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Insolent proceedings
POLITICS, CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN
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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: Preaching, polemic and Restoration nonconformity David J. Appleby Insular Christianity: Alternative models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1570–c.1700 Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó Hannrachain (eds) Reading and politics in early modern England: The mental world of a seventeenth-century Catholic gentleman 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: John Toland and the crisis of Christian culture, 1696–1722 Justin Champion News and rumour in Jacobean England: Information, court politics and diplomacy, 1618–25 David Coast This England: Essays on the English nation and Commonwealth in the sixteenth century Patrick Collinson
Gentry culture and the politics of religion: Cheshire on the eve of civil war Richard Cust and Peter Lake 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) Civil war London: Mobilising for parliament, 1641–5 Jordan S. Downs
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Brave community John Gurney Revolutionizing politics: Culture and conflict in England, 1620–60 Paul D. Halliday, Eleanor Hubbard and Scott Sowerby (eds) ‘Black Tom’ Andrew Hopper Reformation without end: Religion, politics and the past in post-revolutionary England Robert G. Ingram Freedom of speech, 1500–1850 Robert G. Ingram, Jason Peacey and Alex W. Barber (eds) Connecting centre and locality: Political communication in early modern England Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey (eds) 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 London Presbyterians and the British revolutions, 1638–64 Elliot Vernon 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.
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Insolent proceedings Rethinking public politics in the English Revolution Essays in honour of Ann Hughes Edited by
Peter Lake and Jason Peacey
Manchester University Press
Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022
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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 Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL 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 6500 8 hardback First published 2022 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.
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Contents
Notes on contributors Preface:Ann Hughes as historian, friend and mentor – Peter Lake List of abbreviations Note on conventions
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Introduction: rethinking public politics in the English Revolution – Peter Lake and Jason Peacey 1 ‘Great conformitants’ and ‘right ambidexters’: puritans, conformity and the challenge of Laudianism – Anthony Milton 2 Killing (Catholic) officers no crime? The politics of religious violence in England in 1640 – John Walter 3 Anatomy of the General Rising: militancy and mobilisation in London, 1643 – David Como 4 ‘In the hollow of his wooden leg’: the transmission of civil war materials, 1642–9 – Karen Britland 5 Puritanism, parish and polemic in civil war London: the case of Thomas Bakewell – Elliot Vernon 6 William Walwyn’s Montaigne and the struggle for toleration in the English Revolution – David Loewenstein 7 An accursed family: the Scottish crisis and the Black Legend of the House of Stuart, 1650–2 – Thomas Cogswell 8 Indemnity, sovereignty and justice in the army debates of 1647 – Sean Kelsey 9 Milton and Winstanley: a conversation – Thomas N. Corns 10 Women, print and locality: Richard Culmer and the practices of polemic during the English Revolution – Jason Peacey 11 ‘Threshing among the people’: Ranters, Quakers and the revolutionary public sphere – Kate Peters
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Index
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1 22 47 69 88
133 148 166 184 198 225
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Karen Britland is Halls-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (2009), and has edited editions of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (2020), John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (2018) and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (2010). With Line Cottegnies, she edited Henry V: Continuum Renaissance Drama (2010), and she was also an associate editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (2012). She is currently working on a book about clandestine writing in the English Revolution. Thomas Cogswell is Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (1989); Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State and Provincial Conflict (1998); and James I: The Phoenix King (2017). With Alastair Bellany he published The Murder of King James I (2015), and with Richard Cust and Peter Lake he edited Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (2011). He is currently writing books about early Stuart elections and a dual biography of the Duke of Buckingham and his assassin, John Felton. David Como is Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (2004) and Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (2018), which won the 2019 Samuel Pepys Award. His many articles include: ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London’ (with Peter Lake, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 1999); ‘“Orthodoxy” and its discontents: dispute settlement and the production of “consensus” in the London (Puritan) “underground”’ (with Peter Lake, Journal of British Studies, 2000); ‘Predestination and political conflict in Laud’s London’ (Historical Journal, 2003); and ‘Secret printing, the crisis of 1640, and the origins of Civil War radicalism’ (Past & Present, 2007).
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Thomas N. Corns is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Bangor University. His recent publications include: Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (with Gordon Campbell, John K. Hale and Fiona J. Tweedie, 2007); A History of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (2007); John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (with Gordon Campbell, 2008); and he edited A New Companion to Milton (2016). He edited The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (with Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein, 2009); The Milton Encyclopedia (2012); and Milton and Catholicism (with Ronald Corthell, 2017). With Gordon Campbell, he is the general editor of The Complete Works of John Milton (2008–). He is an Honoured Scholar of the Milton Society of America, a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society and a Foundation Fellow of the English Association. His current projects include editing Paradise Lost for The Complete Works… (with David Loewenstein). Sean Kelsey is a Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Buckingham. He is the author of Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (1997), the first book in the series in which this present volume appears. His many articles include: ‘Staging the trial of Charles I’, in Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (2001); ‘The death of Charles I’ (Historical Journal, 2002); ‘The trial of Charles I’ (English Historical Review, 2003); ‘“King of the sea”: the Prince of Wales and the Stuart monarchy, 1648–1649’ (History, 2007); ‘“The now king of England”: conscience, duty and the death of Charles I’ (English Historical Review, 2017); and ‘Instrumenting the trial of Charles I’ (Historical Research, 2019). Peter Lake is University Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of the History of Christianity and Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History at Vanderbilt University. His books include: Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (1982); Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (1988); The Boxmaker’s Revenge (2001); The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (2002); Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (2015); How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (2016); and Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare’s Revenge Tragedies (2020). With Steven Pincus he also edited The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (2012). David Loewenstein is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and the Humanities at Penn State- University Park. His publications include
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Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (1990); Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (2001; winner of the James Holly Hanford Award for Distinguished Book); The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (co-edited with Janel Mueller, 2002); The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (co-edited with Ann Hughes and Thomas N. Corns, 2009); Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2013); Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (co-edited with Michael Witmore, 2015); and Early Modern Literature and England’s Long Reformation (co- edited with Alison Shell, 2021). With Thomas N. Corns, he is currently editing Paradise Lost for The Complete Works of John Milton. He is an Honoured Scholar of the Milton Society of America. Anthony Milton is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. His publications include Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (1995); The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618– 1619) (2005); Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England (2007); and England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England 1625–1662 (2021). He also edited volume 1 of The Oxford History of Anglicanism (2017). He has more books up his sleeve on a variety of historical topics. Jason Peacey is Professor of Early Modern British History at UCL. He is the author of Politicians and Pamphleteers. Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (2004); Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (2013); and The Madman and the Churchrobber: Law and Conflict in Early Modern England (2022). He also edited The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (2001); The Print Culture of Parliament, 1600– 1800 (2007); and Making the British Empire, 1660–1800 (2020). With Chris R. Kyle he edited Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England (2002) and Connecting Centre and Locality: Political Communication in Early Modern England (2020). With Robert G. Ingram and Alex W. Barber he edited Freedom of Speech, 1500–1850 (2020). He is currently working on Anglo- Dutch relations in the seventeenth century. Kate Peters is a fellow and senior lecturer in History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. She graduated with a degree in History and French at the University of Manchester in 1988, and in her final year took Ann Hughes’ special subject on the Interregnum, completing a dissertation on Quaker women pamphleteers. Following an MA in Archives Administration
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at Liverpool University, she moved (on Ann Hughes’ advice) to Cambridge University to complete a PhD on early Quaker pamphleteering under Professor Patrick Collinson. Since then, she has held lectureships in History and in Records and Archives Management. She is the author of Print Culture and the Early Quakers (2005) and a number of articles on the early Quakers. She is currently working on the politics of record keeping in the English Revolution. Elliot Vernon is the author of London Presbyterians and the British Revolutions, 1638–64 (2021). With Hunter Powell he edited Church Polity and Politics in the British Atlantic World, c. 1635–66 (2020), and with Philip Baker he edited The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (2012). His other publications include: ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’ (with Philip Baker, Historical Journal, 2010); ‘A ministry of the Gospel: the Presbyterians during the English Revolution’, in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (2006); and ‘The quarrel of the covenant: the London Presbyterians and the regicide’, in Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (2001) John Walter is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Essex. He is the author of Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (1999), which won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize, and Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution (2017) which was awarded the 2017 Samuel Pepys Prize. With Steve Hindle and Alexandra Shepard he edited Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (2011), and with Michael Braddick he edited Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (2001). Many of his essays have been collected in Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (2013). His next book will be on the Tichborne Dole and its changing meaning from its medieval origins to the present day.
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Preface: Ann Hughes as historian, friend and mentor Peter Lake When asked, in the course of a job interview, what sort of historian she was, Ann replied by describing herself as a ‘bog standard political historian’. This was clearly intended –entirely typically –as an ironical remark, only ostensibly self-deprecating and to be taken on a number of levels, but it seems there were people on the interview committee stupid enough to take it literally. (There are, in my experience, always people on interview committees stupid enough to do that.) Such are the times in which we live. But it seems clear what she meant. For Ann has always been interested in politics, again at multiple levels. After all, her approach to the topic has been anything but uninflected by her own political positions and commitments, but while her history has been influenced by, perhaps even in part been motivated by, her politics, it has never been simply determined by them. Unlike many left-leaning historians of the English Revolution, indeed unlike most historians of the Revolution until recently, she has written with real insight and sympathy about royalism. Indeed, her 1985 essay in the Journal of British Studies, comparing the capacity of the authority structures of the parliamentarian and royalist causes to mediate and incorporate tensions between the local and the national, and indeed between different factions or ideological groupings, into their overall war efforts, contained one of the most important analyses of the past thirty or so years.1 But here her own politics did intervene; when told that there was a whole interpretation of royalism struggling to get out of this essay, and that she should really write a book about it, she replied that she just could not see herself devoting that much time and effort to a subject with which she felt so little sympathy. Luckily that has not entirely prevented her from working on various royalists in the succeeding years.2 However, when it came to the varieties of parliamentarianism her sympathies were remarkably catholic. An admirer, and, at a crucial stage of her career, a sort of protégé of Christopher Hill, for whose work she unfashionably (but quite rightly) retains a very high regard,3 she did not emulate Hill’s relegation of mainstream puritans and Presbyterianism to an undifferentiated ‘conservatism’ while whoring after the false gods of ‘radicalism’.
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Not that she was or is averse to radicals. Applying her own criteria here, no one would devote the years of minutely focused attention that she lavished on the edition of Gerrard Winstanley if they could not stand the fellow or see the point of his often elliptical works.4 But however great her interest in the likes of Winstanley, Ann’s abiding fascination with English Presbyterianism –centred for years on, but by no means restricted to, the fascinating, but also the, at first (and indeed second) sight, rather unsympathetic figure of Thomas Edwards –is a connecting link running through a good deal of her career. Unfashionable at the time she undertook it, as some of the contributions to this book show, that interest in Presbyterianism as an ideological nexus and political force and faction, has emerged as a growth industry in the history of the period, in no small part because of Ann’s work.5 Nor did her work on that subject remain contained within the conventional generic forms and intellectual subsets of the moment. Her book on Edwards, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution, which we take, to this point at least, to be her magnum opus, made the English Revolution look different.6 It was a book brilliant in the originality of its conception and the minutiae of its research. For someone who has been known to criticise certain of her contemporaries for being obsessed with detail, Ann herself displays many of the attributes of the truly talented fact- grubbing archival historian. But as with Gangraena, that formidable command of the sources and the narrative are always put in the service of a finely conceived and actualised set of analytic and argumentative structures. It is tempting to think of Gangraena as being at least three or four books in one. It is an analysis of London politics and the role therein of Presbyterianism; it is an analysis of religious polemic and argument of a highly sophisticated sort; it is an analysis of the relations between the centre and the localities as exemplified in and through a fine-grained analysis of just how Edwards’ book was put together, and therefore of the relationship between both Edwards and his sources and allies and his book and its readers. It took up questions and techniques from new or newish sub-disciplines like the history of the book and of reading, and bent them to the purposes of the political and religious historian, in ways that, through a sort of feedback loop, also contributed to the histories of both the book and of reading. At the most meta level, the book addressed itself to the classic revisionist dismissal of printed sources as providing no real guide to what was actually happening, and in particular to the claim, beloved of certain critics of Christopher Hill, that anything Edwards said about his enemies on ‘the left’ was so exaggerated, or indeed often so made up, that it could provide no sure ground for analysis of ‘radical’ opinion or religion during the period. Ann went straight at that proposition, deconstructing it on a number of levels. In so doing she might be thought to have been defending her mentor
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Christopher Hill. But if that was in part what she was doing, she was not doing it by merely retracing Hill’s steps, attempting to reinscribe his scholarly methods after the rude interruption of revisionist hectoring of the 1970s. On the contrary, she was breaking new ground. First by running to ground and contextualising the local sources for many of Edwards’ most incendiary stories about the horrors of Independency, and second by using the changing, unstable nature of his text in order to get at the way the Presbyterian cause constituted itself, ideologically, through accounts of its other, and, as it were, practically, through the many connections and almost dialectical interactions between the provinces and London, local opinion and print, which produced Edwards’ text in the first place and upon which that text itself had such a dramatic effect. In the process she was able to recuperate Edwards as a source for the study of his enemies and targets on the religious left in novel and interesting ways.7 The impact of that approach or rather series of approaches to political communication and print, to the interchange between, for want of a better word or words, popular and elite, local and national politics, can be seen running throughout many of the contributions to this volume. Gangraena is thus about a lot of things, and none of the things it is about is given short shrift. For a lot of reasons, some personal, to do with Ann’s domestic arrangements and other commitments –crudely put, motherhood, and helping to run various university departments –but some intrinsic to the complexity and difficulty of its multiple subjects, the book took a long time to complete. But the result is, we think, a great book and thus a testimony to the need sometimes not to respond to the immediate carrot and stick pressures of the Research Assessment Exercise /Research Excellence Framework, or of university officialdom, but to take one’s time and let the thing get finished when it is finished, and not before. But of all the many things that Gangraena is about, as its title proclaims, it is about above all else ‘the English Revolution’, that is to say it is about politics. And there is a fundamental sense that Ann always was and remains a political historian, provided we take politics in a broad enough sense. This is not something of which she is ashamed or about which she is bashful. Not that she has ever been a political historian of the bog standard high political sort; the sort of political historian whom David Sabean once described as the writer of leading articles about the politics of several hundred years ago; picking winners and losers; drawing specious comparisons between the politics of the present and the past; dealing in portentous generalisations about political ‘leadership’ or the nature of representative institutions or of parliamentary politics; distributing credit or blame across the spectrum of contemporary actors; and pontificating about whether or not the events and outcomes being described were ‘progressive’
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or ‘reactionary’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ things. If that is what is meant by a ‘bog standard political historian’, then Ann Hughes was never one of those. But if what we mean by the term –and what she presumably meant by it –is someone who always keeps events, and the struggles for and uses of various sorts of power, at the centre of her account of the period, a period defined in her case by a generous construal of the ‘revolutionary decades’, then that is exactly what she was and is. A very good thing too. At a time when the political is in the process of being displaced, even effaced, by various sorts of cultural history, and the English Revolution is in danger of being swallowed up by versions of the ‘long’, ‘the very long’, or indeed of ‘the interminable reformation’,8 these are not merely admirable attributes but a seriously good guide to how to revisit and rewrite the histories of the English Revolution in the coming years, as many as the essays collected here show. With Ann, along with a conviction that the events that she is describing, within which her various subjects found themselves, and to which they were reacting and trying to bend to their various purposes, mattered to them and thus to us as historians, you get a continuous attempt, if not to reinvent, then at least to expand and render porous the nature of politics; to keep asking and answering, again and again, the question of who counted as a political actor, and what sorts of actions might be taken to count as political. Here she consistently worried away at, problematised and sought to undercut crude dichotomies between popular and elite politics and religion. She was insistent that Presbyterianism could in certain situations and places represent a form of popular religious practice and political action; that the various attempts to establish godly reformation in the 1650s were not simply doomed to fail; that the Cromwellian church retained real resources of ideological and spiritual energy and dynamism.9 These have been central themes in Ann’s work, and although, as several contributions to this book show, she is by no means unique in this, there can be no doubt that in her work that attempt –an attempt, in effect, to keep in contact or dialogue species of political, cultural, social and religious history –has reached a consistently, indeed we are tempted to say a uniquely, high level among English early modernists. Nowhere is that more true than in her work on gender and the English Revolution. Like many of her generation, enthusiastic readers of Spare Rib and other organs of the socialist feminist left, Ann was early into the cause of women’s history. Indeed, you can find on her list of publications an article, co-authored with Karen Hunt, on ‘A culture transformed? Women’s lives in Wythenshawe in the 1930s’,10 not to mention British Women’s History: A Bibliographical Guide.11 But tellingly, within her chosen field, Ann has never really done women’s history of the classic sort. Rather, in a
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series of articles, and a book on Gender and the English Revolution, which masquerades as a sort of introduction to the topic, but which in effect helps to define and open it up, she has examined the myriad ways in which gendered identities and gender ideology shaped the personae and ideologies, the political subjecthood and agency of various actors, both women and men, and the notions of public and private, of political virtue and indeed of tyranny, of rule and misrule, in play and under contest, in the events conventionally described as the English Revolution.12 Indeed, it is tempting to conclude that her contribution on this front rivals or perhaps even exceeds in importance and potential impact that of the Gangraena book and its pendant articles. Certainly, there is plenty of room both for her and others to make hay with the insights and prompts provided in what are, it seems to me, a series of seminal articles. Just as with the Gangraena project, where she was open to the insights of historians of the book, of print and of reading, so here, in ways that almost no other political historian of the period has been, she has been in constant dialogue with the work of a series of literary scholars. Again, there is the mark of Ann’s personal political and ideological commitments and friendships, framing and shaping –but not determining, or reducing to mere feel good agitprop, or pointless virtue signalling –the course of her scholarly output. Ann’s work has always been historiographically engaged. Not for nothing was she in at the birth of ‘post-revisionism’.13 Whatever we now take that to have been, to those involved at the time it seemed like a thing; a distinct response to the challenge of revisionism, which accepted the revisionist turn to the political, as the heart of the matter, and took some of the central contentions of revisionism seriously, while vigorously disagreeing with, and sometimes rejecting, others; the aim being not to defend some sort of Hillian, Stoneian, Hexterian or even Gardinerian status quo ante, but rather to engage with, and move beyond, or rather through, revisionism to something else. What that something else would look like was not at the time entirely apparent, but the point was to push towards it though a vigorous campaign of research, argument and dialogue. It has taken the best part of thirty years but it might be thought that we are now at that other place, one in which labels like ‘revisionist’ and ‘post- revisionist’, rather than having any real purchase on the current scholarly scene, are best used to describe and analyse retrospectively the debates of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.14 But deeply engaged with that post-revisionist project as much of Ann’s work has been, it was never bounded or defined by the opinions and interpretations against which she was reacting. Nor has she ever been satisfied with simply negative conclusions. For her, critique is a matter of active, creative engagement, with the aim to end up somewhere other than where
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either side in the debate started. And so her second solo-authored article, published in Midland History, was a seminal assault on the notion of the county community, using her chosen county of Warwickshire as the means to critique the so-called localist model of English political culture.15 The result, even allowing for the peculiarities of Warwickshire –an inland county, whose boundaries were not coterminous with any coherent geographic or socio-economic unit or pays, all of which, by the way, were built into the analysis –was pretty conclusive. But this article had been preceded by another, in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, also set in Warwickshire, which saw localist sentiment used, not for classically conservative ‘localist’ purposes, i.e., to protect the county from the demands of an intrusive central authority, emanating either from King or Parliament, but rather by the earl of Denbigh’s radical parliamentarian opponents in the county, anxious to break his hold on local power in order to prosecute the civil war more aggressively in alliance with their allies at the centre.16 What emerged here was not merely a wonderfully neat inversion of the conventional account, but a dynamic model of the interaction between the centre and the localities, in which ‘localist’ arguments were a product of, and became a means of prosecuting, personal but also genuinely political, indeed in this case deeply ideological, differences. Here is the relation between the centre and localities rendered dynamically political. Localism and arguments based on a notional county interest or community have not disappeared, but, no longer rooted in the soil of whatever county we happen to be talking about, they have been located in an open-ended series of essentially political exchanges and manoeuvres, and thus rendered susceptible to genuinely historical analysis. It has been said (more than once) that Ann’s book on Warwickshire was the county study that ate itself; that is to say, after which it was no longer possible to write any more county histories, at least of the up-until-then conventional sort. That comment was clearly intended to be complimentary but when it was once put to her she did not respond altogether well, and we can well see why. For that book, which had all the virtues of the best sort of local history –a deep immersion in all of the available sources, both local and national, an intimate knowledge of the local terrain and of both the central and local political narratives –did subject the organising assumptions that underlay the standard county study to a devastating going over. But in so doing, it represented not the end but the apogee of the local study as a genre and opened up a series of possibilities for further research. It was just that after that book and its pendant articles it became impossible to write local studies based on the old assumptions about the existence and coherence of the ‘county community’, and therefore also of the hermetically sealed nature of the local sources, that up to that point,
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had animated the county study, and rendered it so perfect a vehicle for the PhD thesis. Now it is true that after the debate on localism ran out of steam, after, that is, the side represented by Ann’s work had in effect ‘won’, local history fell out of favour. But that was a function of intellectual fashion of the most meretricious sort, and of the prejudices of certain publishers.17 The old revisionist assumptions about the real history, history on the ground, history as it was lived by ‘the silent majority’, lying uniquely in the local manuscript sources, may be, if not entirely dead, then at least in serious abeyance, but long after the death of revisionist localism there remains an intellectual agenda, a series of questions about how to relate the local with the national, how to write often minutely local history in ways that contribute to wider questions and national and indeed transnational histories, without merely replicating or illustrating those histories. Recent interest in the structure and functions of the early modern English state, and indeed on the politics of public pitch making, of political communication and news mongering, even of an emergent or nascent ‘public sphere’ of sorts, have reinvigorated such concerns. And so lately that agenda has started to attract the attention of a number of scholars. Perhaps the most obvious evidence of that is a recent collection of essays edited by Jason Peacey and Chris Kyle,18 published in this series, not to mention various contributions to the present volume, and a whole slew of articles published and currently in progress by Ann herself.19 For throughout her career Ann has produced articles that use her extraordinary grasp of various local sources, to contribute to wider historical debates. Thus, in her article in Midland History on ‘indemnity proceedings and the impact of civil war’ she used her intimate knowledge of the Warwickshire materials to comment critically, indeed one could say definitively, on the topic of ‘parliamentary tyranny’, which certain historians had plucked from the realm of contemporary polemic and started to use almost as a term of art and analysis. That tendency Ann’s article cut off at the knees, and left us, once again, with a detailed and nuanced account of relations between often minute local interactions and events and the workings of central authority and the testimony and politics of certain central archives.20 (Ann’s local researches had always been as centred in the Public Record Office (now The National Archives, Kew, TNA) as they were in the Warwickshire Record Office.) Again, her deep knowledge of the Warwickshire sources and contexts allowed her to take the laconic Latin one-liners of Thomas Dugard’s diary and turn them into a vivid picture of life in a corner of Warwickshire during the Personal Rule. Only someone who knew who the people mentioned in these deeply gnomic entries were –this one Lord Brooke’s steward, that
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one someone else’s chaplain –could have deciphered the true significance of the document. Not only did the result take us inside the meetings and ruminations of the ‘junto’ in Warwick castle, providing, on the way, solid proof of the collusion between that group and the Scots, about the existence of which both contemporaries and modern historians had speculated but both been unable to prove, it also provided a vivid picture of just how far puritans like Dugard were able to go about their business throughout the Personal Rule.21 This capacity to find multum in parvo has been a feature of Ann’s career and continues in much of her current work in progress. One thinks here of her recent article using local accounts to excavate memories of the swathe cut through parts of the midlands by the Scots as they marched south during the wars.22 Again, there is a typically Hughesian meld between a meticulous knowledge of the sources and some of the most recent trends in the historiography, her interest in the dynamics of ‘memory’ and the politics of the archive. She is even threatening to take the ‘spatial turn’. Research notes often taken decades ago are being reactivated and reanimated by current concerns and new questions. There is, of course, a danger in writing introductions of this sort to sound like one is writing some sort of intellectual obituary, summing up a career that is nearing its end. Well it is true enough that some of us are more aware of the approaching hoofbeats of the grim reaper than we once were, but where there is life, there is historical research, and certainly in Ann’s case we remain in medias res. Having threatened to while away her retirement with ‘a little light research’, she is now launched into two heavily archival projects, one on the Gell family and the other on the London Presbyterian merchant Walter Boothby. Both are organised around the practice of the taking, preserving and handing on of sermon notes within certain (changing) familial and politico-religious cultures.23 Both projects combine a deep empirical itch, with a conceptual ambition and grasp that has been typical of Ann’s entire career. Both develop long-standing interests and areas of expertise with new sources and questions. We should all be able to retire like this. While blessed with an astringent turn of phrase, and an incapacity to suffer fools anything like gladly, Ann is also incredibly generous with her intelligence, her insight and her knowledge. Suffice it to say that everyone in this collection has benefitted from Ann’s work, her friendship and advice, her criticism and encouragement. As a founder of the series in which this collection appears, it is profoundly fitting that we should be able to acknowledge our debt to and affection for her in a volume published by Manchester University Press.
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Notes 1 Ann Hughes, ‘The king, the parliament and localities during the English Revolution’, JBS, 24 (1985), 236–63. 2 Ann Hughes and Julie Sanders, ‘Disruptions and evocations of family amongst Royalist exiles’, in Philip Major, ed., Literatures of Exile in the English 64; Ann Hughes, Revolution and its Aftermath (Farnham, 2010), pp. 45– ‘Gender, geography and royalism: royalists in the Low Countries in the 1650s’, in Jason McElligott and David Smith, eds, Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (Manchester, 2010), pp. 128–48. 3 Ann Hughes, ‘An English revolutionary: the work of Christopher Hill’, Socialist History, 24 (2003), 26–32. 4 Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein, eds, The Complete Works of Gerard Winstanley (2 vols, Oxford, 2009). Cf. the review by Mark Kishlansky, who clearly did dislike the fellow rather a lot: Mark Kishlansky, ‘Madd men’, London Review of Books, 33.4 (17 February 2011). 5 See Elliot Vernon, ‘A ministry of the Gospel: the Presbyterians during the English Revolution’, in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2007), pp. 115–36. 6 Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004). 7 Ann Hughes, ‘Print, persecution and polemic: Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena (1646) and Civil War sectarianism’, in Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham, eds, The Uses of Print and Script, 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 255–73. See also Ann Hughes, ‘ “Popular” Presbyterianism in the 1640s and 1650s: the cases of Thomas Edwards and Thomas Hall’, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London, 1998), pp. 235–60; Ann Hughes, ‘Religious diversity in revolutionary London’, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The English Revolution, c.1590–1720 (Manchester, 2007), pp. 111–28. 8 For Ann’s take on the confluence between these two problematics see her ‘Preaching the “Long Reformation” in the English Revolution’, Reformation, 24.2 (2019), 151–64. 9 Her concern with the connections between popular politics, religion and civil war allegiance has been a consistent theme from the outset. See here especially: ‘Local history and the origins of the Civil War’, in R. P. Cust and A. Hughes, eds, Conflict in Early Stuart England (Harlow, 1987), pp. 224–53. On the 1650s see Ann Hughes, ‘The Cromwellian church’, in Anthony Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume 1, Reformation and Identity, 1520–1662 (Oxford, 2017), pp. 444–56; Ann Hughes, ‘The frustrations of the godly’, in J. S. Morrill, ed., Revolution and Restoration; England in the 1650s (London, 1992), pp. 70–90. On Presbyterianism as a form of ‘popular religion’ see Hughes, ‘ “Popular” Presbyterianism in the 1640s and 1650s’, pp. 235–60. 10 Ann Hughes, ‘A culture transformed? Women’s lives in Wythenshawe in the 1630s’, in Andrew Davies and Steven Fielding, eds, Workers’ Worlds: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880–1939 (Manchester, 1992), pp. 74–101.
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11 Ann Hughes, British Women’s History: A Bibliographical Guide (Manchester, 1996). 12 Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon, 2012); Ann Hughes, ‘Gender and politics in Leveller literature’, in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky, eds, Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1995), pp. 162–88; Ann Hughes, ‘Men, the “public” and the “private” in the English Revolution’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, eds, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007), pp. 191–213; Ann Hughes, ‘Puritanism and gender’, in John Coffey and Paul Lim, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 294–308. Much of which work is usefully summarised and expanded in Ann Hughes, ‘“Gender trouble”: women’s agency and gender relations in the English Revolution’, in Michael Braddick, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2015), pp. 347–62. 13 See Cust and Hughes, eds, Conflict in Early Stuart England, passim but especially the introduction. 14 Anyone looking for a guide to where we are now could do worse than start with the essays collected in this volume. 15 Ann Hughes, ‘Warwickshire on the eve of the Civil War: a county community’, Midland History, 7 (1982), 42–70. 16 Ann Hughes, ‘Militancy and localism: Warwickshire politics and Westminster politics, 1643–1647’, TRHS, 5th series, 31 (1981), 51–68. 17 With notable exceptions, like Tom Cogswell’s innovative Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State and Provincial Conflict (Manchester, 1998), a study of Leicestershire centred on the lieutenancy and the attempts of the earl of Huntingdon to re-establish his local power through the lieutenancy, or Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), this was largely true for the political history of the period. But it was not at all true of the social history, where nearly all of the most notable contributions to the field have been local studies of some sort. Even Craig Muldrew’s panoramic account of The Economy of Obligation (Basingstoke, 1998) owed its origins to a study of debt litigation in King’s Lynn, while Steve Hindle’s account of The State and Social Change in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998) was similarly based on a local study of Cheshire. Even Alex Shepherd’s study of the Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003) is in origin a local study of Cambridge based on the vice-chancellor’s court records. 18 Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey, eds, Connecting Centre and Locality: Political Communication in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2020). Cf. Richard Cust and Peter Lake, Gentry Culture and the Politics of Religion: Cheshire on the Eve of Civil War (Manchester, 2020); Peter Lake, ‘Puritans, popularity and petitions: local politics in national context, Cheshire, 1641’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake, eds, Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 259–89.
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19 Ann Hughes, ‘Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts: central initiatives and local agency in the English Civil War’, in Kyle and Peacey, eds, Connecting Centre and Locality, pp. 116–32. 20 Ann Hughes, ‘Parliamentary tyranny? Indemnity proceedings and the impact of the civil war; a case study from Warwickshire’, Midland History, 11 (1986), 49–78. 21 Ann Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his circle in the 1630s –a “parliamentary– puritan” connexion?’, HJ, 29 (1986), 771–93. 22 Ann Hughes, ‘ “The accounts of the kingdom”; memory, community and the English civil wars’, in P&P, Special Supplement 11 (2016), pp. 311–29; also see Ann Hughes, ‘The Scots, the Parliament and the people: The rise of the New Model Army revisited’, in Paul D. Halliday, Eleanor Hubbard and Scott Sowerby, eds, Revolutionising Politics: Culture and Conflict in England, 1620–60 (Manchester, 2021). 23 Ann Hughes, ‘Preachers and hearers in revolutionary London: contextualising parliamentary fast sermons’, TRHS, 6th series, 24 (2014), 57–77.
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Abbreviations
A&O
C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, eds, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 (3 vols, London, 1911) Add. Additional Al. Cant. Alumni Cantabrigienses, comp. J. Venn (4 vols, Cambridge, 1922–54) BL British Library Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford CCA Canterbury Cathedral Archives CD S. R. Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 1906) CJ Commons Journals CL Canterbury Licences 1568–1646 (London, 1972) CP C. H. Firth, ed., The Clarke Papers (4 vols, Camden Society, 1899–1901) CPW Don M. Wolfe et al., eds, Complete Prose Works of John Milton (8 vols, New Haven, 1953–82) CSPD Calendar of State Papers Domestic CUL Cambridge University Library CWGW Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein, eds, The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2 vols, Oxford, 2009) DHC Devon Heritage Centre EHR English Historical Review ESTC English Short Title Catalogue FHL Friends’ House Library, London GL Guildhall Library, London Harl. Harleian HEH Huntington Library, California HJ Historical Journal HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly
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Abbreviations
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission HR Historical Research HRO Huntingdonshire Record Office JBS Journal of British Studies JEccH Journal of Ecclesiastical History JP justice of the peace KHLC Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone LJ Lords Journals LMA London Metropolitan Archives LPL Lambeth Palace Library, London MS Manuscript MSS Manuscripts ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography P&P Past and Present PA Parliamentary Archives, London PH Parliamentary History PL John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (2nd edn, London, 2013) TNA The National Archives, Kew TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society WR A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford, 1988)
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Note on conventions
Dates are given in the Old Style (Julian calendar), with the year adjusted to begin on 1 January. Unless otherwise stated, books published before 1850 were printed in London.
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Introduction: rethinking public politics in the English Revolution Peter Lake and Jason Peacey For the last thirty or so years Ann Hughes has been one of the leading historians working on the events formerly known as the English Revolution, and this book owed its origins to the decision of a group of her friends, colleagues and former students to collaborate in a collection of essays in her honour. Some of us can date our acquaintance with Ann back to the 1970s, others from later decades. All of us have felt her influence in one way or another over period of years and in most cases decades. The resulting collection is grouped obviously and appropriately enough around Ann’s interests and major contributions to the field, as well as around the debates that they illuminated.
I Recent scholarship on the civil wars inevitably remains deeply affected by the historiographical battles that have raged since the nineteenth century, as accounts of the ‘Puritan revolution’ and its relationship to grand narratives regarding English constitutional history gave way to accounts that emphasised structural change, the importance of long-term social and economic forces, and the rise of a mercantile bourgeoisie. More recently, and more importantly, the fortunes of civil war studies have been profoundly affected by the ‘revisionist’ assault on both Whig and Marxist narratives, which involved a determination to stress high politics (and high political sources), consensus and contingency, and a kind of localism that focused upon more or less harmonious county communities, into which the civil wars made an unwelcome intrusion.1 The effect of such challenges was profound, and in 2004 Sir Keith Thomas questioned whether there were yet credible ways of responding to revisionism, at least in terms of analysis of the civil wars, and wondered what such responses might involve.2 Thus, while the ‘post-revisionist’ reaction had been prolonged and powerful, this might be thought to have been more effective in a pre-civil war context than in relation to events after 1640. Post-revisionism, in other words,
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made much greater impact in dealing with the causes of the civil wars than with understanding its course and its consequences.3 Thus the question that Thomas posed, and that remained unanswered, was: what would a post- revisionism of the civil wars and Interregnum look like? Put another way, this was a question about whether it remained credible to describe the civil war era as one that involved a ‘revolution’, the word that revisionists very obviously sought to expunge from the mid-seventeenth-century historiographical lexicon.4 Hughes was in at the start of ‘post-revisionism’, and while there is no overarching argumentative ‘line’ being pushed here it is perhaps no surprise that this volume either takes a sceptical view of, or skirts around, some of the major features of revisionism. That means that some areas of recent scholarly activity do not bulk large here. Despite Hughes’ early and seminal contribution to that subject, little attention is paid to civil war royalism.5 Similarly, the experiments in constitution-building or indeed ‘state-building’ and/or ‘state-formation’, that marked the period, whether before or after the regicide, do not figure prominently.6 There is little discussion of the ‘British problem’; a problematic that owed at least some of its origins to a basic revisionist need to look outside of a narrowly English frame of reference to find sufficient combustible materials to explain the explosion of the civil wars and revolution. Much has been gained along the way and it is not necessary to deny that there were British, rather than simply English, dimensions of the civil wars in order to suggest that there is still scope to look at, indeed in some instances to return to topics centred on events in England.7 Similarly, this volume might be thought to represent something of a challenge to the claim that the civil wars represented a ‘war of religion’. As the prominence of religion both in Hughes’ work, and in this collection, clearly shows, this is far from a denial of the central importance to the course of the revolution of religious belief and commitment, not to mention political and constitutional issues raised by debates about church government and church/state relations.8 But there is a challenge here to the overly schematic, even sloganeering attempts of some revisionists, on the one hand, to shift the focus away from ‘constitutional’ controversies and ‘causes’, to ‘religious’ belief, commitment and zeal as the driving force of revolutionary conflict, and, on the other, to deny anything novel or ‘revolutionary’ about these decades by conceiving these events as the ‘end’, rather than the beginning of something; that is to say, as the last of Europe’s wars of religion, rather than as a modernising political revolution.9 But as one might expect of a collection of essays inspired by a leading post-revisionist, even as they attempt to engage with and move beyond revisionism many of the essays printed here retain central features in common with the revisionist account; the aim being to engage with revisionist
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arguments rather than to ‘turn back the clock’ by reviving the older grand narratives. This book thus deals with religion, as well as with the localities, and indeed ‘localism’, but does so in what are non-rather than anti- revisionist ways. In other essays, the response to revisionism involves re-engaging with civil war ‘radicalism’, a topic where older accounts –most notably those by Christopher Hill –provided the focus for sustained revisionist criticism. This criticism lurched from denying any role to religious radicalism in the ‘rise’ of the New Model Army as a political force in the late 1640s, to denying the relevance, indeed one case the very existence, of the radical sects, which in the revisionist account tended to be portrayed as eccentric and epiphenomenal; important only for their capacity to provoke various spasms of moral panic among the moral majority.10 As Thomas pointed out in 2004, any new account of the revolutionary decades has to do justice to the novelty of the revolutionary decades. That is to say, it has to come to terms with, recuperate and explain the unfamiliar voices and unusual and heterodox, for want of a better word, the radical ideas that came to the fore during this period. And to do that the focus of attention cannot solely be on ‘high politics’. We return here to a key distinction drawn by Conrad Russell in 1973 in the edited collection on The Origins of the English Civil War. This was in many ways the opening shot of the revisionist campaign and in the introduction to that volume, Russell drew a contrast between ‘the revolution’, an event he located firmly in the 1640s, and the causes of the civil war, which he located in the period between 1637 and 1642.11 Thereafter, Russell’s attention was focused solely on the former topic and period. Having climbed that particular historiographical Everest, at least to his own satisfaction, he never got around to addressing even the foothills of the second and arguably the greater of the two peaks. And so ways clearly need to be found of moving beyond the kind of revisionist analysis that Conrad Russell produced for the period 1637–42, without merely slipping back into an older style of scholarship, obsessed with the ideas and ideologies of marginal sectarian figures.12 While Thomas suggested that a way forward might involve a return to ‘popular politics’, the aim of this volume is to pursue the idea that what is actually required are ways of bridging the gap between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ politics, and perhaps of blurring the distinction between them, in order to produce an integrated account of contemporary political life. This might usefully involve less reified notions of what constituted ‘radicalism’, recognising the diverse sources of innovative ideas, and acknowledging the many ways in which radical impulses emerged from and fed into political life, in all its manifestations.13 Despite her role in editing the works of Winstanley, one of the central contributions of Hughes’ work has been to refocus attention on the
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Presbyterians, as agents of political change, innovative in their recourse to print and the pulpit, circulating news and rumour, and indeed parliamentary lobbying and local organisation. For the likes of Hill, mainstream puritans and Presbyterians were the representatives of the bourgeoisie, aka the rising middling sort, and by the 1640s and 1650s entirely opposed to the real radicals and revolutionaries amongst the sects; groups he notoriously sought to associate with the ‘real people’, variously defined. But if Presbyterianism can be reclaimed as a form of genuinely popular religion, as Hughes suggested in 1998, then dialectical and dialogic relations between the Presbyterians and the emergent sects can be once again recuperated as the origin of a great deal that was radical about the 1640s and 1650s.14 Again, it is worth distinguishing here between different strands of revisionism. Thus while John Adamson’s attempt to recentre the high political narrative on the role of parliamentarian nobility and the House of Lords might seem quintessentially revisionist, his almost equal insistence on the connections between the politics of the street and those of great parliamentarian magnates is very different from Conrad Russell’s picture of the way the politics of the early 1640s worked.15 And while Adamson’s account of those connections is an almost wholly top-down one, with all the initiative and control in the hands of the peerage, it is more than possible to reconceive those connections in altogether dialogic, and sometimes even bottom- up ways. Here David Como’s work, and in particular his contribution to this volume, has a good deal to tell us about the intricate connections between the politics of the city and the street and those of the Parliament house. Crucial here is a move away from a concentration on the ‘causes’ and the ‘nature’ of the civil wars, in order to reflect on the course of the conflict, and upon the processes and practices of political life. In chronological terms this means moving away from the framework set by the work of Russell, into the mid-and later 1640s. Conceptually, it means reflecting less on why the civil wars happened, and on how to characterise the conflict –as a baronial revolt, a popular rebellion or a war of religion –than on how conflicts over the issues at stake were conducted. Only by doing so will it be possible to successfully move beyond attempts to devise a persuasive metanarrative into which to slot the civil wars, and beyond what might now be considered to be somewhat stale debates about socio-economic determinants of ‘allegiance’.16 As Mike Braddick has persuasively argued, such debates, which generated a considerable body of scholarship, never really escaped from a certain kind of determinism, and they certainly failed to do justice to the ‘fluidity’ and ‘dynamism’ of civil war politics.17 What is needed, therefore, are approaches that make it possible to understand not just the dynamism and ‘creativity’ by which the period was marked, but also the dynamic of contemporary politics, just how the civil wars resulted in the execution of
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the king and the creation of a republic, and what kinds of political, cultural and communicative processes were involved. This means accepting Russell’s claim that few if any contemporaries sought war or advocated for revolution in 1640, not as part of a clinching argument about the contingency of the causes of the conflict, but rather as the starting point of an analysis of the processes that drove the war and the rolling political crises it generated once hostilities had broken out.18 Central here is the history of print culture, and of communicative practices more generally conceived. This is an area where considerable work has been done in recent decades, much of it undertaken fairly explicitly in response to the revisionists’ focus on high politics, and their concomitant move away from the kinds of printed pamphlets and newspapers that were said to have led scholars like Christopher Hill astray. The process of rescuing contemporary printed texts was predicated upon the idea that such material needed to be placed within the specific political and polemical circumstances that called it forth and to which it was intended to speak, rather than merely treated as a source of evidence about what happened. It also rested upon the idea that, by being alert to the ways in which such texts were produced and disseminated –and here the toolkit of the book historian came into play –it might be possible to devise new ways of exploring the culture of debate and controversy, as well as how authors, publishers and patrons –not least from within the political elite –sought to appropriate and deploy print to engage with a range of different publics. The result has been a very significant body of scholarship, which has done much to transform our understanding of political culture in early modern England, and the emergence of a ‘post- reformation public sphere’.19 Again, this is a historiographical movement to which Ann Hughes has made crucial contributions, both in her work of Gangraena and on religious disputations more generally conceived. The potential importance of ‘print culture’ for understanding the ‘English Revolution’ has long been clear, of course, and there remains a palpable sense that the ‘diversity and originality’ of the vast quantity of printed material from the period ‘still awaits full exploration’.20 However, while print and publicity –whether involving propaganda or popular voices – have begun to be integrated into in recent narratives of the civil wars, much more needs to be done to explore issues like ‘mobilisation’ during the mid- seventeenth century.21 As Braddick rightly argued, attempts to ‘influence or by-pass’ formal institutions by appealing to ‘opinion outside them’ provide a crucial means to get at the dynamism of civil war politics, not least because such an approach allows for the possibility of plural, overlapping and conflicting campaigns, and publics, which involved attempts to both legitimise and delegitimise a variety of institutions and groups. It involves both the networks of printers, politicians and officeholders who sought to
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mobilise popular support, as well as those from outside the elite who helped to ensure that print acquired a ‘life of its own’, as a range of contemporary media were appropriated, as wider publics became embroiled in debate, discussion and agitation, and as this became associated with ‘rhetorical escalation’. As Braddick himself recognised, the process of assessing the impact of print has not been fully worked through, and it might be argued that historians have thus far demonstrated some of the ways in which print could be deployed, and developed methods for engaging with print culture, more readily than they have worked through the broader impact of such phenomena.22 Put another way, the challenge that remains is to fully integrate print culture into a revised understanding of public politics, conceived of as those political, religious and constitutional debates that took place more or less in the public domain, or at least in front of a variety of overlapping and intersecting publics. The challenge, in other words, is not so much to produce more studies of ‘print culture’, or of individual authors, tracts and newspapers; rather it is to develop an appreciation of the nature of contemporary political life, and of the ways in which public life underwent transformation, in a situation where print culture and communicative practices touched on so many more people, and upon almost every aspect of contemporary life.23 It is here that this volume seeks to highlight methodological and historiographical ways forward, both by building upon existing strands within recent scholarship, and by developing new historiographical perspectives on the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century.
II And so a good many of the essays collected here deal in some way with print culture and communicative practices. Very often, of course, that means focusing upon the products of the press, and upon the ideas and arguments that specific texts contain. Anthony Milton, for example, explores a range of texts from both before and during the civil wars, in which puritans of various stripes traded blows with each other, and set out their ideas about the degree to which it was possible to conform with undesirable religious innovations, including Laudian reforms of the 1630s (Chapter 1). Elliot Vernon delves into some of the voluminous pamphlet literature that emerged from the pens of London Presbyterians during the mid-and late 1640s, particularly those texts written by Thomas Bakewell of St Bride’s Fleet Street (Chapter 5). Thomas Cogswell explores a range of tracts that were printed in the late 1640s and early 1650s, most obviously in the aftermath of the regicide, and that reflected upon the history of the Stuart monarchy (Chapter 7). Sean Kelsey, meanwhile, draws upon a range of fairly ephemeral army texts
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that emerged during the dramatic events of 1647, all of which shed light upon the rise of the New Model Army, and of agitation within the army’s ranks (Chapter 8). Jason Peacey concentrates upon an extended series of pamphlets that were produced by, or about, the controversial Kentish puritan Richard Culmer, who became a notorious and polarising figure for leading an iconoclastic raid upon the stained glass windows of Canterbury Cathedral (Chapter 10). And Kate Peters draws upon another series of pamphlets, relating to other kinds of debate and disputation, involving Quakers and Ranters in 1650s England (Chapter 11). In a somewhat different vein, two literary scholars, David Loewenstein and Thomas N. Corns, both turn their attention to other products of the ‘radical’ press, albeit from much more familiar figures, in the form of texts by William Walwyn, John Milton and Gerrard Winstanley, all of which are analysed for the political and religious ideas that they espoused (Chapters 6 and 9). John Walter, meanwhile, focuses upon a series of episodes from the second Bishops’ War, in which officers were murdered by their troops, but does so in ways that reflect upon the inflammatory libels and pamphlets circulating at the time (Chapter 2). David Como’s essay, which deals with the campaign for a General Rising in the summer of 1643, revolves around a petitioning campaign that managed to secure 20,000 signatures (Chapter 3). Petitioning, as a somewhat neglected aspect of public politics in the early modern period, also features in the essay by Karen Britland, as part of an examination of the smuggling of print and correspondence during the civil wars, of the people involved, and of the challenges that they encountered (Chapter 4). That these essays do not all focus directly, or solely, upon print and communication reflects the fact that they seek to approach texts, debates and communicative practices in innovative ways. They do so to explore neglected issues, and indeed to rethink the dynamic of contemporary political culture. The controversy surrounding Richard Culmer, for example, is used to shed light upon how contemporaries constructed and challenged the credibility of particular individuals and specific authors. The attempt to promulgate a ‘Black Legend’ of the Stuart dynasty involved in part a concerted press campaign, in which a series of texts were explicitly directed towards a Scottish audience, in the context of renewed war between former allies, and the acceptance by the Covenanters of Charles Stuart as their king. At the same time, Cogswell also demonstrates that an attempt was being made not merely to justify regicide but also to discredit an entire dynasty. Cogswell’s essay thus reconstructs the ways in which contemporaries mobilised historical evidence in the service of a precise political cause. Beyond this, a number of contributors deal with another vital but also evidentially challenging issue: the reception of printed texts and other
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communicative devices. In discussing violence within the army in the months before the outbreak of civil war, Walter detects echoes of contemporary texts, whether libels or pamphlets, in the language that was deployed by mutinous and aggressive troops, and uses such evidence to reflect upon the importance of contemporary rumours and fears regarding political and religious affairs. Como’s analysis of the General Rising utilises evidence of reading practices to shed light upon the political and religious identities of some of the individuals who were involved. Cogswell detects not just the existence of a propaganda campaign regarding the history of the Stuart family, but also evidence that this proved to be effective, by demonstrating how language used in Black Legend tracts fed into wider contemporary discourse. Peters, meanwhile, emphasises that an important way of rethinking the importance of the Ranters involves recognising the extent to which their tracts were successfully disseminated and proved capable of provoking debate within a wider sectarian landscape. Such evidence about the effectiveness and reach of print indicates that essays in this volume relate fairly closely to the issue of ‘mobilisation’, and thus build upon recent work regarding the techniques for garnering public support. At the same time, these studies of the deployment, dissemination and reception of texts also demonstrate new possibilities for exploring wider political phenomena, and for using the processes involved in mobilisation to help explain key political developments. Como, for example, uses the surviving evidence generated by the General Rising campaign to shed light upon both the unifying and divisive forces that can be discerned, not least in terms of the lack of support that the campaign garnered from within the civic and mercantile elite, who evidently had little interest in a scheme that might undermine their own power. What emerges is the possibility of drawing meaningful connections between an episode that might easily be written off as an irrelevant failure and the longer history of an unstable parliamentarian coalition, the fracturing of which would become crucial to the history of the later 1640s. Very often these essays move beyond the study of mobilisation, in order to indicate how print and communication can be used as a means of rethinking the fissures and fractures that marked contemporary political culture, and how those divisions fed into further processes of debate and conflict, critique and side-taking. Again, this is to reflect not just upon the contemporary role and purpose of texts, but also upon the wider political processes with which these texts became associated, and helped to fuel, and therefore upon which the study of ‘print culture’ helps to shed light. Kelsey, therefore, uses printed petitions, remonstrances and pamphlets to rethink the dynamic of debates within the army at a crucial juncture, and demonstrates how a ‘practical’ issue like ‘indemnity’ –legal immunity for things done
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in the parliamentarian cause –provided a means of thinking about much wider and deeper issues regarding the post-war settlement, and about how demands for constitutional reform, and indeed ‘justice’, came to the surface. In her treatment of the debates between Quakers and Ranters, Peters reflects not just upon the rhetorical tactics of those involved, upon the attempt to mobilise sectarian opinion, and upon the precise political context in which such debates took place, but also upon the neglected relationship between these two groups. Similarly, Britland explores different kinds of communication –the smuggling of texts and attempts to petition the authorities –not simply to understand such practices, but rather to scrutinise contemporary attitudes towards those involved, not least in terms of their supposedly humble status. Perhaps the clearest examples of this use of print for rethinking the dynamic of public politics involve the essays by Milton and Vernon. Vernon, therefore, uses Thomas Bakewell to do more than simply explore the kind of mobilisation of opinion within London parishes with which scholars are now familiar, or indeed to lend weight to the idea that contemporary printed debates represented extensions of the polemical environment that was evident in localised forms of communication. He also demonstrates the usefulness to the leaders of London’s Presbyterian movement of a somewhat obscure polemicist like Bakewell, by suggesting that his status as a ‘godly everyman’ was of strategic importance for addressing topics and ideas that were particularly controversial, and for doing so at moments that were particularly sensitive. Bakewell’s texts could be deployed, in other words, when it was not thought wise for more eminent men to write and publish. More striking still, perhaps, is Milton’s exploration of the accusations that emerged during religious controversies of the 1640s, in which Presbyterians and Independents traded blows about how their rivals had been rather too willing to conform themselves to Laudian reforms, and about their own anti-Laudian credentials. Such claims, Milton argues, make it possible to recover hitherto neglected conflicts within the Puritan community, and he highlights not just ‘contests for legitimacy’ during the 1640s, but also forms of partial conformity that can be observed in earlier decades, which even Laud failed to root out. As a result, entirely new light is shed upon the controversies of the 1640s, as well as upon the battle lines of the 1630s (and earlier).
III The aim therefore is to move beyond revisionism, and perhaps even ‘post- revisionism’, and towards a new appreciation of the significance of the
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English Revolution. The challenge to revisionism that can be found in these essays is sometimes more or less clear. Cogswell’s recovery of the Black Legend of Stuart tyranny and depravity represents an explicit challenge to claims by Kevin Sharpe, who insisted that the republican regime failed to undermine support for the monarchy, and monarchical culture more generally.24 Less direct, but no less important, is Milton’s challenge to revisionist (and indeed older) accounts of the antagonism between puritans and Laudians, not just in terms of identifying a neglected strand of partial conformity within puritan thought, but also in terms of highlighting the possibilities that once existed for a rather different religious trajectory during the Personal Rule, in terms of hints that conformist puritans were able to secure support and patronage from within the Caroline regime. In Kelsey’s account of debates over indemnity, meanwhile, it is possible to observe an overt response to revisionist accounts of New Model Army politics, most obviously by Kishlansky and Morrill, not least by demonstrating the strength of the link between ‘practical’ demands and constitutional ideas, not least the possibility of subjecting Charles I to ‘justice’. Indeed, what Kelsey’s essay signals is a determination not just to maintain a focus upon kinds of ‘radicalism’ about which revisionists tended to be more or less dismissive, but also to rethink the nature of radicalism and the processes by which radicalisation occurred. The political thought of the revolutionary decades, radical and otherwise, has obviously remained a vibrant field of scholarship, as too has the Leveller movement, which has actually witnessed a resurgence of interest in recent years.25 Nevertheless, the recent controversy over the motives behind the trial of Charles I perhaps indicates ongoing uncertainty over the nature and role of radicalism, and over how to assess its impact.26 As such, contributions to this volume signal the ongoing need to reassert the importance of civil war radicalism, without merely reviving older approaches, and to find new ways of analysing what constituted radicalism, how it emerged, and how to situate it within the wider context of civil war politics. Walter’s essay on soldiers’ violence might be thought to provide evidence about the origins of army radicalism, as something that was fuelled by Protestant zeal and anti-popery, but also as something that very obviously did not involve a top-down process of radicalisation. The radicalism that Walter detects was fuelled in part by the rumours and fears that abounded in contemporary literature, but also by notions of customary rights. Similarly, whatever role may have been played in the General Rising by known radicals like the MP Henry Marten, the campaign that emerges from Como’s account is something that needs to be reconstructed ‘from the bottom up’, and one that recognises the degree to which ‘radicalism’ was far from being restricted to known ‘firebrands’. Likewise, Kelsey’s account of debates over indemnity at least hints at a
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process of radicalisation that reflected as much the debates occurring within the rank and file of the army –over the dangers posed by a ‘projected settlement’ that would have required them to beg for indemnity from a defeated king –as it did the influence of troublemakers like John Wildman. Elsewhere in the volume, chapters provide novel ways of validating the intellectual vibrancy and significance of contemporary radicalism. In Thomas N. Corns’ essay this involves a self-conscious response to revisionist attacks on historians like Hill, in relation to the connections that he posited within a radical underground, and a demonstration of the feasibility of a ‘dialogue’ between John Milton and Gerrard Winstanley. This involves not just the possibility that the two men’s paths might have crossed, and that they had experiences, friends and places in common, but also an explication of the issues –many involving biblical exegesis –on which they had sufficient things in common to have made a conversation fruitful. Corns, in other words, provides a means of thinking about radical intellectual activities and trajectories that do not require tendentious claims about ‘influence’, or the lumping of different people into artificial ‘traditions’ and schools of thought. Somewhat more concerned with ‘influence’, albeit in novel ways, is the chapter by David Loewenstein, which offers a precise contextualisation, and close textual reading, of works by the Leveller William Walwyn. This reveals Walwyn’s indebtedness to an unlikely thinker, Michel de Montaigne, a Catholic whose scepticism provided the foundations for a radical brand of civil war tolerationism, and someone whose experiences of religious wars prefigured Walwyn’s own life. For Loewenstein, in other words, radicalisation could involve the reading of old texts in new circumstances, and the appropriation of older ideas in the light of personal experiences, a process that may indeed have been replicated many times among Walwyn’s contemporaries. For Peters, on the other hand, the striking conclusion to emerge from evidence about Quaker engagement with the Ranters involves the need to focus less on the eccentricity of Ranter ideas than on the seriousness with which they were treated by other contemporaries, on the unstable divide between different kinds of Interregnum radicalism, and on the significance of their radical mode of political conduct, in terms of the culture of participatory dialogue and disputation that they embraced. In other words, with Anthony Milton’s essay, as well as with the various discussions of civil war ‘radicalism’, it becomes clear that the response to revisionism that emerges from this volume often involves the reconfiguring of themes that might ostensibly appear to be familiar. This is certainly true in terms of the importance that is attached to the task of plumbing the social depth of contemporary politics, which emerges as something other than a return to the study of ‘popular politics’ as it might conventionally be conceived. When Keith Thomas recommended revisiting this territory,
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he rightly recognised the contribution that had already been made by John Walter in his study of the Colchester plunderers, but what emerges from this volume, and from Walter’s own contribution, is the need for a much more expansive approach to non-elite politics, for rethinking the activities associated with popular participation, and for broadening our appreciation of what was involved in claiming a stake in public life.27 This is not a matter of neglecting or dismissing protests, crowds and violence, so much as of finding new means for teasing meaning out of specific episodes and practices.28 Walter’s essay does this by taking seriously the politics involved in violence against military commanders, a somewhat unusual kind of behaviour, and one that needs to be rescued from the dismissive attitudes of contemporary commentators. Employing the techniques of microhistory, and tools from anthropology, Walter demonstrates that violence was meaningful and performative, revealing beliefs not just about the social order, but also about politics, religion and honour, not least in terms of a willingness to act upon media-fuelled rumours and fears regarding the Catholicism of commanders. If the violence at the heart of Walter’s essay involved an unconventional form of ‘popular politics’, then other essays highlight the value of casting the net very widely indeed to harvest evidence about the social depth of political engagement. To Kelsey’s army agitators are added those whom Como finds making financial donations to the campaign for the General Rising, who make it possible to rethink the kinds of people who were actively involved in the parliamentarian war effort, and who were prepared to engage in, or at least support, novel forms of agitation. Britland, meanwhile, rescues from obscurity a number of non-elite individuals, whose work as smugglers of print and correspondence was derided by contemporaries, but who emerge as being committed to the royalist cause, while Peters highlights the number and range of people whose engagement took the form of attending public or private disputations. Peacey, meanwhile, uncovers traces of the hot words and violent actions that formed part of everyday encounters and confrontations across a range of Kentish parishes, and that involved parishioners from all walks of life. Cogswell, on the other hand, deals with what might be called the vulgarisation of political discourse, not simply in the sense of tracing the deployment of allegations regarding sexual scandal, but more importantly in terms of how arguments that had once been restricted to exotic overseas tracts like Corona Regia, and to scribal libels, became a staple of cheap print. Finally, Vernon deals not just with the penetration of puritanism into the laity, and with the possibilities for poorly educated tradesmen to acquire theological knowledge, but also with another route by which earthy and plebeian language made its way from oral and semi- literate culture into public discourse. More importantly, he, like Como, traces the novel ways in which the civil wars brought humble people into
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direct contact with governing institutions, whether by nominating parliamentary committees or indeed attending committee meetings, and (by virtue of becoming a ruling elder) participating in the activities of the London Provincial Assembly. One vital dimension of the expansion of the political nation with which these essays thus deal involves dramatic evidence relating to contemporary ideas about gender. In part, of course, this means reflecting upon contemporary notions of masculinity, as Walter’s soldiers evidently did, and upon the concerns regarding gender roles that arose from the Black Legend literature analysed by Cogswell. More obviously, perhaps, it is about the role of women, who are shown to have been actively involved in the campaign for the General Rising, as well as in disputation between Quakers and Ranters, even if more obviously in private debates than in public discussions. Ultimately, indeed, these essays provide important ways of thinking about how to assess the ‘agency’ of contemporary women, particularly from outside the elite. The controversy surrounding Richard Culmer provides some surprising examples of attempts by women both to assert and enact political and religious opinions, alongside evidence of the brutal and degrading behaviour that was all too common within parochial communities. Indeed, this tension between participatory possibilities and the potential to be made victims emerges very clearly from Britland’s essay, which develops a clear picture not only of the ease with which poor women were marginalised and dehumanised, and of the possibility for such women to become resolved royalists, but also of the paradox that women could become valuable precisely because they were so inconspicuous, and so easily dismissed. Being denied agency thus made certain women useful as agents, at least in certain roles, a highly suggestive conclusion about the complex impact of the civil wars upon women’s political lives. A closely related aspect of the transformation of public life during the civil wars involves the geographical reach of participatory politics, to which a range of essays also speak.29 The soldiers’ violence that is addressed by Walter occurred right across the country, from Dorset to Cambridgeshire, and from Devon to Somerset, while the sectarian disputations that Peters discusses occurred from Whitby to Yarme, and from Swannington to Leek. Como, meanwhile, makes clear how important London’s suburbs were to the scheme for a General Rising, thereby highlighting how little attention such areas have received, while also demonstrating that support for this particular campaign also came from further afield. Subscribers and donors to the scheme certainly came from Kent, the vibrancy of politics in which also emerges from the discussion of Richard Culmer. The pamphlets regarding this notorious Puritan thus shed valuable light upon local awareness of polemical tracts that were being produced in London, as well as widespread
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understanding with the issues that they discussed, and, perhaps more importantly, appreciation of and engagement with the centralised institutions of parliamentarian rule, and with their working processes. Ultimately, what such considerations of public politics in local contexts make possible is a post-revisionist history of ‘localism’, stripped of its associations with a gulf –mental or otherwise –between the ‘centre’ and the ‘localities’, as well as of any notions that the civil wars represented an unwelcome intrusion of ‘national’ affairs into an otherwise harmonious world of the county community.30 Here, what is noticeable about at least some of the essays in this volume is that they move beyond what might be thought to be an initial response to revisionism, which rejected localism, as well as beyond the excellent work that has been done to assess the importance of urban culture for establishing new modes of political thinking, and also to reflect upon the impact of the civil wars upon local government.31 Walter’s disgruntled soldiers, for example, were fuelled not just by fears and rumours regarding popery and the threat to Protestantism, but also by a determination to be led by familiar, local commanders, rather than by people who were strangers to them. In the essays by both Vernon and Peacey, meanwhile, there emerges not merely a sense of attachment to specific localities, but also of a determination to address particular local audiences. With Thomas Bakewell, therefore, Vernon highlights the need to recognise not just that he was able to contribute to wider debates, but also that these contributions were anchored in localised and personalised disputes, thereby making it essential to explore the relationship between the ‘local’ and the ‘national’, and to do so in ways which must necessarily be affected by evidence about the degree to which local knowledge was deployed in printed texts. This was done very obviously in an attempt to address a very specific audience, for whom such references would presumably make sense. Precisely the same thing emerges from the pamphlets by and about Richard Culmer, which related the infrapolitics of local and interpersonal battles to national debates and which did so in ways that made the stories demonstrably more legible to local readers, who were very obviously being targeted even as such pamphlets made a wider impact at a national level. This was perhaps done for the very reason that it was necessary to assist in the process of making national politics comprehensible. Finally, what emerges from Vernon’s study of Bakewell is a new appreciation that the appeal of Presbyterianism, which is so often observed through the lenses of Covenanter thought and the battle with congregationalism, could involve a community-based vision of ‘further reformation’, and one that resisted the idea of foregoing communal autonomy in favour of the power of a centralised church. Presbyterianism, in other words, could involve a brand of localism, and one that was compatible with
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making a powerful contribution to national debates through the medium of print and polemic.
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IV As noted at the outset, this collection was devised without specific historiographical positions and arguments in mind, although to the extent that the aim was to focus upon key areas in which innovative work is being undertaken on the English Revolution it was perfectly clear that the contributors shared key methodological instincts. Of course, the resulting essays clearly leave some questions unanswered, not least in terms of the lasting legacy of the revolutionary decades. This is very obviously an area where much work remains to be done, even if recent scholarship, not least on the ‘memory’ of the conflict, and on connections between civil war and Restoration politics, indicates pathways for future research.32 For the moment, however, it must remain an open question where such research might lead, and whether there is likely to be consensus about the degree to which the experiences of the revolution were transformative or transitory. There is also much that remains to be done on the wider geographical landscape of the civil wars, in terms of the relationship between events in England and in Continental Europe, and perhaps beyond.33 Nevertheless, it can certainly be argued that the approaches and the lines of argument that emerge from this volume provide profitable ways of undertaking such analysis. What can also be claimed is that this volume highlights the importance of focusing upon the transformation of public politics during the revolutionary decades, and on the possibilities for doing so by building upon recent scholarship relating to print culture and political communication, as well as upon the creativity and dynamism of contemporary politics, upon the practices associated with mobilisation, and upon the processes by which contemporaries were radicalised, engaged in escalatory rhetoric and developed novel ideas. These essays thus engage with some of the most important work, and the most interesting advances, within recent scholarship, without being constrained by them, or merely providing further examples of what such approaches can offer. Instead, they demonstrate the possibilities that exist for integrating such things into wider analyses of thought and practice, both ‘elite’ and ‘popular’, during the mid-seventeenth century, not least in the context of institutional change and state formation, and they make it possible to think more broadly about the way in which public life was transformed by civil war and revolution. One result might be the plausibility of detecting the emergence, not of a public sphere, but of new kinds of ‘citizen’, and to think about the role that the civil wars played in accelerating a longer-term
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process by which the roles of the ‘public’, the ‘people’ and the ‘individual’ were recast and rethought. The wars may also have cemented certain practices associated with citizenship, which survived the Restoration, at least in certain (urban?) contexts, and proved likely to reappear at moments of heightened political and religious tension. As such, the meaningful questions that might be thought to arise from this volume relate to the degree to which the civil wars enabled, empowered and required people from increasingly diverse backgrounds to engage with politics and institutions. This involved people needing to grapple with the challenges involved in engaging and interacting with public affairs and public institutions, and it meant thinking about what the revolution meant, about the meaning of their lives and about the events they experienced. It is also worth exploring whether it was possible to forget the kind of processes, practices and behaviour that characterised the public politics of revolution, and whether it proved possible to put the genie of citizenship back into the bottle of subjecthood.34
Notes 1 John Morrill, Cheshire, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 1974); John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993); J. S. Morrill, ed., Reactions to the English Civil War, 1642– 1649 (Basingstoke, 1982). See R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution (3rd edn, Manchester, 1998); Alastair MacLachlan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England (Basingstoke, 1996); Ronald Hutton, Debates in Stuart History (Basingstoke, 2004). 2 Keith Thomas, ‘When the lid came off England’, New York Review of Books (27 May 2004). 3 Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (2nd edn, Basingstoke, 1998); Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990); Conrad Russell, ed., The Origins of the English Civil War (Basingstoke, 1973). See also David Cressy, ‘Revolutionary England 1640–1642’, P&P, 181 (2003), 35–71; David Cressy, ‘The Protestation protested, 1641 and 1642’, HJ, 45.2 (2002), 251–79. 4 See John Adamson, ‘High roads and blind alleys: the English Civil War and its historiography’, in John Adamson, ed., The English Civil War (Basingstoke, 2009), 1–35. 5 That should not be taken as any sort of slight to or diminution of the significance of the excellent work that has been done on that topic in recent years. See Jason McElligott and David Smith, eds, Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (Cambridge, 2007); Jason McElligott and David Smith, eds, Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (Manchester, 2010); David Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement (Cambridge, 1994); Fiona McCall, Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (Farnham, 2013); Anthony Milton, ‘Anglicanism and Royalism in the 1640s’, in
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Adamson, ed., English Civil War, pp. 61–81; David Scott, ‘Rethinking royalist politics, 1642–9’, in Adamson, ed., English Civil War, pp. 240–52. 6 John Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy: the management of war and the Committee of Both Kingdoms, 1644–1645’, in Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey, eds, Parliament at Work (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 101–27; Patrick Little, ed., The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007); Jonathan Fitzgibbons, ‘Hereditary succession and the Cromwellian protectorate: the offer of the crown reconsidered’, EHR, 128.534 (2013), 1095–1128; Jonathan Fitzgibbons, Cromwell’s House of Lords: Politics, Parliaments and Constitutional Revolution, 1642–1660 (Woodbridge, 2018); Patrick Little, ‘Monarchy to protectorate: re-drafting the Humble Petition and Advice, March–June 1657’, HR, 79.203 (2006), 144–9; Patrick Little and David Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge, 2007); Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012); Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the instrument of government’, in Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell, eds, The Nature of the English Revolution 50; Sean Kelsey, ‘Constructing the Revisited (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 123– Council of State’, PH, 22.3 (2003), 217–41; Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000). See also: William J. Bulman, The Rise of Majority Rule in Early Modern Britain and its Empire (Cambridge, 2021). 7 Alan Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, 2005); Alan Macinnes, ‘The Scottish moment, 1638–1645’, in Adamson, ed., English Civil War, pp. 125–52; John Adamson, ‘The English context of the British civil wars’, History Today, 48.11 (1998), 23–9; Conrad Russell, ‘The British problem and the English Civil War’, History, 72 (1987), 395–415; Conrad Russell, ‘The Scottish party in English parliaments 1640–1642, or the myth of the English Revolution’, HR, 66 (1993), 35–52; John Morrill, ‘The causes of Britain’s civil wars’, in Nature of the English Revolution, pp. 252–72; Conrad Russell, ‘The British background to the Irish rebellion of 1641’, HR, 61.145 (1988), 166–82. See Jason Peacey, ‘The outbreak of the civil wars in the three kingdoms’, in Barry Coward, ed., A Companion to Stuart Britain (2003), 290–308. 8 Anthony Milton, ‘Sacrilege and compromise: court divines and the king’s conscience, 1642–1649’, in Michael Braddick and David Smith, eds, The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2011); Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth Century England (Manchester, 2007); Elliot Vernon, ‘The quarrel of the covenant: the London Presbyterians and the regicide’, in Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke, 2001); Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘The church settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History, 87.285 (2002), 18–40; Ann Hughes, ‘The public profession of these nations: the national church in Interregnum England’, in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2007); Charles Prior, ‘Rethinking church and state during the English Interregnum’, HR, 87.237 (2014), 444–65. 9 Glenn Burgess, ‘Was the civil war a war of religion? The evidence of political propaganda’, HLQ, 61.2 (2000), 173–201; Charles Prior and Glenn Burgess,
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eds, England’s Wars of Religion Revisited (Farnham, 2011); John Morrill, ‘The religious context of the English Civil War’, TRHS, 5th series, 34 (1984), 155–78; John Morrill, ‘Sir William Brereton and England’s wars of religion’, JBS, 24.3 (1985), 311–32. 10 Mark Kishlansky, ‘Ideology and politics in the parliamentary armies, 1645–9’, in Morrill, ed., Reactions, pp. 163–84; Mark Kishlansky, ‘The army and the Levellers: the roads to Putney’, HJ, 22 (1979), 795–824; Mark Kishlansky, ‘The case of the army truly stated: the creation of the New Model Army’, P&P, 81 (1978), 51–74; John Morrill, ‘Mutiny and discontent in English provincial armies, 1645–47’, P&P, 56 (1972), 49–74; Mark Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979); Mark Kishlansky, ‘What happened at Ware?’, HJ, 25 (1982), 827–39; J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986). 11 Russell, ed., Origins, pp. 1–30. 12 Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–42 (Oxford, 1991). 13 See Anthony Milton, ‘The public context of the trial and execution of Strafford’, in Julia Merritt, ed., The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, 1621–1641 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 230– 51; John Walter, Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2016); Jason Peacey, ‘Sir Edward Dering, popularity and the public, 1640–44’, HJ, 54.4 (2011), 955–83; Jason Peacey, ‘Reviving the radicals: Clement Writer and the historiography of the English Revolution’, Prose 55; Jason Peacey, ‘The parliamentary context of Studies, 36.4 (2014), 243– political radicalism in the English Revolution’, in Laurent Curelly and Nigel Smith, eds, Radical Voices, Radical Ways (Manchester, 2016), pp. 151–69; Jason Peacey, ‘Perceptions of parliament: factions and the “public”’, in Adamson, ed., English Civil War, pp. 258–67; David Como, ‘Secret printing, the crisis of 1640 and the origins of civil war radicalism’, P&P, 196 (2007), 37–82; Caroline Boswell, Disaffection and Everyday Life in Interregnum England (Woodbridge, 2017); Imogen Peck, ‘Collaborators not cavaliers: popular politics in the northern counties of England, 1647–59’, Northern History, 50.1 (2013), 39–53. 14 Ann Hughes, ‘ “Popular” Presbyterianism in the 1640s and 1650s: the cases of Thomas Edwards and Thomas Hall’, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London, 1998), pp. 235–60. 15 John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007). See John Adamson, ‘Politics and the nobility in civil war England’, HJ, 34 (1991), 567–602; John Adamson, ‘The baronial context of the English Civil War’, TRHS, 5th series, 40 (1990), 93–120; Mark Kishlansky, ‘Saye no more’, JBS, 30 (1991), 399–448; Mark Kishlansky, ‘Saye what?’, HJ, 33 (1990), 917–37; John Adamson, ‘The English nobility and the projected settlement of 1647’, HJ, 30 (1987), 567–602. 16 Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter, 1994); David Underdown, ‘The problem of popular allegiance in the English Civil War’, TRHS, 5th series, 31 (1981), 61–94; David Underdown, Revel, Riot & Rebellion (Oxford, 1985); David Underdown,
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‘Community and class: theories of local politics in the English Revolution’, in B. C. Malament, ed., After the Reformation (Manchester, 1980), pp. 147–65; Rachel Weil, ‘Thinking about allegiance in the English Civil War’, History Workshop Journal, 61.1 (2006), 183–91; John Morrill, ‘The ecology of allegiance in the English Revolution’, JBS, 26:4 (1987), 451–79; Derek Hirst, ‘The defection of Sir Edward Dering, 1640– 41’, HJ, 15 (1972), 193– 208; Andy Wood, ‘Beyond post- revisionism? the civil war allegiances of the miners of the Derbyshire “Peak Country” ’, HJ, 40 (1997), 23–40; David Underdown, ‘ “Honest” radicals in the counties, 1642–1649’, in D. H. Pennington and Keith Thomas, eds, Puritans and Revolutionaries (1978), pp. 186–205; John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (London, 1980); Andrew Hopper, Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides during the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2012). See Ann Hughes, ‘The “chalk” and the “cheese”: David Underdown, regional cultures and popular allegiance in the English Revolution’, History Compass, 11.5 (2013), 373–80. 17 Michael Braddick, ‘Civil war and revolution in England, Scotland and Ireland’, in Michael Braddick, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2015), p. 17; Michael Braddick, ‘War and politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646’, in Braddick, ed., Handbook, pp. 96–113. 18 Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013). See Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2012). 19 Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, eds, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007); Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003); Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers. Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Farnham, 2004); Jason Peacey, ‘The politics of British union in 1642 and the purpose of civil war pamphlets’, HR, 80.210 (2007), 491–517; Ethan Shagan, ‘Constructing discord: ideology, propaganda and English responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, JBS, 36 (1997), 4–34; David Como, ‘Print, censorship and ideological escalation in the English civil wars’, JBS, 51.4 (2012), 820–57. 20 Thomas, ‘When the lid came off England’. 21 Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008). 22 Michael Braddick, ‘Mobilisation, anxiety and creativity in England during the 1640s’, in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott, eds, Liberty, Authority and Formality: Political Ideas, and Culture, 1600–1900 (Exeter, 2008), pp. 175–94. 23 See: David Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018). 24 Kevin Sharpe, ‘ “An image doting rabble”: the failure of republican culture in seventeenth- century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker, eds, Refiguring Revolutions (London, 1998), pp. 25–56. 25 Alan Cromartie, ‘Parliamentary sovereignty, popular sovereignty and Henry Parker’s adjudicative standpoint’, in Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, eds,
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Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 12–63; Jordan Downs, ‘The curse of Meroz and the English Civil War’, HJ, 57.2 (2014), 343–68; D. A. Orr, Treason and the State: Law, Politics and Ideology in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 2002); Rachel Foxley, ‘ “Due libertie and proportioned equalitie”: Milton, democracy and the republican tradition’, History of Political 38; Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles Thought, 34.4 (2013), 614– (Cambridge, 2004); Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007); Michael Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647 (Cambridge, 2001); Philip Baker, ‘Rhetoric, reality and the varieties of civil war radicalism’, in Adamson, ed., English Civil War, pp. 294–304; Elliot Vernon and Philip Baker, ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’, HJ, 53.1 (2010), 39–59; Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon, eds, The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2012); Philip Baker, ‘London’s liberty in chains discovered: the Levellers, the civic past and popular protest in civil war London’, HLQ, 76.4 (2013), 559–87; Philip Baker, ‘The franchise debate revisited: the Levellers and the Army’, in Taylor and Tapsell, eds, Nature of the English Revolution, pp. 103–22; Michael Braddick, The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution (Oxford, 2018); Gary De Krey, Following the Levellers. Volume 1: Political and Religious Radicals and the English Civil War and Revolution, 1645–1649 (Basingstoke, 2017); Rachel Foxley, ‘John Lilburne and the citizenship of “free-born Englishmen”’, HJ, 47.4 (2004), 849–74; Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester, 2013); John Rees, The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–1660 (London, 2017). 26 Sean Kelsey, ‘Staging the trial of Charles I’, in Peacey, ed., Regicides, pp. 71–93; Sean Kelsey, ‘The trial of Charles I’, EHR, 118.477 (2003), 583–616; Sean Kelsey, ‘The death of Charles I’, HJ, 45.4 (2002), 727–54; Sean Kelsey, ‘The kings’ book: Eikon Basilike and the English Revolution of 1649’, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The English Revolution, c.1590–1720 (Manchester, 2007), pp. 150–68; Sean Kelsey, ‘King of the sea: the prince of Wales and the Stuart monarchy, 1648–1649’, History, 92.308 (2007), 428–48; Sean Kelsey, ‘The ordinance for the trial of Charles I’, HR, 76:193 (2003), 310–31; Sean Kelsey, ‘Politics and procedure in the trial of Charles I’, Law and History Review, 22:1 (2004), 1–26; Sean Kelsey, ‘The now king of England: conscience, duty and the death of Charles I’, EHR, 132.558 (2017), 1077–1109; Sean Kelsey, ‘King Charls his case: the intended prosecution of Charles I’, Journal of Legal History, 39.1 (2018), 58–87; Sean Kelsey, ‘A riposte to Clive Holmes, “The trial and execution of Charles I”’, History, 103.357 (2018), 525–44; Sean Kelsey, ‘Instrumenting the trial of Charles I’, HR, 92.255 (2019), 118–38; Jonathan Fitzgibbons, ‘Rethinking the English Revolution of 1649’, HJ, 60.4 (2017), 889–914; Clive Holmes, ‘The trial and execution of Charles I’, HJ, 53.2 (2010), 289–316; Clive Holmes, ‘The remonstrance of the army and the execution of Charles I’, History, 104.362 (2019), 585– 605; Mark Kishlansky, ‘Mission impossible: Charles I, Oliver Cromwell and the regicide’, EHR, 125.515 (2010), 844–74; John Adamson,
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‘The frighted junto: perceptions of Ireland and the last attempts at settlement with Charles I’, in Peacey, ed., Regicides, pp. 36–70. 27 John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Oxford, 1999). See also John Walter, ‘ “Abolishing superstition with sedition”? The politics of popular iconoclasm in England 1640–42’, P&P, 183 (2004), 79–123; John Walter, ‘Popular iconoclasm and the politics of the parish in eastern England, 1640–1642’, HJ, 47.2 (2004), 261–90. 28 See Keith Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London, 1982); Michael Braddick, ‘Popular politics and public policy: the excise riot at Smithfield in February 1647 and its aftermath’, HJ, 34 (1991), 597–626; Andrew Hopper, ‘ “The Great Blow” and the politics of popular royalism in Civil War Norwich’, EHR, 133.560 (2018), 32–64. 29 For discussion of the need to address popular politics outside London see John Walter, ‘Politicising the popular? The “tradition of riot” and popular political culture in the English Revolution’, in Tyacke, ed., English Revolution, p. 107. 30 See Clive Holmes, ‘Centre and locality in civil war England’, in Adamson, ed., English Civil War, pp. 153–74. 31 Phil Withington, ‘Urban citizens and England’s civil wars’, in Braddick, ed., Handbook, pp. 312– 29; Stephen K. Roberts, Recovery and Restoration in an English County: Devon Local Administration, 1646–1670 (Exeter, 1985); Andrew Coleby, Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire 1649–89 (Cambridge, 1987). 32 Gary De Krey, Following the Levellers. Volume 2: English Political and Religious Radicals from the Commonwealth to the Glorious Revolution, 1649– 1688 (Basingstoke, 2018); Edward Legon, Revolution Remembered: Seditious Memories after the British Civil Wars (Manchester, 2019). See also Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Introduction: locating the English Revolution’, in Tyacke, ed., English Revolution, pp. 1–26. 33 See Michael Winship, Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (New Haven, 2019). 34 For ideas about citizens, and about the long gestation of new ways of thinking and behaving, see Walter, ‘Politicising the popular’, pp. 108–9. See also Phil Withington, ‘Citizens, soldiers and urban culture in Restoration England’, EHR, 123.502 (2008), 587–610. This provides a new way of thinking about the ‘experience’ of revolution. See Michael Braddick and David Smith, eds, The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2011). Another fruitful avenue, of course, involves recent work on petitioning, where much more needs to be done: Hannah Worthen, ‘Supplicants and guardians: the petitions of royalist widows during the civil wars and Interregnum, 1642–1660’, Women’s History Review, 26.4 (2017), 528–40; Imogen Peck, ‘The great unknown: the negotiation and narration of death by English war widows, 1647–60’, Northern History, 53.2 (2016), 220–35.
