda collective in London, and in this sense the Wiltshire petitioners certainly deserve the appellation. But this points towards a difficulty with both the epithet ‘Leveller’ and the historiography that has accreted around it. To be sure, there was a discrete group of propagandists in London, centred on the familiar figures of Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn and Wildman, promoting a distinctive ideological programme, and by 1648 that programme was habitually tagged with the name Leveller; moreover, these activists established a striking set of organisational structures­ – ­local committees, collectors, distribution networks­ – ­contributing to a view, partly justified, that the Levellers were something like an infant political party (indeed, as we have seen, similar organisational techniques were evident among the west-country men analysed here). But in truth, the Levellers were never a fixed party, and their supporters had a fluid identity. Those who backed the programme put forward by London leaders at one moment might well decide not to do so months later. It is also clear there were different degrees of support for this programme, ranging from maximalist ‘ultras’, at one end­ – ­those who endorsed the entire complex of 144

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 144

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’

ideas, including not only demands for the supremacy of the Commons and total liberty of conscience but also a high degree of overt anti-monarchism, assertive claims for natural rights, plans for heavy devolution of power, radical legal reform, a massively expanded franchise and other notions that appeared in the leaders’ writings. At the other end, one might suggest there was a minimalist version, taking as its starting point the supremacy of the Lower House against any claims of a negative voice for king or Lords, a broad, but still indeterminate degree of religious toleration and calls for frequent parliaments. On these basic points, there was a very wide constituency by 1648 prepared to follow the Levellers into the political fray, and the 11 September petition was artfully designed to emphasise these shared, central tenets, while downplaying other, more divisive aspects of the programme, such as franchise reform. Moreover, large numbers of parliamentarians were now done with the king, whom they saw as a duplicitous murderer and a danger to the commonwealth, a view Leveller propagandists had sporadically cultivated for the better part of two years. In short, hardened parliamentarians, particularly those affiliated with ‘independency’, were now ripe to follow the lead of the London organisers. October 1648 was the Leveller moment. Of course, this does not mean that backers of either the 11 September petition or the Wiltshire petition of 1648 were forever and eternally ‘Levellers’. As easily as they had jumped on the train, they might get off. The political mood that Leveller leaders captured and to some extent shaped, which spread through the counties and into the New Model, set in motion the famous army remonstrance of November 1648, Pride’s Purge and the trial of the king. Whether one chooses to accept Sean Kelsey’s argument that the king’s trial was not intended by its chief authors to bring about regicide and republicanism, it is obvious that there was a large constituency in the armies, in London and in the provinces, that sought Charles’s trial and execution, which is precisely why, whatever Cromwell and Ireton may personally have desired, they were ultimately forced to do the deed.39 Ironically, of course, several chief Leveller leaders at the last moment withdrew support from the trial and regicide, fearing that the proceedings failed to ensure that the maximalist version of their position would be cemented into the foundation for the new polity. This has to some extent obscured the role they played in the run-up to the king’s execution and the establishment of the republic. It also prompted bafflement among many erstwhile supporters: early 1649 saw the king brought to justice, the establishment of a free state and the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, the promise of broad religious toleration, and, indeed, an Agreement of the People, ready to be enacted by Parliament. In short, the chief demands of the Leveller programme had now been achieved or stood poised to be locked into place. And yet still Lilburne and his confederates were agitating. At this point, many who had backed the Leveller leadership, and in large measure agreed with them, abandoned them and moved into support for the Rump and the new republic. 145

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 145

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

This conclusion receives eloquent testimony in the later lives of the Wiltshire commissioners. These figures aggressively supported the 11 September petition. But when monarchy was abolished, almost to a man the Wiltshire commissioners became bulwarks of the new regime. And not just the Rump regime, but every retooled interregnum contrivance down to the Restoration. The details are recorded in Appendix 7.1, but we may summarise the basic facts. In 1649, the committee for raising Wiltshire’s monthly assessment included nine of the Wiltshire petition commissioners. In 1650, seven were made officers in the new Rump county militia, whilst three were installed as the county’s new sequestration commissioners. Two others served that year as commissioners to survey Wiltshire’s churches. Six were habitually named JPs under the Rump, often forming a near majority on the bench. However, the abolition of the Rump by no means removed them from prominence. The commissioners supplied two of Wiltshire’s three representatives to the Barebones Parliament. The establishment of the Protectorate did little to remove them from centrality. Seven continued to serve as JPs throughout the protectoral period. The dominance of this group in county affairs evidently provoked an organised local counterthrust at the parliamentary election of 1654, in which the radicals, led by Edmund Ludlow and the commissioner William Eyre, were stigmatised with the ‘names of Anabaptists, Levellers, to render them odious to the generality of the injudicious people’, resulting in their defeat in the contest.40 Nevertheless, when the protectoral regime came under threat, it was to precisely these ‘Anabaptists’ and ‘Levellers’ that the government turned. Two 1648 commissioners were named Cromwellian ‘ejectors’, another was assigned to try Penruddock’s rebels, while, most strikingly, the petition commissioners contributed six of the county’s eleven ‘commissioners for securing the peace of the commonwealth’, named to administer government by the Major-Generals in 1655. Two were elected to the second protectoral Parliament in 1656, and two to the third in 1659. Twelve were named to the county assessment committee in 1657. When the next great revolution took place, and the Protectorate was dissolved and the Rump recalled in 1659, these same men were back in the thick of county affairs: five served as JPs, whilst eight were put on the remodelled county militia committee. In short, these men formed the vertebrae not only of the Rump regime in Wiltshire but of every republican permutation of the 1650s. This is an essential point. The interregnum regimes are often portrayed as if they were mere military dictatorships imposed from the outside, with no popular basis. That is plainly not the case: there were from 1648 powerful popular and local constituencies pushing for the king’s trial and the establishment of a republican or crypto-republican order; those local constituencies then furnished the backbone and nerves of state for the new regime in the localities. These men might not have liked every permutation thrown up by the chaotic churn of the interregnum, and some no doubt preferred something closer to the maximalist position of Lilburne and his 146

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 146

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’

friends. In a few cases, these radical tendencies ultimately produced tensions. Thomas Wansey, for instance, apparently continued until 1653 as Lieutenant of Hurst Castle, but was eventually ‘put out … as dissatisfied with the’ protectoral government. Because of his military duties in Hampshire, but perhaps also owing to his hardline beliefs, Wansey played no known role in Wiltshire in the 1650s (although the restored Rump quickly reinstated him at Hurst in 1659). Similarly, in 1655–56, Walter South was removed from the Commission of the Peace at the explicit request of Major-General Disbrowe, suggesting South’s commitment to the new regime may have been suspect. Henry White’s scandalous association with the ‘Ranter’ Thomas Webbe likewise disqualified him from any public role, an exclusion that may have been reinforced by extreme political inclinations, for in the 1650s White revealed ties to the Leveller leader John Wildman. Nevertheless, even those who clearly sympathised with ‘maximalist’ Leveller demands felt compelled to offer strong support to the various republican contrivances of the 1650s. John Rede, for instance, was removed as Governor of Poole in 1651 for alleged Leveller tendencies.41 But Rede then simply retired to Wiltshire and became a trusted pillar of the Cromwellian regime. His apparent preference for a more robustly Lilburnian commonwealth, in its maximalist version, did not stop him from collaborating with the Protectorate, or from supporting the restored Rump in 1659. The significance of men such as Rede and his Wiltshire confederates was more than merely local. To understand them is to get to the heart of the English revolution­– ­a revolution that was not a mere expedient, nor a regrettable accident all sought to avoid, but a calculated, principled political transformation driven by a broad coalition of Parliament’s most determined and extreme supporters in the army, the centre and the localities.

APPENDIX 7.1: COMMISSIONERS NAMED IN THE WILTSHIRE PETITION OF 1648 The entries below are ordered as in the document, quoted on p. 136. 1. Walter South, Esq. of Swallowcliffe, where he was manor lord. HMC Wiltshire, p. 145; Return, Endowed Charities (County of Wilts), Vol. II. Southern Division (London, 1908), p. 690. Routinely named to Rump commissions of the peace (and under the Protectorate in 1654): Ivor Slocombe (ed.), Wiltshire Quarter Sessions Order Book, 1642–1654, Wiltshire Records Society, 67 (2014), p. 322; WSHC, A1/160/2, fos 1, 21; excluded from the bench at request of Major-General Disbrowe in December 1655: T. Birch (ed.), A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe (7 vols, 1742), IV, p. 302. 2. William Eyre, Esq. of Neston (Corsham parish). The son of a knight, Eyre was born c.1617 and matriculated at Pembroke, Oxford, 1634, before becoming Lt Colonel in Parliament’s West Country forces. In 1648, apparently commanded Malmesbury garrison; added to the county committee, June 1648. In November 1648, Eyre was 147

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 147

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality elected recruiter MP for Chippenham, taking his seat in the Rump on 15 January 1649: ODNB, within ‘William Eyre ( fl. 1634–1675)’; Al. Oxon., II, p. 478; CJ, VI, pp. 117, 134; LJ, X, p. 295; BL, Add. 5,508, fos 162, 165, 170; on Commission of the Peace from 1646, and routinely appointed under the Rump and Protectorate: Slocombe (ed.), Quarter Sessions, p. 321; WSHC, A1/160/2, fos 1, 31, 53, 59, 83, 97, 129; W.W. Ravenhill, ‘Justice in Warminster in the olden time’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, 18 (April 1879), 143–5. Colonel of Wiltshire foot regiment in the remodelled republican militia of August 1650 (CSPD 1650, p. 505). Named to remodelled county militia committees in December 1648 and July 1659, and county assessment committees in 1650, 1652, 1657, 1660: A&O, I, p. 1244; II, pp. 481, 678, 1084, 1334, 1381. Named commissioner under the Major-Generals regime in 1655: Bodl., MS Rawlinson A 33, p. 157. Returned MP for Westbury in 1659 Parliament: Browne Willis, Notitia Parliamentaria (3 vols, 1716–1750), III, p. 294. Placed in a colonelcy by the restored Rump in January 1660; removed by Monck. 3. John Long, Esq. of South Wraxall. Born c.1619, matriculated at Pembroke, Oxford, in 1634, and at his death in 1652 owned at least two manors, as well as additional land. John Burke, A History of the Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland (4 vols, London, 1838), III, p. 216; Al. Oxon., III, p. 936; TNA, PROB 11/172/237; PROB 11/222/685. Named to remodelled county militia committee in December 1648 and to county assessment committee in 1650: A&O, I, p. 1241; II, p. 481. First appears as a JP in 1648; prior to his death, routinely named to Rump Commissions of the Peace: Ivor Slocombe (ed.), Quarter Sessions, p. 322. Named to horse captaincy in remodelled republican militia, August 1650 (CSPD 1650, p. 506). 4. Thomas Eyre, Esq. of Bromham. Grandson and heir of Thomas Eyre, gentleman of Bromham: WSHC, P3/E/60; TNA, PROB 11/210/66, fo. 33 (identifying the officer as the Bromham gentleman). Thomas was captain in the west at the war’s start, captured at the Devizes after Roundway Down: Bristol RO, 8029/7; HMC Wilts, p. 120. Governor of Devizes after Parliament retook the town; captured again in January 1646 in royalist raid on Marlborough: BL, Add. 22,084, fo. 13v; Mercurius Academicus (19–24 January 1646), p. 57. E.316[25]; Mercurius Civicus (22–9 January 1646), p. 2022. E.319[18]; The Scotish Dove (21–9 January 1646), pp. 941–2. E.319[17]. By October 1647, Eyre was colonel and Governor of Hurst Castle: Worcester College, Oxford, Clarke MS 66, fos 18v, 29. Routinely named to Rump and protectoral Commissions of the Peace: Slocombe (ed.), Quarter Sessions, 322; WSHC, A1/160/2, fos 31, 53, 59, 83, 113, 143; Ravenhill, ‘Warminster’, 143–5. Lt Colonel of the Wiltshire foot regiment in the remodelled republican militia in August 1650 (CSPD 1650, p. 508), while continuing to govern Hurst. In 1653, mayor of Marlborough: Society of Antiquaries Library, MS 138, fos 134–v. In 1653, with Nicholas Greene, one of Wiltshire’s three representatives in Barebones Parliament: A List of the Names of all the Members of this present Parliament (1653). In 1655, commissioner under the Major-Generals regime: Bodl., MS Rawl. A 33, p. 157. Named to the remodelled county militia commission in July 1659, and to county assessment commissions in 1650, 1652, 1657, 1660: A&O, II, pp. 481, 678, 1084, 1334, 1381.

148

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 148

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’ 5. Edward Stokes, Esq. of Tytherton Lucas (Chippenham parish). Born c.1615, he was apparently of lesser gentry stock, describing himself as of ‘small’ estate. In 1644 named to a county committee to raise Wiltshire forces. He later suggested that he experienced ‘banishment from his estate’ for his service: LJ, VI, pp. 637–8; The Wiltshire Rant (1652), pp. 51–2, 78. In 1648, put forward by Ludlow’s faction as county militia commissioner, and, with Nicholas Greene, raised new horse troops, refusing to disband in September 1648 (see p. 143 above). Routinely named to Rump and protectoral Commissions of the Peace: Slocombe (ed.), Quarter Sessions, p. 322; WSHC, A1/160/2, fos 31, 41, 67, 83, 97, 159. Named to remodelled county militia commissions in December 1648 and July 1659, and to county assessment commissions in 1650, 1652, 1657; A&O, I, p. 1244; II, pp. 481, 678, 1084, 1335. Named to horse captaincy under Edmund and William Ludlow in remodelled republican militia, August 1650 (CSPD 1650, p. 506). 6. John Rede, Esq. of Porton (Idmiston parish). Born c.1615, Rede was styled ‘gentleman’ when married in 1636, but not in the 1638 survey of Wiltshire freeholders, suggesting he straddled yeoman and gentry status (see above for royalist charges that he was ‘a Serving-man’): FSL, V.b.260, unpag.; WSHC, 1098/1, marriages, 19 April 1636; Rees, ‘John Rede’, p. 331 n. 4. Rede in 1644 was named to Wiltshire’s county committee; in December 1644, the Marlborough committee dispatched him to Salisbury, and he was still regularly serving in 1646: LJ, VI, p. 612; Waylen (ed.), ‘Falstone Day-Book’, pp. 374, 388; TNA, SP 23/171, p. 465. Probably the ‘Lieutenant Colonel Read’ captured in the battle for Salisbury in January 1645: Firth (ed.), Ludlow, I, p. 112. In September 1647 Rede was described as Lieutenant Colonel, when dispatched to command Poole garrison; commissioned as Governor in November: Ethel Kitson and E.K. Clark (eds), ‘Some Civil War Accounts, 1647–1650’, Publications of the Thoresby Society, 11 (1902), 144; BL, Lans. 115, fo. 270. In August 1648, Rede was among those Ludlow promoted for a county defence committee, prompting opposition in the House (see pp. 142–3 above). Routinely named to Rump Commissions of the Peace; among the county’s most active JPs under the Protectorate: Slocombe (ed.), Quarter Sessions, p. 322; WSHC, A1/160/2, fos 1, 21, 37, 41, 53, 67, 83, 113, 129, 135; Ravenhill, ‘Warminster’, pp. 143–5. Named to county assessment commissions in 1649, 1650, 1652, 1657 and to the remodelled county militia committee in 1659: A&O, II, pp. 45, 481, 678, 1084, 1334. In 1655, commissioner under the Major-Generals regime: Bodl., MS Rawl. A. 33, p. 157. 7. William Ludlow, Esq. of Clarendon, born c.1619 (Al. Oxon., III, p. 948), showing him matriculating at St Albans Hall, November 1636, aged 17). His uncle was Sir Henry Ludlow and his first cousin Edmund Ludlow. Joined Essex’s lifeguard in 1642: TNA, SP 28/120, fo. 1205; cornet under cousin Edmund in the west; wounded, late 1643. From 1645, William commanded Falstone House and Langford House garrisons, and at war’s end captained a county horse troop: Firth (ed.), Ludlow, I, pp. 69, 124; J.H.P. Pafford, ‘Accounts of the parliamentary garrisons of Great Chalfield and Malmesbury, 1645–1646’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, Records Branch, 2 (1940), 36; CJ, IV, p. 534. In June 1648, when still captain, added to the county committee with William Eyre and Nicholas Greene: BL, Add. 5,508, fos 162, 165, 168. Named to at least one Rump Commission of the Peace; routinely sat 149

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 149

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality as JP under Protectorate and again under restored Rump: CUL, MS Dd.8.1, fo. 116; Slocombe (ed.), Quarter Sessions, pp. 321–2; WSHC, A1/160/2, fos 1, 9, 37, 47, 59, 135, 165. Named to county assessment commissions in 1649, 1650, 1652, 1657, 1660 and to remodelled county militia committees in 1648 and 1659; A&O, I, p. 1244, II, pp. 45, 481, 678, 1084, 1334, 1381. Major of the county horse regiment under Edmund Ludlow in the remodelled republican militia in August 1650 (CSPD 1650, p. 506); in 1650, Ludlow, Nicholas Greene and Bennett Swayne were named as the three county sequestration commissioners: TNA, SP 23/9, fo. 20. In 1654, Ludlow and James Hely were named Cromwellian ‘ejectors’ for Wiltshire: A&O, II, p. 976. In 1655, named one of the commissioners under the Major-Generals regime: Bodl., MS Rawl. A. 33, p. 157. In 1656, elected county MP, and in 1659, MP for Old Sarum: Willis, Notitia, III, pp. 279, 295. 8. Nicholas Greene, Esq. of Winterbourn Stoke, later Grittleton. Greene’s later wealth suggests a prosperous gentry background, but he was not from a major county family. Greene claimed in 1646 that ‘for his affection to the Parliament [he] hath suffered much from the enemy’: Waylen (ed.), ‘Falstone Day-Book’, p. 364. In June 1648, added to the county committee with William Ludlow and William Eyre (LJ, X, p. 295) and commissioned as captain of county horse troop; alongside Edward Stokes’s unit, Greene’s troop apparently resisted disbandment and called for justice against the king (see p. 143 above). Greene was routinely named to Rump and protectoral Commissions of the Peace: Slocombe (ed.), Quarter Sessions, p. 322; WSHC, A1/160/2, fos 21, 59, 129, 143, 159. Named to county assessment commissions in 1649, 1650, 1652, 1657 and to the remodelled county militia committee in 1659: A&O, II, pp. 45, 481, 678, 1084, 1334. In February 1650, named as one of three county sequestration commissioners, alongside William Ludlow and Bennett Swayne: TNA, SP 23/9, fo. 20; SP 23/171, pp. 193–221, 295–465, 470–1. Named to horse captaincy under Edmund and William Ludlow in the remodelled republican militia in August 1650 (CSPD 1650, p. 506). In 1653, Greene was one of Wiltshire’s three representatives in Barebones Parliament, with Thomas Eyre: List of the Names of all the Members. In March 1655, commissioner to try Penruddock’s rebels: Birch (ed.), Thurloe, III, p. 296. In 1655, commissioner under the Major-Generals regime: Bodl., MS Rawl. A. 33, p. 157. 9. James Heely, gent. of Salisbury. In 1642, living in St Thomas Salisbury, he was not accorded the status of ‘Mr’ and after the Restoration he was described as ‘merchant’ (WSHC, 1901/1, fo. 59; TNA, C 8/293/142). In January 1646 he was lieutenant to the new Wiltshire horse troop of Alexander Thistlewaite, serving temporarily under Capt. William Ludlow: Perfect Occurrences (23–30 January 1646), sig. E4v. E.319[20]. In May 1646, county forces were reduced to one horse troop, commanded by Ludlow, with Hely as cornet: CJ, IV, p. 534; HMC Wilts, pp. 126, 131; in October 1648 he had perhaps given up his commission, but acted as messenger between the Wiltshire sequestration committee and London: BL, Add. 5,508, fos 164, 168. Hely became important in Salisbury affairs: see Paul Slack (ed.), Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury, Wiltshire Record Society, 31 (1975), p. 109. In 1654, Hely and William Ludlow were named as Cromwellian ‘ejectors’ for Wiltshire: A&O, II, p. 976. In 1655, named commissioner under the Major-Generals regime, earning repute as ‘A fierce Decimator’: 150

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 150

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’ Bodl., MS Rawl. A. 33, p. 157; Walter Bushnell, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Commissioners appointed by O. Cromwell (1660), p. 228. In 1656, elected MP for Salisbury: Willis, Notitia Parliamentaria, III, p. 279. Named to county assessment committees in 1657, 1660, and to the remodelled county militia committee in 1659: A&O, II, pp. 1084, 1335, 1381. He was JP in 1659: WSHC, A1/160/2, fos 153, 165. Hely concealed the fugitive Edmund Ludlow at the Restoration, and thereafter, with Bennett Swayne (below), was seen as a leader of Salisbury’s dissenting interest: Bodl., MS Eng. hist. c.487, p. 740; CSPD 1664–1665, 581; Basil Duke Henning (ed.), The House of Commons, 1660–1690 (3 vols, London, 1983), III, p. 457; for post-Restoration ties between Hely and Swayne, see TNA, C 8/293/142. Hely’s will was proved in 1694: WSHC, P4/1694/15. 10. Richard Crowch, gent. of Tytherton (Heytesbury parish). Crowch directly farmed lands in Heytesbury and Sutton Veny; when he died, he owned six hundred sheep and 180 acres of grain; his will mentioned only freehold property in Heytesbury. His daughters married the commissioners Edward Frippe and Christopher Meriweather: WSHC, P5/1671/22. It was claimed in 1646 that ‘he hath been a man well affected to the Parliament, and sent a horse and a man fully armed, with three months’ pay’: Waylen (ed.), ‘Falstone Day-Book’, p. 373. In 1648, named commissioner for raising money for Fairfax’s army: J. Waylen, ‘Notes from the Diary of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, 28 (1894), p. 25. Named to remodelled county militia committee in December 1648 and to county assessment committees, 1649, 1650, 1652, 1657, 1660: A&O, I, p. 1241; II, pp. 45, 481, 678, 1084, 1381. Crowch’s will was proved in 1671. 11. Edward Frippe, gent. of Chitterne, later of Norton St Philip, Somerset. Like his father-in-law, Richard Crowch, Frippe probably occupied the border between yeoman and gentry status; he was not identified as a gentleman in the 1638 county survey of freeholders (FSL, V.b.260, unpag.), but routinely described himself as such. Named to the county assessment committee in 1657: A&O, II, p. 1084. Frippe later relocated to Somerset: TNA, C 5/320/1; WSHC, P5/1671/22. 12. William Adlam, gent., of Crockerton (Longbridge Deverill parish). In his will, Adlam described himself as ‘clothier’, but he was frequently called gentleman, including in the 1638 county survey of freeholders (FSL, V.b.260, unpag.). Adlam was tied to the Meriweather family; his sister married John Merewether, and Adlam himself married Jane, daughter of Christopher Merewether of Hilperton, likely the sister of the petition commissioner Christopher Meriweather (see entry for Christopher Merriweather, below). Adlam played no conspicuous role in county affairs until March 1648, when he was named county commissioner for raising money for Fairfax’s army: LJ, X, p. 123. Named to county assessment committees in 1650, 1652 and 1657: A&O, II, pp. 481, 678, 1084. In 1656, inhabitants of the Longbridge area petitioned Cromwell to allow Adlam to appoint a preacher and teacher for the parish, ‘whereby … the Gospell of Christ will be propagated’: TNA, SP 18/123, fo. 24. Despite this apparent willingness to participate in parish religion, Adlam was certainly a Baptist by 1672: CSPD May-Sept. 1672, p. 576. His will was proved in 1677.

151

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 151

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 13. William Mountjoy, gent. of Biddestone/Slaughterford. Mountjoy owned St Peter’s Biddestone manor and lands in Slaughterford. He co-held a Crown monopoly lease to provide ballast from the Thames: John E. Jackson (ed.), Wiltshire. The Topographical Collections of John Aubrey (Devizes: Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 1862), p. 53 n.1; CSPD 1635–1636, p. 153; TNA, PROB 11/254/226. In 1650 Mountjoy, alongside Adam Gouldney (see below), was selected commissioner for surveying the church in Wiltshire: E.J. Bodington, ‘The church survey in Wilts, 1649–50’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society Magazine, 41 (June 1920), pp. 1, 12; named to county assessment committees in 1649, 1650, 1657 (mistakenly, as he had recently died): A&O, II, pp. 45, 481, 1084. 14. George Dyer, gent. of Heytesbury. Dyer was parish gentry, directly farming his land: when his estate was inventoried in 1661, he owned 402 sheep and 32 acres of unharvested crops; the commissioner Richard Crowch attended him on his deathbed in 1661 and (with Edward Frippe) inventoried Dyer’s goods: WSHC, P5/1661/14. In 1646, Dyer was described as ‘a steady friend of the Parliament, maintaining his son in the service with horse and arms to this day­– ­and suffering much by plunder from the Cavaliers’: Waylen (ed.), ‘Falstone Day-Book’, p. 371. In 1647, High Constable of Heytesbury hundred: TNA, SP 63/266, fo. 46v. In March 1648, county commissioner for raising money for Fairfax’s army: LJ, X, p. 123. Named to county assessment committees in 1650, 1652, 1657: A&O, II, pp. 481, 678, 1084. 15. Thomas Wansey, gent. of Warminster. Son of a Warminster yeoman, Wansey was one of at least four brothers serving in the parliamentarian armies in the 1640s (see WSHC, P2/W/315 for their father’s will). Cornet under Capt. John Wansey in a West Country regiment, then lieutenant to a horse troop under Capt. John Chaffin from 30 May 1644 to 22 October 1646. Thomas joined the lifeguard of Fairfax by March 1647: TNA, E 315/5, fos 15–v; Kitson and Clark, ‘Civil War Accounts’, p. 168. Wansey became lieutenant to Thomas Eyre, governor of Hurst Castle, where the former was likely serving by October 1648: Worcester College, Oxford, Clarke MS 66, fo. 29; To the Honourable the Commons House of England. The humble Petition and Representation of the Officers and Souldiers. Still apparently lieutenant in June 1653, but subsequently ‘left out as dissatisfied with the’ Protectorate; reinstated by the restored Rump: TNA, SP 25/69, p. 372; SP 25/127, p. 27; CJ, VII, p. 704. 16. John Stephens, gent. ‘of the Devises’. Son of a Devizes gentleman, Stephens was a dominant figure in town governance at the time, serving as mayor, 1646–48, then as capital burgess and chamberlain in 1649–50: WSHC, G20/1/17, fos 192–209, 220. Named to the Wiltshire militia commission in December 1648, and thereafter frequently named to interregnum county assessment committees A&O, I, p. 1241; II, pp. 45, 481, 678. 17. J. James, gent. Unidentified. 18. Bennet Swaine, gent. of Salisbury (later Milford). Son of a Salisbury gentleman: TNA, PROB 11/159/81. In December 1648, named to county militia commission; thereafter a fixture of the republican regime in Salisbury, appointed to assessment 152

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 152

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’ committees in 1650 and 1657 and the remodelled Rump militia committee in 1659: A&O, I, p. 1241; II, pp. 678, 1084, 1334. In 1650 he, Nicholas Greene and William Ludlow were named Wiltshire sequestration commissioners: TNA, SP 23/9, fo. 20; SP 23/171, pp. 193–221, 295–465, 470–1; in 1650 named foot captain in the county militia under Thomas Eyre: CSPD 1650, p. 508. For his post-Restoration connections, see entry for James Hely, above. 19. Christopher Merriweather, gent. of Chitterne, later Sutton Veny and Warminster. There were several propertied Christopher Meriweathers in Wiltshire, including gentlemen of Market Lavington and Hilperton (the latter was possibly the commissioner’s father). On the basis of connections and later activities, it is likely that the commissioner was Christopher Meriweather who, in 1651, with the commissioner Edward Frippe (see above), both ‘of Chitterne’, contracted with Lord Paulet to dig clay on Paulet’s lands for production of tobacco pipes. Meriweather and Frippe became brothers-in-law, with both marrying daughters of their fellow commissioner Richard Crowch (WSHC, P5/1671/22; TNA, C 5/320/1). Meriweather probably also became brother-in-law of the commissioner William Adlam: Adlam married Jane Merewether, daughter of Christopher Merewether of Hilperton (d. 1658, nominating his son Christopher along with Adlam in his will: TNA, PROB 11/283/502). Meriweather relocated to Sutton Veny, and in 1656 signed a local godly petition supporting Adlam: for the clay-pipe contract and the Adlam petition, with Meriweather’s identical signatures, cf. WSHC, 947/1456; TNA, PRO, SP 18/123, fo. 24; for Sutton Veny, see WSHC, 554/2, births, 21 September 1656. In 1659 the commissioner John Rede identified ‘Christo: Merriweather Gent’ as one of several county residents ‘That shall not be only willing but active in the worke’ of serving as sequestration officers: TNA, SP 23/263/58, fos 148–v, again strongly implicating Meriweather of Chitterne/Sutton Veny as the 1648 petitioner, since other namesakes were dead by 1659. Meriweather relocated to Warminster, where he died in 1701: TNA, PROB 11/460/150; PROB 10/1340, ‘Christopher Meriwether’, for signature matching that of the clay-pipe digger and petitioner of the 1650s. 20. Henry White, gent. of Langley Burrell, later Slaughterford, heir of Henry White, gentleman of Langley Burrell: WSHC, P1/W/189 (1643). In his 1658 will, the commissioner White left a bequest to his ‘cousen’ Thomas Neate (see below), whom he named as co-executor of his estate along with another commissioner of 1648, Nicholas Greene: TNA, PROB 11/302/58. For White’s involvement in the scandal surrounding Thomas Webbe, as well as his connections from 1652 to John Wildman (who bought White’s Langley manor) see Dreher, ‘Amorous Pigeons’, pp. 73–95. White’s will was proved on 7 November 1660. 21. Thomas Neate, gent. of Chippenham. Son of a minor gentleman, Thomas Neate was independently tied to four commissioners. Henry White in his 1658 will left a bequest to his ‘cousen’ Thomas Neate of Chippenham, naming him co-executor along with another commissioner, Nicholas Greene; in 1667, Edward Stokes named Neate trustee to manage his daughter’s marriage portion, and overseer of his will; Neate was overseer of the will of his brother-in-law, Adam Gouldney (see below), in 1676. Ties to Stokes and Gouldney were probably strengthened by shared Quakerism; 153

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 153

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality Neate became a leading Wiltshire Friend: TNA, PROB 11/302/58; PROB 11/326/31; PROB 11/350/211; HMC Wiltshire, p. 150; William Penn and George Whitehead, The Christian-Quaker, and his Divine Testimony Vindicated (1674), p. 61. Neate also witnessed a property transaction involving the Leveller John Wildman on 26 November 1657: WSHC, 118/92. Neate’s will was proved on 5 May 1677: TNA, PROB 11/354/23. 22. Adam Gouleney, gent. of Chippenham. Adam Gouldney described himself as ‘yeoman’ in 1674. A busy participant in Chippenham affairs, he acted as intermediary with the army in 1645, constable in 1649–50 and burgess from 1650: F.H. Goldney (ed.), Records of Chippenham, Relating to the Borough (London, 1889), pp. 62, 214, 219. With William Mountjoy (see above), Gouldney was commissioner for surveying the Wiltshire ministry in 1650: Bodington, ‘Church survey in Wilts’, pp. 1, 12. Gouldney was a leading Quaker by the early 1660s (HMC Wiltshire, p. 145). His will (naming brother-in-law Thomas Neate as overseer) was proved 11 February 1676: TNA, PROB 11/350/211.

