The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays in Honour of John Morrill (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 18) 9781843838180, 1843838184

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NatureofEnglishRevolution_PPC 21/03/2013 13:08 Page 1

STEPHEN TAYLOR is Professor in the History of Early

Cover illustrations: Details from a print of a painted glass window of Farndon Church containing portraits of Cheshire gentlemen who attended King Charles I at the siege of Chester. Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library.

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

THE NATURE OF

THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION REVISITED

Taylor, Tapsell (eds)

Modern England at the University of Durham. GRANT TAPSELL is Lecturer in Early Modern History, University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor at Lady Margaret Hall.

THE NATURE OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION REVISITED

T

he nature of the English revolution remains one of the most contested of all historical issues. Scholars are unable to agree on what caused it, when precisely it happened, how significant it was in terms of political, social, economic, and intellectual impact, or even whether it merits being described as a ‘revolution’ at all. Over the past twenty years these debates have become more complex, but also richer. This volume brings together new essays by a group of leading scholars of the revolutionary period and will provide readers with a provocative and stimulating introduction to current research. All the essays engage with one or more of three themes which lie at the heart of recent debate: the importance of the connection between individuals and ideas; the power and influence of religious ideas; and the most appropriate chronological context for discussion of the revolution.

Edited by Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Volume 18

The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476–9107 Series editors Tim Harris – Brown University Stephen Taylor – Durham University Andy Wood – Durham University

Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited Essays in Honour of John Morrill

Edited by

Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell

THE BOYDELL PRESS

©  Contributors 2013 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2013 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978–1–84383–818–0

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Contents Preface and Acknowledgements

vii

List of Contributors

x

List of Abbreviations

xi

1. Charles I and Public Opinion on the Eve of the English Civil War Tim Harris

1

2. Rethinking Moderation in the English Revolution: The Case of An Apologeticall Narration Ethan H. Shagan

27

3. The Parish and the Poor in the English Revolution Tim Wales

53

4. Body Politics in the English Revolution John Walter

81

5. The Franchise Debate Revisited: The Levellers and the Army Philip Baker

103

6. Oliver Cromwell and the Instrument of Government Blair Worden

123

7. ‘de te Fabula narratur’: The Narrative Constitutionalism of James 151 Harrington’s Oceana J. C. Davis 8. Democracy in 1659: Harrington and the Good Old Cause Rachel Foxley

175

9. The Restoration of the Church of England, 1660–1662: Ordination, Re-ordination and Conformity Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor

197

10. Style, Wit and Religion in Restoration England John Spurr

233

11. A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism under the Later Stuarts Grant Tapsell

261

Index 285

Preface and Acknowledgements Stephen Taylor

and

Grant Tapsell

The debate over the nature of the English revolution has been one of the most contested of all historical issues from the beginning of modern English historiography, and it remains so today. Scholars are unable to agree on what caused it, when precisely it happened, how significant it was in terms of political, social, economic, and intellectual impact, or even whether it merits being described as a ‘revolution’ at all. In the two decades since John Morrill published a volume of his essays reflecting on these themes the debate has only become more complex.1 Leading historians have grappled with the problem of what is the appropriate geographical context within which to explain English events: England alone, the British Isles, or European post-reformation politics. They have also argued with renewed vigour about the best time frame for a ‘revolutionary’ experience: a martial and republican decade stretching from the outbreak of English conflict in 1642 to Cromwell’s acceptance of the title lord protector in 1653; a longer midcentury upheaval running from Scottish rebellion in the late 1630s to the Restoration ‘settlement’ of 1660–2; or a return to older notions of a ‘century of revolution’ spanning the 1600s as a whole.2

John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (1993). To cite only some of the most prominent recent literature (in chronological order of publication): Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000); Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002); David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (Basingstoke, 2004); Allan I. Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, 2005); Clive Holmes, Why was Charles I Executed? (2006); The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Manchester, 2007); Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms 1638–1652 (Harlow, 2007); Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (2008); Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars 1640–1660 (2009); The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–49, ed. John Adamson (Basingstoke, 2009); England’s Wars of Religion Revisited, ed. Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (Aldershot, 2011); The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland: Essays for John Morrill, ed. Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith (Cambridge, 2011).

1 2

vii

preface AND ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

Resolving such disagreements is, perhaps thankfully, a chimerical aim; taking the debate forward depends on clarifying what were the most significant characteristics of the English ‘revolution’. Was it primarily a conflict of ideas, which in turn stimulated novel and far-reaching debates about political structures, the future of the church, and the place of the Stuarts’ kingdoms within Europe and the wider world? Or was it primarily a physical phenomenon, one that killed a significant proportion of the population, redrew political boundaries, and smashed up church interiors? Did a combination of ideas and experience have a significant impact on social relations? Women, the poor, and religious minorities were all buffeted by conflicts between the old and the new. In reflecting once more on these fundamental issues the essays in this volume take their lead from three themes that have been promoted by John Morrill’s research. The first is the imperative to keep human beings at the centre of historical analysis. In particular, the contributors to this volume continue Morrill’s laudable effort to maintain a close connection between people and ideas. Political thinking is undertaken by people; it does not exist simply in a rarefied sphere of warring published texts. In particular, while it has always been clear that difficult compromises could be agreed upon in the constitutional sphere by political actors of very different stamps, Morrill’s work on William Dowsing, William Brereton, and – most obviously – Oliver Cromwell has persistently emphasized that it was the power of religious ideas that destabilized seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland.3 The religious motivation of individuals and, more broadly, the centrality of religious divisions to the English revolution provides the second theme for the volume. Our third theme is the appropriate chronological context for discussions of the revolutionary experience. John Morrill’s scholarship has been remarkable, in an age of ever-increasing academic specialization, for its sure-footed range across the seventeenth century. Building on an early interest in the history of Cheshire, and reflected in ongoing work about state formation, Morrill has always treated the mid-century upheavals as part of a wider early modern experience.4 Indeed, the English revolution connected rather than separated the early and later Stuart eras, both playing its part in changing

Morrill, ‘William Dowsing, the Bureaucratic Puritan’, in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G. E. Aylmer, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (Oxford, 1993), pp. 173–203; ‘Sir William Brereton and England’s Wars of Religion’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 311–32; Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2007). 4 Morrill, Cheshire, 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the ‘English Revolution’ (Oxford, 1974); ‘Introduction’, in The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 1–38; ‘Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown’: Dynastic Crises in Tudor and Stewart Britain, 1504–1746 (The Stenton Lecture for 2003, Reading, 2005). 3