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‘Great conformitants’ and ‘right ambidexters’: puritans, conformity and the challenge of Laudianism1 Anthony Milton The notion that the Laudian reforms of the 1630s posed an existential threat to puritanism is a time-honoured one. This was famously a decade of persecution for puritans, of wicked oppression and noble suffering, as puritan ministers were deprived and/or fled into exile in the Low Countries or the New World. Puritan zeal was refined in the fire of persecution: the godly gained their martyrs and exiles at the hands of the evil Archbishop Laud as puritanism underwent its own version of the Marian persecution (and certainly puritan sufferers were not averse to comparing their plight directly with that of the Marian martyrs).2 Modern historians have sometimes been prone to suggest that for puritans the only choice was between different forms of suffering. Thus, Frank Bremer has commented that puritans in the 1630s ‘had to choose between two painful options that confronted them – deprivation and persecution at home or exile in the Netherlands or the New World’.3 But there was of course a third option –reluctant conformity –and therein lay the problem, and the capacity of Laudianism, not to unite puritans in opposition, but to divide them. The place to begin, as with all inter-puritan conflict, is with Thomas Edwards and his notorious Gangraena (1646). As Ann Hughes has demonstrated, the irascible Edwards was in no doubt that, among their other plentiful sins, some of his Independent foes of the 1640s had been notably lacking in zeal in opposing Laudianism in the previous decade. In fact, not only had they complied with the Laudian reforms, but some of them had done so with positive enthusiasm. They had been ‘not only conformists in the way of old conformity, but great Innovators and forward Episcopall men’ in the 1630s.4 But they could reply in kind. The radical John Saltmarsh complained of how ‘these Ministers who preach so for Presbytery through bloud and persecution now, did but a few yeers since preach as confidently for the Service-book, for Bishops, or against the Presbytery, & our Brethren of Scotland’.5 As another Independent added: Some of you were great conformitants in the dayes of Episcopacie, have you indeed a minde to return again? Doe your soules long after the Summer fruits
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of Poperie, Organs and Altars, cringings and crouching, Tapers and Wafers, Copes and Rochets, Tippets and Surplices, Caps and Hoods, Crucifixes and Crosses, Pilgrimages and pictures, with all the accoutrements, and the whole prophane glory of the Romish Synagogue?6
The intent, of course, was to equate Presbyterian clericalism with its Laudian equivalent, but the charge of earlier compliance with Laudianism was more damaging than a mere suggestion that their policies unwittingly echoed Laudian ones. The Presbyterian Edmund Calamy was a particular target. He was accused of complying with Bishop Wren’s ceremonial innovations. The Independent John Price was emphatic that this was not just a matter of conforming to pre-Laudian ceremonies (‘we say not wearing the Surplice, reading the Service book, crossing in Baptisme, &c. which many honest and godly Ministers in those dark dayes did likewise performe’). Rather, Calamy was ‘such a notorious conformitant unto, and notable stickler for the Prelats fooleries’ that he read the second service at the altar, bowed at the name of Jesus, and was a zealous ‘observer of times and seasons’ who insisted on preaching on Christmas Day despite being ill.7 Henry Burton similarly accused Calamy of ‘yeelding to the Prelates superstitious and idolatrous innovations in Gods worship’. Calamy was forced to write a self- defence (and naturally got in his counter-charge against Burton as having complied with a bishop’s order to satisfy the consciences of those worried by the ex officio oath).8 Similarly, Richard Hollingworth and Samuel Eaton traded accusations over whether ‘in the worst times’ [of Laudianism] ‘the greatest and godliest Independents in the Kingdome’ had been as prelatical as the Presbyterians had been.9 It is notable that the puritan sufferer Charles Chauncey, despite having been driven into exile in the 1630s, felt it necessary to publish in 1641 an account of his attack on the Laudian altar policy ‘for the satisfaction of all such who either are, or justly might bee offended with his scandalous submission, made before the high commission court’.10 The flood of anti-Laudian pamphlets published by puritan authors in 1641 doubtless reflected the loosening of the licensing controls that had inhibited publication of such material in the 1630s, but was also perhaps prompted by the need for puritans who had conformed in the 1630s to display their anti-Laudian credentials to their fellow-godly.11 These clashes take us into ongoing 1640s inter-puritan contests for legitimacy, where the protagonist’s status as erstwhile sufferer or collaborator could play a significant role. Skirting the edge of conformity had been established puritan practice in the pre-war church, and these hostile attempts to misrepresent the extent of adversaries’ collaboration reflect vividly the broader breakdown in puritan unity in these years. But they also represent the after-shocks of a more troubling phenomenon. It is notable that all sides did not seem short of ammunition for these attacks (and royalist opponents
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were happy to add to the fire with their own accusations of time-serving hypocrisy against their puritan adversaries, which were eagerly picked up by warring puritans themselves),12 and these clashes reflected the troublesome legacy of what had sometimes been an uncomfortably ambiguous puritan response to Laudianism. Writing in a more generously inclusive tone in 1641, John Bond reflected of the anti-sabbatarian doctrines and commands of the 1630s that ‘we have (many of us) yeelded too farre unto them, both within booke and without … we have basely (as it were) held that stirrop to those men’. Of the innovations in worship, he lamented that ‘we have bin too tame and passive, and such silence (I feare) must needs contract the guilt of consent’.13 It is that awkward and often neglected process that is the focus of this chapter.
I There was, of course, nothing new about puritan struggles over degrees of ceremonial conformity. It was a crucial issue from the vestiarian controversy of the 1560s onwards. For all puritans who resisted separatism, the task was to find ways of making degrees of partial conformity acceptable. As Peter Lake and others have explained, the standard ‘moderate puritan’ position on conformity was based on the calculation that the benefits achieved by the godly preaching of the word of God exceeded the infelicities of conforming to an insufficiently reformed church. This calculation only worked according to certain conditions; namely, that the unreformed ceremonies themselves were ‘trifles’, things indifferent, which did not impinge on religious belief; that offence should not be taken by others when confronted by such godly conformity; and that such obedience was not obviously incompatible with the conscience, given the other duties of obedience to superiors, of maintaining the peace of the church, and of showing Christian charity. But it was emphasised that conforming puritans must not be acting directly against their conscience (they must be persuaded of the lawfulness and indifferency of the ceremonies), and that governors too should exercise forbearance (they should not enforce conformity in a way that threatened unity, nor should they say that the ceremonies were in themselves necessary to be observed). This all made for a marked diversity of liturgical practice and modified conformity –but tact and discretion were observed.14 From this perspective, puritan preachers as famous as John Rogers of Dedham and Samuel Ward of Ipswich could condemn puritan conflicts over ceremonies as pointless distractions from the real business of teaching and living godly lives, rebuking those who ‘spend all their zeale in crying out against Ceremonies’.15
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But the phenomenon of partial conformity was not as smooth and consensual as this model might imply. The problem of course was that so many variables could threaten this position of partial conformity. What if ceremonial conformity caused offence among the fellow-godly? Much depended on the attitudes of civil and ecclesiastical governors, and the vigour with which ceremonies were imposed. What if bishops ceased to show forbearance in dealing with partial conformity? What if ceremonies were imposed so rigorously that it no longer appeared that they were seen as indifferent? And what if conformist divines started to insist that such ceremonies must necessarily be observed because they had inherent religious value, and were a necessary part of true worship? The mechanics of partial conformity also had their own unwritten rules –not least that these transactions between bishops and puritan ministers should remain discreetly private. Thus, when in 1604–5 the puritan John Burges struck a tactlessly defiant note before King James and prominent bishops, culminating in an open letter to his diocesan bishop where he complained that his modified subscription had permitted him to exercise a high degree of non-conformity in practice (an implicit deal that had now been reneged upon by the authorities when they had imposed new canons) he found himself suspended and deprived. By contrast, Laurence Chaderton got away with similar levels of non-conformity by displaying more tact and discretion, on the basis of private conferences and letters.16 Conforming puritans could still struggle with the issues: while William Bedell publicly repeated the conventional argument that the necessity of preaching justified compliance with undesirable ceremonies, he still requested after the Hampton Court Conference that doubtful cases involving ceremonies be ‘left to be an act of discretion among us’ until offensive ceremonies might be removed. He admitted in private correspondence with his fellow puritan Samuel Ward in 1604 that he had privately told those ministers refusing subscription (such as Burges) that he would stand with them if he saw cause. Ward himself was struggling to be convinced by Bedell’s arguments, and was preoccupied with the concern that, even if the ceremonies were indifferent, subscription might cause offence to his fellow- godly.17 Both men would ultimately gain further promotion in the church – in Bedell’s case to a bishopric –but their struggles over partial conformity and subscription had been anxious and protracted. There were evidently many difficult line-calls here, and often puritans might disagree about when a Rubicon had been crossed (and even if they could agree, the varying diocesan experience meant that puritans might not suffer the same intolerable oppression at the same time). There was never entire agreement within the puritan community, and non-conforming puritans could on occasion condemn the conformity of their godly brethren in the most emphatic terms. Thus, while in 1583–4 the fudged agreement over
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the Three Articles (which permitted ‘modified subscription’ whereby puritans had to subscribe only to those articles that concerned ‘the confession of the true Christian faith and the doctrine of the sacraments’) was a defeat for Archbishop Whitgift, it was also a defeat for the puritan activist John Field who had wished to secure mass non-conformity.18 Partial subscribers were then attacked by their fellow-godly as ‘the demi-pure’, or it was claimed that conditional subscriptions were rigged and subscribers misled.19 When further subscription was required to the book of canons at the beginning of James’ reign, there were similar condemnations of those moderate puritans who complied. Thomas Brightman insisted that only those puritan ministers who steadfastly refused subscription were true members of the godly, while William Bradshaw attacked ‘this lye, or politique subscription’ which would purchase the right to preach ‘with the price of blood, yea the blood of souls’ by its bad example, whereas the silencing of a hundred godly ministers ‘would preach reformation very effectually’.20
II If puritan conformity was so crucially dependent on the behaviour and ideology of ecclesiastical governors, then the rise of Laudianism might seem to have been the critical moment when, as ecclesiastical government fell into the hands of their sworn enemies, the puritan compromise ceased to be feasible. Not only were new ceremonies being imposed, and traditional ones enforced more rigorously than ever, but increasingly ceremonies were also being defended as ‘significative’, as performing a vital religious function, rather than as things indifferent maintained for order’s sake. There can be no doubt that puritan consciences had a new challenge. Moreover, the threatening of puritan partial conformity was not an unfortunate, unintended side-effect of Laudian policies. On the contrary, Laud himself and his most prominent supporters treated partial conformity as a direct target – their task was to clamp down on this mechanism, which enabled puritans who were hostile to the established church and its ceremonies to remain insincerely within it. Instead, they insisted on the punctilious and unvarying (rather than occasional) use of the prescribed ceremonies in order to smoke out those who truly considered them to be unlawful. To the Laudians, compromises allowed a puritan fifth-column insidiously to enter the church to subvert it from within. As the Laudian polemicist Christopher Dow argued, puritans under James had ‘invented a new course, and yeelded a kinde of conformity’ and thereby ‘in an underhand way brought up the use of their owne crotchets, and erected a new Church both for doctrine and discipline far differing from the true and ancient English Church: and made,
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though not a locall … yet a reall separation’.21 But Laudian control was not complete, and the assault on puritan partial conformity did not carry all before it. As Kenneth Fincham has noted, a number of ‘Calvinist’ b ishops – Barnaby Potter, Joseph Hall, Thomas Morton and (to a limited extent) John Davenant –sought to pursue moderate policies in their dioceses which would enable patterns of puritan conformity to continue, and were moderately successful in this regard.22 But while this surreptitious toleration of non-conformity was undoubtedly an important feature of the 1630s, a relatively neglected issue has been the degree to which both non-Laudian conformists and conforming puritans sought to find reassuring justifications for continued conformity in this decade, glossing ecclesiastical developments and even writing defences of disputed ceremonies (from bowing towards the altar to the Book of Sports) in ways that were intended to assuage troubled puritan consciences (while also making implicit or even explicit criticisms of the ecclesiastical authorities). It is this neglected phenomenon that I wish to focus upon in much of this chapter, as it was one of the key elements that helped to create that troubled legacy that so preoccupied Edwards and his opponents in the 1640s. The most famous defences of conformity in the 1630s are the outspoken advocacies of Laudian innovations and fierce attacks on puritan opponents by the polemicists Peter Heylyn, Christopher Dow and John Pocklington. But it would be wrong to assume that more tactful and traditional defences of ceremonial conformity were simply moribund in this decade. As we will see, there were defences of conformity produced in the 1630s that sustained a more low-key, non-Laudian approach to ceremonial conformity. While some of this may have been tactical moderation, at least some of their authors may have been making genuine attempts to engage sensitively with puritan scruples, and some defences assumed a non-Laudian, or even anti- Laudian tone.23 It was in this potentially more sympathetic environment that some of the puritan compromises exposed later in the 1640s may have originated. It is striking that by far the most voluminous defence of ceremonial conformity to be published in the 1630s, which appeared with all the panoply of orthodoxy and authority, was the work of none other than the erstwhile puritan martyr John Burges. Deprived in the 1590s and in 1604 for his opposition to ceremonies, Burges published in 1631 a work which was a remarkable revival of an earlier form of conformist apologetics, where the church’s ceremonies were defended by a puritan repenting of his non-conformity. The work was written in defence of an apologia for the three ceremonies of kneeling at communion, the sign of the cross in baptism and the use of the surplice, that had been published by the Calvinist bishop Thomas Morton in 1618. Burges explained that he wrote his An Answer Reioyned in
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defence of Morton because he was particularly concerned that the new Royal Directions of 1629 were imposing conformity in a more severe manner, and were thereby reviving the whole issue of how far puritans should conform to the established church. He disagreed with those who thought that ‘pressing the utmost rigour of Lawes against all that refuse Conformitie’ would alter puritans’ judgements, and voiced his concern that it would actually confirm ministers in their opposition. He had especially harsh words for those who used invective against puritans. ‘Preaching often and invectively’ against the godly would not cure them of non-conformity. Moreover, a renewed emphasis on ceremonial conformity encouraged other people to adopt a destructive anti-puritanism and a ‘disregard of their … moralities and virtues’, so that ‘all good behaviour is scorned of many, as a matter of Puritanisme, and so tearmed’. Even if some puritans had over-reacted, Burges insisted that some conformists had been just as bad, observing that ‘some of both sides have fallen into fearful extremities’.24 There could be no more explicit way of distancing himself from the new breed of Laudian ceremonialists. Most striking is the fact that Burges does not seek to present the ceremonies as particularly desirable in themselves; they are simply not unlawful (a point that he also maintained in his The Lawfulnes of Kneeling in the Act of Receiving the Lords Supper published in the same year, and described as having first been composed in the form of an answer to a private letter from a puritan friend desiring advice on the matter). One perfect cure for the current unrest, he explained bluntly, would be for the authorities to remove the disputed ceremonies (considering ‘not onely what is lawfull, but what is most expedient’), but ‘so long as the State shall deeme it unfit and inconvenient to alter that which it hath settled, seeing it hath not imposed any thing unlawfull’ then it made sense to settle people’s consciences that the ceremonies were lawful (although Burges warned of the danger of conforming before the conscience was settled). He did reflect that the State was more likely to remove ceremonies that had not been attacked as being unlawful, as it would not thereby lose face.25 Burges claimed that he had been persuaded earlier by Archbishop Abbot that his own understanding of the status of ceremonies (as things indifferent that might be changed at any time) was also that of the Church of England itself, ‘whatsoever some men out of the ryot of their witts had discoursed’ (a revealing allusion to avant- garde conformists). In fact, Burges was very clear that extreme conformists were a real threat: their aims were to ‘make Conformitie but their Stalking- horse’ as a means of attacking ‘the power of Godlinesse’. What was needed was ‘some publike meanes of informing the mind’ of the godly, and that was what his book intended.26 Burges also offered a remarkably balanced (or indeed pro- puritan) account of the struggles over ceremonial conformity in the Elizabethan and
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Jacobean churches. He noted how as a result of the vestiarian controversy some preachers were silenced and deprived ‘even when the Preachers were but few in number, and might full ill be spared’. Each side’s reaction then prompted a counter-reaction, until King James at Hampton Court decided to strengthen one part more than the other, at which time ‘some peaceable and very worthy Ministers were cast out of their service’, with the intention either ‘to bring them in by a kinde of necessitie’ or to shake off those following their example, rather than ‘upon any other grounds of reason’. But this approach was counterproductive, and provoked much more violent books against the ceremonies than had been published in the previous forty years. The spirits of non-conformists were now more embittered than when they had been less restrained by the execution of ceremonial laws. Burges used the example of Thomas Cartwright, not to damn puritans by association, but rather as a stick to beat more hardline non-conformists (such as Robert Parker and William Bradshaw, who insisted that the ceremonies were simply unlawful), presenting Cartwright as ‘a man very learned, godly and sharpe’ who saw the disputed ceremonies as inconvenient rather than unlawful, and who justified pragmatic conformity.27 Not the least curious aspect of Burges’s work is the fact that this enormous (650-page) folio volume is described on its title page as having been ‘published by his Majesties speciall Command’, and bears a dedication to the king in which Burges reports how Charles had written to him requiring him to give his unpublished defence of Morton to be reviewed by Burges’ diocesan (that is, Morton himself).28 It is not quite clear who was advising the king in this matter, but the official publication of the work, with its muted and conservative defence of non-Laudian ceremonies, may point towards an alternative, still-born Personal Rule ecclesiastical policy.29 If Burges was offering puritans a salve of their conscience for conforming to the ceremonies required by the 1604 canons, there is evidence that there was a willing audience for his message. The puritan Thomas Hooker, writing his preface to William Ames’s A Fresh Suit against human ceremonies in Gods worship in 1631, complained how some puritans praised Burges’ book as having ‘made all things evident to them’. These ministers claimed that Burges’ book had changed their minds and convinced them to conform, but they refused to explain how (‘I will be perswaded by Doctor Burgesse his book to it [conformity]; but neither I, nor you shall know, what perswades me; that so my grounds not being know[n]e, they cannot be answered, nor I unsettled any more’).30 While recognising the puritan duty to seek counsel in such matters (which, as several historians have noted, was a central component of many forms of puritan sociability),31 Hooker condemned the cynical way in which this was carried out, by the sort of minister who ‘seeks after the truth as a coward doth for his enemy, being a frayd to fynd it’.
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Such a minister would only ask more inflexible ministers for their judgement ‘upon a start or suddayne’ when they would be unable to produce convincing arguments, and would instead seek the more considered counsel of those ministers ‘who write for the things he would practise, or consult onely with those men that professe to mayntayne them’.32 That was of course the hostile view, but as we will see, quite prominent puritans were prepared to seek the counsel of godly ministers who were known to favour, or at least to practise, some of the Laudian innovations, and a number of defences of the Laudian beauty of holiness or the Book of Sports seem to have originated in letters solicited by puritans whose consciences were troubled but who were seeking assurances that their conformity would be justifiable. The works of Burges and others defending conformity to adiaphoristic ceremonies were all the more potent for conscientious puritans because it was not necessarily self-evident at what point Laudianism should be deemed to have definitively undermined the rationale of puritan partial conformity. Laudianism was a progressive phenomenon: ceremonial innovations were introduced gradually and at a varying pace in different dioceses, so that if there was a red line that was being crossed, it was not always entirely clear when or where this had happened. After all, there were serious ambiguities and inconsistencies already in the rationale of puritan partial conformity, not least in the fact that since Richard Hooker a number of prominent divines attributed religious value to the required ceremonies, while the effective establishment of the notion of iure divino episcopacy as an official orthodoxy meant that church government was no longer being presented (as Whitgift had initially defended it) as a thing indifferent that could be changed according to political expediency.33 Moreover, not only did puritans have an obvious incentive to try to adapt their consciences to the prevailing ecclesiastical winds, but it was not immediately apparent that the Laudians were breaking new ground, especially as the initial thrust of Laudian policy in London diocese in the late 1620s and early 1630s was focused not on the introduction of new ceremonies, but on the more rigorous enforcement of the canons of 1604, and here it could be argued that earlier rationales of puritan conformity were still operative. Burges was not a lone voice in expressing an anxiety that puritan consciences might be offended. The same concern can be found in several other writers anxious to craft more acceptable defences of the disputed ceremonies. Around 1631/ 2,34 Anthony Cade (who had been combination lecturer in Leicester in the 1610s) preached a visitation sermon, at the invitation of Laud’s bête noire Bishop Williams, to whom (as ‘my very good Lord and Patron’) he dedicated the work when he published it in Cambridge in 1636 at the height of the Laudian campaign under the title of A Sermon Necessary for these Times. The printed sermon includes an
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appended treatise entitled ‘An Appendix … Concerning the Ceremonies of the Church of England’ –with both works claiming to have been produced at Williams’ request so that people in his diocese would be convinced of the lawfulness of the church’s rites and ceremonies. There is no explicit mention of Laudian ceremonial innovations. The tract is a synthesis of the writings of Morton, Burges and John Sprint in defence of the church’s ceremonies. In the body of the sermon, Cade stresses how important it is to inform people’s consciences to help them understand, rather than simply forcing compliance, and he appeals to the magistrate not to hasten the punishment of non-conformists as long as they desire to be better informed: they are motivated only by ‘a pious humilitie and fearfulnesse to offend God’ and are not sinning willingly. Cade’s defence of ceremonies is on the basis that they are imposed as things indifferent, and that they do not bind the conscience any further than that they are commanded by the magistrate, and may therefore be changed at any time (in stark –albeit implicit –contrast to Laudian teaching).35 The appendix is a sustained attempt to reinstate a non-Laudian defence of church ceremonies that would be convincing to puritan non-conformists. Cade provides a list of worthy puritans who initially rejected ceremonial conformity but ultimately complied, including the puritan luminaries Edward Dering, Richard Greenham, William Fulke, Laurence Chaderton and John Burges himself. There is a highly significant implicitly anti-Laudian passage towards the end of the tract where Cade quotes Augustine’s warning that where lawful customs are settled ‘though some other more profitable perchance might be found out, yet … The very change of settled customes, though it help with some commodity, yet will it do hurt with the novitie’. The book ends tellingly with a passage from King James’ proclamation prefixed to the Prayer Book in which he warns of the danger of ‘innovation in things once settled by mature deliberation’. There were other defences of ceremonial conformity in the 1630s in visitation sermons that sought to portray ceremonies as adiaphoristic and appealed merely to duties of obedience with no hint of the ‘beauty of holiness’, while also urging that ministers should proceed against non- conformists ‘with patience and gentlenesse to instruct the refractary, and waite, if God at any time will give them repentance, 2 Tim. 2.24, 25’.36 It is notable that these were ministers who seem to have had pre-existing links to godly circles. Thus, even the erstwhile godly lecturer Foulke Robartes, who was happy to declare explicitly his devotion to Wren and Laud and to defend altar rails, images and church music, found room in his Gods holy house and service (1639) to condemn high-church extremists (‘some men expressing devotion outwardly, give too much scandall through want of probity’) and to call his non-conforming opponents ‘my brethren’.37
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Other ceremonies that caused puritan alarm in the 1630s generated attempts to square them with the traditional ‘moderate puritan’ approach to conformity. Bowing at the name of Jesus was a form of devotion that was being enforced more systematically from the 1620s onwards, and provoked especial alarm and resentment among puritans.38 The problem, however, was that it was specifically endorsed in the 1604 canons, and was therefore not a Laudian innovation. The puritan polemicist Thomas Lydiat, initially composing works in prison with only his Bible to hand, had already completed his written attack upon the practice before he realised to his discomfort that it was actually a ceremony prescribed in canon 18, and so he had to write a postscript explaining that it was ‘utterlie out of my mind and remembrance’ that there was anything to the contrary in the canons or injunctions.39 The canonical requirement seems to have prompted some adroit puritan mental gymnastics. Samuel Hartlib was told in 1634 (presumably by one of his puritan interlocutors) that bowing at the name of Jesus was not unlawful as a memorial if done with knowledge. One divine exclaimed: ‘what minister makes scruple, to reade the canon Command viz lowly reverence to be given to the Lord Jesus albeit may be he will alledge the practice is will worship!’40 While Henry Burton would later attack those ministers who argued that if bowing at the name of Jesus ‘be yeelded unto, we shall then quickly enjoy our Ministry, and the Gospell, without any more impositions’, he had earlier himself been adept at finding ways out of the dilemma: he had insisted that the canon did not require bowing at every mention of the name Jesus, and this may have influenced clergymen such as the Essex minister John Borodale, who claimed that his use of a variety of forms of reverence at the mention of each and every member of the Trinity ‘satisfieth the Canon’.41 Increasing numbers of ministers seem to have followed the practice of simply avoiding reading the name ‘Jesus’ at the relevant points in the service. But it is notable that, in the case of Edmund Calamy, while methodically refuting the charges made against him of complying with ceremonies, he passed over in silence the charge that he had bowed at the name of Jesus –a tacit admission of compliance perhaps prompted by the canonical status of the ceremony. The Laudian altar policy presented even more of a test to puritans, although the railed east-end altar seems to have been implemented across most of the country by 1640.42 For puritans, an extra problem emerged over the increasingly fashionable practice of bowing towards the communion table. William Twisse disingenuously invited his conformist friend Joseph Mede to share his thoughts on the practice, and in the subsequent correspondence Mede wrote at some length on the ‘relative holiness’ of churches and altars –a letter which Twisse then showed to several other puritan divines who, he tactfully reported, admired Mede’s learning ‘in an
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Argument wherein we had been so little versed’.43 Although exchanges grew more heated as Twisse heard reports that Mede was preaching in favour of bowing towards the altar, and then on a visit to Cambridge found himself being instructed by Mede to stand at the Gloria Patri, he remained keen to hear Mede’s arguments for conformity and confessed frankly that ‘I will neglect no means to keep me out of the paw of the Lion as well as I can’. Mede explained his own decision to provide a moderate endorsement of Laudian ceremonies by describing how I observed, both out of Books daily printed and out of such Discourses as I had heard, upon what dangerous Grounds some defended these things; namely such as would in time infer the lawfulness of Image-worship: I thought good therefore in more private Discourses to set them upon safer Principles, and such as might, if it were possible, prevent such an Evil.44
Another divine with a strong puritan pedigree –Paul Micklethwaite – composed a manuscript letter defending the practice in moderate terms to a puritan friend ‘that desired to be resolved about boweing before the holy Table, or Altar’ that also circulated in godly circles at this time and may have enjoyed some success: a puritan opponent complained that Micklethwaite’s letter ‘hath prevailed much with some (out of reverence and respect to the Authour) to sway them, not onely to the opinion, but the practise also of the things in question’.45 Restrained defences of the orthodoxy of Laudian policies could, however, be of potential value to the Laudians too, and Mede found himself increasingly sucked into working directly with the archbishop and his supporters.46 Even with bowing towards the altar, there were potential loopholes that puritan consciences might exploit. Thus Edward Corbet, the proctor of Merton College, who objected to bowing towards the communion table on grounds of conscience, petitioned Laud in 1638 that he should give him a specific command to do it ‘or else be pleased to leave him to that liberty which our religious king and orthodox Church have allowed him’. Or as Corbet’s friend Francis Cheynell had maintained in an Oxford sermon around the same time, ‘he that does more than the canon requires, is as great a puritan as he that does less’. In common with other opponents of the Laudian programme, Corbet stressed his conformist credentials, maintaining that ‘from his heart he loveth and honoureth the Church of England, and doth not only rigidly and carefully observe her doctrine and discipline, but would to the utmost of his weak power defend the same with his pen or blood’. Laud smelt a rat: he was convinced that this appeal for an explicit command was a carefully and collectively planned puritan ruse to avoid conformity. Noting that Cheynell and ‘two or three refractors in different parts’ had also asked for a specific order, as had others in a recent visitation of the deanery of Sarum, Laud concluded that ‘the faction have informed
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themselves, and are all agreed to make this answer, to call for a command’. The archbishop was conscious that this required ‘discrete handling’, but was determined that he would never give a command ‘till I may be warranted myself by public authority’. For some puritans this may have been a deliberate calling of Laud’s bluff. But for others it may have been a sincere soliciting of a direct command as a means of settling their conscience by the requirement of canonical obedience. This would seem to have been true in Corbet’s case, as he sought to persuade the vice-chancellor Accepted Frewen to give him the command instead, falsely claiming that Frewen’s predecessor had done this. By refusing to give the command, Frewen hoped that Corbet would end up conforming ‘and cannot deny it to the faction’.47 Corbet may have thought (as we will see below in the case of Nicholas Estwick) that the order from the authorities was the crucial element required for the casuistical justification to kick in. It was not only committed puritans who required this reassurance. The dean of Winchester, John Young, stated that while he was prepared to bow towards the altar in the King’s chapel and Wells Cathedral, when it was required of him, he would nevertheless ‘forbeare at other times till I hade ane order from superioures unto the which I would submit’.48 Similarly, the erstwhile puritan Nehemiah Rogers had in a sermon at Laud’s visitation as bishop of London in 1631 presented Burges-style arguments for ceremonial conformity as adiaphoristic, and in 1637 was asking for an explicit order to set up an altar rail (although even his restrained defence of ceremonial conformity in his visitation sermon met with ‘the false calumnies, and ignorant censures of some ill affected spirits’, as Rogers himself complained).49 The Book of Sports created even more problems for puritan ministers. But while famous for driving godly ministers out of their livings, the Book actually provoked a more variegated puritan response. A variety of ways of navigating the requirement that they read the Book of Sports to their congregations were attempted by godly ministers, from having their curate read the Book in their place, to combining the reading of it with a rehearsal of the fourth commandment, or even a sermon upon that text.50 But other puritans sought to justify the reading of the Book on the same grounds of obedience to secular authority that were usually advanced to defend ceremonial conformity by the godly. Thus, the Northamptonshire puritan minister Nicholas Estwick was convinced that his position was correct in having the book published in his church ‘not looking at the Contents but at his authority which commands the publication thereof’. If he were to refuse to read the Book for the sake of conscience, he claimed, ‘this scrupulosity would lay the foundation of disorder and confusion both in the Church and the Comonwealth’. He therefore requested the approval of Samuel Ward –the respected anti- Arminian master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (and Bedell’s earlier
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correspondent on issues of ceremonial conformity) –to help him convince others of the legitimacy of his actions. As he put it, ‘the most likely way’ to persuade puritans that they could publish the book with good conscience ‘would be if a man famous for learning and of high estimation with them for his soundness of faith and integritie of conversation would declare his judgment that my ground was good’ (precisely the selective request for guidance that Thomas Hooker had condemned). Ward provided the necessary reassurance that a minister ‘may publish in his church, being commanded by sovereign authority[,]such edicts, the contents whereof he doth not approve in his owne conscience’. He also subjoined his own non-Laudian defence of the Book, in which he made no attempt to avoid the word ‘sabbath’ or to suggest that the fourth commandment did not entail perpetual moral obligations, while affirming that recreations on the Lord’s day –even as far as setting up a maypole –were legitimate.51 That even Estwick –a figure at the heart of the Northamptonshire godly network recently described by Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens –sought to find a way of complying with the Book of Sports is especially revealing of how far compliance with Laudianism was still pursued even in the puritan heartlands.52 (The tensions in Estwick’s position are, however, made apparent in the reissue in 1636 of his colleague Joseph Bentham’s The Saints societie, which declares itself to have been published at the urging of Estwick, and which contains explicit arguments that sports and recreations on the Sabbath are simply illegal.)53 If we examine supposedly pro-Book of Sports tracts, we can also find several that seem to have originated in attempts (like Ward’s) to assuage puritan consciences. The Calvinist royal chaplain Robert Sanderson wrote a letter apparently for manuscript circulation in which he tried to chart a ‘middle way’ on the question of the Sabbath. He specifically rejected the extreme position advocated by Laudians such as Heylyn that the weekly Sabbath was merely ‘de jure humano & Ecclesiastico’, and complained of how anti-puritans attacked people for calling Sunday ‘the Sabbath-day’, urging that ‘Men (otherwise sober and moderate) ought not to be censured with too much severity, nor charged with Judaisme, if sometimes they so use it’.54 Gilbert Ironside’s Seven Questions of the sabbath briefly disputed is preoccupied with the problem of conscience and with offering reassurance on it. He refers to opponents of the Book of Sports as ‘men of good apprehensions, honest dispositions, and well qualified with sundry parts of learning’ and when he writes that the word ‘sabbath’ is no more to be retained in the time of the Gospel than the names ‘priest’, ‘altar’ or ‘sacrifice’, Ironside reveals himself to be very consciously off-message when it comes to other Laudian policies (he uses the word ‘table’ rather than ‘altar’ throughout the work, apart for one allusion to ‘a Table or Altar, call it what you please’). Like Burges, Ironside explicitly defined himself against
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an anti-puritan position. His outspoken attacks on evil-living anti-puritans echo the sentiments of Burges (and of Bishop Joseph Hall in a manuscript letter that he composed and circulated in the early 1630s).55 To Ironside, these anti-puritans were licentious ‘Vipers’ whose ‘disciplinarian invectives’ alienated the godly, and who falsely pretended to be ‘a zealous promoter of the government’ of the church.56 The overwhelming impression is that Ironside was a man with godly contacts who had perhaps begun his text with objectives similar to those of Mede (seeking to provide a more moderate gloss on Laudian policies to reassure puritan consciences), but like him had tipped over the edge into more partisan pro-Laudianism. Another attempt to address puritan concerns on the Sabbath which breathes the spirit of Burges and Cade is a manuscript treatise composed by one John Munday. Dedicating his tract to the king, Munday offered a defence of the lawfulness of reading the Book of Sports in church, and defended recreations and feasts of dedication.57 Munday’s treatise nevertheless is chiefly concerned with condemning anti-sabbatarian errors and highlighting the dangers that they posed to Sabbath discipline. Godly ministers not only had to satisfy their own consciences regarding continued ceremonial conformity, but they also had the task of trying to maintain the conformity of their congregations during the Laudian reforms, and the same adiaphoristic emphasis was often deployed to secure this. Thus, as Ann Hughes has demonstrated, the ‘cautious and conformist’ moderate puritan minister Richard Culverwell urged ceremonial conformity on his congregation in St Margaret Moses, London in the Laudian 1630s by defending kneeling at communion in Burges-like terms as a matter indifferent, so ‘as to give satisfaction to yow, if yow will be satisfied’ (as he frankly told his congregation).58 Not all puritans stopped at an adiaphoristic gloss on the disputed ceremonies. Some committed puritans were even prepared to imitate the language of the Laudian preoccupation with the beauty of holiness when events seemed to demand it (just as Edwards and others would later complain). Few struck the necessary ceremonialist note quite as audaciously as the famous John Brinsley. Seeking to outflank an anti-puritan town faction opposing his bid to be appointed to the town lectureship in Great Yarmouth, the puritan (and later die-hard Presbyterian) John Brinsley appealed directly to the new Laudian bishop Francis White by preaching and publishing (in 1631) a remarkable consecration sermon. Dedicated to White himself, Brinsley’s sermon defended the consecration of churches (and condemned those who attacked it as Jesuitical) and exhorted his congregation to ‘this beautifying, this adorning of the Temples of God’ and encouraged expenditure on such things. It was perhaps fortunate for Brinsley that his later Independent opponents did not come across the evidence of this ‘Laudian’ performance.59
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Faced with the need to comply with the new ceremonies, others showed a readiness to learn Laudian arguments to defend their conformity. Thus, in the case of bowing towards the altar, the puritan Elizabeth Penington explained to her sceptical Swiss friend Johann Heinrich Hummel that ‘we say we bowe not to the alter but [to] God and towards the alter’ and ‘we say it is fit to shew some signe of reverence when we come into the presence chamber of a prince’. By extension, ‘what gesture more fit to expres our reverence then by bowing?’ Besides, she continued (echoing the argument of Archbishop Laud), ‘when the eye of my faith shall see God in a more espetiall manner present at the alter then els where, I shall then bowe toward the alter’. She anticipated a negative response, and stressed that bowing in this fashion was a necessary compromise: ‘let it not disturb your patience, but rather provoke you to thankefulnes for yourselves, that God hath kept you free from these rudements, and also to prayer for us the more you here of our weaknes’.60 We can thus see how puritans might study carefully the justifications being proffered for Laudian practices as they could potentially excuse their compliance to fellow puritans. Other commonplace books compiled by those of puritan sympathies which include collections of extracts from Laudian works and lists of ‘what is said for’ bowing towards the altar may similarly have intended, not merely to revel in disgust, but to extract justifications for otherwise distasteful ceremonial conformity.61 There was all the more reason, then, for the efforts of Mede and others to offer more tactful defences –not everyone was necessarily as prickly as Twisse in their responses, and some may have been actively grateful. The results of these efforts to appease puritan consciences and of the manifold other incentives to conformity, are clearly visible in the 1630s. Puritan diaries from the period regularly lament members of the godly who conformed to the ceremonies, including even the later firebrand Calybute Downing, condemned by a fellow minister as ‘a right ambidexter’.62 When Laurence Eachard’s parishioners in 1650 sought to defend their minister against the charge that he had complied with Wren’s regime by enforcing reception at the rails during the 1630s, they explained that he had conformed under threats but that ‘most of the Godly … Ministers in the Diocese did the like’.63 Muriel Gurdon lamented to John Winthrop that so many faithful ministers had been silenced, but deplored ‘that which is wors; many that semed to be zeleous doe yeld obedience to the inventions of men’. Henry Jessey commented more charitably in January 1632 that various good ministers ‘canot abide these ceremonies, and if they might they would never use them: But to avoid the Persecution of Bishops … therefore these good men ar fain to sto[o]p to them sometimes’.64 Famous puritan lecturers condemned idolatry and insisted on the division between the godly and ungodly, but still conformed in the 1630s. None of the godly ministers whom the
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puritan diarist Robert Woodford knew in 1630s Northamptonshire were deprived (and they included Joseph Bentham, who would end up a royalist in the civil war) and many of the most famous puritan ministers of Essex similarly escaped prosecution. Laud’s vicar-general Nathaniel Brent was convinced that Stephen Marshall was a dangerous non-conformist, but admitted: ‘Noe man doubteth but that he hath an inconformable hart, but externally he observeth all. I could not prove upon him the omitting of the blessed name of Jhesus … nor anything els concerning the Ceremonies of the Church.’ Tom Webster notes that Edmund Calamy, William Gouge, Obadiah Sedgwick and John Goodwin can all be found subscribing later in the 1630s, and assumes that some sort of approved mental reservation was taking place.65 Such behaviour is often described in terms of artful (and apparently consensual) godly evasion, but this may underestimate some of the tensions and delicate manoeuvres involved. Calamy justified his own conformity during the 1630s by saying that I never (to my best remembrance) at any time preached for the justification of any of the Innovations. In some few things I did, I confesse, conform according to the light I then had, out of the uprightnesse of my heart … [but] for those particular things wherein I yeelded, I had the consent of the godly people in Bury, who did professe unto me, that if my conscience would give me leave to yeeld to those things, they would not be offended with what I did, nor like my Ministery any whit the worser.66
The key was thus to secure godly approval for the conformity that was exercised (hence Estwick’s anxiety to secure Ward’s testimonial), thereby fulfilling the conventional requirement that such behaviour did not cause offence among the godly. Those who did suffer punishment or exile could understandably prove censorious of those who conformed. William Prynne even berated those ministers whose opposition to the ceremonies led to their suspension. He urged them not to ‘basely sit downe silent under their Suspensions’. It was their duty to emulate the courage of Foxe’s martyrs (and even Roman Catholic priests) and to continue to preach on regardless, and to welcome their further persecution. ‘Their faintheartednes yeelding, silence and submission’ had given ‘a great blow and wound’ to religion: ‘what great discouragement and ill example to their people and fellow Ministers; what losse and prejudice to their flockes, what encouragement to Iesuites, Seminaries, Papists and domineering Prelates’.67 Those who had actually conformed were of course doubly resented. The so-called ‘etcetera oath’ drawn up by Convocation in 1640 –which required clergymen to swear that ‘the doctrine and discipline or government established in the Church of England’ contained ‘all things necessary
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to salvation’ –is often depicted as the final Rubicon whose crossing forced puritans into outright non-conformity. Nevertheless, as long as the outcome of the Second Bishops’ War remained unclear, puritans still moved carefully, given that a refusal to swear the oath theoretically carried the threat of deprivation. Therefore, opposition to the oath still took the form of dutiful submission to the bishops, with diocesans being presented with ‘queries’ (rather than objections). When the puritan John Ley published his charges against the etcetera oath the following year, he had to beg his readers to forgive the deferential tone that they adopted when addressing their concerns to his diocesan, Bishop Bridgeman.68 Small wonder, then, that more outspoken puritans feared that there was no shortage of godly ministers who would take the oath. The author of Englands Complaint to Jesus Christ against the Bishops Canons (1640) commented bitterly that he expected non-Laudian clergymen to go along with the etcetera oath. Those clergy who were not zealous Laudians were ‘such as have already denied their Consciences with abasing their Ministry to the publick obeying of wicked Commands of these their great Masters’ (such as the public reading of the Book of Sports, refraining from preaching in the afternoon, admitting altars in their churches and ‘perhaps’ bowing to them, and not daring to preach the doctrines of grace). Having defiled their consciences already they were ready to do any other base service, ‘their Conscience being by this time made wide enough to swallow downe this monstrous and damnable Oath’.69 Indeed, puritans who took the etcetera oath included Calamy’s later critic John Saltmarsh.70 Right up to the calling of the Long Parliament, then, the godly were still prepared to find ways of conforming to Laudian initiatives.
III Delivering a thanksgiving sermon before Parliament in September 1641, Jeremiah Burroughs exclaimed that the whole world had never before witnessed such ‘conscience-oppression’ as had recently occurred in England. He described what he saw as a plot that had been launched over the previous decade to ‘oppresse tender Consciences’ by discovering ‘what is it that it is most likely they will most scruple, most stick at’ and impose it accordingly. Since some would yield conformity to the old ceremonies, they decided to try new ones. But when puritans yielded to the new ceremonies, then they tried the Book of Sports. If the godly would even yield to that, then there was the ex officio oath, or finally the etcetera oath which ‘will take them all’.71 This chapter has not sought to argue that puritans were happy to collaborate, or that their objections to Laudian innovations have been exaggerated. But accounts that focus on martyrs and confrontations may miss some
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of the more problematic aspects of the Laudian experience for England’s godly. Could some of the violence of the puritan attacks on Laudianism in 1640 reflect the fact that they had been obliged to comply with the innovations? Laudianism created hostility not just because of an iron fist driving persecution, but also because it forced so many puritans to make awkward and uncomfortable compromises –the ‘conscience-oppression’ of which Burroughs complained –and because it closed so many loopholes for partial conformity. But not every loophole was thereby closed. As we have seen, not only were there still bishops prepared to spare puritan consciences in the implementation of Laudianism, but there were many other conformists sympathetic to puritanism (or even ex-puritans) who were just as determined to prevent this campaign of division and to try to find ways of keeping the godly within even a Laudianised church. That being said, the ties between sympathetic conformists and puritans were placed under increasing pressure during the 1630s. An unmistakable growing tension can be observed in the correspondence between Joseph Mede and William Twisse as the logic of the former’s sympathy for Laudian policies drove him closer to the establishment. Even a more emphatic friend of puritans and active opponent of the Laudian college heads in Cambridge such as Richard Holdsworth found himself dragged into de facto support for Laudian policies.72 The Laudian threat to puritan integrity was even more insidious than their attempted undermining of partial conformity. Laud himself occasionally tried to tempt the godly over with offers of patronage. Those who seemed ready to comply sincerely with Laudian policies could find themselves offered greater rewards. Thus not only did the compliant Mede find himself offered a chaplaincy by Laud, but the moderate puritan Francis Taylor received livings from the hands of Laud (to whom he dedicated an academic work), and it was reported at the time that the archbishop had made offers of support to the London puritan preacher Josias Shute and would even have appointed him a member of the Court of High Commission ‘but he did refuse it, well knowing what be the snares that attend preferment’.73 The accusations levelled by Edwards and his opponents in the 1640s of collaboration with Laudianism were therefore partly a revival of the anti-conforming attacks made by Bradshaw, Brightman and Field decades earlier, but they also partly represented a legacy of what had sometimes been a problematic and ambiguous puritan response to Laudianism. We are so used to seeing the puritan confrontation with Laudianism as an elemental struggle that we may miss the degree to which it was not always apparent to godly contemporaries that this was an ultimate conflict that inevitably required puritans to stand their ground and abandon older patterns of partial conformity. For most puritans the challenge was to find ways of
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conforming on their own terms, and there remained no shortage of conformists who wished to find methods of facilitating this, in ways that might have seemed embarrassing from the perspective of the 1640s. It is relatively easy to construct accounts of 1630s religion that present events in terms of a simple binary opposition between aggressive innovating Laudians and alienated, equally aggressive puritans, stoking a division that will lead to civil war. There is a danger, however, that while there were indeed stark conflicts that seem to encapsulate this division, we may be too easily tempted to imprint these upon the country as a whole, to flag the polemical excesses and confrontations of controversialists such as Peter Heylyn and William Prynne, and the familiar stories of Laud browbeating his puritan opponents in the Court of High Commission, in order to present the decade purely in the Manichean terms that the most outspoken Laudians and puritans deployed. This chapter has suggested, however, that historians may perhaps have been too eager to perform the exequies for Patrick Collinson’s Jacobean ‘religion of protestants’ by the 1630s. The principles and practice of puritan partial conformity managed in many cases to survive the 1630s (however bruised and compromised). The fact that for some puritans and conformists alike the challenge in the 1630s had been to try to find a way of making continued conformity palatable to the godly conscience can also help to explain why the Long Parliament did not witness a simple and immediate collapse into opposing religious sides. Rather, there were still attempts to agree on ‘reduced episcopacy’ and Prayer Book reform, and to secure an ‘abortive reformation’ that would enshrine the alliance between godly bishops and conformable puritans, the features of which would recur throughout the following decades.74 The compromises of the 1630s undoubtedly placed unparalleled strain upon that alliance, but unless we recognise its survival in these years and the continued currency of a defence of partial conformity to ‘indifferent’ ceremonies, then we run the risk of blinding ourselves to its later history, and to the continuing attractions of a model of ‘reduced episcopacy’ to moderate puritans. A telling example with which to conclude is that of the famous puritan preacher Calybute Downing. Downing has sometimes served as the archetypal puritan radicalised by the 1630s, his sermon to the Artillery Company in 1640 a daring call for resistance to the sovereign, and his later tract The cleere antithesis or Diametricall Opposition betweene Presbytery and Prelacy calling for the immediate introduction of divine-right Presbyterianism. Yet Downing had conformed to the Laudian innovations of the 1630s (to the disgust of his fellow-godly, as we have seen), and in 1641 he printed a remarkable treatise –Considerations toward a Peaceable Reformation in Matters Ecclesiasticall –that appealed for support for a moderate reform programme along the lines of Ussher’s ‘reduced episcopacy’. Downing’s
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tergiversations help to illustrate how for many puritans the Laudian decade had created a crisis of conformity, but had not made earlier patterns of compliance simply unfeasible.
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Notes 1 I am very grateful to Ken Fincham and Lori Anne Ferrell for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2 E.g., Henry Burton, For God and the King (1636), p. 65; William Prynne, A breviate of the prelates insupportable usurpations (1637), p. 273; Newes from Ipswich (1636), sig. ¶3v. 3 Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion (Boston, 1994), p. 82. Tom Webster similarly concentrates on these ‘two trajectories of response’ (Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 168–9, 268–85) although he notes that some ministers did embrace forms of partial conformity as well. 4 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (1646), i. 75–6; Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), pp. 27–8. 5 John Saltmarsh, Reasons for unitie (1646), p. 125, italics in original. 6 John Price, The pulpit incendiary (1648), p. 54. 7 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 8 Henry Burton, Truth still truth, though shut out of doors (1646), pp. 5, 7, 8; Edmund Calamy, A just and necessary apology (1646), p. 5. 9 Richard Hollingworth, Certain queres (1646), p. 6; Samuel Eaton, The defence of sundry positions (1646), p. 41. See another comparable exchange published in the same year: [William Walwyn], Vox Populi, or The Peoples Cry against the Clergy (1646), p. 26; Vox Norwici (1646), pp. 9–12. 10 The retraction of Mr Charles Chancy (1641). The best form of self-defence was of course attack, and Chauncey did his own fair share of attacking alleged side- changers and time-servers, condemning Archbishop Abbot’s chaplain Thomas Worrall as a ‘hideous apostate’, and complaining that William Twisse’s friend Joseph Mede had written a book in support of Laudian policies ‘most unworthy of his worth and learning’ (p. 2). 11 Anthony Milton, ‘Licensing, censorship and religious orthodoxy in early Stuart England’, HJ, 41 (1998), pp. 640–2. 12 Thus John Price borrowed some of his material from The Complaint of the Kingdom (1646) –also published as [Lawrence Womock], Sober sadness: or Historicall observations vpon the proceedings, pretences, & designs of a prevailing party in both Houses of Parliament ([Oxford], 1643), pp. 32–3. 13 John Bond, A door of hope (1641), pp. 94–5. Cf. also Thomas Hill berating his audience of the London mayor and ‘the Representative City’ on a day of humiliation in 1645: ‘God knows how ready you were when the Prelates were in their ruff, to comply with them in their Altar-Prayers, and Trinckets, and the like’ (Thomas Hill, An olive branch (1648), p. 16, italics in original).
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14 Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 243–61; Peter Lake, ‘Moving the goal posts? Modified subscription and the construction of conformity in the early Stuart Church’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier, eds, Orthodoxy and Conformity (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 179–205. 15 Webster, Godly Clergy, p. 192; Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2015), pp. 106–7, 120–2; Samuel Ward, A coal from the altar (1615), pp. 22–4. See also Peter Lake, ‘The Calvin of East Anglia? Samuel Ward (of Ipswich) and the search for the “mainstream” of post-Reformation English Protestantism’. I am grateful to Professor Lake for showing me a copy of this paper in advance of publication. 16 Lake, ‘Moving the goal posts?’, passim. 17 Margo Todd, ‘ “An act of discretion”: evangelical conformity and the puritan dons’, Albion 18.4 (1986), pp. 584–8. 18 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pp. 243–72. 19 Ibid., pp. 263, 268–9. 20 [William Bradshaw], A triall of subscription (Middelburg, 1599), sigs A5v, A6r; P. Lake, Moderate Puritans, pp. 253–4, 267–8. 21 Christopher Dow, Innovations unjustly charged upon the present church and state (1637), pp. 196, 197, italics in original. 22 Kenneth Fincham, ‘Clerical conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in Lake and Questier, eds, Orthodoxy and Conformity, pp. 151–3. 23 Peter Lake in his seminal article ‘The Laudians and the argument from authority’ (in B. Y. Kunze and D. D. Brautigam, eds, Court, Country and Culture (Rochester, 1992), pp. 149–75) has written persuasively of how Laudian arguments oscillated between ‘maximum’ and ‘minimum’ positions, with the ‘minimum’ position being the traditional conformist defence based on the status of ceremonies as things indifferent. As Lake describes it, this adiaphoristic position was flagged by Laudians (esp. pp. 150, 159, 168–70) but then essentially subverted by a more inflexible emphasis on the scriptural and apostolic origins and imperatives of the controverted ceremonies. The discussion below is not intended to question any of this, but rather to suggest that adiaphoristic defences of ceremonies in the 1630s were being used, not only as polemically astute manoeuvres by die-hard Laudians (as Lake clearly demonstrates), but also as conscious attempts by more equivocal or even anti-Laudian divines to reframe the ecclesiastical policies of the 1630s in a manner that would satisfy puritan scruples. Texts by Ironside, Mede, Sanderson and others may therefore have a more liminal quality than a simple categorisation as ‘Laudian’ might suggest. 24 John Burges, An Answer Reioyned (1631), pp. 6–9, 13. 25 Ibid., pp. 8–9, 13. 26 Ibid., pp. 10, 12, 18. 27 Ibid., pp. 2–5. 28 Ibid., sigs A3r–v. 29 Burges’s other work published this year –The Lawfulnes of Kneeling –is dedicated to Lord Keeper Coventry, a senior figure in Personal Rule government.
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30 William Ames, A Fresh Suit against human ceremonies in Gods worship (1633), sigs b4v, c1–v. 31 Bremer, Congregational Communion, ch. 2; Webster, Godly Clergy, chs. 2–4, 6. 32 Ames, Fresh Suit, sig. b3v. 33 Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), pp. 88–97, 164–9; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 454–70. 34 I am grateful to Professor Fincham for his advice on this dating: the sermon was preached just after William Warr had been appointed archdeacon of Leicester. 35 Anthony Cade, A Sermon Necessary for these Times (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1639), pp. 27–8, 30. 36 John Featley, Obedience and submission. A sermon preached at St. Sauiours- Church in South-warke, at a visitation (1636); Samuel Hoard, The Churches authority asserted in a sermon preached at Chelmsford, at the metropoliticall visitation (1637), p. 71 and passim. See also Edward Reynolds’ A sermon touching the peace and edification of the church (1637) and the penetrating analysis of it in Lake and Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity, pp. 159–67. 37 Foulke Robartes, Gods holy house and service (1639), sigs *2r, *3r, *3v, pp. 34, 38, 40, 42, 44, 48, 53, 61, 66, 71, 73, 75, 85, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98. 38 Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored (Oxford, 2007), pp. 133–5, 146; Webster, Godly Clergy, p. 163. 39 BL, Harl. MS 2405, fo. 13r. 40 Webster, Godly Clergy, p. 168n; Bodl. MS Tanner 71, fos 186–7. 41 Henry Burton, Iesu-worship confuted ([Amsterdam], 1640), p. 11; The Opinion, Judgement, and Determination of two reverend, learned and conformable Divines of the Church of England, concerning bowing at the name, or naming of Jesus ([Amsterdam], 1634), pp. 12–13; Webster, Godly Clergy, p. 243. 42 Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, pp. 177–210. 43 Joseph Mede, The Works of … Joseph Mede (1664), pp. 1002–5, 1009–17, 1019. It is perhaps significant that Mede was a friend and visitor of the conformable godly preacher Nicholas Estwick who (as we will see) was actively investigating ways of complying with Laudian policies (see ibid., pp. 1025–7, 1032–6; Nicholas Estwick, Christ’s submission to his Father’s will (1644), sig. A4v). 44 Mede, Works, pp. 1037–8, 1041. 45 CUL, MS Mm.4.24, fos 122v-4; MS Dd.5.31, fos 181–2v; Daniel Cawdrey, Superstitio superstes (1641), p. 44. See also his reported comments on the Sabbath dispute: Thomas Fuller, Church History (6 vols, Oxford, 1845), vi. 93– 4. Micklethwaite’s will of 1635 places him in the moderate Calvinist fold: one of his overseers was Richard Holdsworth, and he gave gifts to his friends Ralph Brownrigg, and to Nathaniel and Josias Shute (TNA, PROB 11/182, fo. 386v). His name also appears alongside them and other more puritan divines avowing support for the Protestant ecumenist John Dury: BL, Sloane MS 1465, fo. 2. 46 He submitted copies of his book The Name Altar … anciently given to the Holy Table (1637) to John Cosin and others in Cosin’s circle at Durham, requesting
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Cosin’s intercession for him with Laud, to whom he also wrote (see Cosin’s reply, dated 4 August 1637, in The Correspondence of John Cosin part 1 (Surtees Society, 52, 1868), pp. 220–1). Mede also sent a draft of his Churches, That is Appropriate Places for Christian Worship to Cosin later in the same year to review and correct where necessary (see Cosin’s reply in A. I. Doyle, ‘A new Cosin letter’, The Durham Philobiblon, 1 (1954)). 47 The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud (7 vols, Oxford, 1847–60), v. 204–7. 48 The Diary of John Young, ed. F. R. Goodman (London, 1928), pp. 108–9. 49 Nehemiah Rogers, A sermon preached at the second trienniall visitation (1632); TNA, SP 16/339, fo. 123r. 50 Kenneth L. Parker, The English Sabbath: A Study of Doctrine and Discipline from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 194–5. 51 Bodl. MS Tanner 279, fo. 352. 52 Lake and Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity, passim. Estwick was so central to this godly network that he was chosen to preach Robert Bolton’s funeral sermon: Nicholas Estwick, A learned and godly sermon (1633). 53 Joseph Bentham, The Saints societie (1636), sig. ¶2v, pp. 160–3. This passage would have seemed less controversial when it was initially published as The societie of the saints (1630). 54 [Robert Sanderson], A Soveraigne Antidote aganst Sabbatarian Errours (1636), pp. 5, 13–14. 55 Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘Popularity, prelacy and puritanism in the 1630s: Joseph Hall explains himself’, EHR, 111 (1996), pp. 866–7, 879. 56 Gilbert Ironside, Seven questions of the sabbath briefly disputed (Oxford, 1637), siga B3r–v, pp. 117, 123–4, 280. 57 St John’s College, Cambridge, MS I.25, pp. 1–2, 46–65. 58 Ann Hughes, ‘A moderate puritan preacher negotiates religious change’, JEccH, 65.4 (2014), 761–79, pp. 776–7. 59 John Brinsley, The Glorie of the Latter Temple (1631), pp. 17–18, 19, 21–2. For the background see Richard Cust, ‘Anti-puritanism and urban politics: Charles I and Great Yarmouth’, HJ, 35 (1992), 1–26, pp. 18–19. 60 Vivienne Larminie, ‘Johann Heinrich Hummel, the Peningtons and the London godly community: Anglo-Swiss networks 1634–1674’, Journal for the History of Reformed Pietism, 2.2 (2016), 1–26, p. 21. 61 For example, the commonplace book attributed in the BL catalogue to Oliver St John –inaccurately it would appear, as the author seems to be a clergyman – (BL, Add. MS 25285) has an account (fos 303r–v) of ‘what is said for it’ (bowing towards the altar), as well as quotations from Edmund Reeve on bishops and Francis White on the Sabbath (fos 296–8). See also the sections regarding the altar in the earl of Bedford’s commonplace books discussed in D. Duggan, ‘ “London the ring, Covent Garden the jewell of that ring”: new light on Covent Garden’, Architectural History, 43 (2000), 140–61, pp. 152–3. 62 Bodl. MS Tanner 71, fos 186–7; Webster, Godly Clergy, pp. 168n, 240, 243, 1641, ed. J. Fielding (Camden 248; The Diary of Robert Woodford 1637–
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Society, 5th series, 42, 2012), p. 106; The Diary of Samuel Rogers, 1634–1638, ed. T. Webster and K. Shipps (Church of England Record Society, 11, 2004), p. xliii (and cf. p. 50). 63 F. McCall, Baal’s Priests (Farnham, 2013), p. 86. 64 Winthrop Papers (5 vols, Boston, 1929–47), iii. 59, 243. 65 Webster, Godly Clergy, pp. 240, 247. 66 Calamy, Just apology, p .7, italics in original. 67 William Prynne, The Unbishoping of Timothy and Titus (1636), pp. 147–52. 68 John Ley, Defensive Doubts, Hopes and Reasons, for refusal of the Oath, imposed by the sixth Canon of the late Synod (1641), sig. c3v. 69 Englands Complaint to Jesus Christ against the Bishops Canons (1640), sig. C3v. 70 Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism, and the Political Nation, 1553– 1682 (Woodbridge, 2005), p. 141. 71 Jeremiah Burroughs, Sions joy. A sermon preached to the honourable House of Commons assembled in Parliament at their publique thanksgiving, September 7, 1641 (1641), pp. 26–7. 72 TNA, SP 16/ 442/ 84; 444/ 79; 445/ 22. For an important assessment of Holdsworth’s churchmanship and his theological objections to Laudianism see S. Hampton, ‘Richard Holdsworth and the Antinomian controversy’, Journal of Theological Studies, new series, 62:1 (2011), 218–50. 73 LPL, Lambeth MS 468; Larminie, ‘Johann Heinrich Hummel’, pp. 16, 23. Kenneth Fincham (‘William Laud and the exercise of Caroline ecclesiastical patronage’, JEccH, 51.1 (2000), 69–93) notes, however, that Laud’s non-partisan promotions were few, despite his significant levels of control over appointments to crown livings (pp. 87–90). 74 See Anthony Milton, England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England 1625–1662 (Cambridge, 2021).
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Killing (Catholic) officers no crime? The politics of religious violence in England in 1640 John Walter This chapter revisits the puzzling episodes in which officers were murdered by troops enrolled to fight the Scots in 1640. Bringing new evidence to their study and exploring the micropolitics of these episodes, the chapter sets these within the context of the more general level of violence triggered by the mustering of large groups of often recalcitrant troops for an unpopular war whose conduct was the subject of rumour and fears about its ‘real’ purpose. Seeking in Carlo Ginzburg’s words to ‘disclose the rationality of the irrational’ and offering a thick description of the performative violence with which the officers were killed, this microhistorical analysis challenges existing explanations for the killings.1 Exceptional as these episodes were, an attention to what the crowds did and the way they shaped their actions suggests that they can provide valuable evidence of more widely held beliefs (about religion, politics, masculinity and honour) which informed the murders and which challenges the continuing tendency of existing historical explanations to reproduce contemporary (and elitist) judgements about an apolitical and violent people.
I In the spring of 1640, in the context of renewed mobilisation of troops for the Second Bishops’ War, correspondence both public and private reported the worrying scale of disorder that attended the assembling of large groups of men: attacks on property and persons, mutiny and desertion.2 Herefordshire’s deputy lieutenants reported the imminent danger they were in from ‘mutinous disobedience, and insolent behaviours … never before knowen or heard of in this Countie in o[u]r times’.3 Running through these episodes was a worrying disregard for the traditional social hierarchies by which a landed elite as magistrates governed provincial society and as deputy lieutenants and officers raised and commanded the ‘trained’ bands on which the state’s military force was based.4 By the summer of 1640 disorder had
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reached new levels with two incidents in which troops on the march north murdered officers. The first incident involved the six hundred troops raised in Dorset.5 On reaching Faringdon in Berkshire on 17 June, trouble broke out between the troops and their officers, Captain Lewkenor, his lieutenant and ensign. All three were attacked, but the soldiers ‘rankor’ was mainly directed against the lieutenant, William Mohun. Mohun was said to have killed one of the soldiers and almost severed the drummer’s hand in an altercation in which the drummer had disobeyed his orders and struck him with his drumstick. On the evening of the 17th, on news that the drummer was dead, the soldiers had ‘mustered up in troopes’. They pursued the three officers and, ‘cryeing out a Moone, a Moone’, besieged them in their chamber. The soldiers breaking in, the officers were forced to climb out of a window and to clamber onto the inn’s signpost. The soldiers then proceeded to pelt the officers with stones. The captain and the ensign were forced (allowed?) to climb down, but Mohun resisted. A soldier getting into his chamber struck at him with a large piece of wood, eventually toppling him to the ground. He was then subjected to a sustained and bloody assault. Brought to ground, Mohun was set upon by others who beat him with their cudgels. He was hauled by his hair to a sewer and, after ‘they had mired him’, dragged around the town and finally left for dead in a ditch. But coming to, Mohun sought shelter in a house. On learning of this the troops, crying out ‘he was a divill (for they thought they had killed him)’, brushed aside a boy who told them there was nobody there ‘but a poor man that was almost dead’ and broke into the house. At bay, Mohun drew his dagger to defend himself, but it was knocked from his hand and he was again cudgelled till they had knocked out his brains. The soldiers then dragged him through the town again, ‘at a horse tayle’ according to one report,6 finally hanging him, naked according to another, on the pillory.7 Overnight, his fellow officers managed to retrieve his body and bury it in the churchyard, but according to the sheriff, who had only learned of the incident some twenty-four hours later, the troops threatening ‘to put them to the sword’, the officers had all fled.8 The second incident happened a month later on 12 July at Wellington in Somerset. It involved the same regiment, but this time it was a company of one hundred and sixty soldiers, part of the larger contingent of six hundred raised in Devon.9 The 12th was a Sunday and, resting in their march, the men had gone orderly to church in the morning. But according to a report made by one of their senior officers, Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, they had then spent the day grumbling at their Lieutenant, he ‘being a papist … [and] absenting himself from Church’. Missing him all the day, towards the evening the company went to where Lieutenant Compton Evers
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was quartered. They broke into his lodgings; one report says his lodgings were pulled down. They dragged Evers by his arms and legs down the stairs and into the street, beating off those who tried to rescue him. He was then attacked in the street. Several witnesses described a ‘great many souldiers’ surrounding Evers and beating him with their cudgels and staves. One used Evers’ own sword to strike at him. A report claimed that the soldiers were assisted by ‘300’ of the town who gave them more swords. While Evers lay in the street his clothes were searched and torn and ‘a Crucifixe tyed in a Riband’ discovered hanging around his neck. This was taken, along with the coins he had in his pocket. According to the royal proclamation issued for the arrest of the soldiers, Evers too had been dragged through the streets ‘in a most barbarous and inhumane manner’.10 Left for dead, his body lay all night in the street before finally being carried into an inn the next morning. The next day the troops had offered to march on with their captain but, according to a newsletter, on learning that they ‘had resolved amongst themselves to kill all their officers’, he had refused. According to another report, the Devon troops had refused to march on unless they were led by their own county conductors.11 Despite the care with which the authorities pursued the killers and the ease with which the troops, returning home in their distinctive coats,12 could be arrested, we lack all but a handful of names of those involved in the killings.13 Of the pain and terror that Evers and Mohun suffered in what were slow, brutal deaths we hear nothing, nor of the trauma of those who witnessed but failed to prevent their deaths, although we know that thereafter fear of the troops had led their immediate fellow officers to run away and left officers elsewhere reluctant to discipline their troops until they arrived at their northern rendezvous (and even then not without continuing difficulty).14 One Monmouthshire deputy lieutenant was said to have died – ‘without sickness’ –out of fear of the troops,15 and Lord Maynard, the lord lieutenant for Cambridgeshire, before he went to suppress troop disorders there, directly referring to the deaths added a codicil to his will, in case he should come to ‘an untimely end’.16
II The murder of the officers took place in a context in which the recruitment and mustering of the troops occasioned widespread disorder. Troops were traditionally seen as a source of disorder and in the previous year mobilisation for the (unsuccessful) First Bishops’ War had produced similar, if smaller-scale problems. As early as April 1639 Herefordshire troops were reported to have killed one of their conductors, and if the report can be
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believed troops had fired into their officers’ tents and, more worryingly still, into that of the king.17 In 1640 all but five of the thirty-five counties from which troops were to be drawn experienced some problems, and given the spread of the disorder even the absence in these five may reflect an absence of evidence rather than of disorder. Something of the problems of 1640 were those traditionally associated with the mustering of early modern armies, with recruitment being marred by desertion, mutinies over pay and clashes between citizens and soldiers.18 At Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire a dispute arising from the refusal of the trained bands to serve under the officers sent into the county was reported to have led some of the officers to fire the town.19 At Berwick a dispute over pay saw the troops put themselves in rank and file and with lighted match. At Newcastle, a similar dispute saw the man the troops had elected to be their speaker arrested and forced to cast dice with one of those who had subsequently sought to rescue him, with five of the mutineers then forced to shoot the loser.20 In May, disputes over pay led to further mutinies and to reports of troops robbing houses and travellers.21 Disorders multiplied as men began to move north.22 This had led to clashes between troops and the deputy lieutenants whose office it was to assemble the troops and with the conductors whose job it was to march the men north.23 A letter written in mid-June reported that the troops on the march ‘make many broyles with their Commanders and Conductors in their passage’.24 Reports variously described the soldiers as ‘saucy with the officers’ and ‘very insolent in their march against their Officers’. Ominously, magistrates whose office and status accustomed them to expect deference from their inferiors were subjected to physical violence. In Suffolk, troops besieged the deputy lieutenants in their chamber and threatened to kill them; in York, soldiers beat up their officers; and in Essex in an altercation with the troops that turned physical one of the deputy lieutenants, Sir Henry Mildmay, ‘got a good knock’.25 One officer reported his fellow officers ‘soe fearefull of their soldiers, that they daire not March with them on the way, their soldiers having much threatened them … [and] theire officers daring not to correct them’.26 In Worcestershire, the troops cut down and burned the gallows, supposedly the ultimate symbol of military discipline.27 These familiar problems in the raising of troops had been made much worse as a consequence of sudden shifts in government policy. Successive delays in the date originally set by the government for marching the troops north had left large groups of men idle and raised disputes over whether and who should pay them; they remained the responsibility of the county till on the march and in some counties it was decided to pay them only for the days on which they trained –‘in the mean [time] to live at their own costs and labour not at the country’s’.28 As the deputy lieutenants for Somerset
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presciently observed, ‘wee learne for ye future that it is very dangerous to bring soe greate a body together & to suffer them to stay in ye County for so long after they are pressed’, observing on the same day that Mohun was to be attacked at Faringdon that, ‘their Comanders … and orselves were more obnoxious to their fury than any other’.29 Originally, it had been decided that the trained bands were to be excluded from the press, but almost immediately the Privy Council changed its mind and counties were ordered to recruit from the trained bands. This produced further trouble. Across a number of counties members of the trained bands refused to be pressed or to go out of the county, citing the customary understanding that service in the trained bands exempted them from ‘foreign’ service. In Dorset, members of the trained bands were reported to have refused to be pressed and claimed that they never knew ‘the train’ to march out of the county, while Kent’s deputy lieutenants, reporting a mutiny among the trained bands, noted a ‘stubborn sullennesse’ among them: ‘some will not goe beyond theire colours, others will not goe into Scotland’.30 A similar unwillingness was reported in Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Herefordshire, while a letter writer noting stirs in Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Warwickshire reported that ‘they are generally stubborne and will not marche until his Mate goe in person’.31 Already reluctant to leave their counties, the assembled troops objected to those under whom they were expected to march. Ironically, it was again government policy that contributed to the problems county authorities and officers faced in maintaining order once the troops were on the move. The belief that ‘a stranger possibly may touch them with rougher hands than those of their owne countrey’ saw ‘foreign’ officers sent into the counties to conduct and command the troops.32 This again challenged the customary expectation of those who had served in the trained bands that they would march under their own officers.33 Exemption from being commanded by ‘strange Captaynes & Officers’ had been one of the demands listed by the Hertfordshire trained bands in a petition of April 1640.34 What is striking about the behaviours and reported attitudes of the soldiers of 1640 is their political nature. There are hints of the sophistication that army politics might display in the report of the Venetian ambassador that on news of the dissolution of the Short Parliament arriving in the counties as the troops were preparing to march off –interestingly he mentions only Dorset by name –they ‘stopped and steadily refused to serve against that people [i.e., the Scots]’.35 If so, this reflected another report that the raising of troops before the calling of the parliament had provoked discourse and censure.36 Despite the king’s proclamation against the Scots, which had occasioned public shows of disapproval,37 it was reported that nothing would alter the humour of some officers and soldiers who, it was
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said, spare not ‘to declare their judgements against this warre’ and said ‘that they would not fight to maintaine the pride & power of the B[isho]ps’.38 Distrust of their officers and the purposes of the war led to a breakdown in military discipline. Their material conditions doubtless explained the desertion of some and participation in the mutinies over pay. But as should already be clear the refusal or reluctance to leave their counties or to serve was politically informed by references, familiar from other forms of early modern protest, to custom and the rights of ‘freeborn Englishmen’. The petition from the Hertfordshire trained bands declared themselves to be ‘as free borne as the best gent. in the Kingdome’ and claimed that they too were exempt from foreign service. They were not to be pressed, ‘as yf we were the basest & meanest of all his Mats subiects’.39 Political too was the troops’ refusal to answer, as was the case in Northamptonshire and elsewhere, ‘to any Captaine except their owne trained Captaine’.40 Behind the familiar problems created by pressing and pay there was then a politics to the protests of the troops. Both Mohun and Evers were to be its victims.
III Reports emphasised the brutal nature of the attacks on Mohun and Evers.41 But the widespread and violent nature of the other conflicts between troops and officers whose religion they doubted suggest that we should be careful not to exaggerate the exceptional nature of these episodes. And what happened in those other episodes also suggests that simply to dismiss them as the violence to be expected of those propertied contemporaries contemptuously called ‘the many-headed monster’ misses the meaning-making communicated by their actions. Adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, it is possible to attend to the symbolic speaking caught up in performing what became ritualised acts of violence. As David Riches argues in his influential essay on the anthropology of violence, violence can be both instrumental and expressive, practical and symbolic. As such, violence can serve as an ‘excellent communicative vehicle’ to make symbolic statements and to dramatise key social ideas. Donald Horowitz’s powerful study of violence in the ‘deadly ethnic riot’ also demonstrates that its use there represents an amalgam of rational-purposive behaviour and irrational brutal behaviour. According to Horowitz, such violent episodes are ‘passionate but highly structured events’. As ‘patterned events’ they therefore have a meaning which can be recovered.42 In 1640, Mohun and Evers’ killers sought by direct action to remove the threat they were thought to present, but in the manner of their deaths they also sought to articulate the nature of that threat.
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Helpfully, for understanding the violence in 1640, Horowitz emphasises the central role of rumour in explaining episodes of violence. Rumours, and specifically those involving groups that become the target of crowd violence, play an important role in justifying violence. They confirm the menace the crowd’s victims are thought to represent and in the face of everyday prohibitions against violence permit its use against those that rumours render stereotypically. Introducing men not known to those whom they were to command created perfect conditions for the circulation of rumours about the strangers’ political and confessional identities. In what was for many in the country an unpopular war, to whose financing –worryingly –Catholics had contributed in an initiative attributed to the king’s French Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria,43 this also raised suspicions about what was to be the army’s role. Troops under Colonel Lunsford who mutinied and disbanded at Daventry in Northamptonshire at about the time that Evers was killed, were reported to have told other troops they met, ‘that they were going to be shipd & sould for slaves … and be used like dogges, that all was peace in Scotland, and that was only a pretence to carry them some other where’. (Distrust of the purposes for which they were being assembled helps to explain why troops who were to be transported by sea were generally reluctant to embark.44) Lunsford’s troops had also reported that the officers were all ‘papists, & that my Lord Generall himself was one’. Others claimed that at least half the officers in some regiments were ‘popish’.45 What is striking about the mobilisation in 1640 is how widespread were these beliefs. At Cirencester in Gloucestershire one officer, Francis Windebanke, son of Charles I’s secretary of state, found most of his men ‘to be ill affected to this service, and much slyting all their officers by reason the cuntrie had layd an aspersion upon all of us, that wee were romaine Catholickes’.46 In Berkshire, some of the mobilised troops had run away and others who were later to disband themselves distrusted their captain, ‘in respect he is a recusant as they say’.47 A letter from the west reporting other actions by the Devonshire troops reported that the ‘unruly’ soldiers had ‘threats in there mouths against three sorts of men, as ye causes of these disturbances’. First was their officers who they say ‘are needy, and most of them beggarly fellows, and therefor putt forward this desire for there owne advantage’; second were the bishops, ‘great fyarbrands of discord betwixt ye king & his people in both Kingdomes’ –and last were ‘ye papists’.48 Suspicions about the identities of their officers meant that only a fragile line divided verbal violence and fisticuffs from more serious episodes of physical violence. In mid-May, Brilliana Harley reported that there had been a fight at Presteigne on the Welsh border and but for the intervention of the trained bands the pressed men ‘had killed the captaine that is come
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downe for them, refuseing to go with him, because he is a papis[t]’.49 The Daventry mutineers had threatened to dash out the brains of the officer who had attempted to counter the rumours they were spreading, while Francis Windebanke found when first taking command of his troops, that ‘divers of them swore desperately, if they found wee were papestes, they would soon despatch us’.50 Troops in Hertfordshire were reported to have said ‘they will have noe popish Commanders’, while in Northamptonshire, where there was a major mutiny in mid-July, Robert Woodford recorded that the soldiers ‘are vehemently bent ag[ains]t papists & will scarce be ruled by their captaynes’.51 Behind these refusals lay a commitment to the defence of Protestantism. Thus, the Berkshire and Oxfordshire troops who mutinied at Daventry, fearing that they were ‘to be shipt and to be commanded by papists’, had declared that ‘they would not fight against the Gospell’.52 Mobilised by rumour, the troops’ actions can be read as a continuation of the post-Reformation participation of local communities in policing Protestantism. Suspicious of the confessional identity of the strangers under whom they were to serve, the troops subjected their officers to their own form of religious inquisition in search of what Horowitz calls ‘identifying cues’.53 This reflected a recognition of the cultural markers of confessional identity. Thus, a later account of events in 1640 records the troops forcing ‘those Popish Commanders that were to command them … to eat flesh on Fridayes, thrusting it downe their throates’.54 Predictably, however, these exchanges hinged around attendance at Protestant worship, with participation in the communion providing the ultimate test. From Essex, the earl of Warwick reported that, ‘I find the souldyer is very jealous in point of their Religion. They having often moved me that their officers might receive the Communion with them.’55 At Warminster in Wiltshire, the troops having ‘some notice that theire Captaine was a papist’ ‘move it to … [him]’ before they were to march off, ‘that they might all of them receive the Sacrament’. On his showing little inclination to it, ‘at least for his own receiving’, they ‘prest him soe much the more to it & when they perceived hee would not they tell him plainly that if soe bee he will not receive the Com[m]union & pray wth them they will not fight under him’. As the report concludes, ‘in this manner they cashiered theire Captain’.56 Similarly, it was reported of the troops mustered in Worcestershire that they ‘would willingly have pickt some quarrel with their Officers but could not for they all did receave the Communion at the motion of the soldiers’. Nevertheless, on reaching Tewkesbury, the Worcestershire levy sought to make their officers swear, ‘firstly that they were noe Papists, secondly that this designe in hand was for the advantage of the Protestant Religion’.57
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When officers failed to reassure the troops of their allegiance to the Protestant faith, attempts were made, as in other episodes of confessional conflict, at forcible conversion. In an episode at Northampton in June, when their captain refused to attend church on the Sunday –‘he being a papist’ – his soldiers ‘took and bound him and carried him to church’.58 Edmund Verney reported that a captain in Lord Newport’s regiment had also been pulled up by his troops to the ‘byshop’s altar’ and made to receive communion. Verney himself had had to attend church three times in one day ‘to give them satisfaction that I was noe papist’. But finding himself in danger of falling asleep in church that day, he reported, ‘had it been a minute longer truly I doe thinke I had been pulled by the nose, for the souldyers pointed extreamely at me’.59 On the march, Devon troops, from whom came Evers’ killers, pursued a similar policy. On 8 July a group of one hundred soldiers (if the numbers are accurate, effectively a whole company) reportedly ‘fell into fowle disorder … and forst [forced] twoe Recusants to Church in a most tumultuous manner’. Both were officers. One came from the local Catholic Sheldon family; the other was an officer under Sir William Howard’s command.60 Sheldon was beaten and imprisoned in the church with his wife, only getting free after midnight. He escaped with his life, so the report ran, by being taken into custody by the townsmen and having his house searched for arms.61 The timing of the Devon troops’ actions is significant since it took place at the special service ordered to be held on the first national fast day in which the recurring theme was of reformation and repentance to avoid God’s angers for the country’s sins.62 The context for the murders was therefore that identified in the work of Horowitz and others: rumour and fear. The letter, identifying those the troops named as their enemies, when citing ‘papists’ had reported of the troops that ‘they … feare [them] soarly whearever they come’.63 Rumour with its attendant emotion of fear also helps to explain the cruelty of the crowd, driven by fear and committed to removing what they perceived as a source of danger, a danger that was both physical and symbolic. Both Mohun and Evers’ bodies were denied burial and subjected to acts of depersonalising desecration (including in Mohun’s case, perhaps in parody of the rites of purification, being ducked in the local cess pit and then abandoned in a ditch). These signalled their exclusion from human society and eased the use of violence against them. As contemporaries noted, Mohun was ‘basely and inhumanely used’ and ‘beastly slaine’.64 That the soldiers labelled Mohun as ‘a divill’ when they discovered he had not died may have been a characteristic example of the playful humour killing crowds sometimes displayed, but it too may have helped to license his killing.