NOTES 1 The Right Honorable, the Commons of England In Parliament Assembled. The humble Petition of divers wel affected Person inhabiting the City of London (1648). 2 J. Lilburne, The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England (1649), pp. 28–9; The Second Part of Englands New-chaines Discovered (1649), t.p.; A Plea for Common-Right and Freedom (1648), t.p., p. 3. E.536[22]; A Manifestation from Lieutenant Col. John Lilburn, Mr. William Walwyn, Mr. Thomas Prince, and Mr. Richard Overton (1649), p. 4. E.550[25]; To the Commons of England, Assembled in Parliament. The Humble Petition of the well-affected, in and about the City of London, Westminster, and parts adjacent; Presenters, and Approvers of the late Petition of the 11 of September (1651). E.621[12]. 3 Mercurius Pragmaticus (12–19 September 1648), sig. Ii2v. E.464[12]. 4 T. May, A Breviary of the History of the Parliament (1655), pp. 213–14. 5 Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland (Oxford, 1992), pp. 266–70. 6 For noteworthy recent exceptions, see Clive Holmes, Why Was Charles I Executed? (London, 2006) and, more extensively, John Rees, The Leveller Revolution (London, 2016), esp. pp. 250–79. 7 CJ, VI, p. 68. 8 For tactics of printing petitions, often in frustration with official inaction, see Peacey, Print and Public Politics, pp. 267–98. 9 To the Right Honourable the Commons of England in Parliament assembled. The humble Petition of the Well-affected Inhabitants of the County of Wilts (1648). 10 David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985), p. 213. For the Bristol petitions, see Two Petitions of Divers free-men of England (1647); The Moderate (12–19 December 1648), sigs zv–z2r. E.477[4]. See also David Underdown, ‘“Honest” Radicals in the Counties, 1642–1649’, in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-century History presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978), p. 198. 154

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 154

26/02/2020 08:57

Provincial ‘Levellers’ 11 The humble Petition of the Well-affected Inhabitants of the County of Wilts. 12 Christopher Meriweather and Edward Frippe were business partners in 1651; they were also brothers-in-law, having married daughters of another commissioner, Richard Crowch. Richard Crowch attended the commissioner George Dyer’s deathbed and was overseer of Dyer’s estate. Christopher Meriweather was probably also brother-in-law of William Adlam. Henry White was ‘cousen’ of Thomas Neate and named Neate and another commissioner, Nicholas Greene, as overseers of his will. Neate was brother-in-law to Adam Gouldney and served as overseer of Edward Stokes’s will. 13 The Moderate (28 November­ – ­5 December 1648), sig. x2v. E.475[8]; Trinity College, Cambridge, MS O.3.2, fo. 99v; Mercurius Pragmaticus (8–15 August 1648), sig. Xv. E.458[25]. 14 John Rees, ‘Lieutenant-Colonel John Rede: West Country Leveller and Baptist pioneer’, The Seventeenth Century, 30 (2015), 317–37. 15 See Underdown, Revel, pp. 1–8, 146–207, observing, however, that Warminster itself is best seen as an ‘intermediate’ environment, with downland and pasture areas. 16 Steve Hindle, ‘Dearth and the English Revolution: the harvest crisis of 1647–50’, EcHR, 61 (2008), 79, 83, 88–94. Only one commissioner occupied the county bench prior to mid-1648, meaning the rest were untouched by this alleged magisterial malfeasance. One maltster complained against was William Adlam, cordwainer of Warminster, who is distinct from his namesake, the petition commissioner William Adlam, clothier of Crockerton. Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre (hereafter WSHC), A1/1648H, fo. 254. 17 John Wildman, Truths triumph, or Treachery anatomized (1648), pp. 3, 5; Bodl., MS Nalson 15, fo. 87; A New Declaration from the Eight Regiments (1647), p. 3. 18 Arthur Tucker, ‘Porton Baptist church, 1655–85’, Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society, 1 (1908–9), 56–61. 19 LMA, P69/GIS/A/002/MS06419/004, fo. 26v, marrying Jane Hulbert, 30 June 1648; cf. TNA, PROB 11/350/211, in which Adam Gouldney named John Hulbert as brother-in-law. 20 John Stephens (WSHC, 1656/1, baptisms, 22 March 1647); James Hely (WSHC, 1900/5, baptisms, 5 September 1648); John Long (TNA, PROB 11/222, fol. 357r, naming the Presbyterian Humphrey Chambers). 21 ODNB. 22 Edward Stokes, The Wiltshire Rant (1652), pp. 47, 51, 58, suggested that Mary White was Webbe’s leading backer, but revealed that Henry was responsible for Webbe’s presence at Langley as the living’s patron. 23 Stokes, Wiltshire Rant, pp. 4–5, 18–19, 26, 33, 38, 59. For independent confirmation that White and Webbe retained cordial relations in 1652, see Ute Dreher, ‘Of amorous pigeons and passionate parsons: Thomas Webbe and the Ranter community at Langley Burrell, c.1647–1651’, in C.H. George and Julie Sutherland (eds), Heroes and Villains: The Creation and Propagation of an Image (Durham: Centre for Seventeenth-Century Studies, 2004), p. 85. 24 See, e.g., J.C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 28–9. For the most extensive account, see Dreher, ‘Amorous pigeons’, pp. 73–95. 155

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 155

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 25 26 27 28 29

30

31 32 33 34

35 36

37

38

39 40

41

Stokes, Wiltshire Rant, pp. 64, 69–71. Dreher, ‘Amorous pigeons’, p. 86. Stokes, Wiltshire Rant, pp. 64, 76–7. For the petition, presented on 2 September 1647, see Two Petitions of Divers freemen; CJ, V, p. 289. Stokes, Wiltshire Rant, pp. 68–9: ‘M. Stokes affirms that to his best remembrance he was never in London with Webb and [Captain] Treavers together, but confesseth that about four years since he was in Westminster with the said parties. There is a sign of a blew Bores-head in Kingstreet, at which house all the parties lay.’ John Lilburne, Londons Liberty in Chains discovered (1646), pp. 8–16, 21; To the supream authority of England, the Commons in Parliament assembed [sic], the humble petition of many free born people (1647). Lilburne, Legall Fundamentall Liberties, p. 28. TNA, SP 16/516/22, fo. 33. Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watchtower, Part Five: 1660–1662, ed. Blair Worden, Camden Society, Fourth Series, 21 (1978), pp. 104, 111, 113. Mercurius Pragmaticus (1–8 August 1648), unpag. E.457[11]; Mercurius Pragmaticus (8–15 August 1648), sig. Xv. E.458[25]; see also Clement Walker, The History of Independency (1648), p. 128, which amplifies the account of Pragmaticus. CJ, V, p. 667; LJ, IV, pp. 491–3. The Lords took a month to approve it and failed to record it in their journal; the precise list of commissioners is thus lost. BL, Add. 5,508, fos 162, 165, 168; The True Informer (7 October­ – ­8 November 1648), p. 5. E.526[28]; Stokes, Wiltshire Rant, pp. 79–80, affirming he continued his command until ‘six or eight weeks after he had Orders to disband’ on 22 September 1648. CJ, VI, p. 120; To the Honourable the Commons House of England. The humble Petition and Representation of the Officers and Souldiers of the Garrisons of Portsmouth, Southsea Castle, Southton, Hurst Castle, Poole and Brownsea Castle, Weymouth, The Castles, Forts and Forces in the Isle of Wight, and the Garrison of Malmsbury (1649); see Rees, ‘John Rede’, 322–3. For Webbe’s avid support for the Levellers in 1648–49, and for his accusations that Stokes deserted the cause when named JP by the Rump, see Stokes, Wiltshire Rant, pp. 65–6. Sean Kelsey, ‘The death of Charles I’, HJ, 45 (2002), 727–54; Sean Kelsey, ‘The trial of Charles I’, EHR, 118 (2003), 583–616. C.H. Firth (ed.), The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow (2 vols, Oxford, 1894), I, pp. 387–90; The Copy of a Letter Sent out of Wiltshire, to a Gentleman in London (1654), pp. 1–6, which also named ‘Mr. Dyer’, probably the commissioner George Dyer, as an apparent ally of the radical faction. Rees, ‘John Rede’, 323–7.

156

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 156

26/02/2020 08:57

Sovereignty by the book

Chapter 8

Sovereignty by the book: English corporations, Atlantic plantations and literate order, 1557–16501 Dan Beaver

T

o revisit the problem of centre and locality in early modern England is to engage with one of the most influential recent historiographical traditions, an English-language variant of the broader global historical exploration of the social history of politics. Since the 1980s, the emergence of a diverse political landscape of dynastic, oligarchic or corporate, confessional, theatric and calligraphic as well as cartographic states across the early modern world has challenged historical interpretations of the culturally specific modes of communication whereby these states established and maintained control of the populations and territories subject to their authority.2 As a historical problem, the communication between centres and provinces in early modern Europe signalled an interpretative shift from narratives of political events and descriptive or functional administrative histories of particular institutions and offices to the analysis of how integrated political societies formed and changed.3 The focus has likewise shifted from formal structures of authority to the problem of agency: the amalgam of beliefs, interests or projects and related uses­ – ­including modes of communication­ – ­that were expressed during the everyday exercise of power in society. Stuart historians since the 1980s have looked beyond the ‘frenzied activity’ of parliaments to a more routine, everyday administrative agency, spreading more broadly among ‘those who ruled’ and driven by what Anthony Fletcher described as an urgent ‘sense of society being unable to catch up with itself’.4 A now substantial body of scholarship has recovered the complex dynamics of the Stuart dynastic state as well as those of the commonwealth and Protectorate, its mid-century challengers, their multiple and often contradictory interests and projects, their myriad but none the less patterned agency. An increasingly clear understanding of what the process of social and political integration entailed during the seventeenth century­– ­of the processes whereby the problems of local communities became the subject of proclamation or statute, or the political crises of elites became the conflicts of whole kingdoms­– ­raises 157

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 157

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

important questions about how this occurred­– ­the culturally specific modes of communication whereby an increasingly dispersed English population came to understand itself as a more clearly defined and closely bound political society on an Atlantic scale.5 Attending to this cultural aspect of how political societies were made will require more and a different type of attention to the experience of literacy than it has generally received. The experience of reading and writing, and a related fluency in the order and meanings of different types of texts, illuminate the basic shortcomings of the common historical terms ‘centre’ and ‘locality’ as expressions of a spatial conception of polity that was, first, foreign to many seventeenth-century actors and records and, second, contrary in its assumptions to their most important objectives. Far from expressing a political norm, the notion of authority as distant from or external to a local territory frequently summoned the spectre of disorder during the seventeenth century.6 On the contrary, such ordering texts as English corporation books intended to erase this spatial distinction and to invoke a sovereign, incontrovertible political authority, immediately present, as a warrant for practical agency. Processes of communication­ – ­modes of speech, literacy and numeracy­ – ­became the legitimate mediators of this authority and played the key ordering roles in English political society, particularly in its growing number of chartered, incorporated groups, those bodies politic by inscription that crowded both the English political landscape and its Atlantic scrawl. If approached in their own terms, the records of these groups suggest that the study of literacy may shed more light on the experience of authority in political communication than do the spatial or structural terms of ‘centre’ and ‘province’ or ‘locality’.7 Unfortunately, the experience of literacy, past and present, exists among a welter of ephemeral, common-sense phenomena generally considered either unworthy or unneeding of critical analysis, an unreflective tendency that presents more serious evidentiary challenges in the environment of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when a minority of the English population could read and write. In 1622 David Browne observed in Calligraphia that reading and writing could express ‘minds whose persons be absent, as if they were present’, and concluded that ‘writing must needs be, or else there could be little civil order’, but concerned himself primarily with the practical duty of a writing teacher to communicate ‘the art of fair and perfect writing’. As an external sign of status, literacy distinguished persons of ‘honest rank’ from those ‘esteemed either to be base born, or to have been basely brought up, in a moorland desert, far from any city where there be schools of learning, discipline, policy, and civility’. In a 1638 reprise, Browne again intoned that, by writing, ‘all the estates, kingdoms, cities, and countries of the world are governed’, before briskly advertising his ability ‘to teach those that can read, and be capable and careful, to write any hand well in six hours’.8 Given the limitations of the historical record, the study of past literacy has focused primarily on the acquisition of basic skills and on the uses of 158

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 158

26/02/2020 08:57

Sovereignty by the book

reading and writing, on literacy as a practical and personal skill, serving important religious, legal, business or economic and other social functions.9 This functional survey attests to literacy’s instrumental power. Among its uses in law, Jack Goody included its power to connect individuals or corporations to ‘areas of land’ through the ‘lists or tables’ of registered titles, a power enhanced by the ‘partial autonomy of the [written] text’, in this case involving a registered title’s separation of individual or corporate land ownership from its social contexts.10 Such observations implicitly enable a shift away from general functions to literacy’s culturally specific powers to generate particular objects. Among the broad class of objects used in political communication, for example, English charters, as well as the subordinate objects that depended on their authority, had unique meanings, and to be addressed in their terms enabled a form of agency beyond the reach or grasp of other written instruments. In 1558, when Giles Geast set aside forty-four Tewkesbury properties in his will to endow an eleemosynary corporation, making this conditional on its officers’ annual accounting of its revenues and disbursements before the ‘bailiffs of the borough of Tewkesbury’, he recognised, as a bailiff of the borough himself, the capacity of this unique chartered agency to order matters related to landed property within the boundaries of its corporation.11 In 1639, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay expressed this unique agency in more striking terms when it acted on its own chartered authority to create a new corporation, communicating ‘land and liberties’ to a fishing plantation on Cape Ann.12 Through the enabling clauses and seals of charters, both of these complex actions depended on the communication of a sovereign authority, but the terms ‘centre’ and ‘locality’ become disorienting and unwieldy as a means of comprehending its process. A clearer understanding of precisely how this mode of communication informed and animated an increasingly coherent and integrated Atlantic political society during the seventeenth century requires a closer reading of these particular and varied experiences of literacy in English political culture. As sovereign instruments in an English mode of political communication, charters erased the disintegrative threats of spatial separation and geographic distance, in a process characterised by a linguistic or literate immediacy in the embodiment of sovereign authority. In this context, Goody’s observation of the changed ‘capacity’ entailed by literacy, contingent on ‘the interaction between [an] individual and the [specific] objects mediated by writing’, suggests a conservative first condition of the environment in which English charters and their dependencies communicated a sovereign agency to individuals and groups.13 By the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whether in Latin or in English translation, the phrases of these texts addressed their readers in a way that explicitly facilitated an identification with authority for a wide range of sovereign purposes, including the establishment of titles to property and the legitimate use of force; as well as its embodiment by individuals­ – ­often named by the text in the first instance­ – ­which enabled 159

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 159

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

its projection in authoritative written records and other forms of practical behaviour. To the extent that the felt experience of literacy and its object formed a bridge between beliefs about sovereign authority and their practical expression, it becomes possible to understand it as a distinct political affect, a form of what Nigel Thrift has described as the ‘thought in action’ that leads to precisely the types of ‘embodied practices’ expressed in the literate ordering of English corporations and plantations, particularly the immediate use of sovereign authority to generate the books that transformed land into property and individual ordinances into codes of law, while becoming, in the process, warrants for a wide array of further ordering projects.14 This specific type of instrumental writing or literate ordering thus differed from the written word as a ‘normal mode of expression and communication’ but did share its selfconscious ordering tendency, for example, with the ‘discipline of writing’ that Paul Seaver has identified in Nehemiah Wallington’s diffuse attempts to integrate his religious experiences in a coherent religious identity.15 Moreover, the records suggest that this quality of literate experience was not limited to the officers of royally chartered bodies but also expressed itself among the officers of such dependencies as Giles Geast’s charity and the Cape Ann fishing plantation, where it indicates a broader capacity to communicate this authority to a range of dispersed agents. In addition to the challenges of understanding its nature, this literate experience of authority raises difficult questions concerning the awareness or political identities resulting from it. Most significantly, the immediacy of its communication shifts the central point of political perception, resulting not in the unequal relations of the merely ‘local’ to a remote, qualitatively superior ‘centre’ on a more or less distant horizon but in an immediately sovereign angle of vision, from which news of individuals, events and other phenomena acquired its significance and value. Where there was literate order and its affect, there was civil society, an environment of palpable political agency, a felt capacity to make order through the communication and projection of sovereign authority. By 1588 the annual meetings between the bailiffs of Tewkesbury and the officers of Giles Geast’s charity had become a fixture of the political calendar, and the book of record in turn became a register of important events, in this case defining the scale of civil society as a measure of the forces that threatened to destroy it, adding in a footnote to the minutes of the meeting that ‘the great Armada of Spayne, being proudly termed to be invincible, was by the great mercy of god utterly defeated and overthrown in July’.16 In the traditional terms of ‘centre’ and ‘locality’, historians have read such evidence as the reflection of a gradual process whereby ‘local’ horizons broadened to a ‘national’ scale, but the literate experience of authority and its affect suggests a highly mobile central point of reference and a fluency and facility with the instruments of sovereign agency, key sources of the ‘thought in action’ that informed the understanding of events. As corollary of an emphasis on literacy and affect, this approach to the 160

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 160

26/02/2020 08:57

Sovereignty by the book

making of political societies also requires a flexible social vantage point on the process as well as a broader Atlantic political geography. In describing provincial reform in Stuart England as a ‘triumph of the gentry’, Fletcher focused on ‘deputy lieutenants and justices of the peace’ who believed ‘that they were willing and able to govern, that they could secure order’, and that ‘their priorities at any particular moment might or might not be the [Privy] Council’s priorities; their judgment about the best way to proceed might or might not coincide with how they were told to act’.17 Apart from the now ample evidence that a social capacity for effective governance beyond the gentry, formerly associated particularly with the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s, existed much earlier, during the second half of the sixteenth century, the connecting of centre and locality, the communication of ‘the authority to act’, becomes less conspicuous as a political phenomenon when achieved in this way through a group already identified with an ‘undoubted claim to rule’.18 The experience of authority in this process emerges more clearly when it involved those who had little claim to rule, the mercers and clothiers who received ‘the authority to act’ on the margins of English political society or on the edge of its Atlantic frontier. This experience of authority as affect and agency belongs on the spectrum that already includes the intensively studied English gentry as well as those, also closely observed, whose social marginality routinely made theirs the external experience of authority held by others, arguably its own distinctive political affect.19 Jonathan Barry’s observation that middling-sort agency, when not obscured by the sheer diversity of its urban setting, has been ‘mocked since Tudor times by social commentators and writers from the landed classes’, as well as by historians, suggests the scale of the problem, but his dismissal of the limited value of ‘legal records of administration and civic affairs’ strips away a source of its dignity and power.20 It also clearly figures in what Phil Withington has described as the ‘urban dimension’ of English political culture, though it was not limited to urban settings and had a major impact on the ordering of Atlantic plantations.21 To the extent that literacy supplied its instruments, and the law its animating force, this affect and agency could flourish in the urban environment without being narrowly confined to it, and, as a result, the language of the instruments, rather than their setting, becomes a key to their meaning and to the process of literate ordering. This analysis hinges on an understanding of such English terms as ‘free’ or ‘freedom’, ‘franchise’ and ‘liberty’ or ‘liberties’ in early modern English charters and political discourse, or their Latin equivalents, as denoting a practical devolution of sovereignty. Although it is evident that the burgesses of the borough of Cambridge, for example, named in their charter as ‘chief lords of that soil immediately under the king’, nevertheless self-identified simply as ‘lords of the soil’, the connection has been construed as one between property and liberty, rather than as one between property and sovereignty.22 The charter’s words did not invent or expand a 161

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 161

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

new ‘urban’ agency but marked the communication and appropriation of an established principle of imperium, experienced first and foremost in terms of literate control over land title and practical dominium in the uses of property. To those addressed in its terms, this language conveyed powers to exclude and to limit that were as comprehensive as the powers to include, to take possession and to order within its territory. Although those incorporated and empowered in this way have been described as a kind of ‘upper bourgeoisie’, this term again has the effect of confining and localising, in traditional English urban settings, an eminently portable and mobile form of political agency.23 Beginning in the late sixteenth century, the officers of guilds and incorporated charities, as well as burgesses, expressed their status in portraits that signalled the experience of literacy through the books, rolls and on occasion the charters themselves included in the compositions, large canvases put on display in the communal halls whose furnishings reminded the members of corporations of the nature and sources of their power.24 More literal portraits of literate affect were sometimes written into the corporate records themselves, including the elaborate monograms inscribed by John Bartley, whose iconic marginalia in the account book of Giles Geast’s charity from the early 1570s belie the various spellings of his surname. More than mere initials, as close relatives of corporate seals and other tokens of sovereignty, such monograms articulated an agency informed by the letter and the word as written and read, and, as a literate extension of status, a link to what Goody has termed the ‘immortality of the scribe’.25 An important historical measure of any mode of political communication involves the continuities and discontinuities in its register or tone, a linguistic quality directly related to the capacity of its agents to identify and project as sovereign during a political crisis, for example, or when living on the territorial margins of political society. The record books of the Geast charity and of the Gloucester plantation during the English revolution of the 1640s and 1650s both contain valuable evidence of the power and resilience of literate ordering in volatile or marginal political environments. Indeed, the crisis generated an elaboration of written instruments, and Atlantic plantation under the aegis of unincorporated groups, in the style of the 1620s, would compare unfavourably, as a form of agency and authority, to the chartered, corporate approach of the 1640s. As Charles I negotiated an end to the war with his Scottish subjects, in October 1640, his subjects in the Massachusetts Bay colony mandated a new office of recorder for each of the townships in the colony, vesting the authority to convey land title in the recorder’s book. In this way, the sovereign agency of ‘one body politique and corporate’, communicated by the Massachusetts Bay Company’s 1629 charter, contrasted sharply with the Dorchester Company’s 1623 patent, just as the volatility and violence of the 1620s on Cape Ann had furnished a clear lesson in the benefits of sovereignty by the book during the late 1630s and after the re-establishment of the plantation as ‘Gloucester’ in 162

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 162

26/02/2020 08:57

Sovereignty by the book

1642.26 As England moved towards civil war, the written word still ruled on the margins of Massachusetts Bay. This literate agency did not depend on a continuous or even consistent communication from geographically distant or embattled sources of sovereign authority. Its register and tone communicated a fundamental continuity, one of ­sovereignty’s defining effects, through their literate ordering of concepts, places and offices, people and relationships, and objects and property. Sovereign authority required no further communication from an external source and became a matter of agency in place and the order of the record book, sovereignty’s textual projection. In this context, reflecting on the different meanings of literacy’s objects, it becomes significant that the manuscript records of Giles Geast’s charity in Tewkesbury and of Gloucester plantation on Cape Ann appear indistinguishable, in many respects, during the tumultuous 1640s, despite the different conditions of their production. By the devices of such uniformity, literate ordering crafted its sovereign illusions. Few corporate records articulated the potential of literate order as eloquently as the record of Giles Geast’s charity, extending over three hundred folios of continuous administration, from its 1558 foundation to 1891, a decade after its second incorporation and assimilation in the modern British state as part of the Tewkesbury Consolidated Charities.27 As a mercer of Tewkesbury, Geast had built a large and diverse estate of lands, buildings and looms that included properties in nearby Cheltenham as well as those in Tewkesbury, a merchant clothier’s empire, rising in part from the political ruins of monastic foundations in northern Gloucestershire during the 1540s. When the Crown had needed officers to administer the widely dispersed assets of the dissolved Tewkesbury Abbey, it had enlisted the ample experience of such as Geast, an officer of the civil borough of Tewkesbury, to serve as the bailiffs of the newly acquired properties, and political opportunity had thus quickened Geast’s rise to prominence during the late 1540s and 1550s.28 On 20 August 1557, a year from death and suffering from illness, Geast included a ‘device’ in his will to turn ‘certain messuages, tenements, and gardens to the use of poor people’.29 This conventional expression of pious charity in the hour of death assumed a more unusually elaborated form, less in its establishment of an endowed trust from the rents of forty-four properties, an eleemosynary corporation under the supervision of four self-recruiting officers styled feoffees, than in its political subordination to the bailiffs of Tewkesbury, the overseers of the borough’s chartered liberties since the twelfth century and an office in which Geast had served. As a condition of the trust, Geast required the feoffees to present an annual written account to the bailiffs during the week after the festival of All Saints, setting aside funds for an auditor to ‘write and cast’ the account and for a ‘repast’ to refresh the gathering. Apart from this traditional commensality in the arrangements, no one can mistake the evident power of written instruments to dispose of property or 163

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 163

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

the authority of a chartered borough to guarantee title. The ‘device’ operated like a charter. Geast enfeoffed the officers of his charity, investing them with the fee-tail of the properties, conditional on the bailiffs’ oversight of the terms and on their authority to revoke this limited title in case of failure to perform. The moment of death seldom gave itself over to bold experiments or a final roll of the dice to let fortune decide the social life of property. Perhaps fearing the political future, perhaps envisioning another era of royal confiscations, Geast inscribed his trust within the borough’s written authority, creating a charter within a charter, a corporation within a corporation, burying his property in language that would give it life after his own death, in the annual distribution of alms that he had envisioned, his friends or their descendants walking from house to house in Tewkesbury to deliver money in the week before Christmas. Geast’s fundamental political insight in 1557, his use of the borough to secure the trust, paid unforeseen dividends when Tewkesbury obtained a royal charter in 1575, but his ‘device’ supplied the framework for this new scale of devolved authority and agency. Although the testamentary charter established a clear political structure and administrative dynamic, subordinating the charity’s officers to the bailiffs of the borough, and also reflecting the principle of hierarchy intrinsic to early modern corporate politics, it furnished few guidelines for the practical work of the charity. During the 1560s, the feoffees struggled from year to year, their time and revenue taken up with extensive repairs to several decayed houses and their records kept in loose paper ‘bokes’ that have not survived.30 This pattern changed decisively in 1571. After his experience as feoffee and main receiver of rents for the charity during the 1560s, John Bartley ordered a new record book for his colleagues and presented the handsome leather volume as a gift in 1571, when he also served as bailiff of Tewkesbury and thus overseer of the accounts. Bartley created an ornate memorial frontispiece for the book, recording his gift, delivering instructions for its administrative use and in the course of explaining his motives offering the best evidence of literate ordering from the era before the royal charter, four years later.31 Bartley had a vision of the book’s purpose as a record of ‘333 years … of all the rents and profits that shall from time to time arise, grow, and come of the land given by the last will and testament of our late brother, Gylles Geaste’. The book would contain the vastness of the whole charitable project, compressing time and growth into the span of its 333 pages, ‘for that the whole account of every year … be comprised in one leffe of the book’. Bartley’s simple but important innovation involved the recording of revenues on one side of a page and expenses on the other, but the meaning of this administrative reform consisted of nothing less than the achievement of God’s purpose. Bartley’s memorial addressed ‘all Christian people, to whom this book shall come to be seen, read, or understood … as well to them now present as to all them that shall hereafter come’, enjoining them not to fail in the charity’s objects ‘as you shall answer to the contrary at the great Day of Judgement, when the secrets 164

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 164

26/02/2020 08:57

Sovereignty by the book

of all men’s doings shall be known’. He warned that ‘some of late would have [the lands] be put to some other use’ but affirmed that ‘if it had been God’s will and pleasure to have had it put to any other use than the … testator hath done, he would as well aput [put] the same into the mind of the … testator to be accomplished’. As ‘all good works cometh of God’, ‘we cannot devise to have it to any better use than God himself hath appointed, for we must think that this work was the mind of God, for man’s mind do not bring forth such works but the moving spirit of God which is in man’. Bartley concluded with an exhortation that offered the metaphor of humanity’s final accounting to God as the key to reading and understanding the accounts of Geast’s charity. Take not away the portion from the poor, lest thy portion be taken out of the book of Life. Feed the hungry, sayeth the Lord, and remember the needy folks, that both in scarcity and misery it may go well with thee in the time of need. And thus I rest, desiring the almighty God that it may please him of his infinite goodness to give us the grace of his holy Spirit, that all we may make such account of our doings that it may please the almighty God to receive us into his everlasting rest, there to serve our heavenly Father to whom, with the Son and the Holy Ghost, be ever lasting Honour and praise for ever and ever, world without end, amen.