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preface AND ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

political, religious, and social relations, and also standing as an ineradicable part of the English collective experience. The nature of the English revolution was vital: it was contested by men and women throughout the later seventeenth century. It was re-fought in partisan exchanges that proved critical to the self-image and hostile stereotypes of nascent whigs and tories during the 1680s, and stood as a key backdrop for England’s second seventeenth-century revolution: the Williamite one of 1688–9.5 This volume has no aspirations to provide a comprehensive summary of the current state of scholarship on the nature of the English revolution; still less does it aim to present a single interpretation. The debate is too broad, too diffuse and too vibrant to do either of these things. Besides, any such attempt at uniformity or coherence would hardly be an appropriate tribute to John Morrill, whose own work has been characterized above all by its shifting foci and evolving interpretations. The editors, therefore, have not offered the traditional introduction, and contributors were given no brief other than to discuss ‘the nature of the English revolution’ in ways that reflect both their current thinking and the context provided by John’s work. The aim has been to bring together some of the best of current research, casting light for the reader on where the debate on the revolution is going, rather than to provide a summary of where it is. One of John Morrill’s greatest strengths as a scholar comes from his ability to spark enthusiasm about the past in others. All of the contributors to this volume have felt that enthusiasm in a range of different capacities: as undergraduate or graduate students being supervised by John; as collaborators with him on publishing projects; or else as interlocutors in the wider scholarly debates to which he has contributed so much. The editors would like to thank all of the contributors for their written work, and for their personal good humour throughout a lengthy process. Mark Goldie, who has been John’s close colleague, friend, and admirer over many years in Cambridge, was, at the last minute, unable to contribute a chapter, owing to urgent eye surgery: this is some kind of compliment, as John himself has recently similarly suffered. We would also like to acknowledge the kind advice of David Smith. Lastly, of course, we would like to thank John, who has been an inspiring friend and mentor throughout our careers, and in the process shaped our sense of all that is best and most generous in academic life.

Morrill, ‘The Sensible Revolution’, in The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact, ed. Jonathan I. Israel (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 73–104.

5

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Contributors Philip Baker – Research Assistant, History of Parliament Trust, and Senior Research Fellow in Early Modern History, University of Buckingham J. C. Davis – Emeritus Professor of History, University of East Anglia Kenneth Fincham – Professor of Early Modern History, University of Kent at Canterbury Rachel Foxley – Lecturer in History, University of Reading Tim Harris – Munro-Goodwin-Wilkinson Professor in European History, Brown University Ethan H. Shagan – Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley John Spurr – Professor of History, Swansea University Grant Tapsell – Fellow and Tutor in History, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford Stephen Taylor – Professor of History, Durham University Tim Wales – Research Associate, ‘Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell’, University of Cambridge John Walter – Professor of History, University of Essex Blair Worden – Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford

x

Abbreviations Add. MS B.L. Bodl. C.J. C.S.P.D. C.S.P.I. C.S.P.V. E.H.R. H.J. H.M.C. L.J. N.R.O. O.D.N.B. P.R.O. T.N.A. U.L.

Additional Manuscript British Library Bodleian Library, Oxford Commons’ Journals Calendar of State Papers Domestic Calendar of State Papers Ireland Calendar of State Papers Venetian English Historical Review Historical Journal Historical Manuscripts Commission Lords’ Journals Norfolk Record Office Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Public Record Office The National Archives, Kew University Library

Place of publication is London except where otherwise stated.

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1

Charles I and Public Opinion on the Eve of the English Civil War* Tim Harris

In his biography of Archbishop Laud, penned in the 1650s, Peter Heylyn contrasted Queen Elizabeth’s skilful deployment of royal ceremonial to make herself ‘popular’ with ‘her People’ – ‘never Majesty and Popularity were so matched together’, he observed – with James I’s and Charles I’s failings in this regard. The result was catastrophic: ‘first a neglect of their Persons … and afterwards a mislike of their Government’.1 Writing on the eve of the Restoration, the marquess of Newcastle agreed that ‘Seremoney doth Every thing’, and therefore advised the soon-to-be Charles II to imitate Queen Elizabeth and show himself ‘Gloryously, to [his] People’; he was adamant, however, that Charles should keep tight control over the press, since among the many errors of ‘these Laste two Raynes’ was allowing ‘Every man’ to become ‘a state man’ by their reading of domestic and foreign newsbooks.2 A quarter of a century later, licenser of the press and government hack Roger L’Estrange concluded that Charles I’s error had been not so much allowing the people to read the news as failing to do a good enough job in getting his own views across in the press. ‘The Government itself’, L’Estrange believed, ‘is Answerable in a High Measure for the Distempers of the Multitude’; ‘if the King’s Friends would but take Half the Pains, to set * I am grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding two periods of extended research leave – first at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. and then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton – during which time I was able to undertake much of the research and writing of this article. I would also like to thank the Warden and Fellows of Merton College, Oxford, for electing me a visiting fellow for the Trinity Term 2008. Earlier versions of this essay were delivered at the University of Cambridge, Vanderbilt and Yale Universities, the University of Nebraska, Lincoln (where I was honoured to give the annual Carroll R. Pauley Memorial Lecture), and the Institute for Advanced Study. Special thanks must go to Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell for their insightful comments on an earlier draft. 1 Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (1671), p. 228. 2 Thomas P. Slaughter, Ideology and Politics on the Eve of the Restoration: Newcastle’s Advice to Charles II (Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 44–5, 49, 56. 1

TIM HARRIS

them Right, that his Enemies do, to Mislead them, you would find … the Common People as well Dispos’d to Preserve the Government, as they are Otherwise, to Embroil it’. It was ‘the mobile’ who had ‘Destroy’d Monarchy, and Episcopacy, Root and Branch’, L’Estrange believed, but if they were led astray, the fault lay with ‘their Superiors, that look’d no better after ’em’.3 Heylyn, Newcastle and L’Estrange all felt, in their different ways, that Charles I had seriously mishandled the business of public relations. It is a view that was for a long time shared by historians. Charles I was a king, we have been told, who had no taste for public ceremonials and displays, and who in the period 1625 to 1640 ‘systematically distanced himself from his subjects’, and ‘virtually withdrew from his people’s gaze’.4 He did an inadequate job in explaining his policies to his subjects, either because he felt he had no need to explain – he simply issued orders and expected compliance5 – or because he did not try to explain ‘as often or as tactfully’ as he needed. Either way, for most of the 1630s the Caroline regime, it has been said, failed ‘to mount an effective public relations offensive’.6 It was not until the very eve of the Civil War in 1641–2 that Charles began to make a serious effort to try to appeal to public opinion, but by then it was really too late. In the light of recent research, this characterization of Charles I as a king who was insensitive to his public image seems difficult to sustain. As Mark Kishlansky has pointed out, ‘Charles I issued more public declarations explaining his decisions and actions than any previous English monarch’; he did go on progresses and engage in royal ceremonial – note the great funeral he organized for his father in May 1625, the reception of Henrietta Maria shortly afterwards, his progress to Scotland in 1633 and to the north of England in 1639, and his other frequent trips around the English countryside; and he did have a popular touch – note how his public appearances often attracted throngs of ordinary people, note Charles’s touching for the king’s evil. ‘The issue of Charles’s isolation’, Kishlansky believes, ‘can be settled with an odometer’.7 According to Kevin Sharpe, ‘perhaps no early modern monarch paid as much attention to image as King Charles I’: he ‘used a variety of state occasions to present and re-present himself to the people, both in his capital and through the length and breadth of his 3 Roger L’Estrange, The Observator; in Dialogue (3 vols, 1684–7), III, nos 151 (6 Mar. 1685/6), 201 (18 Aug. 1686), 206 (4 Sep. 1686). 4 Judith Richards, ‘“His Nowe Majestie” and the English Monarchy: The Kingship of Charles I before 1640’, Past and Present, 113 (1986), 78, 86; Malcolm Smuts, ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: The English Royal Entry in London, 1485–1642’, in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge, 1989), p. 82. 5 Maurice Lee, junior, The Road to Revolution: Scotland under Charles I, 1625–37 (Urbana and Chicago, 1985), p. 5. 6 Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, 2005), p. 169. 7 Mark Kishlansky, ‘Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, Past and Present, 189 (2005), 41–80 (quotes on pp. 49, 61).