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The attacks on the officers drew on a virulent strain of anti-popery and were therefore entangled with what Alain Corbin has called ‘social images of danger’.65 The objection to serving under ‘strange’ officers and the troops’ susceptibility to rumours about the identity of those officers and the purpose of the war they were to be expected to fight clearly reflected the power and purchase of anti-popery in early modern English popular political culture.66 Seeking to identify officers they suspected to be Catholic, the troops sought, as in other episodes of confessional violence,67 to remove the threat they represented by their forcible conversion. Failing to do so, they killed Mohun and Evers. They desecrated their bodies and subjected them to a ritualised violence which closely mimicked the punishment accorded traitors: dragging Evers’ body and denying it burial, twice dragging Mohun at a horse’s tail and finally displaying his body naked on the pillory. As one report mistakenly (but revealingly) noted, they had ‘quarterd him’.68
IV As Horowitz reminds us, behind the crowd stands the community. Instead of making their actions exceptional, Horowitz’s emphasis on the role of rumour in mobilising ordinary people to do what ordinary people do not normally do restores the killers to the community from which they come, and to its attitudes, ideas and fears. Seen thus, the ‘rationality’ of the troops’ actions and the precise form these took become more understandable. In 1639–40 this was a community marked by growing political tension caused by a war with fellow Protestants in a country where ceremonialist religious changes (witnessed by physical changes in the local parish church) pursued by a king with a Catholic queen (‘papist wench’69) had led to fears of the return of ‘popery’. This reading of a secret plot to reconcile England with Rome was the occasion of public comment and popular panics.70 It was central to popular libels that appeared as the mobilisation of the troops was ordered,71 and to the propaganda pamphlets being circulated by the Scots among the English troops.72 As a libel incorporating current political discontents into the trope of a popish plot announced, ‘the Papists … doe make a laughing stock of us’; ‘the Captns and Lieut[enan]ts must be all papists for none will goe but them’.73 The troops of 1640 were civilian soldiers. Mustering and training during the delay in marching doubtless helped to create an emerging sense of comradeship that may have played its part in the violence and the subsequent attempts of the troops to rescue those arrested for the murders. Attempting to arrest four of Evers’ suspected killers, Devon’s deputy lieutenants were confronted by twenty more troops, crying ‘if we would hang one
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we should hang all’.74 But, as David Underdown has noted, ‘even conscripts were products of communities whose general outlook they would naturally have tended to share’.75 As such, they were not cut off from the ideas and attitudes of the society from which they were temporarily, and only very recently, recruited. This helps to explain other actions sometime taken by the troops in 1640 in remedying community grievances over enclosure, unpopular ministers or local Catholic families.76 Various commentators blamed local opinion and sermons for the friction between officers and troops, while Windebanke blamed the ‘puritan rascolls of the kuntrie’ for spreading the rumours that all the officers were ‘papists’.77 Events at Aylesbury offer a reminder of the consequences of this wider community subscription to the trope of anti-popery. The clash with the officers sent to assemble the troops, apparently triggered by the refusal of the troops to march under the command of strangers, had led the officers to threaten to fire the town. At their subsequent trial, the only officer found guilty and sentenced to be hanged was a Catholic.78 In the attack on Evers at Wellington it was the local community, whose political allegiance was to be captured in the proverbial tag ‘Wellington Roundhead’,79 that provided his killers with swords, a role for which they were to be collectively fined at the Somerset assizes.80 Mark Stoyle notes that the Evers’ killers were recruited from ‘a zealously parliamentarian area’ in Devon.81 It may be revealing of more widely held attitudes locally that when Devon came two years later to petition the Long Parliament their petition gave prominence to the request that all officers who were ‘papist’ or that way inclined should be replaced by Protestants.82 If the troops’ actions were reflective of the wider values of the communities from which they were drawn, then they also had more immediate support from the military codes issued in 1639 and in 1640. Re-statements of earlier sets of ordinances, central to these codes was religion.83 The Lawes and Ordinances of Warre issued in 1639 charged all officers to ‘take care that God almighty be duly served’; they stipulated that there should be both morning and evening prayer services with a sermon, and –significantly – they required that officers themselves should ‘diligently’ attend together with their troops and servants. These injunctions were repeated in 1640, but the orders then omitted the requirement for officers personally to attend church. They did however order that all those wilfully absent from services and sermon be proceeded against.84 Troops who sought to persuade or force their officers to church might then have felt themselves to be acting also in obedience to official orders. Like the troops who staged mock church courts and put on trial women suspected of prostitution, another target of the military orders, and later pulled down altar rails they too could claim legitimacy for their actions.85
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V The killings were exceptional events. However, evidence of the violent animosity troops showed to other officers whose religion they suspected, but which stopped short of murder, suggests the need for another layer of explanation as to why Mohun and Evers were killed. Writing of an earlier period of disorder during the military mobilisation of the 1620s, Stephen Stearns tentatively asked: ‘would it be too much to suggest that, much as E. P. Thompson’s food rioters … had their “moral economy”, so did these civilian soldiers?’86 An additional explanation for Mohun and Evers’ deaths is perhaps to be found in an understanding of the norms and rules governing the relationship between early modern troops and their officers. If it was their religion that ultimately determined their fate, their own relationships with their troops help to explain why in their cases animosity led to murder. Military ordinances laid down clear rules to regulate exchanges between troops and officers.87 However, as the attention devoted to this in military handbooks and army orders suggested, this was not a straightforward task.88 Officers might be expected to prevent outbreaks of disorder or to punish misdemeanours with ‘light blows’ with canes or sheathed swords. But, as the author of The Compleat Body of the Art Military recommended, a captain should ‘not be too rigid, and harsh, caning or beating them, without just cause’, adding ominously, ‘lest he incurre their hatred, who secretly, or in time of Battail, will seek to be revenged of … [him]’.89 ‘A Captain,’ as another military handbook advised, ‘ought to carry himself in such a way, that his souldiers may both fear and love him, too much familiarity breeds contempt, and too sterne a carriage begets hatred.’ He should have a ‘fatherly care of his Souldiers’.90 Conceived in terms of patriarchy and paternalism, the officer’s role was to be like that of a father, blending discipline with concern for the well-being of their men. Officers were advised therefore to adopt a mix of command and courtesy. As Sir Robert Harley was reported to have said: ‘A captain’s good look or a good word sometimes does infinitely win and oblige them.’ But, Harley also noted, ‘generally, the commanders of the king’s army would never be acquainted with their soldiers, which was an extraordinary prejudice to the king’s cause’.91 Harley was clearly parti pris and writing about civil war armies, but there is evidence to suggest there were similar problems in 1640. In a series of self-congratulatory letters, Francis Windebanke told how, confronted on first meeting by threats from those he was to command to dispatch all Catholic officers, he had nevertheless ‘gained the harts of all my Soldiers’. On the first day of their march, he had ‘desired them all to kneele downe, and to sing sames [psalms] and made one of my officers to reade prayers, which pleases them not a leightle [little]’. On their march over the next few days
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they had continued to sing psalms ‘all the daie’. Treating them to drink and tobacco, he told his father that he had ‘gained their loves, so that they all now sweare, that they will never leave mee, as long as they live’.92 In a subsequent letter he was to complain mockingly of his soldiers’ ‘courtesy’ in greeting him each morning with over-vigorous shaking of his hand. But a gestural exchange to be read as symbolising the (temporary) and mutual deferral of deference across the boundaries of class points to the quality of the relationship he had achieved with, and more importantly perhaps was expected by, his men.93 By contrast, Mohun can be seen to have failed this normative order. Although the troops were said to have menaced both his captain and ensign, their hostility was mostly directed against Mohun because he had been ‘very severe towards some of them, and worse was reported amongst the soldiers then [than] he deserved, for it was said he had kild one of the souldiers, and cutt off the drummers hand’. It was when the drummer was reported as dead that the soldiers had ‘mustered upp in troopes’.94 In the 1620s, excessive officer violence had caused earlier mutinies.95 Similarly, troops mobilised in Berkshire in 1640 who refused to serve under a Catholic officer disbanded after he had repeatedly struck a soldier, an episode in which the local authorities also thought him the guilty party.96 A further episode in which an officer was murdered by his troops, in Kingston upon Hull in June 1641, was again prompted by the captain striking a soldier for insolency and then, on his striking back, killing him.97 Significantly, the pamphlet devoted to this episode attributed Captain Withers’ fate to his attempting to exercise ‘Tyrannie’ over his soldiers. It has his soldiers tell him that as he was their Captaine and commander they honoured him, but if that he went any way to tyrannize over them, he should find a souldiers malice not inferior to a Captaine … For since you seeme to forget your love to us, we scorn to tender our service to you.
‘If men be your servants, make them not your slaves’, was the lesson the pamphlet’s author took from this episode.98 Ann Hughes’ innovative work on gendering the English Revolution perhaps allows us to see how issues of age and gender may also have contributed to Mohun and Evers’ fate.99 Given the hypermasculinity associated with the military, the relationships between military service and the achievement of manhood were obvious. As military sermons commonly reminded them, military service allowed the young and unmarried to ‘play the man’. But while excessive use of violence challenged notions of restraint that were thought essential to the proper achievement of manhood, in the competitive world of early modern masculinity the necessary stress upon virility and violence problematised the defence of honour and achievement and acceptance of subordination.100 If it is possible to generalise from the ages recovered for
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those of the Devon troops involved in the attack for which we have names then the tensions with their troops may also reflect a difficult relationship between groups of roughly similar age.101 As lieutenants, Mohun and Evers were probably young.102 In a world in which office and authority usually ran with age, their relative youth may have compounded the difficult relationship with those they were expected to command.103 These issues were perhaps always problematic in England’s civilian army. But the nature of the 1640 mobilisation may have compounded the problems facing Mohun and Evers. While delays over mustering and marching fostered comradeship among the troops before the officers under which they were to march took control, the fact that as a result of government policy these officers were strangers to them may also have robbed young officers in particular of the deference based on pre-existing, and often face-to-face, relationships on which the gentry’s authority as magistrates and officers in the trained bands so often depended.
VI After the event, the government arrested, put on trial and hanged a small number of the leading participants,104 but the press of events saw the larger number arrested allowed to escape punishment,105 and Mohun and Evers slip back into that obscurity from which only the notoriety of their deaths (temporarily) rescued them.106 But their fates merit more attention. The meaning of violence, as Riches argues, is negotiated between victims, performers, and witnesses, to which we should add audience(s) and authority. In 1640, both the government and propertied contemporaries stressed the brutal nature of what had happened –the killings were ‘barbarous’; the killers did it ‘most savagely yt ev[er] was heard of’ –and they attributed this to the ‘inherent’ plebeian violence of troops.107 As such, contemporary comment might suggest that the events of 1640 needed little further explanation. In this, they have been followed by some historians of the period who have been reluctant to take seriously that in the deaths of Mohun and Evers belief may explain behaviour. Drawing on contemporary stereotyping of early modern troops and assumptions about the character of those recruited in 1640, they have been content to attribute them to the violent acts of violent men.108 However, as the sociologist Randall Collins has sought to argue, it is not violent individuals but violent situations that explain and shape the outbreak of violence.109 However, most contemporary comment noted the confessional identity of the victims. As one officer concluded,
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the people being either persuaded or of opinion yt their Leaders & Service were Popish hath don his Matie more Disservice in this Business than any one thing, & thence (I am confident) have proceeded those Barbarous Murthers, that rebellious Deniall of service, & yt felonious running away from their Officers.110
Contemporaries were also alert to the ritualised manner of Mohun and Evers’ deaths. We should not seek to overexplain violence, but recognising the performative nature of the violence against their officers and paying attention therefore to the (repetitive) form their violence took both in the murders of Mohun and Evers and in the other episodes of conflict between troops and their officers reveals the politics behind their protest. As Alain Corbin suggests in Village of Cannibals, an account of the lengthy and brutal killing of a local aristocrat in nineteenth-century France with striking parallels to the 1640 episodes, ‘the adherence to a form of ritual (however corrupt it may have been) sets the event apart as execution rather than “ordinary murder” ’.111 Popular violence in England in 1640 employed rites of violence that were, as in other episodes of confessional conflict,112 both punitive and probatory, and murder, where it occurred, could be read as pre-emptive and purificatory. Although the historian of the Bishops’ Wars seems sometimes reluctant to see the military disorders of 1640 as other than spontaneous and opportunistic, it was as Fissel rightly argues fear of popery that ‘dissolved the bonds of deference … permitting normally unacceptable behaviour, to the degree that some of the participants might have pleaded, in modern parlance, “justifiable homicide” ’. But suggesting, as he does, that the major religious developments of the period otherwise had limited impact on the ‘lower orders’ seems to introduce a false dichotomy.113 The lesson of 1640, with psalm-singing114 troops willing to subject their officers to their own form of religious inquisition, force-feeding them flesh on Fridays and requiring them to participate in the community of sacramental communion, was that Protestant England was now a nation of Protestants with a political culture in which defence of the true religion was a moral imperative and in whose defence even pressed soldiers claimed a right to participate. In a civil war where confessional and ethnic othering of Catholics and foreigners brought episodes of collective massacre,115 both Parliament (more successfully, initially) and king (less successfully, initially) had to present themselves as defenders of Protestantism. As Ann Hughes has argued, ‘it mattered little that rumour overestimated the prominence of “popish” officers in the armies sent against the Scots, the fears created surfaced again and again to magnify the panics later plots aroused’.116
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Notes 1 Maria Lucia Pallares- Burke, ed., The New History: Confessions and Conversations (Cambridge, 2002), p. 207. 2 For which see now the standard authority, Mark Charles Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaign against Scotland, 1638–1640 (Cambridge, 2011). 3 TNA, SP 16/459/86. 4 Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia, 1558–1638 (London, 1967), pp. 244–97; T. G. Barnes, Somerset 1625–1640: A County Government during the Personal Rule (Chicago and London, 1961), ch. 9; Henrik Langelüddeke, ‘The chiefest strength and glory of this kingdom: arming and training the “perfect militia” in the 1630s’, EHR, 118.479 (2003), 1264–303. 5 Unless otherwise indicated, the narrative follows the well-informed letter, sent on the 23rd, by the professional news-writer, Edmund Rossingham: TNA, SP 16/457/104. This is the only detailed account of the episode to have survived. That Sir Kenelm Digby’s shorter, facetious account (SP 16/457/103) sent in a letter the same day follows a similar narrative perhaps suggest that both were drawing from an account or accounts now lost to us. For other brief reports, see HEH, Ellesmere MSS, EL 7838; HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of the Right Honourable Viscount De L’Isle (6 vols, 1925–66), vi. 290. 6 HMC, De L’Isle, vi. 290. 7 Dorset History Centre, D 351, p. 31. 8 TNA, SP 16/457/8, 77. 9 The following narrative is drawn from a letter written by Gibson, Edmund Rossingham’s well- informed newsletter and subsequent examinations of a group of the soldiers: TNA SP 16/460/5, 56; SP 16/463/88; HRO, M32/5/17. 10 James F. Larkin, ed., Stuart Royal Proclamations of King Charles I 1625–1646 (Oxford, 1983), p. 723. 11 HRO, M32/5/17. 12 Bodl. MS Top Oxon c.378, p. 368; DHC, 3004A/PW4/1, fo. 191r (Exeter Heavitree churchwardens’ accounts: ‘pd. for 2 souldiers that came from Charde about the killing of the man at Wellington’.) 13 The royal proclamations named thirteen of the killers of Mohun and twelve of Evers (to which can be added the names of another thirteen from the subsequent examinations, some of whom were also involved): Larkin, ed., Stuart Royal Proclamations, pp. 718–20, 722–4; TNA, SP 16/463/88. 14 BL, Add. MS 35331, fo. 77r; TNA, SP 16/457/77, 91; SP 16/459/64, 91; SP 16/460/3; HRO, M32/5/17; HEH, EL 7844; CSPD 1640, pp. 514, 518, 581; CSPD 1640–1, p. 459. 15 TNA, E 115/99/7265. 16 TNA, PROB 11/185, fo. 195v; BL, Add. MS 21935, fo. 89v. Encircled by the troops at his arrival, Maynard was said to have hurled a handful of money on the ground ‘and set Spur to his Horsse and rided away with all the forse he could’. 17 T. T. Lewis, ed., The Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley (Camden Society, 1st series, 58, 1854), pp. 44–5; Charles Carleton, This Seat of Mars: War and the British
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Isles, 1485–1746 (London and New Haven, 2011), p. 116, citing TNA, SP 16/ 423/29 (but I have been unable to find evidence for this incident in the document). 18 TNA, SP 16/457/5; Lewis, ed., Letters, 90; J. Willis Bund, ed., The Diary of Henry Townshend of Elmley Lovett, 1640–1663 (2 vols, Worcestershire Historical Society, 1920), i. ix. 19 TNA, SP 16/453/24; BL, Add. MS 11045, fo. 116v; Sloane MS 1467, fo. 108v. 20 CSPD 1640, p. 73; TNA, SP 16/454/30, 31. 21 TNA, SP 16/454/30, 49, 85, 99.1; BL, Sloane MS 1467, fo. 117v-18r; CSPD 1640, pp. 73, 247; Bodl. MS Tanner 69, fo. 47. 22 TNA, SP 16/456/2, 42, 44; SP 16/457/5; SP 16/458/77 HMC, De L’Isle, vi. 286; BL, Sloane MS 1467, fos 124r–5r; HEH, EL 7837; Lewis, ed., Letters, p. 97. 23 CSPD 1640, pp. 107, 210, 213–14. 24 HMC, De L’Isle, vi. 286. 25 TNA, SP 16/ 459/ 64; SP 16/ 458/ 77; HRO, M32/ 5/ 17; BL, Harl. MS 383, fo. 176v. 26 TNA, SP 16/460/46. 27 TNA, E 368/656. 28 Stephen Porter, Stephen K. Roberts and Ian Roy, eds, The Diary and Papers Of Henry Townshend, 1640–1643 (Worcestershire Historical Society, new series, 25, 2014), p. 46. 29 TNA, SP 16/457/50. 30 TNA, SP 16/451/5, SP 16/453/11. 31 Belvoir Castle (Rutland Manuscripts), Muniment Room I, case 2, vol. xvii, fo. 271 (Sir Francis Fane to the earl of Rutland, 8 August 1640: I am grateful to His Grace, the Duke of Rutland for allowing me to consult this manuscript); HEH, EL 7837. 32 J. H. Bettey, ed., Calendar of the Correspondence of the Smyth Family of Ashton Court, 1548–1640 (Bristol Record Society, 35, 1982), p. 141; TNA, SP 16/453/24. 33 TNA, SP 16/452/95. 34 Gloucestershire Archives, MF 1395/D7115, vol. I, no. 5. 35 Calendar of State Papers Venetian 1640–42, p. 47. 36 CSPD 1639–40, p. 321. 37 Mark Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction: Rebellion and Civil War in an English City (Exeter, 1996), p. 43. 38 BL, Add. MS 37343, fo. 203v. 39 TNA, SP 16/451/5, SP 16/457/36; Gloucestershire Archives, MF 1395/D7115, vol. I, no. 5; BL, Sloane MS 1467, fo. 128r; CSPD 1640, pp. 95–7. 40 TNA, SP 16/452/95; BL, Add. MS, 11045, fo. 116v. 41 Bodl. MS Top Oxon c.378, p. 309. 42 David Riches, The Anthropology of Violence (Oxford, 1986), pp. 11– 12, 25; Donald H. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Los Angeles and London, 2001), pp. xiv, 1–2, 13. 43 Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, 1983), pp. 102–4.
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44 TNA, SP 16/461/5. 45 TNA, SP 16/461/5; SP 16/460/50. The earl of Northumberland, lord general in 1640, was not a Catholic, but the earl of Arundel, lord general the previous year, was widely believed to be so: George A. Drake, ‘Percy, Algernon, tenth earl of Northumberland (1602– 1668)’, ODNB; Malcom Smuts, ‘Howard, Thomas, fourteenth earl of Arundel, fourth earl of Surrey, and first earl of Norfolk (1585–1646)’, ODNB. For a list of some sixty Catholic officers identified in the 1640 regiments, see TNA, SP 16/473/53. 46 TNA, SP 16/460/46. 47 TNA, SP 16/455/4; SP 16/460/56. 48 Belvoir Castle (Rutland Manuscripts), Muniment Room I, case 2, vol. xvii, fo. 271. 49 Lewis, ed., Letters, p. 95. 50 TNA, SP 16/461/5; SP 16/460/46. 51 TNA, SP 16/ 460/ 50; John Fielding, ed., The Diary of Robert Woodford (Camden Society, 5th series, 42, 2012), p. 357. 52 TNA, SP 16/460/5. 53 Horowitz, Deadly Ethnic Riot, p. 126. 54 John Vicars, True Information of the Beginning and Cause of all Troubles (1648), p. 6. 55 TNA, SP 16/461/25. 56 BL, Sloane MS 1467, fo. 125r. 57 HRO, M32/5/17, emphasis added. 58 Bodl. MS Tanner 65, fo. 89. 59 Francis Parthenope Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family During the Civil War (2 vols, 1892–9), i. 333. 60 Shelton was probably Thomas Shelton, a captain in the Gloucestershire regiment of the Earl of Newport: www.british-history.ac.uk/rushworth-papers/ vol3/pp1221-1286 (accessed 15 February 2018). 61 TNA, SP16/460/56; Belvoir Castle (Rutland Manuscripts), Muniment Room I, case 2, vol. xvii, fo. 271. 62 Natalie Mears, Alasdair Raffe, Stephen Taylor and Philip Williamson (with Lucy Bates), eds, National Prayers: Special Worship Since The Reformation: Vol. I: Special Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings in the British Isles, 1533–1688 (Church of England Record Society, 20, 2013), pp. 368–73. At Radwinter in Essex, troops also chose this day to attack a ceremonialist minister accused of ‘popery’ and to destroy the images newly installed in the parish church: John Walter, ‘ “Affronts and insolencies”: the voices of Radwinter and popular opposition to Laudianism’, EHR, 122.495 (2007), 35–60, pp. 49–50. 63 Belvoir Castle (Rutland Manuscripts), Muniment Room I, case 2, vol. xvii, fo. 271. 64 M. A. E. Green, ed., The Diary of John Rous, Incumbent of Santon Downham, Suffolk, From 1625 to 1642 (Camden Society, 66, 1856), p. 90; BL, Harl. MS 1579, fo. 4v (from back), emphasis added.
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65 Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 2. 66 Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: the structure of a prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds, Conflict in Early Stuart England (London, 1989), pp. 72–106; Robin Clifton, ‘The popular fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, P&P, 52 (1971), 23–55; Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, passim; Alastair Bellany, ‘The murder of John Lambe: crowd violence, court scandal and popular politics in early seventeenth century England’, P&P, 200 (2008), 37–76; Alexandra Walsham, ‘ “The fatall vesper”: providentialism and anti- popery in late Jacobean London’, P&P, 144 (1994) , 36–87, p. 87. 67 Horowitz, Deadly Ethnic Riot, p. 436. 68 CUL, Hengrave MSS 88, vol. II, no. 144. 69 TNA, SP 16/460/85. 70 Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, pp. 124–7; Clifton, ‘Popular fear of Catholics’, passim. 71 TNA, SP 16/421/21, SP 16/422/80; SP 16/463/77, SP 16/464/79, SP 16/465/4; David Cressy, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous Sedition and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England (Oxford, 2010), pp. 153, 182–3. 72 Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 25–6; Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Trouble, 1637–1641 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 186–93, 198, 223; for examples of Scottish propaganda, all anonymous, see, News from Scotland (1638); An English Challenge and a Reply From Scotland [np, nd]; The Lawfulness of Our Expedition into England Manifested (1640); TNA, SP 16/ 460/85–86; SP 16/464/7; SP 16/465/43. 73 TNA, SP 16/438/93; SP 16/415/100 (for another libel with a similar message). 74 TNA, SP 16/460/52; SP 16/464/55. 75 David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1987), p. 190. 76 TNA, SP 16/459/36; Fissel, Bishops’ Wars, pp. 275–7; HMC, The Manuscripts of the Earl Cowper (3 vols, 1888–9), ii. 256–9. 77 TNA, SP 16/460/46–7, SP 16/461/48. 78 BL, Add. MS 11045, fo. 116v; Sloane MS 1467, fo. 108r. 79 David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth- Century England (Oxford, 1996), p. 126. 80 The fine was subsequently suspended: J. S. Cockburn, ed., Western Circuit Assize Orders 1629–1648: A Calendar (Camden Society, 4th series, 17, 1976), p. 222. 81 See, for example, Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter, 1994), p. 169. 82 The Petition of the Knights, Gentlemen and Yeomanry of the County of Devonshire (1642). 83 Margaret Griffin, Regulating Religion and Morality in the King’s Armies, 1639–1646 (Leiden, 2004), pp. 3–80.
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84 Lawes and Ordinances of Warre, for the better Government of His Maiesties Army Royall in the present Expedition for the Northern parts (Newcastle, 1639), p. 4; Lawes and Ordinances of Warre, Established for the Better Conduct of the Service in the Northern parts (1640), sigs A4v, C2v. 85 TNA, SP 16/457/103, 104 (including action by the troops in Suffolk against a suspected witch); John Walter, ‘Popular iconoclasm and the politics of the parish in eastern England, 1640–1642’, HJ, 47.2 (2004), 261–90; John Walter, ‘ “Abolishing superstition with sedition”: the politics of popular iconoclasm in England 1640–1642’, P&P, 183 (2004), 79–123. 86 Stephen J. Stearns, ‘Military disorder and martial law in early Stuart England’, in Buchanan Sharp and Mark Charles Fissel, eds, Law and Authority in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to Thomas Garden Barnes (Newark, NJ, 2007), p. 130n. 87 Lawes and Ordinances (1639), p. 9; Lawes and Ordinances (1640), sigs B1r–B2r. 88 Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642– 1649 (Oxford, 2008), ch. 12, pp. 225–6, 230–2, 238–41, 251–3; Robert Thomas Fallon, ed., The Christian Soldier: Religious Tracts Published for Soldiers on Both Sides During and After the English Civil Wars, 1642–1648 (Arizona, 2003). 89 Richard Elton, The Compleat Body of the Art Military: Exactly Compiled and Gradually Composed for the foot in the Best Refined Manner, According to the Practice of Modern Times (2nd edn, 1659), quoted in Donagan, War in England, p. 225. 90 Robert Ward, Anima’dversions of Warre, or, a Militarie Magazine of the Truest Rules and Ablest Instructions, for the Managing of War (1639), p. 202. 91 Roger B. Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms: The Origins of the British Army 1585–1702 (Oxford, 2006), p. 184. 92 TNA, SP 16/460/46, 47. 93 Peter M. Hall and Dee Ann Spencer Hall, ‘The handshake as interaction’, Semiotica, 45 (1983), 249–64, pp. 250–3. 94 TNA, SP 16/457/104. 95 Thomas Garden Barnes, ‘Deputies not principals, lieutenants not captains: the institutional failure of lieutenancy in the 1620s’, in Mark C. Fissel, ed., War and Government in Britain, 1598–1650 (Manchester, 1991), pp. 78–9. 96 TNA, SP 16/457/104; SP 16/455/4; SP 16/460/38. 97 CUL, Mm.i.45, p. 33; Bodl. MS Tanner 66, fo. 102; H.T., An Uproare in the North, at Hull, about a moneth since by a company of souldiers against their Captaine (1641). 98 Ibid., pp. 1–2, 4. 99 Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon, 2012), pp. 90–1; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), especially chapter 4. 100 On which, see the discussion in Sara Régnier-McKellar, ‘Playing the man: negotiating manhood and authority in England’s civil war armies’ (unpublished University of Essex PhD thesis, 2014).
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101 A search by place and name in Devon parish registers suggest that of those identifiable almost all were unmarried and in their twenties: www.findmypast. co.uk/ (accessed 10 May 2018). We lack place names for those accused in Dorset. 102 But see Fissel, Bishops’ Wars, p. 278n, for a possible identification that would have made Mohun older than suggested here. 103 Keith Thomas, Age and Authority in Early Modern England (London, 1976), pp. 5–12. 104 Larkin, ed., Stuart Royal Proclamations, pp. 718–20, 722–4; TNA, PC 2/ 52, pp. 566–8, 588, 680e; TNA, SP 16/457/77, SP 16/463/41, SP 16/464/ 55; Marjorie Maslem, ed., Woodstock Chamberlains’ Accounts 1609–1660 (Oxfordshire Record Society, 58, 1993), pp. 187– 8; Bodl. MS Top.Oxon c.378, p. 308; DHC, DC/LR/N/24/1, fo. 9r. Of Mohun’s murderers, two were condemned to be hanged at Abingdon assizes, with perhaps up to ten others awaiting trial; three others were arrested at the northern rendezvous but saved by the promise of a royal pardon: HRO, M32/5/17; Bodl. MS Top.Oxon c.378, p. 309; TNA, SP 16/463/41. 105 By October the Privy Council responded to information that 160 of the Devon men arrested for Evers’ murder were near starving in Exeter gaol by ordering all but those to be selected by the Lord General to be released: TNA, PC 2/53, p. 27. Two of those arrested and examined about the murder of Evers went on to join, and apparently desert, the parliamentary forces in 1642: DHC, Devon Quarter Sessions Bundles, Box 47 [1642–43]. I am grateful to Mark Stoyle for his transcription and discussion of this document. 106 I have been unable to identify Evers’ origins. Mohun may have come from the Cornish family who were clients of the duke of Buckingham and active supporters of Charles both before and during the civil war. If so, Mohun was related to John Mohun whose reported wish to have executed some of the soldiers that mutinied at Plymouth in 1627 may have contributed to the hostility against him: Anne Duffin, Faction and Faith: Politics and Religion of the Cornish Gentry before the Civil War (Exeter, 1996) pp. 5, 10, 63, 77, 87–8, 90–1, 124, 133. 107 TNA, PC 2/52, pp. 566, 568; Bodl. MS Top.Oxon c.378, p. 309. 108 See, for example, Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies (Oxford, 1995), pp. 141–2; David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), p. 90 (though contrast this with the statement on p. 157). 109 Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro- sociological Theory (Princeton, 2008), pp. 1–35. 110 TNA, SP 16/460/48. 111 Corbin, Village of Cannibals, p. 78. 112 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The rites of violence: religious riot in sixteenth-century France’, P&P, 59 (1973), 51–91; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Writing the “Rites of Violence” and afterward’, in Graeme Murdoch, Penny Roberts and Andrew Spicer, eds, Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern
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France (P&P supplement, 7, 2012), pp. 8–29; John Walter, ‘Performative violence and the politics of violence in the 1641 depositions’, in Michaél Ó Siochrú and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds, Ireland, 1641: Contexts and Reactions (Manchester, 2013), pp. 134–52; Bellany, ‘Murder of John Lambe’. 113 Fissel, Bishops’ Wars, pp. 274, 278, 283–4, 275. 114 For the association between psalm-singing, Protestantism and, in particular, puritan practice, see Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 391–453. 115 William Coster, ‘Massacre and code of conduct in the English Civil War’, in Mark Levene and Penny Robert, eds, The Massacre in History (New York and Oxford, 1999), pp. 89–105. 116 Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (2nd edn, Basingstoke, 1998), p. 157.
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Anatomy of the General Rising: militancy and mobilisation in London, 1643 David Como In July 1643, after a series of military setbacks, backers of Parliament’s cause launched an ambitious plan to remake their coalition’s armies. Following Sir William Waller’s crushing defeat at Roundway Down, a petition was circulated and endorsed by some 20,000 signatories in and around London ‘to raise the whole people’ of the country, in order to form a new army under a general more reliable than the increasingly mistrusted commander-in-chief, the earl of Essex. The petition for the General Rising (as the plan came to be known) was remarkable in several respects. Not only did it demand, in effect, the displacement of Essex, and a near-total mobilisation of the land into a new, mass force, but it also struck a note of hitherto unparalleled radicalism in its rhetoric: the barbaric royalist army of papists and Irishmen had been incited and provoked to the robbing, burning, murthering and destroying of the Religious, honest, and well meaning people … not by a foraigne enemy, but (to the astonishment of all good men) by him whom the people of this Nation have highly honoured as their King, and used with abundance of love and indulgence, whereof he hath made no better use than to bring them to slavery or destruction.1
Gone here was the soothing talk of evil counsel that had governed the official declarations of Parliament from the beginning of the war. Blame for the conflict and its attendant atrocities was laid squarely on Charles I himself. The petition, moreover, hinted that the existing war effort had been hamstrung by the indifferent or treacherous leadership in Westminster, and in a highly unusual manoeuvre, the text specified a list of MPs –including many of the most militant members of the lower house –to form a committee that would raise the new army and appoint its officers. Members objected to the irregularity of this audacious petition, but ‘in respect of the present desperate condition of things it was thought fitt to swallow downe all’. The lower house obediently named the entire list to a committee, which took up residence at Merchant Taylors’ Hall, chaired by the extremist
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Henry Marten.2 Within a few days, Sir William Waller had been appointed general of the new army. For a brief moment, it seemed that Parliament was on the verge of a sweeping military reorganisation, to be controlled by the most radical elements of the ‘war party’ in the Commons. Partly because the project quickly collapsed, scholarship on the General Rising has been limited, focusing chiefly on the high politics of the plan, and particularly on the reasons for its failure. For J. H. Hexter, the scheme was undermined by the ‘magic of Pym’s political skill,’ which was deployed to see off an extremist gambit that threatened the prevailing hegemony of the ‘Middle Group’.3 Other scholars have pointed to the plan’s popular roots, with Robert Brenner, for instance, arguing that the project represented a high water mark of radical influence in London, the result of collaboration between powerful ‘new merchants’ on the city Militia Committee and their allies in Parliament, with major support from the citizenry as a whole. In his view, the plan was wrecked less by Pym’s wizardry than by puzzling disagreements within this coalition, disagreements he was at a loss to explain.4 Most recently, Ian Gentles in a pair of important articles has challenged these views, arguing that the project collapsed because it had little popular backing. Citing the failure of the plan’s proponents to recruit soldiers, Gentles suggested that the General Rising revealed increasing war-weariness and scepticism about the parliamentary cause in London.5 The reasons for the collapse of the General Rising were in fact manifold, involving obstacles at the highest level, as well as local and internal obstructions. While this chapter does not permit a full analysis of the high politics of the plan, it is enough to note that perhaps the chief cause of its failure was Parliament’s Lord General Essex, who refused to grant Waller an adequate commission until the peer’s demands had been met, an act of political resistance that discouraged fundraising and recruitment, and in the end extorted from the two houses a reversal of course.6 The analysis offered here seeks to provide a more comprehensive view of the movement behind the General Rising, reconstructing its support from the bottom up, using a hitherto undiscovered original account book of the Merchant Taylors’ Committee. This account book affords a rare opportunity to examine a civil-war popular agitation at its most basic level. It includes the names of many of those who loaned or gave money to fund the new army. Recent work on the period has emphasised the importance of techniques and processes of political mobilisation.7 The account book of the General Rising offers a chance to drill into the core of one such mobilisation, in the process projecting a shaft of light onto the most radical wing of London’s parliamentarian front as it existed in 1643. Here, largely anonymous tradespeople and merchants drove the war effort against the royalists, backing a plan that from its inception rejected the fiction that the conflict was being waged
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against Charles’s evil councillors, aimed to supplant the aristocratic leadership that guided Parliament’s military machine, and sought to inflict a total and decisive defeat upon the king, in opposition to what was increasingly seen as the dithering timidity of Westminster’s leadership. The resulting analysis provides for the first time a substantive account of the shape and texture of the project’s popular basis. In the process, it addresses two significant problems: first, how did activists manage to put together a relatively broad-based coalition backing an extreme programme? Second, it aims to shed light on the difficulties encountered in the process, helping to explain some of the local divisions which puzzled Brenner, and which undercut the plan from within. These explorations allow, in turn, for broader reflections on the structure of the parliamentarian coalition. Finally, this chapter is intended as a tribute to the work of a scholar who has done more than any other to illuminate the social, political and religious history of the English Revolution.
I Day one: the grand meeting at Merchant Taylors’ Hall The project to raise the new army began in earnest on 27 July, when Waller was named as general, and a grand meeting of backers convened at Merchant Taylors’ Hall to gather money. Several major city parliamentarians were on hand, including the godly martyr, Henry Burton –minister of St Matthew Friday Street, but also recently pastor of a gathered congregation in the city –who took a leading role at the proceedings.8 Alderman John Langham was also present. Four treasurers were selected –Samuel Warner, John Kendrick, Robert Mead and Ralph Triplett.9 Several of these men were important players in recent urban affairs. Langham was a wealthy Levant and East India trader. Warner was part of the network of colonial ‘new merchants’ identified by Robert Brenner as central to politics of the day; both he and Kendrick became aldermen in 1643, symbolising their rise to the heights of city government. Mead and Kendrick had been involved in London war-party designs earlier in the conflict.10 With the exception of Warner, however, none were part of the close- knit alliance of ‘new merchants’, who in Brenner’s view dominated the Militia Committee and London politics at this stage. This was a first hint that the campaign for the General Rising was promoted chiefly outside the centre of the London pro- parliamentary establishment. The grand meeting of 27 July also exposed latent disagreement over the nature of the plan. Many supporters argued that the new army should not be funded by voluntary loan or donation, but by compulsory taxation.11 This dispute split the meeting, and it is likely that some backed the broader plan
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but refused to contribute voluntarily as a matter of policy and principle; those who donated or lent money, and are recorded in the account book, were thus endorsing a discrete version of the plan, one not shared by all proponents. Although it was not apparently mentioned at the meeting, a second obstacle likewise hindered donations to the Merchant Taylors’ Committee. There already existed a different body –a standing citizen committee at Grocers’ Hall, augmented by a number of MPs –which had been taking subscriptions on Sir William Waller’s behalf for ten days.12 Some money destined for the creation of a new army was therefore presumably diverted away from Merchant Taylors’ Hall. These factors surely limited donations, ensuring that many vigorous advocates of the General Rising are not named in the accounts. Notwithstanding these obstructions, the treasurers began immediately to take money, carefully recording the names of donors and amounts proffered. The eighteen-page account book, arranged chronologically over a three-month period, lists over one hundred and sixty donors, with additional notes as to whether the sums in question were given or lent, and occasional information about contributors’ parish of residence.13 Some sixty of the donors have been identified with relative assurance. The following account offers a cross-sectional analysis of this support, focusing on donors who left behind more extensive evidence of their lives and political careers. Analysis of donations at the first, grand meeting on 27 July serves as a starting point, providing a snapshot of the most enthusiastic backers of the plan, and delineating patterns of support that recurred in following weeks. On 27 July, the committee received some £72 in loans and £8 in outright gifts from twenty-seven individuals.14 The largest loan of £15 came from John Middlemore. This was surely John Middlemore, a prosperous city merchant, who died in 1647. Middlemore’s ideological preferences can be inferred from his ownership of a book produced by the so-called ‘Cloppenburg Press’, a secret printing enterprise operated by Richard Overton and others in 1640 to disseminate radical puritan propaganda.15 Middlemore signed his copy of A Dialogue. Wherein is Plainly Layd Open the Tyrannical Dealing of the Lord Bishops against Gods Children, a Marprelatist tract reprinted by Overton and his collaborators.16 While Middlemore’s ownership of this illicit book gives a sense of his basic religious temperament, it was not a sign that he was a raging separatist, for in his will, Middlemore also left a bequest to the minister James Nalton, asking that Nalton preach his funeral sermon.17 Nalton, although a long-time non-conformist, was by this time an outspoken Presbyterian.18 Whatever Middlemore’s precise religious opinions, there is no doubt about his commitment to the General Rising. He lent a further £5 to the enterprise in August, making him the city’s largest single contributor to the project.19
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Immediately after Middlemore on the list was a more humble figure, Renatus Edwards, who lent £3. Only one man of this name has been located in London, a girdler, who during the 1630s lived in St. Matthew Friday Street, operating a shop in Cheapside.20 As a parishioner of the puritan hero Henry Burton, Edwards’ presence at Merchant Taylors’ Hall is perhaps not a surprise. It would be interesting to know, however, whether he had already plunged into the sectarian religious milieu of his future: in 1657, Renatus Edwards would be one of nineteen Baptist leaders, including Hanserd Knollys, Henry Jessey and John Spilsbury, who would write to Cromwell, urging the lord protector not to ‘re-edify that old structure of government’ by accepting the crown.21 This picture is rounded out by a third donor, William Thomson, who gave thirteen shillings on 27 July. Although the name is very common, this was likely the Virginia trader and militia officer William Thomson. A brother of the rich colonial merchant Maurice Thomson and the auxiliary colonel George Thomson, William was part of the ‘new merchant’ clique chronicled by Brenner.22 It is unsurprising to find him involved in the General Rising mobilisation, especially since his father-in-law and partner, Samuel Warner, was named treasurer the same day. William was a trusted figure in the nascent roundhead military establishment.23 In 1644, having survived the bloody battle of Newbury, he was involved in a push in the city to purge Essex’s army, a design that in many ways sought to rectify the failure of the General Rising.24 Thomson’s exact religious affiliations remain murky, but like his brother Maurice, he later aligned himself with Independency, and emerged as a strong supporter of the republic in the 1650s.25 Thomson’s involvement, set alongside Middlemore and Edwards, suggests the plan drew strong support from across the spectrum of godly religious opinion: here we have three men who would emerge respectively as a Presbyterian, a sectary and a Congregationalist sympathiser. As we will see, this pattern would be repeated in later weeks: the plan drew its heaviest support from committed puritans, albeit of differing ecclesiological or theological temperament. Yet Thomson’s donation is also important for a second reason: his gift of thirteen shillings looks paltry in view of his wealth, and he was the only prominent ‘new merchant’ who funded the project. Indeed, Thomson was arguably the sole Londoner of major political stature who gave to the Merchant Taylors’ Committee. More prevalent among the donors were more obscure figures who, while not highly placed within the new parliamentarian bureaucracy, nevertheless left traces of ideological commitment. A number came not from London, but from the suburbs. Lending £2 on the first day, for instance, was Overington Blundell of Southwark, who optimistically called himself a gentleman, but who was described by others as
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a ‘whitster’ (or cloth bleacher). Blundell was not so obscure, however, that he avoided the attentions of the Caroline regime: on 30 September 1640, with the Scottish crisis in full bloom, the Privy Council ordered him imprisoned for unspecified offences.26 Given the likely politico-religious disposition this suggests, it is predictable to find him in 1642 subscribing as an Irish Adventurer, making him one of several donors who were also involved in the attempt to suppress and profit from the Irish rebellion.27 At the war’s start, Blundell lent a horse to the parliamentary cause and in 1644, the militant MP Sir Arthur Haselrige attested that Blundell had ‘Done good service for the parliament’.28 Blundell was only one of several Southwark men making the trip to Merchant Taylors’ Hall on 27 July 1643: Richard Drury, whose £2 loan was recorded just after Blundell’s, was probably the St Saviour man of this name who the year before had likewise subscribed £20 as an Irish Adventurer.29 Robert Oliver, who gave ten shillings, was likely a St Olave feltmaker.30 While many contributors on the first day emerged from the ranks of the most zealous parliamentarian supporters, and a few bore pasts or futures that savoured of radical religious and political activity, others came from different backgrounds, and revealed distinctive concerns. Thus, for instance, the first man on the list was ‘Mr. Godfrey of Haddeford’, certainly Thomas Godfrey, lord of the manor of Hodiford in East Kent. Godfrey was a political figure of some heft, having represented New Romney in the Short Parliament. He left behind a manuscript journal, which suggested that despite his loan for the General Rising, he was no wild-eyed political radical – the Short Parliament, he believed, had been ‘made a Millitious Parliament’, a comment casting doubt on the leadership of Pym’s circle.31 Nevertheless, Godfrey backed Parliament in the war, and, on the same day he loaned £10 at Merchant Taylors’ Hall, he also repaired to the treasurers for the Irish Adventure, loaning £50.32 This suggests an attachment to the Protestant cause that perhaps explains Godfrey’s involvement in the Rising. Yet it is also likely that his burst of lending was prompted by panic about his home county of Kent, where a royalist rebellion had taken shape during the previous two weeks, potentially threatening the interests of even moderate parliamentarians.33 This serves as a reminder that the General Rising, as an aspiration, relied on the exploitation of cold fear. The project was launched while Parliament’s cause was seen to be on the edge of collapse, amid wild rumours that the king was marching on London.34 Contributions thus came from people alarmed over a deteriorating military situation that in some cases threatened concrete interests. This helps to explain the involvement of Michael Measy, who lent £5. Measy hardly possessed a spotless parliamentarian pedigree: he had been a messenger of the king’s chamber in the 1620s, and
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had specialised in ferreting out customs’ violations.35 Nevertheless, like several others, Measy invested heavily as an Irish Adventurer in 1642, and later claimed that he loaned Parliament some £500 when it was in ‘Lowe condition’. His contribution to the General Rising may have sought to protect the investment represented by these prior loans, as well as a broader set of legal and business interests that apparently tied him to the endangered port of Bristol.36 While Measy was able to find a home within the parliamentarian establishment –he continued as a customs surveyor in the 1640s and later was a servant to the Commonwealth insider Edward Dendy –there is little to suggest anything like the rabid religious or political conviction shared by some other supporters.37 Measy’s 1658 will bequeathed a volume by the famed non-conformist Arthur Hildersham, but also left to heirs valued works by the Scottish Bishop John Abernethy, and the Anglican hero Dr Jeremy Taylor.38 This was not the literary legacy of a dogmatic puritan. On the first day, three of the twenty-seven contributors were women. This is in keeping with the pattern over the following weeks: twenty-four female donors are recorded, roughly one seventh of the total. Their involvement offers striking if indirect testimony about the ways in which women were immersed in the political mobilisations of these years. The mass demonstrations of August 1643, which brought crowds of women to Westminster to demand continued peace negotiations, are the most famous example of such mobilisation during these months.39 The Merchant Taylors’ accounts offer an interesting counterpoint, suggesting that there were also many politically engaged women ready to back the General Rising. Sadly, females are exceptionally difficult to track through the records, meaning that a mere handful can be traced with certainty. For 27 July, only one woman can be conjecturally identified, and then in a way that reveals the prosopographical challenges. The accounts show that a ‘Mrs Mary Smith’ gave £2 ten shillings. Identifying this person might appear a hopeless task, except that a Mary Smith, wife of Henry Smith, was one of the most aggressive purchasers of distrained goods in London in early 1643.40 While nothing else is known about this person, her willingness to buy confiscated property at low prices, mainly seized from suspected royalists, suggests deep pockets and a cold-blooded support for the war effort, making it likely, if not certain, that she was the General Rising donor. As with some male donors, her keenness to launch Waller’s mass army may have flowed partly from desire to protect assets that might have been in jeopardy if the king came riding in triumph back to London. The benefactors who came forward on the first day thus appear to have been a mixed group. Unsurprisingly, many were distinguished by strong godliness, often matched by hints of future commitment to particular, if varying, ecclesiological visions. However, the involvement of men such as
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Godfrey and Measy is also crucial, and helps to explain how the petition gained such traction; these people did not evince any deep godly piety, but they had apparently supported Parliament, and now felt compelled, by the desperate nature of the situation, to back a design that had been confected by the city’s most militant figures. Some donors had already lent to or profited from Parliament’s war effort, and were perhaps spurred by concern that a royalist victory would endanger their estates, if not their lives. Yet despite these signs of commitment, there were also worrying absences: leaving aside Thomson’s trifling donation, the assets of the city’s great merchant chieftains were invisible. While some of the donors were clearly wealthy, many, such as the girdler Edwards or the feltmaker Oliver, were middling tradesmen at best. Moreover, the total returns of the first day were disappointing, and suggested that the plan faced serious impediments from the start. These difficulties persisted over the following weeks. The accounts show that between July and October, the committee raised just over £771, plus a small store of arms.41 This modest return tends to support Gentles’ claim that the project mustered scant support in a war-weary city. But it was also clearly a consequence of the roadblocks encountered. Tellingly, none of the prominent figures who can be found signing the petition or working on the plan –including the treasurers and the MPs of the committee itself –opted to lend money.42 Savvy political activists were reluctant to fund a scheme that from its start was beset by obstacles, and in the first week of August, when Essex’s refusal to grant Waller a commission threw the entire plan in doubt, contributions slowed to a trickle.43 Moreover, in early August there were also signs that the citizens’ committee at Grocers’ Hall, which had been harvesting money for Waller for two weeks, was acting as a direct competitor to the Merchant Taylors’ Committee, luring away potential donors and recruits.44 Wealthy Londoners perhaps channelled their resources towards this older, established committee, which was manned by some of the most entrenched roundhead activists in the city. Lastly, the split that had manifested itself on 27 July –between those who saw the design as a coercive, mass rising and those willing to pursue it as a voluntary project –perhaps continued to inhibit the scheme. Proponents of the more draconian, compulsory vision were active and highly successful in these days: on 29 July, they managed to force through the Common Hall, London’s largest governing body, a resolution to request Parliament That there may be a present genneral Riseing, wherein every on may give assistance in person or Purse, by an Equall Levie … And that all such as shall refuse may be secured and theire Estates seized on for the use of the Kingdome.45
This embodied the most extreme, coercive version of the plan; that advocates were able to win approval for it in Common Hall –the assembly of
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all the city’s liverymen –leaves no doubt that the project, in the abstract, continued to have powerful appeal in London. Yet supporting a proposal in theory and backing it with precious resources were different propositions, especially given the uncertainties that dogged the project. In some ways, then, these complications render the support offered to the Merchant Taylors’ Committee in these days all the more powerful as evidence: these donations came from people who backed the plan in spite of the hindrances militating against it. They clung to hope that a new mass army under Waller could be conjured, despite all indications to the contrary.
II Religion and the General Rising The patterns of donation evident on the first day of collection continued in the weeks that followed. Thus, overt puritans remained prominent, with a roughly equal split between those who would soon show signs of Independency and those inclined to Presbyterianism. Donors who later revealed Congregationalist commitments included: the propagandist John Price, a leader of John Goodwin’s gathered church; the young surgeon Robert Hembricks, later a member of William Greenhill’s gathered flock; and the celebrated preacher Thomas Brooks.46 Among the female donors, the widow Katherine Pattison of St James Dukes Place revealed close ties to Independency.47 At least two other donors, meanwhile, showed later hints of sectarianism: Richard Botting, a Southwark shoemaker, who lent £1, was by the 1650s likely affiliated with a separatist church.48 Valentine Elsden, alias Elsing, was a free skinner of London, who plied his trade in Wapping; by the late 1640s, he was probably some species of Congregationalist or Anabaptist. Without question, in early 1648, he distinguished himself as a robust supporter of the incipient Leveller agitation.49 Yet at the same time, a number of donors later showed Presbyterian sympathies. The largest outright gift (about £15) came from William Mellish, a Stepney gentleman, who served as a justice of the peace (JP) in the 1640s, and held important positions in the Tower Hamlets military establishment. While he was clearly at this stage an enthusiastic supporter of defeating Charles I, Mellish would ultimately show hostility to Independency.50 Another donor, the rich widow Elizabeth Erswell of St Faith’s, like John Middlemore in the early 1650s bequeathed money to the Presbyterian minister Nalton.51 A third contributor, the draper Hanbey Fish, in 1657 left a legacy to the arch-Presbyterian Edmund Calamy, who was to preach Fish’s funeral sermon.52 These examples show that while future Congregationalists and sectaries played a slightly disproportionate role in backing the General Rising, there
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was no shortage of Presbyterian sympathisers ready to support the plan. In the early phases of the conflict, the ‘war party’ in London remained a heterogeneous grouping, composed of both future Independents and future Presbyterians. This serves to qualify Sir William Waller’s later claim that on his return to London, he found ‘multitude of friends … in the Independent party’ eager to raise a ‘considerable army’ under his command, to be run by officers ‘all of their owne party’.53 While the keen involvement of figures such as Burton, Warner and Edwards made it easy for Waller to justify this conclusion, it was an assessment only possible in hindsight, after religious controversy began to divide the cause in late 1643. In July, these rifts had not yet manifested themselves, and although later events have created a natural propensity among scholars to associate politico-religious radicalism with Independency, in the early stages of the civil war, many incipient Presbyterians were also willing to back programmes of sometimes sweeping radicalism, such as the General Rising petition. Only later, as Presbyterians reeled away from policies of toleration and dispersed ecclesial authority championed by Independents, did political and constitutional radicalism come to be the more exclusive preserve of Congregationalist and sectarian leaders.54 Yet this also leads to an important caveat to all attempts to analyse the political situation in terms of religious labels and factions: for many, the grand issues of ecclesiastical governance remained uncertain in 1643, and it is no accident that most of the evidence for religious commitment cited here dated from the later 1640s or 1650s. Although the godly were starting to think more seriously about these issues, many people had not come to any firm conclusion. The fluidity of the situation in 1643 is suggested by the case of Hanbey Fish, who later called on Calamy to preach his funeral sermon. The accounts show that Fish’s £10 loan, which arrived on 17 August, was delivered by ‘Mr Brooke’, almost certainly Thomas Brooks, whose own gift arrived that same day and is recorded just before Fish’s.55 Brooks would soon emerge as a noted Congregationalist; that he and Fish can be found associating together to support the Rising suggests that finer points of ecclesiology, which were to become so divisive in coming months, remained in flux. Either the men had not arrived at any settled, contrary views on the matter, or those views did not as yet compromise godly solidarity in the face of the king’s threat. Indeed, this sense of solidarity persisted long after differences over church government grew heated. Recent historians have focused on an important dimension of godly thinking, frequently labelled ‘anti-formalism’. Although the term has been deployed to describe disparate phenomena, one of its chief uses has been to draw attention to an impulse within godly circles to overlook finer points of ecclesiology in the name of a broader sense of
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harmony among the godly.56 The potent rhetoric of godly unity and love between the saints was often mobilised to sidestep thorny or potentially disruptive disputes. Although this sense of fraternal solidarity underwent heavy strain from late 1643, it never vanished, and to some extent, polemicists and attack-hounds who drove the issue of church government into the public eye did so precisely to breach what they saw as a naively dangerous wall of residual godly forbearance. A good example of how such sentiments functioned can be seen in the 1651 will of John Reade, a carpenter of St Olave Southwark, who conveyed General Rising donations from his parish. Reade left legacies to children of several clergymen, including ‘Mr Tombes the Ministers Sonne’ and ‘the eldest sonne of Francis Woodcock’. John Tombes was one of England’s leading Baptist authors; Woodcock, by contrast, was a prominent Presbyterian of the Westminster Assembly.57 That Reade registered an attachment to both these luminaries would seem an almost calculated statement of anti-formalism, revealing an urge to look beyond contested details of doctrine to a deeper core of shared godliness. There was, however, an implicit politics just beneath the surface of such ‘anti-formalism’. If these ministers deserved equal affection, there could be no question of suppressing the likes of Tombes and his followers as schismatics or heretics. This brand of godly anti-formalism therefore strongly implied some degree of toleration, whereby sober, respected saints, even those who differed on key points of doctrine or practice, might be accommodated without force or violence. That, in turn, was precisely what stern Presbyterians, in following years, argued could never be allowed and what so-called ‘Independents’ would demand as part of any just religious settlement. ‘Anti-formalism’, then, pushed its followers towards ‘Independency’, even among individuals who might not themselves embrace either the ecclesiastical or doctrinal novelties of congregationalism or sectarian forms. It was thus possible to be personally attracted to Presbyterianism, even to participate in the Presbyterian church created in the 1640s, while at the same time remaining favourable to ‘Independency’, imagined as a programme allowing for an unspecified degree of toleration or accommodation for godly brethren of differing opinions. It was in part this posture that made possible the category of the ‘Presbyterian Independent’, a seemingly contradictory phenomenon that has long vexed discussions of civil-war religion.58 Yet if this phenomenon was enabled by a loose anti-formalism, it was also abetted by another factor, once again illuminated by the accounts. Shared commitment to the sort of militant politics exemplified by the General Rising petition also could serve to over-ride ecclesiastical preferences. Thus, although many Presbyterians retreated from the political extremism of the early part of the war as conflicts escalated with Congregationalists and sectaries, some appear to have continued in coalition with the Independents
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precisely because it was Independents who now pushed most aggressively for radical political and constitutional solutions that had begun to emerge in the early months of the war. Again, an example might be adduced from the General Rising accounts: John Hardwick was a Southwark soapboiler, who by 1643 was a major in the borough militia and a member of the Southwark militia committee; he loaned £20, making him one of the most generous contributors to the project.59 Hardwick’s religious opinions were never explicitly articulated, but he was apparently perceived as a friend to Presbyterianism in the mid-1640s. Yet when the political reckoning came in 1647, Hardwick refused to turn against the army and the Independents. His decision to allow the New Model to pass through Southwark when the soldiery marched on London was taken by Presbyterians as a grand betrayal: he was ‘That Trecherous base Skellum Hardwicke’, whose ‘Treacherous base defection … much furthered the Enemies Designe’.60 While we possess no window into Hardwick’s thinking, there would appear to be a direct line from his aggressive support for the General Rising in 1643 to his decision to back the army in August 1647. At this stage, the army, despite its pervasive ‘Independency’, was the most plausible bearer and guarantor of the kind of rigorous settlement that many hardliners saw as essential to the well- being of the commonwealth. Hardwick accordingly seems to have backed the republican regimes that followed, although in keeping with his apparent Presbyterianism, he anchored a faction in Southwark that resisted the takeover of the borough by sectarian and Leveller interests in the 1650s.61
III The General Rising, the city, and the structures of parliamentarian politics If analysis of the religious disposition of the contributors reveals broad unity among the godly in 1643, there are important hints within the accounts that point towards other, more subtle cracks in the war-party front; these, in turn, offer insight into the ultimate failure of the plan. For a start, the vast majority of donors were so obscure that nothing can be discerned about their ideological orientation. This is true even of many who can be identified: John Tranere and Edward Walker of St James Dukes Place, like the cordwainer Theodore Reynolds and Miles Hadley of Allhallows Staining, were men of apparently modest means, about whom virtually nothing has been discovered beyond their bare names.62 Indeed, of the sixty or so residents of the city identified with certainty as donors, virtually none were from the rich urban elite. In 1640, when the Crown conducted a survey of wealth in the city, only one sure contributor to the Rising was named – William Thomson –and even he was placed in the fourth tier of wealth.63
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Similarly, a comparison of the list of donors against the schedule of some 550 parochial and civic leaders compiled by Tai Liu in his study of civil-war London yields only three definite matches: Thomson, Edmund Trench and Solomon Vandenbrooke.64 Finally, a comparison against the men involved in the new taxation machinery of the city likewise suggests that London’s donors emerged from beyond the parliamentarian bureaucratic elite: of the scores of Londoners named as assessors or collectors for the chief revenue measures of 1642, only three can be found in the General Rising accounts.65 This suggests that hard support for the Rising in London came overwhelmingly from beyond the band of merchants and power-brokers who had seized control of the city in 1642–3. By contrast, the accounts show that support within the city walls was far outstripped by backing from the suburbs. At least thirty-five named donors came from Southwark –more than the total number of verifiable contributors from the entire city of London –while representatives from the four Southwark parishes also carried to the committee over £53 in bundled, undifferentiated gifts, meaning there were likely dozens more petty contributors from the South Bank. Moreover, unlike London, in Southwark the design was aided by the borough’s most active parliamentarian functionaries, including militia commanders such as Hardwick, leading committee-men and tax assessors, as well as junior officers in the trained bands and auxiliary regiments.66 Other out-parishes also offered substantial lump gifts: St Clement Danes gave some £55, while the Upper Hamlet of Whitechapel dispatched more than £82. Remaining suburban parishes – Bermondsey, Islington, Shoreditch, Lambeth, St Giles in the Fields –yielded another £102. Adding to this sum amounts given by individual donors from the suburbs shows that at least two-thirds, and perhaps much more, of the money came from suburban contributors. The striking centrality of obscure citizens and the suburbs provides a clue as to why the plan faltered. Although some urban grandees voiced willingness to support the plan, members of the inner circle of the city’s parliamentarian power-structure –important aldermen and common councillors, London’s Militia Committee, the Grocers’ Hall committee, and the tight network of wealthy citizens tied to these figures –appear to have been unwilling to risk their own money. Indeed, the claims of tension between the Merchant Taylors’ Committee and the Grocers’ Hall group, along with similar hints in Parliament that the city Militia Committee sought to exert control over Waller’s new army, all strongly suggest that crucial members of London’s war-party front were actively wary of the pretensions of the Merchant Taylors’ Committee and the alliance of interests that backed it.67 When combined with considerable resistance from Essex and in Parliament itself, this scepticism helped doom the plan.
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Having surveyed the fiscal base of the project, a more definitive explanation for this scepticism can now be offered. The tight-knit clique of pro- parliamentary merchants who had seized London’s government had little interest in allowing their power to be dispersed, either by transferring it to a small group of MPs at Merchant Taylors’ Hall, or by sharing it with a broad coalition of rank and file parliamentary supporters not just in London, but in Southwark, Tower Hamlets, and other surrounding areas. There were probably a number of concerns swirling in the background: first, worry about losing control of the city and its military forces; second, deference to the close ties that had developed between the city elite and the dominant parliamentary Junto; and perhaps also anxieties about the reckless and potentially embarrassing ideological radicalism of some of their grassroots allies. The result was a degree of conflict and friction at the core of the London war-party coalition. Yet this friction points to interesting overarching features of Parliament’s war machine, as it had evolved since 1642. Unlike the royalist front, which, while riven with faction, left no doubt about the ultimate location of authority, Parliament’s war effort grew in such a way that multiple and competing nodes of authority now existed to vie with one another for supremacy. In theory, of course, Parliament reigned supreme, but in fact, the situation was less clear-cut. For Parliament (itself divided into two, sometimes deadlocked, houses) had created competing centres of authority: first, of course, there was Parliament’s lord general, Essex, followed by the scattered hodgepodge of secondary armies, small local forces, and garrisons throughout the country; next, there were the various standing parliamentary committees, of which the Committee of Safety was in 1643 the most important; formally less powerful, but in fact of huge importance, were the numerous overlapping institutions of the City of London, of which the most significant at this stage was the Militia Committee; but beyond this, there was the sprawling array of committees, sub-committees, assessors, collectors and officials that were created, not just in London, but in the counties, to gather money and manage the war effort. Many of these committees and institutions had at first been little more than self-selecting groups of eager supporters, who stepped forward, before being given official status as part of an infant parliamentarian bureaucracy. The Grocers’ Hall committee –a hybrid body, initially composed of militant citizens, which was then combined with a standing committee of the Commons –provides a clear example of the way this ad hoc, standing bureaucracy clattered into being. Beyond these new bureaucratic bodies, however, we must also reckon with a kind of ‘shadow’ authority, that is, the network of hardcore activists on whom the parliamentary coalition relied, both for money, military service, and informal support (and from which the Rising appears to have derived
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most of its funds). Energised by propaganda emphasising the representative, popular basis of parliament’s authority, all of these competing nodes of authority had at least some claim to determine the shape of the war effort, as well as any projected settlement with the king. Yet this layered, disseminated structure also opened up other avenues for possible conflict. First, as these successive skeins of administration were laid over one another, they developed entrenched interests of their own, and became liable to protect power and turf. There are indications that it was precisely such entrenched interests –in the form of the recently erected London power structure –that helped put the brakes on the General Rising, despite widespread urban sympathy for the broad aims of the project. Moreover, the emergent military- bureaucratic engine created enormous potential not just for power but for profit. Faced with the woeful performance of Parliament’s armies, and persistent resistance to projects designed to rectify that performance, die-hard partisans could only look on in frustration at what increasingly seemed like obstructionism, incompetence or profiteering at the centre. By early 1643, the belief that the soldiers, particularly Essex’s great officers, were feeding at the trough had become something of an article of faith, lending momentum to the General Rising. But in fact the same logic could be applied to virtually anyone within the new establishment who was taken to be inhibiting the rapid defeat of the king and the establishment of a satisfactory settlement. Such opponents could be demonised as self-interested climbers, more concerned with enriching or exalting themselves than in the good of the commonwealth, charges often comingled with darker suggestions of secret complicity with the enemy. Because so many rank and file supporters now claimed a stake in that commonwealth –having invested in its well-being either through blood, service or money –such charges, lodged even against people at the very heights of the parliamentarian coalition, would become commonplace. All of these structural tensions were visible in the petition and mobilisation for the General Rising –a rebellion against the embedded power of the Essexian elite, couched in a radical political argot that dismissed the orthodoxy that the war aimed to save the king from his evil councillors, the programme sought to draw together the disparate strands of Parliament’s war effort, only to run up against the competing, entrenched interests it sought to unify.
Notes 1 To the Right Honourable the Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses … The humble Petition of thousands of the well affected Inhabitants (1643). 2 BL, Harl. MS 165, fo. 128v; BL, Add. MS 31116, fo. 64v; CJ, iii. 176.
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3 J. H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, MA, 1941), pp. 122–47; Hexter’s argument is largely followed in Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1961), pp. 269–73. 4 Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, 1993), pp. 456–9. For more details on the project in the city, see Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 314–19. 5 Ian Gentles, ‘ “This confused, divided and wretched city”: the struggle for London in 1642–43’, Canadian Journal of History, 38.3 (2003), 467–80; Ian Gentles, ‘Parliamentary politics and the politics of the street: the London peace campaigns of 1642–3’, PH, 26.2 (2007), 139–59. 6 BL, Harl. MS 165, fos 134v–35r. See: David R. Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018). 7 See, e.g., Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London, 2005); Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (Harmondsworth, 2009); for print and mobilisation, see Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013). 8 CJ, iii. 183; Mercurius Civicus (20–28 July 1643), p. 72; A Declaration of the Proceedings of the Honourable Committee of the House of Commons at Merchant-Taylors Hall (1643), pp. 1–6. 9 TNA, SP 16/539/148, fo. 68v. 10 Pearl, Outbreak, pp. 321–3, 327; TNA, SP 19/1/30–32. Triplett loaned three horses to the cause in 1642, but had not been politically prominent: SP 28/131, part 3, fo. 17v; part 4, fo. 5v. 11 A Declaration of the Proceedings, pp. 5–6. 12 Mercurius Civicus (13–20 July 1643), p. 61; All that wish well to the safety of this Kingdome (1643). For the Grocers’ Hall citizen committee, created in April to support Waller, see BL, Add. MS 5497, fo. 34r; TNA, SP 28/7, fos 537–43; for its merger with Parliament’s committee, see CJ, iii. 122, 165, 240–1. 13 TNA, SP 28/167, part 2, unfol. The MS is a separate booklet, internally paginated, headed ‘The Account of the receipts and Disbursements of money and plate by Samuel Warner, one of the Treasurers of the Committee of Parliament at Marchant-taylors hall’ with an endorsement noting Warner gave it to the Committee of Accounts ‘upon oath 13 March 1643’; hereafter, the MS is cited as ‘MTH’, followed by internal page number. 14 MTH, 1–2; in my analysis, little distinction is made between gifts and loans (which were, at this stage, offered with no hope of immediate repayment). Well over half the funds came as loans. 15 David R. Como, ‘Secret printing, the crisis of 1640, and the origins of civil-war radicalism’, P&P, 196 (2007), 37–82. 16 The signature matches the merchant’s: TNA, PROB 10/680, ‘John Middlemore’. Middlemore’s copy was sold privately in 2009. For an image of the title page, with signature (supplied then by the dealer): web.archive.org/web/20160702141519/ https://history.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/middlemore_marprelate_0.pdf (accessed 5 August 2021).
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17 TNA, PROB 11/201/399: ‘James Norton Minister of the Parish of Leonards Foster Lane’; Nalton was then pastor of the parish, so he was certainly the man named. 18 See TNA, SP 16/154/98, fo. 149r; ‘James Nalton’, ODNB; Bodl. MS Nalson 22, fo. 302(a)v. 19 MTH, 1, 6. 20 MTH, 1; TNA, SP 16/ 378/ 86, fo. 209r. Alice May Bruce Bannerman, ed., Register of St Matthew, Friday Street, London, 1538–1812 (Harleian Society, 63, 1933), pp. 19, 20, 128. 21 John Nickolls, Original Letters and Papers of State, Addressed to Oliver Cromwell (1743), pp. 142–3. 22 MTH, 2; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 134, 195. 23 Two Orders of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament (1643), sig. A3r; Harold Arthur Dillon, ‘On a MS list of officers of the London trained bands in 1643’, Archaeologia, 52 (1890), 129–44, p. 134. 24 PA, Main Papers, HL/PO/JO/10/1/169 (25 April 1644). 25 For a dedication to him from the Congregationalist cleric William Bridge, implying close spiritual ties, see William Bridge, Scripture-Light the Most Sure Light (1656), sigs Br–Cr. 26 MTH, 2; TNA, SP 16/468/109, fo. 179r. 27 TNA, SP 63/291, fos 102r, 107r; SP 63/290, fo. 281r. 28 TNA, SP 28/131, part 4, fo. 12r; SP 19/3, p. 206; Marc Fitch, ed., Index to Administrations in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury … Vol. VI, 1631–1648 (British Record Society, 100, 1986), p. 44. 29 MTH, 2; TNA, SP 63/289, fo. 301r; SP 63/300, fo. 168r. 30 MTH, 1; TNA, PROB 11/280, fos 228v–29r; the identification is uncertain, but rendered likely by ties to John Reade, another St Olave backer of the Rising: TNA, PROB 11/216/352. 31 MTH, 1; ‘The Domestic Chronicle of Thomas Godfrey, Esq.’, in John Gough Nichols, ed., The Topographer and Genealogist, Volume II (London, 1853), p. 463. 32 TNA, SP 63/293, fo. 257r. 33 Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660 (Leicester, 1966), pp. 187–200. The house learned the rebels had been routed late on 27 July, so Godfrey likely did not know the rising was put down (CJ, iii. 184). 1644 (Norfolk Record 34 Bertram Schofield, ed., The Knyvett Letters, 1620– Society, 20, 1949), p. 119. 35 MTH, 1; TNA PC 2/39, p. 470. 36 TNA, SP 63/289, fos 81–2; SP 18/123, fos 1–2; SP 18/124, fo. 64r. 37 TNA, SP 24/4, fo. 47r; J. Rogers, Jegar-Sahadvtha: An Oyled Pillar (1657), pp. 9–10. 38 TNA, PROB 11/286, fos 15v–16r. 39 Patricia Higgins, ‘The reactions of women, with special reference to women petitioners’, in Brian Manning, ed., Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973), pp. 189–99; more broadly, for women’s political participation, see Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon, 2012).
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40 MTH, 1; TNA, SP 46/103/1, fos 9v, 27v, 30v, 31r, 33r, 34r. 41 MTH, 14, 17–18. 42 Neither the petition’s presenters (Sir Giles Overbury, Sir Fulke Greville, John Hatt, John Norbury), nor William Walwyn, who signed the petition, gave money. See Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 315, 319. 43 MTH, 5–6. 44 On 3 August, backers objected that when men came ‘to be listed in the feilde under Sir William Waller’, they ‘were persuaded not to be listed there but to liste themselves at Grocers Hall’. See: BL, Add. MS 18778, fos 8a–b. 45 Bodl. MS Nalson 13, fo. 389r. 46 MTH, 3, 8; for Price, see John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 127– 8; that he was Price of Goodwin’s church is backed by the fact that his name appeared beside Richard Orton, a plumber of Goodwin’s parish of St Stephen Coleman (LMA, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/029, fos 133r-34r); for Hembricks, see TNA, E179/251/22, item 1, fo. 8v; Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, W/ SMH/ A/ 1/ 1, fo. 2v; TNA, PROB 11/329/245; ‘Thomas Brooks’, ODNB. 47 MTH, 7; in 1652, Pattison left much of her estate to the Independent William Pennoyer: TNA, PROB 11/ 231/ 129; for Pennoyer’s religion, see Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 423; for Pattison, see Thomas Cyril Dale, The Inhabitants of London in 1638 (2 vols, London, 1938), i. 72; as a widow in 1642, she gave 6d. to the Irish Protestants: TNA, SP 28/193, part 5, fo. 181r, St James Dukes Place. 48 MTH, 13; TNA, PROB 11/262/502, for his will, witnessed by Rawlins Harvey, a separatist since the 1630s. It was common for sectaries to witness one another’s wills: CUL, Dd.2.21, fo. 148r; Bodl. MS Tanner 56, fos 46r–v. 49 MTH, 18; GL, MS 30719/2, p. 223 (apprenticeship of Valentine Elsden); TNA, PROB 11/263/187, signed ‘Elsing’; LMA, P93/MRY/002, unfol., baptisms, 25 June 1649; 12 July 1652, showing two children born, but not baptised, meaning they were baptised elsewhere or not at all; To the Honourable the chosen and betrusted Knights, Citizens and Burgesses in Parliament Assembled. The humble Petition of divers wel-affected Free-born People of England, inhabiting in and about East-Smithfield and Wapping, and other parts adjacent (1648). 50 MTH, 2; PA, Main Papers, HL/PO/JO/10/1/99, Tower Division; LJ, vi. 205, viii. 170; Keith Lindley, ‘Whitechapel Independents and the English Revolution’, HJ, 41.1 (1998), 283–91, p. 288. 51 MTH, 3; TNA, PROB 11/253/584. 52 MTH, 8; TNA, PROB 11/261/314. 53 William Waller, Vindication of the Character and Conduct of Sir William Waller (1793), pp. 13–16. 54 See Lawrence Kaplan, ‘Presbyterians and Independents in 1643’, EHR, 84.331 (1969), 244– 56. The best guide to this polarisation remains Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004). 55 MTH, 8.
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56 See esp. J. C. Davis, ‘Cromwell’s religion’, in John Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, 1990), pp. 181–208. 57 MTH, 12; TNA, PROB 11/ 216/ 352. ‘John Tombes’, ODNB and Alumni Oxonienses (the will likely referred to Tombes’ son John, a London student); for Woodcock, see Paul C. H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012), p. 332n30. 58 J. H. Hexter, ‘The problem of the Presbyterian Independents’, American Historical Review, 44 (1938), 29–49; Hexter’s article sparked a sporadic debate into the 1970s. 59 MTH, 13; TNA, SP 16/377/45, fo. 77r; CJ, ii. 725; LJ, viii. 170; Dillon, ‘London trained bands’, p. 141. 60 A Paire of Cristall Spectacles (1648), p. 8, italics in original. 61 See TNA, SP 18/74, fos 122v–35r. 62 TNA, SP 28/193, fos 180–1, St James Dukes Place; TNA, PROB 11/254/501; Dale, Inhabitants, i. 18. 453/ 75, fos 127r and 116– 65. John Roberts, Robert Hudson, 63 TNA, SP 16/ William Cox, John Barker, John Powell (also named as donors) appeared in the survey. However, there were many Londoners of each of these names (at least three Robert Hudsons, six or more called William Cox or John Roberts), making identification impossible absent other evidence. 64 Tai Liu, Puritan London: A Study of Religion and Society in the City Parishes (Newark, NJ, 1986), pp. 225–41. 65 TNA, SP 16/491/47, fos 123r–25v; SP 19/1/30–31, 37–43. Again, Vandenbrooke, Thomson and Trench. 66 MTH, 6, 7, 10, 13, These included Samuel Warcupp, bailiff of Southwark (TNA, SP 16/492/74, fo. 211r; CJ, vi. 5); leading committee-men Joseph Collier and Samuel Lynn (LJ, vi. 205, viii. 170; CJ, ii. 707; CJ, iii. 95; TNA, SP 19/1/28, 44); and collectors/assessors Thomas Willoughby, John Matthews, John Syms, John Reade, and John Bury (TNA, SP 19/1/28, 43–44; CJ, ii. 725). For the militia service of Willoughby, Simon Reynolds, William Jackson, and John Emerton, see TNA, SP 24/4, fos 57v–58r; SP 28/121A, fos 646r, 656r. 67 BL, Add. MS 18778, fos 8a–b; Pearl, Outbreak, pp. 271–2.