This was a lay sermon in a civil record book, concluding with a hymn. There is no clearer illustration of literate ordering than this integration of administrative compression and limitation, the exclusion of all ‘strange’ matter that obscured legibility, with the religious objects of Geast’s testamentary ‘device’. As both a feoffee and a bailiff of Tewkesbury, John Bartley and this new book embodied in 1571 the agency that Giles Geast had imagined in 1557. If the Atlantic mode of communication, its sovereign affect and agency, can only date from the acquisition of the royal charter in 1575, this evidence suggests that its embodied practices, based on experience of English literacy’s peculiar objects, were well established in Tewkesbury decades earlier. This is not the place for a systematic analysis of Geast’s project before the outbreak of the civil war, but a brief sketch suffices to indicate the interrelationship of the newly incorporated royal borough and its subordinate. As John Bartley had served in the offices of both corporations, a flow of administrative expertise and experience continued to move up and down between the bailiffs of the borough and the feoffees of the charity. Among the best illustrations of this connection, John Barston, the Cambridge-educated lawyer and first town clerk or recorder of Tewkesbury, named as such in the 1575 charter, and now celebrated author of The Safeguard of Society, a 1576 book on the importance of uniform laws for the ‘regiment’ of a commonwealth, served as a bailiff of the borough and as a feoffee of the Geast charity for more than twenty years from 1592 until 1613.32 As its administrative style became more compressed and refined, reflecting the uniform pattern prescribed in Bartley’s memorial, a basic numeracy figured in both the visual order and legibility of the record, enabling a tracking of revenue from the rents across the years, analysis of 165

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 165

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

the relationship between revenue and a variety of expenses, especially house repairs, and an accountability of officers for sums of money allocated from one year to another. In terms of the Atlantic mode of communication, its affect and agency, the record expressed the devolved sovereignty of a royal borough in its abstraction of sets of lands and houses from the landscape, in its organisation of these properties as blocks of rentals, tenants and payments on specific streets, and in its integration of these blocks as the corporate property of the Geast charity, recorded in a style that generated an index of rental values from otherwise dispersed lands and dwellings, a literate ordering enabled by a security of title that was overseen and reinforced by the authority of the borough, de facto lord of the soil in its territory. At the conclusion of each annual account, the record described the distribution of just under £15 in what were termed ‘running sixpences’, the coins distributed as alms from house to house and street to street in Tewkesbury, with the procession during the week before Christmas including the bailiffs of the borough and at least two of the feoffees, depending on age and capacity. The highly episodic record of the individuals who received relief in this way strongly suggests that, before the civil war, the officers of borough and charity had little difficulty identifying those who were native to the town, understood as the proper recipients of alms, and excluding strangers. The experience of civil war in northern Gloucestershire challenged this regime and its mode of communication, fundamentally in its dislocation of the devolved sovereignty that informed corporate agency. However, on the whole, the annual records indicate a remarkable continuity, given the general crisis and the specific problems faced in a fractured corporation by the officers of one of its dependencies. After its memorial to the Spanish Armada in a footnote to the annual inspection of accounts in 1588, the Geast book had become an informal and occasional record of the events that engaged the sensibilities of its board, including James I’s progress to Scotland in 1617, the travels of Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham in 1623, and the duke’s assassination in 1628: sovereign affairs of the kingdom, all recorded alongside the death notices of prominent borough officers.33 In the common council of Tewkesbury, a large body of twenty-four burgesses, twenty-four assistants and the two bailiffs, the polarisation of king and Parliament into opposed armies in 1642 fractured a group that had identified with the king’s sovereignty as the source of its own authority, had literally built on this foundation, indeed had only acquired its consolidated territory in the borough, including the former Abbey precincts, through the 1575 charter. Under the pressure of dangerous conditions after the sack of Cirencester in February 1643, some of the councillors negotiated surrender to the royalist army at Worcester, whilst others and their families joined the five boatloads of refugees who sailed down the Severn to Gloucester for the duration of the war.34 A few months later, the Geast book recorded that ‘the civil war between King and parliament still continues and threatens to ruin the Kingdom’, one 166

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 166

26/02/2020 08:57

Sovereignty by the book

of the feoffees observing in a letter, ‘I have lent money to both sides, been plundered by both sides, been imprisoned by both sides. A mad world.’35 Had the kingdom been a centralised political society in any sense of the term, defined by a mode of communication that subordinated ‘provinces’ or ‘localities’ to a spatially distant ‘centre’ of authority, the ‘madness’ described by William Hill in his letter could easily have justified suspension of the Geast charity’s operations, including its annual procession, the more readily after the corporation of Tewkesbury had divided into de facto royalists and exiles. By 1644, the garrisons of both sides had mobilised the inhabitants in forced labour groups to build fortifications, and some avoided even going into the streets. In the event, the feoffees did not walk the town or make distributions in 1642 or 1643, and their rentals for these years accrued £16 15s of arrears due to ‘the deadness of trade and the distraction of the time’.36 However, in the manner of centreless political agency, the feoffees continued to hold their meetings and to prepare and present their accounts to the bailiffs, and then resumed their house-by-house distributions from December 1644 to December 1648.37 Although the dislocation of burgesses, the presence of soldiers and other ‘distractions’ did temporarily disrupt their most important activities, the feoffees did not break their administrative routines and even managed to increase their revenue for distribution to more than £20 by 1644. Arguably, the poor harvests of the late 1640s, and the harvest failures of 1648 and 1649, had a greater impact on the feoffees than did the experience of civil war, as the increasing number of struggling families, including refugees driven to the borough by the insecurities of the surrounding countryside, made it difficult and dangerous for a small group of three or four men to distribute relief from door to door. In December 1649, those in need overwhelmed the bailiffs and feoffees behind Church Street, and the officers ‘could not dispose it in any order, but some had two or three times both money and coals, and others nothing at all’.38 In this context, the response involved a more literate order. As early as 1638, the bailiffs and feoffees on their rounds had observed what they considered a species of fraud, whereby ‘strangers’ obtained the alms intended for the ‘town poor’, and had countered this, ‘according to the trust reposed in them’, by devising a ‘note or book of names’ before the distribution, described as ‘a very good course’ to ‘prevent all manner of deceit’.39 Although the practice had not become permanent, the feoffees returned to it following the ‘violence’ of 1649, ‘to prevent which hereafter the bailiffs and feoffees, a week before Christmas, [were to] walk the town and tot a book for the poor for money and coals, then deliver the money and tickets for coals to the constables, churchwardens, and overseers of the poor to distribute’.40 These techniques of literate order, especially their power to limit and to exclude, enabled a flexible response to a social and economic emergency. Just as importantly, the device contravened the obligation of the feoffees, defined by Geast’s 1558 charter, to see the alms properly dispensed, and their record book shows, after the easing of dearth, that the bailiffs 167

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 167

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

and feoffees of the charity resumed their customary house-to-house walk in December 1651.41 If the Geast book indicates the resilience of literate order in the face of political crisis, the first book of Gloucester records, begun on Cape Ann in April 1642, suggests its potential to extend its ordering range and territory, even in the midst of a crisis, paradoxically leaving an expanded and more integrated political society in its wake. The Gloucester project, described as a ‘plantation’ in the Massachusetts Bay records and as a ‘town’ in its own first book, posed the vexed question of whether an English corporation, de facto sovereign and lord of its soil, could create new corporations on the basis of its charter. The General Court of Massachusetts Bay first raised the question in 1639, when it allocated the ‘land and other liberties’ on Cape Ann to a ‘fishery plantation’, thereby also empowering its settlers to undertake the canal project on the Cape which the Court had assayed but left in abeyance during the previous year.42 In its book of records, the plantation would seem to answer the question in the affirmative during the 1640s, using its authority to make binding ordinances and to secure land title much like any other English corporation. An assumption of de facto sovereignty continued to define the General Court’s policy on Cape Ann during the months of crisis and polarisation that preceded the outbreak of civil war in England.43 Its authority extended to the modification of the corporation’s personnel in 1642, marking the plantation as a subordinate body comparable to the Geast charity in Tewkesbury. In April, the Court introduced a new group of settlers into the plantation, a religious fellowship, led by the Welsh cleric Richard Blynman, that also included Obadiah Bruen, formerly of the drapers’ company in Shrewsbury, who would serve as the recorder of the settlement, now styled ‘Gloucester’ in memory of reformed religion’s perceived victories in that English corporation.44 Although the distinctive ‘godly’ religious identity of its officers would show in the use of a reformed calendar, purged of corrupt, pagan names for the days and months, and perhaps in a patriarchal ordering of the plantation’s land holdings, in other ways Gloucester’s records after 1642 were indistinguishable from those of other English corporations, the distinction between ‘freemen’ and ‘town’ in this case encoding a separation of Blynman’s religious fellowship or ‘gathering’ from the general population.45 Bruen’s informal style of administration, involving the accumulation of notes on slips of paper that he later recorded in a book, belied the literate order expressed in his ‘Gloucester Records’, the book of plantation ordinances and its land grants and transactions between 1642 and 1650. Bruen codified the plantation’s orders in the book’s opening, presenting as a law code what had been a series of decisions by the general meeting across the decade, a set of ordinances that clearly displayed the importance of the sovereign powers to mark boundaries, to take possession of land within a territory, to restrict uses and to exclude in the building of a settlement.46 In this context, sovereignty by 168

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 168

26/02/2020 08:57

Sovereignty by the book

the book entailed the settling of boundaries between Gloucester and adjacent plantations, the authorisation of the Annisquam canal project, the laying out of roads and driftways for livestock, restrictions on the commercial removal of timber from the plantation and the establishment of a distinction between the possession and the occupation of land, setting the judicial sanction of a fine for trespasses where necessary. In a style reminiscent of the Geast book and other corporate documents, the Gloucester records then transcribed grants of land and other transactions in a way designed to abstract ‘property’ and specific ‘farms’ from the welter of landscape, integrating dispersed lands in proprietary genealogies headed by those of ‘Mr Richard Blynman’ and ‘Obadiah Bruen’, then arranged as a list of similarly patriarchal house lots and farms, named for the male heads of households and ordered more or less south to north from the first settlement around the southern harbour. These genealogies also served as land titles and deeds, in accordance with the General Court’s order of 1640 to establish a recorder in every Massachusetts Bay township as the exclusive authority in all matters of ‘estate or interest’ in property.47 In 1643, little more than six months after the sack of Cirencester on the other side of the Atlantic, the Gloucester general meeting ordered Blynman ‘to cut the beach’ and start work on the Annisquam canal project, giving him in return three acres of land and possession of the tolls in perpetuity as long as he kept the cut open and allowed free passage to Gloucester’s inhabitants.48 Bruen included no record of the labour involved in this project, but it made use of Cape Ann’s most abundant natural resource, its portion of granite rocks, to line a narrow channel sufficient for the passage of small vessels.49 The canal eased traffic between the plantation’s northern and southern harbours, but it also facilitated the eastern coastal trade from Boston, Salem and Marblehead by obviating the sea voyage around the Cape to Ipswich Bay. In this way, the Gloucester plantation used its sovereign ‘liberties’ of land disposal to achieve one of the important economic goals of the Massachusetts Bay regime, at the same time fostering a closer interrelationship between its southern townships and its eastern shore. In the absence of any continuous communication with its nominal source of sovereignty in England, where the nature of sovereignty and its legitimate political embodiment had themselves become civil war battlefields, the literate ordering expressed in Bruen’s ‘Gloucester Records’ had by 1646 generated a more coherent and integrated English political society on Cape Ann than had existed in April 1642. Its dynamism derived from its lack of a centre, from an Atlantic mode of political communication characterised by the devolved sovereignty of the Massachusetts Bay charter, by the affect and agency of such as Richard Blynman and Obadiah Bruen, and by the literate order or sovereignty by the book that transformed landscape into property and property into the infrastructural means of political integration. 169

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 169

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

If these projects in Tewkesbury and on Cape Ann at first sight appear to suggest only the political dangers of ‘a little learning’, the evidence of literate order and sovereignty by the book indicates not potentially intoxicating quaffs from a spring, but rather, as on Cape Ann, the power of the sea placed at the disposal of human devices, the integrative power of the written word in a specific mode of Atlantic communication. In returning to the question of how an increasingly coherent and integrated English political society took shape on an Atlantic scale during the seventeenth century, corporate and, just as importantly, sub-corporate records have revealed the significance of a mode of political communication whereby persons and groups, often lacking any traditional claim to rule, were enabled to act as the practical embodiments of sovereign authority. Culturally specific written instruments­ – ­royal charters and their dependencies­ – ­generated the sovereign affect that resulted in literate ordering, a sovereignty by the book that not only sustained marginal settlements during moments of political crisis but fostered a centreless political order, its charters serving, even and perhaps especially in moments of crisis, as the warrants for marginal expansion and for the projects vital to political consolidation.

NOTES 1 This chapter combines elements of two projects, one involving the Gloucester plantation on Cape Ann in North America during the seventeenth century and the second the longer history of a corporate charity in the English borough of Tewkesbury. Revised material from the first and second sections appears in the introduction to The Account Book of the Giles Geast Charity, Tewkesbury, 1558–1891 (Bristol, 2017). I am grateful to the editors and also thank Michael Braddick, Gregg Roeber and Janina Safran for valuable comments and suggestions. 2 Richard Bonney, The European Dynastic States, 1494–1660 (Oxford, 1991); Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton, 1980); Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley, 1993); Philip J. Stern, The Company-state: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2011); Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge, 2014). 3 Bonney, European Dynastic States; Wayne te Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500–1700 (Berkeley, 1998); Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000). 4 Anthony Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986), p. 352. 5 See, for example, Michael J. Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (New York, 2009); Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (New York, 1988); Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micropolitics of Poor Relief in Rural England, 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2009). 6 In 1700, for example, such memories of disorder informed Richard Gough’s 170

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 170

26/02/2020 08:57

Sovereignty by the book

7

8

9

10 11 12

13 14

15

16 17 18 19

20

21

22 23

account of the past in the Marches of Wales. See Richard Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. David Hey (New York, 1981), pp. 56–7. See Messick, Calligraphic State, pp. 1–12, for useful comparative observations on the role of ‘textual authority’ and ‘textual domination’ in the ‘interlocking of a polity, a social order, and a discursive formation’. See David Browne, The New Invention, Entitled, Calligraphia (St Andrews, 1622), sigs 2, 2v, p. 59; and The Introduction to the True Understanding of the Whole Art of Expedition in Teaching to Write (1638), sigs Bv, B4v. On this approach to ‘the general uses of literacy’, see Jack Goody (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 25–6; David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 1–18, remains a useful introduction to the problem. Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 127–9, 144, 151–2, 154–65. GA, D2688, Giles Geast Charity Account Book, 1558–1891, fos 6–8. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (ed.), Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England (5 vols, Boston, 1853), I, pp. 256–7. This plantation’s first surviving ordinances date from 1642, when a new group of settlers named it Gloucester and assumed control of its affairs. See: Gloucester City Archives (hereafter GCA), First Book of Town Records, 1642–1715, pp. 1–12. Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987), p. 255. Nigel Thrift, ‘Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect’, Human Geography, 86 (2004), 60; Nigel Thrift, Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (New York, 2007), pp. 224, 223–39. Paul S. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-century London (Stanford, 1985), pp. 10–12. On literacy and agency, see also Keith Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City, and the Plague (New Haven, 2011). GA, D2688, fo. 32v. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, p. 355. Ibid, pp. 3, 12–14, 32. See, for example, Robert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns of England: Politics and Political Culture, c.1540–1640 (Oxford, 1998). Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Stanford, 1994); Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (New York, 1996); Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (New York, 2001). See: Jonathan Barry, ‘Bourgeois collectivism? Urban association and the middling sort’, in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (eds), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society, and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (New York, 1994), pp. 105, 108, 242–9. See: Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), p. 5, and passim for a different reading of the types of records discussed in this chapter as evidence of the power of English corporations to generate a political language of freedom and an urban lifestyle subversive of their authoritarian, monarchic origins. Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. 89–90. Barry, ‘Bourgeois collectivism’, p. 108. 171

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 171

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 24 See: Robert Tittler, The Face of the City: Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern England (New York, 2007), pp. 123–37; Robert Tittler, Portraits, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England, 1540–1640 (New York, 2012), pp. 136–42. 25 Goody, The Logic of Writing, p. 163. 26 Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (4 vols, New Haven, 1934, 1964), IV, pp. 368, 344–74. 27 See: C.R. Elrington (ed.), A History of the County of Gloucester (London, 1968), VIII, pp. 167–9, for a historical survey of Tewkesbury charities; Beaver (ed.), Account Book. 28 Tewkesbury had been a chartered borough, with a distinct political structure, for centuries before the 1575 charter. See: Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 222–7, for the mistaken view that its incorporation as a royal borough in 1575 reflected the activities and consolidation of its artisanal companies during the previous decade. This long history of charter politics becomes important because Withington offers Tewkesbury as a model of the transition from the society of ‘companies’ to the society of ‘corporations’. Its history illustrates, on the contrary, the power of medieval charters, in this case, to create the political environment for economic agency. 29 This discussion is based on TNA, PROB 11/40, Testamentum Egidii Geest, and on GA, D2688, fos 6–8, the excerpts of the will copied into the record book of the Geast charity. 30 See the hints of this method in the references to ‘bokes’ in GA, D2688, fos 10, 11, the accounts for 1564 and 1565. 31 GA, D2688, fos 1–2v. 32 Ibid., fos 34, 37v, 39–58; John Barston, The Safeguard of Society (1576), sig. Bir. See: Withington, Society, pp. 102–3, 124–6, 222–31, for a discussion of the meaning of the term ‘society’ in Barston’s book. In my reading, the concepts of hierarchy and inequality remained fundamental and indispensible to Barston’s idea of a healthy ‘regiment’ of commonweale, with clear lines of demarcation in the interests of public authority, not a ‘web’ of social relationships. 33 GA, D2688, fos 62v, 68v, 72v. 34 Discussion of Tewkesbury’s experience of the civil war is based on Daniel C. Beaver, Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590–1690 (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 195–244. The Geast book records eleven separate changes in the occupation of Tewkesbury by royalists and parliamentarian forces between February 1643 and June 1644: GA, D2688, fo. 89v. 35 See: GA, D2688, fo. 87v; KHLC, Sackville Manuscripts, William Hill to Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, 21 October 1643. 36 GA, D2688, fos 87v, 88v, 89v. 37 Ibid., fos 88v, 90v, 91v, 92v, 93v. 38 See: ibid., fo. 94v. 39 See: ibid., fos 83v, 84v, 85v, for ‘distributions by book’ in 1638, 1639 and 1640. 40 See: ibid., fo. 94v. 41 See: ibid., fo. 96v. 42 Shurtleff (ed.), Records … of Massachusetts Bay, I, pp. 253, 256–7. 43 See: Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 172

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 172

26/02/2020 08:57

Sovereignty by the book

44

45 46 47 48 49

(Cambridge, MA, 2004), pp. 39–70, for a general discussion of charter and proprietary politics in the Atlantic context between 1642 and 1646. See: Daniel C. Beaver, ‘Politics in the archives: records, property, and plantation politics in Massachusetts Bay, 1642–1650’, Journal of Early American History, 1 (2011), 3–25, for the politics and process of this change in 1642. GCA, First Book of Town Records, p. 1; Beaver, ‘Politics in the archives’, 17. Ibid., pp. 3–11. Records … of Massachusetts Bay, I, pp. 306–7. GCA, First Book of Town Records, p. 4. John J. Babson, History of the Town of Gloucester, Cape Ann (Gloucester, MA, 1972), pp. 7–8.

173

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 173

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Chapter 9

Local expertise in hostile territory: state building in Cromwellian Ireland Jennifer Wells

I

n March 1655, eight men surveyed a field in Timolin, County Kildare, Ireland, not far from the Wicklow border. They worked on behalf of William Petty, an Oxford-based anatomist who became physician-general of Parliament’s forces in Ireland and later surveyor-general of the country. Petty’s ambition, and that of the parliamentarian government employing him, was to measure and record all lands forfeited by Irish Catholics pursuant to the terms of the Act for the Settling of Ireland of 1652 and in an effort to fulfil the Act for the Better Satisfaction of Soldiers Arrears of 1653. Petty had won­ – ­even, some whispered, stolen­ – ­a plum contract just months before, on 11 December 1654, to measure all lands, profitable or unprofitable, according to the smallest civil denominations in order to determine how much land the parliamentarians had confiscated and could distribute in lieu of arrears to its foot soldiers and officers.1 History would know his work as the Down Survey of Ireland, the first land survey undertaken on a national scale anywhere in the world.2 As the men laboured, measuring acres and perches, profitable land and waste, another group of men lingered in a nearby fastness, watching. Led by ‘Blind’ Donogh O’Derrig (or O’Derrick) and his lieutenant, Dermot Ryan, the Irishmen, known as Tories, waited for the command. When Blind Donogh gave it, the Tories sprinted forth, captured the eight men, and dragged them into a nearby wood. There, the Irishmen put the surveyors on trial, described by one nineteenth-century Irish nationalist as ‘a kind of drum-head court martial’. Six Englishmen were, perhaps unsurprisingly, found guilty ‘as accessories to a gigantic scheme of ruthless robbery’ and summarily executed.3 Perhaps more surprising was the discovery that two of the surveyors were neither English nor Scottish nor even Protestant Irish, but rather local Catholics, recruited by English authorities to serve as mearesmen, measuring the bounds (or meares) of the land under survey. Worse than an enemy’s fate is a traitor’s fate and the two were bayoneted 174

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 174

26/02/2020 08:57

Local expertise in hostile territory

before being shot, their bodies left not far from the place they had called home. The presence of two Irish Catholics on a team of Cromwellian surveyors may at first seem perplexing, not least because it contradicts a deeply enshrined narrative within the Irish historiography that sees Oliver Cromwell and the parliamentarians as the great ‘bogeymen’ of Irish history.4 Yet, when placed within the broader context of state formation, the presence of Catholics on Petty’s surveying teams comes as little surprise. The literature on the topic of state formation is vast, but Charles Tilly’s classic statement of the three fundamental, interdependent elements of state formation­ – ­coercion, capital and legitimacy­ – ­continues to influence political historians, political scientists and sociologists concerned largely with the institutional forces of state, most especially the fiscal-military apparatus.5 According to Tilly, the formation (or transformation) of the state occurs ‘as consequences of efforts to conquer, and to maintain control over the people and property in the territory’. Politicians, state builders and their agents seek to transform these newly acquired territories by consuming ‘large quantities of resources, especially resources that lend themselves to military applications: men, arms, transport, food’. These resources are not, however, ‘new’, but rather already embedded within the fabric of the conquered society. ‘Households, manors, churches, villages, feudal obligations, connections among neighbors’­– ­all of these, argues Tilly, contain the resources required for the conquering state to succeed. The mission, then, of the usurping power or ruler ‘is to extract the essential resources from those organizations and social relations, while ensuring that someone will reproduce and yield similar resources in the future’. As state-makers attempt to extract these resources, ‘top-down hierarchies of coercive control’ inevitably form.6 Thus, central to Tilly’s institutional approach but unsaid is the role of indigenous labourers and their knowledge of the land in extracting resources (or capital) from the land to fund the activities of the state. To harness this labour, the sovereign wields (coercive) control in order to exercise a monopoly of (legitimate) force over a territory. A series of studies undertaken primarily by social historians, meanwhile, provide a powerful complement to this centre-focused approach. These scholars instead show how state formation depended in large part upon the co-operation and consent of local officials. According to these accounts, state formation had much less to do with the aggrandisement of power at the centre, and much more to do with contingency and negotiation in the provinces.7 That is to say, the centre could maintain its strength and power only with the consent and support of the localities. In an early modern English context, historians, most notably Steve Hindle and Michael Braddick, have emphasised the significance of local men in helping to shape the institutions and methods that bound those in England’s provinces to the ‘hub’ of authority in London.8 Braddick has taken the analysis geographically further, arguing that local elites, not just in England but also in Scotland and Wales, helped 175

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 175

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

to ensure ‘civility’ in the peripheries while simultaneously consolidating and legitimating their own social positions.9 Instrumental to both Hindle and Braddick’s work, then, is the role of provincial powerbrokers or, alternatively, the ‘middling’ sort in building the state. Despite the recognition that local individuals played critical roles in state formation, historians of early modern Britain and Ireland have not considered how, as the English state expanded its reaches first in the archipelago and then overseas, authorities in either the ‘centre’ or peripheral ‘centres’, such as Dublin and Edinburgh, sought to exploit indigenous knowledge. This proves especially true in vanquished territories where, to put it bluntly, the infrastructure of the state remained much more primitive if not wholly absent. In consequence, the labour and knowledge of the native population became much more critical to the successful acquisition of resources.10 This chapter accordingly explores the uneasy balance struck by Cromwellian officials in Ireland between exploiting indigenous (or local) knowledge and also effectively governing a subjugated territory. In the process, it considers the effects that duelling notions of what constituted ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ had upon policy in London, Dublin and the Irish provinces. What becomes clear is that Cromwell, the Parliament and the Council of State, despite their ruthless invasion and conquests of Ireland and, later, Scotland between 1649 and 1652, and despite the visions entertained for the two countries, had very little interest in the business of peripheral governance, whether due to communication lag or simply lack of priority. These divisions between centre and periphery in turn forced the commissioners for Parliament in Ireland to broker uneasy alliances with local elites and destitute Irish Catholics alike. These alliances allowed the parliamentarian administration to exploit native labour and, more importantly, native expertise, most especially and most significantly in the Down Survey of Ireland­– ­so called because of the chains laid down on the ground to mark the land­ – ­undertaken by William Petty between 1655 and 1658. Thus, while the framework of state building in Ireland and Scotland originated at Westminster and was improved upon in Dublin and Edinburgh, the work of state building was carried out in the peripheries of the periphery, in small villages and townlands, by the very people who stood to lose the most by consorting with the Cromwellian administration. The ‘layered-expertise’ that defined the occupation of Cromwellian Ireland would be replicated again in both Scotland and, subsequently, the expanding English empire, revealing how officials in the peripheries resorted to local knowledge in an effort to build the state, even in hostile territories. Historians remain familiar enough with the basic outlines of the Cromwellian conquests of Ireland and Scotland between 1649 and 1652, but they are worth repeating here by way of background. Shortly after the executioner’s axe severed the head of the English King Charles I from his regal body in January 1649, those members of the Rump Parliament who had plotted the king’s 176

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 176

26/02/2020 08:57

Local expertise in hostile territory

demise turned their attention to Ireland for both punitive and defensive purposes. The former objective lay in avenging the deaths of thousands of Protestants slaughtered eight years earlier, when, in October 1641, members of the Gaelic Irish elite, disgruntled by years of maltreatment suffered at the hands of English officials in Dublin, launched a rebellion in Ulster with the aim of negotiating religious toleration from a position of strength. This narrowly targeted, elite exploit soon tapped into wider discontent and spread across the whole of the island. Of more immediate concern to the Rump was Charles I’s heir, Charles Stuart, and the threat of a royalist invasion of England staged in Ireland. Thus, to punish Catholics for the 1641 rebellion and to protect the infant English republic against royalist onslaught, Cromwell led parliamentary forces into Ireland in July 1649. An invasion of Scotland followed in July 1650 after word reached Cromwell that Charles Stuart had begun negotiating a royalist invasion of England through the north with the assistance of the Scots.11 The conquest of Ireland served another purpose beyond just punishment and defence. It provided England with a means of satisfying debts owed to the English Adventurers pursuant to the terms of the 1642 Adventurers’ Act and subsequent parliamentary army arrears accrued during the civil wars. After the bulk of Catholic and royalist forces surrendered by the spring of 1652, settlement was on the lips of everyone from London to Dublin. In London, pamphlets emerged detailing potential settlement schemes, the majority of which involved the forced removal of Irish Catholics and an influx of Protestants to farm the rich lands of Leinster. One such pamphlet, The Present Posture and Condition of Ireland, addressed the differing concerns of both the Westminster and Dublin governments. In London, the Council of State fretted over both Ireland and Scotland, but it was the lure of economic profit that caused Westminster to devote more attention to Ireland. ‘Reason of State’, the pamphleteer wrote, ‘pleads for a preference of Ireland before Scotland’ because the ‘prize we strive for in Ireland doubles, yea trebles the value of that in Scotland’. The ‘prize’ was a sweeping land settlement that would add to English coffers while simultaneously providing payment to the officers and soldiers of the parliamentary army.12 Parliament’s commissioners in Ireland did not share these sentiments. Security, not profit, remained their principal concern. ‘There is no hope of planting safely in Ireland’, the commissioners wrote to Whitehall in early 1652, without the removal of eminent Irish military commanders ‘beyond the seas’, a ‘sharpen[ing]’ of the laws to punish those ‘swordsmen’ who remained, and careful treatment of the native ‘Husbandmen’. The husbandmen, the commissioners believed, were the key to success, ‘for tis his building, planting, and labouring of the earth, by which all our gain at last must be made injoyable, and preserved’.13 These competing visions of the London and Dublin governments as to what Ireland offered and what, moreover, would become of its native 177

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 177

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

­ opulation reflect the duelling agendas of competing centres and peripherp ies (or localities). Here, Westminster saw Dublin as a periphery, while the parliamentary administrators in Dublin quite clearly saw both London and Dublin as equal partners in the state-building project and centres in their own right. The divergent ideas in the two capitals help to account, moreover, for not only the acts passed at Westminster that created the framework for settlement in Ireland but also the numerous allowances the Irish commissioners in Dublin granted to Catholics as the settlement unfolded.14 The Westminster legislation was, after all, stringent. In April 1652 the Rump Parliament passed a number of resolutions concerning Ireland, including a measure that the Council of State should provide for the ‘transporting [of] persons from one part of the nation to another’.15 The August 1652 Act for the Settling of Ireland, widely hailed as a landmark state-building measure, received a ‘muted welcome in Dublin’ for obvious reasons.16 Its ten articles effectively provided for the extirpation or banishment of the entirety of the Catholic Irish population, and excepted of life and estate 109 political and military leaders. Only those Catholics deemed ‘capable of the Parliament’s mercy … shall be pardoned for their lives, but shall forfeit their estates to the said Commonwealth’.17 Parliamentary officers in Ireland, weary of the security situation and the need to keep calm across the country, deemed the language in the act, legislated at Westminster with little knowledge of the situation unfolding in Ireland, too strident. These disparate viewpoints laid bare the differing approaches both capitals had to the state-building project. Westminster’s ideological fervour, based largely upon atrocities committed during the 1640s, tempered the growing pragmatism of the Dublin administration. The Irish commissioners’ tepid response to the Act of Settlement was not, moreover, without merit. The act failed to detail how transplantation and reallocation of lands would occur, leading to further disputes between Dublin and London. In frustration and in testament to the practicality that would ultimately define the Irish state-building project, the Dublin administration created a Committee for Transplantation, composed of both civil administrators and army officers, in June 1653, without the consent of either Parliament or the Council of State. The men appointed to the committee­ – ­Edmund Ludlow, Charles Coote, Hardress Waller, Theophilus Jones, Hierome Sankey, Daniel Axtell, Robert Phaire, Thomas Sadleir and Richard Lawrence­ – ­all enjoyed key military and administrative positions in Cromwellian Ireland.18 In their efforts to satisfy both army arrears and Adventurers’ loans with Irish lands, the committee provided a number of recommendations to Westminster, amongst them a national survey of Ireland. Westminster acquiesced. The final settlement bill, An Act for the Speedy and Effectual Satisfaction of the Adventurers for Lands in Ireland, from September 1653, incorporated many of the committee’s proposals, not least that of a land survey, revealing, in this particular instance, the centre’s 178

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 178

26/02/2020 08:57

Local expertise in hostile territory

bowing to peripheral suggestions. Equally significant, the act established a timeline for transplantation, requiring all Catholics who refused surrender ‘Articles’ with Cromwellian troops or received ‘any favor and mercy held forth by any [of] the qualifications in the … Act for [the] Setling of Ireland’ to transplant to Connacht by 1 May 1654.19 The clash over the land legislation has attracted substantial attention from historians who have shown in remarkable depth and detail the battles between Whitehall and Dublin.20 Even more attention has been paid to the ad hoc nature of settlement and its many spurts, fits and regressions.21 Yet this is only one part of the story. Scholars have proved all too reluctant to consider the numerous allowances the Dublin administration granted that allowed Catholics to remain on the land. By no means did these dispensations arise out of benevolence to the native Irish. Rather, they resulted from exigent circumstances on the ground and a growing realisation in Dublin that the success of the state-building project in the Irish peripheries­– ­in Wicklow and Wexford, Ulster and Munster­– ­could succeed only by retaining Irish labourers for two inherently practical reasons: to appease Anglo-Irish land holders and to effect the land survey required by the Act for Satisfaction. A deluge of requests to retain Catholic labourers flooded the Committee for Transplantation, beginning in late 1653.22 Particularly influential in maintaining these Irish servants and tenants were New English Protestant land holders, many of whom utilised patronage networks established with parliamentarian authorities during the 1640s or the early 1650s to extract dispensations from the regime. For instance, Arthur Annesley and William Dubancks, two land holders from the so-called ‘Five Counties’ of Dublin, Wicklow, Wexford, Carlow and Kildare, which surrounded the city of Dublin, petitioned the Irish Council in March 1655 with the aim of retaining Irish labourers for their lands.23 In an ode to Dublin’s role as a ‘centre’, requests arrived not just from far-off counties such as Kerry but also from Whitehall. In an ironic twist of fate, Cromwell, a staunch advocate of transplantation, even ordered his son, Henry, and the Irish Council to show ‘favour’ to James Murray, 2nd Earl of Annandale­ – ­a person of ‘much credit and worth’. Annendale, according to Cromwell, ‘[was] like to suffer extreme prejudice in his estate in [County Donegal] Ireland’ if ‘the rule for transplantation’ was strictly enforced. Cromwell urged the Irish Council to permit ‘the natives, who are [Annendale’s] tenants, to continue the holding and manuring of his Lordship’s lands’.24 From a cynical perspective, these requests merely reflect the self-interest of an Anglo-Irish elite grasping at its dwindling labour supply. But embedded within the petitions were also rational reasons for retaining the labourers. The petitioners from the Five Counties highlighted that one Sean McMahon was ‘experienced in raising garrens [garrans, small horses]’.25 Another petitioner argued that one female servant had to remain as a cook.26 Sir Charles 179