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CHARLES I AND PUBLIC OPINION

kingdom’, and ‘no other early modern English monarch’, not even Elizabeth, ‘travelled as far or for as long as Charles did on these journeys’. Sharpe conceded that Charles opted for fewer words than did his father, especially during the personal rule, but poets, panegyrists, historians, and clerics all played their part in selling his monarchy. And although not given to writing philosophical or poetic reflections on kingship Charles, over the course of his reign as a whole, Sharpe demonstrated, issued a much larger number of royal proclamations and declarations than James I, using ‘rhetorical devices which implied a dialogue with subjects rather than autocratic command’.8 A few caveats are needed. Charles clocked up the miles on his odometer because, unlike Elizabeth, he had to rule the Scots; but when he journeyed to Edinburgh in 1633 to be crowned and to meet with the Scottish parliament he managed to upset many of the Scottish nation,9 when he travelled to his northern border in 1639 and 1640 it was to fight the Scots, and when he visited Scotland again in 1641 it was to oversee the revolution settlement north of the border after the Scots had defeated him in war. His declarations and proclamations count is inflated by the fact that he issued a large number in late 1641 and 1642 trying to persuade his subjects not to go to war with him.10 Nevertheless, Kishlansky and Sharpe are surely correct to insist that the idea that the Caroline regime did not have a strategy for how best to represent the king and his policies to his subjects, or that it was seriously negligent in its approach to the business of opinion management, is a serious mischaracterization, even for the 1630s. Accepting that Charles did have a strategy for managing public opinion, the important question becomes, of course, did it work? If the intention was to energize and sustain loyalty and affection for Charles I as king and for his style of kingship, then from the vantage point of 1640 it appears not to have worked that well – as Charles I himself recognized. Charles was deeply apprehensive of the mood of his own capital at the time of the calling of the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640. Here we might highlight two royal ceremonials that did not take place. There was no royal entry when Charles returned to London from the north on 30 October; given the humiliating defeat he had suffered at the hands of the Scots, he could scarcely enter the capital in triumph. Perhaps more tellingly, when Charles went to open

Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603– 1660 (2010), pp. 137, 154, 230, 246–7. 9 John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (1993), pp. 93–5; John Young, ‘Charles I and the 1633 Parliament’, in The History of the Scottish Parliament, II: Parliament and Politics in Scotland, 1567–1707, ed. K. M. Brown and A. J. Mann (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 101–37; Dougal Shaw, ‘St. Giles’ Church and Charles I’s Coronation Visit to Scotland’, Historical Research, 77 (2004), 481–502. 10 Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (1981), p. 296; Laurence Hanson, ‘The King’s Printer at York and Shrewsbury 1642–3’, The Library, 4th series, 23 (1943), 129–31. 8

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parliament on 3 November he opted to go by barge along the Thames, ‘in a more private way than ordinary’, instead of the more typical procession on horseback from Whitehall to Westminster. As John Adamson has observed, Charles appears to have regarded London as ‘a constituency that he had already lost’.11 As someone who has previously worked extensively on how loyalists sought to build up support for the crown during the next major crisis for the Stuart monarchy that emerged towards the end of Charles II’s reign, I have always been intrigued by the possible comparisons that might exist with the earlier crisis under Charles I; there was clearly a similar loyalist propaganda campaign on behalf of the crown in the late 1630s and early 1640s – even similar arguments were used – but whereas under Charles II loyalist propaganda helped avert civil war, England under Charles I was to be plunged into one. As my tribute to John Morrill, then, I would like to venture out of the Restoration and back into his period to offer some of my own reflections on how Charles I’s regime sought to manage what we would call ‘public opinion’, focusing in particular on the period prior to the outbreak of the English Civil War. Although contemporaries did not use the term public opinion, they arguably possessed something close to the concept: they talked about the voice of the people or vox populi, even of ‘the minds of the multitude’,12 and they recognized the importance being ‘popular’ with the ‘People’ (as Heylyn put it) or of seeking ‘credit with the people’ (to quote the Venetian ambassador).13 Furthermore, they clearly thought the opinions of ordinary people mattered and needed to be courted. It was not merely that if sufficient care were not taken to keep the ‘Common People … well Dispos’d to Preserve the Government’ (to use L’Estrange’s vocabulary), they might rise in rebellion – though of course all three kingdoms were to rise in rebellion in the years 1638–42. It was also that, given the widespread participation in the processes of governance and law-enforcement at the local level, any government that failed to sustain a certain degree of public support for its policies could find it very difficult to enforce its will in the localities.14 Building on the insights of recent commentators, I will argue that Charles I and his advisors were far from naïve in their approach to opinion management. This was a regime that knew what it was doing, and

H.M.C., De L’Isle and Dudley, VI, 337, 339; John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (2007), pp. 89–93 (quote on p. 89). 12 Vox Populi. In Plaine English [1642]. 13 C.S.P.V., 1640–2, p. 232; Michael J. Braddick, ‘Prayer Book and Protestation: AntiPopery, Anti-Puritanism and the Outbreak of the English Civil War’, in England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited, ed. Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (Farnham, 2011), pp. 127, 137. 14 Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office-Holding in Early Modern England’, The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94. 11