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‘In the hollow of his wooden leg’: the transmission of civil war materials, 1642–9 Karen Britland In late November 1645, the governor of Cardiff was tipped off that a royalist messenger had been sent from Oxford, carrying letters into Glamorganshire and the West. The newsbooks which reported on this event agree on the major details. To arouse ‘lesse suspition’, the documents were carried by ‘a lame Souldier’. When this emissary was stopped, no materials were found about his person until, ‘unscruing his wooden Legge’, the searchers discovered it had been ‘made hollow’, and contained eighteen ‘Letters of consequence’, reputedly ‘from the King to Prince Charles, to Goring, to Hopton, and others’, and from ‘Prince Maurice to Prince Charles’ and ‘Secretary Nicholas to Generall Goring’. The letters were confiscated and sent up to the House of Commons, where they were opened and were found to reveal ‘divers designes of the Kings’: Mercurius Civicus, for example, reported that Nicholas’ letter detailed Lord Digby’s intention to join his forces with those of Montrose for the eventual relief of Chester. While the identities of the letter writers were clearly of interest to the newsbooks and, in some cases, were even moralised upon (Mercurius Civicus noted that Nicholas’s letter contained ‘lying expressions, much unbecomming a private Secretary to a Prince’), the lame soldier’s identity remained unexplored in every iteration of the report.1 Parliamentarian civility dictated that intercepted letters from elite correspondents might be opened only after careful consideration by the Lords and the Commons.2 However, searching a lame man so ‘narrowly’ that his wooden leg was removed evidently did not provoke such squeamishness. In this chapter, I investigate the association between poor bodies and elite letters during the civil wars. I am interested to explore how those bodies were hazarded for the transmission of texts, investigating the ways in which non- elite people participated in the distribution of letters. This chapter concentrates on individuals who do not usually figure in historical discussions, eschewing grand political narratives to pay particular attention to the war’s violence and its cost. As such, it follows the example of Ann Hughes’ pioneering work on women and gender, drawing on ‘social, cultural and political history’ to examine men and women’s activities and experiences
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during the English Revolution, and putting in play a broad notion of politics as, in Hughes’ words, ‘a cultural and discursive struggle to offer particular identities and visions that encourage people to become involved in political movements and activities’.3
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I Writers in the early modern period often averred that their letters were somehow personalised extensions of their spirits. For example, Thomas Forde, in his Virtus Rediviva, declared ‘I know no better Interpreter of the Heart, than the hand; especially in Familiar Letters, whereby friends mingle souls, and make mutual discoveries of, and to one another. The pen, like the pulse, discovers our inward condition’.4 Similarly, James Howell noted, in the voice of a character called Peregrine, that ‘hee who breaks open ones Letters, which are the Ideas of the minde, may bee said to rip up his brest, to plunder and rifle his very braine, and rob him of his most precious and secretest thoughts’.5 Even Charles I observed in the aftermath of the capture and publication of his letters at the battle of Naseby: ‘I will not justefy my selfe; & yet would faine know him, who would be willing, that the freedome of all his priuat letters were publiquely seene, as myne haue now beene.’6 Letters were presented by their writers as bearing a freight of privacy, and the interception and breaking open of letters was seen as analogous to the physical violation of their author. Nevertheless, there is little sense in any of these statements of the material means through which letters were transmitted, nor of the physical violations that might actually be experienced by the people who carried them. The transportation of material letters has a history of danger, and not just because one might be discovered, arrested and punished. Valentin Groebner notes that the ‘contents of the first letter ever mentioned in European literature were quite fatal’, and goes on to tell the story from Book 6 of the Iliad in which Bellerophon is given ‘a little folding tablet’ by King Proteus to carry to the king of Lycia, upon which Proteus has scratched a message ‘that would mean [Bellerophon’s] death’.7 Similarly, in Hamlet, the deaths of both the eponymous hero, and then of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his erstwhile friends, are borne on the letter they carry to England.8 While Hamlet and Bellerophon escape their fates, the threatening potential of the letter remains: like a ‘seditious’ pamphlet, it can inaugurate the deaths of those transporting it, as well as potentially carrying infection into the mind and body of a reader. This infective quality received a material expression in 1641 when a ‘filthy clout, with the contagious plaster of a Plague sore upon it’, was delivered in a letter to John Pym at Westminster, with the threat that,
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‘if this doe not touch your heart, a Dagger shall’.9 The infective qualities of this package manifest the latent potential of letters to operate like a disease, altering the health and identity of those with whom they come into contact. Letters are dangerous: they can render vulnerable those who write, receive and carry them. The effect can be perceived in messages carried between Charles I and John, Lord Belasyse, during and after the siege of Oxford in 1645–6, when the king was negotiating his flight to the Scots. Belasyse, who, at the time, was governor of the besieged town of Newark, famously received a clandestine, ciphered letter from Charles informing him of ‘the King’s purpos’ to leave Oxford and go to the Scottish army at Southwell. The letter acknowledges the danger of correspondence, beginning with the king’s curse to the recipient: ‘If you discover the Secret I now impart to you by this Extraordinary way of Conveyance I wish you as ill as you have had hitherto good Fortune in my service.’10 Instructing Belasyse to surrender, the letter acknowledges the dangers and disappointments of written communication, at the same time as it makes reference to its ‘Extraordinary way of Conveyance’, drawing attention to its mode of transportation, while neatly sidestepping the human details. The king, Belasyse later revealed, sent the letter to him ‘in a sluggbullet’. It had been ‘wrapped up in lead and swallowed’, and had come to him ‘in a man’s belly’. When the man arrived at Newark, the message ‘was yet in his belly’, so he was given ‘some physique, and out it come’.11 Here, as with the anonymous soldier whose wooden leg was so peremptorily removed, the body of the messenger was co-opted as a cover for elite messages, enhancing those messages’ importance at the same time as the body itself became simply a functional tool with a use value. A similar effect is described in a manuscript book of commonplaces and observations, kept by James, earl of Derby, in 1646. Describing his actions while his wife and family were under parliamentarian siege at Lathom House in Lancashire 1644, Derby noted: I did write letters to them in ciphers as much in as little compass as I could. I rowled the same in lead, sometimes in wax, hardly as big as a musquet bullet, that if the bearer suspected danger of discovery he might swallow it, and Physick would soon find it again.12
Derby goes on to describe how he also wrote ‘in fine Linnen, with a small pen, which hath ben sowed to the bearer’s clothes, as part of the linings’, and how he also ‘put a letter in a green [i.e., fresh] wound, in a stick, pen, &c’. He presents his letters as temporary passengers in a messenger’s body, but there is also a sense that they can cause contamination and physical distress. The allusion to musket balls and physic generates a sense that swallowing a message is somewhat like taking a bullet: the dangerous
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incorporation of a foreign object into the body requires medicine, both to remove the object and to reclaim bodily integrity. Here, purging releases the dangerous message, at once potentially healing the body, but also rendering it a discarded shell (the narrative’s attention goes on to be fixed on the letter and its contents, rather than on the fate of the person who carried it). The messenger’s body is simply a convenient vehicle, co-opted by its elite masters: notably, in other explanations of his actions during this time, Derby remarked that he used a ‘ragged man’ as his messenger, as well as several ‘olde women’.13 Couriers hazarded their health and their lives by carrying texts on their bodies from their heads to their feet. In the spring of 1644, for example, soldiers at the court of guard (or guard house) in Tothill Fields (Westminster) apprehended ‘a suspicious fellow’ who was found to be transporting ‘two or three small papers’ rolled up in his cane as well as ‘three Letters of dangerous consequence sown up in his Doublet’. A boy stopped by the court of guard outside London was found to have letters sewn into the shoulders of his clothes, while a spy was apprehended carrying the king’s letters into Chester in his gloves, waist-band and doublet. A ‘French Mounsieur’ was stopped in Southwark and found to have ‘severall Letters sowed betweene the linings of his hose’, and ‘one Taylor’, who claimed to be a London merchant, was apprehended with ‘seuerall letters from Oxford’ in his boots.14 Nevertheless, despite the risks run by these messengers, the elite recipients of clandestine letters were often frustrated when they found their letters to be marked with the physical traces of their bearers’ bodies. For example, Thomas Beckwith, a recusant royalist conspirator at the siege of Kingston upon Hull in 1642, received an apparently clandestine letter from his son- in-law, who was part of the occupying parliamentarian forces within the city. It was brought to him by a boy who had ‘put the Letter in his Shoe’, so that ‘it might appear to Mr Beckwith to be carryed with more secrecy’.15 On delivery, however, the letter was found to be ‘so wasted in [the] shoe’ that Beckwith had to ‘guesse at the sense’. In other words, the messenger’s body had written itself over the material it transported, altering not only the availability of its meanings, but its cleanliness and propriety. The same was true in the spring of 1645, when a letter was found in the pocket of the captured royalist, Captain Bownes, who had been brought to Nantwich as a prisoner. Before sending the letter on to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, Sir William Brereton was forced to copy it out, ‘the Origynall beeing soe bee blooded ouer’ that it was not fit to present to his masters’ eyes.16 The clandestine letter, carried on or in the messenger’s body, became the prosthetic extension of an elite mind out into the world, while the messenger’s body, as the vehicle of that mind, was required to present itself as an unremarkable surface, all but erased in the historical record.
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II I want to turn now to the question of poor women’s involvement in message-carrying during the wars, paying particular attention to the ways in which this has been presented by later commentators. It is not difficult to find examples of elite women’s activities during the civil wars: studies of their letters and activities began to be published soon after the conflict and have continued through to the present day. The Victorian period and its immediate aftermath, in particular, saw a burgeoning interest in the period and in women’s history, giving rise to biographical works such as The Autobiography of Anne, Lady Halkett and The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe.17 Of particular interest here, though, is Henriette de Witt’s study, The Lady of Latham, which considers the life and letters of Charlotte de la Trémoille, countess of Derby, investigating this royalist heroine’s activities at the siege of Lathom House. De Witt’s work presents the countess – who was holding the house during her husband’s absence –as eminently domestic, wanting nothing but to bring up her children and keen to resign back to her husband ‘the authority which she had never exercised but in his name’.18 The account is striking, moreover, not only because it renders Lady Derby a paragon among her sex, but also in its presentation of class. The countess is presented as devout, resolute and enclosed (‘[s]hut up within her walls’), trying to maintain the integrity of herself and her property in the face of a bunch of insolent rebels, led by Colonel Rigby, a former lawyer, ‘a bad man, a robber and a hypocrite’.19 The problem with this kind of historiography is that, in rendering a woman such as Lady Derby a paragon, it divides her from other women. Her civil war activities become an individual achievement, a singular anomaly, accessible only in the context of her relationship with her husband and other men. This makes her contribution to the struggle very easy to erase from the narrative, since it serves, ultimately, only to further another’s story, and it also promulgates a class bias that ensures poorer women are marginalised. This is precisely what happens in The Lady of Latham, which contains an anecdote about a poorer woman, reported in so bizarre a manner that it deserves to be treated in detail. De Witt tells us that, during the siege at Lathom, the Reverend Rutter, Lady Derby’s chaplain, managed to keep up an active correspondence with [Lady Derby’s] friends in the neighbourhood, and with the King, by means of a woman, who for several months courageously risked her life to take despatches and bring back answers during the frequent sorties made by the besieged. She was at length taken and put to the torture, but she would reveal nothing, and suffered three fingers on both hands to be burnt off before her tormentors, tired out by her invincible
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fortitude, at length desisted. Deprived of this faithful messenger they trained a dog to carry the despatches in his collar.20
The unnamed woman’s fortitude here is presented as admirable, but, rather than specifically lauding the really excessive sacrifice offered up by the ‘faithful messenger’ who lost six fingers under conditions of extreme suffering, it somehow seems to mirror the fortitude of the besieged Lady Derby, whose resistance tired out and defeated the parliamentarian opposition. Furthermore, the term ‘faithful messenger’, juxtaposed against the information that the woman was subsequently replaced by a trained dog, not only depersonalises, but also dehumanises this woman and her actions. De Witt’s narrative process is rendered even more suspect when one investigates her sources. The anecdote about this messenger is taken from John Seacome’s The History of the House of Stanley, which in turn takes it from a seventeenth-century manuscript, which Seacome attributes to Rutter.21 In Seacome’s history, the female messenger is named ‘Widow Read’ and described as local to Lathom House. She carried messages in and out of Lathom House for over a year, until she was ‘at last most unhappily taken with cyphers about her; some for his Majesty King Charles, some for the Lord Byron at Chester, and others to some correspondence at Manchester’. When she refused to admit to whom in Manchester the letters were directed, ‘she was burnt with matches betwixt her fingers so long, that three fingers of each hand were burnt off’, yet, ‘beyond the resolution of her sex, or of any woman upon record’, she ‘would discover nothing’.22 The History acknowledges that Widow Read suffered incredible hardship for the royalist cause and, notably, separates her story from that of the dog by several pages.23 Her name, then, appears in the historical record: The Lady of Latham narrative renders her anonymous and virtually invisible; her actions become an attribute of her mistress’s own virtues; her body becomes the vector through which the Reverend Rutter speaks to the king and is analogous to and, indeed, successfully replaced by, that of a trained animal. In contrast to the noble, pious, but paradoxically very visible body of Lady Derby, enclosed behind the walls of Lathom House, the messenger’s body is valuable for its ordinariness. Moreover, it is represented as a material resource that is gradually expended until it is broken and put beyond use. As Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford have noted, it was the negative opinion regarding women’s intellectual capacity and their reputation as gossips that ‘made them so useful to men as emissaries, mediators, and spies’.24 This ‘negative opinion’ can certainly be seen at work in the progressive erasure of Widow Read from historical narratives, and it is also true of the women famously used by John Barwick, a royalist agent, to transport letters and other materials between Oxford and London during the early years of the wars. Barwick used a network of women, established by
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Richard Royston, a bookseller, to carry letters between Oxford and London. These women, we are told, ‘used frequently to travel on Foot, like Strowlers begging from House to House’ taking up books ‘which Mr. Royston had conveyed by stealth among other Merchandize into the Western Barges on the Thames’.25 Barwick’s network of women was reputed to be successful because he employed ‘faithful and honest Messengers, but such for the most part, as were in Circumstances not much to be envied, and were consequently, through the Mediocrity or rather Meanness of their Condition, less conspicuous and more safe’.26 In other words, poor women were deemed to be beneath notice and were therefore paradoxically the most useful. Contemporary references corroborate this information about a number of men and women transporting materials between Oxford and London. For example, in July 1643, the Parliament Scout reported that ‘there is a woman Intelligencer that lives in the Suberbs of London, that goes weekely betweene Oxford and London, and caries the most materiall Letters that goe, she passeth undiscovered a great part of her way by water, and then takes horse’.27 In December 1643, Mercurius Civicus was still protesting about the ‘great abuses’ committed ‘by the transportation both of divers persons and several commodities from Oxford to London by water’.28 A year later, Perfect Occurrences reported that ‘Blacke-Besse and her Comrade, that hath so often passed to and fro betweene Oxford, and London, is now met withall, and a whole bag of Aulicusses, and letters, and Malignancie that she hath brought from Oxford’.29 Reporting on the same incident, the Parliament Scout noted that ‘a Couple of female emissaries’ had been taken ‘passing from Oxford to London’, ‘well stored with Aulicusses, so that they need not be Reprinted at London’.30 It suits historiography for these women to remain unidentified because this adds to the sense of secrecy and intrigue around the transmission of materials to and from London. However, I want to spend some time here investigating the identities of the people involved in this transaction, turning first to the case of Black Bess, one of the couriers who travelled between Oxford and London with ‘a whole bag of Aulicusses, and letters, and Malignancie’. Black Bess’ name participates in an early modern convention which sees working women’s labour buried behind frustrating aliases. At best, aliases such as hers might be protective, or they might locate their bearers in a category inhabited by sensationalist figures such as Long Meg of Westminster, evincing a kind of heroism along the lines of a female Robin Hood.31 At worst, they share names with loose women, and are rendered beneath notice by their gender and class: Black Bess, for example, figures in one of Henry Parrot’s epigrams as a ‘kitchin maid’, who gave Sir Giles, her master, the clap.32 Even elevation to the peerage could not remove the stain of low birth or exempt one from such an alias: despite rising to the status of Duchess of
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Albemarle, Anne Monck, wife of General Monck, has gone down in history as ‘Dirty Bessy’. Born the daughter of John Clarges, a farrier in the Savoy, she has been characterised by later commentators as ‘vulgar’, ‘a perfect mistress of Billingsgate eloquence’ and ‘not at all handsome, nor cleanly’.33 These derogatory comments come not only from a sense of women as an inferior gender, but also from a sense of class and entitlement. Marcus Nevitt has observed that the ‘conference of an alias’ reveals ‘some of the patriarchal force behind the obscuration of so many women’s records’, and goes on to investigate the genesis of the name ‘Parliament Joan’ as it was applied to Elizabeth Alkin, an intelligencer for Parliament.34 Noting that Alkin ‘never once referred to herself as “Parliament Joan” ’, but preferred to use her full name or initials on her printed materials, he identifies the first use of the appellation ‘Joan’ in ‘the State Papers in March 1645’ and shows how this helped to undermine a sense of Alkin’s trustworthiness and the validity of her activities. ‘Indeed, there is a sense,’ Nevitt says, that by giving her a derogatory alias ‘the very authorities who were paying her for the veracity of her intelligence were simultaneously denying its validity, equating it with the mere gossip of a rustic or scullery maid’. He concludes that this was a ‘complex attempt to deny Alkin any agency whilst seemingly using her as an agent’.35 It was precisely this paradoxical and precarious position that rendered Alkin an effective agent: according to Barwick’s formulation it was not just her femininity that made her an unlikely spy; it was also her economic situation that rendered her beneath notice. Black Bess presents a similar interpretive dilemma for scholars. However, while it is impossible definitively to lock down the identity of Black Bess herself, substantial information is extant about a certain Welsh Bess (perhaps the same woman), who also plied the route between Oxford and London. At the Restoration, in the rush of royalist adherents scrambling for compensation from the new regime, a certain Elizabeth Carey, described as ‘an Aged Widow’, repeatedly petitioned for Peter, her son, to be preferred to various offices.36 Her petitions, prepared by a scribe, are relatively formulaic and cannot give us unmediated access to a non-elite woman’s experience in the wars. However, they do contain fragments of information that permit us to perceive a sophisticated petitioning strategy at work. To identify herself to King Charles II, Carey invoked two personal connections, describing herself first as ‘ye Woman whom your Majesty was ordinarily pleased to call Welsh Besse’ and then reminding the king that her son had ‘followed yor Ma.tie to Oxford (and was there bitten by yor Mats Dogg Cupid (as yor Ma.tie may happily call to minde)’.37 Here, the alias ‘Welsh Besse’ is invoked as a mark of familiarity (as is Carey’s knowledge of the name of Prince Charles’ dog). However, hierarchies are carefully maintained when one learns that it was Charles who named Carey ‘Welsh Besse’, and who went on to be
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amused that her son was bitten. Carey does not lay personal claim to the name Welsh Bess, making it clear that this was an identity she was given, rather than one she embraced. The first of Carey’s petitions deserves to be quoted at length because of the welter of information it contains. Addressed to Charles II, it reminded the king, that your Petitioner in the late generall Calamity hath (amongst others) suffered deeply for her great fidelity & constant Loyalty to your Ma:ties Late Royall father of glorious memory, and that your Petition:er for her faithfull adhering as well to yor Royall father as also to your Ma:tie hath endured many great and grievous afflictions by persecution, oppression, ye breaking of her Back at Henley upon Thames & a Gibbet erected to take away her life with the many other Cruelties inflicted on her. Besides her seuerall Imprisonments in Windsor Castle, in Newgate, in Bridewell in ye Bishop of Londons house, and lastly her Imprisonment in the Mewes at the time of his Ma:ties glorious Martirdome for her peculiar service to his Majesty in conveying and bringing of his Majesties Proclamations and Declarations from Oxford to London, and was at last forced to flee into her owne Countrey for her safety, and by that meanes escaped with her Life.38
Carey describes herself as the carrier of printed papers (‘Proclamations and Declarations’), and was later identified as transporting letters of ‘most importance’ throughout the war for Secretary Nicholas.39 Perhaps –given her reference to a final imprisonment in the Mews around the time of Charles I’s execution –she was also involved in the distribution of Eikon Basilike. The locations in which she was imprisoned were all on the Oxford– London route, yet only one of her arrests can definitively be identified: the Bridewell Court Books provide evidence, on 15 December 1643, of a certain ‘Elizabeth Carey sent in by the Committee of examinations for a spye’.40 This very probably makes her one of the messengers whose apprehension was mentioned in The Weekly Account of 13 December 1643, which noted that there ‘was a Scout taken carrying of a cushion for the ease of his tender female companion, which, being opened, were found malignant Letters, and the parties imprisoned’.41 This brief report humorously underlines the paradoxical nature of women’s involvement as messengers: on the one hand, a masquerade of genteel femininity is needed to explain the presence of a cushion; on the other, parliamentarian soldiers see through the deceit, revealing malignancy and, ultimately, the royalist woman’s lack of femininity. Despite the light-hearted nature of this report, December 1643 was a terrible time to be taken as a spy. Carey’s entry into Bridewell is recorded in the same court session as that of Thomas Carpenter, who, a few days previously, had been forced to stand on a gibbet, awaiting his turn, while Daniel
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Kniveton, a haberdasher who had brought ‘Writs and Proclamations’ to London without a pass, was hanged for violating the parliamentary order against transporting materials to and from Oxford.42 Although the length of Carey’s prison term in Bridewell is likely to have been short, it was fraught with danger and demonstrates the hazards her occupation entailed.43 Her body was subject to physical searches, violent discipline and incarceration as she moved royalist materials around the south of England, and she presents her wartime experience as one of geographical dislocation (a vacillation between imprisonment and movement to avoid capture), at the end of which she was ‘forced to flee into her owne Countrey’.44 In contrast to this sense of danger and restless movement, the petition’s reiteration of phrases such as ‘great fidelity’, ‘constant Loyalty’ and ‘faithful adhering’ reveal Carey’s royalism to be a source of stability that, paradoxically, has both given her an anchor and caused her physically to be broken. ‘Welsh Besse’, then, was a low-culture appellation, conferred by a social superior on Elizabeth Carey, which its holder invoked after the Restoration to elicit a bond with the new king. Nevertheless, while Carey seems, on the surface, to fit the profile of a poor female messenger painted by Barwick, her direct and personal connections with Prince Charles and Secretary Nicholas, and her understanding of, and willingness to attempt, the petitioning process, attest to more social standing than might, at first, appear. This is reinforced by her aspirations for her son, whom she wishes to place in courtly or university positions that require literacy and an awareness of elite manners. She seems to belong more to the lower gentry than she does to the labouring poor. This perhaps reveals a strong bias in the views of the elite class (including Prince Charles and the Barwick brothers), whose understanding of degrees of poverty was unnuanced and whose lack of interest in the given names and family ties of the women who carried their documents has helped to condition our own understandings of these activities. Moreover, if one compares Elizabeth Carey’s activities and petitions with those of a certain Katherine de Luke, another self-proclaimed courier and royalist spy, this sense is reinforced. De Luke’s petitions to Charles II at the Restoration evoke the same vocabulary of suffering, loyalty and faithful service as those of Welsh Bess. She claims to have served your Maties Royall Father (of blessed memory) faithfully in carryeing of Letters and private Intelligence, and in performeing of other busines of great waight & concernmt which trust (at her owne costes and charges) shee carefully discharged with all fidelity in tymes of gretest danger, and difficulty dureing ye late Warr to ye vtmost hazard of her life.45
Unlike Carey, who was personally known by Prince Charles, de Luke supported her petitions with a series of affidavits from senior royalists who
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attested to the veracity of her claims. These affidavits all reinforce the notion of de Luke’s sacrificial service, again drawing on a discourse of royalist martyrdom and self-effacing loyalty to the cause.46 I will return to the specifics of de Luke’s actions and sacrifice below, but first I want to establish what can be known about her social status to shed light on the background of a woman who was clearly employed repeatedly as a royalist messenger and spy. De Luke’s petitions provide information about her background and family. We are told that her husband was ‘sequestred & turned out of his whole Estate in ye Isle of Wight’, that the family was ‘4 tymes plundred by the Enemy’, had property ‘to the value of 1000li taken from them’, and that de Luke’s husband ‘raised horse for his Ma:tie by ye Commission from ye Lord Hopton’ and then served as an officer in the royalist army.47 This information gives the impression that de Luke and her family were, at the very least, from the gentry class and had a certain amount of wealth and status. I have no reason to believe this was not true. However, extant documentary evidence tells a more complex story. Katherine de Luke first appears in the records in January 1638–9 after her arrest in Middlesex for ‘misdemeanours’ committed in Romsey. She is described as ‘exceedinge poore’, was unable to ‘finde anie sureties’ to guarantee her appearance at the Southampton assizes, and was therefore kept in Middlesex New Prison ‘vpon the Charge of the howse’.48 During her incarceration, a further charge was laid against her ‘concerninge a scandall and practise by her against Sr Edwarde Powell’ and she was sent to the Fleet, but nobody ‘appeared to prosecute or Informe anie thinge againste her’ and, by March, she had been released and had returned to Philip, her husband.49 She and Philip next appear in West Cowes on the Isle of Wight, accused by a certain Stephen Gilbert of underhand practices concerning a will. In April 1641, Katherine de Luke was a witness to the nuncupative will of James Gilbert, Stephen’s brother, and was asked by Stephen to go to London to attest to its veracity so that it could be proved. Katherine claimed she did not want to go because she was pregnant, but was persuaded when Stephen offered her ‘a very easie horse’ for the journey, her travel expenses and a bonus of five pounds.50 Stephen, in turn, accused Katherine (in confederation with her husband and Edward Fripp, a neighbour) of inflating the costs of the London journey and of embezzling money from bonds belonging to his late brother in repayment. Describing himself as a yeoman who was ‘illiterate and of slender capacities’, Stephen suggested that the de Lukes had pretended ‘to be wel acquainted with ye way of proving wills’ and had offered to undertake this business for him in London.51 Katherine, in her turn, insisted that she had only recently moved to the Isle of Wight, and that everything she had done was from a ‘comon and christianlie courtesie
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of visiting the sicke’.52 None of these documents identify Philip or Edward Fripp’s occupations, but Philip was clearly literate and signed his deposition with a competent signature. Katherine’s deposition, in contrast, concludes with her mark: a carefully drawn ‘C’.53 The evidence of the de Lukes’ early poverty and Katherine’s apparent attempt to extort money from a neighbour sit uneasily alongside her later claims for the loss of land and goods to the tune of £1,000. Nevertheless, she and her husband clearly had some social standing and were at least initially trusted to undertake a business and legal matter by Stephen Gilbert. It is certainly possible that their property was sequestered and that, like Elizabeth Carey, Katherine de Luke belonged more to the lower gentry than she did to the labouring poor. Again, this raises the issue that the information we have inherited from elite actors in the period is blind to nuances of status in the lower classes: anyone not possessed of significant wealth is deemed to be impoverished. What is clear from de Luke’s petitions is the extent of her engagement with the royalist intelligence effort between 1642– 3 and the surrender of Oxford in 1646.54 Attesting to the value of her work were not only Secretary Nicholas, Jerome Weston, earl of Portland, and Thomas Howard, earl of Berkshire, but also inveterate intriguers Sir John Berkeley, John Ashburnham and William Legg.55 John Trethewy, one of Edward Hyde’s principal informants, also noted that she had been ‘Imployed by the late Lord Hopton for Intelligence’ and had performed faithfully, despite ‘many dangers’.56 She operated out of Oxford and Bristol, and, among ‘other services too longe to relate’, was involved in ‘Carrying of his said late Maties Commissions’.57 She also claimed she had ‘discovered the plott at Bristoll’, after being ‘promised satisfaction in case she could finde any thinge out’.58 She was certainly held in considerable esteem by some of those with whom she worked: Walter Slingsby, for example, advocated for her earnestly, claiming that she ‘deserve[d]beyond expression’.59 These Restoration petitions and affidavits bear witness to the partial revelation of the secrets of clandestine activity in the war years. While they demonstrate absolutely that women operated not only as couriers, but also as intelligencers, they also reveal a double bias in the historical record. First, no other woman is mentioned in any of the petitioning documents concerned with either Carey or de Luke, giving the impression that they acted alone in a world of men. Second, affirmations of their poverty cause a flattening of degree: both were certainly ‘in Circumstances not much to be envied’, yet they were far from being at the bottom of the social scale and attestations to the ‘Meanness’ of their conditions draw attention not only to their poverty, but also to the wealth and superior financial expectations of those by whom they were employed. Later commentators have accepted, and even
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exaggerated, the assumption that female spies and couriers were of exceptionally mean conditions, and this, in turn, I argue, has contributed to an unnuanced representation of these women’s activities. To begin to address this problem, I want to turn now to Carey and de Luke’s presentations of physical and mental distress, joining their stories to those of others who carried messages for the royalist cause to investigate the relationship between clandestine documents and the bodies that carried them, and to show how elite words have taken precedence in the historical record over the welfare of their bearers. As I have already noted, Carey’s petitions describe her as one who ‘endured many grievous afflictions by persecution, oppression ye breaking of her Back at Henley upon Thames & a Gibbet erected to take away her life with the many other Cruelties inflicted on her’.60 While this description blends physical and psychological torment, none of the offences proffered against Carey seem to have been specifically undertaken to elicit information: they are all punitive. In contrast, de Luke claims she was ‘Comitted to Bridewell, & there whipped every other day, & alsoe burnt with light Matches, lanched, & cruelly tormented to make her betray her Trust’.61 If we take these assertions at face value, then de Luke claims she was tortured to make her give up information, rather than punitively whipped. I want to evaluate this claim, while also paying attention to scholarly investigations of torture in the period. Considering reports in civil war newsbooks of individuals who were burned with lighted matches, Barbara Donagan notes: This form of torture already had a long history in the propaganda literature of the civil war, and while accounts may have been true, particularly as methods and means were simple, homely, and accessible, repetitions of the formula invite some doubt.62
Ann Hughes, on the other hand, noting that women ‘detected in spying or conspiracy were not protected by their sex’, has identified several instances of women being physically punished for intelligence work or for carrying messages.63 Broader studies of torture in the early modern period identify an efflorescence of the practice under Queen Elizabeth, but posit that it became virtually extinct under the Stuarts. This omission, commentators suggest, came about because English law did not require a confession, so torture was unnecessary, and also because the use of torture had been powerfully linked to tyranny by martyrologists such as John Foxe. Other European nations, such as Spain, practised judicial torture; England, in contrast, ‘engaged in a stylized form of retribution called ritual punishment’.64 Ritual punishment is precisely what Elizabeth Carey describes in her petitions, thereby lending credence to the idea that torture was officially avoided in England even in the case of an identified spy. This is also importantly underlined in John
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Barwick’s biography, which describes how Barwick, captured for engineering the transmission of royalist correspondence, was threatened with torture by Sir Henry Mildmay, but finally exempted because his interrogators considered torture to be ‘a Barbarity in this Age unheard of in England’, and wanted ‘to preserve themselves from the Odium of so barbarous a cruelty’.65 At least in Barwick’s case, torture for the sole purpose of eliciting information seems to have been overtly avoided: its association with tyranny (and therefore its opposition to dignity and reason) is clearly evident in the interaction between Barwick and his accusers. However, rather than immediately moving to dismiss Katherine de Luke’s claims of torture as the exaggerations of a desperate or deceitful woman, I would like to pay them due attention, giving room not only to a consideration of torture itself, but also to the violence that occurs when such women’s professed experiences are rendered invisible and negated. Although a Bridewell whipping might be intended to generate repentance and therefore to purify and save the accused’s soul, the kinds of ritual punishment practised on Carey and on the executed Daniel Kniveton do not necessitate any sense of a reasoning interiority beneath the flesh upon which they are inflicted. Whether applied to a suspected female spy, or to a lawyer such as William Prynne, whose ears were clipped and whose face was branded after the publication of his controversial Histriomastix (1633), ritual punishment disciplined the body and served as an example to others. The cases with de Luke and Widow Read, however, are slightly different, sharing ritual punishment’s fixation on the surfaces of the body, while also intimating that a pre-existing truth can be excavated, through pain, from that body. That is, both de Luke and Read were tortured because they were messengers, and the logical conclusion is that their captors wished to extract information from them. Nevertheless, when de Luke states she was ‘cruelly tormented to make her betray her Trust’, her choice of words reveals that she is not only bearing witness to an extractable secret, but subscribing to the ideology of royalist loyalism that can be perceived in both her own and Carey’s petitions. Elizabeth Hanson has suggested that early modern torture, particularly torture on the grounds of religious belief, involved a tussle over the nature of truth itself. On the one hand, she says, truth (for the torturer) was ‘that which [was] susceptible to discovery’, while on the other, truth (for the victim) was ‘that which [was] felt in resisting discovery’.66 De Luke’s ‘Trust’ is not something discoverable that she was given and holds inside herself, but is something that was always already integral to her identity and which is brought out through the process of torture itself. The ‘Trust’ she bears is part and parcel of her identity as a royalist and cannot be extracted without destroying both it and her. Her Restoration petition therefore resists both the sense
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that her superiors used her as an unthinking tool to transport their messages (thereby giving agency in this matter to herself), and denies her captors the impression that they successfully mined her body for information. Indeed, the violence they inflicted on her body, rather than undermining her sense of self, reinforces it by reinforcing her credentials as a faithfully suffering royalist. Similarly, when Widow Read is described as suffering ‘all those tortures with invincible patience’, this presentation is, like that of de Luke, not only about the extraction of some pre-existent truth, but also a refusal to betray the self and to maintain a resolute royalism. However, we must remain aware that Read’s position is presented to us through Rutter’s quasi- hagiographic account. Hers is a self-imagined story by a royalist churchman and clearly modelled on the narrative of Patient Grissel.67 Ultimately, the accounts of both women’s experiences of torture are rhetorical positions, mediated through scribes and conditioned by a royalist culture that diffracted discourses of religious martyrdom through the lens of Eikon Basilike. Nevertheless, they bear witness to the costs of taking on the roles of messenger and intelligencer; costs that Carey and de Luke were still trying to recoup to the ends of their lives. Elite letter writers frequently presented their writing as extensions of their own minds and often seemed more concerned about the timely transportation of their letters than they did about the individuals who transported them. Nevertheless, stories in news-books and, later, formal petitions give us a glimpse of the ordinary people involved in this process of transportation. Elizabeth Carey and Katherine de Luke both participated in the presentation of themselves as reasoning actors, who, like their martyred king, suffered consciously for the royalist cause. Paying attention to their stories reveals not only class biases in earlier historical writing which have privileged the concerns of the privileged, but also provides evidence of how ordinary people engaged with the civil struggle. The English Revolution had an immensely disruptive effect on many people’s lives. This chapter, inspired by Ann Hughes’ call to ‘ground political history in social and cultural contexts’, recovers evidence about those lives, contributing to excavations of the impact the civil conflict had on everybody concerned, while investigating the stories of people who have all but been written out of history.68
Notes 1 See Mercurius Civicus (27 November–4 December 1645, BL, E.311[6]), p. 1155; The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer (25 November–2 December 1645, BL, E.310[19]), p. 1029; A Diary, or an Exact Iournall (27 November–4 December 1645, BL, E.311[5]), p. 8; The Kingdomes Scout (25 November–2 December 1645, BL, E.310[16]), p. 8.
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2 See Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 39–40. 3 Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon, 2012), p. 4; Ann Hughes, ‘Gender and politics in Leveller literature’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky, eds, Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1995), pp. 162–88, at p. 165. For recent work on female agents during the English civil wars, see also Nadine Akkerman, Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2018). The current chapter was completed before the publication of Akkerman’s book. 4 Thomas Forde, Virtus Rediviva (1660), sigs J4r–v, italics in original. 5 James Howell, The True Informer (1643), p. 2, italics in original. Howell reiterated this sentiment in Som Sober Reflections (1655), pp. 3–4. 6 BL, Add. MS 78264, fo. 86: Charles I to Secretary Nicholas, Cardiff, 4 August 1645. 7 Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (Brooklyn, 2007), p. 155. 8 For more on this, see Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford, 2008), pp. 262–79. 9 Anon., A Damnable Treason by a Contagious Plaster of a Plague Sore (1641), sigs A3r–v, italics in original. The event was mentioned on 26 October 1641 in CJ, ii. 295. 10 HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde (8 vols, London, 1902–20), ii. 392. 11 See Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William G. Matthews (11 vols, Berkeley, 1970), vi. 25. See also: HMC, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland (10 vols, London, 1891–1931), i. 378. 12 James Stanley, Private Devotions and Miscellanies of James, Seventh Earl of Derby, ed. Francis Robert Raines (3 vols, Chetham Society, 1867), i. cviii, note 17. 13 See Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, i. 378. 4 April 1644, BL, E.40[20]), p. 458; Perfect 14 Mercurius Civicus (28 March– Diurnall (23–30 January 1643, BL, E.245[25]), sig. Kk3r; The City Scout (4–11 November 1645, BL, E.309[2]), p. 6; Mercurius Civicus (25 April–2 May 1644, BL, E.45[1]), pp. 486– 7; Perfect Occurrences (20– 27 December 1644, BL, E258[6]), sig. T2v. 15 Sir John Hothams Letter to a Worthy Member of the House of Commons, Concerning the Late discovery at Hull (1642), italics in original. Beckwith’s son- in-law, a certain Foolks, was acting on the instructions of his superiors, and corresponding with Beckwith as a parliamentarian double agent. 16 BL, Add. MS 11331, fo. 140: Sir William Brereton to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, 20 May 1645. 17 See The Autobiography of Anne, Lady Halkett, ed. John Gough Nichols (Camden Society, new series, 13, 1875); The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. H. C. Fanshawe (London, 1907). 18 Henriette de Witt, The Lady of Latham (London, 1869), pp. 106–7.
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19 Ibid., pp. 92–4, 100, 106–7. 20 Ibid., p. 109. 21 See John Seacome, The History of the House of Stanley (Preston, 1793), pp. 270–1. 22 Ibid., pp. 270–1. 23 Ibid., p. 274. 24 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women In Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), p. 413. 25 Peter Barwick, The Life of the Reverend Dr John Barwick (1724), p. 62, italics in original. 26 Ibid., pp. 62–3. 27 Parliament Scout (20–27 July 1643, BL, E.61[26]), p. 40. 28 Mercurius Civicus (8–16 June 1643, BL, E106[13]), p. 41; Mercurius Civicus (30 November–7 December 1643, BL, E78[2]), pp. 321–2. 29 Perfect Occurrences (13–20 December 1644, BL, E258[4]), sig. T2v. 30 Parliament Scout (12–19 December 1644, BL, E21[30]), sig. Eeee3r. 31 On Long Meg, see, for example, Anon., The Life of Long Meg of Westminster (1635). 32 H[enry] P[arrot], Cvres for the Itch (1626), sig. E6v: ‘Of thee Sir Miles too much cannot be said, /For medling with black Besse the kitchin maid /No more those dealings are discernd of late, /Then is that periwig vpon thy pate.’ 33 See, for example, Colonel Mackinnon, ‘Origin and services of the Coldstream Guards’, The Monthly Review, 1.2 (1833), 353– 70, p. 355; J. Granger, A Biographical History of England, From Egbert the Great to the Revolution (2 vols, 1769), ii. 420. 34 Marcus Nevitt, ‘Women in the business of revolutionary news: Elizabeth Alkin, “Parliament Joan,” and the commonwealth newsbook’, in Joad Raymond, ed., News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain (London, 1999), pp. 84–108, at p. 87. See also Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660 (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 93–6. 35 Nevitt, ‘Women’, p. 89. 36 See TNA, SP 29/2, fo. 157. This Elizabeth Carey does not seem to be any relation to Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, author of The Tragedy of Mariam (1613). 37 TNA, SP 29/9, fo. 151; SP 29/66, fo. 153. 38 TNA, SP 29/2, fo. 35. 39 TNA, SP 29/194, fo. 139. 40 LMA, CLC/275/MS33011/009, Bridewell Court Book, 4 October 1642–7 July 1658, p. 82. The Court Book entry for 15 December 1643 also records the imprisonment of Pharaoh Lawriman and Jone Dias, who, like Carey, were ‘sent in by the Committee of examinations for a spye’. 41 The Weekly Account (6–13 December, 1643, BL, E78[15]), p. 6. 42 Carpenter was reprieved on the scaffold and remanded to Bridewell: see Bridewell Court Book, p. 81. See also, Certaine Informations (27 November– 4 December, BL, E.77[27]), p. 357; Perfect Diurnall (20–27 November 1643, E.252[9]), p. 152; Perfect Diurnall (27 November–4 December, BL, E252[10]), p. 153; Anon., An Account of the Sufferings of Mr Daniel Kniveton (1643).
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43 Pharaoh Lawriman was still in prison on 9 February 1643/4 (Court Book, p. 91). Carey’s name is not mentioned again, and she is likely to have been released before Lawriman’s case came up for review. 44 TNA, SP 29/2, fo. 35. 45 TNA, SP 29/67, fo. 281. 46 Secretary Nicholas’s affidavit, for example, avers that ‘Katherine De Luke did serve the King very faithfully by carrying of Letters for his Matyes service with the hazard of her life’: TNA, SP 29/67, fo. 283. 47 TNA, SP 29/17, fo. 54; SP 29/20, fo. 20; SP 29/67, fo. 281. 48 TNA, SP 16/409, fo. 87. 49 Ibid. 50 TNA, C 7/146/38. 51 Ibid. 52 TNA, C 7/146/36. 53 It should be stressed that, just because Katherine de Luke does not appear to have been able to write her name, it does not necessarily follow that she could not read. On this, see Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge, 2005), p. 55. 54 Bruno Ryves noted that she had ‘been a great sufferer’ ‘since Oxford was surrendered’: TNA, SP 29/67, fo. 283. 55 For Ashburnham, Berkeley and Legg’s involvement in Charles I’s escape from Hampton Court in 1647, which ended with the king’s confinement at Carisbrook in the Isle of Wight, see Geoffrey Smith, Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies: Their Role in the British Civil Wars, 1640–1660 (Farnham, 2011), p. 99. Also signing in her favour were Colonel Walter Slingsby, who was in Bristol with Prince Rupert in 1645; George Kirke, one of the grooms of Charles I’s bedchamber; William Pawlett; Edward Mill; John Trethewy. 56 TNA, SP 29/67, fo. 283. 57 TNA, SP 29/17, fo. 54; SP 29/20, fo. 20. 58 TNA, SP 29/17, fo. 54; SP 29/67, fo. 281. This was almost certainly the plot to deliver Bristol to Sir William Waller, uncovered when royalists intercepted some parliamentarian letters in March 1644/5: see John Lynch, For King and 6. See also Parliament: Bristol and the Civil War (Stroud, 1999), pp. 135– Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, ed. W. Dunn Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), iii. 531. 59 TNA, SP 29/255, fo. 1. This document is wrongly placed in the archive; it bears a date of 29 January 1663/4, rather than 1668/9. 60 TNA, SP 29/2, fo. 35. 61 TNA, SP 29/17, fo. 54. 62 Barbara Donagan, War in England, 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008), p. 343. 63 Hughes, Gender, pp. 36, 41, 42. 64 Cynthia Richards, ‘Interrogating Oroonoko’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 25.4 (2013), 647–76, p. 656. See also, John D. Staines, ‘Torture and the tyrant’s injustice from Fox to King Lear’, in Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace and Grant Williams, eds, Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing 57; Injustice in Early Modern English Literature (Toronto, 2015), pp. 225–
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Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985), pp. 27–59; Elizabeth Hanson, ‘Torture and truth in Renaissance England’, Representations, 34 (1991), 53–84. 65 Barwick, Life, pp. 122–4, italics in original. 66 Hanson, ‘Torture’, p. 56. 67 The tale of Patient Griselda, a viciously abused wife, famous for her stoic fortitude, was told by Chaucer and Boccaccio and later dramatised on the London stage (most notably by Thomas Dekker and his associates, under the title Patient Grissel). 68 Hughes, Gender, p. 149.
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Puritanism, parish and polemic in civil war London: the case of Thomas Bakewell Elliot Vernon This chapter concerns the world of the London baker, parish elder and Presbyterian polemicist Thomas Bakewell (d. 1654). Between 1643 and 1650 Bakewell was the author of twelve tracts of Presbyterian polemic.1 Although Bakewell left no personal archive, his life can be reconstructed from local records and his writings. Bakewell’s value derives in no small part from this very obscurity, providing an optic through which many of the questions raised by historians of the mid-seventeenth-century crisis can be viewed with fresh eyes. A study of Bakewell’s milieu addresses questions about the penetration of puritan doctrine among the laity, the mobilisation for Presbyterianism in the London parishes, as well as the nature of civil war polemic and the deployment of print. A key value in making a case study of Bakewell’s life and work is the fact that his world was at all times one of intense localism. Apart from a few rare trips to Westminster on parish business, his frame of reference was largely bounded by the parishes of the western part of the City of London. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, Bakewell’s localism, through his contacts with fellow Presbyterian activists and face-to-face opponents, connected him to the much wider theatre of national religious politics in civil war Britain. Bakewell’s status as a godly ‘everyman’ could be of strategic importance to the well-organised London Presbyterian movement.2 This was especially true on those occasions when the City’s Presbyterian clergy wished, for tactical reasons, to absent themselves from being publicly seen to respond in a particular polemical exchange.3 Consequently, all of Bakewell’s works were commercially published, licensed and thus potentially available beyond the confines of his local world. The medium of print meant that Bakewell’s locally generated controversies contributed to the wider 1640s contests on religious doctrine, the relationship of church and state and ecclesiastical practice in a way that married the politics of the parish with national debate. This chapter therefore picks up on many of themes found in the work of Ann Hughes: of Presbyterians as initiators of popular polemic rather than as embattled elitists, of the nature of local mobilisation in civil war London, and of the importance of those mobilisations in the fracturing of
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the parliamentarian alliance.4 In common with Hughes’ study of Thomas Edwards, Bakewell was driven by the desire to advance a Presbyterian vision of community and reformation and to combat the threat to that vision that the religious heterodoxy unleashed by the civil wars posed.
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I Who was Thomas Bakewell? The reader may be forgiven for asking: who was Thomas Bakewell? The subject of this study has sometime been elided with a clerical namesake, a Presbyterian and later dissenting minister from Rolleston in Staffordshire.5 The Thomas Bakewell of this study, however, was a London layman, whose life centred on the parish of St Bride Fleet Street.6 Having little in the way of formal education, he was, appropriate to his name, a baker by trade and designated a ‘housekeeper’ by the London Company of Bakers in August 1635. A month later he married Mary (or Margery) Bayley in his home parish of St Bride Fleet Street.7 Although a liveryman of the Baker’s Company, he appears to have never progressed far enough to hold office in its governing court.8 By the mid-1640s, however, Bakewell was among the leading parishioners of St Bride Fleet Street, holding office as parish scavenger in 1645, constable in 1648 and sideman in 1651, before retiring to the parish of St Leonard Shoreditch in late 1652.9 In 1646 Bakewell was unanimously chosen as one of St Bride’s board of ruling elders.10 His writings show that he was a supporter of Parliament during the civil wars, contributing £10 to the relief of distressed Protestants in Ireland in August 1642 and investing £2 in 1643 in the Irish Adventurers for Waterford.11 By his will, he left to his only child, Sarah, the freehold and rents of a house, as well as £100 in cash.12 Bakewell, therefore, was in the middle of the middling sort, perhaps just poorer than the Merchant Adventurer and Leveller leader William Walywn, who also contributed £10 to Protestants in Ireland, but marginally wealthier than his more famous Presbyterian contemporary, the artisan Nehemiah Wallington. Bakewell’s world was informed by a deeply local dynamic and the centre of this localism was the parish community of St Bride Fleet Street, a crowded and impoverished parish on the western extreme of the City of London. The vestry calculated in 1652 that its annual bill for poor relief was just over £601, paid for by just 510 of the parish’s 1,530 families. Such was the precarious nature of St Bride’s finances that other London parishes augmented its funds, such as the £20 contributed annually by the wealthier parish of St Stephen Walbrook.13 The general governance of the parish fell to around ninety-eight men, whose qualification for governance was that they had been selected to serve the office of scavenger, or pay a fine in lieu of
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that service. By April 1646 parochial governance was handed by consent to a ‘selected’ vestry of around fifty-eight men, to be elected annually.14 Bakewell’s service to the parish had begun in 1638 when he took a bond to bake bread for the parish poor.15 He was chosen scavenger in February 1645 and was elected to the select vestry between 1648 and 1651.16 Bakewell’s involvement as one of the governing men of this chaotic community is reflected in the language that colours his printed discourse. On two occasions Bakewell deployed the ‘simily’ of an impotent beggar receiving alms to explain the necessity of faith for justification: If the beggar can but reach out his hand, although it be weake or lame, to take his almes, yet it is his when he hath received it sure enough, as if he had received it by a stronger hand … so he that by faith taketh the righteousness of Christ, it is his sure enough, although his faith were never so weak.17
If the practice of poor relief coloured Bakewell’s understanding of the doctrine of justification by faith, the perennial problem of foundlings, children left at the doors of parish churches to be maintained at the expense of the parish, provided the metaphor for his self-proclaimed victory over antinomian opponents. Bakewell declared that his first book had ‘laid open to the world’ the ugliness of the antinomians’ doctrines, such that: they began to be ashamed to owne them, and like common whores, who seek to escape away and to leave their bastards upon the parish, so these men when shame followed their errors; they sought to escape away from them, by denying of them.18
Bakewell, then, was a relatively unremarkable man whose life path was not uncommon to London’s middling sort, yet the very fabric of this artisan’s life coloured his engagement in the religious arena of the 1640s.
II Polemical exchanges in civil war London Bakewell had not been trained in the method and art of formal debate, yet he entered the lists of controversy in the polemically charged atmosphere of 1640s London. This section looks at his polemical tactics and the environment that fostered exchanges with his opponents. Ann Hughes has argued, in relation to 1640s London, that print remained ‘an intimate and personal medium, closely connected to other, more obviously direct forms of communication’. Historians should therefore recognise ‘the novelty and provisional nature of the medium’ of print.19 Print could become an extension of the habits of face-to-face disputation and manuscript transmission characteristic of the London Puritan underground from the period immediately prior to de facto access to the printing press in the 1640s. It will be argued here, in
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agreement with Hughes, that Bakewell’s early pamphlets illustrate how the printed word could be an extension of the polemical environment of more local and personal forms of communication. Bakewell’s polemical exchanges began from face-to-face encounters. He had privately disputed with antinomians in the early 1630s.20 His entry into the 1640s polemical environment came about as a result of perceiving a resurgent theological threat from a string of antinomian publications in 1642.21 The main spur for Bakewell to publish, however, appears to have been his attendance in summer 1643 at the parliamentary committee for investigating antinomians.22 This committee, led by the divines of the Westminster Assembly cross-examined the antinomian preachers, John Simpson, Giles Randall and Robert Lancaster, with a view to a possible prosecution for heresy. Although Bakewell described the antinomian committee as taking place under the aegis of the ‘grave and worthy Assembly of Divines’, it was in fact a parliamentary committee whose hearings were open to the public.23 Jason Peacey has demonstrated that public access to parliamentary committees was more common than has often been suspected.24 Certainly, Bakewell’s entry into the world of public polemics was as much encouraged by his attendance at the cross examination of John Simpson as through reading printed works. Although spurred into print by the resurgence of antinomianism, it is apparent that Bakewell initially had difficulty getting to grips communicating in the medium of print. For example 1644’s The antinomians Christ confounded incongruously blends in its first sixteen pages a refutation of Tobias Crisp’s posthumous Christ alone exalted with snippets of a recent face- to- face disputation held with Robert Lancaster at his St Stephen Coleman Street home.25 Bakewell’s discussion of the disputation with Lancaster is intertwined with his comments on the errors in Crisp’s Christ alone exalted, clumsily shifting back and forth between the disputation and Crisp’s text without caesura. For example, Bakewell moves jerkily from the theological to the domestic, shifting from a refutation of Crisp’s theology, to suddenly telling the reader: upon these things I tarried so long with Mr Lancaster … and his wife cried out that her husband was almost spent, and so my friend and I left him; and were it not for his wife who looked very big about the middle, I would have a third battle with him, in which I am confident he would yield.26
The erratic style of Bakewell’s early tracts suggests that he was struggling to find ways to master the stylistic requirements that his newly gained access to print necessitated. As well as mixing the contexts of print and personal dispute, Bakewell also peppers his work with matters of local knowledge in ways that raise
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questions as to his intended audience. For example, in the preface to his first pamphlet, A short view of the antinomian errours, Bakewell exhorts his readers not to be seduced by heretics and to test novel religious teachings by the Word. This platitude is set out by the device of an extended sentence strung together out of seventeen scriptural quotations. Bakewell then incongruously and suddenly breaks off from quoting scripture to warn his readers that ‘seducers will creep into houses about Moor-fields, and other places, and lead captive silly women laden with their lusts’.27 The reader is not told who the ‘silly women’ in question were, but from a similar tale recited in Edwards’ Gangraena, it is probable that Bakewell was referring to a local scandal concerning the antinomian sect-master ‘Nichols who lives in Moor- Fields’.28 However, Bakewell provides no such identification and seems to assume that his readers would understand this comment. In another tract, Bakewell declares that antinomian errors lead wives to leave their husbands; as proof he asks the reader to ‘witness Mr Rushbrook and his wife’. This perhaps refers to the same scandal perpetrated in Moorfields, but Bakewell provides no further details about either Mr Rushbrook or his wife.29 The introduction of such locally and temporally specific knowledge may reflect Bakewell’s transition from the closer community of the pre-civil war puritan underground to the world of print. It may be that Bakewell failed to understand that his pamphlets would have a wider audience beyond the local knowledge of the face-to-face world of the London godly. It is equally possible, however, that Bakewell had a sense that his non-local readers would understand the crux of his hints and allusions from their cultural understanding of an ‘imagined London’, with Moorfields located as a space symbolic of licentiousness and subversion.30 In any event, Bakewell’s partial intimations of antinomian wrong doings in Moorfields suggest that he felt no need to give his readers further details. A further feature of Bakewell’s polemical style is his resort to fictional characterisations. Like Bunyan’s more successful characters in the Pilgrim’s Progress some thirty years later, and Bakewell’s contemporary Edward Fisher, the author of the popular The marrow of modern divinity, Bakewell drew on the literary techniques found in godly dialogues such as Arthur Dent’s puritan classic The plaine mans path-way to Heaven.31 In The antinomian Christ confounded, Bakewell narrates the tale of a ‘combat with the Antinomian’s Christ in his den’. Adopting the fictional persona of Christ’s ‘Faithful Messenger’, Bakewell asks his readers to ‘give me leave to declare the tydings of that Faithfull Messenger who was sent to try the Antinomians power in their last place of refuge’. The Faithful Messenger, we are told, ‘went on boldly to the Antinomian Christ’s den’, where ‘he was set upon’ by a series of monsters, apparently personifications of erroneous doctrines, before his final battle, where he dealt ‘Hidra’, the antinomian’s false Christ,
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‘five incurable wounds’ that ‘cut so deepe that a man might see the very bone perished’.32 Such allegorical style was too much for Bakewell to sustain, however, and he swiftly shifted literary genres, providing his readers with a thirty-one-page catechism setting out ‘the grounds of true religion’ from the decrees of predestination to the final judgement.33 Bakewell and his disputing partners therefore adapted ‘popular’ or ‘plebian’ genres and tropes, as well as crude humour, in their polemical strategies. In the same vein as Edward’s Gangraena, Bakewell blended theological argument with coarse ad hominen invective. For example, he characterised the antinomian Giles Randall as a drunkard who ‘loves his sack bottle more than the Word of God’. Bakewell reported that Randall hosted apprentices at his house, seducing them with antinomian teaching washed down with copious amounts of free alcohol.34 Even more crudely, Bakewell attacked Robert Lancaster with a fictional antinomian genealogy expressed through an extended scatological metaphor. Antinomian doctrines, he argued, had started during the Reformation: only they lay in the privy, or house of office, till Eaton began to root among the dung for some sweet odour, and he kept it by him; and when he was gone and left an ill savour of his dung behind, yet some there was that made much of this dung, in speciall one Lankaster, he put it in the press, and squeesed it, and presently in his conceit it was so sweet as honey-comb.35
Bakewell therefore saw no incongruence in deploying the tropes of oral and semi-literate culture with theological arguments. In 1644’s A confutation of the anabaptists, for example, Bakewell attacked the general Baptist Thomas Nutt with the jocular subtitle ‘A Nut-Cracker for an Unnaturall Nut, whose shell is as hard as the scales of Leviathan’. Nutt’s retort to Bakewell was equally witty: ‘The Nut-Cracker Crackt by the Nutt, and the Baker’s Cake Stark Dow’. Nutt appended a verse libel against Bakewell to the frontispiece of his reply: Thomas Bakewell heretofore a Baker, Yet now through want is turn’d a Nut-crack maker; Who for abusing much the Word of God, Without repentance cannot escape his rod: Whose want is not of money nor of learning, But poore soule, ‘tis of spirtuall discerning.36
As Adam Fox has noted, such satirical verses were effective because they could be enjoyed by both the literate and illiterate.37 Nutt followed this invective by printing Bakewell’s home address, counselling his readers to visit Bakewell’s home to purchase Bakewell’s tract against Nutt from his opponent directly: ‘let them enquire for Mr Bakewell in Hanging Sword Courte neer Fleet Street conduit, where I think you may have his booke of
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lies’.38 The disclosure of Bakewell’s address, no doubt to encourage Nutt’s followers to personally visit Bakewell, shows how print could connect to the local world to threaten opponents. While Bakewell’s works leave the impression that he was operating alone in tackling heterodox opponents, the surrounding evidence suggest that this was unlikely. It is apparent that Bakewell was connected to the organised network of London Presbyterian activists mobilising for a jure divino settlement of the church through his licensers James Cranford and John Downame and his attendance at the fifth London classis. He was delegated five times to the London provincial assembly, each time being chosen as a lay representative for the assembly’s executive grand committee. This meant that he attended meetings with leading Presbyterian clerics such as Lazarus Seaman, George Walker, Edmund Calamy and Thomas Cawton.39 Bakewell was therefore fully connected to the Presbyterian network operating in London. Indeed, Bakewell’s status as a layman could be of strategic importance in the Presbyterians’ polemical battles in the City. The clearest example of Bakewell’s utility as a lay theologian to City Presbyterian mobilisation was his contribution to the ‘Erastian’ controversy between Parliament and the Westminster Assembly over the independent power of the Church to excommunicate and suspend from the Lord’s Supper.40 This debate came to a head in April 1646 when the House of Commons presented the Assembly with nine queries designed to expose and undermine the claims of the Westminster Assembly’s insistence on the divine right of Presbyterianism.41 The nine queries were delivered to the Assembly with an implicit threat of prosecution by praemunire if the assembly maintained its clericalist position. Worried that the rift with Parliament would scupper the projected reformation of the Church of England, the Assembly avoided answering the nine queries. Parliament’s closing down of the Assembly’s demands for the autonomy of the Church, however, still demanded a reply. The first to answer the nine queries was an anonymous pamphlet which George Thomason identified as being written by Bakewell.42 One historian of the Westminster Assembly, John de Witt, states that ‘there is very little likelihood that the assembly divines had anything whatever to do with this publication, but it is interesting … because it represents the current amongst the Presbyterian populace of London’.43 De Witt may have missed the point of Bakewell’s contribution. It seems highly plausible that Bakewell’s reply to the nine queries was encouraged by the London Presbyterian clergy to ‘test the waters’ of Parliament’s reaction. That Bakewell’s response was soon followed by similar answers to the nine queries written by leading London Presbyterian ministers perhaps suggests that his pamphlet heralded a collective Presbyterian response to Parliament.44
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Another example of Bakewell’s lay status creating tactical space in religious polemical engagement can be seen in the 1650 dispute with the credo-Baptist obstetrician Dr Peter Chamberlen.45 In late January 1650, Chamberlen, a resident of the Presbyterian minister William Gouge’s parish of Blackfriars, challenged Gouge to a public debate at St Anne’s church on the issue of sprinkling in baptism. The seventy-five-year-old Gouge tried to deflect Chamberlen, offering him a private conference at Gouge’s house in the presence of a witness. Such private conferences were favoured by the London Presbyterian clergy as they were more controllable and less likely to end in public disorder and violence. Such violence was a real danger and had occurred at a disputation between the general Baptist Edward Barber and the Presbyterian minister Edmund Calamy at the church of St Benet Fink in 1648 when the congregation had physically attacked Barber.46 Gouge’s offer of a private conference in front of witnesses was rejected by Chamberlen, who persisted in demanding a public debate. Gouge ultimately declined, which seems to have been intended as a tactical snub, designed to denigrate the highly educated but lay Chamberlen as a legitimate disputant. However, Chamberlen was not to be brushed off by this refusal and printed a broadsheet addressed to the inhabitants of Blackfriars attacking Gouge’s refusal to debate.47 Although the matter might have rested at this point, Chamberlen could claim to have confounded one of the most respected and learned ministers in London. It was at this point that Bakewell entered the fray to defend Gouge.48 In joining the lists against Chamberlen, Bakewell positioned himself as a mere local observer scandalised by Chamberlen’s attack on a respected local minister. However, as with his answer to Parliament’s nine queries, Bakewell served the greater needs of the London Presbyterian movement by drawing Chamberlen’s fire without Gouge losing face. It is entirely possible that Bakewell was acting in collusion with the London Presbyterian ministry. Chamberlen was suspicious that Bakewell had been put up to the dispute by the Presbyterian clergy, referring to Bakewell’s ‘cat’s-paw’ Greek and sending a messenger to Bakewell’s house to ask if he had actually written the tract against Chamberlen and, if so, who had helped him in its composition.49 Bakewell’s operation in the polemical world of civil war London therefore confirms Ann Hughes’ arguments that the printed word remained embedded in more local practices of oral dialogue and manuscript transmission. To read Bakewell or Nutt is to see how relatively uneducated polemicists grappled with, even experimented with, different styles, genres and textual strategies to argue their case. Yet, paradoxically, this local quality operated in tension with print’s ability to reach a wider public. While Bakewell’s world was one that never went much further than the City of London, he and his
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opponents were part of the wider development of tropes and strategies of polemic that contributed to far wider developments of partisan politics.50
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III How did Bakewell get his religion? What can be said of the religion that Bakewell entered into the fray of public and printed disputation to defend? Bakewell clearly had a far deeper understanding of Reformed theology than some early modern historians have allowed as the common lot of the laity. Even when compared with recent explorations of the London lay godly community, Bakewell betrays an uncharacteristically systematic, if unoriginal, understanding of puritan practical divinity; a fact demonstrated, as stated above, by Bakewell writing his own catechism.51 It was this knowledge that allowed him to engage in polemical challenges to his opponents. This section looks at the resources from which Bakewell drew to obtain his theological knowledge, from the religious scene in London, to the world of books and how this was deployed to defend Reformed orthodoxy against those doctrinal challenges affecting Bakewell’s world. It is instructive to attend first to Bakewell’s main theological sources. As a Londoner, Bakewell had perhaps the opportunity to encounter a wider variety of theological discourse than those living in other parts of the country. The prevalence of lectures in the City meant that by the late 1630s London was already becoming the ‘religious market place’ that Ann Hughes has described for the 1640s.52 An anonymous sermon notebook in the Congregational Library, London shows that between 1638 and 1640 one godly Londoner gadded between parishes such as St Mary Aldermanbury, St Mark Hackney and St Anne Blackfriars, as well as the chapels of Lincoln’s Inn and the Mercers’ Company, to hear sermons.53 This particular sermon- goer had a specific taste in godly preachers, as he travelled around London to hear the sermons of later prominent anti-Episcopalian ministers such as Edmund Calamy, Stephen Marshall, Simeon Ashe, William Spurstowe, Thomas Goodwin, Nicholas Lockyer and William Greenhill. For the mid- seventeenth-century Londoner, such ‘sermon gadding’ was facilitated by the high density and geographical proximity of venues, the relative cohesiveness of the godly community and the frequency of lectures in, and around, the City. Bakewell shared the metropolitan habit of combining parish religion with gadding to lectures. In 1643 he stated that he gathered his information about his opponents from attending sermons, having personal conferences and reading manuscripts and books that were privately distributed in godly circles.54 For a lay person with little access to libraries, Bakewell had
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to make do with access to texts, relying on borrowed or inspected books and manuscripts. In his first tract, Bakewell cites from Martin Luther’s Commentary on Galatians to argue that the antinomians had erroneously read Luther.55 When he himself was challenged on his reading of Luther by an antinomian opponent, Bakewell could only respond that ‘I have not the book in my hand at this time’, presumably because he had only borrowed a copy of Luther’s commentary.56 In another work, Bakewell admitted that he had ‘borrowed those fourteen sermons of Doctor Crisps’ (i.e., Tobias Crisp’s Christ alone exalted), and that he had ‘the booke but two days in my hands’ in order to prepare for a debate with Robert Lancaster.57 Bakewell’s citations, however, reveal a close familiarity with a small core of books, probably the works that he owned. Aside from the Bible itself, he explicitly and implicitly cites from two authors: Jean Calvin and William Perkins. As well as referring to the English translation of Calvin’s Institutes, Bakewell’s religious arguments relied on the most important works by Perkins: A golden chaine, An exposition of the symbole, The whole treatise of the cases on conscience and Perkins’ commentaries on Galatians and Jude. Bakewell’s religious positions were therefore constructed out of the moderate puritan style of English Reformed theology that Michael McGiffert aptly called the ‘Perkinsian moment’ of experimental predestinarian and double covenant divinity.58 Bakewell therefore was an advocate of the enduring life of godly discipline taught in Perkinsian practical divinity.59 Conversion began with a period in which the sinner’s heart was prepared for a justifying faith by a terrible process of divine ‘tough love’ designed to inculcate a realisation that salvation lays solely by turning to Christ. In this early process, the law given to the Jews operated painfully to convict a person of their inability to bring about their own salvation. As Bakewell expressed it, ‘the sharp knife of the morall law’, ‘worketh in us a sight of our sinne, for by the law is the knowledge of sinne’.60 Bakewell argued that this work of preparation was a work of ‘common grace’, potentially available to all baptised Christians, which worked to abase the person so that they could see the need to turn away from themselves to Christ.61 The period of preparation, as a common grace was not in itself saving. Although Bakewell does not dwell on the issue, his close reading of Perkins would have taught him that the preparations of common grace could and did fail in the reprobate, leaving backsliders and secret hypocrites in the Church.62 However, against the antinomian charge that Reformed orthodoxy had swapped free grace for a works-based righteousness, Bakewell stressed that the process of conversion was, from beginning to end, the gracious work of the Holy Spirit. Preparation may be only a common grace, and it might fail, but it was necessary to lead to the entry of the special
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grace of faith that was the condition for the imputation of Christ’s alien and justifying righteousness in the elect.63 Taking inspiration from the tradition of the Perkinsian ‘practical syllogism’, Bakewell expressed the emergence of faith as a dialogue between the Holy Spirit and the believer; with the Holy Spirit saying to the believer’s ‘spirit or conscience’ ‘he that beleeveth shall be saved’. In response, the penitent’s conscience ‘makes answer, saying, I beleeve’. Finally, ‘the conclusion ariseth from both these witnesses, that I am a child of God’.64 It was in this sense that the ‘condition’ or ‘instrumental cause’ of justification was faith.65 Antinomians, afraid that the language of faith as the ‘condition’ of justification implied that faith was a voluntary act of a person’s will, had argued that justification took place in eternity, or at least before a person had any being in the world. Bakewell accepted that a person was ‘virtually’ justified in the eternal decrees of predestination, but he rejected any modification of the Reformed formula of justification by faith through grace alone. For Bakewell justifying faith provided the believer with the unimpeachable assurance that they ‘cannot totally nor finally fall away’. Yet, he recognised that in practice the spirit ‘ceaseth to give testimony a long time together’ and that the converted could not ignore the fact that sin remained a daily event in their lives.66 Contrary to the antinomian’s teaching that justification liberated the sinner entirely from the law, Bakewell commented that while ‘We are perfectly justified at once … we are not perfectly sanctified in this life.’67 The process of sanctification required the law to be used as a rule of life.68 Good works, aided by the Holy Spirit, were an essential to sanctification. Such works, Bakewell insisted, were never in themselves meritorious: ‘we deny that duties are any causes of our salvation’. However, he continued, ‘they are the way appointed by the Lord to attaine that end, and must be done in obedience to God’s command’.69 The justified Christian received from the Holy Spirit an ‘inherent righteousness’ that empowered him or her to progressively sanctify life against sin.70 In light of the antinomian charge that this provided souls with no comfort but rather an endless drudge of duties, Bakewell counselled those troubled by their relapses to look to the righteousness of Christ imputed to them by justifying faith.71 Bakewell insisted that, contrary to the cheap grace of the antinomians, the elect must work, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, to become sanctified ‘living stones’, slowly progressing ‘actively by the movings of God’ towards glorification in the life to come.72 The above description of Bakewell’s theology of salvation shows how far he had incorporated the puritan practical divinity of the Perkinsian tradition into his religious outlook. It is therefore unsurprising that he was among the first to take to print in the 1640s against the doctrines of those classed as antinomians. Bakewell defined antinomianism as a package of
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five doctrines: (1) that the elect were justified before a person had any being in the world; (2) that God did not see the sins of the justified as such a person was clothed in Christ’s perfect righteousness; (3) that assurance was based solely on the inner witness and not on the signs and marks of sanctification; (4) that God does not correct the sins of the justified; and, finally (5) that the law of the old covenant no longer served as a rule of life for believers.73 The problem with antinomian teaching, Bakewell argued, was that it fooled its adherents, commonly ‘captive silly women laden with sins’ or apprentice boys, that the long path to glory was an unnecessary and cruel one to take.74 Bakewell singled out the antinomian’s doctrine of justification from eternity as the key antinomian doctrine. Justification from eternity led antinomians to argue that because the imputation of Christ’s righteousness had been divinely willed to the elect in the decree of predestination, the elect were clothed in the righteousness of Christ’s justification before they had any being in the world. The consequence of being so shrouded in Christ’s righteousness was that the sins of the justified sinner were insulated from God’s sight.75 This doctrine short-circuited the practical application of the Perkinsian order of salvation as the spiritual work of a lifetime and implied the horror of licentiousness that would later fuel the furore over the Ranters in the 1650s. Responding in a debate to the antinomian Robert Lancaster’s argument that it was against the nature of a loving God to bring a person to despair before justification, Bakewell responded from Luke 14:26–7 that a person needed to first come ‘despaire of all hope in himself’ before Christ would accept him.76 He had learned from witnessing the fate of antinomians in the early 1630s, particularly the fatal path of ‘Young Mr Gray’, who preached at nearby Blackfriars, that antinomian free grace presented only a ‘bare perswasion’ of salvation. Such a persuasion, not fortified by the work of sanctification, Bakewell argued, provided no real assurance and thus would ‘not endure the storme of persecution’ that true Christians would invariably face.77 Antinomianism, rather than being a liberating theology of grace, was for Bakewell a fair-weather doctrine that provided fake assurance to the spiritually vulnerable. What then are we to make of Bakewell’s religion? It certainly was not novel or radical, with many of his quotations and scriptural passages lightly adapted from the common works of puritan practical divinity. Here was a layman for whom these teachings in their full and undiluted predestinarian form provided the true path of the Christian life. Bakewell’s case shows that the tradition of puritan preaching dating back to the 1570s and 1580s had penetrated deep into the life of godly parishioners, at least in London. In this sense he joins the likes of Nehemiah Wallington and other godly London parishioners recently investigated by historians who grasped and worked with the moderate puritan tradition in the Church of England.
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IV Presbyterianism, church and state The mid-1640s saw Bakewell shift his theological attentions to the nature and purpose of the Church and its relationship with the civil state. This arose out of his debates with those who argued for a separation of church and state and the Erastian controversy between Parliament and the Westminster Assembly. This section will explore Bakewell’s involvement in the later 1640s debate on church and state and how Presbyterianism meshed with Bakewell’s localism and evangelical outlook. It will be argued that Presbyterianism was attractive to godly artisans like Bakewell because it offered a community-based vision of further reformation that resisted the collapsing of local religious and communal autonomy into the rapidly forming state. Bakewell saw the removal of the episcopal hierarchy in the 1640s as a liberation for the Church of England. Episcopacy was ‘a false government’ and the ‘traiterous prelates’ were to be blamed for causing the civil wars by their encroachment on the royal prerogative.78 Of particular joy to Bakewell was the abolition of the Book of Common Prayer, a book ‘made by the pope and prelates’ which forced on parishes ‘divine service in shew and not in truth’.79 He therefore welcomed Parliament’s Directory of public worship, which St Bride Fleet Street purchased on 11 May 1646, possibly because locum ministers were then being employed on a weekly basis to take divine service.80 Nevertheless, Bakewell did not equate the removal of episcopacy with the abolition of the Church of England. On the contrary, the Solemn League and Covenant had finally settled the national church on a proper covenantal foundation with God.81 By the later 1640s, it became apparent to Bakewell that this covenanted reformation was under threat from the very body who had proclaimed it to the nation in 1643. As we have noted above, Bakewell was involved in the so-called ‘Erastian’ controversy between Parliament and the Westminster Assembly. On issues of the relationship between church and state, Bakewell held to the Calvinist ‘two kingdoms theory’, which saw the secular and the spiritual spheres as two separate but co-ordinate kingdoms of Christ. Although sometimes seen by historians as a particularly Scottish doctrine associated with James Melville, this strand of two kingdom theory originated in Calvin’s political theology and had been expounded in an English context by the Elizabethan Presbyterian, Thomas Cartwright.82 As Bakewell explained, the secular kingdom was ruled by magistrates as Christ’s ‘deputies’ charged with the governance of the ‘outward affairs of men; and also in relation to the Church, they may be as a guard about it, to defend it by the power of their positive laws’. Christ’s spiritual kingdom, however, was given to the ministry of the Church ‘not to stand there like cyphers to fill the place
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for no use, but to rule in it’.83 Bakewell saw a number of essential differences between the two kingdoms. Whereas the magistrate had an intrinsic power to make laws and to ‘command obedience to himself’, the ministry was only empowered to order God’s commands set out in scripture. In addition, the civil magistrate wielded physical coercive ‘power over the outward man’, whereas the ministry, as representatives of Christ’s kingdom of peace ‘hath power only to counsell, perswade and exhort’.84 In an ideal Christian commonwealth the two kingdoms would complement each other, with Bakewell stating that ‘if the magistrate do his part, and assemblies of church officers also do theirs, this will sweetly settle peace among the churches, and this according to the Word of Christ’.85 From 1644 the issue of the extent to which the civil magistrate could control the doctrine and discipline of the church became a live debate. As stated above, Bakewell was one of the first to defend Presbyterianism against the Long Parliament’s nine queries. Deploying the distinction between a right in the church (ius in sacra) and a right about the church (ius circa sacra), Bakewell advanced the argument that the civil magistrate’s power did not pierce into the jurisdiction given by Christ to the Church. These were the powers of the ‘keys’ of determining doctrine and exercising discipline, granted by Christ in scripture to the overseers of his spiritual kingdom.86 Nevertheless Bakewell held, deploying a common Reformed trope out of Isaiah 49:23, that the magistrate was to act as a ‘nursing father and nursing mother’ to the Church.87 The earthly Church was a mixed body of saints and sinners and thus benefited from the coercive power granted to the secular kingdom. The magistrate could therefore ‘reforme or depose such ministers as shall faile in their administration’ as well as punish heretics, order ministers to preach the gospel, call synods to determine controversies of faith and compel all subjects to attend the preaching of the Word.88 However, for the magistrate to claim the right to determine matters of doctrine and discipline was ‘to dethrone Christ of his kingly office’.89 The Church was Christ’s spiritual kingdom and he had given the keys of this kingdom to the ministry as stewards until his eschatological return.90 Bakewell argued that the Church had exercised the power of discipline for centuries before there was a Christian magistrate and thus a Christian ruler took nothing away from the intrinsic power of the Church.91 Nevertheless, Bakewell anticipated the problematic clash of power between the two kingdoms and conceded that in a Christian state the power of excommunication should remain a reserve power for the Church. He argued, possibly adapting the common lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke’s speech to Parliament on 15 September 1645, that since many of the offences that warranted excommunication were covered more effectively by the magistrate’s criminal law, so long as the magistrate was active in prosecuting these offences, the power
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of excommunication would likely not be used ‘for many years together’. Nevertheless, Bakewell maintained that the Church retained its power of excommunication despite the emergence of Christian magistracy.92 At the centre of the Erastian controversy was the issue of access to, and suspension from, the Lord’s Supper. The parliamentary ordinance of October 1645 gave parochial elderships the power to suspend from communion those who committed the relatively substantial number of specific sins catalogued in the ordinance. Parliament provided that if presbyteries wished to suspend for sins not set out in Parliament’s ordinance, they had to follow a cumbersome procedure of obtaining warrant to effect the suspension from a parliamentary committee.93 In addition to the catalogue of sins worthy of suspension, the ordinance also empowered parish elderships to test communicants on the fundamentals of Christianity and to refuse the sacrament to those found ignorant of this basic knowledge. This was a considerable distance away from the profession of ‘visible sainthood’ required for admission to some gathered churches, being nearer in practice to episcopal confirmation. There is little evidence that the power of suspension was widely exercised by English Presbyterians, even for those sins set out in the parliamentary ordinance.94 The London Presbyterian ministers did, however, adopt a policy of using the requirement that all communicants be tested as a means of refusing the Lord’s Supper to all except those who submitted themselves to be examined by the parish eldership.95 As the London minister Roger Drake pointed out, in practice this meant the parochial eldership could provide a gate to the Lord’s table by refusing to examine those who were known to live scandalously without further reformation. Those who were unwilling to co-operate with the eldership effectively excommunicated themselves from communion with their parish church.96 Despite his connections to high Presbyterian orthodoxy, Bakewell himself held opinions at variance with the Westminster Assembly on the issue of admission to, and suspension from, the Lord’s Supper. While Bakewell defended the Church’s intrinsic power to excommunicate those who lived openly immoral lives, as well as communicants who publicly spread heretical doctrines, he rejected suspending those who were ignorant of the basics of Christian knowledge. This followed from Bakewell’s arguments against Baptists and Congregationalists. In line with many pre-civil war moderate puritans and continental Reformed theologians, Bakewell held a covenantal view of membership of the Church, with baptism acting as the ‘seal’ of a child’s membership into the Church’s covenant community.97 As Matthew Bingham has stated, baptism in Reformed orthodoxy was ‘less about soteriology and more about ecclesiology; it was a marker of one’s covenantal and ecclesiastical inclusion in this world, not necessarily a confirmation that the one baptized would enjoy salvation in the world to come’.98 As we have
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seen above, however, for Bakewell baptismal membership of the covenant community linked ecclesiology to soteriology because membership of the Church set the pre-conditions for receiving the common graces necessary to put a person on the path of receiving the special grace of saving faith. This understanding formed the basis of Bakewell’s critique of gathered churches, as well as Presbyterian ideas about suspension from the Lord’s Supper for ignorance. Bakewell argued that since the ancient Jews, as members of the old covenant community, were permitted to attend the feast of the Passover whatever their state of knowledge, so Christians should be permitted to attend the Lord’s Supper by reason of their baptismal membership of the new covenant and their regular attendance at divine service.99 He accepted that those who were so ignorant of the basics of Christian knowledge so as to be unable to make a meaningful confession of faith should be warned by the minister not to attend communion. However, if this advice was ignored, the minister would be wrong to refuse admission since continuing in such ignorance was an ‘inward sin’ that did not pollute communion.100 Bakewell’s experience of the poor and badly educated at St Bride perhaps gave him a pastoral insight into the need to encourage rather than punish weak believers in the ways of the faith. He argued that suspending the ignorant was ultimately counterproductive for the work of propagating the gospel as it made such parishioners unreceptive to the teaching of the minister and elders.101 Bakewell’s concerns over admission to the Lord’s Supper, therefore, were rooted in pastoral concerns that perhaps betray the practicalities earned from experience of the particular dynamics of the parish community at St Bride. Another of Bakewell’s position at variance with the Westminster Assembly was whether mere suspension from the Lord’s Supper was justified as a measure of discipline of the Church. More in line with William Prynne than the London ministers, Bakewell rejected the scriptural warrant for suspension from the Lord’s Supper.102 Scripture taught only a full excommunication from participation in the Church until repentance.103 In this regard, Bakewell conceived of excommunication in almost Congregationalist terms as an act of common consent of the whole parish community acting on the advice of its eldership, and not the act of the ministers and elders alone.104 Excommunication was a final sanction, designed to reform and restore a sinner back to the congregation as the local expression of the Christian community. Drawing on Matthew 18 to flesh out the process of church discipline, Bakewell argued that the elders were to hear the complaints of witnesses and were to attempt to convince the sinner to promise to amend his or her life. If this proved ineffective, the elders were again to urge the sinner to reform. It was only if this second attempt failed that the eldership were to proceed to excommunication. Yet, ‘to keep the unitie of the Church’,
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Bakewell argued, the elders needed first to obtain the consent of the majority of the congregation before casting out the sinner. If the majority refused to permit excommunication, the eldership:
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must forbeare and try him again by admonition, and if he go on still, make it again known to the whole church, and it may be they will consent to have him cast out; but if they will not, the eldership must forbeare upon further tryall by admonition, lest they make a breach in the Church.105
Bakewell’s Presbyterianism was therefore focused on the local parish as the embodiment of the Christian community.106 Nevertheless, in line with Presbyterian theorists such as the Suffolk minister Samuel Hudson, Bakewell held to the credal idea of the oneness and universality of the visible church.107 In this regard, he agreed with the Presbyterian distinctive that local parish churches should be linked together by classes and higher synods to give expression to the essential unity of the church. Yet, in practice, such higher assemblies should rarely have any business since a properly operating parish eldership would remain the foundation of effective church government.108 Since S. R. Gardiner and William Shaw, historians have generally seen Presbyterianism as an unwelcome Scottish import, at odds with the essentials of the English character. Coloured by Milton’s poetry and the rhetorical excesses found in works such as Edwards’ Gangraena, Presbyterians have been generally cast negatively as ‘new forcers of conscience’. Bakewell’s Presbyterianism demonstrates a different picture, one that saw in Presbyterian polity the most responsive system for local godly communities. His focus on outward covenant membership through baptism and attendance at divine service as the marks of membership of the Church illustrates Bakewell’s community-centred vision. Mirroring Calvin’s theory that the best form of government was a mixture of aristocratic and democratic forms, Bakewell saw in the elected aristocracy of Presbyterianism the ideal government for the local godly community, combining executive authority tempered by common consent. The similarities between Presbyterian Church polity and the manner in which parishes were governed in London in the seventeenth century are obvious. Presbyterian two kingdoms theory in Bakewell’s hands therefore was not born of a clericalist desire to grab power, but rather to preserve the practice of common communal governance.