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 179

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Coote, depicted by historians as a notorious anti-Catholic bigot, sent multiple petitions to the Dublin administration between 1653 and 1659 requesting that he be ‘allowed to employ Irishmen for carrying on his iron works’ in Loughrea, County Galway, and Queen’s County (present-day Laois). Coote’s requests, moreover, explicitly stated that both the Catholic workers and their families ‘be excepted from transplantation’.27 One petition, granted in 1657, allowed some sixty Irish families to remain in Queen’s County two miles from Coote’s ironworks.28 Other requests to retain Irish labourers provided further insights as to why these men and women were so coveted. A Captain Staples received a permit to keep twenty Irishmen at his ironworks specifically because they had ‘been formerly employed in this Mill’. Their children, moreover, were likewise ‘desired’ by Staples for future labour, reinforcing the notion that for state building to prove effective, the labour supply must selfperpetuate.29 Left unsaid but implied within these and other petitions, then, was also the prior experience accrued by these individuals as they laboured in the mills. In determining whether to grant the petitions, the Irish Council established a sub-committee in 1655. Careful attention was paid to determining whether it remained safe to keep so many Catholics in Leinster, Munster and Ulster with the aim of assessing which parts of each county ‘are fit to be totally cleared of all Irish and Papists’ and which ‘other parts … may be tenanted by such Irish’. For the sake of security, moreover, the committee would determine which parts of each county lay waste and how best to ensure that towns and villages currently inhabited by Irish Catholics ‘may be disposed of, with most security and least offence to the neighbouring English’.30 The vast majority­ – ­95 per cent­ – ­of all petitions seeking to retain Catholic labourers were granted. Only when the security situation proved vexing did English authorities in Dublin immediately curtail this relative leniency in the provinces. In July 1654, for instance, the Dublin commissioners ‘rescinded’ one of their many dispensations given to Coote and the local commissioners at Loughrea ‘to grant licences to [the] Irish to come and go to their abodes out of Connaught’ because it had been ‘found to work prejudicially to the Commonwealth’.31 The pragmatism defining the Dublin commissioners’ response to the state-building project extended to protections of Catholic labourers and land holders during the mid-1650s. When Irish land holders fled to the continent or transplanted to Connacht, they left behind servants to tend their lands even as the property awaited confiscation and redistribution.32 By late 1654, however, with the land settlement under way, the Dublin administration received intelligence that English soldiers or Protestant adventurers who had received leases of these lands pursuant to the terms of the Act for Satisfaction had taken to turning the servants out, leading to increased levels of vagrancy, which themselves posed problems for stability.33 Writing to the commissioners of revenue for the twelve precincts established across the island, the Irish 180

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 180

26/02/2020 08:57

Local expertise in hostile territory

parliamentary commissioners urged that, if the Irish were denied the ‘liberty’ of remaining as servants on the property, then the revenue commissioners were to create ‘room’ for them and ensure ‘that no oppression or wrong be done unto them or their goods’. Here, again, the motivation of this selfdescribed ‘care’ should be tempered. The quarters for Irish servants existed so that they could continue to thresh corn and graze cattle, garrans or oxen, all of which would be needed ‘for carrying in the corn in harvest and carrying [it] to the market’.34 Thus, economic profit for the commonwealth, achieved with local resources, remained the ultimate arbiter of these motivations. The retention and practical protection of the Catholic labour supply captures only one-half of the state-building project as it unfolded in the Irish peripheries. As the petitions make clear, the majority of the labour undertaken by the native Irish was menial. It required no real skillset or knowledge. There is, however, another form of labour that makes use of ‘expertise’. A growing body of work by historians of science known as Studies in Expertise and Experience (SEE) has emphasised that, along with coercion, capital and legitimacy, ‘expertise’ remained a vital component of early modern European state formation. Early modern states sought to employ the knowledge and skills of ‘experts’ in order to become more powerful and build empires and economies with a global reach.35 The use of individuals with prior knowledge or experience of a particular topic likewise leant legitimacy to state building projects; administrators did not employ novices to undertake the work of state building, but rather sought those individuals with skills and experience in specified areas. There are countless instances of officials in England, Europe and even imperial ports relying upon the skills of local individuals to build and enhance the state. In interregnum Ireland, the best example of this phenomenon remains the Down Survey, in which William Petty relied on layers of expertise­– ­trained English surveyors, soldiers with a familiarity of the land, local Irish Protestant jurors and Irish Catholic tenants­– ­to chart the land and, in turn, aggrandise the English state. Petty’s was not, of course, the first survey attempted in Cromwellian Ireland. In order to fulfil the requirements of the Act for the Settling of Ireland and the Act of Satisfaction, administrators in Dublin commissioned two surveys, the Gross Survey and the Civil Survey, in 1653 and 1654, respectively. The Gross Survey, commissioned in July 1653, was beset by problems from the outset. At least part of the problem was systemic and cut to the heart of communication issues between competing centres and peripheries. An order had originated in London in late spring 1653, requesting that ‘a gross survey … be taken of the honours, baronies, manors, lands etc. that were forfeited within the ten counties’ of Limerick, Tipperary, Waterford, King’s County, Queen’s County, Eastmeath, Westmeath, Down, Antrim and Armagh. These lands would in turn be divided amongst the soldiers and Adventurers, pursuant to the terms of the Act for Satisfaction.36 The Irish commissioners 181

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 181

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

received the order from Whitehall on 8 July 1653. Around ‘the 11th of the said month’, they directed ‘their letters to the several Commissioners of the precincts’, requesting that they return ‘such an estimate in fourteen days’. Weeks elapsed. Nothing came from the precincts. London, meanwhile, continued to ‘frequently solicit’ the Dublin commissioners for ‘an estimate of the said counties as might enable them at least to proceed to a general lot for the baronies’. Assessments finally began to trickle into Dublin from Ulster or elsewhere in Leinster, but only a ‘few counties’ supplied any data, which were, moreover, ‘very confused and imperfect’.37 The poor estimates forced the Irish commissioners to eschew their dealings with Westminster and improvise, once again asserting themselves as an autonomous centre. They nominated ‘certain persons’ to make use of ‘such surveys as were formerly taken in Lord Strafford’s time, and such other papers, returns or county books as were before them’.38 These efforts were supplemented with ‘the original surveys of Cavan, Fermanagah, Donegal, Tyrone and Antrim’ taken under James VI and I in the early seventeenth century, reflecting a much longer lineage of surveys as eyes of the state.39 The men would use the materials ‘to draw an abstract in general of the contents of the land in each barony’, which would in turn provide a ‘gross estimate’ of the available land.40 The methodology was, to say the least, ‘imperfect’. Even an effort late in 1653 to requisition ‘carts, horses, and carriages’ to carry the ‘instruments, plots, and books’ of the surveyors failed to render accurate tallies.41 As Henry Cromwell himself acknowledged in 1655, ‘there is no distinction of profitable or unprofitable land, nor any mention made of proprietors, or of what lands are forfeited and what not, but [it] is a gross survey of the whole contents of the ten counties’.42 In response to this failure, the Irish commissioners appointed Benjamin Worsley Surveyor-General of Ireland in April 1654, and ordered him ‘to survey, admeasure, and set forth all and singular the honours, baronies, castles, manors, lands, tenements and hereditaments’ that had belonged to ‘the rebels in Ireland and [were] forfeited to the Commonwealth’.43 Known as the ‘Civil Survey’ because civil authorities­– ­not the army­– ­undertook it, the survey likewise sought to ascertain the amount of land available in Ireland to fulfil the terms of the Act for Satisfaction. English officials in Dublin viewed the new survey as significant enough to warrant special rooms set aside for the surveyors in the Custom House and also created an ‘office’ for the Registry of Lands in the same building.44 Worsley was an interesting choice to lead the survey. Described as a ‘dealer in schemes for universal medicine, for making gold, sowing saltpetre, establishing a universal trade, taking great farms’, and, in Petty’s words, other ‘mountain-bellied conceptions’, he had experienced repeated frustration and failure in England.45 He went instead to Ireland in 1652 ‘to improve and repaire himself upon a less knowing and more credulous people’.46 There, too, he failed. The instructions he received remained ‘clogged’ with ‘unneces182

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 182

26/02/2020 08:57

Local expertise in hostile territory

sary impositions’, while the 1653 Act for Satisfaction ‘had not prescribed or warranted any rule for the distinguishment of profitable from unprofitable’ land.47 The surveyors were, moreover, instructed to utilise Strafford’s Survey from the 1630s when available, and proceeded to base their valuations on landowner records from 23 October 1641. Collectively, this methodology rendered inaccurate calculations. The Dublin administration sought to remedy these shortcomings by resorting to one form of local ‘expertise’: the jury. Worsley and his surveyors received the ‘power to sit in such and soe many parts of the counties as they … conceive[d] requisite’. There, they proceeded to ‘call inhabitants of the countrey, to summon juries, to keep courts of survey, and to administer oath[s]’ to any person deemed necessary ‘for the better and fuller information’ of each confiscated estate.48 On its face, this appeared to be a foolproof method of extracting valuable, accurate information from local labourers as to the resources on the land. In several instances, moreover, it did indeed succeed, with individuals testifying as to the boundaries of confiscated Catholic property. In practice, a multitude of issues arose that hampered not just the work of courts of survey but, more generally, all courts of law across Ireland. Juries, the regime quickly discovered, could not be summoned in most counties because, as Charles Fleetwood, Lord Deputy of Ireland, wrote to London in June 1654, after thirteen years of rebellion, warfare and conquest, ‘the devastation’ of the land ‘is universal’ and devoid of inhabitants. Fleetwood and his fellow commissioners lamented that ‘there hath scarce been a house left undemolished, fitt for an Englishman to dwell in, out of walled towns in Ireland’.49 In those counties where people survived, meanwhile, ‘there Cannot be Juries’ because all ‘are papists and Irish, and such as have had a hand in the Rebellion and are noe way to be trusted’ in providing accurate descriptions of the land.50 The lack of English, or even Irish Protestant, labourers only compounded the difficulty of resorting to law as a means of distributing land, as legal recourse proved ‘very tediouse, litigiouse, and unsatisfactory’.51 The failure of juries and Worsley’s apparent inability to innovate was exacerbated by recurrent communications issues and power struggles between London and Dublin. London wanted measurements and a land settlement; Dublin had concerns about undertaking a survey with local expertise. In the autumn of 1654, the Dublin administration, under pressure from Cromwell in London, entered into talks with William Petty. The bitter infighting that ensued between Petty and Worsley in their bids to attain and preserve the contract is well documented and, in an ode to the significance of local knowledge, centred almost exclusively upon whom the two men wished to retain in order to render accurate measurements of the land. According to Worsley, Petty’s ‘worke was dishonourable and scandalouse’ because he wanted to use ‘private soldiers, whose labour he may but hire at an easie rate’ instead of practised surveyors. His appeal rested on expertise: the English ‘surveyors 183

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 183

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

now imployed’ by the Irish administration ‘had exsperience allready in the worke’ and thus would ‘be better able to performe the same then such who are raw and unexsperienced, though taught by the Dr’.52 Petty’s proposition, moreover, created room for corruption. The ‘foot soldiers’ that Petty intended to employ could not, Worsley argued, be trusted to measure the very lands that they were due to receive according to the terms of the Act of Satisfaction. Petty responded that he sought to employ the men only because they were ‘hardy men, and fitter than most others for the difficulties’ in the arduous work of surveying lands in hostile territories. He assured his inquisitors that it remained ‘easie to discover’ any ‘false work’ returned by the soldiers, as the soldiers could ‘abuse the State only in the length of their chaine’ used to measure the land, which would quickly become apparent to Petty and his team. Soldiers would also not have any ideas as to where their plots of land, or those of their friends, lay on the island.53 Petty, the ultimate pragmatist, went one step further in layering this expertise and proposed the employment of Irish Catholics, arguing that ‘there was noe more danger to have the measurer a Papist then the mearesman’­ – ­a mearesman (alternatively spelled as mearsman or mearersman) being the individual who marked the boundaries of land. By Petty’s estimation, moreover, mearesmen almost always had to be Irish Catholics because they had lived upon, worked and knew the very lands that the English state now sought to measure and redistribute. The only real scandal was employing ‘Irish Papists’ when the rare English Protestant living in provincial Ireland might be had.54 There were other reasons, too, to employ the Catholic Irish. Courts of claim records that should have provided information as to who owned the land were deemed ‘insufficient’ by the Dublin government, prompting the Irish commissioners to request that a dozen officers and administrators in the Irish peripheries, amongst them Charles Coote, Hardress Waller and John Reynolds, should better ‘manage’ the surveys by seeking a ‘rendezvous’ with Catholic tenants.55 Catholic knowledge of and experience with the land thus became central to the state-building scheme envisioned in London, adapted in Dublin and executed in the Irish peripheries. The recruitment of Irish Catholics, whom Thomas Waring famously and colourfully described in 1650 as ‘of such profound sloth … that they are meerly a kind of Reptilia’, to serve as mearesmen could not have contrasted more sharply with contemporary English images of surveyors.56 As one individual remarked in 1654, ‘surveyors of land are commonly persons of gentile and liberall education, and theire practise esteemed a mistery and intricate matter, farr exceedinge the most parte of mechanicall trades’. They were ‘artists’ who ‘performed’ their work ‘with that truth and beauty as is usuall and requisite’.57 Despite such dissonant portrayals of English surveyors and Irish Catholics tasked to work on the Down Survey, the administration in Dublin overwhelmingly agreed with Petty and his use of native labourers, granting Petty and those ‘under his hand’ carte blanche authority to ‘cause, 184

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 184

26/02/2020 08:57

Local expertise in hostile territory

from time to time, such and soe many persons to asist him or them as shall be fitt and able to shew the meares and bounds of all such lands as are to be surveyed’.58 In addition to providing for the employ of Catholics, the Irish Council also declared that those few Irish or English Protestant jurors who previously ‘testified’ as to the boundaries of land­ – ­known as  ‘jurors bounders’­ – ­for the Civil Survey would ‘assist’ the Down Survey. One such man, a Mr James Ruthorne, ‘[was] entrusted by several Adventurers for surveying … their Allotments in the Baronies of Clanwilliam, Issen, and Offa’ in Tipperary, as well as their general ‘place in this nation’. In exchange for his local expertise, the regime assured Ruthorne of ‘guards and Convoys’ to protect ‘him from the danger of Tories’.59 What remains particularly impressive about the Down Survey is its use of this layered expertise­– ­trained English surveyors, parliamentary soldiers, Irish Protestant jurors and Catholic Irish mearesmen­ – ­to create the first national land survey in the world, measured all the way down to the parish level. Equally significant is the lack of any outright aggression or violence directed by Catholic mearsemen or surveyors towards their English counterparts. Records indicate that at least thirty-three Irish Catholic men served as mearesmen or helped to assist and survey Ireland under the auspices of Petty.60 On only one occasion is there reference to subtle arts of resistance. In May 1656 Connor McShane Dwyer and Donoagh Dwyer from Tipperary, described by officials as ‘knoweing men in the bounds and meares of the Territory of Kilnemanagh and Thurles Townships’, were summarily ‘dispensed with’ and deported to the West Indies due to inaccurate measurements despite their familiarity with the land. English authorities decried the ‘despicable behaviour’ of purposefully misleading the team as to the bounds of the land.61 In a particularly ironic twist, Catholic Irish expertise became more valued than that of more experienced English or Irish Protestant mearers. When a team under Petty’s direction arrived in Tipperary in 1656, the director remained aghast. ‘The people of Tipperary’, he wrote, ‘having more universally obeyed the orders of transplantation then other countries generally had done’ had ultimately left the county ‘uninhabited and wast[ed]’. This created a two-pronged problem for the surveyors. First, the destruction of the land meant that surveying it proved a near ‘impossible’ challenge. The second issue arose with respect to who, exactly, would serve as mearesmen. Because the parliamentarians had ordered the removal of Irish Catholics to Connacht and because the people of Tipperary had so willingly complied, ‘it would be impossible to find mearers to doe it tolerably well’.62 This growing admiration for native expertise over that of Protestant Irish or even Protestant English surveyors remains at odds with portrayals of Cromwellian officials as fixated on transplanting the Catholic population to Connacht or deporting them to the sugar plantations of the West Indies.63 Instead, it suggests that the vanquished could find not only toleration but also genuine favour, from the victors. 185

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 185

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

The competing interests of centres and peripheries and the attendant communications issues in the early modern world that they induced led to innovations (and cunning calculations) in exploiting the local labour supply to solve pressing problems. In nearly all instances, the resort to this labour resulted from peripheral desperation and a lack of direction from the centre. In interregnum Scotland, the English Council of State ordered a comparable series of surveys undertaken of all lands belonging to ‘excepted persons’, the Crown and the Kirk, amongst others.64 The committee of sequestration in Scotland set about surveying the lands ‘according to the Computation now used in England’ and, as in Ireland, local expertise in charting these ‘diverse Lands, Tenements and Hereditaments’ became valued.65 In Scotland, however, this local knowledge served a more insidious purpose. Scottish tenants and ministers had long drawn their stipends from the estates of the great land holders, yet these barons frequently failed to pay the tenantry. The Cromwellian administration routinely honoured the stipends of the occupants in exchange for information as to the bounds and resources of the estates. Tenants on Lord Balcarres’s estate, for instance, provided George Butler, a sub-commissioner of sequestration and surveyor, with a ‘rentail of their seuerall rowmes, [and] what they payed yearlie’, and also showed Butler ‘severall streams’ on the property and its bounds.66 This provided Butler and the commissioners of sequestration with an estimate as to the estate’s revenue and resources. In exchange, the tenants received a warrant that allowed them to secure their ‘seuerall stipends’.67 Beyond serving as a valuable quid pro quo, such tactics also had the effect of brokering an allegiance with the tenantry. This in turn created a more peaceable population and thus negated the need of the Scottish administration to send missives to London requesting more men and money to police the population, a common feature of early 1650s Scotland.68 In the nascent English empire, too, the distance between centre and periphery forced officials to rely upon local knowledge, whether it belonged to indigenous people or to English settlers and European competitors who had lived their lives far from the metropole. During the 1670s and 1680s one Nathaniel Cox, an English subject living on Barbados, served as overseer of at least one, if not both, of Colonel Christopher Codrington’s substantial sugar plantations, where he developed a talent for both improving the returns on sugar and brutalising the slaves.69 The East India Company (EIC) became aware of Cox’s reputation and offered him a substantial salary to scout for ecological sources on St Helena, the Company’s possession in the South Atlantic.70 Cox arrived at St Helena in 1685 and quickly located a ‘fine curious plaine’ by the ‘Lime Kiln in Sandy Bay’ that made an ideal location in which to plant sugar cane.71 He also helped the Company to construct salt works at St Helena in the image of those that had ‘much enrichet the French and Portugeez Nations’ after discovering a place called ‘Rupert’s Valley’, where the ‘Sun congeal[ed] the salt water upon or in the holes of the Rocks’, result186

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 186

26/02/2020 08:57

Local expertise in hostile territory

ing in salt.72 In testimony as to just how highly the EIC valued Cox’s expertise, even after he fell afoul of local EIC administrators on St Helena, Company officials in London refused to let his talents go to waste and instead sent him to Bencoolen in Sumatra. He was given ‘40 acres of free land on the same terms that land is holden at St. Helena’.73 Company officials commended his ‘skill in raising and boyling sugar’ and hoped he would put them to use at Bencoolen and teach the ‘Madagascar Blacks’ enslaved by the Company there how to plant sugar.74 Cox’s story is just one of many in the expanding English empire of the mid- to late seventeenth century. All share an undeniable connection to those of native Irish labourers in the archipelago some thirty years before: the use by English officials in the ‘centre’, be it London, Dublin or Jamestown, St Helena, of ‘local’ labour, knowledge and expertise in order to aggrandise the power and profit of the centre. In a sense, the Irish, Scottish and, to a lesser extent, the Barbadian and St Helenian examples reinforce the arguments of Hindle and Braddick as to the role of provincial powerbrokers in the formation of the state, albeit provincial powerbrokers in Ireland, Scotland and the East India Company. Wittingly or not, these individuals­– ­be they Anglo-Irish elites utilising their patronage networks to petition for the retention of labourers or EIC officials seeking talent­ – ­harnessed the labour required to build the state (and empire). In an Irish context, the Cromwellian exploitation of native knowledge and its significance in the state-building project should not be underestimated: this was new. Never before had an English government sought Irish Catholic knowledge about Ireland. It suggests, in turn, a level of sophistication in the state-building process in Cromwellian Ireland that historians have previously overlooked and highlights a willingness to forge uneasy alliances in the most hostile of circumstances. As new research seeks to connect faraway ‘peripheries’, such as St Helena and Bencoolen with the wider process of state and imperial formation, the traditional centre/locality paradigm favoured in early modern English history needs to be revised. There are competing centres and localities, always; the challenge is to fit them into a coherent narrative that does not disregard one at the expense of others. Relatedly, given the central importance of indigenous labourers in facilitating state and empire building, not just in England but elsewhere in Europe, and most especially the knowledge that they had of the land, at what point do the localities and the otherwise illiterate and nameless become central actors in the process of state formation? To return, for a moment, to interregnum Ireland, the influential role of native expertise, whether Catholic Irish or Protestant Irish, ultimately came to have a transformative effect on the Down Survey and its lasting legacy in, quite literally, redrawing the map of Ireland. Far from voiceless, passive actors caught up in the process of state formation, Irish Catholics played, contrary to popular belief, a transformative role in the Cromwellian state-building project, indicating that the knowledge of illiterate, destitute Irish labourers in Wicklow or 187

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 187

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Westmeath was just as important as, if not more so than, grandiose designs executed by Cambridge-educated lawyers in London.

NOTES 1 Petty Appointed Surveyor of Ireland, December 1654, King’s Inn, Dublin (hereafter KID), Prendergast Papers, I, fo. 751; Dr Petty Appointed to Survey Lands, 20 December 1654, KID, Prendergast Papers, II, fos 464–5. 2 On the Down Survey, see: Aaron James Henry, ‘William Petty, the Down Survey, Population and Territory in the Seventeenth Century’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2:2 (2014), 218–37; Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford, 2009), ch. 3; P.J. Corish, ‘The Cromwellian regime, 1650–1660’, in T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin and F.J. Byrne (eds), A New History of Ireland, vol. 3, Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 371–5; Thomas Larcom (ed.), William Petty, The History of the Survey of Ireland Commonly Called the Down Survey (Irish Archaeological Society, 1851); S. O’Domhnaill, ‘The Maps of the Down Survey’, Historical Studies, 3 (1942–3), 381–92; William J. Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c.1530–1750 (Cork, 2006), pp. 166–97. See also: http://downsurvey.tcd.ie. 3 John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (New York, 1870), pp. 336–7, 206. 4 Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008), p. 3. 5 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford, 1990), p. 131. For others who favour fiscal-military descriptions of the state, see: Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, 1994); Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, I, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge, 1986). 6 Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, pp. 131, 14–15. 7 James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1995); Paul D. McLean, ‘Patronage, citizenship, and the stalled emergence of the modern state in Renaissance Florence’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 47 (2005), 638–64. In the English context, see: Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), p. 5. See also Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (London, 2000), p. 15; Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1995), especially ch. 5; Michael A.R. Graves, Thomas Norton, the Parliament Man (Oxford, 1994); Michael A.R. Graves, ‘Managing Elizabethan parliaments’, in D. M. Dean and N.L. Jones (eds), The Parliaments of Elizabethan England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 37–63; David Dean, Law-making and Society in Elizabethan England: The Parliament of England, 1584–1601 (Cambridge, 1996); Brian Cowan, ‘The rise of the coffeehouse reconsidered’, HJ, 47 (2004), 21–46; Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the public sphere in early modern England’, JBS, 45 (2006), 270–92. 188

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 188

26/02/2020 08:57

Local expertise in hostile territory 8 Hindle, State and Social Change, 1550–1640, pp. 1–2. 9 Braddick, State Formation, p. 340. 10 For a famous discussion of peripheries and centre see Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, GA, 1986), and Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, VA, 1994). Scottish and Irish historians have taken note of the much more embryonic level of development, most especially in urban centres. See, for example, Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Civil autonomy and military power in early modern Ireland’, Journal of Early Modern History (hereafter JEMH), 15:1 (2011), 31–57; Annaleigh Margey, ‘1641 and the Ulster plantation towns’, in Eamon Darcy, Annaleigh Margey and Elaine Murphy (eds), The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion (London, 2012), pp. 79–96; Laura A.M. Stewart, ‘Military power and the Scottish burghs, 1625–1651’, JEMH, 15:1 (2011), 59–82; Geoffrey Stell and Robin Tait, ‘Framework and form: burgage plots, street lines and domestic architecture in early urban Scotland’, Urban History, 43:1 (2016), 2–27; Laura A.M. Stewart, ‘Politics and government in the Scottish burghs, 1603–1638’, in Julian Goodare and Alasdair A. MacDonald (eds), Sixteenth-century Scotland: Essays in Honour of Michael Lynch (Leiden, 2008), pp. 427–50. 11 Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991); Martyn Bennett, The Civil Wars Experienced: Britain and Ireland, 1638–1661 (Oxford, 2000); Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Dublin, 1994); Nicholas Canny, ‘What really happened in Ireland in 1641’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland: From Independence to Occupation (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 24–42; Frances Dow, Cromwellian Scotland, 1561–1660 (Edinburgh, 1979). 12 The Present Posture and Condition of Ireland (London, 1652), pp. 13–15. Note that the letters are recited and interpreted in the pamphlet and do not appear in print. John Cunningham provides a fascinating overview of the various pamphlet literature concerning settlement, including letters from Samuel Hartlib that envisioned Protestant exiles from Bohemia and the Low Countries sailing to Ireland to plant the land. See John Cunningham, Conquest and Land in Ireland: The Transplantation to Connacht, 1649–1680 (Woodbridge, 2011), p. 27. 13 Present Posture and Condition, p. 15. 14 On the landmark legislation, see An Act for the Set[t]ling of Ireland (1652); An Act for the speedy and effectual Satisfaction of the Adventurers for Lands in Ireland, and of the Arrears due to Soldiery there, and of other Publique Debts, and for the Encouragement of Protestants to plant and inhabit Ireland (1653). On the changing nature of settlement, see: Cunningham, Conquest and Land in Ireland, esp. ch. 2; Karl S. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford, 1971), ch. 3. 15 CJ, VII, pp. 110–13. 16 Cunningham, Transplantation to Connacht, p. 29. 17 Article VII, Act for the Set[t]ling of Ireland (1652). Article IX likewise pardoned of life and estate all Irish Catholics with ‘no real estate in Ireland, nor personal estate to the value of ten pounds’. 18 Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement, pp. 179–80. 189

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 189

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 19 An Act for the Speedy and Effectual Satisfaction of the Adventurers for Lands in Ireland, p. 123. 20 John Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland and a commonwealth in crisis’, PH, 30 (2011), 196–7; John Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” settlement of Ireland’, HJ, 53 (2010), 919–23; Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, ch. 4; Patrick Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Scotland Ireland (Woodbridge, 2004), chs 3 and 5. 21 See, especially, Cunningham, Transplantation to Connacht, ch. 4. 22 A small (incomplete) sampling can be found printed in: Robert Dunlop (ed.), Ireland under the Commonwealth; Being a Selection of Documents Relating to the Government of Ireland from 1651 to 1659 (2 vols, Manchester, 1913), II. See, for example, Order for Sir C. Coote to Retain Irish Labourers, 14 September 1653, ibid., p. 371; The Commissioners to Sir C. Coote, 30 January 1654, ibid., p. 400; Dispensation for Papists to Remain in Kilkenny, 6 March 1654, ibid., p. 410; The Commissioners to the Commissioners of the Revenue in the Respective Precincts, 26 May 1654, ibid., p. 429; Order Rescinding Passes to Coote’s Servants, 10 July 1654, ibid., p. 434; Lord Deputy and Council to the Commissioners at Loughrea, 3 April 1655, ibid., pp. 495–6; Orders Against Inferior Officers Giving Passes to Labourers, 5 April 1655, ibid., p. 497; Petition of C. Coote to Except Ironworkers, 4 March 1657, ibid., p. 657. 23 Petitions of Arthur Annesley and William Dubancks, 9 March 1655, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ed. Dunlop, II, p. 486 24 Oliver Cromwell to the Lord Deputy and Council, 6 November 1654, ibid., p. 456. 25 Petition from the Five Counties to Retain Farm Workers, 10 May 1655, KID, Prendergast Papers, III, fo. 117. 26 Petition from William Lawrence, 6 June 1655, KID, Prendergast Papers, III, fo. 165. 27 Ordered that Sir C. Coote be allowed to employ Irishmen for carrying on his iron works, 14 September 1653, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ed. Dunlop, II, p. 371. I have found fourteen petitions from Coote in both Dunlop and the Prendergast Papers. There are likely more that have not survived. On Coote’s bigotry, see Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, p. 15; Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British (Oxford, 2001), pp. 508, 527. 28 Ordered on the petition of Sir C. Coote, that the sixty Irish families employed in his ironworks be excepted from transplantation, 4 March 1657, Canny, Making Ireland British, p. 657. 29 Twenty Irish workmen permitted in Captain Staple’s Iron Mill, 15 May 1654, KID, Prendergast Papers, II, fo. 370. On a self-perpetuating labour supply, see Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, pp. 14–15. 30 Orders to form a committee to consider the retention of Irish servants, 9 March 1655, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ed. Dunlop, II, p. 486. 31 Order Rescinding Coote’s Passes to Connacht, 10 July 1654, ibid., p. 434. The 95 per cent figure accounts only for those original petitions that were granted, and not subsequent revocations. 32 See, for example, Trial of Donough MacCarthy, Lord Viscount Muskerry, 7 December 1653, Trinity College, Dublin (hereafter TCD), MS 866, fo. 37–v. 190