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which quite self-consciously thought through its strategies. However, its strategies proved not particularly successful in the period up to 1640; even the carefully crafted propaganda campaign against the Scots in 1639–40 fell short of achieving the desired results. Although there was to be a rise in public support for the crown from 1641 onwards, ironically the lead here, at least initially, appears not to have come from Charles I and his government. This groundswell of support for the crown was certainly fuelled by royalist propaganda, but it was not necessarily fuelled by propaganda that was being sponsored by the crown. It was only belatedly that Charles I sought to insert himself into this media campaign and to seize control of an ideological initiative that had not been started by him or his advisors. In the process, I hope also to shed some light on the dynamics of how propaganda worked in this political culture. Sometimes the way the discussion is framed – whether we are talking about monarchs going out on progress (or not) or about government-orchestrated (or even oppositionorchestrated) propaganda campaigns – encourages the impression that a message comes out from the centre and the people are supposed to absorb it. This was certainly how contemporaries such as Heylyn and Newcastle saw the issue: an appropriate use of ceremony, they seem to have thought, would have been enough for Charles to have kept the people on his side. Even L’Estrange, who had a highly sophisticated grasp of how the medium of print might be most effectively used to ‘undeceive the People’, as he put it, nevertheless seemed to believe that if it was ‘the Press’ that had ‘made ’um mad’, then ‘the Press must set ’um Right again’.15 Such a model is too onedirectional. For propaganda to be effective, propagandists have to offer the public something they want to buy into; they also have to structure their message in such a way that they can appeal to the sensibilities, anxieties and concerns of the people to whom they are trying to appeal. This means that the people ‘determine’, in certain respects, both what the message can be and also what sorts of messages can be successful – although, of course, what the people’s concerns and anxieties are in turn are shaped by what those in positions of political authority are doing. Above all, context is vitally important. Arguments that can prove persuasive at one time might not work at another – a consideration which further highlights why we cannot just look at what those at the centre were doing (in this case, was Charles I doing what other monarchs had done before him or were to do after) but requires us to pay attention to audience and likely receptivity at any given historical conjuncture.

15

L’Estrange, Observator, I, [no. 1], 13 Apr. 1681. 5

TIM HARRIS

I The notion that Charles I was insensitive to the need to court public opinion is undoubtedly a myth that needs to be dispelled. There is plenty of evidence of Charles in the 1620s seeking to court opinion out-of-doors. Charles was clearly very self-conscious about his public image during the early part of his reign. Following the disappointments of his first two parliaments of 1625 and 1626, for example, Charles decided to publish a declaration explaining why he had dissolved them: although not obliged to give account to any but God for his ‘Regall Actions’, he explained, he nevertheless intended to order ‘the great and publike Actions of State’, so that they might ‘justifie themselves to His owne people’.16 Charles launched a major public-relations exercise in support of his ‘Forced Loan’ of 1626–8, sending detailed instructions to the commissioners on how to ‘persuade’ people to give ‘willingly and cherefully’ and to the bishops on how to direct their clergy to ‘exhort the people’ to serve the Crown at this time of great danger, as well as encouraging public sermons (subsequently published with royal approval) in support of the measure.17 Following the dissolution of his third parliament in March 1629, Charles issued another declaration aimed at satisfying ‘the mindes and affections’ of his ‘loving Subjects’, so ‘the world’ might see ‘the truth and sinceritie’ of his actions and not believe how he was represented ‘to the publike view’ by ‘some turbulent, and ill-affected Spirits’.18 One might question the effectiveness of these public-relations initiatives; there is no denying, however, that this was a regime which was seriously engaged in the business of spin. It is true that the period of the personal rule saw a tightening up of (what some historians now like to refer to as) the ‘public sphere’, with the government making fewer direct interventions in print to justify its policies and instead trying to restrict the range of views to which the king’s subjects might be exposed. In November 1628, for example, Charles issued a proclamation prohibiting any disputation over the true doctrine of the Church of England; in 1632 he banned corantos or news books; and throughout the 1630s his regime sought to police the press through the system of pre-publication licensing and the law of seditious libel.19 Yet this is not surprising. Engagements with the public sphere throughout the Tudor-Stuart period Charles I, Declaration of the True Causes which moved His Majestie to Assemble, and After Inforced Him to Dissolve the Two Last Meetings in Parliament (1626), pp. 2–3. 17 T.N.A., P.R.O. SP 16/36, ff. 68–73; Charles I, Instructions Directed from the Kings Most Excellent Majestie unto all the Bishops of this Kingdome (1626). For the Forced Loan, see Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987). 18 Charles I, His Majesties Declaration to all his Loving Subjects, of the Causes which Moved Him to Dissolve the Last Parliament (Dublin, 1629), p. 4. 19 Cyndia Clegg, Press Censorship in Caroline England (Cambridge, 2008); Jayne E. E. Boys, London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War (Woodbridge, 2011). 16

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were always sporadic – ‘emergency measures’, according to Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘resorted to in extremity’.20 The preference for all early modern regimes was to try to limit public controversy; if this could not be achieved, the government might seek to engage with the public sphere temporarily in an attempt to rally public opinion, but once the need had passed it would seek to close it down again. Charles II pursued such a strategy with brilliant success towards the end of his reign.21 Government whigs in the early eighteenth century were to do the same.22 Yet the government did not shy away completely from engaging in controversy in print during the personal rule. As Anthony Milton has shown, during the mid-1630s the government employed a number of Laudian divines – amongst them Christopher Dow, John Pocklington, Bishop Francis White of Ely, and of course Heylyn – to produce pamphlets vindicating the Book of Sports, the altar policy, and the measures taken against puritan extremists. The mid-1630s also saw a surge in the publication of visitation sermons supporting Laud’s vision of reform in the Church and extolling the beauty of holiness. Government spokesmen were sometimes quite upfront in acknowledging how they were trying to sway ‘opinion’. In his attack on the puritan extremist Henry Burton, for instance, Dow explained that his aim was ‘to shew the groundlessnese and vanity of those suspicious jealousies’ which had been raised of late ‘in many parts of this Kingdome’: although he knew that ‘the ruder sort and common people’ were easily misled by ‘bold calumnies’, he was convinced that ‘truth and a good cause may yet finde equall judges’, and that those ‘ensnared by the opinion they have unwarily drunk in’ would weigh ‘things in the ballance … and upon due consideration be ready to expresse their love to truth and peace’.23 Furthermore, although the press was being more tightly controlled in the 1630s than ever before, the regime did allow some moderate Calvinist works to be published, choosing instead to massage the texts to make them compatible with the Laudian outlook, either by purging the text of passages deemed objectionable or by inserting a Laudian preface; from the government’s point of view, it was preferable to have notable Calvinist divines appear to endorse the Laudian position than to turn them into martyrs for opposing it. Rather than allow themselves to be compromised in such a way, some Calvinist authors chose self-censorship and decided not to go into print, which served the governPeter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 277. For important criticism of the applicability of the concept of the public sphere at this time, see George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1660–1714 (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 126–8. 21 Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (2005), chs 4, 5. 22 Brian Cowan, ‘The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered’, H.J., 47 (2004), 21–46. 23 Christopher Dow, Innovations Unjustly Charged upon the Present Church and State (1637), pp. 4–5. 20

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ment’s purposes just as well.24 In short, the evidence points to a regime that not only appreciated the need to try to influence how the public perceived its policies but one which also had quite a sophisticated understanding of how it might be possible to do so. II Even in the 1630s, then, we find the Caroline regime seriously engaged in the business of opinion management. The stakes were raised from 1638, however, with the outbreak of the covenanter rebellion in Scotland. The covenanters had launched an aggressive campaign to appeal to opinion south of the border, flooding England with pamphlets and manuscript separates justifying their position and appealing to the English as brethren and neighbours who faced the same threat to the true religion from Archbishop Laud. Covenanter works reached not just London but also provincial centres: they were scattered around in city streets, left at sporting events where large crowds were expected to gather, and read aloud in local inns and meeting places; some even reached troops in the king’s army.25 Charles recognized he had to respond in kind. He needed to keep the nation behind him as it drifted into war, and his government had to mobilize enough troops who would be willing to fight to put down the Scottish resistance. The government’s ideological campaign against the Scots was carefully conceived.26 Charles opted not to draw on the Laudian divines who had orchestrated much of the pro-government propaganda of the mid-1630s (although Heylyn and Pocklington did deliver sermons at court on the