V Conclusion In Thomas Bakewell we see something of the type of London citizen sneered at by the radical clergyman Hugh Peter as men who ‘never lived beyond
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the view of the smoke of their chimnies, that measure States and Kingdoms with their interests, by their private shop-wands’.109 Hugh Peter’s disdain for citizens such as Bakewell has been quoted with approval in modern historiography, particularly by Robert Brenner, who sees Peter’s view of domestic London traders as analogous to Lenin’s contempt for the ‘environment of petty- bourgeois philistinism’ during the Paris commune.110 In a similar vein, Michael Mahony encapsulated his view of the London ‘Presbyterian’ citizen by reducing their motivation to the single factor of ‘propertied conservatism’.111 It is hoped that this study has shown that such crass reductionism cannot be maintained. It is possible to separate Brenner’s insightful grasp of the local dimensions of civil war London politics and Presbyterianism from his conclusion that Londoners like Bakewell were just reactionaries standing against the radical mercantile harbingers of the eighteenth-century fiscal-military state.112 It is true that Bakewell’s milieu, involving the trudge of daily artisanal labour joined with the local administration of his parish community, rarely experienced the world beyond the parish, let alone the City. This can be seen most clearly in the appropriation by Bakewell and his opponents of the technology of print and its integration with the localism of pre-civil war London religious polemic. This urban localism also intimately informed Bakewell’s religion. However, to reduce his intense and internalised grasp of the puritan theology of grace and his vision of the local community of the faithful to a cipher for ‘propertied conservatism’ is as unsatisfying as it is unconvincing. In Bakewell we see the elective affinity of the urban environment for what T. D. Bozeman has called the ‘precisianist strain’ of puritanism, with its rigorous personal discipline. That discipline extended to the local community, with the parochial mutual ‘holy watch’ of one’s neighbours being part of the culture of the godly ethical life.113 In this context, it becomes clear why antinomianism was perceived as a threat to the world that urban precisianists such as Bakewell inhabited. With its offer of ‘free grace’ through collapsing sanctification into justification, antinomianism threatened to unravel the rigours of personal and communal life upon which godly religion, as well as the urban social order, was predicated. This concern to protect the community of the faithful, particularly the youthful and inexperienced, also links to Bakewell’s support for Presbyterianism. For Bakewell the 1640s were ‘revolutionary’ only to the extent that they sought to ‘reform the Reformation’. This fresh wave of reformation was to remain true to its sixteenth-century roots: magisterial, not voluntarist, and to be achieved by way of a confessional settlement and the co-operation of ministry and magistracy. Keith Wrightson has described
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post-Reformation parochial governance as a ‘participatory, discretionary, accommodative relationship with higher authority’.114 The experience of both Laudianism and the ‘Erastianism’ of the Long Parliament warned parish leaders how fragile this local discretion could be. Presbyterianism offered Bakewell, and those like him, the opportunity to retain what James C. Scott has called the ‘precious zone of autonomy and freedom’ characteristic of the world of the small tradesman against the predations of an increasingly hegemonic state.115 This is not to deny that Presbyterianism also provided a blueprint to maintain the authority and position of the godly ‘housekeeper’ in the local community. As with Wrightson and Levine’s study of early modern Terling, puritanism created a coherent identity for the governing men of the 1640s St Bride Fleet Street.116 This suggests one reason why London’s Presbyterian citizens mobilised in favour of the Calvinist two kingdom theory of the Westminster Assembly against the Long Parliament’s ‘Erastianism’. While Bakewell’s credal nods towards higher synods and ultimately the universal church were essential to anchor the autonomy of the Church outside the power of the state, his writings on church government make it clear that his Presbyterianism functioned primarily as a community-based discipline. It was primarily congregational, albeit not ‘congregationalist’. Bakewell’s vision of the Church was thus intimately intertwined with the parish as a unit of community and administration. Having thrown off the unwelcome external power of the bishops and the church courts, those within the ken of parochial leadership such as Bakewell did not want to cede their newly gained communal power over worship and morals to the increasingly distant and untrustworthy Leviathan of the rapidly centralising state. This issue points to a fundamental fault line within parliamentarianism, and one that in part explains why the parliamentarian cause began to unravel over such a short time. On one side we see the desire of ‘Erastians’, analysed by scholars such as Jeffrey Collins, to reposition the royal supremacy in Parliament in order to fend off the threat of a clericalist imperium in imperio.117 Yet, in Bakewell, and Presbyterian two kingdoms theorists in general, we also see the fear that ceding the local administration of the church to the state would be to rob Christianity of both its communal and evangelical dynamic. Erastianism and Presbyterian two kingdoms theory therefore represented two solutions to the problem presented by Charles and Laud’s captivity of the Church of England. The tensions between these two responses to the church/state question raised by the pre-civil war regime significantly contributed to the fracturing of parliamentarianism, as well as puritanism. Bakewell’s Presbyterianism, like his polemical engagement, pitched the local against those who sought to threaten the dissolution of such communal power.
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Notes 1 According to the British Library’s online ESTC catalogue, Bakewell may have been the ‘T.B.’ answered by John Lilburne in 1638 but published in the 1645 tract An Answer to Nine Arguments Written by TB. While this is a possibility, Bakewell never mentions Lilburne in his work, and the positions held by Lilburne’s 1638 disputant do not always concur with Bakewell’s positions, at least in the mid-1640s. 2 One of Bakewell’s opponents, the credo-Baptist John Tombes, plays on the insignificance of ‘one Thomas Bakewell’ in An apology or plea for the two treatises (1646), p. 1. 3 For the London Presbyterian movement, see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), and Elliot Vernon, London Presbyterians and the British Revolutions, c.1638–1664 (Manchester, 2021). 4 See generally, Hughes, Gangraena. 5 For Thomas Bakewell, the rector of Rolleston, see A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), p. 24. For examples of the confusion of the two Bakewells see, for example, Samuel Palmer, The Nonconformists Memorial (2 vols, 1802), ii. 391–3, Randall J. Pederson, Unity in Diversity: English Puritans and the Puritan Reformation, 1603–1689 (Leiden, 2014) pp. 222–4. 6 It has proven impossible to determine Bakewell’s place and year of birth. Both the Thomas Backwell christened in St Saviour, Southwark in 1612 and the Thomas Bakewell born to John Bakewell on 22 May 1612 in Ashby De La Zouch, Leicester would fit his age range (see www.familysearch.org). Bakewell makes no mention of his birth county in any of his works and the apprenticeship records for the London Company of Bakers are lost for the first thirty years of the seventeenth century. 7 GL, CLC/L/BA/002/MS05189 (microfilm of the Bakers’ Company Register of Housekeepers, 1631– 46), no foliation, August 1635; LMA, P69/ BRI/ A/ 002/MS06537 (Parish register of St Bride Fleet Street), no foliation, entry for 9 September 1635. 8 GL, CLC/L/BA/001/MS05177/004 (London Company of Bakers Court Minute Book), no foliation, numerous references between 1634 and 1648. 9 LMA, P69/BRI/B/001 (Vestry minute book of St Bride Fleet Street, formerly GL MS 6554/1, [hereafter St Bride Vestry Minutes]), fos 1r, 56r, 103v. His will of October 1653 locates him at St Leonard Shoreditch: TNA, PROB 11/236. 10 St Bride Vestry Minutes, fos 36r–37r. 11 Thomas Nutt, The Nut-Cracker Crackt by the Nutt (1644), frontispiece; GL, CLC/ L/ BA/ 001/ MS05177/ 004 (London Company of Bakers Court Record Book), no foliation, entries for 18 August 1642 and 31 August 1643; TNA SP 28/ 193, fo. 134r (I am grateful to the kindness of David Como for this last reference). 12 TNA, PROB 11/236. The death of Sarah Bakewell, ‘a maiden’, is recorded in the registers of St Bride Fleet Street for 16 February 1656 (LMA, P69/BRI/A/ 005/MS06540/1). 13 St Bride Vestry Minutes, fos 120r–v, Alice Elizabeth McCampbell, ‘The London parish and the London precinct, 1640–1660’, Guildhall Studies in London
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History, 11:3 (1976), 109–18, p. 113; Tai Liu, Puritan London: A Study of Religion and Society in the City Parishes (Newark, NJ, 1986), pp. 42, 91n46. St Bride had been in the same position in 1638, see Thomas Cyril Dale, The Inhabitants of London in 1638 (London, 1931), p. 201. 14 St Bride Vestry Minutes, fos 31v, 116v. The parish had considered a select vestry in 1638 in response to the Laudian parish survey of 1637, see J. F. Merritt, ‘Contested legitimacy and the ambiguous rise of vestries in early modern London’, HJ, 54:1 (2011), 25–45, p. 41n71. 15 St Bride Vestry Minutes fo. 91v; LMA P69/BRI/B/016 (St Bride Fleet Street Church Wardens’ Accounts), fos 91, 185. 16 St Bride Vestry Minutes, fos 1r, 3v, 57r, 102v–103r. 17 Thomas Bakewell, A short view of the antinomian errours (1643). p. 6; see also: Thomas Bakewell, The antinomians Christ confounded (1644), sig. A1. 18 Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, sig. A1. 19 Ann Hughes, ‘Print, persecution and polemic: Thomas Edward’s Gangraena (1646) and civil war sectarianism’, in Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham, eds, The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 261–2. 20 Thomas Bakewell, A faithfull messenger (1644), pp. 1, 25, 28, David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, 2004), p. 98. 21 In particular, these were John Eaton’s The honey-combe of justification (1642) and the anonymous antinomian work Two treatises, the first of Christs counsell to the angell of the Church of Laodicea (1642). 22 Bakewell, Faithful messenger, p. 28; Chad Bernard Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the reformation: Theological debate at the Westminster assembly, 1643–1652’ (7 vols, unpublished Cambridge University PhD thesis, 2005), ii, appendix A: ‘John Lightfoot, “A briefe journal of passages in the assembly of divines”, a transcript of CUL, Dd.XIV.28.4, fos 1r–62v (1 July 1643 to 12 October 1643)’, pp. 31–4, 38–9, 44, 53–4; Thomas Gataker, Mysterious cloudes and mistes (1648). For a meticulous discussion of the antinomian committee see W.G. Gamble, ‘ “If Christ fulfilled the law, we are not bound”: The Westminster Assembly against English antinomian soteriology, 1643–1647’ (unpublished University of Edinburgh PhD thesis, 2014), pp. 87–97, 155–6. I am grateful to Professor Gamble for her generous assistance with the points raised in this note. 23 Bakewell, Faithful messenger, p. 28; CJ, iii. 201; C. Van Dixhoorn, ed., The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly (5 vols, Oxford, 2012), v. 22–3; Gataker, Mysterious Cloudes, p. 1. 24 J. Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 167, 193–4. 25 Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, pp. 2–12. 26 Ibid., p. 12. 27 Bakewell, Short view, sigs A2r–v. 28 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (3 vols, 1646), i. 78–9, ii. 95. 29 Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, p. 28. 30 For the cultural tropes surrounding seventeenth-century Moorfields see Jason Peacey, ‘To meet in Moorfields: the places and spaces of revolt in early modern
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London’ in Juan Carlos D’Amico and Paloma Bravo, eds, Territoires, lieux et espaces de la révolte: XIVe–XVIIIe siècles (Dijon, 2017), pp. 127–40. 31 For a study of the tradition of godly dialogues see Antoinina Bevan Zlatar, Reformation Fictions: Polemical Protestant Dialogues in Elizabethan England (Oxford, 2011). 32 Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, pp. 16–36. 33 Ibid., pp. 36–67. 34 Bakewell, Faithfull messenger, pp. 29, 35. 35 Ibid., p. 28. ‘The house of office’ was slang for an outside lavatory. 36 Thomas Nutt, The nutcracker crackt by the Nutt (1644), frontispiece. 37 Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 300–2. 38 Nutt, The nutcracker crackt by the Nutt, ‘To the Reader’, sig. A1v. 39 LPL, Sion College MS, ARC L40.2/E17 (Records of the London Provincial Assembly, 1647–1660). 40 I use ‘mobilisation’ here in the same sense as Michael Braddick, i.e., ‘the attempt to influence or by-pass the formal institutions of government through appeal to opinion outside them. See Michael Braddick, ‘Mobilisation, anxiety and creativity in England during the 1640s’, in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott, eds, Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900 (Exeter, 2008), p. 175. 41 Van Dixhoorn, ed., Minutes and Papers, i. 214–16. 42 [Thomas Bakewell], An answer to those questions propounded by the Parliament to the assembly of divines (1646). 43 John R. de Witt, Jus Divinum: The Westminster Assembly and the Divine Right of Church Government (Kampen, 1969), p. 230n64. 44 [George Walker], A modell of the government of the Church under the Gospel (1646); Jus divinum regiminis ecclesiastici (1646). 45 For Peter Chamberlen, see H. King, ‘Chamberlen, Peter (1601–1683)’, ODNB. 46 Edward Barber, A declaration and vindication (1648); P. R. S. Baker, ‘Barber, Edward’, ODNB. 47 Peter Chamberlen, To my beloved friends and neighbours of Blackfryers (1650). 48 This debate also illustrates the use of witty titles in Bakewell and his opponents’ polemics: Thomas Bakewell, The dippers plunged in a sea of absurdities, or an answer to doctor Chamberlaine concerning sprinkling the baptized (1650); Peter Chamberlen, Master Bakewells sea of absurdities concerning sprinkling, calmely driven back (1650); Thomas Bakewell, Doctor Chamberlen visited with a bunch of his own grapes (1650). 49 Chamberlain, Master Bakewells sea of absurdities, p. 2; Bakewell, Doctor Chamberlain visited, p. 8. ‘Cat’s paw’ is defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as ‘A person used as a tool by another’. 50 In using the term ‘partisan politics’, I have in mind Paul Halliday’s use of this term in his Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. ix–xv.
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51 Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, pp. 36–67. Bakewell can in this sense be usefully contrasted with his contemporary Robert Saxby who lacked such a systematic understanding of Reformed doctrine. For Saxby see: Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 110–14. 52 Ann Hughes, ‘Religious diversity in London’, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The English Revolution, c.1590–1720 (Manchester, 2013), p. 111. On the pre- civil war lectures see Paul S. Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent 1560–1662 (Stanford, 1970). 53 Congregational Library, London, MS II.a.46 (Anonymous Sermon Notebook 1638–41). 54 Bakewell, Short view, sig. A1v. 55 Ibid., pp. 22–3. For a discussion of the debate on the use of Luther in the seventeenth-century Antinomian debate, see J. Wayne Baker, ‘Sola fide, sola gratia: the battle for Luther in seventeenth-century England’, The Sixteenth Century, 16.1 (1985), 115–33. 56 Bakewell, Faithfull messenger, p. 34. 57 Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, pp. 1–2. 58 W. B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England (Oxford, 2014), 4 and 5; Michael McGiffert, ‘The Perkinsian moment of federal theology’, Calvin Theological Journal, 29 (1994), 117–48. 59 T. D. Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), pp. 89–104. 60 Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, p. 50. 61 Bakewell, Short view, p. 4, Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, p. 35. 62 For this aspect of Perkinsian practical divinity see Michael Winship, ‘Weak Christians, backsliders, and carnal gospellers: Assurance of salvation and the pastoral origins of puritan practical divinity in the 1580s’, Church History, 70:3 (2001), 462–81. 63 Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, p. 5. 64 Bakewell, Short view, p. 10. 65 Ibid., pp. 2–3; Bakewell, Faithfull messenger, pp. 12–23; Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, pp. 12, 23. 66 Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, p. 9, Bakewell, Short view, p. 8. 67 Bakewell, Short view, p. 8. 68 Ibid., p. 29. 69 Ibid., p. 29. 70 Ibid., pp. 1, 4. 71 Bakewell, Faithfull messenger, p. 23. 72 Bakewell, Short view, p. 1; Bakewell, Faithfull messenger, p. 18. 73 Bakewell, Short view, sig. A1v; Pederson, Unity in Diversity, pp. 222–3. 74 Bakewell, Short view, p. 22; Bakewell, Faithfull messenger, p. 29; Bakewell, Antinomians Christ confounded, p. 27. 75 For the antinomian doctrine of justification from eternity see Robert J. McKelvey, ‘“That error and pillar of antinomianism”: Eternal justification’, in
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Michael A. G. Haykin and Mark Jones, eds, Drawn into Controversie: Reformed Theological Diversity and Debates within Seventeenth- Century British Puritanism (Göttingen, 2011), pp. 223–62. 76 Bakewell, Antinomian Christ confounded, p. 6. 77 Bakewell, Short view, p. 10; Bakewell, Faithful messenger, pp. 29, 35; Bakewell, Antinomians Christ Confounded, pp. 27–8. For ‘young Mr Gray’ see Como, Blown by the Spirit, pp. 67–9. 78 Thomas Bakewell, A brief answer to objections of all sorts, against Presbyterian churches (1650), pp. 1, 14; Bakewell, A confutation of the anabaptists (1644), sig. A2. 79 Bakewell, Dr Chamberlen visited, p. 14; Bakewell, A brief answer to objections, p. 1. 80 LMA P69/BRI/B/016 (St Bride Fleet Street Church Wardens’ Accounts), fo. 161. 81 Bakewell, A brief answer to objections, p. 22. 82 For Calvin’s two kingdoms theory see Matthew J. Tuininga, Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Christ’s Two Kingdoms (Cambridge, 2017). For Cartwright and other puritans’ adaptation of Calvin’s teaching, see A. F. Scott Pearson, Church and State: Political Aspects of Sixteenth-Century Puritanism (Cambridge, 1928), pp. 9– 40; Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), pp. 28–9; W. J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden, 1990), pp. 98–105. 83 [Bakewell], An answer to those questions, pp. 10–11, 14. 84 Bakewell, A confutation of the anabaptists, sig. B2v; Thomas Bakewell, The ordinance of excommunication rightly stated (1646), sig. A2r. 85 [Bakewell], An answer to those questions, p. 18. 86 Thomas Bakewell, An answer or confutation of divers errors broached and maintained by the seven churches of anabaptists (1646), p. 43. 87 Bakewell, An answer or confutation, p. 42. 88 Bakewell, A confutation of the anabaptists, sigs D3v, E1v; Bakewell, An Answer or confutation, p. 42. 89 Bakewell, The ordinance of excommunication, sig. A1v; Bakewell, A confutation of the anabaptists, sig. E1v. 90 Bakewell, The ordinance of excommunication, sig. A1v. 91 [Bakewell], An answer to those questions, p. 11. 92 Bakewell, The ordinance of excommunication, sig. A4r. For Whitelocke’s speech see John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (7 vols, London, 1722), vi. 205. 93 A&O, i. 789–96. 94 I have not uncovered records of any suspensions or excommunications in London. Richard Baxter appears to have carried out about five excommunications in his ministry; see Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), pp. 91–2. 95 London Provincial Assembly, A vindication of the presbyteriall-government and ministry (1650), pp. 48–51.
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96 R. D. [Roger Drake], A boundary to the holy mount (1653), p. 207. For an example of the practice of refusing examination, see Adam Martindale, The Life of Adam Martindale, Written by Himself, ed. Richard Parkinson (Manchester, 1845), pp. 113–14. 97 Bakewell, A confutation of the anabaptists, sig. H3v; Thomas Bakewell, A plea for Mr Strong’s church members (1650), p. 4, 6. 98 Matthew C. Bingham, Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2019), pp. 68–73, at p. 70. 99 Bakewell, The ordinance of excommunication, sigs A3r–v. 100 [Bakewell], An answer to those questions, p. 18; Bakewell, A plea for Mr Strong’s church members, p. 4. 101 Bakewell, A brief answer to objections, pp. 15–18. 102 On Prynne’s views, see William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–1660 (London, 1969), pp. 120–1, 127–8. 103 Bakewell, The ordinance of excommunication, sig. A3v. 104 In this sense, Bakewell looked back to a long tradition of Presbyterian discussion on common consent. See Polly Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Stanford, 2011), 4. 105 Bakewell, The ordinance of excommunication, sigs A2r–v. 106 Bakewell, A plea for Mr Strong’s church members, pp. 6–7, 11. 107 [Bakewell], An answer to those questions, p. 16; Bakewell, A brief answer to objections, pp. 2, 22–4; Bakewell, A plea for Mr Strong’s church members, pp. 4, 9; Samuel Hudson, The essence and unitie of the church catholic visible (London, 1644); Samuel Hudson, A vindication of the essence and unity of the church catholike visible (1650). 108 Bakewell, An answer or confutation, p. 6; [Bakewell], An answer to those questions, pp. 9–10, 16; Bakewell, A brief answer to objections, pp. 2–4, 21–3; Bakewell, The ordinance of excommunication, sigs A4r–v. 109 Hugh Peter, Gods doings, and mans duty opened (1646), pp. 35–6. 110 Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550– 1643 (Princeton, 1993), p. 508; Vladimir I. Lenin, ‘State and revolution’, in The Essential Texts of Marxist-Leninism, Volume 1 (Springfield, MO, 2017), p. 140. 111 Michael Mahony, ‘Presbyterianism in the City of London, 1645–1647’, HJ, 22.1 (1979), 93–114, p. 112. 112 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 462. 113 Bakewell, A plea for Mr Strong’s church members, p. 7. For a further investigation of the political and social dimensions of puritanism in the parish environment, see 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. 26–30; Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early 64. See Theodore Dwight Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 230– Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain. Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Williamsburg, 2004).
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14 Wrightson, ‘The politics of the parish’, p. 26. 1 115 James C. Scott, ‘Two cheers for the petty bourgeoisie’, in his Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton, 2012), p. 55. 116 Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700 (New York, 1979), pp. 158, 161–2. 117 See Jeffrey R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005).
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William Walwyn’s Montaigne and the struggle for toleration in the English Revolution David Loewenstein Montaigne was avidly read and quoted –and his ideas adapted –by at least one major radical puritan writer during the political and religious upheavals of the English Revolution. The Florio translation of his Essayes (1603), published in second and third editions respectively in 1613 and 1632, had a profound impact on William Walwyn (1600–81), the London merchant, Leveller leader, radical pamphleteer and defender of separatism (though he himself never joined a radical religious group or sect), and one of the most talented, independent-minded defenders of unfettered religious toleration and liberty of conscience during the English civil wars and Interregnum. Walwyn revealed in his Just Defence against the Aspertions Cast upon Him (summer 1649) that his most intense reading –all of it in English since he knew no other language1 –included the Scriptures, works by English divines, the works of select classical authors (notably Seneca, Plutarch, Lucian and Thucydides), and works by the French sceptics Pierre Charron and, most significantly, Montaigne: ‘I blush not to say, I have long been accustomed to read Montaigns Essaies’, a ‘Romish Catholique’ French author who, Walwyn adds, some readers (including Walwyn’s Independent adversaries) will ‘perhaps … startle at’, but who ‘will be worth [their] study’.2 Like Montaigne, Walwyn had a bookish side to him: ‘The truth is, for many yeers, my books, and teachers were masters in a great measure of me.’3 Reading and quoting choice passages from Montaigne’s book of essays, moreover, seemed to give Walwyn particular pleasure (‘I am in love with them’, he declares),4 stimulating him to think in fresh ways about his own deeply contentious world. And yet the Leveller activist, engaged in pamphlet warfare and the political and religious struggles of the English Revolution, did not retire from public life to the inner room of a tower to write essays and examine the fluctuations of his private self. The impact of Montaigne on Walwyn’s writing and thinking during the bitter struggle over toleration in the English Revolution, however, has generated only occasional or little comment by recent scholars investigating the wide reception of Montaigne among early modern readers and writers in England.5 Why indeed was Montaigne, the great French Catholic writer
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and sceptic, so appealing to Walwyn, especially during the religious and political conflicts of the English civil wars and Interregnum when toleration was bitterly contested? How did Walwyn read and interpret Montaigne and what aspect of the French essayist stood out and ‘made so deep impression in [him]’?6 Was it the Montaigne who studies, probes and portrays himself in all his variability –who turns his ‘gaze inward’, looks ‘inside’ of himself and proclaims that he ‘has no business but with [himself]’7 –and who illuminates so brilliantly the inconsistencies, unpredictability and continual flux of the human self based on observing his own random personal life? Was it the Montaigne who Virginia Woolf characterised as standing out from other writers who construct self-portraits by using his pen to follow his ‘own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection’?8 Was it ‘the astonishing novelty’ of Montaigne’s enterprise –an essentially modern one – which involves the writer portraying himself in a state of constant passage and irregular motion, rather than portraying a stable being?9 There seems to be little evidence that this introspective, subjective side of Montaigne – the Montaigne whose fluid consciousness and whose unstable, evolving self and book of essays have, in his various ways, intrigued such distinguished modern critics as Eric Auerbach, Georges Poulet, Jean Starobinski, among others10 –was the Montaigne who primarily appealed to William Walwyn during the political crises and religious antagonisms of mid-seventeenth- century England. Nonetheless, striking a Montaignian note in his Just Defence, Walwyn observes that ‘my care is rightly to understand my self in my native language’:11 to be sure, self-understanding is crucial to Walwyn’s writing and self-assertion, as it is to Montaigne’s project of self-study and of writing, revising and constantly adding to his always evolving Essais.12 And no doubt Walwyn would have appreciated Montaigne’s claim to portray and examine with candour his ‘imperfections’ and ‘naturall forme’, rather than engage in theatrical self-fashioning full of ‘art or study’.13 Yet Walwyn did not choose to undertake the same kind of extended and continual self-probing and observation of the inner, private self –ill-formed and in a perpetual state of change or motion –that the famous French essayist did. Rather, writing in his age of Protestant fragmentation, anti-Catholic hysteria, and religious anxiety, Walwyn found in Montaigne a major Christian writer from the Renaissance whose unconventional meditations about himself and his world enabled Walwyn to respond sceptically to assumptions underlying the bitter religious conflicts of his time and to think in subtle ways about religious toleration when the latter was being fiercely resisted by orthodox puritans –indeed, when even members of separatist churches, notably the Independents, had much more to learn about the spirit of
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Christianity. Incendiary Presbyterian ministers, notably Thomas Edwards in his massive catalogue of heresies, Gangraena (1646), portrayed toleration of recent years as particularly insidious, as ‘the grand design of the Devil, his Masterpeece and chiefe Engin he works by at this time to uphold his tottering Kingdome’ and the surest ‘way to destroy all Religion’.14 The orthodox puritan assault was driven by fear and paranoia based on a perception that toleration was unleashing heresy and apostasy and generating frightening schisms: the spectre of religious chaos that Milton referred to in 1644 as ‘these fantastic terrors of sect and schism’ since (as Walwyn put it) ‘by Toleration new Opinions every day breake forth’ threatening to deform the nation into ‘a very monster in matters of Religion, one part being Presbyter, another Anabaptist, Brownist another, and a fourth an Independent’.15 Believing that such fears were fuelling a new ‘spirit of persecution’ that ‘increased in all quarters of the land’,16 Walwyn expressed serious misgivings about the zealous godly campaign to enforce a new ‘uniformity in Religion’ and to lash out against the splintering of Protestant unity.17 As John Coffey and Rachel Foxley have observed, Walwyn’s toleration of ‘the diversity of mens judgments’ when it comes to religious beliefs owed much to the Leveller preference for a voluntary, non-coercive church based on the New Testament model, rather than on the Old Testament model in which the magistrate has a religious duty to suppress heresy and false religion.18 Indeed, in his writings Walwyn emphasises an undogmatic and gentle Christ: the Jesus who chose not to revile his adversaries (e.g., the Jewish sect of the Sadducees) with censorious language for their ‘dangerous opinions’ and who ‘knew that men might live peaceably and lovingly together, though they differ in judgement one from another’.19 Walwyn’s toleration of a multi- faith society, however, was also indebted to his scepticism, notably his sense of ‘the uncertainty of knowledg in this life’ so that ‘no man, nor no sort of men can presume of an unerring spirit … since there remains a possibility of errour’,20 a perspective influenced by the scepticism of Charron and especially Montaigne with his famous motto, Que sçay-je?: ‘What do I know?’21 Walwyn’s scepticism about the certainty of human knowledge did not mean that he was following in the steps of Montaigne’s major sceptical text, ‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’, and abandoning the power of human reason with regard to matters of faith and liberty of conscience.22 But it did mean that he was deeply sceptical about the authority of all human, political and religious institutions or powers when it came to judging another person’s conscience or separatist churches for their religious beliefs, coercing them to adhere to one religious truth over another. Thus, in the same work (The Compassionate Samaritane) and paragraph where Walwyn remarks on ‘the uncertainty of knowledge in this life’, he also comments that ‘’Tis knowne
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that the Fathers, Generall Councells, Nationall Assemblies, Synods, and Parliaments in their times have been mostly grosly mistaken’.23 Montaigne’s scepticism and his wariness about zealous dogmatism in matters of religion –‘There is no hostilitie so excellent, as that which is absolutely Christian’, he observes in his ‘Apologie of Raymond Sebond’24 – had been deepened by his experience of the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion. These religious wars were characterised by their exceptionally bitter and savage relations between French Protestants and Catholic militants that erupted in 1562 and that continued (with eight phases of warfare) until 1598, plunging France into anarchy and ending only in a final exhausted recognition of compromise (with the Edict of Nantes) six years after Montaigne’s death.25 After all, ‘How many weighty strifes, and important quarrels, hath the doubt of this one sillable, hoc, brought forth into the world?’: so Montaigne wonders in Raymond Sebond,26 referring to the murderous tensions between Protestants and Catholics that arose over differing understandings of transubstantiation and the Eucharist based on verbal ambiguities and the interpretation of Christ’s words, Hoc est corpus meum. In another essay admired by Walwyn, Montaigne compares the cruel spectacles of European warfare conducted in the name of religion, including mutilating victims and burning them alive at the stake, to the supposed savagery of cannibals who live according to nature, concluding: I thinke there is more barbarisme in eating men alive, than to feed upon them being dead; to mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense, to roast him to peeces, to make dogges and swine to gnaw and teare in mammockes [i.e., pieces] (as wee have not only read, but seene very lately, yea in our our owne memorie, not only among ancient enemies, but our neighbours and fellow-citizens; and which is worse, under pretence of pietie and religion) than to roast and eat him after he is dead.27
Montaigne’s unorthodox observation (and conclusion) about comparative savagery occurs just after a passage from ‘Of the Cannibals’ quoted by Walwyn who cites the essay for its provocative perspective on European barbarism (see below). Indeed, as Montaigne perceives, perhaps the most bitter and savage of such popular religious hatreds in his age were between ‘our neighbours and fellow citizens’ rather than between nations; this was made painfully clear by the St Bartholomew’s massacres of 1572 when about 5,000 Protestants were slaughtered in Paris and in the provinces by French Catholics. Were he alive in our own time, Montaigne would have understood that the hatreds witnessed in the streets of Rouen or Paris were the sixteenth-century version of the deep hatreds witnessed in twentieth- century Belfast or the villages of Rwanda.28 One key issue Montaigne highlighted for Walwyn was that our limited and customary cultural perspectives shape what we perceive and define as
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‘barbarism’ and that barbarism is too often attributed to any kind of behaviour or point of view that seems foreign to one’s own cultural, national, or religious point of view:
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men call that barbarisme which is not common to them. As indeed, we have no other ayme of truth and reason, than the example and Idea of the opinions and customes of the countrie we live in. There is ever perfect religion, perfect policie, perfect and compleat use of all things.29
Reading Montaigne underscored for Walwyn not only the enthralling power of customary habits of thinking shaped by narrow cultural perspectives, but the ways that xenophobic and chauvinistic cultural and national thinking – including the belief that ‘ever perfect religion’ can be found in ‘the opinions and customes of the countrie we live in’ –could lead to religious hatred and savagery. Walwyn’s scepticism about ‘perfect religion’, deepened by reading Montaigne, was a response to England’s own wars of religion during the 1640s,30 struggles fuelled by the dismantling of the Church of England, by anti-Catholic hysteria intensified by the Irish Rebellion, by anxieties over the spectre of Protestant fragmentation and the explosion of radical sectarianism, and by tensions between Presbyterian pressure to conform to a national church and an increasingly diverse culture of non-conformity. The splintering of Protestantism intensified religious fears so that Walwyn came to question the ‘true piety or reall Christian virtue’ of any church or religious movement that cast ‘foul aspersions’ on any who ‘joyne not with them’, ‘making whom they please Atheists, Antiscripturists, Antinomians, Anti-magistatres’ and anathematising ‘one to be carnall, another erroneous … another an Heretick, a Sectary, Scismatick, a Blasphemer, a man not worthy to live’.31 In this age blighted by bitter and unrestrained aspersions, Walwyn himself had been cast as a ‘dangerous man … not fit for society’, a ‘denier of Scriptures’, an atheist, a Jesuit, a Leveller who ‘would have no Government, and all things common’ like the True Levellers or Diggers, and a man who aims ‘at the destroying of Religion’ just as he does ‘at the subversion of all Government’.32 From Walwyn’s Montaignian perspective it is ‘the vanitie of the present churches’ to anathematise others, to presume to judge in any way another individual’s conscience, to proclaim (in so many words or gestures) ‘I am holyer then thou’,33 and to presume they have a monopoly on religious truth. After all, one potential danger that could arise from this coercive and authoritarian religious culture encouraged by ‘the present churches’, is ‘that he who is in an errour, may be the constrainer of him who is in the truth’.34 Even the Independent congregations who were ‘pleading for generall liberty of conscience, void of all compulsion or restriction, and professing the meekness of the very Lambs of Christ, and humility towards all men’, Walwyn concludes, were indeed ‘no more infallibly certain
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of the truth they raised from Scriptures then any of those they so much condemn’.35 Committed to the freedom of religious perspectives in his age of bitter religious disputes and widespread intolerance of religious difference, Walwyn sought to examine all religions, churches, sects and opinions with a curious and open mind. The writings of both Montaigne and Walwyn were therefore profoundly shaped by their own particular experiences of religious hatred and civil war. ‘O miserable Reformation!’36 Walwyn lamented in what seemed to him a world disfigured by unchristian enmity and in which genuine progress in reforming the Reformation during the English Revolution seemed imperiled. Paradoxically, then, it was ‘a Romish Catholique’ French author –an ‘honest Papist’ as Walwyn calls ‘this worthy Montaign’ –that the English Independent churches themselves might study in order to learn about the spirit of toleration, Christian charity, and openness to new religious truths in Walwyn’s age of religious acrimony and vicious confrontation: ‘Go to this honest Papist,’ Walwyn urges, or to Montaigne’s ‘innocent Cannibals, ye Independent Churches, to learn civility, humanity, simplicity of heart; yea, charity and Christianity’.37 Montaigne’s unorthodox reflections on ‘innocent Cannibals’ –men who exemplify humankind’s natural and primitive state without being enslaved to custom in contrast to Europeans who claim civility but resort to acts of extreme barbarism –provide Walwyn with an attractive illustration of cultural and societal self-examination, especially in such a period of religious polarisation.38 For Walwyn, Montaigne’s ‘innocent Cannibals’ themselves are an arresting model for contemporary puritan churches: Walwyn regards them as a means to understand and potentially restore the purity of the primitive church corrupted by so much incivility and religious hatred.39 Walwyn read attentively either the second or third edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essays (the pagination is the same in both editions), often citing specific pages from his copy to support his arguments about Christian civility and religious savagery in relation to the difficult struggle for toleration in England. Walwyn was drawn to Montaigne not simply because of his irenic sensibility –as unusual as that was in his own age of religious extremism –but because of his tendency to interpret against the grain, to think in fresh and often surprising ways about ethical issues, and to query dogmatic judgements and religious prejudices based upon claiming doctrinal infallibility. Reciting passages from Montaigne gave Walwyn more than pleasure: it gave him ‘some hope to convert [his] Adversaries’, wishing that they might even be ‘of the same mind’40 and same humane sentiment by instilling a sense of civility and Christian charity in them. The months preceding the publication of Walwyn’s pamphlet (June–July 1649?) in which he recites substantial passages from Montaigne had been
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unusually traumatic ones, marking an acute crisis in the English Revolution and republic.41 After all, earlier that year not only had Charles I been executed and monarchy and the House of Lords abolished, but the Leveller leaders, including Walwyn, Richard Overton, John Lilburne and Thomas Prince, were soon in trouble for subjecting the new military government, established by a coup d’état, to searing criticism, especially in their work called The Second Part of England New Chaines Discovered. They had been arrested in late March of that year, were imprisoned in the Tower and found themselves deserted by the Independent and separatist congregations, including the congregation of John Goodwin and notably the Baptists. Furthermore, Cromwell had angrily sworn that he would ‘break [the Levellers] in pieces’ in the spring of 164942 and the pro-Leveller mutiny would suffer a crushing defeat at Burford in May 1649. While imprisoned in the Tower, the four Leveller leaders issued A Manifestation (April 1649), drafted by Walwyn, an apologia vindicating the Levellers from ‘the many aspersions cast upon them’, including invented accusations –‘insinuations of imaginary evill’ as they put it –that they would ‘Levell all mens estates’ (i.e., like the agrarian communist Diggers), that they would have no government and instead favoured ‘Popular Confusion’, and that they were atheists and deniers of Scripture who aimed to ‘overturn, destroy, and overthrow all Religion’.43 In April Walwyn was smeared as a ‘great Imposter’ by John Price, an Independent polemicist and leading figure in the Arminian congregation of John Goodwin, who accused Walwyn of atheism, anti-scripturism, moral depravity and Satanic cunning44 –prompting Walwyn to respond with salient ‘sayings’ from Florio’s Montaigne,45 interspersing them with his own observations about his character and England’s religious hostilities in the 1640s. In the midst of such rancorous times, when fear and the religious imagination interacted explosively so that ‘aspersions fly faster, then any man can fetch them back’,46 Walwyn found in Montaigne’s Essayes fresh perspectives on the nature of civility and human brutality, on duplicitous behaviour, on religious stereotypes, on openness to new religious truths and on the question of judging others, including one’s adversaries, more charitably. The first lengthy passage by Montaigne that Walwyn quotes is from the ‘Apologie of Raymond Sebond’, a work Walwyn revealingly calls Montaigne’s ‘Of Christian religion’,47 an indication that Walwyn regards Montaigne highly not only for his political and moral insights (the title of Florio’s edition refers to Montaigne’s ‘Morall, Politike, and Militarie Discourses’), but also for his unconventional observations about religious behaviour and beliefs. Writing in an age of uncharitable Christian factionalism, Walwyn appreciates the Montaigne who re-examines customary assumptions about the cultural, ethical and religious superiority of Europeans and Christians,
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thereby encouraging a more complex and sceptical perspective about those assumptions:
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Compare but our manners [i.e., morals] unto a Turk, or a Pagan, and we must needs yield unto them: whereas in respect of religious superiority, we ought by much, yea, by an comparable distance outshine them in excellency. And well might a man say, Are they so just, so charitable, and so good, then must they be Christians.48
Walwyn’s subsequent quotation from Montaigne’s ‘Of the Cannibals’ – part of a famous passage that Shakespeare draws upon in The Tempest – enables Walwyn to reinforce his unconventional position by contrasting Montaigne’s natural and ‘innocent Cannibals’, who conduct themselves without ‘any insinuating arts’49 or language, with the treacherous behaviour and discourse of Europeans who claim to exemplify civilised behaviour and values: ‘the very words that import lying, falshood, treason, dissimulation, covetousnesse, envy, detraction, and pardon were never heard amongst [the Cannibals]’.50 In an age of English anti-Catholic hysteria, Walwyn relishes the thought that the ‘worthy Montaign’, who thinks in such unusual ways about duplicitous European behaviour and vicious warfare carried out ‘under pretence of pietie and religion’, is a papist who has, ironically, much more to teach Walwyn’s contemporaries about toleration than most Protestants do, including radical ones who plea for ‘generall liberty of conscience’ and profess ‘humility towards all men’. Indeed, while he does not assent to everything he finds in Montaigne (‘nor do I approve of him in all things’), Walwyn writes figuratively about the value of the thought- provoking reflections he treasures the most from Montaigne (‘I recite these passages, because I am in love with them’), as though he is cultivating from the French Catholic writer and thinker a ‘Garden’ of wise and pithy ‘cogitations’ for his own bitter times: ‘These, and the like flowers, I think it lawfull to gather out of his Wildernesse, and to give them room in my Garden.’51 Sometimes, however, even a concise reference to Montaigne is enough to underscore Walwyn’s polemical challenge to the judgements of contemporary churchmen, including an Independent like John Price who makes assumptions about virtue, class, social differences and wealth that clash with the spirit of Christianity.52 Responding to the accusation that he does not believe that riches and estates should determine a man’s fitness for government or ‘places of trust’, Walwyn rebuffs such disdain for the mean and the poor by defending the idea that virtue is often found among the poorer professions –‘for the callings are honest’, the Bible itself suggests –since Christ ‘chose simple herdsmen for his Prophets, and poor fishermen for his Apostles’, and therefore ‘did certainly judge otherwise then these Churchmen judge’. And even in recent memory, Walwyn reminds his
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Independent adversary, there was a cobbler by the name of Samuel How –‘a contented man in that calling’ much like those simple men chosen by Jesus –who ‘was not ashamed to preach before your most learned Pastor [i.e., John Goodwin] and printed his Sermon afterwards’. At this point in his Just Defence Walwyn reveals that he is ‘exceeding in love with’ the New Testament letter of James and its voice of prophetic warning –‘Nay, is there not such an expression again in Scripture [?]’, Walwyn asks rhetorically – as he invokes James addressing the rich with exceptional directness and vigour: ‘Go now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you’ (James 5:1). Yet Walwyn is no less ‘in love with’ Montaigne whom he uses to cap his rebuttal to Independent churchmen whose thinking about riches violates the spirit of the Bible and who may therefore find wisdom, if not by recalling the Bible itself, then at least by reading a short essay by the French papist: ‘And that Riches may no longer be a stumbling block in your way, reade, at your leisure, Montaign’s 52 Chapter, of the Parcimony of our Fore-Fathers.’53 Moreover, in order to expose the all-too-common ‘treachery’ of malevolent churchmen in his age (‘since treachery seems so slight a matter’ with them), Walwyn makes ‘bold to send them again to this Lord Montaign’, this time to several passages from the essay ‘Of profit and honesty’ that opens the third book of Montaigne’s Essayes. Towards the beginning of this essay, Montaigne is meditating on treachery in relation to honourable behaviour – ‘to whom should not treachery be detestable, when Tiberius refused it on such great interest?’ Montaigne wonders –as he ponders the example of the Roman emperor whose reign (14–37 CE) was characterised by Tacitus and Suetonius as one of terror, vengeance and suicides. But even Tiberius, Montaigne observes (in a passage Walwyn quotes), could give up ‘the profitable for the honest’: on one occasion he refused the opportunity offered him to destroy Rome’s most powerful enemy, the German chief Arminius, by poison (since Arminius had ambushed and annihilated the legions of the Roman general Quintilius Varus), Tiberius preferring instead to seek vengeance on Rome’s enemies ‘not by subltities, nor in hugger-mugger [i.e., in secret]’, but ‘by open courses’.54 Furthermore, Montaigne proceeds to note that even if Tiberius was no man of virtue inwardly (‘that’s no wonder, in men of his profession’, Montaigne concedes), he nonetheless attempted to make a show of it (‘at least, to adorn himself he will put it on’)55 –and that is presumably more honourable than the equivocal behaviour exhibited by Walwyn’s godly ‘Churchmen’ whom he regards as ‘seeming Saints’ who have ‘palliated with the most specious pretences of the plainest sincerity’.56 Like the ‘honest’ Montaigne he discovers in the Essayes, Walwyn strives to present himself as a man whose word and honour are one and who eschews the Machiavellian craftiness that he has been accused of practising but that
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he discerns in the behaviour of Independent churchmen: ‘so far am I from that politique, crafty, subtil and hidden reservedness’ and ‘I have not fawning flattering waies to work upon men’.57 Walwyn therefore quotes elsewhere from ‘Of profit and honesty’, a passage in which Montaigne asserts that he would rather be condemned as a slave to the galleys than ‘to lye, betray, or forswear’ himself and commit ‘any shamefull or dishonest thing’; and in which he expresses his admiration for Egyptian kings who vowed that their ultimate loyalty was to their individual conscience: ‘Every man should give himself the oath’, writes Montaigne in the passage Walwyn quotes, ‘which the Egyptian Kings solemnly and usually presented to their Judges, Not to swerve from their Consciences, what command soever they should receive from themselves to the contrary.’58 For Walwyn the exercise of individual conscience, threatened by the religious acrimony and coercion of churches in his age and by their seeming godliness, should be protected at all cost: it is essential for the autonomy of judgement and for adhering to the spirit of Romans 14:5 (a key text for Walwyn) in which the Apostle Paul ‘alloweth every one to be fully perswaded in his owne minde’,59 especially pertaining to matters of faith.60 The last substantial passage Walwyn quotes from Montaigne, again from ‘Of profit and honesty’, is taken from a part of the essay that concerns his observations about the notable and, indeed, paradoxical qualities of the great Theban general of the fourth century bce, Epaminondas, who raised Thebes to be for a period the most powerful city in Greece. It is a passage in which the humanist Montaigne, who often carefully observes models of behaviour from antiquity and assesses himself and early modern Europeans in relation to them, reaffirms his placement of Epaminondas ‘in the first rank of virtuous men’ in a time of war: his actions and judgements revealed his humane sensibility and integrity of ‘Conscience’ with respect to his enemies – he ‘never slew man he had vanquished’ and refused, even when restoring liberty to his country was at stake, ‘to take away any mans life, without a due and formall course of Law’ –as well as his possession of ‘a mind of a rich composition’.61 Montaigne had already singled out Epaminondas in his essay ‘Of the worthiest and most excellent men’ (Chapter 36 of Book II) for ‘his maners and conscience’, qualities in which ‘he farre outwent all that ever medled with managing affaires’, and, most strikingly, for his ‘innocencie’, a quality ‘proper, chiefe, constant, uniforme and incorruptible’, and one which set him apart from Alexander the Great in whom it was corrupted –having become ‘uncertaine, variable, effeminate and accidentall’.62 Indeed, what stands out for Montaigne, as he observes in lines directly following those quoted by Walwyn, is the paradoxical character of a great general who combined ‘the most violent and rude actions of men’ with ‘goodnesse and courtesie’ and who not only exemplified ‘unmatched
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courage’, but who was able ‘to joyne mildnesse and facility of most gentle behavior that ever was’ with ‘pure innocency it selfe’.63 Thus Montaigne associates Epaminondas not only with the charitable ‘maners’ that he and Walwyn observe in Turks, but with that same quality –‘innocency’ –that Montaigne and Walwyn associate with New World cannibals, examples of humankind living in a state of nature and devoid of cunning or artifice. Although he was no Christian and did not live in a state of nature, Epaminondas manifested this quality missing from the character and behaviour of early modern Europeans –including treacherous churchmen who cast aspersions upon Walwyn –in their own times of war. In a way, then, Montaigne was crucial to Walwyn’s self- fashioning, although he would not have used the term with its implications of theatrical self-presentation. Plain, direct, true to his self (especially his conscience) and made uneasy by any kind of behaviour marked by dissimulation, ‘this honest Papist’ provided a kind of broad-minded, multi-vocal European model for Walwyn in his seventeenth-century world too often marred by religious enmity, suspicion, treachery and uncharitable Christian behaviour. To be sure, Walwyn’s Montaigne may not always accord with our modern sense of Montaigne as a highly introspective writer who examines so memorably his unstable, erratic, ill-formed self. But then Walwyn was reading Montaigne in the context of his own fractured seventeenth-century world and using him to make a powerful polemical point to his puritan contemporaries: citing the ‘honest Papist’ writer as a major commentator capable of illuminating, while stimulating more subtle thinking about, the central ethical, religious and political issues that were fuelling the upheavals and conflicts of the English Revolution. Montaigne may have been ‘but a Romish Catholique’, yet his Essayes, and the often startling perspectives they afford, offered Walwyn thought-provoking reflections on Christian religion and behaviour in a seventeenth-century world of sharp Protestant divisions –a world in which ‘pretence of pietie and religion’, to recall a phrase from Montaigne’s ‘Of the Cannibals’, was too often manipulated and toleration for religious diversity was far from assured.
Notes 1 For Walwyn’s admission that he ‘can read only such as are translated into English’, see The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft (Athens GA and London, 1989), p. 397. Further references to Walwyn’s works are taken from this edition, its title abbreviated in my notes as Writings. On Walwyn’s education and lack of other languages, see also Barbara Taft’s biography of the writer in the ODNB.
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2 Writings, pp. 397–400, 403, 410. 3 Ibid., p. 398. 4 Ibid., p. 401. 5 See especially William Hamlin, Montaigne’s English Journey: Reading the Essayes in Shakespeare’s Day (Oxford, 2014), an excellent study of Montaigne’s early reception in England; and Warren Boutcher, ‘Montaigne in England and America’, in Philippe Desan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne (Oxford, 2016), chapter 16. Although Hamlin briefly notes Walwyn’s admiration for Montaigne’s ‘Of the Cannibals’ (pp. 89, 273–74n.), neither author discusses Walwyn in any detail and in relation to the struggles over toleration during the English Revolution; there is only a brief mention of Walwyn’s use of Montaigne in Boutcher’s chapter (p. 318). A special issue of Montaigne Studies, 24 (2012), edited by Philip Ford and devoted to ‘Montaigne in England’, also does not discuss Walwyn. An earlier assessment, emphasising the appeal of Montaigne during the English Revolution because of ‘sa tolérance et son humanité’, remains Olivier Lutaud, ‘Montaigne chez les niveleurs anglaise: Walwyn et les Essais’, 8. I comment Rivista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate, 12 (1959), 53– briefly on Walwyn and Montaigne (in my discussion of the former writer) in David Loewenstein, Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2013), pp. 246–7, although my essay develops more thoroughly those comments. See also note 21 below for helpful accounts by Nigel Smith and Nicholas McDowell on Walwyn’s theological and intellectual thought in relation to Montaigne. 6 Writings, p. 402. 7 Montaigne, ‘Of presumption’, in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, 1976), p. 499. 8 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (New York, 1953), p. 59. 9 Georges Poulet, ‘Montaigne’, in Studies in Human Time, tr. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore, 1956), p. 43. This is the Montaigne who comments on both life and the self in ‘Of experience’: ‘It is an irregular uncertaine motion, perpetual, patternlesse and without end’: Montaigne, The Essayes or, Morall, Politike, and Militarie Discourses of Lord Michael De Montaigne, Knight (3rd edn, 1632), p. 602. Walwyn quotes either from this edition or the second (1613), though not from the first edition of 1603. I therefore cite from the 1632 text in the rest of this chapter. 10 Erich Auerbach, ‘L’Humaine condition’, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. William Trask (Princeton, 1953), pp. 285–311; Poulet, Studies in Human Time, pp. 39–49; Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1985). 11 Writings, pp. 387–8. Rachel Foxley discusses other Leveller views of self-understanding (not indebted to Montaigne) in terms of their political and religious activism and sense of civic duty: The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester, 2013), pp. 131–2. 12 Cf. Montaigne’s assertation in ‘Of experience’: ‘I had rather understand my selfe well in my selfe, then in Cicero’: The Essayes, p. 605.
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13 ‘The Avthor to the Reader’, prefacing The Essayes. 14 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (1646), p. 121. About the shocking spread of toleration in his age, Edwards adds: ‘Should any man seven yeers ago have said that many … [would] be for Toleration of all Religions, Poperie, Blasphemie, Atheisme, it would have been said, It cannot be.’ For Edwards, puritan intolerance and its incendiary rhetoric, see especially the rich study by Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004). 15 John Milton, Areopagitica (1644), pp. 31–2; Walwyn, Writings, pp. 104–5. For the best recent study of toleration in early modern England and its complex relation to intolerance, see Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006). Also see the nuanced study by John Coffey, ‘Puritanism and liberty revisited: the case for toleration in the English Revolution’, HJ, 41.4 (1998), 961–85, on radical puritan tolerationists, including the Levellers, who advocated a multi-faith society. Coffey qualifies the revisionist argument that puritans sought a godly but not a liberal society in which true freedom is found in submission to the will of God: see J. C. Davis, ‘Religion and the struggle for freedom in the English Revolution’, HJ, 35.3 (1992), 507–30. 16 Writings, pp. 386–87. 17 See The Compassionate Samaritane, in Writings, p. 104, for Walwyn’s challenge to the orthodox godly claim that ‘unity and uniformity in Religion is to be aimed at, and confusion above all things to be avoyded’. ‘Unity of faith’, Walsham notes about the pressure to maintain religious uniformity during the early modern period, ‘was supposed to be the best antidote to sedition and subversion and a preservative against internal dissolution’ (Charitable Hatred, p. 2). 18 See Coffey, ‘Puritanism and liberty revisited’, and Foxley’s helpful account of the Leveller theory of toleration in The Levellers, pp. 128–32. 19 Walwyn, The Compassionate Samaritane and Good Counsell to All (1644), in Writings, pp. 114, 128–29, where Walwyn mentions such dangerous opinions of the sect as denial of resurrection and denying the existence of angels or spirits. Notably Jesus responds ‘gently’ to the Sadducees, despite their having come to him ‘in a kinde of insolent confidence in these their opinions’. Walwyn reimagines the engagement between Jesus and the sect in Matthew 22:23–33. 20 The Compassionate Samaritane (1644), in Writings, p. 104. 21 See also Foxley who, in The Levellers (p. 130), comments briefly on the impact of the scepticism of Charron and Montaigne on Walwyn’s thinking about toleration, as does William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1955), pp. 170–72. Nigel Smith, ‘The charge of atheism and the language of radical speculation’, in Michael Hunter and David Wotton, eds, Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992), pp. 148–51, discusses Walwyn’s reading of Montaigne in relation to the Leveller’s belief in free grace and free justification and also notes the impact of Charron (through Samson Lennard’s 1606 translation, Of Wisdome) on Walwyn’s sense of the importance of reason (p. 151). Nicholas McDowell explores further the impact of this continental intellectual tradition on Walwyn’s argument for the
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liberty of conscience: The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 74–5, 77–83. We should note, however, that it is Montaigne who made the deepest impression on Walwyn and from whom he quotes extensively in his Just Defence. 22 See, for example, The Compassionate Samaritane where Walwyn asserts that ‘the conscience [is] subject only to reason’ and not to coercion and violence (Writings, p. 105). See also Walwyn’s response to the objection that separatists are basically antinomians who do not employ ‘their Reason’, but are driven instead by ‘their Enthusiasms, and Revelations’; indeed, Walwyn asserts, ‘the Brownist and Anabaptist are rationall examiners of those things they hold for truth … and able to give account of what they believe’ (Writings, p. 103). In Just Defence Walwyn tells his readers: ‘your faith is built upon Reason’ (Writings, p. 415). 23 Writings, p. 104. 24 The Essayes, p. 245. 25 See especially Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1995; 2nd edn, 2005). 26 The Essayes, p. 295. 27 ‘Of the Cannibals’, in The Essayes, p. 104. 28 My observations here are partly indebted to Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York, 2003), p. 328. 29 ‘Of the Cannibals’, in The Essayes, p. 101, italics in original. 30 On the religious conflicts of the English Revolution in terms of early modern Europe’s ‘wars of religion’, see especially John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London and New York, 1983), Part 1. 31 The Vanities of the Present Churches (1649), in Writings, pp. 316, 321, 329. 32 Writings, pp. 388, 389, 393, 394, 404, 409. 33 Ibid., p. 429. 34 The Compassionate Samaritane, in Writings, p. 104. 35 The Vanitie of the Present Churches, in Writings, p. 315. 36 Writings, p. 423. 37 Ibid., p. 400. 38 As Hamlin notes in Montaigne’s English Journey, cultural self-scrutiny is ‘quite rare’ in English manuscript responses to Montaigne’s ‘Of the Cannibals’, ‘perhaps suggesting that early English readers … require less exotic illustrations of alterity to steer their thoughts toward societal self-scrutiny’ (p. 89). 39 On the impulse of primitivism in Puritanism –‘the drive to restore an original pattern that has been lost’ –see Coffey, ‘Puritanism and liberty revisted’, p. 973. 40 Writings, p. 401. 41 McMichael and Taft discuss the likely dating of Walwyn’s Just Defence in Writings, p. 383. 42 John Lilburne, Thomas Prince and Richard Overton, The Picture of the Council of State, Held forth to the Free people of England (1649), p. 15. 43 Writings, pp. 335, 337, 339, 415.
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44 John Price, Walwins Wiles (1649); ‘great Imposter’ occurs on p. 13. For the charge of atheism in the period and against Walwyn in particular, see Smith, ‘The charge of atheism’, pp. 143–58, and McDowell, English Radical Imagination, p. 83. 45 Writings, p. 402. 46 Ibid., p. 388. 47 Ibid., p. 399. 48 Ibid., p. 399, quoting from The Essayes, p. 244. 49 I borrow the phrase from A Manifestation, in Writings, p. 339, where the Leveller leaders deny resorting to ‘any insinuating arts’. 50 Writings, p. 400, quoting from The Essayes, p. 102. 51 Ibid., pp. 399, 401, 400. 52 For Price’s attack on Walwyn over this issue, see Walwins Wiles, p. 14. On the Leveller concern for the poor and oppressed as a key message of Christianity and the substance of religion, see Brian Manning, ‘The Levellers and religion’, in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay, eds, Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1984), 3, especially pp. 73–6. 53 Writings, pp. 417–18. 54 Ibid., p. 400, quoting The Essayes, p. 443. 55 The Essayes, p. 443. 56 Writings, pp. 429, 432. The second phrase is from the opening of Walwins Wiles –quoted by Walwyn at the end of his Just Defence and then used against his adversaries. 57 Writings, pp. 401, 419. 58 Writings, p. 401, quoting from The Essayes, p. 447. 59 Good Counsell to All, in Writings, pp. 128–29; Romans 14:5: ‘Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.’ 60 Just after the passage about the Egyptian kings, Walwyn also quotes (Writings, p. 401) a part of Montaigne’s question from p. 448 of The Essayes on a prince not doing violence to his conscience: ‘What is lesse possible for him to do, then what he cannot effect without charge unto his faith[?].’ Montaigne emphasises that a prince’s faith and honour are ‘things which peradventure should bee dearer to him, then his owne salvation, and the safety of his people’. 61 Writings, p. 402, quoting from The Essayes, p. 449. Walwyn, who tends to quote verbatim from Florio’s translation, uses the word ‘virtuous’ to define ‘men’, rather than Florio’s ‘excellent’, giving Montaigne’s passage more ethical force. 62 The Essayes, p. 424. 63 Ibid., pp. 449–50.
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An accursed family: the Scottish crisis and the Black Legend of the House of Stuart, 1650–2 Thomas Cogswell In May 1650, as the war loomed with Scotland, Marchamont Nedham did what he did best; he sneered. ‘I am sorry,’ he told his readers, ‘I must waste Paper upon this Nation.’1 Nevertheless he wasted a great deal of paper on the Scots, and he did so for the next two years. So too did other republican writers. Although they may have disliked the topic, they had to write about Scotland, for it then posed an existential threat to the new Free State. Earlier in 1650, Prince Charles was easy to dismiss; he only held the Channel Isles, and Cromwell’s troops were then slowly crushing his most formidable allies, the Irish Catholics. In June 1650, however, the Stuart pretender’s position abruptly changed after he returned to Scotland and took the Covenant. Not only did the Scots, and their many military veterans, flock to him, but Charles also hoped to rally English Presbyterians, who had earlier supported Parliament, as well as the surviving royalists. Furthermore, the impending conflict was particularly sensitive because Charles’ new Scottish supporters were fellow Protestants and former allies. David Leslie, Charles II’s Scottish general, had fought beside Cromwell at Marston Moor in 1644, and the prospect of fratricidal violence so troubled Lord Fairfax that he resigned rather than lead English troops in an offensive war against his old Scottish comrades. Instead the Council of State sent Cromwell north, beginning a conflict that only ended in 1652 after English victories at Dunbar in 1650 and Worcester in 1651.2 In this conflict, print was at least as important as pikes. In the army’s July 1650 Declaration to the Scots, the troops proclaimed ‘our tenderness towards you, whom we look upon as our Brethren’, and according to a report in July, the men wished ‘that if it might be the will of God no bloud might be shed’.3 Cromwell echoed this sentiment. In one letter, he begged the Covenanters to appreciate that ‘nothing would be more acceptable to us to see than the Lord … inclining the hearts of His People in Scotland to meet us with the same affection’; and in another he explained that ‘the greatest difficulty in our engagement in Scotland’ had been to contend ‘with some who were (I think verily) godly, but, through weakness and the subtlety of
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Satan were involved in interest against the Lord and His People’. Arguably his most memorable line came as he marvelled at the Covenanters’ support for the young king: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’4 Cromwell and his men would fight the Scots if they had to, but they were much more eager to talk to them. Cromwell repeatedly advocated what he variously termed a ‘friendly debate’, ‘a friendly and Christian conference’ and ‘a friendly and Christian meeting’, binding together ‘honest men in Scotland as well as England’ so that ‘all misunderstanding between us may be taken way’. In December 1650, he assured a Scots commander that ‘I have so much reason to believe that, by a Conference, you may be well satisfied’.5 Towards that end, he softened up Scottish defences by sending them 500 copies of the army Declaration, and he released captured Scottish scouts provided they ‘carry home with them’ copies of the Declaration. Likewise, the army Declaration announced the desire ‘to perswade the Hearts and Consciences of those that are godly in Scotland’. The officers in Lambert’s regiment pursued ‘this way of Reconcilement’, and after a lieutenant unilaterally met with a Scottish colonel, ‘some more freedom was taken by the Officers to confer with those of the Enemy’. Their blandishments were so tempting that the Kirk sternly warned its followers ‘carefully to avoid all familiar Converse’ with English troops.6 What did Cromwell and his men say to their former colleagues? We cannot be certain but it likely echoed what they read in print. To second military action, the Free State produced works rehearsing recent Anglo-Scottish history, all designed to make the Scots –and Charles’ potential English supporters –think long and hard about the young pretender. Admittedly, some items reflected English anger. The Scot Arraigned, for instance, denounced the ‘most horrid and odious Conspiracy and Rebellion’ of ‘a malignant envious pack of indigent contemptuous wretches’ who were like ‘their beggarly mutinous progenitors’. After asking what had prompted the Scottish decision –‘Was it the kindness which you have received from us at severall times in these late years in free Contributions’ –the author lamented ‘O the retaliation of Scottish Gratitude!’7 Such vitriolic tracts, however, were atypical. More common were balanced appeals to the Scots like a dialogue between two travellers, one Scottish and the other English, who eventually agreed to back the Free State.8 Another offered a calm Examination of the Seasonable and Necessarie Warning concerning present Dangers and Duties Emitted from … the Kirk of Scotland, and a third thought Presbyterians might enjoy reading A Letter from the King of Scots to the Pope of Rome.9 In Scotlands Holy War, Henry Parker took pains to assure his readers that ‘I my self know many excellent men of that Nation’ who were ‘as dear as if they were English’. Naturally the most effective material came from
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Scotland; for instance, The Remonstrance of the Presbyterie of Sterling and A Word of Advertisemnt [sic] to the Godly Party in Scotland from ‘a Scotch-Man’ both cautioned against trusting Royalists.10 Equally useful was a Scottish sermon against the conflict and James Douglas’ predictions of Scottish defeat.11 Yet the English presses also produced items with more unusual arguments. The army Declaration, for example, declared that Charles I ‘was guilty of more Innocent Blood in England, Ireland and Scotland … then any of his predecessors’. This rather predictable sentence then ended with a striking clause: ‘the guilt whereof he brought upon his Family’. Likewise A Briefe Relation dubbed the Stuarts ‘a most unhappy Family, under a most miserable and dreadful fate’, unable to avoid ‘their decreed ruine’. Cromwell himself reiterated this line when he rebuked the Scottish Parliament for ‘taking into your bosom that Person’ who embodied ‘malignancy’. Then alluding to the young prince’s public repudiation of his Catholic mother and his tyrannical father, Cromwell added ‘against whose family the Lord had so eminently witnessed for bloodguiltiness, [which was] not to be done away by such hypocritical and formal shews of repentance’.12 These somewhat obscure references become clearer once set within a polemical campaign during the Scottish crisis deriding and defaming the royal family. The rhetorical violence of these items is especially striking because for most of the 1640s, parliamentary writers had excoriated the king’s supporters, but not the king himself. Such polite deference, which made sense when Parliament was ostensibly fighting to bring the king back to his people, disappeared in 1648 when Charles I was denounced as a man of blood. The Scottish crisis prompted republicans to go further and to vilify the executed king’s family. The resulting ‘Stuart Black Legend’ trumpeting the dynasty’s depravity was designed to remind contemporaries that the charming young prince represented a family that God had cursed. Scholars have largely neglected this unsavoury campaign of systematic dynastic demolition. Yet these vivid, if sometimes far-fetched, stories allow us to understand the radicals who backed both the regicide and the Free State. Since, as Ann Hughes has observed, ‘the maintenance of gender order and propriety within the royal household was an important register of royal authority’, these stories were plainly intended to destroy any lingering respect for the Stuarts. The examination of these stories also affords us the opportunity to ponder Kevin Sharpe’s argument that the Republic did not succeed ‘principally because the regime failed to secure its own cultural authority or even significantly to undermine the culture of kingship’.13 To explore this remarkable dynastic defamation, this chapter will first discuss several key texts and their authors before deploying them to form a collective portrait of Charles II’s family and their crimes.
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I In 13 June 1650 issue of Mercurius Politicus, Marchamount Nedham asked ‘is not this ticklish time … to write intelligence?’ It was indeed, especially for a man who had a year earlier imagined the regicides’ execution. Now he was defending them by articulating the Stuart Black Legend in his newsbook. He soon found help from Henry Parker who produced The True Portraiture of the Kings of England, smearing all of them but especially the Stuarts.14 In October 1650, the demolition efforts continued with the posthumous publication of Sir Anthony Weldon’s Court and Character of King James. Since the book, ‘Published by Authority’, echoed some of Nedham’s lines, the printer Robert Ibbitson, a radical who supported the regicide, may well have modified Weldon’s original text for maximum impact.15 In January 1651, several English publications greeted Charles II’s coronation at Scone. Some English observers had grown frustrated with the ‘stubborn and stupid’ Scots, for ‘a King they must have’. Cromwell, however, was more optimistic, given the ‘mighty workings of God upon the divers, both Ministers and People’ in Scotland where some ‘startled’ to see the Kirk allied to ‘the Head Malignant’ (Charles II). In fact, this unholy alliance so upset some ministers and soldiers that in October 1650, they issued the Western Remonstrance, protesting that they could see no ‘sure ground of hope that the Lord’s controversie was removed from the Roiall Familie’. The General Assembly eventually proclaimed these men traitors, who in turn began to co-operate with Cromwell. Consequently, while the grandees celebrated Charles’s coronation, the common people reportedly greeted it with ‘many sighings’.16 The Free State’s polemicists then deployed the Stuart curse to widen these divisions. In January 1651, The None-Such Charles His Character, another Ibbitson production and also ‘Published by Authority’, appeared partly employing material from Sir Balthazar Gerbier, Charles I’s former diplomatic agent who had publishing ties to Ibbitson. The book itself chronicled the many crimes of James I and Henri IV, the ‘two Stemmes of this dismall Race’ and detailed the ‘fatall … curses on their Posterity’. Charles II’s coronation also coincided with John Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio and the first ‘English’ publication of George Buchanan’s 1571 history of Mary Queen of Scotland, A Detection. Shortly afterwards, John Hall, an associate of Nedham and Milton who had accompanied Cromwell north, used a Scottish printer to publish Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy Considered in a Review of the Scotch Story. According to a recent historian, this ‘anti-monarchical’ work represented a landmark in Scottish print culture because ‘the English regime utilised the press in a wholly novel fashion in Scotland’ to discuss ‘topics which had never before been addressed by Scottish presses’.17 Finally in 1652, as Cromwell’s troops mopped up the
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last Covenanter strongholds, two major books came out. The first, likely (at least partly) written by Nedham, was A Cat May look upon a King, examining ‘the lives of all our former Kings, and the lamentable condition of this Nation under these two last’. Sir Edward Peyton, an old Parliament- man famously obsessed with religion and morals, produced an even more lurid work, The Divine Catastrophe of the Kingly Family of the House of Stuarts. Omitting ‘the Murders, Inchantements, Witcheries, committed by his Predecessors’, Peyton focused instead on the crimes of James’ immediate family, which had ‘weight enough, without more, to pull down that House’. Since Peyton had died around the book’s publication, the revelations about ‘the most secret and Chamber-abomination of the two last Kings’ may owe something to Giles Calvert, another radical publisher.18 These authors and printers knew each other, often quite well. Milton, Nedham and Hall worked for the regime, and Gerbier wanted to join them. Likewise, Ibbitson and Calvert both emphatically backed the republican experiment. Given their collective enthusiasm for articulating the Stuart Black Legend, it becomes clear that contemporaries in 1650–2 witnessed a co-ordinated polemical campaign.
II Since the new Republic was ‘building New Jerusalem’ by abolishing the monarchy, it naturally celebrated 30 January, the date of Charles I’s beheading, as ‘an everlasting Anniversary, in remembrance of that, and other great Deliverances’. The executioner’s axe, one poet announced, ‘hath now delivered us from servitude’, and another maintained ‘We are not born in fetters’.19 Yet brave republican rhapsodies could not stop contemporaries from longing for a monarchical government. But the Black Legend could. To unnerve potential Scottish royalists, John Hall reviewed their previous monarchs, sarcastically announcing that he found ‘such mutual Endearments between Prince and People, so many of them crowned with happy Reigns and quiet Deaths’ –then adding that ‘two together scarse dying naturally’. One ruler died ‘suspected to be poisoned’; another ‘slayed all the Nobility at a Banquet, and is by the People slain’; a third decreed ‘the Nobility should have the enjoyment of all new Married women before they were touched by their husbands’; and a fourth ordered ‘most of the Nobility to be strangled’ only to be ‘slain by his own servants’. These horrors made Hall marvel that David II ‘could Reign fourty-nine years and die in peace’. The accession of the Stuarts did not improve matters. Robert II ‘did little’ except marry his concubine, and Robert III was ‘a wretched unactive Prince’. James I was murdered by his uncle, and Parliament so despised James III that it
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rewarded the priest who stabbed him. Hall denounced the Stuart family as a ‘plague to the Nation’, and their history made Nedham quip that ‘it is a Solecism in Scotland that a King should be said to die in his bed’.20 Equally appalling were their English counterparts. In a survey of medieval England, Nedham trashed even the celebrated rulers. Richard I ‘made the People to pay for his superstitious adventure to the Holy Land’. Edward I ‘shed more blood within this Isle of Britain’ than ‘never King, before or since (except the late Tyrant [Charles I]’. Edward III ‘ground the poor people to powder’, and the records of Henry V’s reign ‘mention nothing but his wars, raising of monies and spending the blood of this poor nation’. The Tudors were worse. Henry VII had only ‘a spurious Title’ and, according to Nedham, ‘was little less then a Bastard’. Henry VIII ‘scrued up Prerogative to the height, trampled on the Laws and wallowed in blood’. Consequently ‘he never spared man in his anger, nor woman in his lust’. Henry Parker maintained that Henry ‘was very lascivious, and delighted much in variety, and changes of Lawes, as wives’. While A Cat declined to discuss Elizabeth I –‘I have nothing to do with woman’ –Nedham argued that ‘she kept up Prerogative too high over the Commons, and so transmitted it into the hands of her Successor’. Consequently ‘the whole succession produced no other effects but Tyranny and Slavery’.21 Republican polemicists next reviled Charles II’s immediate family. By the 1650s, few recalled Mary of Guise, James V’s wife. Yet plans were then afoot to make her descendant, Charles IV of Lorraine, the head of the Irish Catholic Confederation. Thus, when Nedham denounced the duke and his ‘mercilesse crew of Plunderers … the very Filth and Dregs of Christendome’, against whom ‘all in England’ should ‘stand up for the defence of Religion and Liberty’, he recalled her: ‘it must not be forgotten, how much [blood] was spilt by the Lady of the house of Lorraine’. Hall noted that she ‘in her Regencie, exercised all Rage against the Professors of the purer Religion’.22 Sexual excess dominated the anti- Stuart discourse. Mary of Guise’s daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, had long attracted malicious whispers, but in the early 1650s, the republican writers broadcast them. Details had first emerged in the faux Scottish 1571 editions of George Buchanan’s Ane Detectioun of … Marie Quene. Understandably Buchanan’s attack was never reprinted under the Stuarts, but early in 1651 an ‘English’ edition finally brought out a memorable depiction of Charles II’s great grandmother. A Cat described her as ‘a lusty young widow’. Peyton slyly said Mary ‘was educated in the School of Venus’ where she ‘proved an apt Scholar in that wanton Academy’. Likewise, a ‘loose education’ in France, Hall quipped, left James I’s mother with a taste for ‘French effeminacies’. Her marriage to Darnley baffled Hall who thought it might have been used ‘to colour her Adulteries, and hide the shame of an impregnation’. Since her musician,
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David Rizzio, was ‘her perpetual Companion at Board and Managing all Affairs’, he may have been James’s father, but Hall added that ‘some have whispered that she never conceived, and that the son was suppositious’. After Darnley had Rizzio murdered, Mary, then in love with the earl of Bothwell, had her husband ‘strengled, thrown out of the window, and the House blown up’.23 Even more ominously, Peyton depicted Mary as an aggressive, predatory female who ‘in her inclination to be more absolute in her passion of Love to chuse without controul a Paramour sutable, when, how long, and who she pleased’. Rizzio’s murder had made Darnley wary of his wife, but after she ‘cherisht him extreamely, til the credulous young man began to lay aside suspicion’, Mary lured him into ‘a ruinous House near the Palace’ and ‘brings in her own bed, and lyes in the room with him’. She then had him murdered and the house blown up –but only after ‘her own rich bed having been before secretly convayed away’.24 Ridicule of James I’s parentage followed these revelations. The situation baffled the author of A Cat: ‘I cannot in the best stories I have read, find who was clearly King James his Father.’ The preface to the 1651 Buchanan reprint noted that ‘Rize, Darley and Bothwell’ had been intimate with the queen, and then wondered ‘which of these might have hit luckiest may well be doubted’, adding only ‘if (as I have heard some Scots lowdly aver) the Childe it selfe were not supposititious [sic]’. Milton, however, had no doubts, and in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio he readily agreed with the royalist Salmasius that James I had been a new Solomon. After all, Solomon was ‘the son of David, who was originally Saul’s musician’, just as James had been the child of another musician named David –Mary Queen of Scots’ Italian lover, David Rizzio. Milton repeated George Buchanan’s story that Darnley had caught Rizzio ‘on a nocturnal visit to his queen’s bedroom’ and killed him. ‘For such a reason,’ Milton wryly noted, ‘was the ancestry of King James more illustrious, and he was called a second Solomon.’ Because ‘some People remain too obstinate to adore that Tribe [the Stuarts]’, Milton’s tract coincided with the 1651 reprint of Buchanan’s accusations about Queen Mary.25 James, these writers insisted, shared his mother’s passion for men. Weldon archly noted James’ taste for ‘young Faces, and smooth Chins’. The author of A Cat politely declined to discuss the old king’s ‘uncleannesse’ because ‘I cannot do it without fouling too much paper’. Instead he simply noted ‘his slabbering expression of affection’. No such delicacy troubled Peyton. He announced that James was ‘more addicted to love males then females’ and above all, he loved the duke of Buckingham whom he ‘would tumble and kiss as a Mistress’. The king’s preferences were so obvious that Gondomar ‘observing how king James was addicted’, amused him with quips about the ‘foredoor’ and the ‘backdoor’. James then allowed Buckingham free rein at
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Court where he ‘vitiated many gentile and noble virgins’. All of this paled before James’ portrayal in The None-Such Charles. Favourites obsessed both James I and Henri IV, except that ‘in his love he [James] differed in the Sexe’. The king could not contain ‘his horrid filthinesse’ to the bedroom; instead, horrified witnesses had to watch ‘his lascivious tongue licking of his Favourites lips’, his continual fiddling with his codpiece and the ‘lascivious actions’ of his hands.26 To illustrate James’ ‘pernicious, horrid depraved courses’, the tract described a particularly startling scene. Finding Charles, a ‘Theobald Virgin’, James decided to initiate him into manhood. Yet ‘King James was not onely a witnesse’, but he also ‘lay on that same bed, blowing the bellowes to that fire, to sting thee [Charles] with lasciviousnesse it selfe, to make thee the more fit for a Hell Harlot’. Not surprisingly, James’ daughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia, reportedly refused to receive Gerbier after this sensational book came out.27 For these writers, James’s marriage to a Danish princess only accelerated his moral decline. Peyton insisted that he had witnessed her brother Christian IV, touring the country, and he saw that ‘after repast’ Christian ‘took for a collation the handsomest daughter, kinswoman or servant in the house (al her kindred adorning her with all sorts of wearing ornaments)’. The king then ‘solaced himself with this jewel so long as he pleased’. The king’s son was equally casual. He rode ‘in a Sled drawn with horses, bells fastned to them, which tingled as he passed through Townes’, and ‘the noise caused the women to run out of doors’. He then ‘beholding one more amiable then the rest, beckning to her with his finger, presently she came to the Sled, and accompanied him to some Hosttery [sic], till he had satisfied his lust’.28 Christian IV’s sister brought these casual mores first to Edinburgh and then to Whitehall. Peyton in particular fastened onto James’ queen. Although contemporaries largely knew Anne for her fondness for jewellery and Catholicism, Peyton emphasised her voracious sexual appetite. The marriage of a lady ‘of a goodly presence, beautiful eyes and strong’ to ‘a Prince young and weak’ proved a ‘union unsutable, for a Virago to couple with a Spiny and thin Creature’. Consequently ‘to further a female content’, she ‘placed in her delight one Master Stuart of the house of the Earle of Murray’. Learning of ‘his haunting her Chamber too sedulously’, James ordered his young rival burned in his own house. Anne then found ‘others to satisfie her unruly appetite’, most notably the earl of Gowrie who had ‘a comly visage, good stature, and of an attracting allurement’. Again James developed ‘suspition of often society with the Queen’, and with the help of John Ramsey, he murdered him. Nevertheless, the queen proved insatiable. She took up first with ‘Lord Saintcleare, then Ambassador in Denmark’, who later claimed Prince Henry ‘to be his own son’. Next, she ‘entertained into her service one Mr Beely a
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Dane’ who ‘grew more entire in her thoughts’. Peyton then testified that Beely had ‘in great secrecie discovered to me, he was natural Father to King Charls’. When Beely was ‘waxing old’, Anne then took up with two Bohannon brothers who ‘being partners in her affection, fell out in a Duell, and killed one another for priority in her love’. Well might The None-Such Charles insist that James ‘acknowledged him [Charles] not for his owne Son’.29 According to Peyton, Anne’s sexual adventures extended to her children. Concerned that her eldest son Prince Henry was ‘too serious’, she ‘initiated him in the Court of Cupid’, and ‘she shut him under lock and key in a chamber with a beautiful young Lady’. This action horrified Peyton, for it ‘shewed her love of the sport’ and revealed her to be ‘more like a Bawd; than a discreet Mother’. According to Peyton, her end was appalling –and appropriate. Finding herself ‘with childe’, Anne used ‘Physick’ and ‘destroyed it’. But ‘the Skeleton remained’, and efforts for the foetus ‘to be purged away’ proved ‘all in vain’. Hence the child ‘rotted in her’.30 Loose sexual mores also came from Paris. Peyton chronicled ‘these bawdy transactions’ because they ‘may bring nearer to our memories the fashion of Charles his Reigne’ and reveal ‘how sin was hatched from an Egg to a Dragon to devoure the holinesse of life’. These baleful foreign influences made the English Court hopelessly dissolute; indeed ‘the Masks and Playes at Whitehall were used onely for Incentives to lust’ in which ‘the Courtiers invited the Citizens wives to those shews, on purpose to defile them’. Sceptics had only to consider that ‘there is not a Lobby nor Chamber (if it could speak) but could verify this’. Henrietta Maria further unsettled the Court’s moral compass. In order to dominate her husband, ‘she bedded not with the King some nights’, which, Peyton noted, ‘were the devices of cunning Dames, when silly men, being horn-beated [i.e., cuckolded], are cured without a plaster’.31 Both king and queen, Peyton insisted, were ‘peccant.’ Henrietta was ‘advertized of Charles his lubricity with divers Ladies his Mistresses’, one of whom was ‘a great married Lady’. She witnessed his jealousy over ‘a lord handing [sic] a Countess he dearly loved through the court of Whitehall’. In response, the queen attempted to embarrass one of Charles’ mistresses by remarking that the woman ‘would be a better Mistris for a king, then a wife for a knight’, but the lady smoothly replied ‘I had rather be Mistris to a King then any mans wife’. Given Charles’ amours, king and queen reached an understanding; ‘one had freedome of Mistresses, and the other of Servants’. Peyton then spelled out what he meant. Henrietta had ‘too much familiarity with Buckingham, Holland, and Jermine’, and while Peyton suggestively remarked that ‘the Duke, for fear the French Ladies should tell tales of George, often mounted on his steed’, his attention never wandered far from Lord Jermyn, the queen’s household officer: ‘Behold, if we examine Queen Mary, she cannot cleare her reputation with Harry Jermine.’ He insisted that
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‘if king Charles had not been so blinded, it had been discovered long ago, and she punished or divorced’. Yet Charles ‘being guilt of the same crime, winked at it’. An unnamed earl begged the king to investigate this scandal, telling him ‘if he would not believe the unsutable behaviour between the Queen and Jirmine, if he would go into her Chamber, he might be satisfied, and behold Jermine sitting upon the bed with the Queen’. He did so and ‘found her and Jermine in that posture’.32 These stories of sexual excess allowed the republican writers to cast a very long, dark shadow over the dynasty and to play on contemporary anxieties about aggressive women, bisexual men and adulterous couples. Admittedly, these reports would have not fazed many cavaliers, but they would have appalled devout Calvinists. Hence Nedham enjoyed warning the Scots to ‘take heed he [Charles II] do not turn their wives into Lemmans; for, they say, he hath that way an excellent facility’. Since the prince shared the family’s obsession with sex, Nedham told the Scots in early June 1651 that ‘as for the Title of young Tarquin [Charles II], who now would fain be accounted the Right heir, let us but remember from whence he had it, and how it is now tainted’.33 As Milton, Hall, Nedham and especially Peyton had emphasised, the prince was actually the heir, not of the House of Stuart, but rather of the more obscure House of Jermyn-Beely-Rizzio. The preface to the Buchanan reprint made precisely this point: since ‘all Bloud-Royall is not unmingled’, subjects ‘may iustly fear, that many times they adore a perkin-Warbeck instead of a Duke of York’.34
III Along with sexual depravity, the Stuart Black Legend also highlighted several murders. By the early 1650s, many radicals assumed that Mary Queen of Scots had murdered Lord Darnley, that James I had killed the earl of Gowrie, and that either James or Charles had poisoned Prince Henry in 1612. While anti-Stuart works alluded to these events, they brooded over the murders of Sir Thomas Overbury and James I. These two charges, which have been discussed at length elsewhere, need only a brief rehearsal here.35 In 1626, a Brussels printer, likely financed by Habsburg officials, possibly including the Conde de Gondomar, printed George Eglisham’s allegation that Buckingham had poisoned King James. After circulating in ‘underground’ political culture for two decades, this charge finally emerged in the House of Commons early in 1648 when the Parliament-men used it to justify their decision to end all negotiations with King Charles. In the resulting Declaration, the Commons highlighted what a majority regarded as a strong possibility: that Charles I had been involved in his father’s death
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either before or after the fact. This allegation ignited a major furore and generated numerous royalist replies. Early in 1649 when planning the king’s trial, some had argued for a full indictment, which would have begun with the charge about James’ death. In the end, if only in the interests of a speedier trial, it was decided to confine the indictment to events of the civil wars. Nevertheless, this accusation hung around the proceedings, and immediately after the king’s execution, John Cook, the prosecutor, printed King Charls His Case, containing what he would have said if Charles had entered a plea, and here Cook reiterated the same charge that had appeared a year earlier in the Commons’ Declaration. The charge quickly became an accepted fact by radicals –and an infamous libel by royalists. Early in the 1650s, it loomed large in anti-Stuart works, receiving extensive coverage from Weldon, Peyton and in the None-Such Charles.36 While there were ample grounds to repudiate the idea of James I’s poisoning, there was no denying that the countess and earl of Somerset had poisoned Sir Thomas Overbury, a scandal that had rocked the nation in 1615–16. The two poisonings were not linked until early in 1648 when a remix of Eglisham’s original allegations about James’ poisoning came out, urging readers to note ‘King James His Protestation concerning our Soveraign Lord the King that now is’; he often publikly protested even in the presence of his apparent Heire, That if His owne sonne should commit Murther, or any such execrable act of injury, he would not spare him, but would have him dye for it, and would have him more severely punished then any other.