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 190

26/02/2020 08:57

Local expertise in hostile territory

33

34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 6 4 47

48 49

50 51

52 53 54

Muskerry’s loyal steward, McSwiny, remained behind after Muskerry was pardoned and fled to France. See, for example, Order that All Laws Pertaining to Vagrants in England are Now in Force in Ireland, 23 May 1653, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ed. Dunlop, II, pp. 342–3; Oliver Cromwell to Fleetwood, 30 January 1654, ibid., pp. 400–1; The Commissioners to Colonel Phaire, 15 June 1654, ibid., pp. 430–1. The Parliamentary Commissioners to the Commissioners of the Revenue, 26 May 1654, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ed. Dunlop, II, p. 429. Eric H. Ash, ‘Introduction: expertise and the early modern state’, Osiris, 25:1 (2010), 1–24. See also H.M. Collins and Robert Evans, ‘The third wave of science studies: studies of expertise and experience’, Social Studies of Science, 32:2 (2002), 235–96. Lord Deputy and Council to the Committee of Adventurers at Grocers’ Hall, 21 May 1655, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ed. Dunlop, II, p. 509. Ibid., pp. 509–10. Ibid. Surveys of Escheated Counties of Ulster from James I, 21 August 1653, KID, Prendergast Papers, II, fo. 208. Lord Deputy and Council to the Committee of Adventurers at Grocers’ Hall, 21 May 1655, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ed. Dunlop, II, pp. 509–10. Carts to be taken up for carriages of Surveyors’ Instruments, 20 December 1653, KID, Prendergast Papers, I, fo. 97. Lord Deputy and Council to the Committee of Adventurers at Grocers’ Hall, 21 May 1655, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ed. Dunlop, II, pp. 509–10. Order for Benjamin Worsley to Survey Forfeited Lands, 14 April 1654, ibid., pp. 418–19. Surveyor General’s Office & Registry of Lands Office, 11 May 1654, KID, Prendergast Papers, II, fo. 295. Edmond Fitzmaurice, The Life of Sir William Petty, 1623–1687 (London, 1895), p. 29. See also Ireland under the Commonwealth, ed. Dunlop, II, p. 418. William Petty, Reflections Upon Some Persons And Things In Ireland (1660), p. 107. Order for Committee to Consider how the Survey May Most Expeditiously and Cheaply be done, 8 September 1654, in Larcom (ed.), History of the Down Survey, p. 7. Report of the Committee of Survey, 11 May 1654, ibid., p. 5. Commissioners of Ireland to Secretary of State John Thurloe, 27 June 1654, Thomas Birch (ed.), A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe: Containing Authentic Memorials of English Affairs from the Year 1638 to the Restoration of Charles II (hereafter TSP) (7 vols, London, 1742), II, p. 404. Irish Commissioners to Parliament, 11 August 1652, Bodl., Firth MS c.5, fo. 115. Report on the Order for Committee to Consider how the Survey May Most Expeditiously and Cheaply be done, 8 September 1654, in Larcom (ed.), History of the Down Survey, p. 9. The humble Remonstrance of serverall of the Surveyors lately imployed in the Service of the Commonwealth, c.November 1654, ibid., pp. 18–19. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., pp. 20–1. 191

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 191

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 55 Commissioners to the Commissioners of the Revenue, 14 September 1655, KID, Prendergast Papers, II, fo. 605. 56 Thomas Waring, A brief narration of the plotting, beginning & carrying on of that execrable rebellion and butcherie in Ireland. With the unheard of devilish-cruelties and massacres by the Irish-rebels, exercised upon the Protestants and English there (1650), p. 3 57 Larcom (ed.), History of the Down Survey, p. xiv. 58 Order by the Lord Deputy and Councell for mearesemen, spademen, and the rates to be paid, &c. 20 December 1654, ibid., p. 39. 59 Jurors Bounders of Civil Survey to Assist the Adventurers’ Surveyors, 30 March 1655, KID, Prendergast Papers, I, fos 303–4. 60 List of Mearesmen, 5 April 1655, KID, Prendergast Papers, II, fo. 301. 61 Connor McShane Dwyer and Donogh Dwyer Dimissed as Mearsemen, 12 May 1656, KID, Prendergast Papers, II, fo. 370. 62 Larcom (ed.), History of the Down Survey, p. 60. 63 Cunningham, Conquest and Land in Ireland, pp. 8, 12; John Morrill, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1660 (Oxford, 1998), p. 10. 64 A Copy of Resignation of my Scotch Lands, 1655, BL, Add. 25,347, fo. 15v; Purves’s Production, 27 February 1656, National Records of Scotland, RH 1/2/568. As in Ireland, the surveys stemmed from a series of ordinances and decrees ultimately passed as An Act of Pardon and Grace to the People of Scotland on 5 May 1654. The legislation ‘freed, acquitted, and discharged’ the Scottish public for various crimes committed during the civil wars, but it also listed by name those Scottish leaders excepted from the provisions. Twenty-four Scots lost their estates to the regime, whilst another seventy-three were fined. 65 A Copy of Resignation of my Scotch Lands, 1655, BL, Add. 25,347, fo. 15v. 66 4 January 1654, G.R. Kinlock (ed.), The Diary of Mr John Lamont of Newton, 1649–1671 (Edinburgh, 1830), p. 66. 67 November 1652, ibid., pp. 49–50. 68 See, for example, General Monck to the Protector, 23 July 1654, C.H. Firth (ed.), Scotland and the Protectorate: Letters and Papers Relating to the Military Government of Scotland from January 1654 to June 1659 (Edinburgh, 1899), pp. 146–8; General Monck to Secretary Thurloe, 20 November 1654, TSP, IV, p. 220. 69 On the Codrington Plantations and allusions to Cox, see J. Harry Bennett, Jr, ‘The problem of slave labor supply at the Codrington plantations’, Journal of Negro History, 36:4 (1951), 406–41. 70 BL, India Office Records, E/3/91, fo. 168v. 71 BL, E/3/90, fo. 175v. 72 Ibid., fo. 176. San Hvallo / St Ubal is spelled today as Setubal. 73 BL, E/3/91, fo. 318. 74 Ibid., fo. 119v.

192

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 192

26/02/2020 08:57

News and the personal letter

Chapter 10

News and the personal letter, or the news education of Theophilus Hastings, 7th Earl of Huntingdon, 1660–71 Lindsay O’Neill

T

he frontispiece to John Ogilby’s Britannia, published in 1675, presents a lively and highly mobile scene. Just outside of a well-defended fortification are groups of travellers. Some are sitting and poring over a map. Some are gathered around a globe. A lone traveller, pack on his back and dog at his side, is arriving and two men on horseback, with maps in hand, are leaving. The road stretches before them, dotted with other travellers. Above them all fly a trio of cherubs holding aloft the title of the work and three maps: London in the centre, flanked by the route from London to Berwick and a map of York. In this scene mobility is linked with prosperity: the fields are replete with domestic animals and game, men fish from the stream, and ships await their cargo nearby.1 In the mid-seventeenth century the English were on the move and, at least in this image, they liked it. Ogilby was not alone in publishing a work that mapped the nation. Topographical works were in vogue at the time. They spoke to a need to reassert national unity and a desire to simply move around it. Their authors used their pages to link together the natural histories of local places to the conception of the nation at large.2 This echoed the world the British elite experienced. Local landlords were increasingly tied to national centres. They needed to travel between their local estates, where they wielded local power, and state centres, like London and Westminster, where they could use that influence on a national scale.3 For them connecting a centre, like London, with a locality, like Berwick, was necessary. Furthermore, to operate on a national scale, the members of the British elite had to be aware of international occurrences. The elite had to balance many nodes of interest: the local, the national and the international. This was not only a world on the move; it was a world that had to be in the know. However, being in the know, especially when one was on the move, was challenging to say the least. The easiest way to keep in touch with the local world when one was away and the larger world when one was at home was through the exchange of letters. In fact, it 193

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 193

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

would come as no surprise if the pockets of some of these fictional travellers in Ogilby’s frontispiece held bundles of correspondence. However, the historiography on the dissemination of political information in the seventeenth century centres on print culture. This is the big rupture, the massive change: newspapers surging forth, pamphlet wars kindling flame and the public sphere blossoming.4 Whilst there is certainly a refined sense that manuscript circulation mattered, the focus has been on manuscripts produced solely for the dissemination of political news, specifically the newsletter.5 Humdrum everyday modes of circulation like the personal letter have received less attention.6 Yet political information lived in the bodies and margins of most letters. It was expected. Looking at personal letters, and the way writers included news in them, reveals the increasing importance of centres during the later seventeenth century, but also makes a case for the continuing, or even increasing, necessity of local news: News from both kinds of places surface in letters. Scholarship has shown that the links between governmental centres and localities were becoming thicker. State and local governance were more intertwined and the British elite were becoming more cosmopolitan.7 We also know that with the expansion of print, along with other developments, more individuals were able to keep an eye on the centre­– ­the public sphere was growing and public news was in demand. It was public news, news that gained national or international significance, which ended up in the public prints or newspapers. This is the kind of news that has drawn the most scholarly attention. But by focusing on the growth of public news, we sometimes miss out on the continued draw of local news, as letters make clear. As individuals, especially the elite, became more mobile and began to have wide-ranging economic and personal interests, such generalised public news did not fulfil their needs; they wanted news from localities too. Letters were places where the two kinds of news came together. Some correspondents specialised in sending public news and others in sending local news. Well-connected correspondents could control the kinds of news they received. They knew who had connections to the centre and who had links to certain localities and they could tap these correspondents when necessary. As this suggests, the best way to keep track of both kinds of news was by developing a robust epistolary network.8 Keeping such a network functioning was getting easier as well. The flow of letters was becoming more centralised and constant. In 1660 Charles II officially opened the royal postal system to the general public and placed its headquarters in the heart of London.9 All letters sent by post needed to go through the centre where news gathered and where Charles could keep an eye on them. The opening of the post corresponded with his attempts to muzzle other forms of communication. The 1662 Licensing Act caused newspaper publication to dwindle until only the London Gazette, the official mouthpiece of the government, remained and he eyed the coffee houses with great suspicion.10 With the expansion of the postal system, Charles let 194

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 194

26/02/2020 08:57

News and the personal letter

information flow rather than restricting it, in part, because he knew he could control it. Letter writers were aware they had to be careful when composing their letters. Postal officials were known to open letters and peruse their contents.11 Thus sending letters was becoming more regularised, but one had to know the pitfalls. Gathering news and judging it were not simple, and many young members of the elite received informal instruction on how to proceed. Theophilus Hastings, 7th Earl of Huntingdon, certainly did. The letters sent to him between 1660 and 1671, from the time he was 10 years old until he reached 21 years, show this process. In his formative years he had a number of correspondents who taught him how to deal with news in letters and, as time went by, Hastings himself began to take control. He learned that both local and public news were important pieces to the puzzle of his world and that news had to be handled with care. Theophilus Hastings became the Earl of Huntingdon in 1656 at the tender age of 5 and inherited a fragile patrimony. The last fifty years or so had not been easy for the family. During the rule of the Stuarts they had been ideal local landlords who answered the Crown’s call for money and men, but this had hurt them and the civil war destroyed their estates and, to a degree, their ability to influence national politics and local society.12 Whilst the 6th Earl and his wife attempted to remain neutral during the war, the earl’s brother was an active royalist, for which the family suffered. Thus, when Theophilus Hastings became the 7th Earl the family power was mostly locally based. Furthermore, his mother kept him close to home for most of his early years, which gave him a deep grounding in the locality. It was not until 1677, when he was in his late twenties, that he became active in national politics and established himself in London.13 However, part of his education in the wilds of Leicestershire was learning how to compose letters and how to collect and process news. The first letters that survive from him are to his sisters. When he was six he composed one to his sister Elizabeth in which he proclaimed: ‘I love you better then any sweete meates or any Jewells and yet I cannot love you so well as you desire. I commend your beauty which equals my lady Eliz: Darcyes.’14 He was learning the art of compliment here. At this same time, he also began corresponding with Matthew Davys, the family lawyer and friend, who counselled him to say his prayers and obey his mother.15 This correspondence taught him how to correspond with important dependants, who would help him run his patrimony. These connections could also serve as sources for news. When he was 10 in 1660 he received his first letter with news from a family dependant who was in London on business.16 This was the first step in his ‘intelligence’ training; the next was to have a correspondence with an individual solely for the exchange of news. His instruction in this form of correspondence began in 1663 when he was 12. That year, the young Hastings received a letter from Thomas Salusbury 195

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 195

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

full of news. It first told of the workings of Parliament, then the happenings at court, and then gave an account of news from abroad, including the war between the Turks and the Holy Roman Empire.17 Salusbury is a bit of a shadowy figure. Historians of science know him for his translations of scientific works, including those of Galileo. The Marquess of Dorchester, who moved in scientific circles himself, hired him around this time to catalogue his library. Salusbury had enough connections to know what was happening in Parliament and to be called upon by the king for unspecified duties.18 He appears to have written news as a side business. At one point, he told Hastings he was halting his letters for a month ‘by which time, I hope to have freed my selfe from all those Encumbrances & Aversions that at present interrupt ye Correspondency I had settled with your Lordship & my other Noble friends’.19 It is clear that news was not his main occupation; he has other ‘Encumbrances & Aversions’ that came first, but he did have other ‘noble friends’ he wrote news to, so Hastings was not the sole receiver of his news. The earl probably became one of these ‘noble friends’ because the wife of Salusbury’s patron, the Marquess of Dorchester, was a friend of Hastings’s mother Lucy.20 Hastings’s mother seemingly believed that this amateur newsletter writer, who had personal ties to her circle of acquaintances, would be an acceptable person to teach the young earl the ways of the news world. The first lesson he taught Hastings, in a roundabout way, was that the relationship between a news writer and a news receiver was a business relationship. He spent one long letter playing with the conceit that not answering letters was ‘a token of Slothfullnesse or want of manners; To those of our Superiors we are obleiged to reply by duty & Necessity: To Those of our Equalls by Justice & Amity: But to those of our Inferiors, to respond is an Act of Courtesy and Pure Virtue’. He traced such a belief to ‘the practice of the Greatest & Best Men of Greece or Italy’. Then, after detailing how all the great classical leaders did this, he unsurprisingly draws a parallel with the young earl who sent him two letters for his one. He defended himself, saying ‘News failing & wanting your Lordships Comission for Correspondentry in any other Maters, I must be favored to obterude upon your Lordship emptie or impertinent Lines’.21 He used this guide to epistolary etiquette to distance himself from Hastings­ – ­he was Hastings’s inferior and only had a commission to write news, to send a solely personal letter would be impertinent. However, as the letter makes clear, he decided to be impertinent, as the letter’s length and flourishes reveal. No hired hack was going to fill letters with celebratory classical allusions and also be forgiven time and time again for not sending his news because his other business impeded his duties. Salusbury was a family friend or at least valued connection who visited Hastings and sent greetings to the family. The mix of tones in the letters reveals Salusbury’s complex position: he is the earl’s news writer, but he is also a personal friend teaching him the ways of news. Salusbury’s second lesson to Hastings was to expect professional news 196

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 196

26/02/2020 08:57

News and the personal letter

writers to send intelligence from centres of news, but to be aware that those centres could move. As in his first letter, Salusbury’s correspondence to Hastings almost always opened with Parliament news, followed by news of court occurrences, and then on to news from abroad before sometimes circling back to the news of court or Parliament. Court and Parliament were places where news of national importance was created almost constantly. The centres of international news were less constant, but a good news writer knew what locations were ‘hot’. When Salusbury was in Bristol he admitted that his letter needed news from French Lorraine, Venice, Scotland, Ireland and London.22 These places were producing news at the time and Hastings should expect news from them. However, all these places could cool off, even Parliament. Hastings often pressed Salusbury when his letters came more infrequently than their weekly agreement. When this happened Salusbury would remind him that when Parliament was not in session his letters were going to arrive less often. He told him, ‘I am bound by my Promise to write weekly only while ye Parliament doth sit, there Adjourment did suspend my Adresses’.23 He was educating the young earl on the ebb and flow of news. In fact, he wrote to Hastings on 27 July 1663, the day the second session of the Cavalier Parliament came to a close: ‘at present wee have a very great Ebbe of Intelligence, after those late Spring Tides’.24 Even Parliament was not a constant centre of news. There were places that almost always provided news, like the court, but the importance of other locations came and went. This was especially true of news from abroad. The importance of news from abroad was Salusbury’s third lesson. News from aboard usually came last in the letters because it was more diffuse and more irregular and thus easiest to add at the end. Most of the international news in Salusbury’s letters detailed the Austro-Turkish war, the lead up to the Anglo-Dutch war, quarrels between the Papacy and France, and the trials of English Tangiers. These pieces of news were to give the earl a sense of the structure of international politics and alliances, but one can also see concerns about trade slipping in: a main worry about the frictions with the Dutch, which Salusbury noted, was the loss of the East India trade.25 These items of foreign news expanded and complicated the view of the political world that the pieces of Parliament news and court news had created. Parliamentary news illuminated decisions that affected the workings of the state at home, and such decisions still depended upon informal influences, hence the interest in the court, but understanding political news still depended upon knowing the broad lie of the land globally, for shaking from those places could quickly come home and affect domestic politics and the economy. All three sections fit tightly together to give a view of public affairs. Salusbury knew that the elite world did not survive on hard reporting alone; he also showed the earl that knowing the ‘talk of the town’, the local gossip, was critical to being part of elite society. In one letter, after attempting to untangle rumours of foreign politics and giving notice of domestic 197

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 197

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

trials, Salusbury admitted, ‘but all those make not so much noise as one sole Turner ye London Hector condemmed for Burglary for a Notoriouse Robbery committed on 12th night at ye house of a Rich Vseror [usurer] & Jeweller in Limestreet’. Turner was not only a criminal for his burglary, but for a host of moral crimes such as forcing another man to prostitute his wife, training children to thievery and forcing his own wife into a life of crime.26 This is the last piece of news in the letter, but it is given considerable space. Gossip or scandals like this usually come last, but, as the amount of space they can take up shows, they were desired, perhaps as a way to feel part of the ‘town’ and the stories flowing through it. The gossip about James Turner, the burglar, fed into Salusbury’s next lesson: use the prints, but with care. Salusbury, after describing Turner’s crimes in detail, declared that to any longer ‘blott my Papers with his Nefareause Crimes would make them unworthy of Accesse unto so much Goodnesse & Inocence as your Lordship is ye owner of’ and that he should see the prints for more.27 This would not have been difficult in London at least. Many pamphlets, printed in the capital, detailing Turner’s crimes survive. There is A True and Impartial Account of the Arraignment, Tryal, Examination, Confession and Condemnation of Col. James Turner, The Several Examinations and Tryal of Colonel James Turner, The Speech and Deportment of Col. James Turner and Life and Death of James Commonly Called Collonel Turner.28 Interestingly, Salusbury seems to have assumed that, even out in Leicestershire, Hastings would have had access to these prints or newspaper accounts. Furthermore, he does not doubt the accuracy of those prints. At another time, though, he cast doubt on the prints. He declared his belief in the great strength of a foreign navy ‘let our Prints say as they please to ye Contrary’.29 Here prints should be eyed with suspicion. The difference probably lay in the type of news. By the time of Salusbury’s letter, Turner had been found guilty and was to be executed the next day. There was no doubting the truth of the story and since its force came from its ability to titillate and provide moral lessons the truth of details did not matter much. The news about naval strength, however, was subject to opinion and the truth of the matter yet to be determined. Both news items allowed Salusbury to teach Hastings to pay attention to all sources of news and to weigh them accordingly. Salusbury also demonstrated to the earl the importance of letters as a medium of news exchange. Letters were more flexible than the prints. They could be personalised to fit the interests of the receiver. In one letter he added, ‘I canot omit to let your Lordship know (whose tendernesse of the Protestant Interest I have perticularlie observed) that new Injuries have bin offered those of Piedmont in Savoy’.30 Hastings might not need this information to keep track of the shifting stars of the European firmament, but it fitted into what mattered to him personally. Salusbury knew this and tailored his letter to reflect this fact. 198

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 198

26/02/2020 08:57

News and the personal letter

Finally, Salusbury wanted Hastings to use the postal system; it made things easier. The first surviving letter from Salusbury to Hastings came by the hands of an acquaintance, but the next came by post. In the handdelivered letter, Salusbury stated that he ‘shall present your Lo[rdshi]p a fuller Account by Thursdays Post, directed to Wilden Ferry, as commanded’. Wilden Ferry, which was within three miles of Hastings’s estate, would have been a convenient post for the earl. Salusbury also provided his own address, stat[ing, ‘your Letters will come safe to mee if directed At the Black Horse in Aldersgate street unto the highgate Coach’.31 Both agreed that this was to be a postal exchange, and the next surviving letter from Salusbury to Hastings is postmarked, the first letter to Hastings to have one.32 With the post these two were able to set up a regular correspondence that could flow relatively constantly, and the majority of the surviving letters from Salusbury are postmarked.33 Since Salusbury was not sending the earl secret or sensitive information, he did not worry about the royal censors. The news he sent was the same news that was swirling around London. The system did have its hiccups, however. At one point, after a frustrated recounting of information that the earl should already have known, Salusbury declared, ‘it appeareth that ye Letter miscarried; a thing frequent with those I write’.34 It was certainly not a failsafe system, but it did make things easier. So what gave Salusbury the ability to give these lessons and to be a good intelligencer? One reason was that he lived in a place where news happened and gathered: London. But a lot of people lived in London; what made Salusbury special was that he also cultivated his own networks of information. His report that the Persians were invading the Turks and forcing them to sue the Holy Roman Emperor for peace came from the Earl of Winchilsea’s secretary. This means it came directly from Constantinople where the earl was the English ambassador.35 In another letter Salusbury countered a general report from France with information he had from ‘an Intelligent Person’ who ‘writes to me from thence’.36 Thus, Salusbury obviously had a web of his own correspondents whose news he received and weighed against other reports. This might be the most important lesson he imparted to the earl: develop a network and be suspicious. When Salusbury was stuck in Bristol and could not give Hastings all the news he would need to make sense of the world, he urged him to seek out ‘more Inteligent Persons’ or people who had access to intelligence or news.37 He also pushed the earl to evaluate his own news. After laying out numerous reports, some contradictory, he told Hastings, ‘I am no Oedyppus, but leave ye reconcillacion of theise enegma’s unto your Lordship mor happy Conjecture’.38 Salusbury’s last surviving letter to Hastings is dated 5 April 1665. Sadly it appears that the correspondence ended due to Salusbury’s death rather than the completion of the earl’s education. Scholars believe that Salusbury died during the great London plague of 1665–66.39 Being at the centre was not always a blessing. The letters Hastings wrote from 1665 onwards reveal that he took 199

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 199

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

Salusbury’s lessons to heart. He began to build his own news network: he had a number of correspondents, both informal and professional, who sent him all sorts of news. Most of these contacts were informal news correspondents. These contacts were not intelligencers. They did not provide news on a schedule and the news they sent was usually an addendum to a letter begun for a different purpose. They provided news at the ends of letters as a courtesy. However, their news still mattered. They could provide information from desired locations and they illustrate the way news had become a kind of social currency. During this period of Hastings’s life the two correspondents that filled this role were Gervase Jaques and Jean Gailhard. Gervase Jaques was a well-established and trusted family dependant. The first dated reference to him in the family letters is 1655, but he had probably been around longer.40 He was in change of many of the family’s affairs and when he went to London one of his duties was to send the young earl news from the capital. The first time he did this was in 1660 when he went to watch over the family business upon the Restoration. He sent the 10-year-old earl a detailed report of Charles’s first meeting with Parliament and reported on who it appeared was getting positions in the new regime.41 These were the first letters of news the young earl received. Jaques would be Hastings’s source for London news at least two more times­ – ­in 1665 and in 1667. By this time, sending letters from London to Leicestershire was getting easier as well. The majority of the letters sent in 1665 and 1667 were sent by post.42 Jaques knew that most letters, especially letters from a place like London, were expected to have news in them. His letters both hold news and apologise when they do not. One postscript began, ‘My Lord, we are still barren of newes’.43 However, there is never a question of these being letters of news, they were letters with news. In Jaques’s letters news always comes last, often as a postscript, and business comes first. This is especially true in Jaques’s letters to the earl while journeying to London to deal with the funeral of Hastings’s aunt, Alice Clifton, in 1667. In the majority of these letters, Jaques wrote his news on the backside of the paper, separating it from the main letter.44 The first page detailed family business and then when you turned the page you got a letter of news. He even gave the news side its own salutation. News was important enough to warrant its own page, but family business always came first. Jaques knew that Hastings judged him on the basis of his service to the family, not on his news. He had no trouble declaring, ‘I have not the least designe in giving you those frequent troubles as to presume to bee your Intelligencer I know that is done by a better hand, I only tell you the Towne talk, and some remarkeable passages that have of late happened here’.45 Jaques saw himself as someone who could gather the general tattle of the town, but not as someone who could do so responsibly or with regularity. He had no news network and simply reported news that echoed through the capital. Ferreting out what he called ‘public news’ was a bit of trial for Jaques. 200

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 200

26/02/2020 08:57

News and the personal letter

He defined his news by where he heard it. One letter reported on ‘this dayes newes at Court and Exchange’.46 He had figured out where important news came from, but he cautiously called it the talk of those places rather than confidently declaring the news itself. Later, he alluded to the confusion such news gathering could bring, writing, ‘My Lord as to publique newes I doe not know what to Credit, reports have beene soe various and a grat noyse both in Court and Cittyie of the grat defeat given to de Ruyter by Prince Rupert but not a sillable of truth in all the Stories’.47 Public news, which was Salusbury’s bread and butter, was not Jaques’s cup of tea. Jaques preferred to gather local talk. In one letter he laboriously recounted the movement of ambassadors and troops, but came alive when reporting on a fire in Southwark. He was an eyewitness to this event. He wrote, ‘I was a speckater [spectator] from the Turrett upon this House and cold see the Engines play which did notable service, I cold easily discerne the blowing up of houses and heare the report of the Powder’.48 Jaques was much happier sending his lord local news that he was sure of. This is where he felt grounded and sure of himself. One of the telling aspects of the correspondence between Jacques and Hastings is that Hastings sent Jaques news from London as well. When Hastings went to the capital later in 1667 he sent Jaques, who was back in Leicestershire, public news. Jaques thanked him stating, ‘I have Recd yours and doe here returne my most humble thankes … for soe signall a favour, being soe Crowded with newes’.49 This suggests that Hastings now knew both that news belonged in a letter (he is 17 here) and that dependants like Jaques, who would never sit in Parliament or become Lord Lieutenant, also wanted to know public news since it could impact their lives as well, perhaps increasingly so. However, Jaques, at heart, remained a strong supporter and provider of local news. It was the fire in London that truly interested him and when he came home and the earl went off to London he was sure to provide the newly mobile Hastings with news from his now distant Leicestershire. For Jaques this was ‘countrie news’ and he knew that it stood in contrast to the news flowing in and out of London. He ended a letter stating: ‘My Lord the Country affords noe better newes then this the Citty beinge the Theatre where (I suppose) greater things are Acted.’50 He understood that it was London news that people desired. It was the news that mattered. However, his insertion of ‘I suppose’ gives the statement a note of ambivalence. He only supposes that the city is where ‘greater things are acted’, he was not utterly convinced. This belief is verified by his letters to Hastings, which are full of country news. He jammed it into the margins and sometimes gave up and put it on a new page. It mattered to him and he thought it should matter to Hastings. He used much of the same language that he employed when describing public news in London. He told Hastings that ‘the Countrie is barren of news’ and that one report on a man’s intoxicated state before he drowned had been 201

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 201

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

‘confidently reported’.51 Country news, like city news, ebbed and flowed and should be demanded, but like city news its credibility could be suspect and had to be questioned. But what was country news? What did Jaques think Hastings needed to know? In some ways it was not drastically different from the city news he reported. The country news was to allow Hastings to keep track of the power dynamics and talk of the locality. For the most part this news revolved around the marriages and deaths within the community. To an extent, Jaques could not resist a good story. He relished telling Hastings of ‘Becke Ortons Sister’ who ‘was a mayde wife mother & widow & all in two days for she was married to Mr. Asterly … and he dyed Friday night followinge about 10 Cloke shee being in bed with him, some say he was not able to stand when hee was married hee hath left a daughter which hee had by his former wife and was very much in debt’.52 Sometimes a bit of judgement slips in, as when he reported on Mr Theophilus Perkins’s death. Perkins left his estate to his younger brother who, as Jaques told it, ‘(I feare) has long since wisht it.’53 Jaques was sending local gossip so that Hastings did not get out of the loop. Just as Salusbury assumed that Hastings wanted to know the talk of London, Jaques assumed he wanted the talk of Donington Park, Leicestershire. It is also true that many of these deaths and marriages could restructure local power dynamics. In one letter, the main points of country news are the movements of the Earl of Chesterfield, whose estate of Bretby Hall was not far from the earl’s home, and the fact that Sir Samuel Sleigh’s eldest son was to marry Mr Palmer’s daughter who had a substantial dowry.54 Keeping track of local notables like Sleigh was a good idea if one wished to keep up on local politics, and the news about Chesterfield shows how figures of importance in the national scene could enter the local. A lesser example of this occurred when Jaques noted that ‘Here is a report that Sir William Jesson is dead of the meassells in London’, but then he paused and added ‘the truth thereof is best known to your Lordship’, who was in London at the time.55 Mobility had blurred the borders. This was news of local importance­ – ­Jesson was a local landowner­ – ­but it was a question better answered in London. In Jaques’s mind the local and the national were intertwined. When he listed a litany of deaths in one letter they ranged from ‘poore George Doxcie’ to a local minister, to the wife of a local landowner, to the Bishop of Lichfield.56 The deaths of these figures might affect Hastings’s world on different registers, but they all mattered and Jaques knew it. The world around Donington was not the only locality that was important to Hastings. His own personal concerns, particularly those regarding the Protestant interest, could make a locality interesting. Jean Gailhard knew this and used it to cultivate Hastings’s acquaintance. Gailhard was a mobile French Protestant who often travelled to England and looked for support from local notables. He survived by his pen and the patronage it might bring him. He contributed to religious debates, wrote travel literature and eventually 202

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 202

26/02/2020 08:57

News and the personal letter

composed a work on how to be, as he entitled it, The Compleat Gentleman.57 In 1670 he was looking to cultivate the young Earl of Huntingdon. At this time, he wrote to Hastings three letters from Angers, a city in north-western France. Whilst a bustling city and administrative centre, Angers was not a permanent central node in most people’s networks. Whilst content in this city, Gailhard lamented to Hastings: ‘I wish this place could afford me some news worthy of your Lordships curiosity, that thereby I might now and then have a faire pretence of troubling you with a letter: here we are remote from the spring of state affairs.’58 However, Gailhard knew that it was not just state affairs that interested Hastings and so he followed that statement up with: ‘yet of late something is fallen out which is of some moment; Att Saumer have been seized upon 1200 copys of a new book tending to an union of the protestant and papish religions’. He described the book at length and then detailed the struggles of the Protestants in the area, including the story of a maid forced into a convent due to her Protestantism.59 The next two letters further elaborated on the struggles of Protestants in Anjou and, in his last letter, he included the persecution of Protestants at the French court, noting that the king turned out twenty men from his life guard due to their religion.60 Gailhard knew that in Angers he did not sit in a news centre, so state affairs would not fill his letters. However, he did have access to news that revolved around one of Hastings’s main interests­ – ­the Protestant religion. Like Salusbury he knew this would be of interest to the young earl. Some places were centres not because they were crossroads of information or governmental centres, but because, for a brief period, they spoke to the interests of an individual or a nation. At the same time Hastings was receiving news of Protestant persecution from Gailhard and Donington news from Jaques, he was receiving his public news from a professional. In early October of 1669 he received his first of fourteen surviving newsletters from Henry Muddiman.61 By this time Hastings was 20 years old and no longer the student of news written to or by Salusbury. In becoming one of those who received Muddiman’s newsletters he signalled his maturation as a news consumer. Muddiman was arguably the newsman of the Restoration. Throughout the period he vied with Sir John Birkenhead and Roger L’Estrange for control of the printed newsbooks of the period, and by the time he sent Hastings newsletters he had long had control of The London Gazette and thus the world of printed news.62 He also flourished, as his newsletters show, in the world of manuscript news. Into these he could pour the more private information of parliamentary affairs along with the news of happenings at home and abroad. Through Muddiman’s newsletters we can also see how news flowed. In London and, as the editor of The London Gazette, Muddiman sat in the centre of a vast web of news. But to get to him the news had to be funnelled through many different centres. The way the news was presented in the newsletters 203