Anthony Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’, H.J., 41 (1998), 625–51. See also his excellent study of Heylyn: Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007). 25 T.N.A., P.R.O. SP 16/374, ff. 24, 25; T.N.A., P.R.O. SP 16/465, ff. 16, 25; Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992), pp. 813–15; Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 172–87, 191; Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 188; Sarah Waurechen, ‘Covenanter Propaganda and Conceptualizations of the Public During the Bishops’ Wars, 1638–1640’, H.J., 52 (2009), 63–86; David Como, ‘Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, Past and Present, 196 (2007), 37–82; David Stevenson, ‘A Revolutionary Regime and the Press: The Scottish Covenanters and their Printers’, The Library, 6th series, 7, 4 (Dec. 2006), 315–37; Joseph Black, ‘“Pikes and Protestations”: Scottish Texts in England, 1639–40’, Publishing History, 42 (1997); A. J. Mann, The Scottish Book Trade (East Lothian, 2000), pp. 83–4, 90. 26 Mark Kishlansky, ‘A Lesson in Loyalty: Charles I and the Short Parliament’, in Royalists and Royalisms during the English Civil Wars, ed. Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (Cambridge, 2007), p. 23. 24

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Scottish crisis that were not published); given that the covenanters saw the Laudians as their enemies, it would clearly have been counterproductive to have done so. Instead, he commissioned the dean of Rochester, Walter Balcanquhall – a transplanted Scot who had been an observer at the Glasgow Assembly in November and December 1638 – to write A Large Declaration Concerning the Late Tumults in Scotland, providing a detailed justification of the crown’s policies in Scotland and exposing the treasonous nature of the covenanters’ actions, which appeared in the spring of 1639 with the attribution ‘By the King’ on the title page.27 The bishop of Durham, Thomas Morton – one of the few remaining Calvinists on the episcopal bench and who as Bishop of Coventry and Litchfield had been an outspoken opponent of Arminianism in the 1620s – preached against the Scots at Durham Cathedral and his sermon was subsequently printed by the king’s special command.28 The Church of Scotland minister John Corbet, who had fled to Ireland following his refusal to take the Covenant, and the bishop of Down and Connor, Henry Leslie (himself Scottish by birth) – both Corbet and Leslie were clients of Wentworth – also produced works condemning the covenanters, seemingly with government backing, whilst another blast against the Scots came from the French Huguenot turned Church of England cleric Peter du Moulin.29 In short, the government was pitching Scots against Scots; the case against the Scottish Calvinists was being made by English and French Calvinists. One may wonder how wide an audience such government propaganda reached. The Large Declaration was large indeed – some 430 pages long – it was expensive, and it was hardly likely to be accessible to those on the margins of literacy. Yet anti-covenanter authors saw themselves as furnishing loyalists with arguments which they in turn could use to convince others. Corbet explained that his objective in publishing was to provide ‘all our Orthodoxe Divines’ with the information and arguments necessary ‘to stop the mouth of the Gain-sayers’.30 [Walter Balcanquhall], A Large Declaration Concerning the Late Tumults in Scotland (1639). Secretary Windebank produced a sequel a year later, again issued in the king’s name, taking the story from the Pacification of Berwick up to the meeting of the Short Parliament: His Majesties Declaration Concerning his Proceedings with His Subjects of Scotland (1640). 28 John Philipson, ‘The King’s Printer in Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1639’, The Library, 6th series, XI (1989), pp. 1–9; Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004), p. 43; Thomas Morton, A Sermon Preached before the King’s Most Excellent Majestie, in the Cathedrall Church of Durham (London, 1639). 29 John Callow, ‘Corbet, John (1603–1641)’, O.D.N.B.; John Corbet, The Ungirding of the Scottish Armour (Dublin [i.e. London], 1639); John Corbet, The Epistle Congratulatorie of Lysimachus Nicanor (London, 1640); Henry Leslie, Full Confutation of the Covenant (1639); Peter du Moulin, A Letter of a French Protestant to a Scottishman of the Covenant (1640). 30 Corbet, Ungirding of the Scottish Armour, sig. A4. 27

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The government saw the covenanters as rebels who sought to challenge the king’s power. Anti-covenanter works thus predictably rehearsed traditional arguments concerning irresistible, divine-right monarchy. Morton, preaching at Durham Cathedral on 5 May 1639, took as his text Romans 13:1, ‘Let every soule be subject to the higher Powers’, and reminded listeners and readers that resisting the king was resisting the ordinance of God.31 The government also sought to refute the covenanters’ claim that they were acting in defence of religion. ‘The aim of these Men’ was not religion, claimed a royal proclamation of 27 February 1639, but ‘to shake off all Monarchicall government, and to vilifie … Regall power’.32 The government further sought to show that the covenanters challenged the rule of law and undermined parliament. Balcanquhall, ventriloquizing for Charles I, claimed that the covenanters’ ‘tumultuous and rebellious courses’ demonstrated ‘their wearinesse of being governed by Us and Our Lawes’. He also reminded readers that episcopacy was established ‘by Acts of Parliament’ and bishops were one of the three estates of parliament, and that Charles could not permit his subjects acting ‘out of Parliament, or in Parliament without Our consent’ to ‘abolish or destroy any Act of Parliament’, nor to ‘destroy any of the three Estates of Parliament’.33 Government propagandists even sought to exploit popular fears of popery by arguing that the covenanters, by resisting the king, were acting on popish principles. Morton maintained that although those of the ‘Romish’ Church and the covenanters ‘do dissent in Religion’, nevertheless they agreed ‘in this one Conclusion of professing violent Resistance, for defence of Religion’. It was as if the covenanters ‘meant to be the Disciples of Papists’.34 Balcanquhall argued that the covenanters’ maxims were ‘the same with the Jesuites’. Corbet accused the covenanters of borrowing their intellectual armoury from the papists and asked: ‘Is your doctrine so Jesuiticall and rebellious, to thinke that the King’s authority is of humane institution by positive lawes, and not from God?’35 Did such arguments work? In the right context, they surely could have done: similar arguments were to prove highly successful for the tories in their propaganda campaign against the whigs and nonconformists in the early 1680s.36 It would be hard to make the case that the rhetorical strategy adopted by the Caroline regime in its war of words with the covenanters was intrinsically flawed. And clearly Caroline anti-covenanter propaganda did prove to be of some effectiveness. Some people rallied behind the governMorton, Sermon Preached Before the Kings Most Excellent Majestie, p. 1. Charles I, By the King. A Proclamation and Declaration to Inform Our Loving Subjects of Our Kingdom of England (1638[/9]). 33 Balcanquhall, Large Declaration, pp. 2, 424–6. 34 Morton, Sermon Preached before the King, pp. 3–4, 9. Cf. Du Moulin, Letter of a French Protestant, pp. 2, 38, 39, 49. 35 [Balcanquhall], Large Declaration, p. 3; Corbet, Ungirding of the Scottish Armour, p. 29. 36 Harris, Restoration, ch. 4. 31 32