In fact, James had said this to the judges investigating the Overbury murder, and he had never even hinted at his son’s involvement. Yet aside from this quotation, the 1648 text made no mention of the 1615– 16 case. That changed in 1650 when Anthony Weldon’s history of James’s reign highlighted the Overbury scandal. So too did Truth Brought to Light and A True and Historical Relation of the Poysoning of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1651, and A Cat May Look Upon a King and Peyton’s Divine Catastrophe in 1652.37 Needless to say, this Overbury revival occurred during the Scottish crisis of 1650–2. From these shocking stories of murders and sexual transgressions, republican authors fashioned compelling accounts of the ‘accursed family’.
IV The godly were well aware of generational curses. After all, the Fourth Commandment forbad the use of graven image, lest God punish ‘the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation’.
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The republican writers therefore used this stern punishment to capture their readers’ attention. Ironically the Covenanters themselves encouraged them to do so. In June 1650, they made Prince Charles acknowledge ‘all the sins of his Fathers house’ in order to avoid ‘visiting the sins of the Fathers upon the Children’. While Charles II was understandably coy about elaborating on the family’s sins, the republican authors were happy to do so. Initially Politicus scoffed at the news: the Scottish Presbyterians ‘were the Beagles wherewith they hunted his great Grandam, grand-sire and Daddy out of Scotland, neither of which dyed a naturally death, for (they say) Jamy’s was more unnaturall than any, except Prince Henry’s’.38 Nedham then began broadcasting ‘This strange Fate’ of Charles II, which ‘is the very same which hath followed the whole Family for many Generations, For King James his Father (if we may say the Lord Darnly was his Father) was hang’d in Scotland, and by the consent (or rather conspiracy) of his own Wife’. Then ‘This mother of King James (Mary Queen of Scots) was, as well as his son Charls, beheaded in England, K. James himself and his eldest Son Henry, more then suspected to be both poysoned’. After adding that James’ daughter, Elizabeth, and Charles I’s wife, Henrietta Maria, had been driven into exile and ‘Buckingham stab’d’, the editor warned against supporting the young prince, because ‘they can have little confidence in a Cause, that admits of a Combination with that wretched Family’ and especially after they recalled ‘the ruines of the Scotish fatall Family’.39 Other writers quickly followed Nedham’s lead. In October 1650, Sir Anthony Weldon’s new book mocked the ‘anniversary Feast’ and regular sermons celebrating James’s deliverance from the Gowrie Plot, and after alluding to stories that James had murdered Gowrie for his affair with Anne, Weldon prayed that ‘the effects of those Sermons in the Fathers time for that service cause no ill effects, or be not one cause of Gods anger with us’. Then he cited James’s ‘dreadfull thunder-Curse’ at the beginning of the Overbury investigation –‘if I spare any that are found guilty Gods curse light on me and my posterity for ever’ –adding ‘I pray God, the effect be not felt amongst us even at this day’. After all, ‘God treasures up such imprecations and deprecations, and pours them out … upon King, Judges and the whole State’. In Ibbitson’s preface to the work, he asked ‘the Reader … would give glory to God, in acknowledging his Justice, in the ruining of that Family’. And he begged them ‘to take heed how they side with this bloody House, lest they be found opposers of Gods purpose, which doubtlesse is, to lay aside that Family, and to make it an example to posterity’.40 Thanks to these interventions, the polemicists knew how to respond to Charles II’s coronation early in 1651. The None-Such Charles echoed Weldon, which was predictable since Ibbitson printed both of them.
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It announced that ‘the Publick must justly expect to be acquainted with the crying Sins which have brought downe so signall a wrath from God upon that Family’. The preface explained that the book would trace ‘those dismall Fates, which proceeded from his [Charles I’s] and from his … Progenitors’, so that ‘consequently you are hereby acquainted with the successive curses which descended from them on their Posterity’. Indeed it was obvious that since all men must confesse, that as the Queene of Scots, was removed from the Earth: to prevent the mischeifes which shee might have done: So that it was a case … to cut off her Grand Sonne [Charles I], who had already done so much evill.
To emphasise this point, the book capitalised and italicised the passage: ‘The Justice of God doth punish the iniquities of the Fathers on the Children, unto the third and fourth Generation.’ Consequently, the book asked readers ‘to take heed how they side with that bloody House, least they be found to be opposers of Gods purpose’, which plainly was ‘to lay aside that Family and to make it an example to all posterity’. Plainly ‘the crying Sins’ of the Stuarts ‘have brought downe so signall a wrath from God upon that Family’.41 At the same time, John Hall marvelled at how the Scots ‘were strangely blinde as to Gods Iudgement perpetually powered out upon a Family’, because ‘it could be no other then Gods hand that arrested him in the height of his Designes and greatness, and cut off him and his Family’. In early February, The Weekly Intelligencer echoed the same line: ‘when God in Justice is pleased to examine the Deeds of Kings, although the offence is personal, yet the punishment is often National’. Consequently it is believed by grave Men that (amongst other things) God permitted this land to be covered with blood, because the King thereof (though often besought unto it) did forbear to make an Inquisition after blood for the Death of His Father.42
Even a broadsheet on Charles II’s Scottish coronation found space to mock King James VI who brought ‘a heavy curse, and terrible plague, into England’. Consequently ‘the Sins of’s Fathers house’ would soon make Charles II understand ‘What tis attends the STEWARD’s Family’.43 In spring 1651, Politicus returned to the ‘Tyrannick Family’, ‘the wretched Family’ and ‘the Fatall Family’, warning the Scots to ‘take heed then how ye dandle the Scotch Baby [Charles II]’. Likening the prince to Ishboseth, one of Saul’s sons who was ‘heir of the Curses of his Familie’ and eventually murdered, Nedham prayed for the moment when God hath opened the eyes of the Scots so far as to consider, that they have an Ishbosseth [sic] among them, Heir of a Famny [sic] … against whom destruction hath been written in broad Characters by the speciall hand of Providence.
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Furthermore Mary Queen of Scots’ various murders and adulteries made her a serious contender for the title of ‘Whore of Babylon’. Her son was responsible for the deaths of Gowrie, Walter Raleigh and Prince Henry; while Charles I likely murdered his father and abandoned millions of German Protestants to the tender mercies of the Counter-Reformation. Naturally ‘in the very same yeare wherein the peace of Germany was restored’ at Westphalia, ‘it pleased God to execute his wrath upon that bloody family’. Given the family history, the Scots had rightly compelled Charles II ‘to acknowledge the sins of his Fathers bloody and Idolatrous House: the wicked wayes of his Father, the Idolatry of his Mother, and the blood-guiltiness of his Fathers Family’. The next issue underscored the ‘blood-guiltinesse of that pernicious House’, guilt which descended ‘from Father to Son, for divers generations’. Since Charles II was ‘Heir apparent of that Blood and vengeance which belongs to his Fathers house’, Nedham italicised the biblical warning, ‘Woe to the bloody house’.44 These variants were all embodied in Edward Peyton’s Divine Catastrophe of the Kingly Family of the House of Stuart. In addition to exposing the sexual deviance and ruthless violence within the dynasty, this book sought ‘to prove Gods just revenging hand on the Family of the Kingly Stuarts of Scotland’ and to illustrate ‘the just Judgement of God on the Family of these Stuarts’. For him, there was no denying ‘the Almighty hand of God hath determined the extirpation of the Royal Stock of the Stuarts, for murthering one of another, for their prophane Government, and wanton Lasciviousness of those Imps ingrafted in that Stock’. Peyton’s catalogue of the dynasty’s murders and sexual excesses was designed to reveal that ‘the cup of Gods vengeance was filled to the brim, for king Charles his Family to drink the dregs’.45
V These anti-Stuart denunciations ended with Peyton’s book in 1652. By then, such works were no longer needed since the Scots were being incorporated into the Commonwealth. Later in the 1650s, the language of the damned dynasty did not return in any sustained way, and after 1660 it vanished altogether in print. It is easy to see how this rhetoric had first developed. From Charles I the man of blood, a common metaphor in 1648–9, it was an easy step after Prince Charles claimed his father’s throne to the cursed dynasty, a charge that fitted neatly into the Free State’s rhetoric about ushering in a new age without monarchs and aristocrats. Interestingly, the tone in 1650–2 was markedly different from earlier Anglo- Scottish conflicts, which generally revived
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predictable ethnic caricatures. Instead English polemicists then begged their former allies and fellow Calvinists to reconsider their enthusiasm for young Charles Stuart, and they did so by constantly reminding them of the family’s sins. Granted in the 1650s ‘Britishness’ was still at least a century or more away. Yet it is fascinating to see that English writers then stressing the communalities, not the differences, of the two nations, and chief among these shared experiences was their common suffering under the Stuarts. We cannot not tell if this anti-Stuart rhetoric weakened Presbyterian commitment to Prince Charles. Yet it plainly made an impression on the Free State’s supporters. In January 1651, for instance, George Bishop wrote to Cromwell, telling him to take heart, for ‘Certainly God hath cursed that kingly race’. This language returned again in the early 1660s when contemporaries objected to the Restoration of Charles II. In Tynemouth, John Careuth denounced the new king as ‘the son of a whore, and that the late King was a son of a whore, and that the late King Charles poison’d his father’. Likewise in mid-Wales, Arthur Morris reportedly said that the new king ‘was a Bastard and that his mother was a whore; And that the Duke of Gloucester [Charles II’s brother] was the Lord Digbys Bastard’. Morris offered to prove what he had said by producing something he called ‘the booke of the generacons’.46 While the allegation of an affair between Henrietta Maria and Digby was novel, everything else merely repeated what had first appeared in print in 1650–2. The importance of this campaign is undeniable. ‘Slander,’ Robert Darnton aptly remarked, ‘has always been a nasty business, but its unsavoury character is no reason to consider it unworthy of serious study. By destroying reputations, it helped delegitimize regimes and bring down governments.’47 But while he was talking about eighteenth-century France, this essay has described a vivid, and largely forgotten, episode a century earlier in Britain. The English tales of a threesome involving James I and Prince Charles and of Queen Anne dying from a botched abortion easily equals the most vicious French libels about Louis XV and Marie Antoinette. This astonishing assault on the dynasty’s reputation also sits uncomfortably with Sharpe’s contention that the English Republic failed ‘significantly to undermine the culture of kingship’. While there might be a debate about what constituted a significant effort at undermining, the republican polemicists in 1650–2 unquestionably made a sustained effort to make the Stuarts, and kingship itself, odious. Above all else, this chapter has endorsed Ann Hughes’ contention that ‘attention to gender can enrich our understanding of much studied political developments’. To be sure, this effort to revile the royal family has not hitherto attracted scholarly attention. Nevertheless, without recalling contemporary gender norms, we would otherwise miss the gripping power of these lurid tales, which depicted the wholesale subversion of ‘gender
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order and propriety within the royal household’, and we would miss the horrified gaze of godly readers on both sides of the Tweed as this royal cast of effeminate and hen-pecked men and sexually dominant women slipped from sexual excess and murder to utter depravity.48
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Notes 1 Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Common-wealth of England Stated (1650, ESTC, N377). 2 Andrew Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2010), pp. 112–15. See also Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 461–562; S. R. Gardiner, The History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1656 (4 vols, London, 1894), i. 278– 329, 368–476. 3 A Declaration of the Army (19 July 1650, BL, E.607[20]), p. 4; A Perfect Diurnall, 33 (29 July 1650), p. 390. 4 The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. T. Carlyle and S. C. Lomas (3 vols, London, 1904), ii. 144, 240, 79: Cromwell to Strahan, 25 October 1650; Cromwell to Cotton, 2 October 1651; Cromwell to the General Assembly of the Kirk, 3 August 1650. 5 Ibid., ii. 145, 130, 196: Cromwell to Strahan, 25 October 1650; Cromwell to Dundas, 13 December 1650; and report from Glasgow. 6 Declaration of the Army (19 July 1650), p. 4; The Lord Gen. Cromwell’s Letter (23 August 1650, BL, E.610[4]), pp. 4–5; Perfect Diurnall, 33 (29 July 1650), p. 387; Perfect Diurnall, 60 (3 February 1651), p. 790; Severall Proceedings in Parliament, 43 (25 July 1650), p. 221: ‘A Letter from Newcastle’, 18 July 1650. 7 R. F., The Scot Arraigned ([16 June] 1651, BL, E.632[10]), pp. 3–5, 8. See also A New and True Declaration of the False Treachery of the Scots ([23 June] 1651, BL, E.632[17]); The False Brother (1651, BL, E.620[13]); The Changeable Covenant ([29 February] 1651, BL, E.613[11]); and Henry Parker, Scotlands Holy War ([17 January] 1651, BL, E.621[16]). 8 One Blow More at Babylon ([15 February] 1651, BL, E.623[16]). 9 An Examination of the Seasonable and Necessarie Warning concerning present Dangers and Duties Emitted from … the Kirk of Scotland ([25 July] 1650, BL, E.608[13]); A Letter from the King of Scots to the Pope of Rome (1652, ESTC, C3098). 10 Henry Parker, Scotlands Holy War (1651, ESTC, P421), p. 65; The Remonstrance of the Presbyterie of Sterling ([10 February] 1651, BL, E.623[18]); A Word of Advertisemnt [sic] to the Godly Party in Scotland ([4 February] 1651, BL, E.623[4]). 11 James Rew, The Wounds of the Kirk of Scotland ([14 October] 1650, BL, E.614[8]); A Strange and Wonderful Prophecy of Mr Douglas a Scotchman ([22 January] 1651, BL, E.622[6]); Strange News from Scotland … a Dreadful Prophecie of Mr. Douglas ([14 February] 1651, BL, E.626[15]).
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12 Declaration of the Army, p. 5; Briefe Relation, 45 (2 July 1650), p. 674; Letters and Speeches, ii. 140–1: Cromwell to the Committee of Estates, 9 October 1650. 13 Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon, 2012), p. 25; Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars (London, 2010), p. 388. 14 Mercurius Politicus, 1 (13 June 1651), p. 2; Henry Parker, The True Portraiture of the Kings of England ([7 August] 1650, BL, E.609[2]). See also Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007), pp. 14–54, 154–240. 15 Sir Anthony Weldon, The Court and Character of King James ([1 October] 1650, BL, E.1338[1]) (sig. a4v). 16 Perfect Passages, 27 (17 January 1651), p. 177; Letters and Speeches, ii. 151: Cromwell to Lenthall, 4 December 1650; A True Relation of a Second Victorie ([16 December] 1650, BL, E.620[1]), p. 7: ‘The Humble Remonstrance’, 25 October 1650; Perfect Passages, 27 (17 January 1651), p. 181. 17 The None-Such Charles His Character (1651, BL, E.1345[2]); John Milton, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651); John Hall, The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy (1651); R. Scott Spurlock, ‘Cromwell’s Edinburgh press and the development of print culture in Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review, 90 (2011), 179–203, pp. 189–91. On the dating of the None-Such, see Weekly Intelligencer, 4 (21 January 1651), p. 32. 18 A Cat May Look Upon a King ([10 January] 1652, BL, E.1408[2]); Sir Edward Peyton, The Divine Catastrophe of the Kingly Family of the House of Stuarts ([24 April] 1652, BL, E.1291[1]), pp. 11, 23–4. On the date of A Cat, see: Severall Proceedings in Parliament, 143 (17 June 1652), supplemental insert 4. 19 George Wither, A Timelie Caution (1652, ESTC, W3199), p. 3; William Lilly, Merlini Anglici Ephmeris (1651, BL, E.1343[3]); Radius Heliconicus, or the Resolution of a Free State (1651, BL, 669.f.15[83]). 20 Hall, Grounds and Reasons, pp. 25, 37, 40–2; Mercurius Politicus, 12 (22–29 August 1650), p. 180. 21 Mercurius Politicus, 53 (5–12 June 1651), p. 854; Mercurius Politicus, 64 (21– 28 Aug 1651), pp. 1013–16; Mercurius Politicus, 65 (28 Aug to 4 Sept 1651), pp. 1029–31; Parker, True Portraiture, p. 36; A Cat, pp. 20, 26, 28. 22 Mercurius Politicus, 50 (15–22 May 1651), pp. 797–9; Mercurius Politicus, 51 (22–29 May 1651), p. 815; Hall, Grounds and Reasons, p. 42. 23 Peyton, Divine Catastrophe, p. 14; Hall, Grounds and Reasons, pp. 42–3; A Cat, p. 86. 24 Peyton, Divine Catastrophe, p. 14; Hall, Grounds and Reasons, p. 43. 25 A Cat, p. 86; John Milton, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (trans. Donald McKenzie), in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Wolfe (8 vols, New Haven, 1966), iv. 372, 408, 451; George Buchanan, A Detection of the Actions of Mary Queen of Scots ([12 February] 1651, BL, E.1382[2]). 26 Weldon, Court and Character, p. 8; Peyton, Divine Catastrophe, pp. 29, 31, 43; A Cat, pp. 47, 81; None-such Charles, pp. 13–17, 21, 30, 36–7. 27 A Cat, pp. 47, 78; Peyton, Divine Catastrophe, pp. 47, 78; None-such Charles, pp. 20–2, 33–4.
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28 Peyton, Divine Catastrophe, pp. 65–6. 29 Ibid., pp. 20–3; and The None-Such Charles, p. 18. 30 Peyton, Divine Catastrophe, pp. 27, 29–30. 31 Ibid., pp. 46–7, 56. 32 Ibid., pp. 56, 68–70, 128. 33 Mercurius Politicus, 1 (6–13 June 1650), p. 14; Mercurius Politicus, 52 (29 May–5 June 1651), p. 832. 34 Buchanan, A Detection [sig. *6v]. 35 Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603– 1660 (Cambridge, 2002); Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (New Haven, 2015). 36 See Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 6, 20–1. 37 George Eglisham, A Declaration to the Kingdome of England (1648, BL, E.427[5]), pp. 1–2, italics in original. See also A True and Historical Relation of the Poysoning of Sir Thomas Overbury (1651); [Michael Sparke], Truth Brought to Light (1651); A Cat; Peyton, Divine Catastrophe. 38 Bible (King James Version), Deuteronomy 5:4; A Declaration by the Kings Majesty ([27 June] 1650, BL, E.1030[8]) pp. 1–2; Mercurius Politicus, 11 (15– 22 August 1650), p. 162. 39 Mercurius Politicus, 14 (5–12 September 1650), pp. 210–11. 40 Weldon, Court and Character, pp. 8, 10, 100–1, and sigs A4–v [A5–5v]. 41 None-such Charles, pp. [sig. A3–3v], 2–4, 30–1. 42 Hall, Grounds and Reasons, p. 49; Weekly Intelligencer, 16 (4 February 1651), p. 41. 43 Old Saying and Predictions (1651, BL, 669.f.16[13]). 44 Mercurius Politicus, 41 (20 March 1651), p. 657; Mercurius Politicus, 43 (3 April 1651), pp. 685–6; Mercurius Politicus, 50 (15–22 May 1651), pp. 799–801. 45 Peyton, Divine Catastrophe, [sig. A3v–4], 11–12, 91. 46 J. Nickolls, ed., Originial Letters and Papers … Addressed to Oliver Cromwell (1743), p. 50: Bishop to Cromwell, 14 January [1651]; Depositions from the Castle of York (1834), p. 84; TNA, SP 29/67, fo. 211. 47 Robert Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water (Philadelphia, 2010), p. 6. 48 Hughes, Gender, p. 3; Sharpe, Image Wars, p. 388.
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Indemnity, sovereignty and justice in the army debates of 1647 Sean Kelsey In the spring of 1647, the officers and men of the English Parliament’s main field army, reacting to the prospect of their intended disbandment, appealed in writing to their commanding officer, Sir Thomas Fairfax.1 Their ‘humble representation’ opened by declaring that Whereas the necessity and exigency of the war hath put us upon many actions which the law would not warrant, nor we have acted in a time of settled peace; we humbly desire that, before our disbanding, a full and sufficient provision may be made by Ordinance of Parliament (to which the royal assent may be desired), for our indemnity and security in all such services.2
The soldiers’ words are a reminder that the famous ‘rise of the New Model Army’ began with a demand for indemnity. Their insistence on relief from the legal consequences of their wartime actions, the legislation passed in May and June providing that relief, and the work of the parliamentary committee responsible for enforcing it have all been examined closely by historians of the English Civil War ever since John Morrill placed indemnity at the centre of his account of ‘the army revolt of 1647’.3 To adopt a distinction first drawn by Michael Mendle,4 indemnity has generally been approached in one of two ways: as a ‘practical and political’ matter, by historians interested in the impact of civil war on English society, or the ‘politicisation’ of the New Model Army;5 and more recently, by historians addressing what Professor Mendle has called the topic’s ‘theoretical and constitutional’ dimensions.6 The underlying connections between these ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’ dimensions of indemnity were drawn long ago by Ann Hughes, in her path-finding study of indemnity proceedings and the impact of civil war in Warwickshire. Questioning Professor Morrill’s characterisation of the indemnity administration as a straightforward instance of arbitrary parliamentarian rule, Professor Hughes noted that ‘the experience of civil war seems to have forced people to reflect in a more urgent manner on what the law was and when it should or should not be implemented’, and on ‘profound questions of legality, justice, necessity and tyranny’.7
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Arising with particular intensity at the boundary between military and civilian jurisdictions surveyed by Barbara Donagan, these questions lay at the heart of the crisis of authority that had led into the cataclysm of civil war in England, as well as the quest for settlement that would lead back out again. And they are questions that made indemnity an issue whose resolution has been described with every justification by Ian Gentles as ‘intrinsically political’.8 On the whole they are not questions, however, with which the modern scholarship has been principally concerned, focused as it is on contemporary attempts to answer them. Indeed, according to Professor Mendle, the challenge of cutting through the hopelessly ‘Gordian’ entanglement of theoretical issues with indemnity’s practical complexities helped inspire the first Agreement of the People, much of the novelty of which lay in its attempt to ‘entrench’ indemnity legislation, thus preventing its amendment or abolition by a future sovereign legislature.9 This argument has been developed by Elliot Vernon and Phil Baker in their re-characterisation of the first Agreement as an attempt to secure the ‘twin’, ‘material and political demands’ of indemnity and liberty, ‘before any settlement with the king’.10 The object of this chapter is to build upon the work of all these scholars in order to describe the substance of the problem of indemnity itself –rather than just the implementation of solutions to it –as a key issue in the politics of settlement, the struggle for the constitution in post-civil war England, and the involvement of the parliamentarian army in those things. Although it offers a view on the debate as to the so-called ‘politicisation’ of the army, its main aim is to provide a different perspective on divisions emerging within it, from the late spring and early summer of 1647 onwards. It is the contention of this chapter that indemnity became a central issue in a vigorous and increasingly angry debate among the soldiers over the constitutional settlement of the kingdom. Arguments about indemnity provided a vehicle for the rise of ‘the new model mutineers’ –the men who, in the course of the soldiers’ ‘mutiny’ against their political masters at Westminster, would end up leading a ‘mutiny within a mutiny’ against their own commanders. The primary objective of what follows is to demonstrate that the debates fostered by anxieties about indemnity would contribute substantially to the emergence of a political and ideological environment in which, by the autumn of 1647, calls for a judicial proceeding against Charles I started to gain significant amplification from within the English army. The evidence (such as it is) suggests that, during the autumn of 1647, in seeking to address the conundrum of indemnity, a number of soldiers and their civilian associates steered their way, via some of Professor Hughes’ hard questions about the source, and legitimate exercise of sovereign authority, to the seemingly simple solution of ‘justice’.
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I The moment they began mobilising to fight in 1642 –and notwithstanding all the other complex features of their reasoning, and unreasoning, for doing so –contemporaries understood the significance of what was happening in terms of its almost unfathomable legal import. The appointments to military command of the earls of Warwick and Essex in the summer of 1642 included arrangements for holding each harmless from the legal consequences of things they and their subordinates did in the performance of their respective roles, and they set the tone.11 As Professor Morrill observed more than forty years ago: ‘Many of the principal military and fiscal ordinances … contained clauses freeing the agents of Parliament from any legal liability for actions undertaken on parliamentary authority.’12 In fact, ordinances for matters as diverse as regulating Cambridge University, removing scandalous ministers in the Eastern Association, and the better observation of the monthly fast all made similar provision.13 By providing that all those enforcing their ordinances should be held harmless against the suits of those alleging they had acted illegally or unlawfully in so doing, the two Houses acknowledged, even if they obviously did not accept, that there were those who would hold their legislative instruments in contempt. The issue of indemnity was ‘always already’ an index of attempts to manage the catastrophe of a constitutional crisis so deep it was no longer possible to tell objectively who exercised legitimate legislative authority. And it was an issue that sat at the heart of the English peace process. At Uxbridge in 1645, and again at Newcastle in 1646, the first parliamentarian demand required the king to repudiate all proclamations and declarations issued since 1642 in denunciation of the legislation and proceedings of his English and Scots Parliaments. It expressly also provided that ‘all judgments, indictments, outlawries, attainders, and inquisitions in any the said causes; and all grants thereupon had or made, or to be made or had, be declared null, suppressed and forbidden’.14 The entire issue of what Robert Ashton has called ‘revolutionary illegality’ went as wide and as deep as early modern English society itself. Cleaning up the Augean legal mess left behind by civil war was always going to be a Herculean task. When set in this wider context, the routine bracketing of the soldiers’ supposedly ‘mundane’ insistence on indemnity with what are often described as their ‘bread-and-butter’ claims, or their ‘material’ demands would not appear particularly apt.15 It is perfectly clear, right from the very start, that the articulate rank-and-file were well aware that their situation reflected the complex reality of a full-blown constitutional crisis
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whose victims they were in grave personal danger of becoming. They were also perfectly capable of conveying that danger in a way their less articulate comrades-in-arms could readily understand. The soldiers’ intention of petitioning ‘the honourable house of Parliament’16 was announced to their officers in March 1647 in the first of three Apologies published that spring. Those who wrote it explained that they had been ‘inforced, or rather provokd’ to such course by ‘seeing … how the common enemyes of our peace are countenanced and we disregarded, or rather contemned, and the honest partie of the Kingdome in all parts slited, and in many places imprisoned’. Contemplation of the sad lot of men and women ‘who have shewen themselves with us, and for us in these our sad calamities, and that ten times more for our just priviledge and liberties, then for their owne ends’ made the soldiers ‘sensible, what we are like to suffer, when once dispersed’, unless the parliamentarians ‘will … thinke upon us … and not … expose us into the hands of … mercilesse men’. Without protection, it would not be safe for the soldiers to profess such truths as God had revealed to them, nor even ‘speake in the behalf of this our just and lawfull service’.17 More powerful still than this sense of the suffering being visited upon ‘the honest partie’ at large was that feature of indemnity that would make it so explosive as an issue with inherent constitutional significance. The same text began with the soldiers’ recollection of their loyal service in a war ‘which was, and is both justifiable and warrantable for you [i.e., the soldiers’ commanders], which both by the law of nature, and the necessity of the land, through the permittance of God you have been called unto’. These were practically the first recorded words of the army revolt, and they express sentiments that confirm the truth of Austin Woolrych’s assertion that ‘the politicisation of the army was already well advanced when it first began to stir’.18 March 1647 witnessed not the matriculation of political theory freshmen, but the graduation of a class perfectly conversant with the principles underpinning the ideology of parliamentary supremacism, and thoroughly schooled in the often harsh realities of putting them into practice. In their ‘humble Petition’ addressed to Fairfax a few days later, and commending to him their first Humble Representation, the soldiers –now officers and men together –justified themselves by express reference to Parliament’s ‘manifold promises, and declarations, to protect and defend those that appeared, and acted in their service’.19 There was, however, a politically devastating paradox at work here. A large part of the reason why indemnity had become such a big issue was not only the promotion from within Westminster of the very movement to re-establish the old judicial and administrative order to which soldiers and civilians alike were now falling prey, but also the protection at Westminster of the very men who were now
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taking advantage of the restoration of peace to punish those who had put their lives and fortunes on the line fighting to restore it.20 The reaction to the soldiers’ petitioning activities merely served to underline those terrible truths. The notorious parliamentarian ‘declaration of dislike’ acted like a lightning strike, electrifying the nascent campaign for indemnity. The ranks now addressed their officers again, in their second and third Apologies, at the end of April 1647 and the start of May.21 The soldiers now complained that having defeated their enemies in battle, they now faced ‘farre worse’, in the shape of men ‘who like foxes lurke in their dennes, and cannot be dealt withal, though discovered, being protected by those who are intrusted with the Government of the Kingdome’. Moreover, when the soldiers had protested that they and other ‘cordiall friends to the Parliament’ found themselves ‘slighted, abused, beaten, and dragged to jayles, yea to the utter ruin of their estates, and losse of their lives’, they had been condemned as enemies to the state. Meanwhile, Parliament itself had appointed as judges ‘such as have [been] and are now the enemies of the Parliament and Kingdome’. That was why ‘so many of our fellow souldiers, that have been disbanded, have been so rigorously dealt withal’ for things that had been done in the service of men who ‘could not have safely sat in the House of Parliament with their heads on’ otherwise. The soldiers professed to perceive in all this ‘a cleare designe to enslave all the honest party of this Kingdome, and in them wee and you also’, warning their officers that any of them who did not ‘stand fast’ would ‘be marked with a brand of infamie for ever, as a traytor to his countrey, and an enemie to his armie’.22 All three of the soldiers’ Apologies identified the political imperative of establishing a peace that did not physically imperil the war’s victors. In May, as the regiments each sought to articulate their grievances, the injustice of the situation was summarised in the words of soldiers under the command of Colonel Nathaniel Rich, in ‘the recalling to our serious meditation the miserable imprisonment and ignominious death of many who were reall and faithfull in this Service’, with a kind of mournful disbelief ‘that we who suffered for the Parliament, should now be made sufferers by the Parliament, for acting things that were attendant to their Service’.23 Colonel John Hewson’s men were even more to the point, saying that without an indemnity ‘we fear that we should be hanged like dogs for the good service that we have done this kingdom’ in obedience to Parliament’s commands.24 At around this time, Captain William Rainborowe claimed that ‘to speak seriously many of [the men of his troop] did not know what they did, for many of them cried out “indemnity”, “indemnity”, and afterwards asked me what it was’.25 But in the grievances articulated from within Rich’s and Hewson’s regiments can be heard the authentic sound of men who knew exactly what was at stake.
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From the start, the demand for indemnity was nothing less than a requirement that the parliamentarian leadership act as if Parliament really were the sovereign body they had all along insisted it was, extend to the soldiers their sovereign protection, and translate their armies’ hard-fought victories into a new civil order that would protect, not consume all those who had contributed to winning them. Insofar as that challenge necessarily involved questions of legislative sovereignty, judicial authority and executive power, it would soon come to be characterised as a requirement that the kingdom’s very constitutional arrangements be brought into conformity with the justice that God had administered so decisively on the battlefield.
II On 21 May 1647, Parliament passed an Indemnity Ordinance that fell far short of meeting the challenge. Although it ‘fully acquitted and discharged’ those who had acted or commanded ‘by authority of this present Parl[iament] or for the service or benefit thereof’, plainly it did not meet expectations.26 The royalist judge, David Jenkins, did what he could from his confinement in the Tower of London to stoke the anxieties of the soldiers, opining within days that no ordinance could indemnify anyone: they were the illegal instruments of men who would do better to beg from their sovereign an indemnity for themselves against the consequences of their lawless rebellion. Only an act of Parliament would do. And that required a free Parliament, and royal assent.27 But Jenkins’ recommendation that the soldiers throw themselves on the king’s mercy was not a particularly judicious reading of their mood. In their second Humble Representation, agreed at Kentford Heath on 4 June, the day before they entered their famous Solemn Engagement to one another, the soldiers took a rather more pragmatic line in their criticism of the Indemnity Ordinance, pointing out the difficulties of proving that they had acted with due authority, and for the ‘benefit’ of Parliament. What they wanted was ‘an Act or Ordinance of oblivion for all trespasses, or other things so done by soldiers in this war’.28 Forced to sit up by what was happening at Newmarket in the wake of the king’s abduction by Cornet George Joyce from Holdenby, Parliament passed a further ordinance on 7 June. It expressly pardoned ‘all persons who have committed any offences, trespasses, injuries, or other misdemeanours whatsoever’ while in Parliament’s military service, and provided that their actions be ‘put in oblivion’. It justified this blanket protection as a necessary evil required in order to ensure that none be ‘brought into a continual vexation for such actions as the exigency of War hath necessitated them unto’.29
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On paper, thus reinforced, the legislative scheme would appear reasonably effective. Any soldier pursued for acting without legitimate authority could point to the blanket pardon. There was now less point prosecuting or suing soldiers in relation to their actions in wartime. Indemnity is a notable absence from the famous 14 June declaration of the army.30 All The Heads of the Proposals would have to say, six weeks later, was to require ‘that the Ordinances for indemnity may be confirmed.’31 And on 21 September, in certain ‘desires of the army in relation to themselves as souldiers’, a request was made that the Indemnity Ordinances simply ‘be past into Acts at the setling of a peace’.32 There had been signs in the preceding months that there were those among the army high command who were not particularly comfortable with the violent passions that the issue of indemnity was capable of stirring, and no doubt many senior officers were relieved to be able to act as if a line had been drawn fairly definitively under the issue. Yet, for many, indemnity remained a live and highly emotive issue. It is not difficult to see why. David Jenkins pointed out in an update to his opinion on the legal inefficacy of the legislative regime that the new ordinance did not cover felonies, some of them punishable by death, which as Jenkins pointed out ‘is the main businesse insisted upon, and most concerneth the Souldiers security’.33 Neither would it have assisted much had it been known, moreover, that the Commons had voted to omit reference to felonies from a draft of the second ordinance.34 And the new ordinance did nothing at all to improve the condition of those honest, well-affected civilians whose plight had first stirred the soldiers to action back in March. Part of the reason why indemnity continued to rouse passions after 7 June 1647 may be the efforts of some to exploit it to that end, in order to harness the radical potential of the army’s revolt. The commander of the brigade in the North, Major General Sydenham Poyntz, complained that in mid-June 1647 agitators who had come among the men under his command were inciting them to band together until they had been properly indemnified, and actively endeavouring to undermine Poyntz’s efforts to maintain discipline with tales of fourteen soldiers hung for taking horses in obedience to their commanding officers’ orders.35 In the South, demanding a resumption of the march on the metropolis a month later, the agitators petitioned Fairfax and his Council of War, reciting as the last of their ‘grounds’ for putting pressure on Parliament the fact that ‘we see justice more perverted now than ever, and violent illegal proceedings of corrupt magistrates, against the most cordiall and well affected people in the Kingdom, who are wrongfully imprisoned, fined, &c, and as yet left remedyless’.36
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Indemnity remained an important issue for many soldiers even after the promulgation of the two ordinances in May and June 1647. Interestingly, however, the way in which the issue was articulated began to change, markedly, in the course of the summer. Debate came increasingly to focus on the new system’s legislative and constitutional underpinning, and specifically the intention that the two Indemnity Ordinances be converted into acts of Parliament. It was here that the whole issue of indemnity began to fuel the fires of revolutionary change. And again, it was those closest to an incipient ‘mutiny within a mutiny’ fanning the flames.
III One of Professor Hughes’ ‘profound questions’ with which the issue of indemnity would eventually require that the soldiers grapple was the constitutional principle of the king’s legislative veto. As we have seen, in late March 1647 they had demanded an indemnity ‘to which the Royal Assent may be desired’.37 By mid-May, in contemplation of what would happen if the king refused, some soldiers were already stating that they ‘should and shall acquiesse in the authority of Parliament for [their indemnity]’, just as they assumed Parliament itself would do if the king turned down its demands.38 In other words, it was assumed that, if the king would not co- operate, Parliament would indemnify its soldiers on its own authority. Obviously, Parliament had been legislating for the past five years with no regard to the requirement for royal assent, and would shortly do so again in passing the Indemnity Ordinances. But in reality, Parliament had never yet acted as if it was a de jure sovereign legislative body. As we also saw earlier, Parliament had consistently signalled its insecurity in the role, by providing that anybody responsible for implementing and enforcing its legislation should be held harmless from any legal consequences of doing so. Indeed, the very ordinance creating the indemnity regime in May expressly indemnified judges and juries who enforced it. And this presiding insecurity was perhaps nowhere better embodied than in the evolving parliamentarian strategy for settlement –including the proposition that Charles I assent to an act declaring Parliament to have been ‘necessitated’ to fight a war in its own self-defence, reflecting the fact that, politically, settlement with the defeated king inevitably required that he himself finally accept, in essence, Professor Mendle’s ‘political theory of the emergency’.39 This was all a very long way from the position adopted as early as the winter of 1642–3 by some of Parliament’s more radical partisans, who had begun arguing that the king was personally responsible for a war fought in
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defiance of the absolute legislative sovereignty of the two Houses, and that his assertion of a legislative veto was invalid.40 In their presumption that Parliament must surely intend to indemnify them on the basis that it was a sovereign legislature, some of the soldiers seem to have begun by mid-1647 – whether deliberately, at the outset, or perhaps even fully consciously, it is hard to say –to throw their weight behind such arguments, in the process transforming the politics and the pace of the quest for settlement. For a number of reasons, this development began to gather momentum in the summer of 1647. An important catalyst in this process was provided in September by an episode that has been remarked in the past but whose true significance has gone pretty much unnoticed.41 A group of leading army agitators took up the cases of four ex-soldiers convicted in the spring at Surrey assizes for ‘words spoken against the king (acting in his tyrannical practises in the late war)’, and languishing in the dreadful dungeons of the White Lion at Southwark, demanding their indemnification. One of them was guilty of no more than refusing to drink the king’s health, and ‘saying, that King James said, that the king which ruled not according to his laws, is no longer a king but a tyrant’, on which footing Charles I was ‘no king’.42 The plight of ‘the Surrey four’ demonstrates how the debate over indemnity formed part of the struggle to make a civil peace that was in conformity –or at least not totally at odds –with the militarily inarguable outcome of the English Civil War. For to reverse that outcome, to return to the status quo ante, and to do so over the broken bodies of men and women who had helped win the war, was, as the agitators warned, to permit the defeated to ‘recover more upon our words’ than the ‘wel-affected of the Kingdome’ had secured ‘by our swords’.43 It was at the same meeting of the General Council at which the agitators presented a paper about the plight of the four that words were spoken by Major Francis White –himself second signatory of the agitators’ paper – which led to White’s expulsion from the General Council, on the pretext that he had ‘publikely declared and expressed himself, That there is now no visible authority in this Kingdome, but the power and force of the Sword’.44 White appears to have been an early advocate, in the army’s internal debates about constitutional settlement, of Parliament’s untrammelled legislative sovereignty, and participated in the agitators’ relentless campaign for a purge in August 1647.45 In my view, it is likely that he was expelled not for the crude advocacy of some sort of military dictatorship, but for drawing far too effectively a clear connection between protecting the physical well-being of the honest party, and the urgent need for the army to act as an agent of transformative constitutional change.
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Debate in the army over the post-war settlement of the kingdom was rapidly coming to a head by the late summer of 1647, and the issue of indemnity seems to have provided a lot of the motive force behind it. Officially, as we have seen, the whole topic was done and dusted: all that remained was to convert the ordinances of May and June into an act. For the new model mutineers, it was as if nothing had been achieved at all. One of the claims with which they opened their famous October manifesto was that there was still ‘No such Indempnitie, as provideth security, for the quiet, ease, or safety of the Soldiers, disbanded or to be disbanded’.46 Substantial grounds there may have been for continuing concerns as to the adequacy of the legislative regime, but this was plainly an exaggeration. There is more than a hint here of a deliberate attempt to rake the embers of a blaze that had been substantially damped down by the ordinances of May and June. At around the same time, Francis White was making the point, in an address to the other officers of his regiment, at Ware in Hertfordshire, that the plan of subjecting the existing legislative regime to the king’s assent risked turning it into a kind of pardon on licence. Expressly citing the sufferings of the Surrey four, White declared: I am sencible that if we should receive an act of oblivion from the King, which I never will accept of, yet may the next King call us to account, or if he will not, yet the law will, which is a written letter, and will kill us, and hang the Judges if prosecuted, which shall give sentence contrary thereto.
There was only one answer, in White’s view. ‘I see no sufficient securitie, but by turning the currant of the lawes to run in the name of the Commons of England.’47 Similarly, the new agents considered that it was ‘the highest disparagement to the supream authority of this Nation, the Parliament, that when they have commanded an armie upon service against the King, they should not have sufficient power to save them harmelesse for obedience to their commands’. Moreover, the new agents now said that they regarded it as ‘the highest dishonour to the armie’ to suggest that the soldiers ‘should seeke to the conquered enemie to save them harmelesse for fighting against them, which is to aske him pardon, and so will remaine as a perpetuall reproach upon them’.48 This marked a turn in the debate that before long would lead some of the soldiers into their most revolutionary statements of intent yet. By now, the new model mutineers were on a collision course with the military high command. Both in print and in the General Council held at Putney, 29 October 1647 witnessed something of a pitched battle between two conflicting positions. In the context of a vigorous debate in the General Council that day about the king’s negative voice, Henry Ireton responded to
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‘that [charge] of going to the kinge for indemnity’ by saying ‘wee propose for ourselves an Act of indemnity and justification’. Ireton was referring to the terms of the so-called projected settlement of 1647, which repackaged the first proposition of the standard parliamentarian peace, requiring the king to assent to an act declaring that Parliament had been ‘necessitated’ to fight in self-defence, to include an act implementing the Indemnity Ordinances.49 Demanding to know ‘[i]s this the asking of a pardon?’ Ireton also reminded his audience that royal assent to an indemnity had been specified in the first Humble representation in March, ‘wherin wee all were engag’d once’. By contrast, ‘whoever talk’t either of the indeavours of the souldiers, or of any other Indempnity by the sworde in their hands’, seemingly intended as an echo of what Francis White was alleged to have said in September, ‘is [for] the perpetuating of combustions’.50 John Wildman replied that the fault lay in presuming the king had any right to a say in the legislative deliberations of the people’s representatives. Allowing the king back on his throne with a legislative veto amounted to ‘his restoration’. Wildman denied that he thought demanding an Act of Indemnity ‘was an asking of the kinge pardon’: much worse than that, ‘itt is rendring us uppe’, handing themselves to the king, to do as he would.51 The same day that Ireton and Wildman were duelling at Putney, George Thomason acquired A Cal to All the Souldiers, a pamphlet which implored its addressees to trust in God and themselves, urging them ‘let your end be justice without respect of persons’. Only ‘a free Parliament’ rid of ‘usurppers’ and ‘incendiaries’ could be counted on to indemnify them. There must be no deal with the king, who must be held close ‘till you can referre him to a free Parliament’.52 When Wildman and his ilk were effectively shut down with the adjournment of the General Council on 8 November, the position of the new model mutineers became even more robust. The next day, 9 November, the anonymous author of An Alarum to the Headquarters denounced the ‘sending againe and againe to our conquered enemy’ for his consent to laws including an Act of Indemnity. Why not ask him to legislate for ‘our Arrears, & next for our ears, to keep them on our heads’?53 A couple of days later, on 11 November, the new agents went into print to cleare the armie from any desire or intent of constraining the Parliament to send new propositions to the king, whereby your indemnitie for fighting against the king, should be begged of the king, and so the gilt of innocent bloud laid upon your owne heads, and your enemies shall boast and insult over you, saying, you were forced to aske them to save you harmlesse.54
The agents’ Letter was the climacteric of the indemnity crisis –as provocative a statement of the issue as might possibly be imagined. Eight months
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earlier, the soldiers’ spokesmen had called for an indemnity to which the king had assented. Now it was held that seeking his assent would be tantamount to voluntarily accepting war guilt. Indemnity had ceased being just a legal problem. It had become a massive political problem. And I think it was the search for a political solution to the problem of indemnity that first brought a notion of ‘justice’ into play, in ways that would transform the landscape within which revolutionary politics played out thenceforth. On the very day the new agents wrote their Letter, Colonel Thomas Harrison and Commissary General of Victuals, Nicholas Cowling, were making the case for a trial of the king that would subject him to a higher earthly jurisdiction, and break the power of his office, but which would let his person alone.55 The idea of prosecuting the king might seem to have taken its rise originally from ideas about the king’s accountability to Parliament, as a mere officer of state or chief magistrate, that had been circulating since at least the winter of 1642–3, and from calls for an inquest after the shedding of innocent blood first heard no later than May 1646.56 I think that understanding why the idea had started to commend itself to the soldiers in the autumn of 1647 requires that we understand the issue that lay at the very heart of the indemnity debate: the need for a constitutional transformation that would legitimise –on some objective, inarguable basis – the armed response of the well-affected to the national emergency that had engulfed the realm since 1642. As we have seen, the latest proposed solution –Ireton’s ‘Act of indemnity and justification’, which would shortly be transposed from the terms of the projected settlement into the second of the Four Bills –had come to be regarded by many soldiers as tantamount to crawling on their knees to the king for mercy.57 Although the evidence is thin, there are grounds nonetheless to believe that the idea of a prosecution of Charles I was intended as an alternative to such a humiliating course of action. The author of A Cal to all the Souldiers had remarked that ‘the voice of necessity is the call of God; all other waies for your indempnity are but delusive, and if yee trust to any other, under the fairest promises, yee will find your selves in a snare’. He advised the soldiers to ‘[t]rust only to justice, for God is a God of justice, and those that promote the same shall be preserved’.58 This text seems to me to mark an important stage in the emergence of an agenda of ‘justice’ as a practicable means to the creation of a civic order founded on victory in a war fought of necessity. While self- evidently an incitement of opinion from the outside, nothing about A Cal went against the grain of emergent opinion in certain quarters of the army, and it was assuredly not without effect there.59 On 28 November, the day after the two Houses had agreed a plan to submit the Four Bills to the king, Captain George Joyce (as he now was)
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explained to the king’s emissary to army headquarters, Sir John Berkeley, on the road to Windsor, that
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it had been discoursed among the adjutators, ‘whether for their justification the king ought not to be brought to a trial,’ which he [Joyce] held in the affirmative, not that he would have one hair of his head suffer, but that they might not bear the blame of the war.
A few hours later, at a secret midnight rendezvous with one of his general officer friends –most likely Scoutmaster General Leonard Watson –Berkeley learned, aghast, that, apparently still fearing for their control of the army, Cromwell and Ireton had resolved ‘to destroy the king and his posterity’. The plan was to send 800 men, in the very near future, to secure the king’s person then put him on trial –‘and I dare think no farther’, offered Watson, who had ‘pleaded hard’, he said, against this resolution that very day. As soon as the interview was over, Berkeley immediately despatched a letter in cypher to the king, making ‘a most passionate supplication to his majesty, to meditate nothing but his immediate escape’.60 There is not a lot to go on here, but there is enough to suggest that the trial of Charles I was now posited as a means to the soldiers’ ultimate safeguard. Erecting a jurisdiction superior to the king, before which it might be possible to establish –as a matter of objective, legal fact –the ‘necessity’ on which the soldiers had acted, would enable the soldiers to avoid the bear-trap of indemnity altogether. There could be no need of a release –by anyone’s hands, least of all those of the king whom they had conquered –if they had been fighting out of necessity. The prospect of this trial was no doubt proffered as the carrot with which the grandees sought to win back opinion in the army after the brutal reassertion of military discipline in mid-November. In January 1648, Cromwell would admit as much in the House of Commons.61 But it is not beyond the realms of possibility that, in the wake of the king’s flight from Hampton Court, the threat of a trial was intended, simultaneously, by those who now made great show of mending fences with the new model mutineers, as a stick with which to beat Charles I into assenting to their bill for ‘indemnity and justification’ –a threat to whose effectiveness Berkeley’s ‘most passionate supplication’ (assuming he made it) would appear to attest. The king must now see that if he would not yield, he risked something far worse.
IV In 1647, debate about indemnity had emerged as soldiers began to grapple with the question of how to keep the well-affected safe from vengeful
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landlords, employers, neighbours and countrymen, and from the magistrates who would happily have presided over the attempts of such people to hunt down and destroy at law the enemies who had beaten them in war. The soldiers’ list of grievances subsequently grew longer and longer, as they added to it denial of the right to petition, Parliament’s failure to act against the Eleven Members, its active encouragement of deserters from their ranks, and the recruitment of reformadoes in London, for example. But indemnity remained on their agenda throughout, and in certain quarters the nature of the demand itself began to evolve. As it did so, it became clear that indemnity was ‘always already’ an issue that raised all those ‘profound questions’ to which Ann Hughes has referred, and to which there would ultimately only ever be political and constitutional answers. Inescapably, indemnity was all about power and the exercise of sovereignty. In the spring and early summer of 1647, the issue of indemnity had underlined for soldiers the fact that their enemies were inside the gates, helping to fuel growing demands for a purge of Parliament. By the autumn, soldiers were increasingly concerned not only at the invidious prospect that the king they had beaten might be asked to assent to their indemnification, but also that merely asking betrayed a guilt in relation to wars they had fought defending themselves against the violent depredations of the king and his party. Most significantly of all, we can discern in the soldiers’ efforts to grapple with the issue of indemnity a vital source of support from within the army for bringing England’s constitutional arrangements into conformity with God’s wartime judgements. This in turn contributed to the emergence of support for a prosecution of Charles I that would subject the king and his office to a higher constitutional authority, some superior earthly jurisdiction, forcing him to accept the emergency conditions in which the well-affected had been ‘necessitated’ to act in ways that did not accord with the law of the land. In the show made by the army high command of co-opting the soldiers’ demand for a trial of Charles I, ‘that they might not bear the blame of the War’, lay the origins of a strategy of ‘justice’ that would exert an important influence over the subsequent course of the English Revolution.
Notes 1 I am grateful to the editors for their invitation to publish this chapter in honour of Professor Ann Hughes. It was Ann’s scholarship that first inspired in me what in many ways remains my idea of what a historian can and should be, drawing me to Manchester in its pursuit. As a doctoral supervisor, it was Ann whose
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advice and encouragement set me on the road back out again, both figuratively and metaphorically. I’m still not entirely convinced it’s the same road she’s on, but I’m grateful to her in any event, for having seen me safely past what –looking back –now feels a lot like it was probably the point of no return. 2 LJ, ix. 114, ‘The humble representation of the desires of the officers and soldiers of the army under the command of his excellency Sir Thomas Fairefax, presented first to his excellency, to be by him represented to the Parliament’, together with its covering petition to Fairfax (and see CJ, v. 127). The published version of both texts is The Petition of the Officers and Souldiers in the Army, under the Command of his Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax ([2 April] 1647, BL, E.383[13]). 3 John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow, 1993), pp. 307–31, at pp. 310–17; John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War 1630–1650 (London, 1980), p. 76. 4 Michael Mendle, ‘Putney’s pronouns: identity and indemnity in the great debate’, in Michael Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 125–47, at p. 132. 5 For local, legal and administrative dimensions, see in particular Ann Hughes, ‘Parliamentary tyranny? Indemnity proceedings and the impact of the civil war: a case study from Warwickshire’, Midland History, 11 (1986), 49–78; Robert Ashton, ‘The problem of indemnity, 1647–1648’, in Colin Jones, Malyn Newitt and Stephen Roberts, eds, Politics and People in Revolutionary England. Essays in Honour of Ivan Roots (Oxford, 1986), pp. 117–40; John Shedd, ‘Legalism over revolution: the parliamentary committee for indemnity and property confiscation disputes, 1647–1655’, HJ, 43.4 (2000), 1093–107. For treatments of the issue as an aspect of the politics of the parliamentarian army see principally Ian Gentles, ‘Ideology and arrears of pay’, War and Society, 1 (1975), 44–66; Mark Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979), passim, particularly pp. 156–7, 180–2, 212–13; Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 121–5; Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: the General Council of the Army and its Debates, 1647–1648 (Oxford, 1987), passim, particularly pp. 36, 75, 86, 119, 199–200; Barbara Donagan, ‘The army, the state and the soldier in the English Civil War’, in Mendle, ed., Putney Debates, pp. 79–102, at pp. 88–95. 6 Elliot Vernon and Philip Baker, ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’, HJ, 53.1 (2010), 39–59; Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon, eds, The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2012). 7 Hughes, ‘Parliamentary tyranny?’, pp. 56, 71. 8 Ian Gentles, ‘The New Model Army and the constitutional crisis of the late 1640s’, in Baker and Vernon, eds, Agreements of the People, pp. 139–62, at p. 145. 9 Mendle, ‘Putney’s pronouns’, pp. 132, 141–2. 10 Vernon and Baker, ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’, pp. 49–50, 52. 11 A&O, i. 12, 14–16.
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12 Morrill, Nature of the English Revolution, p. 310. 13 A&O, i, 371–2, 905–7. 14 CD, pp. 275 and 291. Italicised text was introduced in 1646. 15 See for example Morrill, Nature of the English Revolution, pp. 308, 327; Kishlansky, Rise, pp. 156–7, 201; Woolrych, Soldiers, pp. 198–9; Gentles, New Model Army, pp. 164, 227; Barbara Donagan, War in England, 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008), p. 291; Vernon and Baker, ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’, pp. 49, 52. 16 The singular form is noteworthy. See David Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018), pp. 115–16, 268. 17 An Apollogie of the Souldiers to all their Commission Officers in Sir Thomas Fairfax his Armie ([26 March] 1647, BL, E.381[18]). 18 Woolrych, Soldiers, pp. 35–6. 19 LJ, ix. 114, and see Petition of the Officers and Souldiers, sig. A2, for the published version. 20 Kishlansky, Rise, pp. 181, 186–7, and see, e.g., Morrill, Nature of the English Revolution, p. 311, and Hughes, ‘Parliamentary tyranny?’, pp. 52–3. 21 The Apologie of the Common Souldiers ([3 May] 1647, BL, E.385[18]) publishes both. 22 Ibid., pp. 3, 6–7. 23 Divers Papers from the Army ([22 May] 1647, BL, E.388[18]), pp. 7–8. 24 Morrill, Nature of the English Revolution, p. 320, citing Worcester College Library, Oxford, Clarke MS 41, fos. 119–20. 25 Kishlansky, Rise, p. 201, citing CP, i. 66. 26 A&O, i. 936–8. 27 The Armies Indempnity (24 May 1647, acquired by Thomason on 31 May, BL, E.390[10]). 1701), 28 John Rushworth, ed., Historical Collections (8 vols, London, 1680– vi. 507–8. 29 A&O, i. 953–4. 30 Pace Vernon and Baker, ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’, p. 49. 31 CD, p. 320. 32 A Representation from His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax (1647, BL, E.408[11]), p. 6. 33 D. Jenkins, The Works of that Grave and Learned Lawyer, Iudge Jenkins (1648, BL, E.1154[2]), pp. 85–6. 34 CJ, v. 200. 35 Henry Cary, ed., Memorials of the Great Civil War in England from 1646 to 1652 (2 vols, London, 1842), i. 233–4, cited by Ashton, ‘Problem of indemnity’, p. 128. 36 CP, i. 173. 37 LJ, ix. 114. See also Kishlansky, Rise, p. 256. 38 The Declaration of the Armie under his Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax, as it was Lately Presented at Saffron-Walden in Essex ([4 June] 1647, BL, E.390[26]), pp. 5–[6]. See Woolrych, Soldiers, p. 93n for a discussion of the status of this text.
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39 Cited by Como, Radical Parliamentarians, p. 125. 40 David Wootton, ‘From rebellion to revolution: the crisis of the winter of 1642/ 3 and the origins of civil war radicalism’, EHR, 105.416 (1990), 654– 69; Jason Peacey, ‘ “Fiery spirits” and political propaganda: uncovering a radical press campaign of 1642’, Publishing History, 55 (2004), 5–36; Como, Radical Parliamentarians, particularly pp. 149–52. 41 S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (4 vols, London, 1987), iii. 362; Ashton, ‘Problem of indemnity’, pp. 132–3 (and see Robert Ashton, Counter- Revolution. The Second Civil War and its Origins, 1646– 8 (New Haven, 1994), pp. 226–7) ; Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), p. 152; Ariel Hessayon, ‘Crab, Roger, c.1616–1680, hermit’, ODNB. 42 An Humble Remonstrance from his Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax ([16 September] 1647, BL, E.407[15]), p. 4. For an instance in 1642 of the controversial polemical overstatement of this Jacobean dictum, see Como, Radical Parliamentarians, pp. 134–7. 43 The Humble Proposalls of the Adjutators in the Army Presented to his Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax ([13 September] 1647, BL, E.406[21]), p. 2. 44 Two Declarations from his Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax, and the Generall Councell of his Army ([14 September] 1647, E.407[1]), p. 6. 45 The Resolution of the Agitators ([4 September] 1647, BL, E.405[22]), pp. 6–8; Woolrych, Soldiers, p. 93n. 46 The Case of the Armie Truly Stated ([19 October] 1647, BL, E.411[9]), p. 1. 47 Francis White, The Copy of a Letter sent to his Excellencie Sir Thomas Fairfax ([11 November] 1647, BL, E.413[17]), pp. [8–9]. 48 Case of the Armie, p. 12. 49 LJ, ix. 502. 50 CP, i. 360–1. 51 Ibid., i. 362–3. No soldier, Wildman’s first-person plural was a reminder, for any that needed it, that the case of the army was not just the soldiers’ case. 52 A Cal to all the Souldiers ([29 October] 1647, BL, E.412[10]), pp. [15–16]. 53 An Alarum to the Headquarters ([9 November] 1647, BL, E.413[10]), p. 1. 54 A Copy of a Letter Sent by the Agents of Severall Regiments of his Excellencies Army ([12 November] 1647, BL, E.413/18), p. 4; A Letter Sent from Several Agitators (11 November 1647, acquired by Thomason on 12 November, BL, E.414[8]), p. 4. See also White, Copy of a Letter, p. [8]. 55 CP, i. 417–18. 56 Peacey ‘ “Fiery spirits” ’, pp. 13, 22; Joyce Macadam, ‘Mercurius Britanicus on Charles I: an exercise in civil war journalism and high politics, August 1643 92, pp. 489– 90; Como, Radical to May 1646’, HR, 84.225 (2011), 470– Parliamentarians, pp. 151–2, 160. 57 CD, pp. 339–40, 342. 58 A Cal to all the Souldiers, pp. [15–16].
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59 Soldiers were discussing subjecting the king to some sort of legal proceeding not later than early October 1647: see Woolrych, Soldiers, pp. 205–6, and Case of the Armie, pp. 6, 15. See too CP, i. 372–3. 60 Francis Maseres, ed., Select Tracts Relating to the Civil Wars in England in the Reign of Charles I (2 vols, London, 1815), i. 383, 384–7; Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars, ed. W. D. Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), iv. 282–3. 61 David Underdown, ‘The parliamentary diary of John Boys, 1647–8’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 39 (1966), 141–64, p. 156.
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Thomas N. Corns Connections between Milton and Winstanley have sometimes been drawn, most effectively by Christopher Hill, in his unfairly neglected Milton and the English Revolution.1 Hill’s book achieved a certain notoriety because of its larger argument that Milton’s writings show a complex relationship with the heterodox thinking of what he termed ‘the Radical Underground’. Hill never really met the challenge, posed for example by Blair Worden, to produce evidence of contact between Milton and the likes of Winstanley or Coppe or Bauthumley, a charge which still has currency.2 Nor do I suggest that Milton and Winstanley necessarily shared a jug of ale in a metropolitan tavern while debating the legacy of original sin. But the City of London, despite its burgeoning population, had the geographical intimacy of a village, and radical London, the network, sometimes now imperfectly understood, was a village within a village. The physical proximity of Milton and Winstanley was closer than it seems at first sight. Milton on his return from Italy took lodgings in St Bride’s churchyard about half a mile away from Winstanley’s home in St Olave Old Jewry.3 Such intersections, were they to have happened, would have been merely fortuitous. However, there is strong evidence to place them in much closer proximity, in Coleman Street. The vicar of St Stephen was John Goodwin, a figure frequently associated with Milton in Presbyterian attacks on tolerationism in the mid-1640s. His Theomachia (1644) rehearses arguments analogous to those of Milton’s Areopagitica, published in the same year. Their common ground extended further –Goodwin, like Milton, was both radical and anti- Calvinist, in effect a puritan Arminian. Milton’s recent biographers have remarked on the closeness of their affinity ‘[s]ocially, theologically’,4 and by 1649 both were apologists for regicide (for which they suffered similar censure at the Restoration). Goodwin draws directly on The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in his Obstructors of Justice (1649). Visiting Goodwin would have been reason enough to carry Milton, perhaps frequently, to Coleman Street. But he had connections with another Coleman Street resident, the superbly well-read Dr Nathan Paget, at whose home he would in 1661 or 1662 meet his third wife. Paget was living in Coleman Street and worshipping at St Stephen by the early 1640s, and Milton’s friendship with him probably dated back that far. Paget’s library,
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though primarily medical and scientific, held copies of some of Milton’s tracts of the 1640s (as well as both editions of Paradise Lost, his Latin primer on logic, and a copy of the 1671 Paradise Regained).5 That all or some were ‘ex dono auctoris’ is altogether likely, and suggests a protracted intimacy over several decades. We can thus place Milton with a reasonable degree of confidence in Coleman Street quite frequently in the 1640s. What could have taken Winstanley there? The answer probably lies over the road from the parish church, in Bell Alley, a spur off the east side of the thoroughfare. From no later than 1645 it was the location for the most notorious General Baptist congregation in London, under the leadership of Thomas Lambe, by profession a soap-boiler. Building on the work of John Gurney, Ariel Hessayon has argued that Winstanley’s likeliest route to extreme radicalisation was through contact with General Baptists, among them Lambe and his congregation.6 Even if Winstanley were not a member of that group, there is every likelihood that the general radical milieu in which he developed included meetings in Bell Alley: uniquely among non-parochial congregations, Lambe’s church regularly held meetings which were open to the public.7 Curiously, Milton and Lambe, or rather caricatures of Lambe, appear together on a Presbyterian broadside, These Trades-men are Preachers in and about the City of London (London, 1647) –Lambe is surely to be recognised in the thumb-nail cartoon of ‘a Sope-boyler’, and Milton’s complex arguments on divorce are summarised in one sentence as heresy number 20. At least one of Lambe’s congregation claimed some familiarity with his divorce writing. In an anecdote collected by the heresiographer, Thomas Edwards, Mrs Attaway, a preacher associated with Lambe’s group, allegedly cited Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in justification for her own intention of finding a new and ‘sanctified’ husband.8 Maybe that notion of a shared jug in a Cheapside tavern isn’t quite so fanciful. Such whimsy apart, their lives followed a surprisingly similar trajectory. Both were radicalised by personal setbacks in the mid-1640s –in Milton’s case, the assault of the Presbyterian mobilisation; in Winstanley’s, financial disaster. Socially, they were closer than at first sight. Winstanley was an unsuccessful guildsman and London businessman; Milton the son of a successful guildsman and businessman, and he had grown up in the parish adjacent to the one where Winstanley traded. Certainly, in the years when, ideologically, they were at their most comparable, the very late 1640s and very early 1650s, Milton was financially considerably better off than Winstanley and lived much more comfortably. Winstanley described the act of writing thus: I have sat writing whole winter-daies from morning til night & the cold never offended me, though when I have risen, I was so starke with cold that I was
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forced to rise by degrees and hold by the table, till strength and heat came into my legges.9
Milton’s lifestyle as a well-remunerated public servant, even when blind, appeared altogether pleasanter. Yet we should note that Winstanley, as Bunyan would later do, did tend to exaggerate his personal poverty.10 Both looked to Oliver Cromwell for some degree of radical action long after the Levellers had rejected him. Winstanley presented The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652) to him,11 while Milton’s sonnet to Cromwell dates from after the Battle of Worcester and his Defensio Secunda praises him fulsomely.12 Both in the 1660s moved in Quaker circles. Winstanley’s second marriage, in 1664, took place in St Giles Cripplegate, which would be Milton’s last resting place, and where his father was already interred. And of course they were brilliantly heterodox thinkers and, in my view, the finest prose stylists of the mid-century decades, at least in the production of controversial prose. It is not my purpose to suggest that Winstanley influenced Milton or Milton Winstanley; there is nothing to suggest that either had read the other’s work –indeed, controversial prose by other authors left a slight trace on Milton’s writing, except when he was confuting them, and Winstanley famously refers only once to any other book besides the Bible.13 However, intellectually their paths cross sufficiently often for a comparison to be useful, to demonstrate how distinctive each was in his critical thinking about society, politics and theology. Both regarded the Bible in general and the book of Genesis in particular as far too important to be left to the naiveties of literal reading. Winstanley in his own practice in effect endorses Milton’s approach in his divorce tracts, and pre-eminently in Tetrachordon (1645), of asserting that, since Christ’s mission is to bring comfort, his words about divorce need interpreting as it were ironically. Comparison, though, is sharpest in their discussion of the fall of Adam. This is what Winstanley says in The New Law of Righteousnes, probably published in February 1649 or thereabouts: This first man is he, by whose disobedience many are made sinners, or by whom the whole Creation is corrupted; Therefore you Preachers, do not you tell the people any more, That a man called Adam, that disobeyed about 6000 years ago, was the man that filled every man with sin and filth, by eating an apple. For assure your selves, this Adam is within every man and woman; and it is the first power that appears to act and rule in every man. It is the Lord Esau that stepped befor Iacob, and got the birthright, by the Law of equity was more properly Iacobs. …
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The Apple that the first man eats, is not a single fruit called an Apple, or such like fruit; but it is the objects of the Creation; which is the fruit that came out of the Seed, which is the Spirit himself that made all things: As riches, honours, pleasures, upon which the powers of the flesh feeds to delight himself.
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And this is the messe of pottage which he prefers before righteousnesse, or before righteous walking in the Creation towards every creature, which is Christ, that power that appears in the fulnesse of time to take the Kingdom and rule next. Therefore when a man fals, let him not blame a man that died 6000 years ago, but blame himself, even the powers of his own flesh, which lead him astray; for this is Adam that brings a man to misery, which is the man flesh, or the strong man within that keeps the house, till the man of Righteousnesse arise and cast him out, who is the second Adam.14
Winstanley allegorises the fall of Adam into representing the fall of humankind through the development of ‘propriety’, that is, the private ownership of property. Of course, he suggests, one trivial event six thousand years ago cannot bring about a world of woe. That would be silly; so the story must be tractable to sensible interpretation. What, then, is the nature of sin? Or, rather, what sin could be the fons et origo of all subsequent sin that has brought humankind to universal misery? And the answer comes in the private ownership of property, symbolised by Adam’s taking of the apple, representative of ‘the objects of Creation’, into his own possession. From such ownership follow trade, buying and selling, exploitation, and the work of lawyers, all of which are disempowering and enslaving to the propertiless. I turn to a text that is very closely contemporary with The New Law of Righteousnes, Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (mid-February 1649). Milton, explaining the origins of civil society and its political institutions, in the manner of Hobbes and Locke produces a foundation myth: No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey: and that they liv’d so. Till from the root of Adams transgression, falling among themselves to doe wrong and violence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs tend to the destruction of them all, they agreed by common league to bind each other from mutual injury … against any that gave disturbance or opposition to such agreement. Hence came Citties, Townes and Common-wealths. And because no faith in all was found sufficiently binding, they saw it needfull to ordaine som authoritie, that might restrain by force and punishment what was violated against peace and common right.15
Of course, it is hardly surprising when a foundation myth reaches for Genesis –even Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriacha (1680, but written perhaps
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as early as the 1630s) went there; but Milton and Winstanley share a common fascination with thinking through what sort of offence was perpetrated and what its implications would have been. For Winstanley, disinclined to accept the literal truth of Genesis, the allegory saves its high seriousness and supports a large argument. Milton keeps the historicity of the event in play, though Adam’s fall assumes the same kind of fictive convenience in the schematic narrative of pre-history that he advances. Tellingly, though, for Milton the fall occasions a disequilibrium in political, rather than economic, power. It is a distinction which, as we shall see, emerges again in Paradise Lost. In that long epic, the fall of Adam (and Eve) for Milton requires a great deal of supplementation to seem of sufficient gravity to justify the ways of God in attributing to it its massive impact on physical well-being. Milton’s strategy is to suggest that Adam’s temptation or rather his regeneration is to be played out in the individual lives of the godly through the rest of recorded time. The vision of futurity which occupies him in books XI and XII stretches from the earliest crime, Cain’s murder of Abel, through recorded history to Milton’s own age and beyond, touching directly the lives of the godly in the fallen world. As Adam with justifiable concern asks Michael: if our deliverer up to heaven Must reascend, what will betide the few His faithful, left among the unfaithful herd, The enemies of truth; who then shall guide His people, who defend? Will they not deal Worse with his followers than with him they dealt?
Michael’s response is, in terms of physical well-being is not encouraging: ‘Be sure they will.’16 There are fascinating comparisons to be made between Winstanley’s and Milton’s depiction of that first crime. For Winstanley, Cain’s treatment of Abel equates to the elder brother’s treatment of his younger sibling, a recurrent configuration, drawing on the pre-eminence of primogeniture in English inheritance practice, a practice that leaves property, and particularly land, in the hands of one, and denies possession (and thus the means of living independently of employment) to the other. For Winstanley, the biblical account lacks historical plausibility because it lacks internal consistency – how can Cain be at once ‘the third man in the world’ and at the same time be punished by his ostracism: ‘Thou hast set a mark upon me, and every one that sees me, wil kil me’?17 But as myth, metaphor, paradigm, the narrative retains a potency as an embodiment of a recurrent principle: … the younger brother comes in, and saith, the land is our portion by creation as well as yours, and we give no consent to be shut out; therefore what authority had you to buy, or the other to sell; by thus doing you cheat us, and
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cast us out of the Earth; And from hence now divisions and wars begins to arise betweene the brothers.