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 203

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

makes this clear. In his first newsletter to Hastings he began by stating, ‘the French gazett mentions Letters by way of Venice which tell them that ye Turks have blowne up a Mine Neere Sabeinera’, which was part of the fortifications of Candia, the besieged capital of Crete. This piece of news began its journey in Crete, then made its way to Venice, and thence into a letter to Paris, before being put in the French Gazette and reaching Muddiman in London. The next piece of news came from a letter via Hamburg. Then we hear from a Parisian letter that ‘they are assured from Marellis that ye French Ambassador and their Effects are seized in Constantinople’. The newsletter also references letters from Vienna and ‘the Italian letters’.63 Thus news started in a certain locality, be it Candia or Hamburg or Constantinople, and made its way through the European centres of news: ports like Marseilles or government centres like Paris and Vienna, before arriving in the English centre of London or, if we want to be more specific, the English centre named Henry Muddiman. The form through which news flowed varied; it could travel orally, or by letter or by gazette, and mentioning the form could help readers evaluate the credibility of the report. However, tracing how the news poured through these different locations also illustrates that centres were not just locations where news happened; they were also places where news gathered and pooled. London was a centre not simply because the court and Parliament were there but because it was a major port and population centre. News travelled with people. Following the flow of news highlights the importance of infrastructure. News might be contained within newspapers and newsletters, but those pieces of paper could not travel on their own. We have already seen the importance of the post, and the newsletters reveal that the movement of people and ships mattered. News from Tripoli came via Leghorn with Captain William Poole.64 The George of Hull brought news that there was talk in the Netherlands that six or seven of their ships had been taken by the Turks on their way from Bordeaux.65 Muddiman was able to command such a wide array of news because the infrastructure of transportation had widened­ – ­more ships came from the far seas and many crisscrossed the channel with ease. News was piling up and people and letters were helping it move. Hastings himself was mobile by the time he received these newsletters. He had shifted his abode from Donington Park to London. We know because his letters begin to hold addresses in the capital. While only one of the newsletters, the first no less, has an address on it­ – ­in this case ‘Mr Mars Bookseller near York[h]ouse’­ – ­the addresses on other letters sent around the dates of the newsletters suggest that the newsletters that survived among his papers were sent to him while he was in London.66 So interestingly, even when he was in the centre, he wanted to receive letters of news. Here we have a man who knew the news-gathering business. He had his professional news writer for public news from the main centres of national concern and correspondents in localities that mattered to him. 204

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 204

26/02/2020 08:57

News and the personal letter

These letters tell us that, for the English elite of the late seventeenth century, centres were places that produced or processed public news. There were permanent centres of public news. Such places were usually ports or postal centres because what defined them as centres was their ability not necessarily to make news but to gather news and send it out again. Thus, London, Leghorn and Amsterdam surface as centres. Making news, however, mattered as well, so places where governmental work was done­ – ­be it the court or Parliament­– ­were often centres too. Here is where Paris and places like Vienna and Madrid come into play. Such places might go silent, but did so less often than other localities. But every locality could be an ephemeral centre. During the Ottoman siege of Candia in Crete it became a centre of news.67 When local news became nationally or internationally relevant it too became public news. This is the kind of news that ended up in newspapers. But letters show us that this was just one level of desired connection with the world. Local news or private news mattered. Especially for local power figures like Hastings, knowing who married whom and what those on his lands were interested in was an integral part of his power. His influence in the national community was often contingent on his ability to have sway in the local. It was also simply the world he was the most attached to at this time. Thus, when he was away he wanted to keep up on the local news and this was best done through letters. Furthermore, news from locations disconnected from larger public concerns, like his deep interest in the prosecution of Protestants, was also best accessed through letters, or, even better, by having a vast epistolary network he could tap into for news from multiple places. These were his personal centres. Looking at how news filtered through different forms­– ­the spoken word, letters, newsletters, proclamations, pamphlets, newspapers­– ­helps reveal that people listened for news on different registers because they needed access to many different sorts of news to keep track of their many different sorts of worlds. Hastings needed city news and country news, he needed links to centres and localities, and to satisfy these desires he needed the letter.

NOTES 1 John Ogilby, Britannia (1675). 2 Elizabeth Yale, Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia, 2016), pp. 1–2. 3 James M. Rosenheim, The Emergence of a Ruling Order: English Landed Society, 1650–1750 (London, 1998), pp. 11, 45, 112, 124, 225–58. 4 For pamphlets see Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregum (Burlington, VT, 2003), and Peacey, Print and Public Politics. For the development of the newspaper see: Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford, 1996), and C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Oxford, 1996). For the public sphere see: Jürgen Habermas, 205

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 205

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Fredrick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989), and David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Earlymodern England (Princeton, 2000). For the importance of manuscript circulation in politics see: Millstone, Manuscript Circulation. For manuscript news see: Sabrina Baron, ‘The guises of dissemination in early seventeenth century England: news in manuscript and print’, in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (eds), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London, 2001), pp. 41–56; David Randall, ‘Joseph Mead, novellante: news, sociability, and credibility in early Stuart England’, JBS, 45:2 (2006), 293–312; Henry L. Snyder, ‘Newsletters in England, 1689–1715, with special reference to John Dyer­ – ­a byway in the history of England’, in Donovan H. Bond and W. Reynolds McLeod (eds), Newsletters to Newspapers: Eighteenth Century Journalism (Morgantown, 1977). Scholars of letters mention news but it is rarely a focus. For news in letters, see: Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 12–13, 57; Clare Brant, Eighteenth-century Letters and British Culture (New York, 2006), pp. 172–96; James Daybell, Women Letterwriters in Tudor England (Oxford, 2006), pp. 152–7, 165; Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994), pp. 117, 142; F.J. Levy, ‘How information spread among the gentry, 1550–1640’, JBS, 21:2 (1982), 11–34; Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia, 2015), pp. 169–96; Randall, ‘Joseph Mead’, 293–312; Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark, 2005), pp. 27, 145–74; Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 66–8. Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000); Rosenheim, Emergence of a Ruling Order. Lindsay O’Neill, ‘Dealing with newsmongers: news, trust, and letters in the British world, c.1670–1730’, HLQ, 72:2 (2013), 215–33. Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton, 1948), p. 48. Peter Fraser, The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State and their Monopoly of Licensed News, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 29, 117–20. Ibid., pp. 20–6. See Thomas Cogswell, Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State and Provincial Conflict (Manchester, 1998), and James Knowles, ‘Hastings, Henry, Fifth Earl of Huntingdon (1586–1643)’, ODNB. Catherine F. Patterson, ‘Hastings, Theophilus, Seventh Earl of Huntingdon (1650–1701)’, ODNB. HEH, HA 5863, T. Hastings to Lady Elizabeth Hastings, 24 April 1656. HEH, HA 2048, Matthew Davys to T. Hastings, 7 May 1656. HEH, HA 7644, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, c. 20 June 1660. HEH, HA 10653, Thomas Salusbury to T. Hastings, 27 July 1663. Jacob Zeitlin, ‘Thomas Salusbury discovered’, Isis, 50:4 (1959), 455–8. HEH, HA 10660, Thomas Salusbury to T. Hastings, 14 July 1664.

206

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 206

26/02/2020 08:57

News and the personal letter 20 Tania Claire Jeffries, ‘Hastings, Lucy, Countess of Huntingdon (1613–1679)’, ODNB. 21 HEH, HA 10655, Thomas Salusbury to T. Hastings, 31 October 1663. 22 HEH, HA 10654, Thomas Salusbury to T. Hastings, 12 September 1663. 23 HEH, HA 10659, Thomas Salusbury to T. Hastings, 19 April 1664. 24 HEH, HA 10653. 25 HEH, HA 10659. 26 HEH, HA 10657, Thomas Salusbury to T. Hastings, 20 January 1663/4. 27 Ibid. 28 A True and Impartial Account of the Arraignment, Tryal, Examination, Confession and Condemnation of Col. James Turner (1663); The Several Examinations and Tryal of Colonel James Turner (n.d.) The Speech and Deportment of Col. James Turner (1663); Life and Death of James Commonly Called Collonel Turner (1663). 29 HEH, HA 10663, Thomas Salusbury to T. Hastings, 9 January 1664/5. 30 HEH, HA 10653. 31 Ibid. 32 HEH, HA 10654. 33 Seven of the eleven letters sent by Salusbury were postmarked. See: HEH, HA 10654, HA 10656, HA 10658, HA 10659, HA 10661, HA 10662, HA 10664. 34 HEH, HA 10660. 35 HEH, HA 10664, Thomas Salusbury to T. Hastings, 5 April 1665. 36 HEH, HA 10657. 37 HEH, HA 10654. 38 HEH, HA 10657. 39 Zeitlin, ‘Thomas Salusbury’, 457–8. 40 HEH, HA 4885, Ferdinando Hastings to unknown, 5 June 1655. 41 HEH, HA 7644. 42 Of the two letters sent in 1665 one has a surviving postmark. All four sent in 1667 have surviving postmarks. For the postmarks see HEH, HA 7650, 7654–7. 43 HEH, HA 7657, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 7 May 1667. 44 HEH, HA 7655, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 20 April 1667; HEH, HA 7656, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 2 May 1667. 45 HEH, HA 7649, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 25 April 1665. 46 HEH, HA 7650, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 9 May 1665. 47 Ibid. 48 HEH, HA 7655. 49 HEH, HA 7659, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 19 December 1667. 50 HEH, HA 7658, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 20 November 1667. 51 Ibid. 52 HEH, HA 7662, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 20 January 1668/9. 53 HEH, HA 7696, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 29 March 1671. 54 HEH, HA 7702, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 5 June 1671. 55 HEH, HA 7681, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 26 April 1670. 56 HEH, HA 7670, Gervase Jaques to T. Hastings, 12 November 1669. 57 Mark Goldie, ‘Gailhard, Jean ( fl. 1659–1708)’, ODNB. 58 HEH, HA 3339, Jean Gailhard to T. Hastings, 8 June 1670. 59 Ibid. 207

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 207

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 60 HEH, HA 3340, Jean Gailhard to T. Hastings, 17/7 September 1670; HEH, HA 3341, Jean Gailhard to T. Hastings, 1 February 1670/1 [NS]. 61 HEH, HA 9599, Henry Muddiman to T. Hastings, 5 October 1669. 62 Ronald Hutton, ‘Muddiman, Henry (bap. 1629, d. 1692)’, ODNB; Fraser, Intelligence, pp. 39–41. 63 HEH, HA 9599. 64 HEH, HA 9602, Henry Muddiman to T. Hastings, 18 January 1669/70. 65 HEH, HA 9605, Henry Muddiman to T. Hastings, 3 May 1670. 66 HEH, HA 9599. 67 Ibid.; HEH, HA 9600, Henry Muddiman to T. Hastings, 26 October 1669.

208

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 208

26/02/2020 08:57

The news out of Newgate

Chapter 11

The news out of Newgate after the 1715 Jacobite rebellion Rachel Weil

T

‘

here is a sinister practice on foot to frighten clergymen from their benefices.’ So warned George Flint, the author of the Jacobitish weekly The Shift Shifted during the summer of 1716. The practice in question was to tell divines of the Church of England that they should flee because someone had accused them of treason. To prove the point, Flint printed a letter ‘counterfeited as from a prisoner in Newgate’ that had been lately received by a ‘divine in the country’. The letter-writer warned the clergyman that There is an information brought up to London … sworn against you and several more in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire, for words of High treason against King George. My informer is one who is a tender [attendant] belonging to our Master Keeper Mr Rouse, and a very good friend to myself; he tells me the many secrets that he hears at court, for he is conversant with all the messengers and tipsters that are employed in fetching up all men who are informed against.1

Even three hundred years before Breitbart, fake news was a popular tactic. How many levels of fraud are contained in this story remains an open question: there is no way to know whether the anonymous ‘divine in the country’ mentioned here was a real person who had received a letter of warning falsely claiming to be from a prisoner in Newgate, or whether the clergyman and the letter he received, too, were fictions concocted by George Flint. Fortunately, we do not have to decide what is true. The key point for the purposes of this chapter is the crucial status of Newgate in the letter of warning. Whoever wrote it operated on the assumption that prisoners in Newgate would have access to the secrets of the court; and, moreover, that the messengers, the tipstaffs and perhaps the deputy keeper of Newgate, Bodenham Rouse, would be the conduits through which these secrets passed. Newgate was assumed to be a privileged source of information. And George Flint, even as he condemned false news bearing a fake Newgate imprimatur, did so from a position of Newgate-derived authority: The Shift Shifted, the weekly paper 209

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 209

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

in which this item appeared, was written while George Flint himself was a prisoner in Newgate. This chapter looks at the circulation of news about and through Newgate prison during the period 1715–17, a time when it held Jacobite prisoners of war taken in the unsuccessful 1715 rebellion. That Newgate prison could be represented as a source of knowledge, as in the story above, raises questions about how to categorise Newgate in terms of the centre/locality binary. Although it stood at the edge of the City of London, near St Paul’s Cathedral, it was not exactly easy of access. If nothing else, its stench would have kept most Londoners away. These factors, along with Newgate’s famously exotic customs and high concentration of prisoners from Scotland and the northern counties after the 1715 rebellion, justify treating it conceptually as a ‘locality’. But one could also treat Newgate as a centre. As we saw above, a Newgate provenance conferred a stamp of authority on information that either came or purported to come from the prison. Moreover, that information (whether real or fake) impacted the legitimacy of the new Hanoverian regime. Newgate was thus both a centre and a locality, and puts some pressure on those terms. It might lead us to wonder if those terms are helpful. The first part of this chapter surveys the wide range of literature and news about Newgate prison and in particular about the Jacobite prisoners there that appeared in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion. It makes the case for Newgate as a ‘centre’ in the sense that information about Newgate was thought to be of national political importance. The second part focuses on the weekly papers, Robin’s Last Shift and The Shift Shifted, which were written during 1716 by the Newgate prisoner George Flint. Flint’s writing, I argue, complicates the centre/locality dichotomy, in the sense that the newspapers addressed both a national general public and a particular community of prisoners. Both parts of this chapter, moreover, raise questions about the meaning of ‘locality’: is it a piece of real estate, an area measured in square miles? Is it a set of relationships upon which a historian chooses to focus? Or, is it a node in a network whose nearness to or distance from other nodes has to do with something other than geography?

VARIETIES OF NEWGATE NEWS The defeat of Jacobite forces at the battle of Preston in November of 1715 effectually put an end to the Jacobite rising. It also created a glut of Jacobite captives, crammed into jails, churches, castles or any spaces that would hold them all across Scotland and the north of England, where many of the trials, executions and transportations were carried out. The most important officers of the Jacobite army were taken to London, and distributed among several prisons there, including the Tower, the Marshalsea and the Fleet. Those prisoners who were sent to Newgate, as befitting their status as officers, occupied the relatively comfortable section of the prison known as the Press 210

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 210

26/02/2020 08:57

The news out of Newgate

Yard, where they mingled with others who were capable of paying the rent for a chamber and avoiding the miseries of the notorious Common Side, where poor prisoners lived in squalor. Because habeas corpus had been suspended in July 1715, the Press Yard of Newgate also contained persons taken up on suspicion of Jacobitism, including some journalists.2 It is possible that the author of The History of the PressYard (1717) was one of these. He opens the book by explaining that, ‘it being my misfortune, amongst other brethren of the Quill, to be caught Tripping, in censuring the Conduct of my Superiors, to fall under the Displeasure of the Government’, he was conducted to Newgate ‘to cool my Heels, till the Act for suspending Habeas Corpus Act for a certain time be out of Force’.3 Whether he really was a Newgate prisoner, or taking on the voice of one in order to sell books, the claim to have been imprisoned in Newgate licensed the author to write about high-stakes issues that affected the legitimacy of the new regime. Newgate was the place where, allegedly, the Jacobite Jew Francis Francia was tortured to extort information, and where the five men arrested in 1696 on suspicion of involvement in the Assassination Plot still languished without trial. The History of the Press-Yard accordingly offered readers a chapter on ‘the Usage and Sickness of Mr Francia the Jew’ and ‘The History of the Unfortunate Florimel, one of the State prisoners that has been confin’d’. The History of the Press-Yard also purported to satisfy the curiosity of the politically engaged public on another burning question: how had the Jacobites lost at the battle of Preston? In the chapter on ‘Young Mr Botair’s Account of the Action between the Kings troops and the rebels’, the author recounted a conversation he had, or allegedly had, with Archibald Botair, a young Scottish officer in the Jacobite army who the author tells us shared his cell in Newgate, who offers a detailed narrative of the battle. In fact, although an Archibald Botair or Bottair did serve in the Jacobite army, the narrative that is put in his mouth in The History of the Press-Yard was almost certainly plagiarised from another source, The History of the Late Rebellion (1717) written by the turncoat clergyman Robert Patten.4 Like Flint’s story about the letter from the fake prisoner to the clergyman with which we began this chapter, the recycling of Patten’s account as if it were a story that Bottair told in Newgate testifies to the special cachet that the prison carried as a source of desirable information. Although The History of the Press-Yard was not explicitly pro-Jacobite, it was perceived as sympathetic enough to the Jacobite prisoners it described that it met with a critical rejoinder. The Secret History of the Rebels in Newgate. Giving An Account of their Daily Behaviour, from their commitment to their Gaol-Delivery, was published later the same year and presented a more negative picture of the rebels in the Press Yard. The Secret History of the Rebels claimed to be ‘taken from a Diary, kept by a Gentleman in the same prison’. The source can be certainly identified as the diary of Carleton Smith, who was appointed by the Mayor of London to supervise the Press Yard in the months 211

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 211

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

after the real warden, William Pitts, was arrested for having allowed a highprofile Jacobite prisoner to escape.5 Whereas The History of the Press-Yard had presented relatively sympathetic character sketches of the prisoners and reprinted arguments that had been made for clemency towards them, The Secret History of the Rebels portrayed them as drunk, debauched, impudent, unrepentant and thus undeserving of mercy. Visitors sympathetic to the Jacobite cause thronged the Press Yard wining and dining the prisoners. The prison, rather than containing the Jacobite threat, became a site of defiance, a staging ground for Jacobite ritual. Prisoners and their visitors wore rue and thyme to signify their sorrow during the official thanksgiving day for the Hanoverian victory at Preston, indicating that they were not happy about it. They sported white roses on 10 June, the pretender’s birthday. In May, a ‘poor fiddler’ was brought in to ‘play Tunes that were adapted to their Treasonable Ballads’.6 Above all, they partied. What bothered the author (or the diarist Carleton Smith) was not just that prisoners were living luxuriously rather than repenting but that their doing so made obvious the level of support they enjoyed from allies outside the prison: The Prisoner being thus fed with Money, and hopes of Life, ’tis the less to be wonder’d at, that they had no Sense of their Crimes, especially since their Friends ply’d them so hard with Wine and luxurious Diet, that … they had every day, at first, variety of the choicest Eatables in the proper Seasons, and that too as early as the greatest and nicest Ladies, so that 40s. for a Dish of Pease and Beans was nothing in their Pockets, and a Dish of Fish of 30s. with the best French Wine, and every thing in Proportion, was an ordinary Regale. Being thus pamper’d, like high fed Horses, we are not to wonder that they neigh’d after their Female Visitors, who were very numerous, and liberal enough of heir Favors.7

The image of the Press Yard as a place of hard partying and womanising was recycled to very different effect in the various poems about Newgate that appeared as single broadsides or in printed collections purporting to be written by prisoners. Poems of Love and Gallantry written in the Marshalsea and Newgate, by several of the Prisoners taken at Preston, a volume taking the form of a poetic duel between Charles Wogan and William Tunstall, promoted the image of Jacobite prisoners as romantic obsessives; the poems play on equations between love and war, being in jail and being in love, infatuation and submission. For example, ‘The Preston prisoners to the Ladies about Court and Town’ had the prisoners laugh off their lack of freedom and the prospect of death, for What dread can gaols or gibbets show To men who’ve died so oft for you?8

The political thrust of the volume as a whole ran in the opposite direction from The Secret History of the Rebels in Newgate: whilst The Secret History took rebel carousing and bravado as an indication that the rebels deserved no mercy, Poems of Love and Gallantry minimised the threat posed by the rebel212

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 212

26/02/2020 08:57

The news out of Newgate

lion by casting it as a romantic misadventure and, in the final poem moving from the familiar willing submission to the ladies to a willing submission to the ‘mild’ George I, whose authority was now cast in a language of love: To gain this bliss let Calidon conspire That she with Albion may unite entire And no more Factions kindle Hiber’s Fire. Unite, who would not under such a lord Whose Love and Mercy challenge an Accord His juster claim maintains him in his Throne, And rules with mildness all that are his own.9

The Quatorse, or the Sorrowful Lamentation of the Preston Gentlemen in the Press-yard, for the Loss of P.W., made by the Author, while he was playing at Picket, a broadside poem purporting to be written in Newgate, can also be considered as a riposte to the negative images put forward in texts like The Secret History of the Rebels. Once again, the Press Yard is depicted as a place of defiant partying, but the message is more sympathetic to the prisoners. The Quatorse was a lament for the departure of a musician known as ‘Pere’ who had entertained prisoners in the Press Yard.10 The poem is a parodic homage to the well-known broadside ballad The Life and Death of the Piper of Kilbarchan, or, the Epitaph of Habbie Simpson, which was published in several versions in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.11 Like its inspiration, its mournfulness is a bit jokey: Pere is, like the original Habbie, a grotesque instigator of misrule Ay when he barked like the Dogs The Geitlings leap’ed and skipped like Frogs, Or Irish tripping o’er the Bogs But now there’s none That can diver the little Rogues Sen Pere’s gone12

Whereas the pieces in Poems of Love and Gallantry defused the horror of imprisonment by likening it to love, The Quatorse did it by lamenting the countless small miseries of confinement rather than the existential threat it posed. Pere’s disappearance, the speaker opines, will make the keeper Bodenham Rouse and the turnkey Mr Revel cranky, for Whilst Pere staid we feared no evil From fawning Rowse or surly Revel Both then were grown most wondrous Civil By Musick won But now begin to play the Devil, Sen Pere’s gon.

Likewise, those condemned to die are presented here as suffering not because they will die but because Pere’s playing had offered them ­pleasurable 213

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 213

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

a­ lternative to having to listen to the condemned sermons of Newgate’s chaplain, Paul Lorrain: When doom’d to die was bonny Wood end, And likely was to make no good end, Instead of Paul he did attend, His Tunes alone.13

In so far as one can discern a political slant to The Quatorse, it seems sympathetic to the prisoners in the Press Yard. The smallness of the tragedy, the loss of Pere’s music, gestured at the prisoners’ much more serious losses (of the battle, of their lives and of the Prince of Wales, who shared with Pere the initials P.W.). At the same time, it cut these losses down to size, drawing the reader into laughing with the prisoners rather than at them. There may have been a political edge, as well, in the jab the poem took at Paul Lorrain, who had notoriously turned his privilege of preaching to the condemned and hearing their final confessions into a minor literary industry. Lorrain’s ability to profit from the sufferings of others had already drawn satirical comment, including a mock advertisement (written in Lorrain’s funny foreign diction) announcing that he had built ‘in mine Shappel in Newgate, a vere fine Gallery for mine own Benefit; where all dose dat love to see de vere pretty vine Show of de good People dat sall be Hang’d, may be accomodated at de vere reasonable rate’.14 In this context, mocking Lorrain by saying his sermons were less attractive or comforting than Pere’s playing resonated with a wider critique of the government’s harshness towards rebels as being motivated by bloodlust and greed. How do we understand the relationship of the material discussed in this section to Newgate as a place? We should not assume it was all literally written in Newgate. In the case of The Quatorse, for example, the obvious status of the poem parody and the absurd claim that it was written while the author played at ‘picket’ automatically draws attention to its lack of authenticity. Poems of Love and Gallantry is alleged to come from Charles Wogan and William Tunstall, who really were prisoners in Newgate and the Marshalsea; but there is no evidence as to whether they actually wrote the poems. The Secret History of the Rebels has stronger claims to authenticity: the surviving parts of Carleton Smith’s diary match closely with corresponding sections of the printed book. Whether The History of the Press-Yard was written by a journalist who had been imprisoned remains an open question: certainly there were many imprisoned journalists who would be candidates for authorship, but it is not possible to identify the author with any of these Tory journalists in particular, and the fact that the book contains prose plagiarised from elsewhere rather than first-hand information makes one wonder if the Newgate provenance of the book is a useful fiction. Whether the texts discussed here actually emanated from Newgate, or merely pretended to, they all worked together to construct a sense of Newgate 214

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 214

26/02/2020 08:57

The news out of Newgate

as a familiar place, populated by recognisable characters who appeared across different texts. As we have seen, the keeper Bodenham Rouse has appeared more than once, in the passage from George Flint’s The Shift Shifted that began this chapter and again in The Quatorse. The chaplain Paul Lorrain was likewise a fixture in this literature. Even the fancifully named ‘Florimel’ of History of the Press-Yard, who was clearly a romantic construction, would have been recognisable to readers as a composite of the several men who had been arrested at the time of the 1696 Assassination Plot and remained confined without trial ever since; their plight had been and would continue to be kept in the public eye through a variety of news items, poems and books.15 The appearance in the many genres of Newgate news we have examined here of figures who did exist in real life does not mean that the news was true. But it does mean that writers, even when lying, lied to an audience that was interested and informed about the personnel, conditions and rituals there. The effect of Newgate news was to make Newgate seem familiar to those outside. It also, as I’ve suggested, conferred a sense of authority upon information coming out of Newgate. In both of these senses, then, Newgate can be described as a ‘centre’ of news.

GEORGE FLINT’S NEWSPAPERS: ROBIN’S LAST SHIFT AND THE SHIFT SHIFTED We turn now to a discussion of Robin’s Last Shift and The Shift Shifted, two newspapers that really were written by a prisoner in Newgate. The fact that prisoners were able to write and publish is less unusual than it may first appear. The Whig-leaning Flying Post, for example, had been published in 1713, even when its author George Ridpath was in exile and its printer William Hurt was in prison.16 As Molly Murray has noted, early modern prisons were permeable enough that texts of all sorts could enter and leave them.17 George Flint followed in this tradition of prison publication. He was arrested in January 1716 in connection with an earlier anti-ministerial journal, Weekly Remarks and Political Reflections upon the most material News Foreign and Domestick, which was published by William Heathcote.18 Within a month of his arrest, he began to produce Robin’s Last Shift, or Weekly Remarks and Political Reflections upon the most material news Foreign and Domestick. It borrowed from the original Weekly Remarks its subtitle and visual appearance (layout, typography and emblems of Mercury and Apollo at the top of the title page), but had a new publisher, Isaac Dalton in Goswell Street. Dalton himself was soon arrested as well, but Robin’s Last Shift survived, perhaps by transferring the task of production to James Alexander, churchwarden of Robert Orme’s non-juring meeting house.19 Robin’s Last Shift ceased publication in April, but was quickly replaced by another Flint–Dalton production, The Shift Shifted. Again, the paper endured many challenges. P.J.B. Hyland notes that the government put considerable effort into its suppression, and 215

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 215

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

estimates that ‘as many as one hundred people were arrested and examined in connection with the paper [Robin’s Last Shift] and its sequels’.20 Isaac Dalton’s sister Mary was taken up for distributing the paper in May.21 Mary Flint, George’s wife, whom he credited with helping him to write, was put into close confinement in the Fleet in July, and then in September caught smuggling papers to George.22 The Shift Shifted published its last issue on 29 September 1716, possibly because the discovery of Mary’s smuggling had landed George in closer confinement than before. But even this did not shut down Flint and Dalton. A brief third iteration of the paper appeared on 16 February 1717, with the rueful title The Shift’s Last Shift. It lasted only for one issue. But that did not exhaust Flint and Dalton’s productivity. A witness who later testified against Dalton in his trial for publishing the seditious libel Advise to the Freeholders described a visit to Flint and Dalton in Newgate in a way that conveys their continuing enthusiasm for churning out Jacobite propaganda. Mr Mexey testified that being introduced by one Derbyshire, a sort of a Pacquet-Bearer from France to the Disaffected in England, [he] went to Mr. Flint’s Room in Newgate the 9th of Feb. last to get the Libel call’d The Battle of Sherifmore. That the Prisoner [Dalton] being there, ask’d him if he could not dispose of the Advice to the Freeholder, &c. and that he sold him 10 of them at 18d a piece (being about the size of a penny Book) one of which he mark’d and was produced in Court. That they sent for Drink, where the Prisoner drank the Pretender’s Health … That the Prisoner asked him if he had any thing to print, telling him, if he had any thing to print against this damn’d Government he would print it.23

They were caught, of course, and both Flint and Dalton were arraigned on charges of seditious libel. But before the trial could happen, Flint escaped to France, where his wife eventually joined him. How, then, do we think about Flint’s writing in relation to the categories of centre and locality? We might think of his papers as facing both inward to audiences of prisoners, and outwards to address a general public. Even if we take his brag that in his first three months in prison he ‘caused forty or fifty thousand papers against the government to circulate every week through the three nations’ with the requisite spoonfuls of salt, the strong efforts of the government to suppress his papers indicate that they must have been intended for, and reached, an audience far beyond the walls of Newgate.24 In that sense Flint’s papers contributed to the process, which was discussed in the first part of this chapter, of making Newgate into a centre, a place to which the eyes of the nation turned to learn important truths. Flint also seems, however, to have written with an audience of prisoners in mind. According to The Secret History of the Rebels in Newgate, Flint’s publisher Isaac Dalton had tried to drum up business among the prisoners, sending ‘a Letter to Newgate by one Anne Leonard, a Parish pensioner in Ratcliff Highway, wherein he desired the Gentlemen in Prison to stand by him and subscribe, or else he must drop his paper for want of money to carry 216