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ment in its efforts to suppress the rebellion in Scotland and some of those enlisted to fight in the wars against the Scots were eager to see the Scots get their come-uppance.37 However, the propaganda campaign did not work as well as the government hoped it would. Sympathy for the Scots remained widespread in England. There were reports from the beginning of the conflict of how many of the ‘nobilyty, gentry, and commonalty’ of England were ‘well Wishers’ to the Scots, and ‘hartely … wisht’ their cause to succeed.38 In May 1639 the Venetian ambassador reported that the English government’s plan to send troops against the Scots did ‘not coincide with the sympathies of the generality’, and that all the remarks one heard uttered in London were ‘entirely favourable to the constancy and interests of the Scots’.39 To such observations we can add expressions of support for the Scots found in diaries, wouldbe emigrants cancelling their plans to move to New England after the Scots had rebelled, and most disturbingly, from the government’s perspective, the reluctance of people to support the military campaigns against the Scots. In 1640 some of those who were recruited to fight the Scots mutinied and took to pulling down altar rails instead.40 Sharpe acknowledged that Charles I lost the verbal contest with the Scots and suggested that this was because the king downplayed proclamations as a site of self-presentations in the 1630s; in other words, Charles’s ‘pose of silent majesty’ during the personal rule had been misguided.41 It was perhaps a factor, though it is a view which surely exaggerates the power of government spin, implying, as it seems to, that careful and assiduous attention to self-presentation is sufficient to achieve broad public compliance. A more obvious explanation is that Charles’s policies during the personal rule were simply too unpopular. Not universally so, one must hasten to add. The personal rule clearly had not alienated everybody; some were in sympathy with the crown’s reforming agenda in Church and state (or certain aspects of it), and some actively supported it, as the effectiveness with which the

Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 85–7, 139–40. 38 Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, p. 61; D. L., Scots Scouts Discoveries (1642), p. 20. Cf. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, p. 185. 39 C.S.P.V., 1636–9, pp. 535–6. 40 Mark Charles Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaign against Scotland, 1638– 1640 (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 7; John Walter, ‘Popular Iconoclasm and the Politics of the Parish in East England, 1640–1642’, H.J., 47 (2004), 261–90; John Walter, ‘Abolishing Superstition with Sedition? The Politics of Popular Iconoclasm in England 1640–1642’, Past and Present, 183 (2004), 79–123; David Cressy, ‘Battle of the Altars’, in his Agnes Bowker’s Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2001), pp. 203–6; Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (2008), ch. 3. 41 Sharpe, Image Wars, p. 156. 37

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Laudian reforms were implemented in many localities testifies.42 Nevertheless, a major reason why Charles failed to generate enough support in England for the war against the Scots was because too many English people were already alienated from his regime: there was resentment at the fiscal policies of the personal rule (especially ship money); concern about the failure to call parliament and about the way the prerogative courts of star chamber and high commission were being used to police dissent; and of course alarm about the religious innovations under Archbishop Laud. The most common reason people gave for sympathizing with the Scots was opposition to Charles’s reform agenda in the Church. In June 1639 one Godfrey Cade of Southwark in south London said – admittedly under the influence of drink – that he thought ‘the Bishopp of Canterberry and the rest of the Bishopps’ were ‘the Cause of this Mutiny in Scotland’, ‘that the Bishop of Canterberry was the pope of Lambeth’ and that he ‘doth plucke the royall Crowne of his Majesties head and trample it under his foote and did whip his Majesties Arse with his owne rode’. Given the chance to recant the next morning, after he had sobered up, Cade instead reaffirmed what he had said, adding ‘that the Book of Comon prayer was false and that he would mainetayne [prove] it’.43 The Kent puritan Richard Culmer admitted that he had rejoiced at ‘the first coming in of the Scots into England’ because it signalled delivery from ‘the persecuting Arch-bishop’.44 It was possible to see the Scottish rebellion as the result of the mistaken policies pursued by Charles and Laud without necessarily identifying positively with the Scots. At Stockport during Easter 1639, for example, a local minister climbed into a pulpit and announced that if Charles’s older brother, Prince Henry, had lived ‘he would never have suffered such popery and idolatry as now is in England’ and there would have been ‘no rebellion in Scotland’, since the Scots would not dared ‘so much as have opened their mouths against him’.45 For many, however, anti-Laudianism readily slipped into a sense of solidarity with the Scots. In mid-December 1638 a Newcastle merchant named Raiphe Fewler, having drunk quite a bit of wine, allegedly said that ‘the Scottish Covenanters weare noe way to be accused, for they did nothing but in defence of theire owne right and maintenance of the Gospell, and did but defend them selves against those that would have brought in Popery and Idolatrie amongst them’. Pressed by one of his drinking companions on whether he would refuse to fight if commanded by the king, Fewler supposSylvia Watts, ‘The Impact of Laudianism on the Parish: The Evidence of Staffordshire and North Shropshire’, Midland History, 33 (2008), 21–42; Christopher Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1640 (Oxford, 2007), p. 214. 43 T.N.A., P.R.O. SP16/423, f. 183. 44 Richard Culmer, junior, A Parish Looking-Glasse (1657), p. 4. 45 David Cressy, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England (Oxford, 2010), p. 183. 42

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edly added that ‘if he thought in his owne conscience the Scotts weare in the right, he would not feight against them for all the Kings in the world’.46 Northamptonshire husbandman John Fox in March 1639 described the Scots as ‘our loving Friends’.47 Reading clothier Henry Spier, who hated ‘Cathedrall Churches’ and resented Charles I’s mulcting of the merchants, predicted in early August 1640 that ‘ere long’ the Scots would ‘prove the best Subjects’.48 It was the English puritans who perhaps most positively identified with the Scottish covenanters. The Northamptonshire puritan lawyer Robert Woodford saw the Scottish revolt as divine judgement upon the nation. Shortly before the first Bishops’ War, he recorded in his diary ‘how justly the Lord may bring upon us the Judgment of the sword’; shortly before the start of the second he wrote of ‘great expectations of this great business of Scotland’ and that ‘the Lord hath some great worke to doe … in the behalfe of his church to root out Idolatry and superstition’. 49 III The shortcomings of the crown’s propaganda offensive against the Scots in 1639–40 contrasts strikingly with the success of efforts to rally support for Charles I in 1641–2. Morrill observed long ago how the broad antigovernment consensus of 1640 began to fracture over the course of 1641, as many who had supported the reforming legislation of the early months of the Long Parliament grew concerned about the increasing radicalization of those who wanted further reform in Church and state, and began to align themselves with the crown in defence of the rule of law, the bishops, and the prayer book.50 It would be misleading to imply, of course, that royalism appeared out of nowhere in the second half of 1641. As mentioned already, the personal rule had not alienated everyone, whilst there was already considerable disagreement in parliament in late 1640 and early 1641 over what to do about the Scots, the fate of Strafford, and the future of the Church. Yet there is no question that support for the crown’s position, not just inside parliament but also out-of-doors, did grow stronger over time, as the crisis unfolded. Royalism as a mass movement first began to manifest itself as a petitioning campaign in defence of the Church, in response to the petitions that had begun flooding into parliament calling for the root and branch abolition of T.N.A., P.R.O. SP 16/413, ff. 81, 82. Upon examination Fewler denied the charge and said he would be willing to fight against the Scots: ibid., f. 83. 47 Bodl., MS Bankes 42, ff. 159, 160v. 48 T.N.A., P.R.O. SP 16/463, f. 252. 49 New College Oxford, MS 9502, Woodford’s Diary, 2 Apr. 1639, 12 Aug. 1640. 50 John Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, T.R.H.S., 5th series, 34 (1984), 155–78, reprinted in his Nature of the English Revolution, pp. 45–68. 46