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And so the elder brother Cain kills the younger brother Abel; Cain was subtle and covetous, and Abel single hearted, and molested Cain, and opposed him in his selfe-seeking Principle … to raise himselfe to be above others … And by this murdering power, over-awing one another, the cheating Art of buying and selling, and of dividing the Land into parcells, prevailes among mankind …18
While Winstanley’s typology transforms a Bible story into a symbol of immediate importance to England in 1649–50, he does so at the expense of its historical and non-fictive status. Milton seems to retain a commitment to its factuality in his own account, which is marked by its brutal particularity: … [Cain] inly raged, and as they talked, Smote him into the midriff with a stone That beat out life; he fell, and deadly pale Groaned out his soul with gushing blood effused.19
The tableau revolts Adam in its graphic detail. But it, too, carries the significance of the narrative into Milton’s own age. As I have elsewhere argued, Abel becomes the archetype for godly martyrs executed in the marketplaces and execution sites of the world, most memorably –for Milton in 1667 –at Tyburn and Charing Cross where in the early years of the Restoration regicides met their end. The massive effusion of blood, foregrounded in Milton’s retelling, was often remarked upon as a conspicuous element of execution by hanging, drawing and quartering.20 Winstanley extends deeper into Old Testament history his appropriation of Bible narratives as vehicles for his larger political analysis. The oppressing Lord Esau and his junior sibling Jacob further type out the transhistorical struggle of the younger brother against the first born. As David Loewenstein observes, ‘He freely reworks biblical myths to represent contemporary political and class conflicts, as well as the conflict between the power of darkness and the Spirit raging within the heart of each restless individual groaning under the curse.’21 Although Milton never dissolves his imaginative recreation of Hebrew historiography into pure myth-making, he too at times ties early history to immediate crises, most significantly in the two final books of Paradise Lost, but his agenda is less mythic and more strictly political. His account of Nimrod, as related to Adam by Michael, is the most egregious example of an opportunity, dexterously grasped, to reflect on the untenability, in terms of political philosophy, of kingship. Postdiluvian society progresses amicably: till one shall rise Of proud ambitious heart, who not content With fair equality, fraternal state,
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Will arrogate dominion undeserved Over his brethren, and quite dispossess Concord and law of nature from the earth.22
Milton has Adam react in terms that would not be out of place in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates:
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Oh execrable son so to aspire Above his brethren, to himself assuming Authority usurped, from God not given.23
Adam defines tyranny as the non-consensual assumption of power by one individual over his equals, terms central to Milton’s justification of the trial and execution of Charles I, and thus he insinuates into his Restoration epic at least an echo of ‘the language of that which is not call’d amiss the good Old Cause’.24 Arguably, the anticlericalism that Milton and Winstanley share is again distinguishable in terms of the political concerns of the former and the economic concerns of the latter, at least in its simplest articulation. Each, though, had good reason in personal experience to mistrust the professional clergy. The figure of John Platt, rector of West Horsley, keen defender of manorial rights, and ardent opponent of the Diggers, stalks the pamphlets written during the experiments in agrarian communism. Indeed, in 1650 he was indicted at the Surrey assizes for firing Digger houses.25 Milton’s divorce tracts were hounded in pamphlets and pulpits in the mid-1640s, and perhaps resulted in arraignment before the House of Lords.26 His frustration found expression in verse, which was to remain unpublished till 1673, in which specifically Presbyterian clergy are memorably and wittily censured: ‘New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large.’27 Winstanley’s tracts of 1648–50 broadly echo the arguments and assumptions of the then contemporary movement to abolish tithes. If that by then was Milton’s position, he did not articulate it; he was, of course, in the employment of the state, and his writings reflected the agenda of his immediate political masters. However, in 1659, at a time in which the anti-tithing campaign somewhat revived, he does explicitly state his opposition to tithes in terms which extend the anticlericalism of the 1640s to include all beneficed ministers, including congregational Independents with whom he had once perhaps been aligned. Together, they constitute a ‘Simonious decimating clergie’. In a phrase of Winstanleyan resonance, he reminds his readers and his political master that ‘They [who first taught the gospel] were otherwise unlearned men’.28 Unsurprisingly, professional clergy have no place in the radical utopia delineated in Winstanley’s Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652). There are to be ministers, unbeneficed and chosen to hold office for only one year, and their duties are severely circumscribed:
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He who is the chosen Minister for that year to read, shall not be the only man to make Sermons or Speeches … yet he who is the Reader may have his liberty to speak too, but not to assume all the power to himself, as the proud and ignorant Clergy have done.29
But Winstanley takes the argument in a bold direction Milton would never follow. The professional clergy encourage people to believe in that which cannot be demonstrated from experience, scaring them with a ‘divining spiritual Doctrine’ of posthumous reward or punishment in heaven or hell, neither of which entity has been substantiated. Milton’s own philosophy was monist and materialist; creation is formed from atomic matter, the soul dies with the body (albeit to be resurrected with it), and even angelic spirits are material entities that eat and excrete.30 Winstanley’s view approximates to humanism (in the modern sense of that word): … to know what he [God] will be to a man, after the man is dead, if any otherwise, then to scatter him to his Essences of fire, water, earth and air, of which he is compounded, is a knowledge beyond the line, or capacity of man to attain to while he lives in his compounded body.31
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Heaven is dismissed, as in the International Workers of the World song, as ‘pie in the sky when you die’. Hell, much more feelingly, is denounced as a concept that occasions much human suffering, and it functions to cow people into submission. Rochester’s formula, in translating Seneca, comes to mind: Devouring time swallows us whole, Impartial Death confounds Body and Soul. For Hell, and the foul Fiend that rules The everlasting fiery Gls, Devis’d by Rogues, dreaded by Fools With his grim griesly Dog that keeps the Door, Are senseless Stories, idle Tales, Dreams, Whimseys, and no more.32
But in Winstanley, those rogues, the beneficed clergy, have a particular role in the larger critique of a degenerate society in which the propertied exploit and exclude the propertiless, engendering the false consciousness that entitles the former while deluding the latter: This Doctrine is made a cloke of policy by the subtil elder Brother, to cheat his simple younger Brother of the Freedoms of the Earth: For saith the elder Brother, The Earth is mine, and not yours, Brother: and you must not work upon it, unless you will hire it of me: and you must not take the fruits of it, unless you will buy them of me, by that which I pay you for your Labor: for if you should do otherwise, God will not love you, and you shall not go to Heaven when you dye, but the Devil will have you, and you must be damned in Hell.33
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Milton, of course, invests his vast poetic imagination in indeed envisaging heaven and hell, the latter, in Paradise Lost books I and II, in considerable detail. Moreover, his divergence from Winstanley on the afterlife relates centrally to his radically different (and much more orthodox) view of the millennium. Consider the tone of the millenarian declaration in the penultimate section of book XII: so shall the world go on, To good malignant, to bad men benign, Under her own weight groaning, till the day Appear of respiration to the just, And vengeance to the wicked, at return Of him so lately promised to thy aid, The woman’s seed, obscurely then foretold, Now amplier known thy saviour and thy Lord, Last in the clouds from heaven to be revealed In glory of the Father, to dissolve Satan with his perverted world, then raise From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date Founded in righteousness and peace and love, To bring forth fruits, joy and eternal bliss.34
This declarative tone is a rare one in Milton’s prose, which tends to be measured and, at least after his divorce tracts are targeted, somewhat guarded. But it is to be found in his earliest controversial writing, in the curious millenarian reverie with which he concludes Of Reformation (1641), as he anticipates: that day when thou the Eternall and shortly-expected King shalt open the Clouds to judge the severall Kingdomes of the World, and distributing Nationall Honours and Rewards to Religious and just Common-wealths, shalt put an end to all Earthly Tyrannies, proclaiming thy universal and milde Monarchy through Heaven and Earth. Where they undoubtedly that by their Labours, Counsels, and Prayers have been earnest for the Common good of Religion and their Countrey, shall receive, above the inferiour Orders of the Blessed, the Regall addition of Principalities, Legions, and Thrones into their glorious Titles, and in supereminence of beatifick Vision progressing the datelesse and irrevoluble Circle of Eternity shall clasp inseparable Hands with joy, and blisse in over measure for ever.35
Several points suggest themselves. There are obvious echoes of the prose passage in Paradise Lost –the ecstatic tone, that labouring towards syntactic completion, in which the syntax is mimetic of the process, and, as the editorial tradition has noted, there are overlaps in the vocabulary and
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phrasing. On occasion the argument for an early composition date for Samson Agonistes has invoked similarities of that kind between the drama and Milton’s prose of the 1640s. But evidently mature Milton was generally mindful of the achievements of young Milton, not only reissuing the poems of his childhood but also revisiting his earliest controversial writing. That simulation –if, indeed, it is a simulation –of ecstasy occurs almost pervasively in Winstanley’s theological writing and features at least to some degree in many of his Digger tracts. Like the passages from Milton we have just considered, those millenarian sections of Winstanley’s writing stitch together a welter of biblical allusion. This example is from The New Law of Righteousnes, but many examples abound throughout the oeuvre: He is now coming to raign, and the Isles and Nations of the earth shall all come in unto him; he will rest every where, for this blessing will fill all places: All parts of the Creation in whom the curse remains shall be shaken and moved, and the seed of the flesh shall find peace no where: He will throw down the mountaines of the flesh, fill up the low valleys of the spirit, he will make rough wayes smooth, and crooked wayes strait, he will make the earth fruitfull, and the winds and the weather seasonable; he will throw all the powers of the earth at your feet, and himself will be your governour and teacher, and your habitations on earth shall be in peace, that so you that are the Citie of the Lord, New Jerusalem, the place of his rest, may be the praise of the whole earth.36
Although the idiom seems similar, the passage, like other manifestations of Winstanley’s millenarianism, serves also to define Milton’s view of the end of the world and the end of time, and to situate it in the larger topography of radical and heterodox divinity. For Winstanley, the millennium is no more an event scheduled for a predetermined date than the fall of mankind was a poor managerial decision taken by Adam about six thousand years earlier. Rather, it occurs whenever individuals and communities align themselves with the spirit of the risen Christ, a figure once more allegorised, in this case into something like the collectivist revolutionary force behind the Digger movement. Milton never conceptualises the millennium in anything other than temporal and literal terms, as an event that will occur in time and at the end of time, though he is darkly speculative about the eventual fate of the material world, derived from a chaos to which it may return, that ‘wild abyss, /The womb of nature and perhaps her grave’.37 Indeed, in its earliest manifestation there is nothing especially radical about Milton’s millenarianism. ‘Ring out, ye crystal spheres’, the poet exclaims, at the very heart of his Nativity Ode, a poem celebrating an event of the liturgical year.38 In Of Reformation his millenarian reverie has become explicitly politicised as he imagines that the damned will have only the relief of exercising a ‘Raving and Bestiall Tyranny’ over the inhabitants of the lowest circle of hell, bishops and their
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supporters. By Paradise Lost and the passage cited from book XII, the millennium seems almost infinitely postponed, and in Paradise Regained only the fallen angels seem much exercised about when it will happen. Other concepts and categories that survive unallegorised by Milton evaporate as material entities into the larger symbolic universe Winstanley produces, and they are devoid of any claim of actuality. Although he dismisses heaven as the local dwelling of God and the future abode of the physically resurrected godly, Winstanley instead revalidates the term by attributing a metaphoric value to it: The heart of man is the place wherein heaven and hell, for nature and kind are both to be seen, that is, when the Law of Righteousnesse rules, there is Christ or the Kingdom of heaven within, even the manifestations of the Father appears in glory to the sweet rest and peace of that soul. But when the power of unrighteousnesse rules in the heart, which is the Serpent, Dragon or God of this world; this is hell or kingdom of darknesse; for first the man sees and feels himself in bondage to his lusts, and to the powers of his flesh. This is death, and the curse that he lies under.39
On hell he is clearer still; it exists only as a symbol for human suffering: If there be a local place of hell, as the Preachers say there is, besides this I speak of, time will make it manifest but as yet none ever came from the dead to tell men on earth, and till then, men ought to speak no more then they know.40
The devil, rightly understood, has no certain objective status, but merely represents, figuratively, in a world innocent of the terms of modern psychology, the inner torment that follows a recognition of sinfulness: And now presently thou concludest, That the Devil, which thou thinkst is a third power, distinct between God and thee, comes and torments thee. But no: for it is the very power of the spirit, which is pure reason, which governs the whole globe in righteousnesse, that shews thee thy wickednesse, and the light thereof discovers thy darkness, and fills thee with shame and torment.41
In Paradise Lost, in the uncertain modality of those strange figures of Sin and Death that after a fashion guard the gates of hell,42 Milton does show a preparedness to allegorise, though, by taking the categories of mainstream theology and personifying them; Winstanley’s dialectic runs quite counter, taking such categories and rendering them symbols of a substantially secular worldview. In a sense, his occasional proximity to Milton illuminates the considerable distance between Miltonic heterodoxy and the extreme edge of that spectrum among mid-century radicals. But the concerns and priorities, even the idiom and the symbolic landscape, are close enough to have permitted dialogue. If they had met, they could certainly have talked purposefully, since
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they share such common ground in their radical scepticism and their visceral hatreds. Perhaps it is merely coincidence, but Milton, like Winstanley, only vouchsafed his blueprint for a new society once his cause was lost. The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (two editions; London, 1660), as surely as The Law of Freedom, reads into the historical record a vision of a world that, each would argue, might have been. The differences are indicative both of their ideology and temperament. Winstanley’s society is marked by the transience of its power structure; across all offices, office-holders are chosen to serve for a single year. Milton, rather, stresses the need for permanence in government. His ‘Grand Councel’ should ‘sit perpetually’.43 Both formulae show a lack of prescience, of the horrors of a workers’ state that has degenerated and of a stable oligarchy that has morphed into a kleptocracy; but they reflect their rival concerns, as the old order, variously defined, reasserted its dominion.
Notes 1 Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London, 1977), passim. 2 As recently as 2009, Worden reiterated his conclusion that ‘there wasn’t a shred of evidence for Hill’s thesis’ (www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/jan/31/blair- worden-life-in-history) (accessed 5 August 2021). 3 Biographical details for Milton are drawn from Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford, 2008), c hapters 8, 9, 16; for Winstanley, CWGW, i. 1–42, which rests in turn on James Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: religion and respectability’, HJ, 28.3 (1985), 705–9; James Alsop, ‘A high road to radicalism? Gerrard Winstanley’s youth’, Seventeenth Century, 9:1 (1994), 11–24; James Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: what do we know of his life’, in Andrew Bradstock, ed., Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649– 1999 (London, 2000), pp. 19–36; John Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007). See also J. D. Alsop and J. C. Davis, ‘Gerrard Winstanley’, in ODNB. 4 Campbell and Corns, Milton, p. 194. On Goodwin, see John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution (Woodbridge, 2006). 5 Anon., Bibliotheca Medica Viri Clarissimi Nathanis Paget, M. D. (1681). On Paget, see Peter Elmer, ODNB. 6 Ariel Hessayon, ‘Gerrard Winstanley, radical reformer’, in Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan, eds, Varieties of Seventeenth-and Early Eighteenth- Century Radicalism in Context (Aldershot, 2011), pp. 87–112; Ariel Hessayon, ‘Winstanley and Baptist thought’, Prose Studies 36.1 (2014), 15–31. On Lambe, see Murray Tolmie, ‘Thomas Lambe, soapboiler, and Thomas Lambe, merchant, General Baptists’, Baptist Quarterly, 27 (1977), 4–13; Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: the Separate Churches of London, 1616– 1649 (Cambridge, 1977); and Stephen Wright, ODNB.
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7 Tolmie, Triumph, p. 76. 8 Thomas Edwards, The Second Part of Gangraena (1646), pp. 10–11; see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), pp. 244–5. On Attaway, see Ariel Hessayon, ODNB. 9 [To the Reader], Several Pieces Gathered into One Volume, in CWGW, i. 98. 10 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (London, 1966), p. 7: ‘my fathers house being of that rank that is meanest, and most despised of all the families in the Land’. Actually, his father was a skilled tradesman from a downwardly mobile gentry family. See Richard L. Greaves, ODNB. 11 CWGW, ii. 278. 12 John Milton, ‘Cromwell, our chief of men’, in Barbara Kiefer Lewalski and Estelle Haan, eds, The Complete Works of John Milton. Volume III: The Shorter Poems (revised edition, Oxford, 2014), p. 286; John Milton, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (1654), passim. 13 John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments or Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563 and most recently re-published in 1641, is cited in The Breaking of the Day of God, in CWGW, i. 185. See also: CWGW, i. 59, n226. 14 CWGW, i. 499–500, italics in original. 15 N. H. Keeble and Nicholas McDowell, eds, The Complete Works of John Milton. Volume VI: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings (Oxford, 2013), p. 155, italics in original. 16 PL, XII. 478–85. 17 The New Law of Righteousnes, in CWGW, i. 533, italics in original; the reference is to Gen. 4.14. 18 Fire in the Bush, in CWGW, ii. 217, italics in original. 19 PL, XI. 444–7. 20 Thomas N. Corns, Regaining Paradise Lost (London and New York, 1994), p. 88. 21 David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge, 2001), p. 61. 22 PL, XII. 24–9. 23 Ibid., XII. 64–6. 24 The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (2nd edn), in Keeble and McDowell, eds, Complete Works, p. 521, italics in original. 25 On Platt, see CWGW, ii. 451. 26 Campbell and Corns, Milton, p. 167. 27 ‘On the new forcers of Conscience under the Long PARLIAMENT’, line 20, in Lewalski and Haan, eds, Complete Works, p. 242, italics in original. 28 Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the church, in CPW, vii. 275, 302. 29 CWGW, ii. 344. 30 See, for example, PL, VII. 205–42; John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington, with Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, eds, The Complete Works of John Milton. Volume VIII: De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford, 2012), pp. 440–62; PL,
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V. 433–43. On Milton and contemporary philosophy, see Stephen M. Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca, 1991), passim. 31 CWGW, ii. 343. 32 John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, ‘The latter End of the Chorus of the second Act of Seneca’s Troas, translated’, lines 12–18, in Vivian de Sola Pinto, ed., Poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (London, 1964), p. 49. 33 CWGW, ii. 346, italics in original. 34 PL, XII. 537–51. 35 CPW, i. 616, italics in original. 36 CWGW, i. 476, italics in original. 37 PL, II. 910–11. 38 ‘On the morning of CHRISTS Nativity’, line 125, in Lewalski and Haan, eds, Complete Works, p. 9. 39 The New Law of Righteousnes, in CWGW, i. 540. 40 Ibid., i. 542. 41 The Saints Paradice, in CWGW, i. 367. 42 PL, II. 648–884, X. 235–409. 43 Keeble and McDowell, eds, Complete Works, pp. 504, 505.
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Women, print and locality: Richard Culmer and the practices of polemic during the English Revolution Jason Peacey ‘On top of the citie ladder, neer sixty steps high, with a whole pike in his hand ratling down proud Becket’s glassy bones.’ With this story about the destruction of stained glass windows in Canterbury Cathedral –as well as about the culprit urinating in a sacred space –the puritan minister Richard Culmer was immortalised in his own day, and made famous ever since, as ‘Blew Dick’, the Kent iconoclast.1 This notoriety was also secured by involvement in local electoral politics in the 1620s, and by his having fallen victim to Caroline church policies, and having been deprived for refusing to read the Book of Sports, Culmer became involved in angry confrontations with Archbishop William Laud, which prompted him to rail against the ‘tribe of Lambeth’ and Laud’s ‘tyrannous patronage’. Culmer’s reputation was then cemented by involvement in puritan petitioning campaigns of the early 1640s, and by providing evidence used in Laud’s trial, as well as by his appointment to a succession of Kentish livings, including positions at Goodnestone, Harbledown and Minster, not to mention the cathedral itself. As was common across the seventeenth century, such appointments generated controversies with parishioners, which in Culmer’s case involved robust responses to his reforming ‘fanatic’ ways. Such exchanges have been seen as prime examples of the period’s ‘culture wars’. Culmer’s legacy and reputation, moreover, have been contested ever since the 1640s, and it has proved tempting to dismiss him for his ‘pathological spleen’. At the very least it seems clear that he was ‘a contentious opinionated person’, with ‘many enemies’. This reflected his willingness to engage in controversial pamphleteering, but while the tracts by Culmer and his son –Richard Culmer Junior –from the 1640s and 1650s are now familiar to scholars, they are worth revisiting because of the light they shed on the political and religious culture of the civil wars and Interregnum.2 Indeed, the aim of this chapter is to use such tracts to examine the intersection between three key issues that have featured prominently in the work of Ann Hughes: politics and society in a specific locality; the purpose and power of cheap print and its more or less intimate relationship to interpersonal disputation; and the
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role of women within the upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century, both as active participants in the troubles and as victims of bad behaviour.3 That Culmer makes this possible reflects the ways in which he was both similar to and different from the great Presbyterian propagandist, Thomas Edwards, the subject of Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution. With this book, Hughes revolutionised our understanding of the print revolution, demonstrating the innovative ways in which texts could elucidate not just the lives and beliefs of their authors, but also how pamphleteers used print as part of political and religious strategies; how they chose to deploy evidence, and how they thought about audiences and readers. Like Edwards, Culmer was a controversial, engaged and active cleric, and an innovative appropriator of print who provoked heated pamphlet controversies. As with Edwards, the pamphlets produced by Culmer offer a remarkably rich and detailed picture of contemporary happenings, and have too often been treated simply as sources for, rather than the subject of, scholarly enquiry.4 And as with Edwards’ famous heresiography, the tales related by Culmer invite attempts to assess authorial accuracy and veracity. What makes Culmer distinctive, however, is that while he shared with Edwards a determination to catalogue the errors and ills of his age, he focused on royalists and Arminians rather than on sectaries. Moreover, while Gangraena certainly drew upon characters and episodes from across the country, including Culmer’s Kent, it was very obviously a Londoner’s book, whose author looked outwards from the capital, with whose affairs he was intimately involved. Culmer, while sharing Edwards’ determination to address both local and national audiences, very obviously wrote as a participant in local battles, and as such he highlights somewhat different dynamics regarding the relationship between centre and locality during the 1640s and 1650s. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to demonstrate that Culmer provides a means of enhancing our understanding of the political and religious culture within a specific locality, and a window onto a world of political and religious engagement beyond and below the elite, in ways that involved women from all walks of life and that were intimately connected with ‘national’ affairs. It will thus add to a growing body of scholarship on the infrapolitics of local communities, and the ways in which ministers became focal points for rumour, gossip and allegations involving both male and female parishioners. This will involve testing and contextualising the claims made in pamphlets by and about Culmer, and it will also mean establishing what made such pamphlets distinctive, in terms of their treatment of evidence and the expectations made of readers. Not the least significant issue to be addressed will be one of Culmer’s most striking practices as an author: the decision to anonymise so many of the people to whom he referred. Ultimately, the aim
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is to deepen our understanding of the nature, practices and role of polemic during the civil wars and Interregnum, not least in relation to how evidence was deployed to make and break reputations, in ways that are likely to have resonated somewhat differently at national and local levels.5
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I In certain ways, Richard Culmer’s pamphleteering reinforces our increasingly well-developed understanding of the role of print in the civil war era. His first work, Cathedral News from Canterbury (1644), bore all the hallmarks of a piece of semi-official parliamentarian propaganda. It was licensed by John White and Joseph Caryll, who detected in its pages that ‘the hand of providence hath indeed wrought a new thing in our Israel, worthy to be looked upon by all’. It was also dedicated to the Committee for Plundered Ministers, and it chimed with other works that provided damning evidence about the Laudian church, its personnel and its persecuting practices. Culmer’s particular aim was to expose the ‘corrupt constitution’ of Canterbury Cathedral, ‘that you may more perfectly cure the malignant disease, called the Cathedral evil’, not least in order to support Kentish petitioners.6 As such, he catalogued grievances regarding the railing of altars and the downgrading of preaching, noted the promotion of Laudian clerics to livings across the county, and outlined evidence of their ‘forwardness in the archbishop’s pious designs’, as well as how they treated parishioners who refused to conform to innovative practices.7 He also recalled the suspension of local ministers who refused to publish the Book of Sports, including Mr Huntley, Mr Gardiner, Mr Partridge, Mr Player and Mr Hieron, as well as Thomas Wilson.8 And he described recent episodes such as the visit by the queen mother (Marie de Medici), who kissed ‘Becket’s stone … as thousands of papists have done before her’, and who was invited by local clerics to reflect upon the need for ‘vengeance on those that shed this holy martyr’s blood’.9 As such, Culmer justified attempts to implement reform, noting that the iconoclasm of 1642 took place on ‘that very day’ when the royalist advance into Kent was ‘broken’ by ‘the religious and valiant Sir William Waller’. Culmer did so to make clear to readers that ‘God’s providence fitted that day to begin that deliverance, when that most idolatrous cathedral first began to be purged of those abominable images of jealousy’.10 In other words, Culmer’s pamphlet provided not just polemic but also detailed accounts of specific incidents and people, and he painted a vivid picture of the charged atmosphere within Kent during the years before civil war. He noted ‘how often’ the ‘railing prayer … against the Scots’ was read in that Cathedral, ‘with a hundred cathedral bellowing and bawling
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A-A-mens’, and he referred to a sermon on 5 November 1639 in which the covenanters were compared to gunpowder plotters, as well as to a visitation sermon in April 1639, in which Laud was referred to as ‘dominus deus noster papa’ who had authority ‘jure divino’. Elsewhere, Culmer referred to an Ascension Day sermon from 1642, in which a prelate hearing that some of the parishioners of [St] Andrews in Canterbury did not kneel at the communion … came and administered it there himself, and was so punctual for their kneeling that he looked very low, or under, to see if the females kneeled.11
Most strikingly of all, Culmer offered a detailed account of Canterbury’s election for the Short Parliament, referring to how ‘proctors, fiddlers, tapsters and other friends of the cathedral and prelatical party’ mobilised in support of Laud’s secretary, William Dell. Culmer noted that Dell not only ‘prepared’ his friends to vote for him, and presented letters of recommendation from both Laud and the Lord Keeper, but also referred to a portrait of Sir Thomas White, one of the city’s benefactors, thereby provoking cries of ‘no pictures, no images, no papists, no archbishop’s secretary’. After that, the citizens were said to have ‘hissed him down, and … cried up others, whom they chose burgesses’. According to Culmer, moreover, one ‘petty canon’ who asserted his right to vote as a freeman was mocked as ‘a Weaver, a Weaver, a priested weaver, in a canonical coat’.12 Second, Culmer and his enemies were driven by awareness of the power of cheap print. Culmer reflected having ‘seen books of news from several places, as news from Hell, news from Rome, news from court, news from Ipswich etc.’, and he made it clear that such works made an impact in the localities. He noted, for example, that Laud’s speech at the trial of Burton, Bastwick and Prynne ‘did presently echo’ in the cathedral, ‘where they were called … black mouth’d-railing-rabshakees’.13 He also made it clear that his own pamphlet was a response to how print was being used by other local ministers, referring readers to ‘a printed prelatical sermon … not long before the long sad eclipse of parliaments’, as well as to ‘a cathedral news from Canterbury in print’, not least to insist that the iconoclasm of August 1642 was undertaken in an orderly fashion.14 Culmer’s rivals, meanwhile, treated such material, and the mobilisation of popular opinion involved, with genuine disdain. One critic mocked how mass petitioning ‘put the people into a humour of fluctuation and unquietness’, and the way in which ‘weavers, tailors, tobacco-pipe-makers and all the poor rabble of London’ had been ‘called to the office of reformers in church and state’, presumably by the Protestation.15 Another decried how London’s streets ‘echo with nothing more of late, than news and newsbooks’, and dismissed ‘that upstart corporation of newsmongers’, and it was suggested that Culmer’s
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book was ‘fitted to the genius of (his old patrons) the vulgar, calculated to the meridian of their capacities’. According to this author, ‘if the people, the rabble, the multitude, relish, taste, resent it well, quoth Dick, why Hey then up go we’.16 Third, Culmer’s story highlighted how civil war pamphlets could generate extended exchanges within Kent, in which truth claims were tested and reputations challenged, not least in tracts written by his own parishioners.17 In dealing with the story about Marie de Medici, for example, The Razing of the Record suggested that Culmer was told to ‘blush at thy own dishonesty and false dealing’, on the grounds that ‘an unwary reader might be caught, and think twas some cathedral man spake it’.18 The author of Antidotum Culmerianum challenged Culmer’s ‘saucy’ account of the Canterbury election, given that Dell’s supporters were ‘neither proctors, fiddlers, nor tapsters’, but rather ‘prime citizens’, and that he had been defeated by the ‘rude and uncivil’ behaviour of ‘the opposite party’.19 More generally, such authors questioned Culmer’s reputation, often with the hallmarks of cheap print: abuse and libellous verse. Culmer was portrayed as a ‘pitiful news-monger’ and peddler of ‘a rag tag collection of poor tales, ending in nonsense and slanders’.20 Culmers Crown Crackt styled him a ‘prodigious monster’, a ‘pseudo-martyr’ and the ‘grand imposter of this age’, and in responding to his ‘impertinent, false and frivolous’ pamphlet the author referred to the ‘woeful exchange the good but unfortunate men of Minster have made of a doctor for a dunce, of a learned divine for a leaden Dick, of a revered pastor for a ravenous persecutor’. Its author also claimed that Culmer told ‘a tale of a turd … wrapping it up in a legend of lies, forgeries and other base trumpery, to say nothing of his shitten style’.21 And as with that other notorious pamphleteer, Henry Walker, much was made of the fact that Culmer was ‘a red-haired freckle-faced fellow’, who had ‘Judas’s own complexion’.22 As with so many puritans, moreover, Culmer was challenged not just about his unorthodox views but also about his godliness and hypocrisy. This was not just a matter of decrying his iconoclasm, at Minster as well as at Canterbury, but also of noting how he conducted irregular marriages, ‘without license, without ring, without book’.23 More importantly, he was said to have shown ‘impiety’ by neglecting his father, to have been quick to criticise the morality of others while apparently condoning incest by ‘a precious pair’ of his ‘acquaintances’, and to have been excessively litigious. One critic noted ‘his continual suits at law’, concluding that he was ‘a better lawyer than divine’.24 Ultimately, such traits were linked to Culmer’s apparent covetousness, as opponents made repeated claims about his ‘griping usury’ in dealings with men like ‘his friend Richard Pising’, and about how, despite his evident wealth, he pleaded poverty to the people of Harbledown,
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‘to borrow a few pence to buy himself and family bread’.25 What such allegations made clear was the importance of delving into Culmer’s life history. One author, therefore, claimed to be ‘furnished … with materials from Thanet, from the free school at Canterbury, from Magdalene College in Cambridge, from Goodnestone in East Kent, from Herbaldowne and elsewhere’.26 Culmer was said to have been ‘famous’ in his youth for ‘football and swimming’, and for ‘his new-found way for descending the cliffs to catch Jackdaws by the help of a rope fastened to his father’s cowhorns’.27 It was said that at Canterbury school he proved to be a ‘blockhead’, and the ‘senior dunce of all the school’, although he showed ‘some proficiency in his laudable liberal arts of swimming, thieving, cussing, football-playing’.28 Repeated references were made to the story about how at Cambridge he narrowly avoided a beating for stealing wheat, and how he was ‘shamefully expelled’.29 More importantly, critics exposed the traits that were revealed through Culmer’s clerical career. It was claimed that after Cambridge he ‘betook himself … to vulgar association’, consorting with ‘the ignobile mobile vulgus, the vulgar spirited rabble, a sort of people naturally given to contemn their governors and superiors, and to quarrel with the present state’. However, he was accused not just of ‘courting and countenancing the common people’s humour’, for ‘private ends’, but also of deliberately deceiving them, not least by telling them that Parliament had ordered ‘that no jot of painted glass must be left standing’ in the cathedral. At the same time, critics also decried how he ingratiated himself with the parliamentarian authorities at Westminster, by telling ‘lies’ about Laudianism at Canterbury, by engaging in blatant self-promotion, and by using ‘tricks and impudent practices’ –as well as the exploitation of ‘good friends’ –to intrude himself into a succession of clerical positions, at the expense of honest ministers like Stephen Goffe.30 As a minister, moreover, Culmer was said to have been unpopular, not least as someone who was tyrannical and money-grabbing, and who was guilty of ‘following his barn more than his book’. It was said that he was almost ‘stoned’ by ‘enraged parishioners’ of St Stephen’s; that he failed to intrude himself at Margate because of the ‘distaste both to ministers and people’; and that at Minster –‘a fit morsel for his insatiate maw’ –he provoked the ‘ill-will and odium of the parish who were not such arrant asses as willingly to suffer such a fool to ride them’. It was also said that ‘by the saving of their souls he meant the gaining of their tithes, not caring so much to reform their lives as to improve his own livelihood’, and that he behaved ‘like a very tyrant or a tiger’.31 After fleeing the royalist rising in Kent in 1648, moreover, Culmer was said to have engaged in ‘preaching in [a]chimney corner’ at his cousin’s house in Deal, to have been seen ‘prattling at Bermondsey’, and to have accepted the protection of the army.32
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In the face of ‘open slanders … and printed libels’, Culmer and his son felt compelled to respond. They decried ‘venomous calumnies’ which served as ‘deadly poison’ to damage Culmer’s ‘good name and reputation’, and they defended a book which was described as ‘the finger in the bile and swelling ulcer of prelacy’, and as ‘true history’. This naturally involved discussing episodes like the iconoclasm at Canterbury, where labourers were said to have exceeded their orders, as well as Culmer’s removal from Goodnestone, ‘only for refusing to publish the king’s book for sabbath recreations’, for which he referred readers to the printed account of Laud’s trial.33 However, the explanation for issuing such responses is revealing, because readers were informed that Culmer initially ‘thought fit to answer only with scorn and contempt’, ‘being confident that no wise man would believe that, which no man doth avow’. Ultimately, however, he realised that such libels were being used ‘not only against him, but against the common cause’.34 What was particularly concerning was the impact of such pamphlets within Kent. Culmer’s son claimed that the ‘cathedral hornets … flew about my father’s ears, bombalizing and toating so loud, that city and country rang of their railing and libelling’, and that ‘after those libels were spread abroad in print’, other libels, false reports and mocking verses were also circulated around Canterbury, ‘and in the night thrown under the door of the then mayor’, in order to ‘cause the people to destroy him’.35
II Complaints about the impact of pamphlets in Kent indicate that tracts by and about Culmer add weight to recent scholarship regarding the importance of print and polemic during the civil wars, but they also demonstrate that the controversy surrounding him can be used to highlight aspects of seventeenth- century print culture which are not yet widely recognised. These relate to the role of pamphlets as part of political processes, rhetorical tactics relating to authorial credibility, and the deployment of evidence to engage with different audiences. First, the pamphlets produced in Culmer’s defence represented part of a wider strategy for dealing with attempts to undermine puritan preachers in Kent. References were made to the ‘lawless liberty’ which saw people attacking ministers like Culmer, and the ‘worrying and wearying out most precious ministers by word and deed, by tearing and tugging, lyings and slanderings, revilings and defraudings, and withholding their maintenance by confederacy’. It was also made clear that attacks in print were intimately connected to how Culmer’s enemies submitted ‘articles’ against him, and ‘raised persecution against him to the shedding of his blood’.36 It was
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suggested that ‘libels, printed and published, and spread all the nation over’ led to his being ‘assaulted at Billingsgate’ in 1648, when ‘the people were incensed against him by a scribe that did belong to the archbishop’s registry at Canterbury’, and when Culmer ‘hardly escaped with his life’.37 More importantly, pamphleteering was directly linked to the petitions about Culmer that were submitted to the authorities in Whitehall and Westminster, and to the difficulties encountered during political and legal proceedings, not least in relation to the withholding of tithes. It was suggested that publishing books against such ‘persecutors’ –whose ‘complaints and moans’ were ‘daily heard’ –arose from the need ‘to awaken the Christian magistrate’, and to supplement difficult legal cases that Culmer undertook through the Court of Exchequer. Pamphleteering, in other words, reflected a concern that, while ‘relief is certain’, it was ‘so long waited for, that in the meantime the poor ministers and their families perish’. The resort to print, in short, was a practical political expedient.38 Second, the pamphlets produced by and about Culmer highlight the novel strategies that authors used to assert credibility. For Culmer’s son this naturally involved rhetorical flourishes, and he mocked ‘silly fictions’ that were ‘invented and published in those railing libels’. He also boasted that his books ‘caused them to gnaw their tongues for pain, and to put so much gall in their ink, in their pretended confutation of his books’.39 But he also drew attention to Culmer’s powerful connections, something that could be done not just by printing official licenses, as well as dedications to powerful committees and local grandees, but also by depicting Culmer as someone well-connected at Westminster.40 One example involved the privileged access that Culmer gained to Laud’s as-yet-unpublished diary, which ‘Mr Prynne found in his pockets in the Tower of London’, and which readers were told they might ‘see … in Mr Prynne’s custody’.41 Another involved an attempt to refute the ‘forgery’ about Culmer’s being expelled from Cambridge, which involved name-checking ‘worthy Mr [Richard] Vines, of the reverend assembly of divines’, who could prove its falsity.42 Beyond this, Culmer and his son frequently referred readers to official archives: to evidence that could be seen ‘upon record in this present parliament’; to the proceedings of the Committee for Plundered Ministers; to the papers of the committee chaired by ‘the truly religious’ Sir Robert Harley; to the records of the Committee of Examinations; and to the minutes of the Council of State.43 Indeed, Culmer frequently reprinted specific documents relating to official business, including testimonials that had been submitted in his favour by parliamentarian peers like the earl of Warwick, as well as by local magistrates, MPs and certain parishes. All of these attested to his ‘exemplary life and conversation’, his ‘diligence’ as a preacher, and his zeal for the ‘common cause’ and the ‘cause of God’, and at least some of them were said to remain on record.44
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Third, this use of testimonials formed part of a wider pattern in which Culmer, his son, and their critics traded on being able to deploy local knowledge. His opponents certainly proclaimed their familiarity with both Culmer and his locality, informing readers that they were his parishioners, and that Canterbury was ‘a place whereunto I have formerly had some relation’.45 As will already be clear, this made it possible to refer to things that were ‘very well known’ in the region. These included the fact that one of Culmer’s sons was a convicted drunkard, while another ‘hath attempted the abuse of several women’, and the fact that Culmer himself was worth ‘120 pounds per annum besides … land in Ireland’, not to mention the fact that he neglected his aged father, of which ‘the whole island where he lives rings’. On another occasion it was claimed that ‘all the city and parts adjacent’ had ‘long experience of his common, customary, habitual lying’.46 Culmer, meanwhile, frequently glossed the evidence he provided by saying that it involved ‘no news’, or ‘no cathedral news to those that live near the Canterburian cathedral’, and that he referred to things ‘well known to all that live in or near Canterbury’.47 Ultimately, however, what makes the pamphlets produced by Culmer and his son particularly intriguing is their tendency to anonymise the characters to whom reference was made, in marked contrast to the practice of Thomas Edwards.48 In cataloguing the problems at Canterbury, for example, Culmer referred to the ‘singingmen’ who were appointed to benefices ‘in and about the city’, including Mr etc late weaver, now reading priest, and parson of St Mary Bredman, and peticanon of that cathedral; Mr etc late tobaccopipe maker, and reprieved from the gallowes, now reading priest and parson of St Martins …; Mr etc, late taylor, servingman and butler to the dean of that cathedral, now reading priest and curate of St Mary Bredin, and also of St Mary Magdalen …; Mr etc late servingman, now reading priest and curate of St Johns.49
In referring to the erecting and railing of altars, Culmer referred to ‘the command of Dr etc, parson of Hithe, parson of Ickham, parson of Well, parson of Saltwood, prebend of Canterbury, Archdeacon etc’. Similarly, in discussing the superstitious font in the cathedral, Culmer explained that this was erected ‘at the costs of Dr etc, late prebend there, now parson of Backchurch in London, parson of Barham in East Kent, near Dover, parson of Bishops Bourn, Lord Bishop of Rochester etc’.50 In part, of course, these lists represented conceits, since Culmer was not so much identifying a large group of clerics as mocking a few pluralist ministers who held multiple posts simultaneously, including Matthew Warriner (d. 1644), Rowland Vaughan, Dr William Kingsley (d. 1648) and Bishop John Warner.51 The same was true of the story about Laud’s ‘young chaplain’ who was made a
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prebend of Canterbury and given three of the seven livings within the Isle of Thanet –a reference to Meric Casaubon.52 And the same was also true of the author of ‘news from Canterbury in print’, who was said to be ‘a master of a college, an archdeacon, two prebends, and three parsons, and yet but one man, a Canterburian cathedralist’, and who can be identified as Dr Thomas Paske.53 However, this was also part of Culmer’s broader style, as with the story about healths being drunk to Prince Rupert in the cathedral, wherein Culmer referred to ‘Mr etc’, a ‘tavern-haunting cathedral doctor’, who ‘upon the fast day in the afternoon, at the tavern with other gentlemen, drunk about ten healths, and continued there until night, where he was left with the dean of Canterbury’.54 Similarly, when Culmer claimed to have seen a note, in a Bible belonging to a ‘well-affected Alderman’, regarding a sermon on the ‘first day of the high altar’ in 1633, he noted that it was preached by ‘Dr etc’, who told worshippers that ‘if they would find Christ, they must come to the altar, and there they should find him really present’.55 In part, using terms like ‘Dr etc’ were probably used as mocking nicknames for people who endorsed the controversial ‘etcetera’ oath introduced in the Laudian canons of 1640, and yet it also involved a deliberate policy of withholding the names of key adversaries. Anonymity was certainly Culmer’s preferred way of discussing the cathedral’s dean, Isaac Bargrave. On one occasion, Culmer referred to him as ‘the Nimrod of that Cathedral, a mighty hunter, and hawker too’, who not only hunted hares and foxes ‘on weekdays’, but also ‘the GRAY or badger on the sabbath day’. This was a reference to how, ‘about five years since’, Bargrave had heard that ‘one Mr Gray (a godly and able minister, now living in Essex)’ had preached against the prelates’ ‘popish proceedings’, whereupon he ‘rode out to find him’ one Sunday, and ‘hunted’ him ‘from Shoulden to Ham, from parish to parish’. According to Culmer, Bargrave almost caught his prey at Sandwich, only to be thwarted once Gray ‘crept through a secret muse’, whereupon he ‘caused the town gates to be shut, and watchmen were set with halbards at every corner, but the preacher escaped them all’. According to Culmer, Gray then ‘went beyond the bridge by the windmill, and escaped the wrath of that cathedral Levi’, escaping along the coast with the assistance of Anthony Oldfield, ‘to Lid, and so to Tenderden, and so to London’. Meanwhile, the dean brought in several people for questioning, ‘in his prelatical outrageous fury’, and bound over one of them, Thomas Foach, to the High Commission.56 Elsewhere, Culmer referred to Bargrave as ‘the grandee’, who fired up troops mustered for the first Bishops’ War in 1639 by expressing the hope to see them ‘return … with blew Scots caps’ on their heads. He was also said to have ‘laughed exceedingly’ at a comment that the King ‘would make the Scots glad to take bishops, and archbishops, and popes too’.57 Culmer also used this term ‘grandee’ when referring to an incident in 1642,
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when Bargrave apparently ‘feasted some malignants’ who planned to seize parliamentarian ships, and who was then rewarded by God on his journey home, when his coach ‘overthrew into the common sewer, or broad stinking ditch, between the Three Kings tavern and King’s Bridge in Canterbury’. According to Culmer, ‘the great cathedralist’ duly cried out for help, only to find ‘the people laughing at their land shipwreck, and filthy pickle’, and at the ‘bedaubed white satin gown of the female cathedralist’, adding that ‘the people said also that the prelates would have a greater fall, they hoped’.58 Here, in other words, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Culmer deliberately framed stories in ways that were likely to have been particularly legible and meaningful to readers in Kent, such that they are likely to have been understood very differently by local and national audiences. Indeed, similar tactics are also evident in his son’s relation of Culmer’s own troubles and trials, especially in relation to his enemies, if not perhaps his friends, some of whom were explicitly identified, so that those who were ‘yet living’ could verify his stories.59 In relating Culmer’s experiences at Harbledown, for example, where he became ‘assistant’ to Robert Austin –‘now living’ – and where he ‘had very many auditors’ from Canterbury, Culmer Junior described how his father was persecuted for his actings against drunkenness, and against prophaning the sabbath by cricket playing before his door, to spite him, which, when he had reproved privately and publicly, they removed that sport to a field near the woods, where they threw stones at his sons, whom he sent to see if they played there.
Moreover, ‘upon public reproof, the churchwarden (whose wife was for just cause denied the sacrament) bought boards to keep the people of Canterbury out of the church seats’, while the grandee persecutor J. W. used to go with his crew of brawlers and railers, his wife especially, upon the sabbath to the parsonage house, and there did clamour and bawl to the doctor to move him, that Mr Culmer might preach no more there.
Indeed, it was also noted that one of this ‘crew’, one ‘S. S.’, tried to get Culmer removed by hinting at shameful behaviour which had caused his removal from Goodnestone parish, prompting the conclusion that ‘some people are like a kennel of hounds, that will bark for company’.60 Elsewhere, reference was made to ‘a debauched malignant priest’ –‘P. K.’ –who ‘incensed the people’ of the Minories (London) against Culmer in the mid-1650s, thereby endangering his life once again. Another story involved an elder in the ‘pretended separatist congregation’ of ‘J. T.’, some thirty miles from Minster, who ‘meeting Mr Culmer lately upon the road, affronted him, and used opprobrious terms’.61
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In other words, the aim behind the pamphlets produced by both Culmer and his son was to provide stories that were verifiable, at least for some readers, and it seems clear that the characters involved were real, and that the incidents recounted had at least some basis in fact. Beyond this, of course, readers may have disputed the way in which particular people and episodes were discussed, especially in terms of the emphasis that was placed on the providential ‘hand of God against such persecutors’. This involved the story of ‘Mr E. K. of Dover’, who ‘joined in the hurly-burly’ against ‘a godly able minister’ at St James, Dover –John Vincent –but who ‘a little after’ was a ‘self-executioner by hanging himself’.62 Likewise, it involved the account of Mr Morgan, who tried to dupe those illiterate parishioners who were Culmer’s allies into signing petitions against him (professing that they would help to secure his ‘preferment’), who ‘a few days after was stricken with death’.63 It also involved an episode following the publication of Culmer’s suspension from Goodnestone by ‘Mr D (yet living), then curate to the Bishop of Rochester at Barham’, when ‘the people of Barham fell to dancing on the sabbath’, leading to a ‘quarrel … between two dancers’ which resulted in one man having ‘his brains knocked out’.64 And it involved ‘the grandee persecutor J. W.’ from Harbledown, whose son ‘used to thresh corn on sabbath mornings’, and who himself wound up in Canterbury gaol, as well as another man from the same parish, ‘E. Br.’, who promoted a petition against Culmer when he was refused the sacrament for having been drunk, and when he was denied a loan of twenty shillings. This man was soon ‘found guilty of a felony’ for having chased his wife ‘with a drawn sword’, and was ‘burnt in the hand at the sessions at Canterbury’. Apparently, he would have been ‘hanged’ if Culmer had not ‘taught him to read’, presumably meaning that he escaped by reciting the so-called ‘neck verse’.65 Finally, it involved the story –‘which a thousand can witness, and which you know to be true’ –of Joan Yates, who was executed at Canterbury for infanticide, and who also confessed to having eluded her mistress in order to skip church services, specifically so that she could attend a ‘bawdy house’ where she ‘played the whore’.66 Not every reader, one assumes, would have agreed that these interpretations were ‘famously known’, even if the stories themselves were based in fact. However, given the willingness of Culmer’s contemporaries to respond to the pamphlets that he and his son published, it is noteworthy that such enemies not only felt compelled to deal with stories where characters had been anonymised, but also that they were able to identify those involved, and that they tended to confirm at least part of what had been alleged. This is particularly striking in relation to the lives and activities of local women. Culmer, for example, referred to an episode involving ‘their brave female cathedralist’, otherwise ‘a cathedral lasse beguiled [i.e., seduced] by
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a singing man’. Having been ‘delivered of a child alone’, this woman was arraigned for murder when the baby was subsequently ‘found dead in the vault’. Culmer’s point was to expose how ‘malignant and prelatical justices’ had ‘so bestirred themselves’ that she was acquitted, in order to protect the reputation of the cathedral, and in the face of protests from the bench.67 In essence, this story –which cannot be verified due to the lack of surviving sessions papers –was confirmed by one of Culmer’s opponents, who admitted that it involved ‘a maidservant of a prebend’. Culmer’s story had basis in fact, even if the interpretation was contested, and his opponent insisted that it was merely a ‘private’ matter; that it was more important to show sympathy for the ‘weak female cathedralist’; that the father was ‘no singing man, but a townsman’ (a surgeon who had ‘left the city to dwell in the church’); and that it was ‘notorious in the country … that the business had a square, fair trial’.68 Indeed, the fact that the identity of those involved would doubtless have been recognised from the evidence presented perhaps lends credibility to at least elements of Culmer’s other stories relating to local women. One of these involved the ‘proud cathedral dame’ and the maidservant who was beaten for failing to starch her ruff properly. According to Culmer, the ruff in question was then miraculously starched overnight, ‘none knew how’; it was then cast into a fire, ‘out of which it lept’, until it was finally destroyed by being held in the flames. Once again, Culmer insisted that this story was ‘famous in city and country’, and although not everyone might have agreed with the conclusion that ‘the devil was the cathedral laundress’, none of his critics attacked the story’s basis in fact.69 The same is also true for Culmer’s story about ‘a rich widow Mrs R.’ of Harbledown, who ‘clamoured’ against him and refused to pay her assessment of 2s. 6d. towards the poor, as well as for his story of the ‘patroness’ of Goodnestone, ‘Mrs P’, who gave his living to ‘Mr A. H.’, the latter of whom soon ‘lost his goods by fire’ and was then ‘drowned in the water’.70 Very occasionally, Culmer’s critics were willing and able to identify specific characters from Culmer’s pamphlets very precisely. Thus, in addition to making allusive references of their own –to characters like ‘Mr P. E.’, who was ‘yet alive’, and who had apparently tried to stop Culmer from smashing the windows in the Cathedral, by ‘dashing out those little brains he had’ –they sometimes identified those whom Culmer had mentioned only cryptically.71 For example, in criticising Canterbury’s prelates for ‘carding, dicing, dancing, swearing, drunkenness and drabbing too’, and for ‘tavern tospotting’ –all which things were ‘no news’ –Culmer made a vague reference to seeing ‘sack bottles keep rank and file in their studies’.72 One critic responded by naming the culprit as Dr Thomas Jackson, one of the prebends. That this was done reflected the fact that Jackson was someone who
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had offended both Puritans and Laudians, and it was said to be ‘no wonder’ to see such a sight in Jackson’s study –‘and no where else in the whole church’ –given that he probably felt the need to return to ‘those warm draughts of canary’ out of the guilt that arose from his ability to ‘one day preach for bishops, another day against them; one day for the liturgy, and the next day against it’.73
III Thus, while Culmer was considered to be ‘a notable plunderer of the good names, and rigid ransacker of the lives and conversations of his other fellow ministers’, his stories were not regarded as mere fictions. They were probably susceptible to being interrogated and verified by local readers, and they thus provide valuable insights into both the nature of the civil war in Kent, and into the uses of print.74 These three facets of the pamphleteering surrounding Culmer can best be demonstrated, and perhaps also explained, by means of three small case studies, not least to show that they also applied to Culmer’s enemies. The first relates to someone who was described by Culmer’s critics as ‘Mr E. B. of B. in the Parish of G.’, a gentleman ‘of birth and credit’ who was ‘brought in question for his life by the treacherous malice of this grand imposter’. More specifically, it was claimed that Culmer had made accusations about ‘treasonable speeches’ regarding Ship Money in the late 1630s, namely that ‘if we have such taxes laid upon us, we must rebel, or we must be fain to rebel’.75 Culmer was apparently motivated by the desire to secure revenge upon someone who had helped secure his removal from a ‘curateship’, and the story was supplemented by a copy of the deposition that Culmer submitted to the Privy Council in July 1635, as well as by a transcript of the Council’s order of 9 October 1635, which insisted that his allegations were ‘causeless and unjust’, and which ordered his incarceration in the Fleet prison.76 This can all be shown to have been true, in terms of the trouble in which Culmer found himself for accusations levelled against Edward Boys of Bonnington in Goodnestone, even though he continued to maintain his innocence, blamed Laud for his ‘crying persecution’, and pointed out how quickly he was released.77 The second case study involves further allegations against Culmer by his enemies, in relation to two female parishioners in Harbledown. The first of these was the ‘rich matron’ into whose favour he ‘wound himself’ with various ‘tricks’, to the point where, ‘in commiseration’ of his perceived poverty, ‘she made him her constant almsman while she lived, and her executor when she died’.78 This was a reference to the widow Ann Bull –another critic
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referred to Culmer going ‘a Bulling to Herbaldowne’ –who was actually Culmer’s ‘loving cousin’, and who made him both a beneficiary of her will as well as its executor in 1640.79 The second woman was ‘Mrs B’ (and her husband ‘Mr B’), with whom Culmer was said to have become embroiled in lawsuits, and to whom he refused to pay money that was owed.80 This was Grace Bull and her husband Miles, both of whom were beneficiaries of Ann Bull’s will, and both of whom became involved in complex and protracted Chancery suits with Culmer over unpaid legacies between 1641 and 1644, which resulted not just in ‘causeless suits’ but also hot words, threats of excommunication, and physical assaults, with Culmer claiming to have been attacked with a sword, and to have received ‘many sore blows’.81 Here too, Culmer’s critics referred to verifiable events, and to a case that was probably notorious within Kent, and as such it is intriguing that reference was made to a bizarre episode which involved Culmer being ‘pursued from street to street’ by an irate ‘Mrs B’. According to the author of the Antidotum, Culmer was chased ‘up to St Thomas Hill … and so towards Christchurch Wood’ –‘a good breathing you may think for a gentlewoman’ –with his pursuer ‘chattering at him all the way for her money’, so that ‘all they met took notice of it’. Culmer apparently only escaped when, after a chase of some few miles, he was able to gather up his cloak and make for ‘a rough thicket’, which was ‘hard of access, especially for a gentlewoman’.82 The third and most substantial of the case studies involves Culmer’s troubled time at Minster in Thanet during the 1640s and 1650s, and someone who was referred to merely as the ‘£500 man’.83 Culmer’s son recognised that his father’s appointment to the parish was inherently controversial, noting how it prompted attempts ‘to make the minds of the people … ill-affected against him’, not least by means of allegations made ‘openly in the streets at Canterbury’. This doubtless reflected his puritan practices –his removal of images and crosses, his opposition to the maypole, and his refusal to preach on Christmas day –but it also involved claims that he courted ‘poor people’, so that they would not ‘join with the rich men against him’.84 However, serious difficulties were said to have begun in earnest following a dispute with a parishioner (and churchwarden) who ‘desired him to entertain his brother-in-law, Mr P, then curate, to be his assistant’, an offer that Culmer refused because the curate was ‘the father of drunkards’, and also a Laudian royalist. The curate’s brother-in-law responded by boasting that he would spend £500 to get Culmer out of the living, and it was this ‘£500 man’ who was said to have demonstrated ‘burning malice’ against Culmer, and who became the ‘grandee’ of the ‘faction’ that sought to undermine him.85 This campaign against Culmer by the ‘faction’ around the ‘£500 man’ apparently involved ‘taunts and cries’, and repeated outbursts of verbal abuse, including an incident where one parishioner –a ‘common swearer’
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called ‘J. D.’ –pointed to an open grave and cried ‘we shall have him here, here, here shortly’, before threatening to hang him from a nearby tree. However, it also involved attempts to petition the Westminster Assembly, a committee of parliamentarian peers, and Kent’s deputy lieutenants, as well as the county committee, all of whom expressed their support for Culmer.86 Thereafter, unsuccessful plans were allegedly made to complain about him to the Committee for Plundered Ministers, which involved collecting a common purse of £300, as well as the appointment of a treasurer, and processing ‘coaches full of witnesses through Canterbury in triumphant bravado’.87 Culmer’s son also referred to a complaint being made to the Commissioners for Scandalous Ministers, to a petition being submitted to Oliver Cromwell, and to the burdening of Culmer with billeted soldiers, to the point where he had to borrow money from two local JPs, Thomas Paramour and Major Thomas Foach. Culmer Junior also pointed to the fact that a range of parishioners engaged in ‘tithe-robbing tricks’, and to the occasion when Culmer’s ‘tithing servant’ was ‘knocked down, and beaten and bruised’.88 Ultimately, Culmer himself was said to have become the target for physical abuse in 1647. It was claimed that a group of parishioners ‘crushed his body so, that he vomited blood, and purged blood’, and then ‘dragged him by head and shoulders out of the church’. It was also alleged that riotous parishioners used force to keep Culmer from preaching: they ‘bedaubed’ the church windows with a ‘filthy sir-reverence’, and removed the clappers from the church bells, so that he could not call parishioners to worship. Eventually, a force was raised to assist Culmer, and the rioters –including someone who was referred to as ‘C. S.’, and as the ‘scout’, ‘ringleader’, ‘incendiary’ and ‘trumpeter’ –were all ‘indicted and found guilty’. Their fines were promptly paid, however, by some of Culmer’s parishioners, and new articles were promptly submitted against him by the ‘£500 man’, alongside three others that Culmer claimed to be able to identify.89 Apparently, Culmer then became a target for rioters at Canterbury (December 1647), not least as a result of having tried to defend the city’s mayor, who had been ‘knocked down’. Having been assaulted by a mob led by Joseph Philips, innkeeper of the Saracen’s Head, Culmer was reported to have taken refuge with Sir James Oxinden, one of the deputy lieutenants, before returning to Minster and witnessing the murder of Richard Langley –‘a very godly man, and active for the state’ –by a ‘gentleman cavalier’. Thereafter, Culmer’s son claimed that his father made a dramatic escape via Sandwich and Deal, pursued by a tumultuous mob, and assisted by a cast of named characters, including John Culmer of Deal, the physician Mr Wood, and one Mr Potter, as well as Colonel Thomas Rainsborough and Captain Nubery of the Hunter frigate. Readers were explicitly informed that Mr Wade,
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gentleman usher at Whitehall, could ‘tell more of this’. According to this version of events, Culmer eventually wound up in Berdmondsey, where he preached at the church of Jeremiah Whitaker.90 Here too, Culmer’s son drew attention to the workings of providence in relation to the ‘chief agitators’ from Minster. One parishioner who offered verbal threats was said to have ‘died a little after stark mad, cursing and calling out the devil, the devil’, while another, ‘J.W.’, was soon ‘crushed to death’ after falling under a wagon in a ‘drunken reel’. Yet another, the bigamist ‘T. D.’ who ‘did beat his own aged dearest father’, was soon after hanged in Sussex. One of those who was supposed to witness against Culmer at Westminster –a ditcher from Upstreet called Wilde –fell sick soon after, and ‘died in a fearful manner’, and one of those who took part in the Minster riot subsequently became a pirate and a ‘cavalier captain’, and was ‘slain at sea’.91 Although he did not say so explicitly, Culmer’s son also intimated that the death of the ‘£500 man’ shortly after participating in the Kentish rising –thereby enabling Culmer to live ‘peaceably without disturbance’ –involved divine sanction.92 As elsewhere in the controversy surrounding Culmer, the troubles at Minster were also said to have revolved around the role of, and treatment of, female parishioners. In part, attention was paid to women who suffered at the hands of Culmer’s enemies, or who fell victim to the feuds in which he was involved. These included the poor bastard girl whom his adversaries sought to make his servant or apprentice, as well as the wife of the ‘£500 man’, who, having told her husband that she was ‘edified’ by Culmer’s sermons, and that she did not want to ‘gad’ to other parishes, suffered the indignity of having ‘a sir reverence… laid in her pew in the church’. To make matters worse, it was instead a visiting ‘gentlewoman of London’ who was ‘bedaubed with that stinking excrement’, such that she was ‘constrained to strip her white satin petticoat over her feet in public, in the church, in the time of divine worship’.93 More obviously, attention was drawn to the active part that local women played in such contests. These were said to have included a ‘gentlewoman’ –the wife of a local yeoman, William Goldfinch –who appeared as a witness against Culmer before a parliamentary committee, as well as a woman who threatened Culmer in a Canterbury street during the agitation in December 1647.94 Most strikingly, reference was made to plans to raise a ‘band of women’, who were to attack Culmer ‘and throw him in a ditch’. On this occasion, the plans were apparently mocked by a female parishioner, ‘Mrs O’, who told ‘the gossips in the church porch’ that the likely ‘captain’ of this group would probably be a ‘whore’, like the woman who ‘was brought a bed a month after she was married’. As a result, Culmer’s son was able to report that ‘the band of women never advanced … but with their sharp tongues’. Nevertheless,
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it was also noted that Culmer was accused for ‘rehearsing’ some ‘words of the feminine gender’.95 Finally, the story of Culmer’s trials at Minster confirms not just that such claims were susceptible to being interpreted by local readers, but also that even his enemies made concessions about their accuracy. On this occasion, verification came in the form of a pamphlet by Stephen Blaxland called Speculum Culmerianum, which mocked the ‘false and opprobrious assertions’ made by Culmer Junior –they were said to reveal his father’s ‘vainglory’, and to have been peddled to serve a ‘private interest’ –but which tended to quibble over details rather to than challenge basic facts.96 Blaxland thus confirmed the essence of the story about the Minster riot, including the fact that one of the ringleaders was nicknamed the ‘trumpeter’, while insisting that he had been made parish clerk out of charity –as someone who was ‘aged and lame’ –rather than because of his loyalty to ‘the faction’.97 Blaxland also confirmed that Culmer’s sermons were attended by local magistrates, while denying that these included anyone other than Paramour and Foach.98 Most interesting of all, Blaxland confirmed the essence of the story about the ‘£500 man’, revealing his identity as John Blaxland –‘my father’ – while defending his reputation from ‘insufferable injury’ by insisting that he was ‘very well known to all in that island’, as ‘a man of quiet and peaceable spirit’. Moreover, while Blaxland claimed that it was ‘altogether untrue’ that his mother valued Culmer’s sermons, comments about his father generally involved little more than qualifying his role in opposing Culmer, and reflecting upon his motivations.99 Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Blaxland picked up on a reference to an anonymous parishioner who mocked some locals as ‘Culmer’s disciples’, noting that ‘I know you mean me’. This involved complaining about an ‘undeserving scandal … cast upon me’, while admitting that he had been involved in erecting a controversial pew in Minster church.100
IV These comments by Stephen Blaxland take us to the heart of what makes Culmer’s pamphlets, and those of his enemies, so intriguing. In responding to tracts by Culmer’s son, Blaxland understood even the vaguest of references, worried about the response within his local community, and subjected the evidence to close scrutiny. As such, he makes it possible to draw to a close by suggesting that the Culmer affair sheds light on a somewhat different kind of pamphleteering to the one with which historians are familiar. This is partly because Culmer, his son and their enemies highlight the innovative ways in which pamphlets could be composed and constructed, in terms of
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how credibility was promoted rhetorically and evidentially, and in terms of the strategic ways in which they could be used alongside other kinds of political and legal activity. But it is also because such authors wrote about the political and religious issues that drove the civil wars as they played out in Kent –most obviously in Canterbury and the parishes where Culmer ministered –through detailed accounts of local factions, tensions and disputes. In many ways, of course, this was predictable and natural, and in line with the wider culture of pamphleteering, but what merits attention is how these authors chose to provide vivid and detailed narratives while also anonymising many of those involved. This was not done systematically, and there was certainly scope for revealing the identities of those involved, so that stories might be verified, or so that authors could make rhetorical claims about the possibility of stories being verified. At the same time, there was no clear pattern whereby authors named their friends while anonymising their enemies, and to the extent that patterns can be discerned it is not immediately apparent why this tactic should have been deployed. It is possible that such information was thought to be redundant in pamphlets that were published in London for more widespread consumption. It is also possible that authors wanted to be able to say provocative things without being accused of libelling living people. However, irrespective of the precise reasoning involved, the implications seem clear. First, the stories written by and about Culmer involved identifiable individuals, and episodes that can often be shown to have taken place, or at least that nobody denied having happened. Second, the anonymity surrounding key players did not stop other people in Kent from being able to identify those involved, and to recognise the stories being told. Third, these pamphlets thus provide a more or less reliable means of recovering the kinds of things that happened in Kent during the 1640s and 1650s. Such things are striking in terms of the nature of popular politics and religion, and in terms of the awareness that locals had about print culture, national affairs and the political and legal processes of Westminster and Whitehall. They are also revealing in terms of the active role of women from all walks of life, as well as in terms of the complex and distasteful ways in which contemporaries responded to female power and agency. Fourth, anonymity can also be presumed to have been deployed in the expectation that, while many of the characters and episodes would have read for their general value outside Kent, they would also have been read and interpreted differently, and more knowingly, by people within the local area. As such, it becomes clear how far the authors of these pamphlets wrote with more than one audience in mind, and at least in part for an audience for cheap, polemical and topical print, which was presumed to exist within their own community. What Culmer and his enemies understood, in other words, was that pamphleteering could be undertaken with the intention that texts would
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prove useful in different ways in local and national contexts, and with different kinds of audience.
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Notes 1 Certaine Informations, 49 (18–23 December 1643, BL, E.79[8]), pp. 385–6; ODNB; Richard L. Greaves, Saints and Rebels (Macon, 1985), pp. 63–75; Edmund Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial, ed. Samuel Palmer (3 vols, London, 1802–3), ii. 345–6; Jacqueline Eales, ‘Kent and the English civil wars, 1640–1660’, in Frederick Lansberry, ed., Government and Politics in Kent, 1640–1914 (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 17; Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford, 1988), pp. 84–95. For a later claim for financial aid by a Canterbury cordwainer, William Cooke, who had been injured trying to resist Culmer, see KHLC, DCc/PET/232. 2 Jacqueline Eales, ‘The rise of ideological politics in Kent, 1558–1640’, in Michael Zell, ed., Early Modern Kent, 1540–1640 (Woodbridge, 2000), p. 285; CSPD 1640–1, pp. 453–4; CSPD 1641–3, p. 545; CSPD 1644, p. 15; HMC, Fifth Report, p. 70; LJ, v. 588; William Prynne, Canterburies Doome (1646), pp. 27, 33, 388–409, 539–43; Calamy, Memorial, ii. 345–6; Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (12 vols, Canterbury, 1797–1801), x. 288; Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars (Oxford, 2012), pp. 1–3; Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640– 60 (Leicester, 1966), p. 60; Aston, Iconoclasts, p. 88. For Culmer and the petitioning campaign, see: BL, Add. MS 26785, fo. 84; Lambert B. Larking, ed., Proceedings, Principally in the County of Kent (Camden Society, 1862), p. 119. For his petition for a place at Canterbury Cathedral in 1644, see: PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/174; LJ, vii. 10. For evidence of a dispute in 1659, see CCA, CC/F/A/26, fo. 435. 3 Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987); Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004); Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon, 2012). 4 Everitt, Community of Kent, pp. 53, 59, 60, 74, 85, 117, 127, 202–3, 204, 225–6, 233. 5 See 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; John Walter, ‘ “Affronts & Insolencies”: the voices of Radwinter and popular opposition to Laudianism’, EHR, 122.495 (2007), 35–60; John Walter, ‘Popular iconoclasm and the politics of the parish in Eastern England, 1640–1642’, HJ, 47.2 (2004), 261–90; David Cressy, ‘Mercy Gould and the vicar of Cuckfield: domestic and clerical pleading’, in Agnes Bowker’s Cat (Oxford, 2000), pp. 51–72; Jacqueline Eales, ‘The clergy and allegiance at the outbreak of the English civil wars: the case of John Marston of Canterbury’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 132 (2012), 83–109.
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6 Richard Culmer, Cathedral Newes from Canterbury (1644, ESTC C7478), sig. A2. 7 Ibid., pp. 2, 3, 5. 8 Ibid., pp. 7, 8, 12. See Peter Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution (Hassocks, 1977), pp. 364–5, 370. For George Huntley (d. 1646), of Stourmouth, see Larking, ed., Proceedings, pp. 196–8; An Argument Upon a General Demurrer (1642, ESTC H3779); TNA, PROB 11/195, fo. 326v. For Gardiner, vicar of St Mary Sandwich, see CL, p. 382; Al. Cant., ii. 194. For Partridge, curate of Sutton by Dover, see CL, pp. 96–7; Al. Cant., iii. 316. For Player (d. 1660), vicar of Kennington, see A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), p. 392; CL, p. 99; Everitt, Community of Kent, pp. 77–80. For Hieron, vicar of Hernhill, see CL, p. 99; Al. Cant., ii. 367. For Thomas Wilson, rector of St George the Martyr, Canterbury see: ODNB. For the clash between Laud and these ministers, see: TNA, SP 16/477, fo. 17; SP 16/499, fo. 218; SP 16/500, fo. 123; SP 16/502, fo. 16. 9 Culmer, Cathedral, p. 7. 10 Ibid., pp. 20, 24. 11 Ibid., pp. 8, 9–10, 10–11. 12 Ibid., pp. 18– 19. For Dell, see A Biographical Register St John’s College, Oxford, ed. A. Hegarty (Woodbridge, 2011), p. 253; TNA, PROB/11/204, fo. 197v. In the election, Dell and Sir Roger Palmer (a future royalist and a court nominee) were defeated by two local men, John Nutt and Sir Edward Masters, amid lively scenes in which at least one libel against Dell was ‘cast abroad’. Dell secured election at St Ives, and served as Laud’s solicitor at his trial. See CCA, A/C4, fos 121v, 151v, 158; BL, Add. MS 11045, fo. 99v; CSPD 1639–40, pp. 561–2. 13 Culmer, Cathedral, pp. 1, 9. 14 Ibid., pp. 10, 18. These comments referred to Isaac Bagrave, A Sermon Preached before King Charles (1627, ESTC 1414) and T. Paske, A Copy of a Letter (1642, ESTC P646). 15 The Razing of the Record (Oxford, 1644, ESTC R420), p. 1. 16 Antidotum Culmerianum (Oxford, 1644, ESTC A3500), sig. A2, p. 20. 17 One tract reprinted Cathedral Newes, with additions apparently written by his son: Dean and Chapter Newes from Canterbury (1649, ESTC C7479). Another tract was attributed to Richard Culmer Junior: Richard Culmer, A Parish Looking- Glasse (1657, ESTC C7482). His role was disputed by other authors –both parishioners –but is accepted for the purpose of this chapter: Culmers Crown Crackt (1657, ESTC C7483); Stephen Blaxland, Speculum Culmerianum (1657, ESTC B3176). See also Richard Culmer, The Ministers Hue and Cry (1651, ESTC C7481); Charles Nichols, The Hue and Cry (1651, ESTC N1099); Richard Culmer, Lawles Tythe-Robbers (1655, ESTC C7480). 18 Razing, p. 4. 19 Antidotum, pp. 28–9. 20 Razing, pp. 11–12. For verses, see: Crown, pp. 15–17. 21 Crown, title page.
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22 Razing, p. 3; Antidotum, p. 6; Crown, pp. 15–17. 23 Crown, p. 8; Blaxland, Speculum, p. 14; Antidotum, pp. 23–4. Culmer was said to have removed the cross from the steeple at Minster. 24 Antidotum, pp. 17, 23. 25 Ibid., p. 12. Culmer was said to be worth £1,200. 26 Ibid., sig. A2v. 27 Ibid., pp. 5–6; Crown, p. 1. 28 Crown, p. 2. 29 Antidotum, pp. 6–7; Crown, pp. 2, 10–12. 30 Antidotum, pp. 8, 9, 13, 14; Razing, sig. A2v, p. 3; Crown, p. 2. 31 Antidotum, pp. 6–7; Crown, pp. 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10–12. 32 Antidotum, pp. 6–7; Crown, pp. 2, 10–12. 33 Culmer, Dean and Chapter, title page, p. 24; Culmer, Parish, sig. A2, pp. 3, 5, 6. For Culmer at Goodnestone, see CL, 64. 34 Culmer, Parish, p. 6; Culmer, Dean and Chapter, p. 24. 35 Culmer, Dean and Chapter, p. 24; Culmer, Parish, pp. 9–10, 36. 36 Culmer, Parish, sig. A2, pp. 2, 3. 37 Ibid., p. 37. Culmer apparently fled to Summers Key, where one Mr Mapsden gave him shelter. 38 Culmer, Parish, pp. 2–3, 22; Culmers Crown, p. 13. 39 Culmer, Parish, p. 7. 40 Ibid., sig. A2. 41 Culmer, Cathedral, pp. 15–17. Culmer’s stories about Laud and his dreams included material not in Prynne’s edition of the diary. 42 Culmer, Dean and Chapter, p. 24; Culmer, Parish, pp. 3, 6–7. Culmer named his tutor in Canterbury as Roger Raven, ‘an eminent, godly learned yet persecuted and silenced minister’: Al. Cant., iii. 423. 43 Culmer, Cathedral, pp. 4, 5, 6, 12; Culmer, Parish, pp. 19–20. 44 Culmer, Parish, pp. 7–8, 8–9, 38–9; Culmer, Dean and Chapter, pp. 26–8. For such testimonials and correspondence with those involved, see PA, HL/PO/JO/ 10/1/174; HL/PO/JO/10/1/142. These testimonials were mocked by Culmer’s enemies, forcing him to insist that they were ‘real, under so many names of worth’: Blaxland, Speculum, p. 7; Culmer, Parish, p. 7. 45 Antidotum, sig. A2. 46 Blaxland, Speculum, pp. 9, 28; Antidotum, pp. 17, 12. For evidence of Culmer’s investment as an Irish ‘adventurer’, see TNA, SP 63/298, fo. 349; SP 63/285, fo. 3. 47 Culmer, Cathedral, pp. 4, 12, 13. 48 Hughes, Gangraena, pp. 166, 177, 205. Edwards occasionally anonymised his sources, perhaps reflecting the information he received, and decisions of his informers: Edwards, Gangraena, i. 68, 69, 70–1, 81, ii. 50, 53, 57. For other examples of how stories regarding local disputes involved anonymised characters, see: Ralph Wallis, More News from Rome (1666, ESTC W616), pp. 29– 32; Ralph Wallis, Room for the Cobler of Gloucester (1668, ESTC W619), pp. 14, 25, 27–30, 33, 38–9. 49 Culmer, Cathedral, p. 2.
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50 Ibid., p. 3. 51 For Warriner, see WR, p. 2. For Archdeacon Kingsley, whose 1647 will claimed that he was ‘a firm and constant professor of the faith, doctrine and discipline which is now by law established in the Church of England’, see WR, p. 220; J. Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1541–1857 (13 vols, London, 1969– 2014), iii. 15, 31; TNA, PROB 11/204, fo. 109. For Warner, see ODNB. Others cannot be identified. 52 Culmer, Cathedral, p. 5. For Casaubon, see WR, p. 213. For the claims about Causabon and his curate, John Picard, including enthusiasm for ceremonies, see Larking, ed., Proceedings, pp. 104, 107; ODNB. 53 Culmer, Cathedral, p. 18. See Antidotum, p. 26, where the author identified Culmer’s target as ‘Dr P’. For Paske, see A Copy of a Letter (1642, ESTC P646); Le Neve, Fasti, iii. 25. 54 Culmer, Cathedral, p. 4. This may have been a reference to William Dunkin, sometime minister at St Laurence, Isle of Thanet, canon of the cathedral and six preacher, a frequenter of alehouses who drank healths to Prince Rupert, bowed before the altar and likened the covenanter invasion to the Spanish Armada: WR, p. 215. 55 Culmer, Cathedral, pp. 8–9. 56 Ibid., pp. 7–8. For Bargrave, see ODNB; Le Neve, Fasti, iii. 12. This story referred to Enoch Gray, sometime minister in Sandwich, who then became rector of Wickham Bishop, Essex: Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. 232; Al. Cant., ii. 250. It also refers to Thomas Foach or Foche of Monckton, who had signed an anti-Casaubon petition in 1641, and who became a prominent parliamentarian JP and committee-man, and an ally of Culmer. See Larking, ed., Proceedings, p. 107; Everitt, Community of Kent, pp. 151, 154; The Visitation of Kent… 1619–1621 (Harleian Society, 42, 1898), pp. 49, 73; G. J. Armytage, ed., The Visitation of Kent… 1663 (Harleian Society, 54, 1906), p. 27. 57 Culmer, Cathedral, p. 8. 58 Ibid., p. 19. 59 Named friends include John Lade, sometime mayor of Canterbury, and Richard Pysing: Culmer, Parish, pp. 6–7. For Robert Austin, sometime rector of Harbledown and parliamentarian pamphleteer, see ODNB; TNA, PROB 11/310, fo. 236v. For Pysing (d. 1675), from Canterbury, see Armytage, ed., Visitation of Kent, p. 152; CL, p. 806; CCA, PRC/27/26/92. 60 Culmer, Parish, p. 4; Culmer, Dean and Chapter, pp. 24–5. This may have been Stephen Smith, identified in another pamphlet: Culmer, Ministers, p. 8, but it may also have been Stephen Swayne: J. M. Cowper, ed., The Christnynges, Weddinges and Burynges in the Parish of Harballdowne (Canterbury, 1907), p. 6. ‘J. W.’ was James Wood: Cowper, ed., Christnynges, pp. 80–83; Culmer, Dean and Chapter, pp. 24–5. 61 Culmer, Parish, pp. 37–8. ‘P. K.’ was Paul Knell (d. 1664), sometime minister of St Dunstan, Canterbury, a royalist sequestered from his living, who later preached in London in the late 1640s. See Larking, ed., Proceedings, pp. 136–9; WR, p. 221; ODNB. ‘J. T.’ was John Turner of Sutton Valence. See R. J. Acheson,
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‘Sion’s Saint: John Turner of Sutton Valence’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 99 (1983), 183–97; No Age Like Unto This Age (1653, ESTC N1173), pp. 1, 9, 11–13. 62 Culmer, Parish, p. 3. This was a reference to Edward Kemp, a moderate reformer and sometime ally of Sir Edward Dering, who subsequently become a royalist: Larking, ed., Proceedings, pp. 23–4, 60–2; Visitation of Kent 1619– 1621, p. 32; Everitt, Community of Kent, pp. 71–8, 213. Vincent, who was appointed by Parliament, later served as a naval chaplain and died on board ship during the second Anglo-Dutch war in 1665: CJ, ii. 489; CJ, iii. 66–7; TNA, PROB 11/317, fo. 383. 63 Culmer, Ministers, p. 8. 64 Culmer, Parish, p. 4. This was Francis Drayton (d. 1669), curate of Barham from 1637, and later vicar of Little Chart: CL, pp. 66, 71, 137; Al. Cant., ii. 66; WR, p. 210. 65 Culmer, Parish, p. 5; Culmer, Ministers, p. 8; Culmer, Dean and Chapter, pp. 24–5. For J. W., i.e. James Wood, see above, n.60. ‘E. Br’ was Edward Browning: Cowper, ed., Christnynges, p. 82. 66 Culmer, Ministers, p. 14. 67 Culmer, Cathedral, p. 4. 68 Razing, p. 3; Antidotum, p. 22. This involved drawing a parallel with the case of ‘another gracious virgin’, who miscarried after having ‘conceived a child’ by the ‘religious son’ of ‘Master Necessity, alias Ladde, now judge of the archbishop’s court at Canterbury’. For Ladde, who had apparently been presiding at the sessions when the case was tried, see Robert Ladd or Lade of Canterbury, Staple Inn and Gray’s Inn: CL, p. 597; J. Foster, The Register of Admissions to Gray’s Inn (2 vols, London, 1889), i. 128; R. Fletcher, ed., The Pension Book of Gray’s Inn (2 vols, London, 1901–10), i. 226, 339; J. S. Cockburn, ed., Calendar of Assize Records. Kent Indictments Charles I (London, 1995), pp. 392, 409, 537. One pamphleteer claimed that the acquittal may have resulted from ‘the counsel of friends’, just as Culmer was supposed to have used friends to secure a clerical living at the expense of Stephen Goffe: Razing, p. 3. For Goffe, see WR, p. 356; ODNB. 69 Culmer, Cathedral, pp. 4–5. 70 Culmer, Parish, pp. 3–4, 5; Culmer, Ministers, p. 8. ‘Mrs P’ was perhaps Alice Pordage of Goodnestone, widow of Nicholas Pordage of St Dunstan in the East, London. She remarried in 1634: TNA, PROB 11/218, fo. 59v; PROB 11/164, fo. 287v. ‘A. H.’ was Arthur Hatch: CL, pp. 64, 66; J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses (4 vols, Oxford, 1891–2), ii. 671. ‘Mrs R’ was probably Jane, widow of Christopher Rich: Cowper, ed., Christnynges, p. 83; CCA, DCb/BT1/ 107/19, 29; CCA, PRC/17/65/380a, PRC/10/54/104. 71 Crown, pp. 3–4. 72 Culmer, Cathedral, p. 4. 73 Razing, pp. 2, 4. Dr Thomas Jackson (d. 1646) was a cathedral canon and prebend, rector of St George, Canterbury and vicar of Ivychurch, who later witnessed against Laud, who accused him of frequently changing his views.
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See WR, p. 219; Le Neve, Fasti, iii. 21; W. Laud, Troubles and Tryal (1695), p. 326. In his 1642 will, Jackson professed loyalty to the Church of England, and bemoaned ‘all such heterodox novel and curious tenets as by papists, Arminians and sectaries have been most unhappily broached, preached and printed to the great trouble of the church and the disquieting of the minds of many godly people’. He hoped that God would ‘compose the many and great differences lately risen amongst us’. A 1644 codicil referred to ‘the continuance of those grievous, troublesome and bloody times’, and to how his estate was ‘much diminished’. See TNA, PROB 11/201, fo. 205v. 74 Razing, sig. A2. 75 Antidotum, pp. 17–18. 76 Ibid., pp. 19, 34–5. 77 Culmer, Dean and Chapter, p. 24; Culmer, Parish, p. 7. Culmer’s son blamed not just Laud but also ‘Sir J. F.’, i.e., Sir John Finch, a prominent lawyer and sometime speaker of the House of Commons. See ODNB. For the documentation, see CSPD 1635, pp. 301, 368; TNA, SP 16/294, fo. 151; SP 16/297, fos 145, 147; TNA, PC 2/45, fos 43, 44, 66–v. Culmer’s deposition contained the allegation that Boys wanted to ‘get my benefice for his cousin Hatch by my ruin’. For Boys (d. 1661), see Visitation of Kent… 1619–1621, p. 39. 78 Antidotum, p. 12. 79 Culmers Crown, p. 3; CCA, PRC/ 27/ 8/ 140; PRC/ 31/ 114 B/ 1. Bull left books worth £7, including Foxe’s ‘book of martyrs’, and asked to be buried ‘without pomp’. 80 Antidotum, p. 15. 81 TNA, C 2/Chas1/B160/77; C 2/Chas1/C41/52; C 2/Chas1/B27/60. It was alleged that Culmer, a ‘troublesome and lawing man’ had threatened ‘to go beyond the seas and to live in Holland, New England or some other remote part’, while Culmer claimed that his rival said that ‘Hell is too good for such a rascal as you are’. In his will of December 1643, Miles Bull expressed the hope that Culmer would ‘show himself both faithful and just in pursuance of my aunt’s will, in so ample a manner as may be desired’. He also referred to money ‘due to me from the king’: CCA, PRC/27/11/33; PRC 31/122 B/3. For ecclesiastical court wrangling within the Bull family, and with local ministers like James Hirst, John Gee and Francis Kettleby, involving libels and tithe disputes, see CCA, DCb/J/J/36/63; DCb/J/J/35/103 and 105; DCb/J/J/39/67; DCb/J/J/51/ 64; DCb/J/J/58/211; DCb/PRC/18/19/28 and 36. 82 Antidotum, pp. 16–17. 83 Aston, Iconoclasts, pp. 89–91. For a report by Culmer on Minster and the Isle of Thanet from 1651, see TNA, SP 25/65, fo. 43; SP 25/96, fo. 19. Unpicking the story of Minster is made more difficult by the fact that while the churchwarden’s accounts survive they are too fragile to be made accessible: CCA, U3/ 164/P255/5/A4. 84 Culmer, Parish, pp. 9, 11, 17, 18, 24. The ‘£500 man’ refused to support Culmer’s attempt to remove ‘idolatry’ from the church, whereupon Culmer apparently hired two parishioners, Peter Wotton and Thomas Austin (d. 1648) to remove the crosses. For these men, see KHLC, U3/164/1/1.