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 216

26/02/2020 08:57

The news out of Newgate

it on’.25 I will argue here that Flint’s writings are inflected by the needs and concerns of Newgate as a specific locality. I use ‘locality’ here not only in a geographical sense, to denote Newgate as a street address, but in the sense of particular interests and identities as opposed to general or generic ones. I will further suggest that the paper played a role in constructing the identity of a community organised around Newgate and its prisoners. The content of Flint’s papers also faced in two directions. On the one hand, they contained much news of interest to a general public­ – ­news so generally interesting, in fact, that the same news was reported in other contemporary publications, from which large swathes of Flint’s papers were barely distinguishable. Like many other weekly and semi-weekly papers of the age, both Robin’s Last Shift and The Shift Shifted began with international European news, arranged roughly from east to west. This was followed by news of Britain, most of which concerned the continuing Jacobite rebellion in Scotland. Although Flint did accompany his international news stories with opinionated ‘remarks’, the reporting per se was more or less straightforward, and, given that Flint could not pay the salaries of news correspondents, the substance was most likely lifted from other newspapers or newsletters. Flint also included (in the final section labelled ‘London’) a lot of items concerning the births, marriages, deaths, elevations, promotions to office and travel plans of the nation’s elites. Thus, in the 25 February issue we learn from Robin’s Last Shift that ‘the Countess of Berkeley was brought to bed of a son’, and from the 10 March issue that ‘the honorable James Brudenell, esq. (brother of the Earl of Cardigan, and MP for Andover in Hampshire) is made master of the Jewel Office, in the room of the Lord Guernsey’. Readers of the 17 March issue were duly informed that ‘the earl of Arran, High Steward of Westminster has appointed John Cotton, Esq to be his Deputy-Steward’ and that ‘the Duchess of Portsmouth, who designed to set out for France as this day, has put off her departure for some time, the wind being contrary’. These items were by no means original to Flint, and can readily be found in other contemporary papers.26 Also apparently stolen from the Weekly Packet was the ‘Casualties’ section which Flint printed in many issues, wherein readers would find summaries of the weekly bills of mortality along with a selection of the shocking deaths occurring in the city, such as: ‘Cut his throat at St Martin in the Fields, 1. Found dead 2, one at St. Mary Aldermary; and one in the Street, at St Martin in the Fields. Hang’d Himself (being a Lunatic) at St Dunstan’s Stepney, 1. Killed by a fall out of a Window at St Martin in the Fields, 1. Overlaid, 2.’27 It is possible to make the case that, even if Flint did not write many of the news items he published himself, he actively curated the material he found, so that even the plagiarised sections of Robin’s Last Shift and The Shift Shifted might contain clues to the needs of a particular audience of prisoners. The inclusion of news about elites, for example, might have been especially welcome to prisoners or their families who were hoping to obtain mercy. 217

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 217

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

As Margaret Sankey has pointed out, virtually all the Preston prisoners who were brought to trial were condemned, but few were executed. What largely made the difference between those who did and those who did not obtain mercy was the intercession of courtiers.28 It would indeed be useful for prisoners to know who got married or promoted, died or arrived in town. Perhaps, too, Flint decided to include the bills of mortality and notices of bizarre deaths because it fed a sense of gallows humour among his prisonerreaders. But this is speculation. The most obvious explanation for Flint’s eclectic choices of what to borrow from other papers is that he was casting a broad net. In much the same way that small-town newspapers today include national and international news briefs so as to give readers more value for money, Flint hoped to publish enough material that a potential reader would commit to a subscription of 18d per quarter to his paper rather than someone else’s. Having discussed the overlap between Flint’s papers and other contemporary news sources, the rest of this chapter focuses on stories that readers would be hard-pressed to find outside of Flint’s papers, and in particular news or opinion that concerned or invoked prisons and prisoners, both in Newgate and in the other places scattered across the north of England where Jacobite prisoners were held. Although other contemporary papers did cover Newgate and even provincial places of confinement, Flint covered prisoners with an unusual frequency, level of detail and sympathy. 29 In cases where Flint reported essentially the same news of prisoners as was reported in other sources, his tone was subtly different. The point can be illustrated by comparing several contemporary accounts of the failed escape attempt occurring on the night of Wednesday 14 March 1716. The Whigleaning Flying Post rendered it like this: Last Wednesday night some of the rebel prisoners in Newgate attempted to make their Escape, and had for that purpose made a Hole though the Wall, from which they were to be let down by a Rope, but the same being timely discovered from a Neighbouring House, by the Light of their Candle, the Keepers came in before any had escaped, secur’d all of ’em, and put some in Irons.30

Most contemporary papers gave accounts that echoed the important elements of this one. The British Mercury concurred that a wall was broken, but that ‘they were timely discover’d, so that none of them have escaped’.31 Along very similar lines, Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer had it that ‘the matter was timely discover’ed, so that none of them escaped, and some are put in Irons’.32 Several others ended with a similar image of a more secure imprisonment and stricter confinement. As the Weekly Packet put it, they ‘are now, for greater security, more closely and strongly confin’d, and more narrowly look’d after; and some add, that they are put into Fetters’.33 To all of this we can compare George Flint’s account, which differed in both in details and rhetorical orientation: 218

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 218

26/02/2020 08:57

The news out of Newgate On Wednesday night last, the prisoners in the Press-Yard of Newgate, had framed a contrivance to make their escape up a chimney, and down by a rope upon a shed, where persons were ready to receive them; but imprudently holding up a candle out of the Hole, they were discover’d by a Maid in the Old Bailey, who told her Master of it, and he immediately gave Notice to Mr Pitts, to prevent it, or otherwise the Birds had all been missing out of their Cage the next morning; what a pity it would have been that so many should have escaped hanging.34

There is obviously more and different detail in Flint’s account compared to those of the rival journalists: beyond the fact that he has the prisoners try to use a chimney rather than break a wall (which makes them seem less destructive), he just sets a more crowded, complex scene. The detail in itself conveys an impression that this is an account that comes from someone close to the action. It also conveys sympathy for the prisoners. Flint is the only journalist, for example, to draw attention to the existence of would-be helpers, the persons waiting at the shed who were ‘ready to receive’ the prisoners. Whereas in other accounts the significant actor is the unnamed non-prisoner by whom the escape was ‘timely discovered’, Flint puts the focus on the prisoners as agents, albeit tragic ones: the significant figure is the unnamed prisoner who ‘imprudently’ held up a candle. The most striking difference of all lies in the way that Flint ends the story. Rather than reassuring readers that security has now been enhanced, he ventriloquises the speech of the authorities with obvious sarcasm: had the escape succeeded, ‘what a pity it would have been that so many should have escaped hanging’. Flint’s reporting of news about Newgate, even when the same news was covered elsewhere, was meant to make prisoners look good, make the regime look bad and draw attention to his privileged access to knowledge. Flint put prisoners’ concerns front and centre when he used the paper to advocate for mercy for the rebels charged with treason. The paper heaped paeans of praise upon the Earl of Argyll, the one Hanoverian commander thought to favour milder treatment of prisoners, and then detailed Argyll’s fall from political grace. Flint also devoted space to publicising the arguments made by Henry Oxburgh and George Earl of Winton, two of the Preston defendants, that when they had ‘surrendered to discretion’ to General Wills at Preston they had had every right to assume that their lives would be spared. The Shift Shifted reprinted in full Oxburgh’s scaffold speech, wherein that case was made, as well as another letter from an (anonymous) ‘gentleman of eminent talents’ pleading that England should refrain from executing the surrendered rebels, as to do so would give ‘to other nations so fatal an example of unusual rigour and severity’.35 Rigour and severity were also themes in the many items about individual prisoners that Flint included in his paper. The 3 March issue of Robin’s Last Shift told the sad story of ‘Mr Rigburg, and eminent Chyrurgeon, who suffered considerably in the last fire that happened in Thames street, for words 219

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 219

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

he uttered was sent to Newgate, when his reason being drowned in Liquor, his words could have no more meaning than in pronounced by a parrot’. ‘We think Madmen deserve compassion’, Flint concluded, ‘and though there may be pleasure in being mad, as Mr Dryden says, yet I should not so much envy that pleasure, as to send a man to Newgate for enjoying it’.36 The ordeals of Francis Francia, Flint’s cellmate, and of a locally famous Jacobite known as George the High Church Cobbler, all Newgate prisoners, were also discussed in Flint’s papers.37 Flint’s own case, and those of family members and close prison associates, featured prominently in the pages of his papers. The 18 August issue of The Shift Shifted was devoted to the cruelty of Secretary of State Charles Viscount Townsend, whom Flint dubbed ‘Moloch’, after the pagan deity associated with child sacrifice. The sufferings of Flint and Dalton, their families and their close associates figured prominently. A memorable passage concerned Isaac Dalton’s sister, ‘a beautiful young modest maiden … confin’d for a Twelvemonth in a loathsome Gaol, conversing with the Strums [i.e. strumpets] of Newgate’. Flint followed that with a narrative about a gentleman­ – ­one suspects he means himself­ – ­‘whose sole Fault was a suspicion to have reflected upon Moloch’s administration, and to have inveighed against the presbyterians’. The gentleman’s wife was also drawn into his suffering, likewise for trivial offences. A gentleman obnoxious to a certain Person (as any Gentleman or any other Person easily may be) who has lain eight months in prison, during the Fury of the late Winter’s Frost, just recovered from a long and sharp sickness, expos’d to the inclemency of the Sason and the Hardships of the Gaol, by which he contracted another cruel sickness … yet is condemned to lie there twelvmonth longer, and to a fine superior to his fortune; Yet his Wife for endeavouring to help her husband (which most think to be a wive’s duty) and in a way which she could not think unlawful, is also close imprison’d, and cannot be let out upon Bail, tho the husband (beside the Bail) offers to take upon himself what-soever his wife can be charg’d with. Now one would think her Crime could be no less than High-Treason, and at the same time it is alleged to be no more than ordering the carriage of a few News-Papers.38

Charging the government with rigour and severity both towards the rebels and towards harmless journalists, drunkards, maidens and madmen served several purposes. At one level, it was a simple plea for better conditions and mercy. At another, it fitted well with the political narrative that Flint promoted throughout his newspapers, namely that King George I was the dupe of his closet republican/fanatic advisers, who were inflicting all sorts of cruelty on the British people in the hope of provoking a rebellion that would destroy monarchy. This narrative was in turn useful for Flint because it fed a long-term project of discrediting the regime while claiming on the surface to love the king (Flint went so far as to dub himself a ‘Hanoverian Whig’, which he explained meant that he supported monarchy and hereditary suc220

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 220

26/02/2020 08:57

The news out of Newgate

cession).39 By tying instances of cruelty to prisoners to a plot to foment civil war and destroy monarchy, Flint linked the interests of prisoners to those of the public at large. The general non-imprisoned public, Flint suggested, would ignore the fate of prisoners at their peril. Perhaps the most powerful way that Flint made the condition of prisoners an urgent concern for the public was to invoke the threat of disease. ‘The prisoners in Chester Gaol’, he reported in March, ‘die less or more every day of a sickness that rages amongst them through their hard usage there, which also begins to infect the people of the town; that six of the grand jury that found the bill of indictment against the rebels are dead; that several of those that went to the Church in Preston, where about a thousand of the rebels were crammed in prisoners stark naked, are dead of a spotted Fever; so that the Church is shut up and no more used’.40 In July, when a milder disease spread through Newgate, Flint warned of a ‘pestilence over this large and populous City which may sweep away Millions’. In Newgate, conditions were so crowded that the air they draw must necessarily be copiously stored with the exhalations out of their own bodies, which has already bred a contagious Fever among them; and tho’ it seems yet only a warning … yet as the heats increase, how fatal it may prove not only to the unfortunate gentlemen, but considering the necessary concourse thither, how wide the dismal effects of it may spread, Providence only can foresee. If we have forgot all humanity, and they are not worth our consideration or compassion, at least let us take Care of ourselves and the publick safety.41

Pestilence in jail, spreading out to the city, was Flint’s most powerful image of a cruel government killing the innocent, a symbol that connected the suffering of prisoners to the suffering of an entire people. Flint’s reporting on the subject of prisons may also, however, have been aimed at a narrower audience. For readers who were either in prison or connected to prisoners, Flint’s papers would have been valued less for their anti-ministerial rhetoric than for the information they conveyed and the relationships they created or strengthened. Flint could therefore be considered to have written ‘locally’, that is, for a particular rather than a general audience. In this case, however, that particular audience was not confined to a single geographic space. Let me first consider this suggestion with respect to Flint’s writings about the north. It is significant in this respect that Flint, when he wrote of distant prisons and prisoners, wrote as if he had access to networks of information. The 5 May issue of The Shift Shifted, for example, reprinted an ‘extract of a letter from Chester’ that Flint claimed had come to his hands. The source is unidentified, but as the letter is written in the first person it is implied that the source is a prisoner. It describes the disheartening aftermath of a petition from prisoners to have themselves transported: they find, to their disappointment, that they are instead offered virtual enslavement. 221

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 221

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality Chester Castle, April 28, 1716 Upon Thursday last we were all taken out of apartments before the Sheriff, the Officer of the Guard, and Sir Thomas Jonston’s son-in-law (who they say have bought us from the King) and were offered indentures to sign for seven years service in the plantations, as the said Sir Thomas [Johnston] should please to dispose of us. They have prevailed with a great many of the common sort to sign them; the last of whom were carried off to Liverpool this morning: But the Gentleman unanimously refused to do the same, alleging, We were no way bound thereto by the Nature of the petition presented to his Majesty, but only to simple Transportation, which we were willing to undergo at his Majesty’s desire; whereupon we were severely threatened; and without getting Liberty to return to our own rooms for our Bedclothes and Linnen, we were all turned into a Dungeon or little better; and fed only with bread and water.42

This is the only instance I have found of a letter from (or purporting to be from) a prisoner in the north being reproduced. There are, however, other instances where Flint wrote in a way that implied the existence of networks of contacts. ‘I am assur’d from Chester’, he reported in June, ‘that the Preston Prisoners there are chained together like dogs, in pairs, nay, eleven of them are linked together in one chain’.43 The 4 August issue of The Shift Shifted conveyed news from Scotland, that Brigadier Campbell of Ormond had arrived as a prisoner from Inverlochy and committed to Winton House, where ‘the guards were doubled ever since the escape of Dr Clare (whose sister, having assisted in it, is still kept there very close)’. ‘We hear nothing farther’, Flint continued, ‘either of the transportation of some into England to be tried there (tho’ nobody doubts but that will happen) or of the releasement of the rest, by Discharge or bail, as was expected’.44 One important feature of these reports is that they would have been useful to prisoners, or to people who cared about those prisoners. Although he was not unique among newspaper writers in covering such matters, Flint provided exceptionally thorough coverage of who got hanged, who got bailed, who was arraigned, who escaped, who was in close confinement, who died, who got moved from one jail to another, across the entire network of prisons wherein Jacobites found themselves. When several Preston prisoners prepared for their trials at Westminster Hall in early May, Flint helpfully provided the names of all the eligible jurors.45 It is impossible to tell from the evidence at hand how Flint obtained any of the information about prisoners that he reported. But again, Flint’s veracity is beside the point. What matters more to me is the impression that Flint’s writings created of networks and shared interests, of a community that awaited information. More important than the accuracy of the information was the building of community. Even if Flint was, for example, making up the letter about the gentlemen prisoners in Chester refusing to become indentured servants, it still created for readers the illusion of a connection between themselves and faraway prisoners. 222

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 222

26/02/2020 08:57

The news out of Newgate

Flint’s papers worked not just to create a sense of community built around prisoners and those who cared about them, but between Newgate prisoners and their supporters outside the prison. As noted above, the celebration of Jacobite ritual by prisoners and their visitors was well publicised and condemned in The Secret History of the Rebels. It seems important, therefore, that Flint showed a continuing interest in the harassment of people wearing Jacobite symbols, like rue, thyme or white roses. ‘A lady of quality passing Hyde park to see another lady that was sick’, he reported, ‘The Bullies at Rochfort’s coffee house, because she had a spring of greens in her bosom, gave orders and money to the soldiers to take her up; and after they had whip’ed her severely, brought in a black-guard boy, and made him dawb over her Backside, her Belly, etc. with Lamb-black and oil. We shall be detested and brained as mad dogs by all foreigners abroad for such practices.’46 The 23 June issue of The Shift Shifted carried a jocular account of an open war declared upon all roses, to destroy them root and branch.47 Such stories fit Flint’s favourite narrative about a regime delegitimated by its cruelty. But perhaps they did more: although Flint’s paper never mentioned the display of rue, thyme and roses inside Newgate, anyone who was or knew a prisoner would get the psychological boost of knowing that the prisoners’ gestures of defiance were echoed in the world outside, that they were connected to a wider community through both symbols and suffering. Flint’s paper was inflected by Newgate concerns, whether he was reporting specifically about Newgate or not. So far we have postulated that Flint’s papers created many different kinds of relationships: while bringing prisoners to the attention of the general public, they also facilitated the creation of bonds across a dispersed community of prisoners and people connected to prisoners, and between Newgate prisoners and their community of supporters outside the prison. There is one more kind of bond that, I postulate, Flint’s papers helped to develop: that between himself and Bodenham Rouse, the Deputy Keeper of Newgate, who was often charged with the care of prisoners in the Press Yard. Rouse (or ‘Rewse’) is notorious among historians as the embodiment of the dark underbelly of the criminal system, a thief-taker and informer known for working both sides of the law.48 It is striking, therefore, to find him the object of sympathetic attention in Flint’s papers. On 7 April Flint extended condolences to Rouse from the prisoners on the death of his son, who had ‘dy’d last Monday of a Fever contracted among the prisoners’. ‘The young man’s humour’, Flint wrote, ‘was it seems very sweet, and obliging, for which he is very much regretted by the unfortunate prisoners there.’49 There is a second positive reference to Rouse in the The Shift Shifted as well. Flint reports that the captain of the military contingent guarding Newgate had insulted both the Lord Mayor and Bodenham Rouse: ‘The Captain of the Guard at Newgate, the other Day, confined Mr Rouse the Keeper, for standing with his Hat on before him; the like he did to the Lord Mayor’s officers, bidding my Lord kiss his A-se, and 223

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 223

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

asserting, that there he was Lord Mayor. They that will rule by Soldiers must take care, if they can, that Soldiers do not rule.’50 Flint’s reporting of this incident operated as both macropolitics and micropolitics. At the macropolitical level the story about the Captain’s insult to Rouse pointed to the arrogance of the military officers guarding and the danger of rule by a standing army, and thus fed into his narrative about the incipient tyranny of the Hanoverian regime. It is possible that Rouse would have been ideologically receptive to such a critique. Relations between the  military officers guarding Newgate and the civilian governors of the prison were tense. The diary kept by Carleton Smith, Rouse’s boss, records numerous clashes with the military and expresses a traditional Whig scepticism about rule by standing armies that would, ironically, have resonated with Flint’s language.51 If Rouse shared Carleton Smith’s views, then, we can imagine that Flint’s criticisms of military rule helped Flint to underscore a surprising ideological alignment of staunch Whigs and Jacobites, based on a shared antipathy to soldiers. We do not need, however, to postulate ideological sympathy to suspect that Flint’s sympathetic and flattering words about Rouse were intended to curry favour with a man who had power over him. It is possible that the strategy worked. When George Flint escaped from Newgate in March 1717, he did so on Bodenham Rouse’s watch. As Rouse explained to the magistrates who examined him about Flint’s escape, he had been told repeatedly when he visited Flint’s room that Flint was sick in bed, but had not actually looked in on him for two or three days, until he realised Flint had escaped. One wonders if the negligence was deliberate.52

CONCLUSION The news out of Newgate was part of a political debate on a national scale, but it also reflected and refracted the micropolitics of a specific place. In that sense it problematises the distinction between centre and locality. George Flint’s papers were not ‘local’ in a geographic sense: they covered international news, and reached audiences outside Newgate. But we can think of them as ‘local’ in some other senses: in that they derived authority from the fact of being written from a particular vantage point inside Newgate, in that they addressed and perhaps created a community of prisoners and their sympathisers and in that the choice of content (for example, material flattering to Bodenham Rouse) was itself part of a process of negotiating personal relationships. I hope I’ve shown that scholars need to don both localist and centralist lenses when reading this material. Perhaps scholars need to don both realist and nominalist glasses as well. Newgate was a physical place, there’s no denying that. But it is also fair to say that texts played a large role in constructing Newgate as a place: that is, it is through texts which represent and deploy Newgate that the readers out there in the rest of the world come to think of Newgate as a site that holds valuable 224

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 224

26/02/2020 08:57

The news out of Newgate

knowledge, to identify it with a set of recognisable characters, become receptive to the authority of the Newgate voice, whether that voice really belongs to a denizen of Newgate or not. It is also through texts that Newgate becomes locatable in conceptual rather than geographic space, as a near neighbour of Chester gaol as well as of Cheapside or Holborn. If we think of Newgate prisoners as part of a translocal community of prisoners, it is because Flint’s papers did not just transparently reflect that community but actually created it. Perhaps, then, we need to rethink not just the well-worn dichotomy of centre and locality, but how we define and locate the ‘locality’.

NOTES 1 The Shift Shifted (23 June 1716), p. 47. 2 See: P.B.J. Hyland, ‘Liberty and libel: government and the press during the succession crisis in Britain, 1712–1716’, EHR, 101 (1986), 865 (for habeas suspension) and 875–7 for the arrests of Tory journalists. 3 The History of the Press-Yard (1717), p. 4. 4 Robert Patten, The History of the Late Rebellion (1st edn, 1717). The near wordfor-word resemblance can be shown by comparing passages from the two books about the death of Captain Peter Farqharson of Rockley, described in one text as ‘an officer of invincible spirit and bravery’ and the other as ‘a gentleman of invincible Spirit, and almost inimitable Bravery’. As Botair tells it in The History of the Press-Yard, Farqharson, ‘being short thro’ the bone of the leg, endured a great deal of Torture in the operation of an unskilful Surgeon, When he was first brought into the White Bull Inn, where all the wounded men used to be dress’d, he took a Glass of Brandy, and said, Come lads, Heres to our Master’s Health, tho’ I can do no more, I wish you good Success. After which he presently died by the Amputation of his leg’ (p. 79). Patten says: ‘This gentleman being shot through the Bone of the Leg, endured a great deal of Torture in the Operation of the Surgeon: When he was first brought into the Inn called the White Bull, the house where all wounded men were carried to be dressed, he took a glass of Brandy, and said, Come, Lads, here is our Master’s Health; tho’ I can do no more, I wish you good Success. His Leg was cut off by an unskiful Butcher, rather than a surgeon, and he presently died’ (p. 104). It is possible, of course, that the plagiarism went in a different direction than I have hypothesised: perhaps Patten got it from the History of the Press-Yard. The fact that both books were published in the same year makes it difficult to tell. One clue that Patten is the prior source is that his book is longer, and contains a lot of material that is not in The History of the Press-Yard. For Patten to have plagiarised from The History of the Press-Yard, he would have had to gracefully interpolate a lot of other material into his book. This would have been a lot of work. It would be have been easier for someone to chop pieces out of Patten’s book. 5 Secret History of the Rebels in Newgate, Giving an account of their Daily behavior, from their Commitment to their Gaol Delivery (2nd edn, 1717). The Diary is ‘Newgate Diary by Carleton Smith’, LMA, CLA/035/02/001. This is a photocopy of the original manuscript, which was ‘destroyed by enemy action in WWII’. The surviving portions of Smith’s diary preserved in the LMA are almost identical to passages in The Secret History of the Rebels. Carleton Smith was appointed to 225

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 225

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality

6

7

8

9 10

11

12 13

14 15

supervise the Jacobite prisoners in the Press Yard by the mayor of London in May 1716, after William Pitts, the keeper of Newgate, was arrested for treason. After Pitts was acquitted in July 1716, Smith was relieved of his duties. Smith was brought back again for a second stint in April 1717 after yet more escapes had occurred on Pitts’s watch. Smith then ran the Press Yard again (though this time with Pitts still in charge of the prison as a whole), until the Act of Indemnity released most of the inmates in July 1717. Smith apparently kept journals of his experiences in Newgate during both of his stints as supervisor of the Press Yard. A copy of the journal of his second tour of duty (April–July 1716) survives as a manuscript in the LMA, with a preface addressed to the mayor. The journal of his first stint, from 4 May to 14 July 1716, no longer exists. We know that it did exist, however, because he alludes to it in his prefatory letter to the journal of his second stint, addressed to Charles Peers, alderman and customs commissioner, wherein Smith asks Peers (or Pierce) not to ‘dispise this small offering, which is the second of this nature’. For rue and thyme on 7 June (a designated day of thanksgiving for the suppression of the rebellion) and white roses on 10 June, see: Secret History, pp. 18–19; For the fiddler, ibid., p. 37. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Reports of wining and dining are present in all sources. Even The History of the Press-Yard, a text deemed sympathetic to Jacobite prisoners, describes excessive drinking, pp. 54–5 and 84–5. The second of these passages is in turn quoted verbatim in Secret History, p. 4. Alcohol appears on just about every page of Carleton Smith’s Newgate Diary, but especially vivid descriptions of prisoners partying with guests can be found in the entries for Thursday 18 April, Monday 22 April, Monday 6 May, Saturday 18 May, Thursday 6 June, Tuesday 11 June, Sunday 30 June. Poems of Love and Gallantry written in the Marshalsea and Newgate, by several of the Prisoners taken at Preston (1716), pp. 10–13. This poem was also reprinted as a freestanding broadside, with the same title. ‘The despairing captive eased with the thoughts of mercy’, in Poems of Love and Gallantry, p. 24. Pere is described as a fiddler and a piper. It is tempting to think he is the fiddler complained about in Secret History, discussed above. Alternatively, Pere may be Mr Perry who worked as a turnkey, though I have no evidence either that he departed or that he had musical talent. The Life and Death of the Piper of Kilbarchan, or, the Epitaph of Habbie Simpson (n.p., n.d.) EEBO/ECCO provides versions for 1690, c.1701 and c.1750 but the dates are guesswork. The piece is sometimes attributed to Robert Sempill. The Quatorse (n.p., n.d.). A gietling or gittling or gattling is a little brat (Oxford English Dictionary). ‘Bonny Wood end’ is likely the ‘Captain Menges of Wood-end’ who is listed among the prisoners in Newgate in Robin’s Last Shift (7 April 1716), p. 46. This is the James Menzies of Culdares, who was eventually pardoned (and came to be known as ‘Old Culdares’ in the ’45). The advertisement is found at the back of the copy of Carleton Smith’s diary, LMA CLA/035/02/001. They had been the subject, for example, of Patience. A Present to the Press-Yard

226

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 226

26/02/2020 08:57

The news out of Newgate

16 17 18 19 0 2 21 22

23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

(n.p., 1706). One of them later published a memoir, A Short History of the Life of Major John Bernardi: Written by Himself in Newgate; where he has been for Near 33 Years a Prisoner of State (1729). For the arrest and continuing detention of John Bernardi, John Counter, Robert Cassells, Robert Meldrum, James Chambers and Robert Blackbourne, see Rachel Weil, A Plague of Informers (New Haven, 2013), ch. 7, esp. p. 273. Hyland, ‘Liberty and libel’, 866–8. Molly Murray, ‘Measured sentences: forming literature in the early modern prison’, HLQ, 72:2 (2009), 146–67. Hyland, ‘Liberty and libel’, 877–8 and esp. notes 2 and 3 for Flint’s imprisonment. The suggestion about James Alexander as publisher is made in Paul Chapman, ‘George Flint’, ODNB. Hyland, ‘Liberty and libel’, 879, for the quotation; for the general point, 879–82. Ibid., 879 and note 1. For Mary Flint’s arrest and confinement, see: TNA, SP 44/80/36 (25 July 1716). For her smuggling in September, see Hyland, ‘Liberty and libel’, 880 and notes 6 and 7. George was later to convey Mary’s importance to the paper in a letter to the Duke of Mar: ‘in prison, when sick and in bed unable to wield a pen, I caused my wife to write by me, and when shut up from the sigh or hearing of mankind other than the jailers, I caused them by my wife’s means, unknown to themselves, to fetch and carry my papers’. See: HMC Stuart VI, p. 551. ‘Trial of Isaac Dalton for Seditious Libel, 1 May 1717’, Old Bailey Online, t17170501–54. Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, Royal Stuart MS 131/46, Petition of George Flint, quoted in Paul Chapman, ‘George Flint’, ODNB. Secret History, p. 18 (6 June 1716). For the Countess of Berkeley’s son, reported in Robin’s Last Shift (25 February 1716), p. 12, see also British Weekly Mercury, 556 (15–22 February 1716), and Weekly Packet, 190 (18–24 February 1716). For Brudenell being master of the Jewel Office, reported in Robin’s Last Shift (10 March 1716), p. 23, there are identical reports in The Weekly Packet (3–10 March 1716) and The Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (10 March 1716). John Cotton’s appointment and the Duchess of Portsmouth’s travel delay, discussed in Robin’s Last Shift (17 March 1716), p. 30, are both covered in The British Weekly Mercury, 560 (14–21 March 1716). Robin’s Last Shift (10 March 1716), p. 24. The Weekly Packet for 3–10 March 1716 contains a nearly identical passage. Margaret Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion: Preventing and Punishing Insurrection in Early Hanoverian Britain (Aldershot, 2005), esp. pp. 29–38. The other papers in the Burney Collection most likely to contain news about prisoners were The Weekly Packet and The Weekly Journal, or British Gazeteer. Flying Post (15–17 March 1716). British Weekly Mercury, 560 (14–21 March 1716). Weekly Journal or British Gazeteer (17 March 1716), p. 303. Weekly Packet (10–17 March 1716). Shift Shifted (17 March 1716), p. 30. Shift Shifted (19 May 1716), pp. 16–17. Robin’s Last Shift (3 March 1716), p. 17. 227

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 227

26/02/2020 08:57

Connecting centre and locality 37 Francia is discussed in Shift Shifted (18 August 1716), p. 94; there is also a poem to him printed in the 30 June issue, p. 52. For ‘honest George’ the High Church Cobbler, see Robin’s Last Shift (7 April 1716), p. 48. 38 Shift Shifted (18 August 1716), p. 94. The gender politics of the passage about Dalton’s sister are discussed in Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street (Oxford, 1998), pp. 108–9. Mary Flint was closely confined by Townsend’s warrant on 25 July 1716, making it likely that Flint is referring to her. 39 Robin’s Last Shift (7 April 1716), p. 47. 40 Robin’s Last Shift (17 March 1716), p. 30. 41 Shift Shifted (5 May 1716), p. 5. 42 Ibid., p. 6. 43 Shift Shifted (23 June 1716), p. 47. 44 Shift Shifted (4 August 1716), p. 81. 45 Shift Shifted (5 May 1716), pp. 4–5. I have not found any other contemporary publication that did this. 46 Shift Shifted (16 June 1716), p. 41. 47 Shift Shifted (23 June 1716), p. 46. 48 Tim Wales, ‘Rewse, Bodenham (d.1725)’, ODNB. 49 Shift Shifted (7 April 1716), p. 47. 50 Shift Shifted (30 June 1716), p. 32. 51 See, for example, ‘Newgate Diary of Carleton Smith’, covering Friday 19 April­ – ­Monday 22 April 1717. 52 TNA, SP 35/8/97, ‘Examination of Bodenham Rouse’, 30 March 1717.