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episcopacy. Between January 1641 and the summer of 1641 some six petitions in defence of the bishops and/or the Book of Common Prayer were either delivered or drawn up. The period from the autumn of 1641 to June 1642 saw the formulation of a further twenty-two petitions in defence of the Church. Some of the petitions could boast large numbers of signatories: the first Cheshire petition (in support of episcopacy) was supposedly signed by over 6,000 people, the second (in support of the Book of Common Prayer) over 9,000; that from Devon 8,000; Nottinghamshire over 6,000; Somerset some 14,350; and from the six counties of North Wales 30,000.51 Royalism as a political identity was further shaped and crystallized by the press. Many of the petitions in defence of the Church found their way into print, whilst the Cheshire gentleman Sir Thomas Aston produced a printed anthology in May 1642, so these in turn became part of the print propaganda campaign.52 The parliamentarian attempt to court opinion out-of-doors was met in kind by publicists who wrote in condemnation of radical puritans and the protestant separatists in an effort to persuade people not to support those who sought far-reaching reforms in Church and state.53 The first thing to notice is that the impulse here did not come from the crown. Charles I, very much on the defensive in the early months of the crisis, entered the fray quite late. His first transparent attempt to appeal to opinion out-of-doors following the calling of the Long Parliament was his progress south from Edinburgh in November 1641, after his meeting with the Scottish parliament. Everywhere he stopped he was greeted by enthusiastic crowds, whilst Londoners celebrated his return to the English capital with bonfires and bells and loyal toasts – a carefully stage-managed affair planned by Secretary Nicholas, although even now the idea seems to have come from the City of London rather than the king himself.54 Charles only began to exploit the press directly following parliament’s decision on 15 December 1641 to publish its Grand Remonstrance; as Charles himself subsequently confessed, it was now that he ‘resolved to do [his] part’ to give the ‘people’ a ‘cleare satisfaction of [his] upright Intentions to the publike’.55 There followed a flood of royal declarations and proclamations outlining the king’s position – some seventy-three items have been identified as issuing from the Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), Appendix 1, pp. 238–47. 52 [Sir Thomas Aston], A Collection of Sundry Petitions Presented to the Kings Most Excellent Majestie (1642). 53 The fullest analysis of this literature to date is David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), ch. 10. I have previously discussed some of this literature in Tim Harris, ‘Propaganda and Public Opinion in SeventeenthCentury England’, in Media and Revolution: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Jeremy Popkin (Lexington, 1995), pp. 48–73. 54 Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 160–3; Adamson, Noble Revolt, ch. 15. 55 Charles I, His Majesties Declaration to All His Loving Subjects. Of the 12 of August 1642 (York and Oxford, 1642), p. 38. 51

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press he set up at York alone, following the king’s flight north – which appear to have been widely disseminated, with loyal sheriffs and other local officers often taking it upon themselves to distribute these works at the local level.56 As is now well known, Charles – or, more accurately, Hyde, Culpepper, and Falkland, who wrote in the king’s name – re-­positioned himself as a constitutional royalist: as a king who had addressed the ­grievances of his subjects in a parliamentary way but who was determined to resist parliament’s attempt to reduce him to a doge of Venice, a king who stood for the rule of law and the true religion (as embodied in the Church of England) against the threat to order posed by radical puritans and separatists.57 Yet Charles, I would suggest, was seeking to tap into – and attempting to seize control of – a burgeoning royalist ideological platform that was being forged around the crown, but which was not, in any obvious way, the result of a self-conscious media campaign orchestrated on behalf of the crown. Some caution is necessary here, since it is not that there was no input from the crown at all. People could only rally behind the king if they felt they understood what the king stood for. Charles made a crucial early statement of his position in a speech delivered before both Houses at the Banqueting House on Saturday 23 January 1641: he was prepared, he announced, to reform ‘all Innovations in Church and Commonwealth’, ‘reduce all Matters of Religion and Government to what they were in the purest Times of Queen Elizabeth’s Days’, and lay down any part of his revenue ‘found illegal or grievous to the Public’; he would not, however, consent to any ‘Alteration of Government’, was determined to uphold the right of the bishops to sit in parliament, and would not allow others to call parliament in his name, and he expressed alarm at petitions calling for root and branch reform and the recent interruptions of church services by radical puritans.58 The speech was not published, although reports of it certainly circulated. Certain key aspects of the king’s stated position, however, were reinforced by official public pronouncements from the centre. On 16 January, a week before the Banqueting House speech, the house of lords, responding to a recent spate of sectarian attacks on church services in the London metropolitan area, sent an order to all parishes in London, Westminster, and Southwark requiring them to ensure that church services were performed according to

56 Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 296; Laurence Hanson, ‘The King’s Printer at York and Shrewsbury 1642–3’, The Library, 4th series, 23 (1943), 129–31. 57 Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 478–87; David L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994); Michael J. Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Tuscaloosa, 1985); Quentin Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War’, in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage vol. 2 The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Martin Van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 20–1. 58 L.J., IV, 142.