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85 Culmer, Parish, pp. 9, 11, 24–5, 27–33. This cleric was John Picard, who had been curate at Minster since 1621, and had been criticised in 1641 alongside Casaubon as being ‘zealously observant of all innovations, and bowing and cringeing to the communion table’. He also refused the sacrament to those who refused to kneel at the altar rail. See KHLC, DCb/BT1/160/14–29; CL, pp. 62, 69, 99, 136, 779, 1340; Al. Cant., iii. 358; Larking, ed., Proceedings, p. 104. 86 Culmer, Parish, pp. 17, 18, 24. ‘J.D.’ was perhaps John Dyer (d. 1670) of Minster: CCA, PRC/16/286 D/2. It might also have been James Dobson (fl. 1626–51) of Minster: KHLC, DCb/BT1/160/16; KHLC, U3/164/1/1. In the Assembly, Culmer was apparently defended by Dr Peter Smith, Herbert Palmer, William Gouge, Dr Thomas Wilson and Dr Edward Corbet (for whom see ODNB), and elsewhere he received support from the earl of Warwick, as well as from a string of prominent Kent parliamentarians: Sir James Oxinden, Mr Boys of Betteshanger MP, Richard Hardres, Anthony Weldon, Robert Scot, William Miller, John Boys and William Kenwrick, as well as Sir Edward Boys (MP and governor of Dover Castle) and Thomas Blount. See Culmer, Parish, pp. 11–13, 15, 16. 87 Culmer, Parish, pp. 18, 19. 88 Ibid., pp. 20, 21, 22, 34, 35. For Paramour and Foach, see A&O, i. 1238; ii. 119, 301; Visitation of Kent… 1619–1621, p. 13; KHLC, U3/164/11/1, fos 85v, 131. For action against Minster parishioners for tithe infractions, see KHLC, Q/SB/3/4. 89 Culmer, Parish, pp. 25–8, 34. Culmer apparently received support from ‘good people’ like Mr Hartius of Birchington, while the attackers seem to have included a parishioner called Robert Wells, who had signed the parish petition of 1641 and who was constable of Ringslow hundred in 1647: Larking, ed., Proceedings, p. 104; Cockburn, ed., Kent Indictments, pp. 489, 508; KHLC, U3/164/11/1, fos 1–2, 45v. Warrants were issued by the Committee for Plundered Ministers to protect Culmer, and by the earl of Warwick as Lord Admiral at Walmer Castle. Culmer responded to the silencing of the bells by using his wife’s ‘great iron pestle’. Subsequently ‘a quondam singing man of the cathedral said in the open street that he heard Mr Culmer had routed C.S. at the sessions but C.S. would rout him out of Minister’: Culmer, Parish, p. 35. ‘C.S.’ has not been identified. 90 Culmer, Parish, pp. 29, 30, 32. For Richard Langley of St Laurence, see Everitt, Community of Kent, pp. 244–5; For Philips (d. 1670), see CCA, PRC/31/139 P/5. For John Culmer (d. 1671) of Deal, see CCA, PRC/32/54/669. 91 Culmer, Parish, pp. 17– 18, 19, 27. ‘J.W.’ was probably John Warden, whose son, John Warden Junior, was accused in 1655 of stealing wood from Culmer: KHLC, Q/SB/6/7 (information of Richard Culmer, 19 April 1655). 92 Culmer, Parish, pp. 30, 32. Readers were also told about the sad fate of the murderer of Richard Langley, who ‘did afterwards cut down his own wife in pieces, and was hanged at Sandwich’. According to Culmer, this man was ‘a great jeerer at praying by the spirit, a contemner of public ordinances, a great incendiary against Mr Culmer’: ibid., p. 31. The murderer was Adam Sprackling: The Bloody Husband and Cruell Neighbour (1653, ESTC B2254).
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93 Culmer, Parish, p. 29. 94 Ibid., pp. 20, 30. The first of these was Joan Goldfinch, widow of Daniel Pamphlet of Minister, who was licensed to marry William Goldfinch (d. 1651) in 1643. He was sometime churchwarden of Minster in the 1620s and 1630s, and had signed the petition complaining about Meric Casaubon and John Picard in 1641: KHLC, DCb/BT1/160/14, 18, 25; KHLC, U3/164/1/1; KHLC, U3/164/ 11/1, fos 1–2, 5v; Larking, ed., Proceedings, p. 104; CL, p. 413. 95 Culmer, Parish, p. 12. 96 Blaxland, Speculum, sig. A2, pp. 3, 18, 21–2. 97 Ibid., pp. 19, 23–4. 98 Ibid., pp. 20–1. 99 Ibid., sig. A2, 8– 9, 14– 15, 17, 21– 2. For John Blaxland (d. 1649), of St Margaret Atwade and Minster, who served as churchwarden at the latter in 1644, see CL, ii. 109–10; TNA, PROB 11/208, fo. 228v; KHLC, U3/164/1/1; KHLC, U164/11/1, fos 1–2, 13v, 16, 33v, 45v. 100 Blaxland, Speculum, p. 25.
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‘Threshing among the people’: Ranters, Quakers and the revolutionary public sphere Kate Peters In February 1658, in a private chamber in Whitby, the Quaker author and minister Richard Farnworth took part in a debate with Thomas Burdsall, accounted a ‘cheife Ranter’. The debate took place following an exchange of letters, and was one of a number of debates held between Ranters and Quakers in Whitby over several years. Their discussion was conducted in front of an audience of ‘many witnesses’, and Farnworth wrote a manuscript account for circulation exposing the ‘Ranters principles, and what they lead unto’.1 In Farnworth’s undoubtedly partial narrative, the Ranter came off worse in debate, his ‘craftiness’ and self-contradictions repeatedly laid bare. Audience engagement was of paramount importance for Farnworth. The questions posed were for the ‘good and satisfaction of the people then present’; when Burdsall contradicted himself, many in the audience ‘witnessed against’ him; when his errors were exposed, it was much to ‘the joy of the innocent’, ‘who desired to escape the serpents policy and wiles’.2 Farnworth’s account of this apparently well-organised, semi-public disputation between Ranters and Quakers affords an important insight into the conduct of radical politics in the 1650s. Although recent work on the Ranters has corrected J. C. Davis’ famous 1986 assertion that the Ranters did not exist (‘there was no Ranter movement, no Ranter sect, no Ranter theology’), the broader significance of the Ranters is still largely shaped by the legacy of Davis’ revisionist interpretation.3 For Davis, the primary significance of the Ranters was the moral panic generated by print media in reaction to their extreme antinomian heterodoxy, which fed a wider public reaction against untrammelled religious liberty, and exemplified the disillusion and defeat of the English Revolution. Subsequent scholarship has largely agreed with Davis that the disproportionate historical attention paid to the excesses of the radical religious sects has detracted from the far more widespread phenomenon of those seeking to shape or belong to a new religious orthodoxy. The moral and theological eccentricity of the Ranters is emphasised, while their political and social significance –as well as their numerical significance –has been underplayed.
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As Ariel Hessayon has observed, much of the crucial work re-establishing the existence and significance of the Ranters has been done by literary rather than historical scholars; important work by Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith in particular has emphasised the rhetorical sophistication and power of Ranter texts.4 Yet despite the centrality of printed texts both to Davis’ critique, and to subsequent scholarship on Ranters, relatively little attention has been paid to the broader reception of Ranter texts, and we know little about the mechanics of dissemination of Ranter ideas. This chapter explores the public encounters between Ranters and Quakers in order to better understand the potential and the mechanisms for radical political debate and mobilisation in the 1650s; it will move beyond arguments about the existence or coherence of Ranters and Ranter belief, and instead will argue that Ranter and Quaker ideas were meaningfully contested and debated in different locales and in front of many different audiences.
I A central plank of Davis’ argument was that the Ranter print sensation was a brief phenomenon over the autumn and winter of 1650–1, and was largely a spent force by the spring of 1651. Accounts of early Ranters and Quakers commonly emphasise the separate chronology of the two movements, the ‘Ranter moment’ of 1650–1, and the subsequent emergence of the sober and more enduring ‘successful’ Quakers in 1652–3.5 This sectarian demarcation is partly shaped by the surviving sources: the flurry of Ranter and anti-Ranter tracts central to Davis’ thesis for the earlier period, and the appearance of a more substantial body Quaker tracts and correspondence from 1652–3 onwards; it is further compounded by the ways in which contemporary heresiographers distinguished between the two sects, as did post- Restoration Quaker authors.6 This differentiation has, however, obscured the chronological and political contiguity of Ranters and Quakers, and their shared endeavours in opposing religious compulsion and advocating liberty of conscience throughout the 1650s. George Fox’s Journal, written retrospectively in the 1670s, affords an important insight into the shared chronological origins of Ranters and Quakers. In Fox’s account, the ‘first stirrings’ of the Quaker movement were in Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, where George Fox, a native of Leicestershire, spent much of the late 1640s preaching and discussing religion.7 As such, he was close to the well-documented Ranter activity in Coventry and Warwickshire in 1650.8 In 1650, the Presbyterian minister Thomas Hall lamented the region’s infection by
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‘Ranters, Seekers, Shakers, Quakers and now Creepers’.9 Fox recalled seeking out Ranters in 1650 in Coventry in the context of the struggle for liberty of conscience: having heard ‘of a people that were in prison in Coventry for religion’, he travelled to visit them, but despite their nominally common cause he was struck by their ‘great power of darkness’; ‘the prisoners began to rant and vapour and blaspheme’.10 The prisoners included Ranter authors Joseph Salmon and Andrew Wikes, imprisoned ‘for foul miscarriages’ in Coventry in March 1650; and probably Abiezer Coppe, arrested for the ‘horrid Blasphemies’ in his work A fiery flying roll and imprisoned in Coventry gaol in February 1650.11 Like a number of Ranters, Fox was imprisoned under the terms of the Blasphemy Act in Derby gaol in October 1650. Fox’s engagement with the Ranters continued immediately following his release from Derby in late 1651. Travelling north-east from Derby through Yorkshire and up the coast to Cleveland, he preached to a congregation who formerly had ‘tasted of the power of God but were all scattered to pieces’ and whose leaders had ‘turned ranters’.12 Although Fox was unable to persuade the congregation’s leaders, his preaching was more effective among the audience: ‘the heads of them all came to notheing: but most of the people came to be convinced, and stands a meeting to this day’. From Cleveland, Fox travelled south towards Staithes, just north of Whitby. Here Fox preached to a congregation ‘which the people did not receive’, but ‘the worde of the Lorde stuck with some of them soe that at night some of the heads of the parish came to mee’. This was a more fruitful exchange: ‘most of them [was] convinced and satisfyed and confesst to truth’. In Fox’s analysis, convincing the ‘heads’ of the parish was a significant turning point in precipitating local religious debate. ‘[T]ruth began to spread up and down’ the country, at which ‘the priests began to rage and the ranters began to bee stirred: and they sent to mee that they would have a dispute with mee’.13 This led to a formal disputation: ‘a day was set’, attended by ‘the leader of all the Ranters’ (perhaps Thomas Burdsall, with whom Farnworth disputed in 1658) and ‘all his company’, as well as a local beneficed minister. In Fox’s estimation, the disputation ended when Fox ‘stopt uppe his (the Ranter’s) mouth that hee coulde say noe more and all his fellow ranters were stopt uppe for hee was the heade of them … And then I layde open the ranters in Sodom.’14 Fox’s accounts thus emphasised the significance of debate in his early encounters with Ranters. As Sharon Achinstein has argued, the process of debate was transformed by the experience of revolution in the mid- seventeenth century. Debate was hailed as necessary for resolving disagreements; at Putney, the Levellers advocated reason and natural law as mechanisms for revealing God’s truth through public debate, while printed tracts presented dialogue didactically, in order to engage readers in the
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resolution of political and religious questions.15 This process was particularly fundamental to debates about liberty of conscience; important intellectual interventions by John Milton and Roger Williams had emphasised the significance of free and open debate in order to allow people to determine their own conscience in matters of religion.16 While much scholarship has focused on print as the key locus of political engagement and debate, the accounts in Fox’s Journal are important sources for understanding how similar debate was pursued in public meetings and disputations, as local groups met to argue about the parameters of religious liberty of conscience and its place in civic politics. As Ann Hughes’ work has offered a rich account of local religious debates, so the complex dynamics described by Fox involving ‘heads’ and ‘people’ in a parish, local ministers and Ranters, suggest ongoing local engagement with the process of public religious debate that exceeded the London-focused moral panic of the Ranter phenomenon, and locates the esoteric and exalted rhetoric of Ranter authors identified by Smith and McDowell within an immediate locale.17 Surviving correspondence from Quaker ministers confirms that Quaker preachers continued to seek out public encounters with Ranters throughout the 1650s. Accounts of their meetings focused on debating as a process leading to the revelation of truth. Thus, in the autumn of 1654, James Nayler held a meeting at Yarme, near Stockton-on-Tees, which was attended by ‘many of the Ranters’ who ‘shewed much lightness and vanity’. At this meeting, ‘frends in the truth was much confirmed in their standinge’ even though ‘divers of them [Ranters] would have opposed, but durst not, for the power of truth kept them under’.18 Ranters also sought debate: in July 1654 John Wilkinson and John Storey described ‘a great meeting’ in Derbyshire, ‘whither the ranters was come to, to prove and try ther god’.19 Quaker ministers clearly believed that the value of public exchanges with Ranters was in the revelation of their deceit, for the benefit of the audience. In late 1654 James Nayler described a meeting at Swannington, Leicestershire, at which two Ranter preachers appeared: ‘but their filthy harts was plainly manifest to the view of all the people, and the terror of the lord was upon them all the while they was amongst us, not being long, soe that they fled away’.20 Richard Farnworth’s account of his dispute with the Ranter Burdsall in Whitby also emphasised the audience’s reaction: ‘When thou wast clearly seen and comprehended … thou started aside in the craftiness of thy minde and would have denied thy former assertion … insomuch that thy wickedness … clearly appeared.’21 This was not a process without risk: Quaker preachers were also afraid that Ranters could prevail in debate. In May 1656 the Quaker Richard Hickock, on a preaching mission to Leek in Staffordshire, described his dread when an entire Ranter meeting came to join his own meeting: ‘when I saw
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them come in’, he wrote, ‘I was very fearfull of the truth suffering’, although in the event he concluded that ‘the truth was advanced that day’. Hickock’s response to the Ranter presence was to ‘Minister Much & Lead them much open’; some of the Ranters were ‘pricked in there harts’ and ‘could Not Rest but went in & out oft’; others ‘stayed still till ye Meeteing was done, not one of them oposed a worde but went their way much confounded’.22 This was clearly a well-established meeting of Ranters –in Hickock’s account the Ranters came collectively ‘from the place where they used to Meete & came in amongst us’.23 The Quakers also had an established meeting locally, at the home of Thomas Hammersley in nearby Basford, and Hickock kept an eye on relations with the Ranter congregation in Leek over a number of years.24 He returned in April 1658, this time bringing with him heavyweight reinforcements in the form of Edward Burrough, a well-known Quaker preacher and author, who held a formal disputation. Hickock was pleased with his ministerial efforts, the silence of his audience –‘all their mouthes were stopped’ –indicating that truth had prevailed. Hickock’s letters thus indicate a process of ongoing dialogue with a local Ranter meeting, augmented by the authority of Edward Burrough, and focused on exposing the ‘folly’ of Ranter ideas through debate with local Quaker and Ranter audiences alike. Silence in Quaker meetings, Richard Bauman has shown, symbolised the presence of God and the ultimate subordination of ‘carnal’ worldly language to the word of God. Although for Colin Davis and other scholars the avowed subordination of religious radical sectaries to spiritual rather than human authority indicated a profound disillusion from civic politics, I would argue rather that Quaker ministers deployed a range of familiar and worldly debating strategies in pursuit of a rhetorical victory over the Ranters: Farnworth, Hickock and Nayler all produced printed tracts denouncing Ranter principles, and also organised public debates with them as they travelled.25 Other accounts of Ranter– Quaker encounters emphasised the value of established preachers or leaders in debate. When the Quaker William Dewsbury wrote to George Fox from Whetstone, Leicestershire in the winter of 1654, he was impatient for the Ranters to appear. Dewsbury described a number of encounters with Ranters, most recently when his own Sunday meeting had been gatecrashed by a group of Ranters. The most prominent, ‘the highest of them’ was Jacob Bauthumley, and Dewsbury explained to Fox that Bauthumley was the man ‘who wear burned through the toung in the army for setting forth a book called the light and darkside of god’ – implying either that Fox might not know who Bauthumley was, or that Dewsbury felt his status as an author and victim of religious persecution at the hands of the army was worthy of comment.26 Dewsbury’s assessment of Bauthumley recognised his persuasiveness and his power over the audience,
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although he was confident that he had triumphed over Bauthumley and his Ranter opponents. He explained to Fox how:
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when their decaitts was layd open before them … the power of the lord stayed their mouths [and] they had no power to resist … Frinds were much strengthened who had been bewitched by them, to see how they lowered when the truth was spoken to their conscience and notwithstanding all their great swelling words formerly the truth stayed their mouths and they went away in shame and contempt.27
In other cases, Ranter rhetoricians clearly triumphed. In Barbados in 1656 the Quaker Henry Fell encountered another Ranter author, ‘one Joseph Salman’. Like Bauthumley, Salmon was a published author, whom Fox had visited in Coventry gaol in 1650: Fell described him as a former ‘ring leader of the Ranters in England’.28 Fell was defeated by Salmon, explaining in a letter that ‘he seems to deny Ranting outwardly’; but this was clearly a ploy to ‘deceive the hearts of the simple’, and Fell regretted that the audience had been swayed by the power of the Ranter: And truly many are deceived by him who formerly have had a profession … but are now drawne after this painted beast & gotten into his Image. [H]e hath gotten the forme of truth in words, the most that ever I heard … but [although] his fruites doe plainly make him manifest that he is not what he speakes … soe blind and bewitched are they by him, that they nether can, nor will see him: truly he is a great enemy to ye truth.
Henry Fell, nevertheless, was keen to have a go at Salmon in public: ‘I have been twise at him already’ and ‘Some threshing I have amongst the people, but [they] are so bewitched with him that they will heare nothing against him’.29 These, then, were Ranter and Quaker polemicists in action, published authors of the revolutionary public sphere vying for audiences in public meetings, and recognising each other as skilled rhetoricians. J. C. Davis’ work made much of the fact that his so-called ‘Ranter core’ was a small group of authors who did not express a coherent set of doctrines and may not even have met each other. The response of Quaker ministers to Ranter authors suggests that, in the context of the vibrant print culture of the 1640s and 1650s, their significance as authors was broader than this, and located primarily in their reception by audiences. Their books clearly added authority to their preaching, and may have afforded notoriety, but this occurred alongside an ongoing and dynamic process of argument and persuasion, which was clearly embedded in local, public encounters in which audiences discussed, and participated in debates about, the nature of sin, transgression and God.
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II The public meetings engineered by Ranters and Quakers replicated other public preaching, stressing both the authority of the minister, and the ignorance or potential gullibility of the audience. Yet the degree to which this was ‘public’ preaching was ambiguous. The spaces in which radical sectaries could hold their meetings were highly charged, as they negotiated legal constraints and local hostility to their preaching.30 James Nayler and Richard Farnworth, undertaking a formal dispute with a group of Manifestarians in Lincolnshire in 1655, refused to hold it in the local church and insisted on meeting in the street, ‘where there was as much liberty for the one as for the other’.31 When John Stubbs and William Caton arrived for the first time in Dover in 1654, they attended a meeting in a ‘chamber’ where they were ‘knowne to noe man by face’; when word of their presence in the town got out the following morning, they were called before the mayor of Dover and a ‘Captain’, a local separatist teacher, and subjected to a ‘very exact’ examination. In this instance, perhaps owing to the sympathies of the separatist army officer, the law prevailed: the Quakers presented their papers, proved they were not vagrants, and ‘wee had our liberty with a Charge from the maior that wee should bee of good behaviour’.32 For many reasons, then, radical preaching meetings and ‘public’ debates often took place in the legal safe space of private chambers or houses. In this liminal space between public and private, women were hosts and organisers as well as speakers and authors. Most famous in this respect is the Quaker founder, Margaret Fell, whose home at Swarthmoor Hall in Lancashire served as headquarters under the benign legal eye of her husband, the judge Thomas Fell.33 Other Quaker women also organised meetings with Ranters and sectarian groups.34 Thus in 1654, Margaret Killam appointed meetings at Kidsley Park in Derbyshire, and Swannington in Leicestershire, attended by Ranters, in which ‘was desires stirred up’ and ‘much came in’. In the same letter she reported holding meetings at the homes of Captain Brown (possibly the Ranter Jonas Browne encountered by James Nayler in Swannington) where ‘there did very many come in but there was not one word of opposition’, and another ‘at a widow-womans, about 5 miles of worsup’.35 James Nayler, travelling from county Durham to Swannington in the same year, reported a meeting held at the home of Barbara Levens and noted ‘many of the Ranters was there’.36 Women were active participants in Ranter meetings. During an exchange with a group of Ranters in Derbyshire, at which there were ‘about 6 men and 2 women’, the Ranters ‘began to singe and whisell and swear and say they was god’ at which the Quaker preacher John Storey spoke to them ‘the dreadful word
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of the lord’, ‘and they was all brought at under for a while’. Ultimately one of the Ranter women present was singled out as receptive to the Quakers’ preaching: ‘Bess Hoogskin that in her conscience was reached which caused her to confess; it was the word of the lord’, upon which Storey and his companion felt able to leave the meeting.37 In Leek, Richard Hickock also noted the specific experience of a woman Ranter when, after having subdued the whole meeting of Ranters: Only one woman of the familie of love stood up at the laste meetinge when I had done: & would [have] s[ai]d somethinge ag[ains]t the truth but god had so confounded her wisdome that shee spoke she knew not what, & Manifested her owne folie there; so the truth Raigned over her.38
In Ann Hughes’ important analysis, many of the political interventions made by women in the English Revolution were shaped by patriarchal languages of household, and the emergent parliamentarian ‘public sphere’ was explicitly gendered male.39 Preaching and public interventions by Quaker women were similarly regarded somewhat cautiously by their male counterparts who worried that women preachers could bring them into disrepute.40 Yet the holding of public debate in private spaces allows us to complicate this perspective: below the radar of public opprobrium and control, women led meetings and participated in debates with (apparently) relatively little censure.
III The language used to describe the process of persuasion of ‘the people’ mapped closely on to the doctrinal issues at stake in the arguments between Quakers and Ranters. The Quakers emphasised the universality of the inner light of Christ, with which they spoke and were guided, and with which they sought to reveal the truth to and about the Ranters. When John Wilkinson and John Storey challenged Ranters at a large public meeting, they concluded ‘the dreadfull presence and power of the lord god was with us; who gave us victory and dominyon over them and they wear much silenced’.41 This victory was expressed as a process of discernment, by which audiences were enabled to recognise truth from falsehood and good from evil, a fundamental component of the universal inner light which was central to Quaker belief and practice, and was clearly at odds with the antinomian Calvinism of their Ranter opponents.42 By this power, as we have seen, Quakers claimed to expose Ranter error to audiences and Ranters alike. The emphasis on silencing opponents and audiences was presented as the victory of the ‘inner light’, and the concomitant defeat of carnal language. As Fox described it, this could be a profoundly contentious experience in a disputation, one which alluded potentially to the constraints of the
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Blasphemy Act. At a meeting attended by an eclectic mix of ‘high spirits, presbyterians, dippers, separatists, ranters and such like’, Fox described how he had been moved ‘to judge and speak to their condition’ and had denounced the ungodly practices of his audience. In Fox’s account, they ‘could not deny but that I had spoken truly to their several Conditions’ and were unnerved by his powers: ‘some of the unclean spirits said I was a witch’ and others ‘demanded by what power or spirit I knew those things’.43 In his reply, Fox explained that it had pleased God ‘to reveal his son in me, which knew all things’; he was then asked whether he was the son of God, which he denied, but claimed rather that ‘the father and the sone was all in mee and wee are one’. The Ranters present were obliged to agree: Jacob Bauthumley ‘and many others’ acknowledged that what Fox had said ‘was the eternal truth’.44 An account by Farnworth of the same meeting indicates that Farnworth and Bauthumley had a longer exchange on knowledge of sin and transgression, Farnworth asking Bauthumely ‘if there were not actual sin, and Transgressions, whereby God was and is displeased’, to which Bauthumley replied ‘there is no sin to him that did not imagine it to be evil’.45 In a similar exchange recorded in 1658 with the Ranter ‘leader’ Thomas Burdsall in Whitby, Farnworth revisited both the origins of sin and the possibility of knowing sin: For the good and satisfaction of the people then present … I asked […] if there be not something in man which is the cause of his transgression … Then I asked thee whether god did not in a dispensation of Light […] convince man of the cause of evil … and councell and perswade him therefrom.46
While the inner light enabled not just Quakers, but audiences and opponents, to recognise truth, Quakers were equally aware that the Ranters were capable of bewitching their audiences. As we have seen, Joseph Salmon was thought to have ‘bewitched’ his followers in Barbados, while William Dewsbury was pleased that those ‘bewitched’ by Bauthumley were able to return to ‘truth’. Despite their professed confidence in the power of the inner light, then, Quaker correspondence depicts a deep-seated anxiety about the power of Ranters over local audiences as literally diabolical or apocalyptic. As a number of the letters discussed thus far have indicated, the demarcation between audiences at Ranter and Quaker meetings was fluid and highly contested. These meetings were sites of ongoing, actual debate, rather than the constructed and retrospective invention of tradition assumed by Colin Davis, and rather differently by Christopher Hill and Frank McGregor. As we have seen, itinerant Quaker ministers like Richard Hickock returned many times to debate with local meetings of Ranters; James Nayler, George Fox and Richard Farnworth all maintained a dialogue with Ranter groups in the Cleveland/Whitby region over a period of seven or eight years; equally intense recurring debates were held around Swannington, Leicestershire,
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and Synderhill Green, Yorkshire, over a number of years. Many of the debating strategies demonstrated and emphasised the proximity of Ranter and Quaker belief. The instability of the Ranter–Quaker divide is evident in a letter written by the Quaker minister Thomas Lawson to Margaret Fell, describing a series of meetings he held in Kent, and his encounters with Ranters there. Generally Lawson was unimpressed by the Ranters: they spoke ‘nothing but the forbidden, abominable swine flesh’ and sought self-justification, pleading ‘to justify that which they wallow in’.47 Yet Lawson was aware of their shared past and origins: ‘as thou knows’, he wrote to Fell, ‘some and severall of them, have tasted of the good word of god’; ‘severall of them, their hearts were truly touched with the love of god, and they led by a principle of righteousness’. Lawson was troubled by the Ranters’ powerful tactics of persuasion, which in his account were worldly as well as diabolical. He informed Fell that ‘many simple people were affraid to receive us’, even those with ‘secret groneings after righteousness’, because ‘the Ranters had [told] them, that there was nothing stood up between them, and the Quakers’. The Ranters laid ‘many stumbling blocks’ in the way of people’s understanding, specifically by claiming ‘they do nothing, but what they have scripture for’. Lawson, university educated and a former clergyman, was well versed in the process of animadversion, and suggested resorting to print. ‘I got their false words from them and the scriptures which they wrest to their own destruction, and I took an account thereof’ –a copy of which he duly forwarded to Fell for publication: if thou bee moved to write any thing to them, or to send to George, it could not but bee serviceable, to scatter an answer of things up and downe the nation, for with their swelling words they catch severall, and labour to make people beleeve, that all things are brought forth by one power.48
Lawson’s letter may have prompted Margaret Fell’s refutation of Ranter principles published in 1656 –the first ‘Ranter’ principle she identified echoed Lawson’s words: ‘God is darkness as well as light, and that there is but one power.’49 But of equal significance in this exchange is Lawson’s account of the organised persuasive tactics of the Ranters, a feature of Ranter behaviour overlooked by scholars keen to focus on their antinomian and sexual excesses, and the moral panic they engendered. That Ranters were clever and serious opponents is echoed in Henry Fell’s warning about Joseph Salmon: he hath gotten the forme of truth in words, the most that ever I heard … but [although] his fruites doe plainly make him manifest that he is not what he speakes … soe blind and bewitched are they by him, that they nether can, nor will see him.50
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The careful analysis of the likes of Thomas Lawson and Henry Fell about the dangerous persuasiveness of Ranter preachers recalls Nicholas McDowell’s account of the rhetorical sophistication of Abeizer Coppe. The final section of this chapter will consider what, during the 1650s, Ranters and Quakers were arguing about.
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IV That Ranters and Quakers were involved in an extended and relatively sophisticated dialogue throughout the 1650s raises questions about the nature and possibilities of a ‘radical’ public politics which have been by- passed in a scholarship that has, by and large, equated public politics with parliamentary participation, and maintains a vision of radical religious sectaries in the 1650s as defeated, eccentric millenarians who were unable or unwilling to engage with worldly politics.51 Here again, Ann Hughes’ work has been an important exception, demonstrating how Gerrard Winstanley’s prose was assimilated relatively unproblematically into news media and thus proposing wider public engagement with ideas otherwise assumed to have been marginal or deeply unpopular.52 Many of the encounters between Ranters and Quakers described in this chapter appear to have taken place as part of a sustained dialogue with the army over the summer and autumn of 1654, against the backdrop of profound constitutional unease expressed over powers of the new Protectorate. This was the first moment of national mobilisation of Quakers, when ministers travelled in pairs from Swarthmoor Hall in Lancashire, taking different routes to London through counties as far south as Somerset and Devon in the west, through Yorkshire, and the midlands in the east, as well as Oxfordshire, before converging in London in late August 1654, shortly before the convening of the first Protectorate Parliament. This was an orchestrated and organised campaign accompanied by the first sustained attempts at Quaker fundraising and an expansion in book publication.53 It is striking that Quakers described frequent meetings of Ranters in the company of soldiers and army officers. A frequently mentioned destination for Quaker itinerant ministers in the summer of 1654 that brought together Ranters, Quakers and the army in political debate, was the village of Synderhill Green (now Handsworth Grange), situated on the Derbyshire-Yorkshire border. Synderhill Green was home to a wealthy Quaker, Thomas Stacey, and also to an army officer, William Bradford, a captain in the regiment of Robert Lilburne who was cashiered from the army for his Quaker views in 1657.54 In July 1654 two Westmorland Quakers, John Wilkinson and John Storey, used Stacey’s
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home in Synderhill Green as a base from which they held a number of public meetings in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. They addressed a variety of audiences, including Ranters: a conference with ‘frinds’ as well as ‘some of the world’; a meeting ‘in the forest’ between Mansfield and Skegby, attended by many ‘of divers opinyons and many religions’; as well as meetings with the ‘people’ and the Baptists. After a meeting among friends in Skegby, Nottinghamshire, they attended ‘a meeting of professors’ nearby at the market town of Sutton-in-Ashfield, held ‘at a prests house’, from which they were eventually ejected by the minister.55 Following this skirmish, the Ranters became drawn into debate: the next stop for Wilkinson and Storey was Kidsley Park in Derbyshire to ‘a great meeting; whither the Ranters was come’.56 A second iteration of Quaker agitation in the area more explicitly involved meetings with Ranters and army officers. Towards late August or early September 1654, the Quaker, Gervase Benson, a former mayor of Kendal who had commanded the garrison there in 1645, also travelled to Synderhill Green. On this occasion, Synderhill Green was the focus for a bigger gathering, Benson describing a ‘very great meeting of freinds’, ‘from severall places of the Nation’. ‘Several’ army captains were present, including William Bradford, and Captain Amor Stoddard (a figure who had helped early Quaker publishing ventures in London through contact with Giles Calvert). Following this large meeting, Benson reported that George Fox planned to stay ‘some dayes’ more at Synderhill Green, ‘haveinge sent for some Ranters from severall places to come to him’.57 Fox and William Bradford met again at Synderhill Green in late October 1654, and James Nayler stayed with Bradford a few weeks later, on his way south to a much larger meeting in Swannington, Leicestershire, in December 1654.58 Indeed, James Nayler’s itinerary in the late autumn of 1654 from North Yorkshire to Leicestershire included a number of public encounters or meetings with army members, politicians and Ranters. Setting off from Yarme in North Yorkshire, Nayler attended a meeting with ‘many of the Ranters’; he then passed through Egton Bridge, near Whitby, ‘to one Burdetts house’ –perhaps the Ranter Burdsall with whom Farnworth later disputed. From Whitby, Nayler held a meeting in Pickering with Luke Robinson, a committed Rump politician whom Fox had already met in 1651: ‘very loving and I had tyme with him to declare my whole message, and hee received itt in much love’.59 Near York, Nayler held a meeting to which ‘there came some soldiers’ who ‘seemed to bee much convinced’. At Easington he held a very large meeting, with ‘many convinced’, attended, he noted, by the wife, son and chaplain of Colonel Robert Overton. Near Kingston upon Hull, they held a meeting ‘at Drypool, without Hull walls’ attended by more soldiers, ‘beinge very attentive, until our tyme was well nigh spent’.60 From here, Nayler travelled sixty miles, without noting any stops, to ‘Captain Bradford’s house’ at
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Synderhill Green, where he attended a meeting of ‘many people’ with ‘much of the love of god amongst us, which made our meetinge proffittable’, and finally concluded his journey at the home of one Edward Muggleston in Swannington, Leicestershire. Here he held a mixed meeting; some of the people were ‘silent and some of them truly convinced’, but it was attended also by Ranters, and ‘their filthy harts was plainly manifest to the view of all the people … soe that they fled away’.61 This sustained contact between army officers, Quakers and Ranters in the autumn of 1654, over a large geographical area, should be understood in the context of the petition circulating among the army, and signed by three regimental colonels, Matthew Alured, Thomas Saunders and John Okey, denouncing the constitutional framework of the Protectorate.62 Quaker involvement in this petition is well known. Described by Barbara Taft as the ‘last of the Army-Leveller manifestos’, and an early iteration of the Good Old Cause, the petition was written by John Wildman, and discussed at meetings in London from mid-September attended by key Quaker figures, Anthony Pearson (former secretary to Sir Arthur Hasilrige) and George Bishop (former secretary to the Committee for Examinations between 1649 and 1653). Wildman gave a draft of the petition to Bishop, who discussed it with his former colleague, John Bradshaw.63 The humble petition of several colonels of the army was framed by reference to earlier key constitutional declarations of the army, The Declaration of the Army of June 1647, and Remonstrance of 16 December 1648, asserting the fundamental principle of ‘constant successive parliaments, to be freely and equally chosen by the People’ and warning of the potential for tyranny in placing the army under the power of a single person.64 Although the petition was discovered before more could sign it, given the sustained contact between Quaker preachers, army officers and meetings of soldiers in the autumn of 1654, it is probable that Quaker preachers were mobilising among soldiers during the constitutional crisis of September and October 1654 to discuss this petition, just as they did during the constitutional crisis of October 1659.65 A tract by Quaker Edward Burrough, obtained by Thomason on 26 September, addressed ‘soldiers and all the officers of England, Scotland and Ireland’, urging them to stick to their promises and observing that current rulers and lawyers had ‘done violence’, ‘oppressed the innocent, and trodden the poor underfoot’ and warning: ‘uphold them not, lest with them you fall’.66 Quaker mobilisation continued in Swannington in late December 1654, in conjunction with a series of meetings and debates with Ranters in the region attended by Fox, Dewsbury, Nayler and Farnworth, as we have seen. The scale of the Swannington meetings, attended by upwards of two thousand people, including the stationer and publisher Giles Calvert, who was reported to be constantly printing, was the cause of government alarm and
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Secretary John Thurloe received intelligence that Quakers were armed and planning insurrection.67 The scale of the uprising was such that George Fox was eventually arrested and taken first to the Marshalsea prison at Leicester, and from thence to London.68 As Fox recalled in his Journal, his arrest and incarceration became a focal point for further meetings and debate: ‘abundance of professors, priests, and officers, and all sorts of people came to see me’ –including a visit from Colonel William Packer and his officers, to which ‘a great company of Ranters came’. For Fox, the Ranters and Packer were of a mind: Packer began to preach ‘with a light chafy minde’; ‘Packer and the Ranters bowed and scraped one to another.’ Fox’s dismay focused on the Ranters’ worldly obsequiousness and observation of oaths: ‘And it was the way of the Ranters to be soe extreme in their complements that Packer bid them give over there complements … I told them they was fit to goe together for they was both of one spiritt.’69
V This chapter has argued that Ranters and Quakers conducted regular and serious public debates for much of the 1650s, and that occasionally they did so in the context of broader civic concerns such as liberty of conscience, the regulation of sin and the constitutional integrity of the Protectorate and the army. Quaker ministers had a sound knowledge of a number of settled Ranter meetings with whom they regularly debated and argued, although it is also clear, as many scholars have argued, that the term ‘Ranter’ could be used generically to describe (and denounce) anyone pursuing what Quakers perceived to be a pragmatic, worldly Calvinism. At the heart of Ranter and Quaker disputations was an impressive religious dexterity, and a dedication to the pursuit and revelation of truth through argument. Davis’ concern to reduce the Ranters to an identifiable and fixed doctrinal coherence has obscured the essential fluidity at the heart of religious debate in revolutionary England. Ranter and Quaker encounters in the 1650s underline the vibrancy and urgency of those arguments, as they sought victory over their opponents, and broaden our understanding of the revolutionary public sphere.
Notes 1 FHL, Portfolio MS 36:130: Richard Farnworth, ‘A short relation of some discourses’. 2 Ibid.
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3 J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986), quotation at p. 124. For a useful summary of early responses see J. F. McGregor, Bernard Capp, Nigel Smith, B. J. Gibbons, and J. C. Davis, ‘Fear, myth and furore: reappraising the “Ranters” ’, P&P, 140 (1993), 155–94. More recent responses include Nicholas McDowell, ‘A Ranter reconsidered: Abiezer Coppe and civil war stereotypes’, Seventeenth Century, 12.2 (1993), 173–205; Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 2003); Nigel Smith, ed., A Collection of Ranter Writings: Spiritual Liberty and Sexual Freedom in the English Revolution (London, 2014), introduction; Ariel Hessayon, ‘The making of Abiezer Coppe’, JEccH, 62:1 (2012), 38–58; Ariel Hessayon, ‘Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters’, in L. Lunger Knoppers, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford, 2012), pp. 346–74; Roger C. Richardson, ‘ “Babels of profaneness and community”: The Ranter sensation in Hampshire and Wiltshire, 1649–51’, Southern History, 36 (2014), 29–55. 4 Hessayon, ‘Abeizer Coppe and the Ranters’; McDowell, ‘A Ranter reconsidered’; Smith, ed., Ranter Writings. 5 Davis, Fear, Myth and History, p. 83. J. F. McGregor argues that Ranters were defeated by the harsh repression of the Blasphemy Act: J. F. McGregor, ‘Fear, myth and furore’, P&P, 140 (1993), 158–60. 6 Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography, or a description of the heretickes and sectaries (1654), pp. 136–44; J. F. McGregor, ‘Seekers and Ranters’, in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay, eds, Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1986), pp. 134–9. 7 Rosemary Moore, The Light in their Consciences: Early Quakers in Britain 1646–1666 (Pennsylvania, 2000), pp. 5–6. 8 Hessayon, ‘Abeizer Coppe and the Ranters’, especially pp. 366–9; Smith, ed., Ranter Writings, pp. 14–19. 9 Thomas Hall, The Pulpit Guarded (1651), pp. 15, 29. 10 John Nickalls, ed., The Journal of George Fox (Cambridge, 1952), pp. 46–7; H. Larry Ingle, First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (Oxford, 1994), pp. 65–7. 11 CSPD 1650, p. 45; Smith, ed., Ranter Writings, pp. 13–16; Hessayon, ‘Abeizer Coppe and the Ranters’, p. 367. 12 Norman Penney, ed., Journal of George Fox (Cambridge, 2011), p. 21. 13 Ibid., p. 22. 14 Ibid., p. 23. For the identification of this as Thomas Bushell, see p. 401n.2. 15 Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, 1994), pp. 102–8. 16 Thomas N. Corns, ‘John Milton, Roger Williams and the limits of toleration’, in Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds, Milton and Toleration (Oxford, 2007), pp. 72–85; Andrew Murphy, Liberty, Conscience and Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn (Oxford, 2016), especially pp. 252–4. 17 Ann Hughes’ work has developed a nuanced account of local political and religious participation: an important early essay for me in this regard was
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‘The pulpit guarded: confrontation between orthodox and radicals in revolutionary England’, in S. Sim, W. Owens and A. Laurence, eds, John Bunyan and his England, 1628–88 (London, 1990), pp. 31–50. See also Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004); Ann Hughes, ‘Preachers and hearers in revolutionary London: contextualising parliamentary fast sermons’, TRHS, 24 (2014), 57–77. 18 FHL, Sw[arthmore] MS 354:6: ‘A relation of James Nayler’ [1654]. 19 FHL, Sw. MS 355:63 (5 July 1654). 20 FHL, Sw. MS 354:6: ‘A relation of James Nayler’ [1654]. 21 FHL, Portfolio MS 36:130: Farnworth, ‘A short relation’. 22 FHL, Sw. Tr[anscript] 2:299: Richard Hickock to George Fox, 8 May 1656. 23 Ibid. 24 ‘ “First publishers of truth” in Staffordshire’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 5.3 (1908), 165. 25 Richard Bauman, Let Your Words be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers (Cambridge, 1983); J. C. Davis, ‘Living with the living God: radical religion and the English Revolution’, in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 19–41; Glenn Burgess, ‘Radicalism and the English Revolution’, in Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein, eds, English Radicalism, 1550–1850 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 62– 86. Quaker tracts attacking Ranter principles included: Richard Farnworth, The Ranters principles and deceits discovered (1655); Richard Hickock, A testimony against a people call’d Ranters (1659); George Fox and James Nayler, A word from the Lord (1654). 26 FHL, Sw. MS 3, fo. 22: Dewsbury to Fox. Bauthumley was bored through the tongue on 14 March 1650 for blasphemy and cashiered from the army; his work The Light and Dark sides of God was published in 1650 and copies ordered to be burned, although Thomason obtained a copy of it in November 1650; Smith, ed., Ranter Writings, p. 18. 27 FHL, Sw. MS 354:22: Dewsbury to Fox. 28 FHL, Sw. Tr. 2:101: Henry Fell to Margaret Fell. 29 Ibid. 30 For a compelling account of hostility to Quakers see John Miller, ‘ “A Suffering People”: English Quakers and their neighbours c.1650– c.1700’, P&P, 188 (2005), 71– 103; Barry Reay, ‘Popular hostility towards Quakers in mid- seventeenth-century England’, Social History, 5.3 (1980), 387–407. 31 FHL, Sw. Tr. 2:675: John Killam to Margaret Fell, 1655. This encounter is described in William G. Bittle, James Nayler, 1618–1660: The Quaker Indicted by Parliament (York, 1986), pp. 74–5. 32 FHL, Sw. Tr. 3:451: John Stubbs and William Caton, 1654. 33 The best account is Bonnelyn Young Kunze, Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism (Basingstoke, 1994). 34 The vast literature on the presence of women in early Quakerism cannot be covered in a footnote. See Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA, 1992); Kate Peters, ‘ “Women’s speaking justified”: women and discipline in the early Quaker movement,
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1652–56’, Studies in Church History, 34 (1998), 205–34; Catie Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community: A Literary Study of Political Identities, 1650–1700 (Aldershot, 2005). 35 FHL, Sw. Tr. 2:673: Margaret Killam to George Fox [1654]. 36 FHL, Sw. Tr. 2:873: Nayler. 37 FHL, Sw. Tr. 3:909: John Wilkinson and John Storey to George Fox, July 1654. 38 FHL, Sw. Tr. 2:303: Richard Hicock to Margaret Fell, April 1658. 39 Ann Hughes, ‘Men, the “public” and the “private” in the English Revolution’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, eds, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early 212; see also Ann Hughes, Modern England (Manchester, 2007), pp. 191– Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon, 2012). 40 Peters, ‘Women and discipline’. 41 FHL, Sw. Tr. 3:909– 10: John Wilkinson and John Storey to George Fox, 6 July 1654. 42 For the critical rejection by Quakers of Ranters’ antinomian Calvinism, see: McGregor, ‘Seekers and Ranters’, and ‘Fear, myth and furore’. 43 FHL, Sw. MS 359:171: George Fox, n.d. 44 Ibid. 45 FHL, Sw. MS 41:162–3: Farnworth to Bauthumley. 46 FHL, Portfolio MS 36:130: Farnworth to Burdsall. 47 FHL, Sw. MS 252:242: Thomas Lawson to [Margaret Fell?]. 48 Ibid. 49 Margaret Fell, A testimony of the touch-stone (1656), p. 23. 50 FHL, Sw. Tr. 2:101: Fell. 51 Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 397–403; on the prevalence of defeat in narratives of radical political participation in the 1650s, see: Kate Peters, ‘The Quakers and the politics of the army in the crisis of 1659’, P&P, 231 (2016), 98–102. 52 Ann Hughes, ‘Gerrard Winstanley, news culture, and law reform in the early 1650s’, Prose Studies, 36.1 (2014), 63–76. 53 Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 45–50, 217–27. 54 Journal of George Fox; ‘Relation of James Nayler’; FHL, Sw. MS 355:35: Gervase Benson. 55 FHL, Sw. Tr. 3:909: John Wilkinson and John Storey to George Fox, July 1654. 56 FHL, Sw. Tr. 3:910: John Wilkinson and John Storey to George Fox, July 1654. 57 FHL, Sw. MS 4:35: Gervase Benson to Margaret Fell, [1654]. Geoffrey Nuttall dates this letter ‘after 25 August 1654’, and from internal evidence it cannot have been written after the middle of September at the latest. 58 FHL, Sw. MS 355:89: Thomas Aldam to Margaret Fell, 30 October 1654. The general Quaker meeting in Swannington is discussed in Moore, Light in their Consciences, p. 28; Bittle, James Nayler, p. 63. 59 FHL, Sw. Tr. 2:874: James Nayler, ‘A relation’. Nayler also recorded meetings with local politicians Sir Robert Barwick, John Anlaby (Barebones nominated member) and Justice Hotham. 60 Ibid.
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61 Ibid. 62 To his highness the Lord Protector, &c. and our general. The humble petition of several colonels of the army (1654). 63 Barbara Taft, ‘The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army: causes, character, and results of military opposition to Cromwell’s Protectorate’, HLQ, 42.1 (1978), 15–41, quote at p. 15; Thomas Birch, ed., A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe (7 vols, London, 1742), ii. 147–8. 64 The humble petition of several colonels. 65 Peters, ‘Quakers and the politics of the army’. 66 Edward Burrough, For the soldiers and all of the officers of England, Scotland and Ireland (1654). 67 Birch, ed., State Papers of John Thurloe, iii. 94, 116: William Sheffield and Thomas Cockran to the Protector, 9 January 1654/5. 68 William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1955), pp. 177–80. 69 Penney, ed., Journal of George Fox, p. 165.
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Index
Abbot, George, Archbishop of Canterbury 28, 42 Abernethy, John (Bishop) 75 Abingdon (Oxfordshire) 67 Achinstein, Sharon 227 Adamson, John 4 Alkin, Elizabeth (aka Parliament Joan) 95 Alured, Matthew 237 Ames, William 29 Anne of Denmark, Queen of England 155, 156, 159, 162 Antinomians 109, 110, 111, 112, 116, 118, 127, 137 Arminians and Arminianism 34, 139, 184, 199, 222 Ashburnham, John 99 Ashby de la Zouch (Leicestershire) 126 Ashe, Simeon 115 Ashton, Robert 168 Attaway, Mrs 185 Auerbach, Eric 134 Austin, Robert 208, 220 Austin, Thomas 222 Aylesbury (Buckinghamshire) 50, 57 Baker, Philip 167 Bakewell, Margery (née Bayley) 108 Bakewell, Sarah 126 Bakewell, Thomas 6, 9, 107–25 Baptists 73, 77, 79, 112, 114, 121, 135, 139, 185, 236 Barbados 230, 233 Barber, Edward 114 Bargrave, Isaac 207 Barham (Kent) 206, 221
Barker, John 87 Barwick, John 93, 95, 97, 101 Basford (Staffordshire) 229 Bastwick, John 201 Bauman, Richard 229 Bauthumley, Jacob 184, 229, 233 Baxter, Richard 130 Beckwith, Thomas 91, 103 Bedell, William 25, 34 Belasyse, John, 1st Baron Belasyse 90 Benson, Gervase 236 Bentham, Joseph 35, 38 Berkeley, Sir John 99, 178 Berkshire 53, 54, 59 Bermondsey (Surrey) 81, 203, 214 Berwick-upon-Tweed (Northumberland) 50 Bingham, Matthew 121 Bishop, George 162, 237 Bishops’ Wars (1639–40) 7, 39, 47–61, 74, 207 Bishopsbourne (Kent) 206 Black Besse 94, 95 Blasphemy Act (1650) 227, 233 Blaxland, John 215, 224 Blaxland, Stephen 215 Blount, Mountjoy, 1st Earl of Newport 55, 64 Blount, Thomas 223 Blundell, Overington 73, 74 Bolton, Robert 45 Bond, John 24 Book of Common Prayer 119 Book of Sports 27, 30, 34, 35, 36, 39, 198, 200 Boothby, Walter xix
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244 Borodale, John 32 Botting, Richard 77 Bownes, Captain 91 Boys, Sir Edward 211, 223 Boys, John of Betteshanger 223 Boys, John of Fredville 223 Bozeman, T. D. 124 Braddick, Michael 4, 5, 6, 128 Bradford, William 235, 236 Bradshaw, John 237 Bradshaw, William 26, 29, 40 Bremer, Frank 22 Brenner, Robert 70, 71, 73, 124 Brent, Nathaniel 38 Brereton, Sir William 91 Bridge, William 85 Bridgeman, John (Bishop) 39 Brightman, Thomas 26, 40 Brinsley, John 36 Bristol (Gloucestershire) 75, 99, 105 Brooks, Thomas 77, 78 Browne, Jonas 231 Browning, Edward 221 Brownists 135 Brownrigg, Ralph 44 Buchanan, George 151, 153, 154, 157 Bull, Ann 211 Bull, Grace 212 Bull, Miles 212, 222 Bunyan, John 111, 186 Burdsall, Thomas 225, 227, 228, 233 Burford Mutiny (1649) 139 Burges, John 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36 Burrough, Edward 229, 237 Burroughes, Jeremiah 39, 40, 214 Bursdall, Thomas 236 Burton, Henry 23, 32, 71, 73, 78, 201 Bury, John 87 Byron, John, 1st Baron Byron 93 Cade, Anthony 30, 31, 36 Calamy, Edmund 23, 32, 38, 39, 77, 78, 113, 114, 115 Calvert, Giles 152, 236, 237 Calvin, John (or Jean) 116, 123 Calvinism 27, 35, 44, 119, 125, 157, 162, 232, 238
Index Cambridge (Cambridgeshire) 30, 33 Cambridge University 40, 168, 205 Magdalene College 203 Sidney Sussex College 34 Cambridgeshire 13, 49, 51 Canterbury (Kent) 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 208, 209, 212, 213, 214, 216, 219, 220, 221 Canterbury Cathedral (Kent) 7, 198, 200, 204, 206, 207, 209, 210, 220, 221 Cardiff (Glamorgan) 88 Careuth, John 162 Carey, Elizabeth 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105 Carey, Peter 95 Carpenter, Thomas 96 Carr, Robert, 1st Earl of Somerset 158 Cartwright, Thomas 29, 119 Caryll, Joseph 200 Casaubon, Meric 207, 220, 223, 224 Catholics and Catholicism 11, 12, 38, 48, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 64, 69, 91, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 148, 150, 153, 155, 200, 201, 222 Caton, William 231 Cawton, Thomas 113 Chaderton, Laurence 25, 31 Chamberlen, Dr Peter 114 Chancery, Court of 212 Charles I 10, 29, 36, 51, 53, 56, 61, 67, 69, 71, 74, 83, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 96, 97, 102, 105, 125, 139, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 167, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 190 Charles II 7, 88, 95, 96, 97, 148, 150, 151, 153, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162 Charles IV of Lorraine 153 Charron, Pierre 133, 145 Chauncey, Charles 23, 42 Chester (Cheshire) 88, 91, 93 Cheynell, Francis 33 Christian IV, King of Denmark 155 Cirencester (Gloucestershire) 53 Clarges, John 95
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Index Cleveland (Yorkshire) 227, 233 Cloppenberg Press 72 Coffey, John 135, 145 Colchester (Essex) 12 Collier, Joseph 87 Collins, Jeffrey 125 Collins, Randall 60 Collinson, Patrick 41 Commissioners for Scandalous Ministers 213 Committee for Plundered Ministers 200, 205, 213, 223 Committee of Both Kingdoms 91 Congregationalism 14, 71, 73, 77, 78, 79, 121, 122, 125, 139, 190 Cook, John 158 Cooke, William 217 Coppe, Abiezer 184, 227, 235 Corbet, Edward 33, 34, 223 Corbin, Alain 56, 61 Cornwall 67 Cosin, John (Bishop) 44 Council of State (1649–53) 148 Committee for Examinations 237 County Durham 231 Coventry (Warwickshire) 230 Coventry, Thomas, 1st Baron Coventry (Lord Keeper) 43, 201 Cowling, Nicholas 177 Cox, William 87 Cranford, James 113 Crawford, Patricia 93 Crisp, Tobias 110, 116 Cromwell, Oliver 73, 139, 148, 149, 150, 151, 162, 178, 186, 213 Culmer, John 213 Culmer, Richard 7, 198–217 Culmer, Richard junior 198, 208, 213, 214, 215 Culverwell, Richard 36 Darnton, Robert 162 Davenant, John (Bishop) 27 Daventry (Northamptonshire) 53, 54 Davis, Colin 225, 226, 229, 230, 233 de Luke, Katherine 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105 de Luke, Philip 98, 99 de Witt, John 113
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Deal (Kent) 203, 213 Dedham (Essex) 24 Dell, William 201, 202, 218 Dendy, Edward 75 Dent, Arthur 111 Derby (Derbyshire) 227 Derbyshire 226, 231, 235, 236 Dering, Edward 31 Dering, Sir Edward 221 Devereux, Robert, 3rd Earl of Essex 69, 70, 76, 81, 82, 83, 168 Devon 13, 49, 53, 55, 56, 60, 67, 235 Dewsbury, William 229, 233, 237 Dias, Jone 104 Digby, George, Lord Digby and 2nd Earl of Bristol 88, 162 Digby, Sir Kenelm 62 Diggers 137, 190, 193 Dobson, James 223 Donagan, Barbara 100, 167 Dorset 13, 48, 51 Douglas, James 150 Dover (Kent) 209, 231 Dow, Christopher 26, 27 Downame, John 113 Downing, Calybute 37, 41 Drake, Roger 121 Drayton, Francis 221 Drury, Richard 74 Dugard, Thomas xviii, xix Dunbar, battle of (1650) 148 Dunkin, William 220 Durham (County Durham) 44 Dury, John 44 Dyer, John 223 Eachard, Laurence 37 Easington (County Durham) 236 East India Company 71 Eastern Association 168 Eaton, John 127 Eaton, Samuel 23 Edict of Nantes (1598) 136 Edward I 153 Edward III 153 Edwards, Renatus 73, 76, 78 Edwards, Thomas xiii, xiv, 22, 27, 36, 40, 108, 111, 112, 123, 135, 185, 199, 206, 219
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Index
Eglisham, George 157, 158 Elizabeth I 100, 153 Elsden (or Elsing), Valentine 77 Emerton, John 87 Erastian controversy 113, 119, 120, 121, 125 Erastianism 125 Erswell, Elizabeth 77 Essex 32, 38, 50, 54, 207 Estwick, Nicholas 34, 35, 38, 44, 45 Evers, Compton 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 67 Exchequer, Court of 205 Exeter (Devon) 67 Fairfax, Sir Thomas 148, 166, 169, 172 Fanshawe, Ann 92 Faringdon (Berkshire) 48, 51 Farnworth, Richard 225, 227, 228, 229, 231, 233, 236, 237 Feilding, Basil, 2nd Earl of Denbigh xvii Fell, Henry 230, 234 Fell, Margaret 231, 234 Fell, Thomas 231 Field, John 26, 40 Filmer, Sir Robert 187 Finch, Sir John 222 Fincham, Kenneth 27 Fish, Hanbey 77, 78 Fisher, Edward 111 Fissel, Mark 61 Foach, Thomas 207, 213, 215, 220 Forde, Thomas 89 Fox, Adam 112 Fox, George 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 233, 234, 236, 237 Foxe, John 100 Foxley, Rachel 135, 144 French wars of religion 136 Frewen, Accepted 34 Fripp, Edward 98, 99 Fulke, William 31 Gardiner, S. R. xvi, 123 Gardiner, Thomas 200 Gee, John 222 Gell family xix Gentles, Ian 70, 76, 167 Gerbier, Sir Balthazar 151, 152, 155 Gibson, Lieutenant Colonel 48, 62 Gilbert, James 98
Gilbert, Stephen 98, 99 Ginzburg, Carlo 47 Glamorganshire 88 Godfrey, Thomas 74, 76, 85 Goffe, Stephen 203, 221 Goldfinch, Joan 224 Goldfinch, William 214, 224 Goodnestone (Kent) 198, 203, 204, 208, 209, 210, 211, 219 Goodwin, John 38, 77, 86, 139, 141, 184 Goodwin, Thomas 115 Goring, George, Lord Goring 88 Gouge, William 38, 114, 223 Gowrie Conspiracy (1600) 159 Graham, James, 1st Marquess of Montrose 88 Gray, Enoch 207, 220 Gray, Mr (Antinomian) 118 Great Yarmouth (Norfolk) 36 Greenham, Richard 31 Greenhill, William 77, 115 Grevile, Robert, 2nd Baron Brooke xviii Greville, Sir Fulke 86 Groebner, Valentin 89 Gurdon, Muriel 37 Gurney, John 185 Hackney (Middlesex) 115 Hadley, Miles 80 Halkett, Anne 92 Hall, John 151, 152, 153, 157, 160 Hall, Joseph (Bishop) 27, 36 Hall, Thomas 226 Ham (Kent) 207 Hammersley, Thomas 229 Hampton Court conference (1604) 25, 29 Hampton Court Palace (Middlesex) 178 Hanson, Elizabeth 101 Harbledown (Kent) 198, 208, 209, 210, 211, 220 Hardres, Richard 223 Hardwick, John 80, 81 Harley, Brilliana 53 Harley, Sir Robert 58, 205 Harrison, Thomas 177 Hartius, Mr 223 Hartlib, Samuel 32 Harvey, Rawlins 86 Haselrige, Sir Arthur 74, 237
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Index Hatch, Arthur 221 Hatt, John 86 Heads of the Proposals (1647) 172 Hembricks, Robert 77, 86 Henley-upon-Thames (Oxfordshire) 100 Henri IV, King of France 151, 155 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England 53, 56, 156, 159, 162 Henry V 153 Henry VII 153 Henry VIII 153 Hepburn, James, 4th Earl of Bothwell 154 Herefordshire 47, 49, 51 Hertfordshire 51, 52, 54 Hessayon, Ariel 185, 226 Hewson, John 170 Hexter, J. H. xvi, 70 Heylyn, Peter 27, 35, 41 Hickock, Richard 228, 229, 232, 233 Hieron, Thomas 200 High Commission 23, 40, 41, 207 Hildersham, Arthur 75 Hill, Christopher xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, 3, 4, 5, 11, 184, 233 Hill, Thomas 42 Hirst, James 222 Hobbes, Thomas 187 Hodiford (Kent) 74 Holdenby (Northamptonshire) 171 Holdsworth, Richard 40, 46 Hollingworth, Richard 23 Hoogskin, Bess 232 Hooker, Richard 30 Hooker, Thomas 29, 35 Hopton, Ralph, 1st Baron Hopton 88, 98, 99 Horowitz, Donald 52, 53, 54, 55, 56 Houldsworth, Richard 44 How, Samuel 141 Howard, Frances, Countess of Somerset 158 Howard, Thomas, 14th Earl of Arundel 64 Howard, Thomas, 1st Earl of Berkshire 99 Howard, Sir William 55 Howell, James 89 Hudson, Robert 87 Hudson, Samuel 123
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Hughes, Ann xii–xix, 1, 2, 3, 5, 22, 36, 59, 61, 88, 100, 102, 107, 109, 114, 115, 150, 162, 166, 167, 173, 179, 198, 199, 228, 232, 235 Hummel, Johann Heinrich 37 Huntingdonshire 51 Huntley, George 200 Hyde, Sir Edward (later 1st Earl of Clarendon) 99 Hythe (Kent) 206 Ibbitson, Robert 151, 152, 159 Ickham and Well (Kent) 206 Independents and Independency xiv, 9, 22, 23, 36, 73, 77, 78, 79, 80, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 190 Inns of Court 115 Ipswich (Suffolk) 24 Ireland 69, 86, 108, 148, 153 Ireton, Henry 175, 176, 177, 178 Irish Adventurers 74, 75, 108, 206, 219 Irish Rebellion (1641) 74, 137 Ironside, Gilbert 35, 36, 43 Isle of Thanet (Kent) 203, 207, 212, 220, 222 Isle of Wight (Hampshire) 98 Islington (Middlesex) 81 Ivychurch (Kent) 221 Jackson, Thomas 210, 221 Jackson, William 87 James VI and I 25, 26, 29, 31, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 174 Jenkins, David 171, 172 Jermyn, Henry, Baron Jermyn and 1st Earl of St Albans 156 Jessey, Henry 37, 73 Joyce, George 171, 177 Kemp, Edward 221 Kendal (Cumbria) 236 Kendrick, John 71 Kent 7, 12, 51, 74, 198–217, 234 County Committee 213 Kentford Heath (Suffolk) 171 Kenwrick, William 223 Kettleby, Francis 222 Kidsley Park (Derbyshire) 231, 236
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Killam, Margaret 231 Kingsley, William 206, 220 Kingston upon Hull (Yorkshire) 59, 91, 236 Kirke, George 105 Kishlansky, Mark 10 Knell, Paul 220 Kniveton, Daniel 97, 101 Knollys, Hanserd 73 Kyle, Chris xviii Ladd (or Lade), Robert 221 Lade, John 220 Lake, Peter 24, 35 Lambe, Thomas 185 Lambert, John 149 Lambeth (Surrey) 81 Lancaster, Robert 110, 112, 116, 118 Langham, John 71 Langley, Richard 213, 223 Lathom House (Lancashire) 90, 92, 93 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury 9, 22, 26, 30, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 46, 125, 198, 201, 204, 205, 206, 211, 218, 219, 221, 222 Laudianism 9, 10, 22–42, 125, 200, 203, 207, 212 Lawriman, Pharoah 104, 105 Lawson, Thomas 234, 235 Leek (Staffordshire) 13, 228, 229, 232 Legg, William 99 Leicester (Leicestershire) 30, 238 Leicestershire 226, 236 Leslie, David 148 Levant Company 71 Levellers 10, 11, 77, 80, 108, 133, 135, 137, 139, 145, 186, 227, 237 Levens, Barbara 231 Levine, David 125 Lewkenor, Captain 48 Ley, John 39 Lilburne, John 126, 139 Lilburne, Robert 235 Lincolnshire 51, 231 Little Chart (Kent) 221 Liu, Tai 81 Locke, John 187 Lockyer, Nicholas 115
Loewenstein, David 189 London xiii, xix, 6, 9, 30, 40, 42, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 107–25, 133, 179, 184, 199, 201, 207, 214, 216, 228, 235, 236, 237 Bakers’ Company 108 Billingsgate 205 Bridewell 96, 100, 101 Common Hall 76 Fleet Prison 98, 211 Grocers’ Hall committee 72, 76, 81, 82, 84, 86 Honourable Artillery Company 41 Mercers’ Company 115 Merchant Taylors’ Hall committee 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 81, 82 Militia Committee 70, 81, 82 Minories 208 Moorfields 111 parishes All Hallows Staining 80 St Anne Blackfriars 114, 115, 118 St Benet Fink 114 St Bride Fleet Street 6, 108, 112, 119, 122, 125, 184 St Dionis Backchurch 206 St Dunstan in the East 221 St Faith 77 St Giles Cripplegate 186 St James Dukes Place 77, 80 St Leonard Shoreditch 108, 126 St Margaret Moses 36 St Mary Aldermanbury 115 St Matthew Friday Street 71, 73 St Olave Old Jewry 184 St Stephen Coleman Street 86, 110, 184, 185 St Stephen Walbrook 108 Tower of London 139, 171, 205 London Provincial Assembly 13, 113 Lunsford, Thomas 53 Luther, Martin 116 Lydd (Kent) 207
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Lydiat, Thomas 32 Lynn, Samuel 87 Mahoney, Michael 124 Manchester (Lancashire) 93 Mansfield (Nottinghamshire) 236 Margate (Kent) 203 Marie de Medici, Queen of France 200, 202 Marshall, Stephen 38, 115 Marston Moor, battle of (1644) 148 Marten, Henry 10, 70 Mary of Guise, Regent of Scotland 153 Mary Queen of Scots 151, 153, 154, 157, 159, 160, 161 Masters, Sir Edward 218 Matthews, John 87 Maurice, Prince Palatine of the Rhine 88 Maynard, William, 1st Baron Maynard 49 McDowell, Nicholas 226, 228, 235 McGiffert, Michael 116 McGregor, Frank 233 Mead, Robert 71 Measy, Michael 74, 75, 76 Mede, Joseph 32, 33, 36, 37, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45 Mellish, William 77 Melville, James 119 Mendelson, Sara 93 Mendle, Michael 166, 167, 173 Micklethwaite, Paul 33, 44 Middlemore, John 72, 73, 77, 84 Middlesex 98 New Prison 98 Mildmay, Sir Henry 50, 101 Mill, Edward 105 Miller, William 223 Milton, John 7, 11, 123, 135, 151, 152, 154, 157, 184–95, 228 Minster (Kent) 198, 202, 203, 208, 212, 213, 214, 215, 219, 222, 223, 224 Mohun, John 67 Mohun, William 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 67 Monck, Anne, Duchess of Albermarle 95 Monck, George, 1st Duke of Albermarle 95
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Monmouthshire 49 Montaigne, Michel de 11, 133–43 Morrill, John 10, 166, 168 Morris, Arthur 162 Morton, Thomas (Bishop) 27, 29, 31 Muggleston, Edward 237 Munday, John 36 Nalton, James 72, 77, 85 Naseby, battle of (1645) 89 Nayler, James 228, 229, 231, 233, 236, 237 Nedham, Marchamont 148, 151, 152, 153, 157, 159, 160, 161 Nevitt, Marcus 95 New Model Army 3, 7, 8, 10, 80, 166–79 agitators 12, 172, 174 General Council 174, 175, 176 New Romney (Kent) 74 Newark (Nottinghamshire) 90 Newbury, battle of (1643) 73 Newcastle Propositions (1646) 168 Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Northumberland) 50 Newmarket (Suffolk) 171 Nicholas, Sir Edward 88, 96, 97, 99, 105 Nichols (Antinomian) 111 Norbury, John 86 Northampton (Northamptonshire) 55 Northamptonshire 34, 35, 38, 51, 52, 54 Nottinghamshire 226, 236 Nubery, Captain 213 Nutt, John 218 Nutt, Thomas 112, 114 Okey, John 237 Oldfield, Anthony 207 Oliver, Robert 74, 76 Orton, Richard 86 Overbury, Sir Giles 86 Overbury, Sir Thomas 157, 158, 159 Overton, Richard 72, 139 Overton, Robert 236 Oxford (Oxfordshire) 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99 Oxford University 34 Merton College 33
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Oxfordshire 54, 235 Oxinden, Sir James 213, 223 Packer, William 238 Paget, Nathan 184 Palmer, Herbert 223 Palmer, Sir Roger 218 Pamphlet, Daniel 224 Paramour, Thomas 213, 215 Parker, Henry 149, 151, 153 Parker, Robert 29 Parliament 39, 41, 51, 61, 69, 70, 74, 75, 76, 81, 82, 83, 88, 89, 107, 110, 113, 119, 120, 121, 125, 139, 148, 150, 157, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 190, 201, 203, 205, 214, 216, 235 Committee of Examinations 96, 104, 205 Committee of Safety 82, 205 Parrot, Henry 94 Partridge, Ralph 200 Paske, Thomas 207 Pattison, Katherine 77, 86 Pawlett, William 105 Peacey, Jason xviii, 110 Pearson, Anthony 237 Pennington, Elizabeth 37 Pennoyer, William 86 Percy, Algernon, 10th Earl of Northumberland 53, 64, 67 Perkins, William 116, 117 Peter, Hugh 123 Peyton, Sir Edward 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161 Philips, Joseph 213 Picard, John 220, 223, 224 Pickering (Yorkshire) 236 Pising, Richard 202, 220 Platt, John 190 Player, John 200 Plymouth (Devon) 67 Pocklington, John 27 Pordage, Alice 221 Pordage, Nicholas 221 Potter, Barnaby (bishop) 27 Poulet, Georges 134
Powell, Sir Edward 98 Powell, John 87 Poyntz, Sydenham 172 Presbyterians and Presbyterianism xiii, xiv, xv, xix, 4, 6, 9, 14, 22, 23, 36, 41, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 80, 107–25, 135, 137, 148, 149, 159, 162, 184, 185, 190, 199, 226, 233 Presteigne (Radnorshire) 53 Price, John 23, 77, 86, 139, 140, 147 Prince, Thomas 139 Privy Council 51, 67, 74, 211 Protestation (1641) 201 Prynne, William 38, 41, 101, 122, 201, 205 Putney debates (1647) 175, 176, 227 Pym, John 70, 74, 89 Quakers 7, 9, 11, 186, 225–38 Radwinter (Essex) 64 Rainborowe, William 170 Rainsborough, Thomas 213 Raleigh, Sir Walter 161 Ramsey, John 155 Randall, Giles 110, 112 Ranters 7, 8, 9, 11, 118, 225–38 Raven, Roger 219 Read, Widow 93, 101, 102 Reade, John 79, 85, 87 Reeve, Edmund 45 Reynolds, Simon 87 Reynolds, Theodore 80 Rich, Christopher 221 Rich, Henry, 1st Earl of Holland 156 Rich, Jane 221 Rich, Nathaniel 170 Rich, Robert, 2nd Earl of Warwick 54, 168, 205, 223 Richard I 153 Riches, David 52, 60 Rigby, Alexander 92 Rizzio (or Riccio), David 154 Robartes, Foulke 31 Roberts, John 87 Robinson, Luke 236 Rogers, John 24 Rogers, Nehemiah 34
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Index Rolleston (Staffordshire) 108 Romsey (Hampshire) 98 Rossingham, Edmund 62 Roundway Down, battle of (1643) 69 Royalists and Royalism xii, 2, 12, 13, 23, 38, 69, 70, 74, 75, 76, 82, 88–102, 148, 150, 152, 154, 157, 158, 171, 199, 200, 203, 212, 213, 214, 218, 220, 221 Royston, Richard 94 Rupert, Prince, and Count Palatine of the Rhine 107, 205, 220 Rushbrook, Mr (Antinomian) 111 Russell, Conrad 3, 4, 5 Russell, Francis, 4th Earl of Bedford 45 Ruthven, John, 3rd Earl of Gowrie 155, 157, 161 Rutter, Samuel 92, 93, 102 Ryves, Bruno 105 Saintcleare, Sir Andrew 155 Salisbury cathedral (Wiltshire) 33 Salmasius, Claude 154 Salmon, Joseph 227, 230, 233 Saltmarsh, John 22, 39 Saltwood (Kent) 206 Sanderson, Robert 35, 43 Sandwich (Kent) 207, 213 Sarmiento de Acuna, Diego, Count of Gondomar 154, 157 Saunders, Thomas 237 Saxby, Robert 129 Scot, Robert 223 Scotland 51, 53, 148–63 Covenanters xix, 7, 47, 51, 56, 90, 123, 148, 152, 159, 200, 207 Kirk of Scotland 149, 151 Parliament 150 Scott, James C. 125 Seacome, John 93 Seaman, Lazarus 113 Sedgwick, Obadiah 38 Seekers 227 Sharpe, Kevin 10, 150, 162 Shaw, William 123 Sheldon family 55 Shelton (or Sheldon), Thomas 64 Ship Money 211
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Sholden (Kent) 207 Shoreditch (Middlesex) 81 Shute, Josiah 40, 44 Shute, Nathaniel 44 Simpson, John 110 Skegby (Nottinghamshire) 236 Slingsby, Walter 99, 105 Smith, Henry 75 Smith, Mary 75 Smith, Nigel 226, 228 Smith, Peter 223 Smith, Stephen 220 Solemn League and Covenant (1643) 119, 148 Somerset 13, 51, 235 Southwark (Surrey) 73, 74, 77, 80, 81, 82, 87, 91, 174 parishes St Olave 74, 79, 85 St Saviour 74, 126 Southwell (Nottinghamshire) 90 Spilsbury, John 73 Sprackling, Adam 223 Sprint, John 31 Spurstowe, William 115 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) 136 St Ives (Cornwall) 218 St John, Oliver 45 Stacey, Thomas 235 Staithes (Yorkshire) 227 Stanley, Charlotte, Countess of Derby 92, 93 Stanley, James, 7th Earl of Derby 90 Starobinski, Jean 134 Stearns, Stephen 58 Stephens, Isaac 35 Stepney (Middlesex) 77 Stockton-on-Tees (Yorkshire) 228 Stoddard, Amor 236 Stone, Lawrence xvi Storey, John 228, 231, 232, 235, 236 Stoyle, Mark 57 Stuart dynasty 7, 8, 148–63 Stuart, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia 155, 159 Stuart, Henry, Duke of Gloucester 162 Stuart, Henry, Lord Darnley 153, 154, 157, 159
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Stuart, Henry, Prince of Wales 155, 156, 157, 159, 161 Stubbs, John 231 Suffolk 50, 123 Surrey 174, 175, 190 Sussex 214 Sutton-in-Ashfield (Nottinghamshire) 236 Swannington (Leicestershire) 13, 228, 231, 233, 236, 237 Swarthmoor Hall (Lancashire) 231, 235 Swayne, Stephen 220 Syms, John 87 Synderhill Green (Yorkshire) 234, 235, 236, 237 Taft, Barbara 237 Taylor, Francis 40 Taylor, Jeremy 75 Tenterden (Kent) 207 Terling (Essex) 125 Tewkesbury (Gloucestershire) 54 Thomas, Sir Keith 1, 2, 3, 11 Thomason, George 113, 176, 237 Thompson, E. P. 58 Thomson, George 73 Thomson, Maurice 73 Thomson, William 73, 76, 80, 81, 87 Thurloe, John 238 Tombes, John 79, 126 Tower Hamlets (Middlesex) 77, 82 Tranere, John 80 Tremoille, Charlotte de la see Stanley, Charlotte, Countess of Derby Trench, Edmund 81, 87 Trethewy, John 99, 105 Triplett, Ralph 71, 84 Turner, John 220 Twisse, William 32, 33, 37, 40, 42 Tyburn (Middlesex) 189 Tynemouth (Northumberland) 162 Underdown, David 57 Upstreet (Kent) 214 Ussher, James, Archbishop of Armagh 41 Uxbridge, Treaty of (1645) 168
Vandenbrooke, Solomon 81, 87 Vaughan, Rowland 206 Verney, Edmund 55 Vernon, Elliot 167 Villiers, George, 1st Duke of Buckingham 67, 154, 156, 157, 159 Vincent, John 209, 221 Vines, Richard 205 Virginia 73 Walker, Edward 80 Walker, George 113 Walker, Henry 202 Waller, Sir William 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 84, 86, 105, 200 Wallington, Nehemiah 108, 118 Walwyn, William 7, 11, 86, 108, 133–43 Wapping (Middlesex) 77 Warcupp, Samuel 87 Ward, Samuel 24, 25, 34, 35, 38 Warden, John 223 Ware (Hertfordshire) 175 Warminster (Wiltshire) 54 Warner, John 206, 209 Warner, Samuel 71, 73, 78 Warr, William 44 Warriner, Matthew 206 Warwickshire xvii, xviii, 51, 166, 226 Watson, Leonard 178 Webster, Tom 38 Weldon, Anthony 223 Weldon, Sir Anthony 151, 154, 158, 159 Wellington (Somerset) 48, 57 Wells cathedral (Somerset) 34 Wells, Robert 223 West Cowes (Isle of Wight) 98 West Horsley (Surrey) 190 Westminster Charing Cross 189 parishes St Clement Danes 81 St Giles in the Fields 81 The Mews 96 Tothill Fields 91
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Index Westminster Assembly of Divines 79, 110, 113, 119, 121, 122, 125, 205, 213, 223 Westminster Palace 75 Westmorland 235 Weston, Jerome, 2nd earl of Portland 99 Whetstone (Leicestershire) 229 Whitby (Yorkshire) 13, 225, 227, 228, 233, 236 White, Francis 45, 174, 175, 176 White, Francis (Bishop) 36 White, John 200 White, Sir Thomas 201 Whitechapel (Middlesex) 81 Whitehall Palace (Westminster) 156, 205, 214, 216 Whitelocke, Bulstrode 120 Whitgift, John, archbishop of Canterbury 26, 30 Wikes, Andrew 227 Wildman, John 11, 176, 182, 237 Wilkinson, John 228, 232, 235, 236 Williams, John (Bishop) 30, 31 Williams, Roger 228 Willoughby, Thomas 87 Wilmot, John, 2nd earl of Rochester 191
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Wilson, Thomas 200, 223 Winchester cathedral (Hampshire) 34 Windebanke, Francis 53, 54, 57, 58 Windsor (Berkshire) 178 Winstanley, Gerrard xiii, 3, 7, 11, 184–95, 235 Winthrop, John 37 Withers, Captain 59 Wood, James 220, 221 Woodcock, Francis 79 Woodford, Robert 38, 54 Woolrych, Austin 169 Worcester, battle of (1651) 148, 186 Worcestershire 50, 54 Worden, Blair 184, 195 Worrall, Thomas 42 Wotton, Peter 222 Wren, Matthew (Bishop) 23, 31, 37 Wrightson, Keith 124 Yarme (or Yarm) (Yorkshire) 13, 228, 236 Yates, Joan 209 York (Yorkshire) 50, 236 Yorkshire 227, 235, 236 Young, John 34
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