228

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 228

26/02/2020 08:57

Index

-

Abbot, George, Archbishop of Canterbury 35, 70 Abbots Salford, Warwickshire 121 Abbott, Robert 97 Adam, Ferdinando 75–6, 82, 85, 86, 91n.43 Adlam, William 136, 137, 140, 151, 153, 155nn.12, 16 Advise to the Freeholders 216 Agreement of the People, An 133 Alcester, Warwickshire 117 Aldobrandini, Pietro 72 Alexander, James 215 Alford, Edward 26, 27 Althea (ship) 59 Amsterdam 205 Anabaptists 140, 146 Anderson, Sir Henry 51, 55 Andrewes, Lancelot, Bishop of Winchester 35, 78 Angers, France 203 Anjou, France 203 Annesley, Arthur 179 Antelope (ship) 59 Apsley, Sir Allen 44, 59 Ashburn, John 75, 76, 77, 78 Ashley, Thurston 83 Aston, Sir Thomas 11 Atherstone, Warwickshire 117, 128 Atkin, Thomas 100 Atkins, Edward 123 Austro-Turkish war (1663–64) 197 Axtell, Daniel 178

Aylesbury, Thomas 88–9 Aylmer, John, Bishop of London 31 Baddison, John 76, 79, 91n.44 Baldero, Edmund 87 Baldwyn, Richard 84 Bancroft, Richard, Bishop of London 69 Bankes, Sir John 89 Bankes, Thomas 25 Barbados 186, 187 Barker, John 128 Barnstaple, Devon 47, 51 Barrington family 105 Barrington, Sir John 102 Barry, Jonathan 161 Bartley, John 162, 164–5 Bateman, Robert 52, 53, 54 Batten, John 104 Baynes, Adam 102 Beard, Nicolas 76, 77, 82, 85 Beaumont, Thomas 105 Beaver, Dan 7, 12 Bedle, Nathaniel 104 Beecher, Sir William 53 Bellany, Alastair 2 Bencoolen, Sumatra 187 Beresford, Maurice 38 Berkshire 104 Bertie, Robert, 14th Baron Willoughby of Eresby 45, 63 Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland 100, 193 Betham, Ursula 121, 123 Bill, John 36 229

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 229

26/02/2020 08:57

Index Binton, Warwickshire 128 Birkenhead, John 203 Birmingham, Warwickshire 128 Blatchly, John 69 Blomfield, John 83 Blynman, Richard 168–9 Bodin, Jean 68 Bolton, Robert 30 Bonadventure (ship) 56 Book of Martyrs 9 Book of Orders (1631) 88 Boothby, Sir William 105–6 Bordeaux, France 204 Borne, John 36 Bosvile, Godfrey 125 Botair (Bottair), Archibald 210 Boughton, Richard 99, 101 Boughton, Thomas 124 Bourchier, Henry, 5th Earl of Bath 97 Boyle, Richard, 1st Earl of Cork 97, 103 Braddick, Michael J. 5, 8, 175–6, 187 Bragge, Elizabeth 34 Brent, Sir Nathaniel 67, 73, 74, 80, 91n.43 Bridges, John 123–4 Brief Note of the Benefits that grow …by the observation of Fish-Dayes 24 Bristol 7, 48, 59, 101, 104, 135, 141–4, 197, 199 Britannia 193–4 British Mercury, The 218 Brooke, Christopher 51 Broughton, Northamptonshire 30 Brown, Daniel 108 Browne, David 158 Browning, John 30 Brudenell, George, 3rd Earl of Cardigan 217 Bruen, Obadiah 168–9 Brundell, James 217 Brussels 49 Buckland Monachorum, Devon 35 Burrough, Edward 141 Burton, Henry 30, 85 Burton, John 117, 123, 129 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk 76 Bushell, Thomas 104 Butler, George 186 Bynum, Caroline Walker 39n.4 Bysshe, Edward 51

Cadiz, Spain 45, 48, 50, 51, 55 Cage, William 53, 55, 80 Calais, France 56 Calamy, Edmund 76 Calligraphia 158 Calvert, Sir George 26 Cambridge 69, 161, 165, 188 Jesus College 87 Pembroke College 78, 79, 87 Queens’ College 71 St Mary the Less 34 Camden, William 35 Campbell, John, 2nd Duke of Argyll 219 Candia, Crete 204–5 Canterbury, Kent 39n.5 Carleton, Sir Dudley 45, 46 Cary, Henry, 1st Viscount Falkland 36 Cave, Thomas 73 Cavendish, William, 3rd Earl of Devonshire 97 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 28, 29, 36, 37 Chamberlain, John 35 Chancery, court of 32 Charles I 24, 32, 44, 45, 47, 48, 72, 73, 78, 79, 82, 86, 87, 88, 89, 133, 134, 137–8, 143, 145, 146, 162, 166, 176, 194 Charles II 33, 177, 194, 200 Chaunterell, John 36 Cheesman, Christopher 104 Cheltenham, Gloucestershire 163 Cheshire 4, 5, 6, 51, 122 Cheshunt, Hertfordshire 35 Chester, Cheshire 32, 221, 222, 225 Chichester, Sussex 69 Chippenham, Wiltshire 137, 138 Chiswell, Richard 105, 106 Chitterne, Wiltshire 137 Christchurch, Dorset 51 Christians Daily Walke, The 30 Cirencester, Gloucestershire 166, 169 Clarges, Thomas 97 Clark, Peter 5 Clarke, Elizabeth 85 Clarke, William 85 Clifton, Alice 200 Clubmen 103 Coale from the Altar 86 Codrington, Christopher 186 Coffin, Richard 94, 106, 107, 108 Coffman, D’Maris 130n.15

230

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 230

26/02/2020 08:57

Index Cogswell, Thomas 3, 5, 6, 14 Coke, Sir Edward 27, 47 Coke, George, Bishop of Hereford 104–5 Coke, Sir John 47, 48, 53 Colchester, Essex 8 Cole, Jeremy 85 Cole, John 85 Collection of Private Devotions 30–1 Coller, William 141, 142 Collinson, Patrick 66 Como, David 15 Compleat Gentlemen, The 203 Conocke, Joan 34 Constant Reformation (ship) 50, 59 Conway, Edward, 1st Viscount 54 Coote, Charles 178, 179–80, 184, 190nn.27–8 Corbet, Clement 67, 73, 76, 80, 81, 87 Corbet, Richard, Bishop of Norwich 71, 73, 74 Cork (ship) 57 Cornwall 50, 51 Cort, Thomas 36 Coryton, William 51, 53 Cosin, John, Bishop of Durham 30 Cotton, John 217 Council of State 25, 102, 103, 176–8, 186 Council of War 47, 52, 62 Courthope, Peter 35 Courtnall, Philip 83–4, 86 Coventry, Warwickshire 117, 121, 123–9 Cox, John 97 Cox, Nathaniel 186 Crane, Sir Robert 53 Cranfield, Lionel, 1st Earl of Middlesex 35 Cressy, David 10 Crockerton, Wiltshire 137 Cromwell, Henry 102, 182 Cromwell, Oliver 97, 108, 175–7, 179, 183 Crowch, Richard 136, 137, 151, 152, 153, 155n.12 Crymes, William 35 Cunningham, John 189n.12 Cust, Richard 3, 6, 10 Cutler, Elizabeth 79 Cutler, Thomas 72, 78–9, 81, 82 Dade, Henry 71–2, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 86, 91n.43 Dalton, Isaac 215, 216, 220

Dalton, Mary 216 Damnet, Thomas 46 Darcy, Lady Elizabeth 195 Dartmouth, Devon 51 Davenport, William 5 Davys, Matthew 195 Day, Edmund 76, 86 Deal, Kent 59 Dean, David 29 Deane, Thomas 97 Delbridge, John 46, 51, 55 Derbyshire 7, 104 Description of England 33 Desire (ship) 57 Devereux, Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex 31 Devereux, Robert, 3rd Earl of Essex 35, 97, 127, 128 Devon 106 Digges, Sir Dudley 26, 51, 54 Dillingham, John 103, 104, 113n.51 Disbrowe, John 147 Diss, Norfolk 34 Dorchester, Dorset 6 Dorset 103 Dort, Synod of 29 Dover, Kent 49, 51, 58 Drayton, George 128 Drayton, John 128 Drayton, Ralph 117 Dubancks, William 179 Dublin 13, 176–84, 187 Duncon, Eleazar 87 Duncon, John 83, 87 Dunkirk, France 14, ch.3 passim Dwyer, Connor McShane 185 Dwyer, Donoagh 185 Dyer, George 136, 137, 152, 155n.12, 156n.40 Dyos, William 100 Dyott, Richard 29 Eales, Jackie 4, 6 Eastern Association 121, 122 Eastlowe, George 84 Eccleston, William 99 Eden, Thomas 81 Edgehill, Battle of (1642) 128 Edinburgh 176 Edward VI 23, 34, 35 Edwards, Thomas 104 Egloskerry, Somerset 34 Eliot, Sir John 27, 48, 51, 53 231

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 231

26/02/2020 08:57

Index Elizabeth I 24, 31, 35, 46, 50, 51, 53, 54 Elton, G.R. 7, 28, 29 Ely, Cambridgeshire 88 Erle, Sir Walter 51, 53 Erskine, John, 2nd Earl of Mar 35 Erswicke, John 25 Espernace (ship) 57 Essex 58, 88 Evelyn, Sir John 51 Everitt, Alan 3–4, 6 Evesham, Worcestershire 98 Exchequer, court of 24, 26, 27, 80, 89 Exeter, Devon 25, 51 Eyre, Thomas 136, 137, 138, 143, 150, 152, 153 Eyre, William 136, 139, 146, 147–8, 149, 150 Fairfax, Thomas, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron 134 Falcon (ship) 57 Farnese, Alexander, Duke of Parma 45 Farqharson, Peter 225n.4 Featley, Daniel 30 Fenton, Roger 34 Ferriman, Bartholemew 105 Fiennes, William, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele 96, 97 Finch, Heneage, 3rd Earl of Winchilsea 199 Fitzjames, John 104 Flanders 46, 48, 58 Fleetwood, Charles 183 Fletcher, Anthony 4, 157, 161 Flint, George ch.11 passim Flint, Mary 216, 227n.22, 228n.38 Flying Post 218 Forced Loan 10 Fortune (ship) 57 Foster, Thomas 87 Fowey, Cornwall 100 Fox, Adam 2 Fox, Luke 56 Foxe, John 9, 77, 106 Francia, Francis 211, 220, 228n.37 French Gazette 204 Frippe, Edward 136, 151, 152, 153, 155n.12 Gailhard, Jean 200, 202–3 Galilei, Galileo 195 Gangraena 104 Garthwait, Thomas 69, 72

Geast, Giles ch.8 passim Geast, William 87–8 George I 213, 220 George, The (ship) 204 Gifford, George 57 Glanville, John 55 Gloucester, Gloucestershire 7, 100 Gloucestershire 12, 35, 88, 209, ch.8 passim Goad, Thomas 81, 82, 83 Goody, Jack 158 Gookin, Vincent 102 Gouge, William 30 Gough, Richard 170–1n.6 Gouleney (Gouldney), Adam 136, 137, 140, 142, 152, 153, 154, 155n.12 Grantham, Lincolnshire 68 Grantham, Sir Thomas 51 Great Yarmouth, Norfolk 6, 28, 29, 46, 49, 53, 55, 59, 74, 100 Greathead, Major 100 Greene, Giles 51, 52, 55 Greene, Nicholas 136, 143, 148, 149, 150, 153, 155 Greswold, Henry 121, 123, 129 Greville, Robert, 2nd Lord Brooke 97, 123 Grosvenor, Sir Richard 4–5 Grosvenor, Thomas 51 Hacket, John, Bishop of Lichfield 202 Hague, The 48, 50 Hakewill, George 36 Hamburg 102, 204 Hampshire 137, 147 Handmaid to Private Devotion, The 30 Harris, John 60 Harrison, William 33 Harris, Tim 3 Harsnett, Samuel, Bishop of Norwich 69–70, 78, 80 Hartlebury, Worcestershire 117 Hartlib Jr, Samuel 100, 101 Harwich, Essex 59 Hastings, Ferdinando, 6th Earl of Huntingdon 195 Hastings, Theophilus, 7th Earl of Huntingdon 15, ch.10 passim Haveland, William 102 Haverill, Suffolk 80 Haynes, John 51 Heathcote, William 215

232

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 232

26/02/2020 08:57

Index Hector (ship) 59 Heely (Hely), James 136, 150, 151, 153 Henri IV of France 4 Henrietta Maria, Queen 47 Henry VIII 22, 23 Herbert, William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke 61 Hereford, Herefordshire 116–17, 129n.1 Herefordshire 4, 116–17, 126, 129n.1 Heylyn, Peter 80, 92n.77 Heyman, Peter 53, 55 Heytesbury, Wiltshire 137 High Commission, court of 67 Hill, Christopher 4 Hill, Miles 116, 117, 126, 129n.1 Hill, William 167 Hindle, Steve 8, 11, 138, 175–6, 187 Hippesley, Sir John 49, 56 History of the Late Rebellion, The 211 History of the Press-Yard, The 211–12, 214 Hobbes, Thomas 68 Hoby, Sir Thomas 27, 51 Holland, Richard 83 Hollingbourne, Kent 34 Holmes, Clive 4 Holton, Henry 84 Hooker, John 25 Hopper, Andrew 6 Howard, Charles, 2nd Lord Howard of Effingham 31 Howard, Sir Francis 56 Howgill, Francis 141 Hubbard, William 77, 87 Hughes, Ann 4, 10, 12, 13, 14 Hughes, John 41n.62 Hull, Yorkshire 48, 53, 59, 103 Hunt, William 4 Hunton, Robert 26 Hurt, William 215 Hyde, Edward, 1st Earl of Clarendon 101 Hyland, P.J.B. 215–16 Iceland 28, 59 Île de Ré, France 63 Ipswich, Suffolk 13, 14, 53, ch.4 passim St Clement 74, 75, 76, 79 St Helen 73, 74, 76 St Lawrence 69, 76, 78 St Mary Key 79 St Mary-le-Tower 67, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 84, 87 St Mary Stoke 79, 87

St Matthew 73–4, 87 St Nicholas 74, 76, 83, 84, 87 St Peter 74, 76, 79, 83, 84, 85 St Stephen 74, 77, 78, 84 Ireland 12, 13, 28, 46, 48, 55, 59, ch.9 passim, 197 Isabella of Austria, Archduchess 46 Isham, Sir Justinian 97 Islington, Middlesex 36 James I 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 35, 45, 46, 47, 54, 70, 166, 182 James, J. 136, 152 James, William 33 Jaques, Gervase 200–2 Jeake, Samuel 124 Jegon, John, Bishop of Norwich 69, 71, 77, 80 Jermyn, Henry 89 Jesson, Sir William 202 Jessop, William 97 Jones, Sir Francis 41n.62 Jones, Theophilus 178 Kelsey, Sean 145 Kent 34, 56 Kent, Joan 8 Kerrington, William 76, 82, 83 Keyte, Lott 121 Kings Cliffe, Northamptonshire 122 Kirke, George 89 Kirton, Edward 50, 51 Knights, Mark 3 Kyle, Chris 12, 13 Kynaston, Andrew 101 Kynaston, Sir Francis 61 L’Estrange, Roger 203 Lake, Peter 3, 5, 6, 11, 78 Lambert, John 102 Lancashire 99 Langley Burrell, Wiltshire 140–1 Langley, John 103 Langstone, Anthony 97–8 Lany, Benjamin 79 Lany, John 78–9, 81 Lapthorne, Richard 94, 96, 106, 107, 108 La Rochelle, France 44, 50, 51, 60, 61 Lathburie, John 128 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury 13, 31, 35, ch.4 passim 233

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 233

26/02/2020 08:57

Index Lawrence, Richard 178 Lee, Cromwell 33 Leeds, Yorkshire 100 Leghorn (Livorno) 204–5 Leicester, Leicestershire 36, 100 Leicestershire 195, 201, 202 Leith, Scotland 103 Leonard, Anne 216 Levant 28 Levellers 15, 16, 101, ch.7 passim Leveson, Sir Richard 103 Levine, David 7 Ley, James, 1st Earl of Marlborough 55, 59 Life and Death of the Piper of Kilbarchan, The 213 Lilburne, Ann 102 Lilburne, John 103, 133–4, 137, 140, 142, 145, 146–7 Lincoln, Lincolnshire 51 Lincolnshire 68 Lindsay, Alexander, 2nd Lord Balcarres 186 Lindsell, Samuel 34 Lister, John 48, 53, 54 Littleton, Sir Edward 35 Livesey, Michael 96 London 1, 4, 13, 14, 15, 16, 24–9, 31–3, 35, 37, 38, 44, 47, 52, 53, 67, 69, 71, 78, 80, 86, 88, 89, ch.5 passim, 116, 122–7, 133, 134, 135, 138, 140–5, 175, 176–7, 178, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 193–5, 197–205, ch.11 passim Bakers’ Company 101 Brewers’ Company 101 Clement’s Inn 97 Clerkenwell 36 Clifford’s Inn 101 Clothworkers’ Company 101 East India Company 186–7 Fishmongers’ Company 25, 28, 32 Fleet prison 210 Haberdashers’ Hall 102 Inner Temple 100, 101 Marshalsea prison 57–8, 210 Middle Temple 100 Newgate prison 15, ch.11 passim St Giles Cripplegate 140 St Michael Cornhill 34 St Paul’s Cathedral 210 London Gazette 104, 194, 203

Londonderry, Ireland 96 Long Lawford, Warwickshire 122, 123 Long, John 135, 136 Lorraine 197 Lorrain, Paul 214, 215 Lostwithiel, Cornwall 51 Louis XIII of France 46, 50 Love, Sir Thomas 58 Lowther family 105 Ludlow, Edmund 142, 144, 146, 149, 150, 151, 178 Ludlow, Sir Henry 136, 149 Ludlow, William 136, 137, 142–3, 149, 150, 153 Lyme Regis, Dorset 51 Lynne, William 97 Lyvessey, Gabriele 34 Mabbott, Gilbert 102, 103 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 69 Maddison, William 100–1 Madrid 205 Mansell, Sir Robert 47, 50–1, 52, 53–4 Mansfelt, Peter Ernst, Count of 45 Mapletoft, Edmund 77 Maria, Infanta of Spain 58 Maria (ship) 25 Markham, Mary 33 Marlborough, Wiltshire 50, 143 Marsh, Robert 100 Marten, Henry 97 Marten, Sir Henry 56 Mary I 76, 86 Mason, Henry 30 Mathew, Roger 51 Maxey, Northamptonshire 121 May, Thomas 134 Mayo, John 30 McMahon, Sean 179 Mendlove, William 36 Merchant Adventurers, Newcastle 101 Merriweather (Meriweather; Mereweather), Christopher 136, 137, 151, 153, 155n.12 Micklethwaite, Paul 73 Middlesex 33, 36, 99 Midland Revolt (1607) 11 Mildmay, Sir Henry 48 Millstone, Noah 12, 13, 14 Milton Sr, John 97 Monck, George 97

234

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 234

26/02/2020 08:57

Index Montagu, Edward, 1st Baron Montagu of Boughton 103 Montagu, Sir Edward 26 Montague, Edward, 2nd Earl of Manchester 122 Moore, Giles 105 More, Sir George 51 Morley, Harbert 100 Morley, John 105 Morrill, John 4, 66 Mosse, Clement 100 Mountjoy, William 136, 152, 154 Muddiman, Henry 203–4 Muldrew, Craig 119 Murray, James, 2nd Earl of Annandale 179 Murray, Molly 215 Myniken (ship) 57 Nash, Gawin 87 Neate, Thomas 136, 137, 140, 153–4, 155n.12 Needham, Marchamont 132n.41 Neile, Richard 78 Newark, Nottinghamshire 26 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland 50, 51, 67, 100 New England 12, 72, ch.8 passim Newes from Ipswich 86 Newfoundland 28 Newman, Karen 120, 121 Newmarket, Suffolk 79 New Model Army 96, 101, 126, 145 Newport, Cornwall 48 Nicholas, Sir Edward 35, 45 Noddel, Daniel 103, 104 Norfolk 53, 71 North Curry, Somerset 34 Northamptonshire 120, 121 Norwich, Norfolk ch.4 passim, 100 Noy, William 89 Nunnelley, Richard 99 O’Derrig (O’Derrick), Donogh 174 O’Neill, Lindsay 14 Ogilby, John 183, 194 Orange, Frederick Henry, Prince of 48–9, 50 Orange, Maurice, Prince of 44 Orlin, Lena 118 Orme, Robert 215 Ostend, Flanders 46, 48

Overall, John, Bishop of Norwich 69 Over, Cheshire 128 Overton, Richard 140, 144 Oxburgh, Henry 219 Oxford, Oxfordshire 50, 53, 55, 84, 174 Oxfordshire 134 Palmer, Sir Henry 49–50, 56, 58, 60 Paris 204–5 Parker, Henry 102 Parkins, George 100 Parliament 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 22, 25–9, 32, 35, 37, ch.3 passim, 70, 83, 88, 96, 97, 99–104, 106, 107, 109, 116, 118, 123–9, 133–7, 142–8, 150, 157, 166, 176–8, 197, 197, 200, 201, 203–5 Parsley, Edward 82–3, 85 Pawley, Robert 25 Peacey, Jason 14, 15 Pearson, John 71, 74 Pennington, Sir John 50, 59, 60 Pepys, Samuel 33 Perfect Occurrences 104 Perian, Henry 97 Perkins, Theophilus 202 Perkins, William 97, 103 Petre, Katherine, Lady Petre 34 Petre, William, 2nd Baron Petre 35 Petten, Robert 211, 225n.4 Petty, William 174–6, 181–5 Phaire, Robert 178 Phelips, Sir Robert 47 Philip III of Spain 46 Phipps, Robert 128 Phoenix (ship) 59 Piedmont 198 Pierrepont, Henry, 1st Marquess of Dorchester 196 Pincus, Steve 3 Pitts, William 212, 226n.5 Plymouth, Devon 46, 50, 59, 60 Poems of Love and Gallantry written in the Marshalsea and Newgate 212–14 Pole, Reginald, Cardinal 35 Poole, Dorset 137, 143, 147, 149 Pooler, Hugh 117 Poole, William 204 Portledge, Devon 94 Portsmouth, Hampshire 59, 62 Present Posture and Condition of Ireland, The 177 235

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 235

26/02/2020 08:57

Index Preston, Battle of (1714) 210–12, 219, 221–2 Pride’s Purge (1648) 145 Pringle, John 55 Privy Council 1, 22, 24–9, 31–5, 37, 72, 76, 87, 88, 161 proclamations 12, 13, ch.2 passim, 83, 107, 157, 205 Prosperous (ship) 57 Protestation (1641) 10 Prynne, William 14, 86, 96, 119 Putney, Surrey 127, 133 Pym, John 29, 97 Quakers 140, 141 Quatorse, or the Sorrowful Lamentation of the Preston Gentlemen in the Pressyard 213–14 Quintrell, B.W. 88 Radwinter, Essex 8 Ranters 141, 144, 147 Rashleigh, Jonathan 102, 103 Ravensthorpe, Northamptonshire 120 Raylton, William 97 Reade (Rede), John 136, 137, 138, 140, 142, 143, 147, 149, 153 Reading, Thomas 101 Redharte (ship) 56, 57 Reed, Edward 105 Reynolds, John 184 Reynolds, Matthew 70 Rich, Sir Henry, later 1st Earl of Holland 34 Rich, Robert, 2nd Earl of Warwick 25 Rich, Sir Nathaniel 27 Richardson, Simon 35 Richmond, Middlesex 53 Riddell, Sir Peter 50, 51 Ridpath, George 215 Ripon, Yorkshire 51 Rives, Thomas 89 Roberts, Stephen 6 Robin’s Last Shift 210, 215–24 Robinson, Henry 103 Roe, Thomas 128 Rohan, Benjamin de, Duc de Soubise 46 Rolle, Henry 47 Rouse, Bodenham 209, 213, 223–4 Rowington, Warwickshire 121, 123, 129 Rozer, Edmund 104 Rugby, Warwickshire 121

Rushworth, John 100–1, 102, 103 Russell, Conrad 7, 61, 66 Ruthorne, James 185 Ryan, Dermot 174 Rye, Sussex 36, 100 Rye House Plot (1683) 106 Sacks, David Harris 7 Sadleir, Thomas 178 Safeguard of Society, The 165 Saffron Walden, Essex 33 Salisbury, Wiltshire 137, 138 Salisbury Cathedral 68 Salusbury, Thomas 195–200 Sampson, Richard, Bishop of Chichester 23 Sandown, Isle of Wight 59 Sankey, Hierome 178 Sankey, Margaret 218 Sarmiento de Acuña, Diego, 1st Count of Gondomar 35 Saville family of Rufford 105 Scotland 40n.42, 49, 51, 59, ch.6 passim, 143, 162, 166, 174–7, 186, 187, 197, 210, 217, 222 Scottish Dove 126 Scott, James C. 122 Scott, Thomas 76, 77, 79, 84 Scudder, Henry 30 Seaver, Paul 160 Secret History of the Rebels in Newgate, The 211–12, 214, 216, 223 Seely, Roger 84–5 Selden, John 27 Seton, George, 5th Earl of Wintoun 219 Sexby, Edward 127 Seymour, Anne, Duchess of Somerset 35 Seymour, Sir Francis 48, 54 Sgroi, Rosemary 29 Shaftesbury, Dorset 51 Sharpe, Kevin 1, 10, 66 Shelton, John 36 Shepard, Alexandra 86, 119 Sherfield, Henry 54 Shift Shifted, The 209–10, 215–24 Ship Money 5 Shoesmith, Urien 26 Short, Thomas 104 Shrewsbury, Shropshire 168 Skinner, Jonathan 72, 83–4 Sleigh, Sir Samuel 202 Smith, Alfred Hassell 4

236

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 236

26/02/2020 08:57

Index Smith, Carleton 211–12, 214, 224, 225–6n.5 Smyth, Adam 120 Smyth, John 97 Somerset 4, 5, 88 South, Walter 136, 139, 147 Southwark Lambeth Palace 72 St Mary Newington 34 Speccot, Paul 34 Spencer, Dorothy, Countess of Sunderland 126 Spinola, Ambrogio, 1st Marquess of Balbases 46, 53 Sprigge, Basil 100 St George (ship) 56, 57, 59 St Germains, Cornwall 51 St Helena 186–7 St James (ship) 57 St Peter (ship) 57 Stacie, William 100 Standish, John 34 Stanhope, Charles, 2nd Baron 104 Stanhope, Philip, 2nd Earl of Chesterfield 202 Stansby, Robert 77 Star Chamber, court of 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 80, 87 Stephens, John 136, 137, 152 Stokes, Edward 136, 140–4, 149, 150, 153, 155n.12, 156nn.29, 38 Strangways, Sir John 51 Stuart, James Francis Edward, prince of Wales (James III and VIII) 214 Sudbury, Suffolk 81 Suffolk 53, 61–2, 68, 71, 73, 78, 88, 89 Surrey 51 Sussex 4, 99, 105, 124, 127 Swaine, Bennet 136, 150, 151, 152–3 Swallowfield, Wiltshire 9 Swift, John 26 Talbot, Francis, 5th Earl of Shrewsbury 33 Talbott, William 104 Tangiers 197 Taylor, John (poet) 38 Teeton, Northamptonshire 120 Terling, Essex 7 Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire 51, 159, 160, 163–5 Thirsk, Joan 6

Thomas, Richard 105 Thomason, George 116, 126 Threefold Treatise 30 Thrift, Nigel 160 Tilly, Charles 175 Timolin, Co. Kildare 174 Tomkins, Nathaniel 51 Toulson, Robert 34 Townsend, Charles, 2nd Viscount 220 Trapnel, Anna 127 Treffry, Thomas 100 Tripoli 204 Triumph (ship) 62 True and Impartial Account of the Arraignment, Tryal… of Col. James Turner, A 198 Truro, Cornwall 47 Tuke, Sir Brian 36 Tunstall, William 212, 214 Turner, James 198 Turner, Samuel 51, 53 Tytherton Lucas, Wiltshire 140, 141 Underdown, David 4, 5, 6, 135, 138, 141 Vanderberg, Nicholas 58 Venice 197, 204 Vienna 204–5 Villiers, George, 1st Duke of Buckingham 14, ch.3 passim, 85, 166 Wales 31, 134, 175 Walford, John 126 Waller, Hardress 178, 184 Waller Plot (1643) 97 Waller, Sir William 123 Wallington, Nehemiah 160 Walmer, Kent 59 Walsingham, Sir Francis 31 Walter, John 10, 11, 129 Walwyn, William 144 Wandesford, Sir Christopher 53 Wansey, Henry 142 Wansey, Thomas 136, 137–8, 142, 143, 147, 152 Ward, John 121 Ward, Samuel 12, 13, 67, 69, 70, 71–3, 75, 76 Waring, Thomas 184 Warminster, Wiltshire 137, 138, 142 Warner, Edward 35 237

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 237

26/02/2020 08:57

Index Warr, John 102, 103 Warren, Thomas 76, 82 Warwick, Warwickshire 122, 123, 125, 127, 128 Warwickshire 4, 10, ch.6 passim, 209 Watt, Tessa 2 Watts, Joseph 105–6 Webb, Thomas 123 Webbe, Thomas 141, 142, 144, 147, 153, 155nn.22, 23, 156n.38 Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer 218 Weekly Packet 217, 218 Weekly Remarks 215 Weil, Rachel 15 Wells, Jennifer 12, 13 Wentworth, Thomas, 4th Baron 34 Wentworth, Thomas, 1st Earl of Strafford 97 West, Edward 99 Westminster 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 24, 37, 47, 67, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 104, 109, 123, 124, 126, 134, 136, 142, 143, 144, 176–8, 182, 193, 222 Weston, Sir Richard 53 Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, Dorset 51, 52 Wharton, Nehemiah 126 Whitby, Edward 50 White, Robert 25 White, Henry 136, 140, 141, 147, 153, 155nn.12, 22, 23 White, Mary 141 Whitehall 1, 4, 5, 12, 13, 37, 56, 96, 97, 109, 177, 179, 182 Whitehead, Henry 51–2

Whitelocke, Bulstrode 104 Whittingham, Hills 104 Whitton, George 101 Whole-Armor of God, The 30 Wibtoft, Warwickshire 120 Wilcox, Robert 125 Wildbore, John 122, 127–8, 129 Wilde, John 55 Wilden Ferry, Leicestershire 198 Wildman, John 101, 102, 103, 144 Willet, Andrew 30 Williams, John, Bishop of Lincoln 70 Wilson, Rowland 123, 124 Wilton, Wiltshire 51 Wiltshire 15, 48, ch.7 passim Wiltshire Rant, The 140–2 Winchester, Hampshire 51 Wingfield, Sir Anthony 81 Winstanley, Gerrard 127 Witham, John 78 Withington, Phil 2, 7, 8, 161, 172n.28 Withypoll, William 87 Wogan, Charles 212, 214 Wood, Andy 2, 7, 11 Worcester, Worcestershire 166 Worcestershire 117, 126 Worsley, Benjamin 182–3, 184 Worster, William 128 Wren, Matthew, Bishop of Norwich 13, ch.4 passim Wrightson, Keith 2, 6, 7, 8 Yelverton, Sir Henry 29 York, Yorkshire 7, 25, 51, 56, 122, 193 Younger, Neil 10

238

KYLE 9781526147158 PRINT.indd 238

26/02/2020 08:57