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law and that anyone who disturbed such services was ‘severely punished’.59 When a Commons committee charged with suppressing innovations in religion finally recommended at the beginning of September that altar rails be taken down and communion tables be removed from the east end of the church, the House of Lords responded on the 9th by publishing its order of 16 January in favour of the traditional prayer book service and against the disorders of the sects, and this order was subsequently officially endorsed by the crown in a royal proclamation of 10 December.60 Some of the early petitions in defence of the bishops may have taken their cue from Charles’s Banqueting House speech of January – Charles subsequently sent a letter to the promoter of the Cheshire petition, Sir Thomas Aston, making it clear he welcomed the initiative – whilst the Lords’ order of September and the royal proclamation of December most likely served as stimuli for the second wave of petitioning in late 1641 and early 1642, albeit that the petitioning activity itself appears to have been largely orchestrated by committed local activists, both lay and clerical, who were responding to other developments besides the above-mentioned cues from the centre (a major one being, of course, the rise of root and branch petitioning in the localities).61 If we turn now to the printed works condemning puritan extremism, which began to appear in 1640 though which became particularly numerous from the second half of 1641, again it appears that this ideological offensive, whilst doubtless inspired to some degree by the known opposition of both the king and the House of Lords to the disorders of the sects, was largely independent of the crown. Because many of these works were printed anonymously it is not always possible to identify who was behind them, but in so far as we can tell many of these authors appear to have been working on their own initiative. One of the key anti-puritan polemicists at this time

B.L., Harleian MS 6424, ff. 6r–v; L.J., IV, 134. C.J., II, 279, 283, 287; L.J., IV, 395; The Orders from the House of Commons for the Abolishing of Superstition and Innovavation [sic] in Church Affaires (1641); A Declaration of the Commons in Parliament, made September the 9th, 1641 (1641); A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns and of Others Published under Authority 1485–1714, ed. Robert Steele (2 vols, Oxford, 1910), I, nos 1886, 1887, 1903; Charles I, By the King. A Proclamation for Obedience to the Lawes Ordained for Establishing of the True Religion (1641); Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 64–8. 61 Peter Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions: Local Politics in National Context, Cheshire, 1641’, in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 259–89 (esp. 277–84). I am grateful to Professor Lake for sharing with me an extended, unpublished version of this article. For the disorders of the sects, see: Walter, ‘Popular Iconoclasm’; Walter, ‘Abolishing Superstition with Sedition?’; Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, chs 3, 5. 59 60

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was the water poet John Taylor; yet despite being a royal waterman, Taylor appears not to have enjoyed court patronage.62 When considering the impact of this literature in comparison to the crown-sponsored campaign against the Scots, it is important to recognize the very altered context of 1641–2. The breakdown of the system of pre-publication licensing following the calling of the Long Parliament resulted in a great outpouring of the press. Whereas on average 459 titles were published per year in the 1630s, we know of over 2,000 titles published in 1641 and over 4,000 in 1642.63 We also see the rise of pithier, highly polemical pieces, written in a popular idiom, designed to enflame, to agitate, to appeal to the emotions rather than just reason.64 Those writing in support of the crown or the traditional order in Church and state had to engage with what was now a very different public discourse of print; to get one’s point across effectively, one needed to keep the message simple and to repeat it often. There was thus a heightened intensity to the war of words of 1641–2. Charles’s efforts at the time of the Scottish crisis by contrast seem somewhat minimalist: he appears to have thought that getting Balcanquhall to publish a lengthy refutation of the covenanter position and having a few Calvinist divines back him up would be enough. Most crucially, the political context was radically different by 1641. To state the obvious, it is easier to scaremonger if one can point to a genuine threat in one’s own backyard, even if one misrepresents and exaggerates that threat. The Scots challenging Laud in 1638–40, in the context of what had been going on in England during the personal rule, simply did not seem as frightening as did the radical puritan and separatist challenge to the Church of 1641–2 and concomitant apparent breakdown in law and order. Let us examine more closely, then, the anti-puritan / anti-separatist polemic of 1640–2, to see how it might have functioned to shape and help promote a burgeoning royalist identity on the eve of the Civil War. A crucial part of the strategy was simple scaremongering. This literature was alarmist and sensationalist; it exaggerated and distorted the reality of the puritan – and especially the separatist – challenge, in order to frighten people into supporting the crown. Titles such as A Discovery of 29 Sects here in London (1641) and The Divisions of the Church of England Crept in at XV Several Doores (1642), documenting the existence not only of puritans, Brownists and anabaptists, but also supposedly adamites, familists, socinians, saturnians, panonians, bacchanalians, and heathens, were intended to give the impression not only of large numbers but also of never-ending Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water Poet, 1578–1653 (Oxford, 1994), esp. pp. 63, 143–6, 163–70. 63 Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, p. 163. These figures underestimate, since they are based on surviving titles, but give an indication of the trend. 64 Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London, 1637–1645 (1997), ch. 4. 62

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fragmentation.65 The case against the sects was in part a religious one: they were condemned for theological error, for getting their scripture wrong, and thus for being heretics and enemies of the true religion.66 Yet they were also condemned for a host of non-religious reasons: for promoting disorders, being a threat to the rule of law, undermining the social hierarchy, and violating gender norms. Taylor invoked images of ‘violent outrages, and Sacrilegious disorders Committed in the Church’, such as ‘laying violent hands upon the Minister’ and tearing off his hood and surplice, or ‘rending the Railes from before the Communion Table’.67 One satirical song observed how the ‘Roundheads’ wanted not only the downfall of the bishops, the destruction of stained glass windows, and the removal of Rome’s ‘Trash and Trumpery’ from parish churches, but also cried down the universities and all good manners and threatened to level all social hierarchy: ‘The name of Lord shalbee abhorred / For every mans a brother / Noe reason why in Church or State / One Man should rule another’.68 The separatists, it was alleged, hailed from humble social backgrounds – ‘Mechanick persons’, cobblers, tinkers, pedlars, weavers, sowgelders, and chimney-sweeps by trade69 – and even allowed women to preach, violating St Paul’s dictum that women were supposed to be silent in Church. The visible presence of women in the separatist congregations inevitably led to allegations of sexual impropriety. Edward Harris charged how a company of Brownists, separatists and nonconformists in Monmouthshire had ‘drawne divers honest men’s wives in the night times to frequent their Assemblies, and to become of most loose and wicked conversation, and likewise many chast Virgins to become harlots, and the mothers of bastards’.70 It was all the easier to hate the sects because they were represented as un-English. They were seen as alien: ‘these Amsterdam whelpes’, Taylor called them.71 They were thus an external threat, something from outside that was undermining the health of the body politic. They were a cancer or a gangrene that had to be removed: ‘recover this almost gangrean’d Church and Common-weale to its former health’, Taylor pleaded to king and parliament.72 Cf. Cressy, England on Edge, ch. 10. See, for example, Richard Carter, The Schismatick Stigmatized (1641); John Taylor, Religions Enemies (1641). 67 [John Taylor], The Brownists Synagogue (1641), p. 2. 68 Bodl., MS Ashmole, 36, 37, ff. 81r–v. 69 John Harris, The Puritanes Impuritie; Or, The Anatomie of a Puritane or Seperatist (1641), p. 4; John Taylor, A Swarme of Sectaries (1641), subtitle. 70 Edward Harris, A True Relation of a Company of Brownists, Separatists and Non-conformists in Monmouthshire (1641), sig. A2. 71 [John Taylor?], The Discovery of a Swarme of Seperatists, Or, A Leathersellers Sermon (1641), sig. A3. This theme is developed further in Hillary Taylor, ‘“An Epidemicall Disease … Raigneth over the Whole Land”: Separatist Disorder, Patriotism and the Early Royalist Press, 1640–42’, Brown University honors thesis, 2009. 72 [John Taylor], Tom Nash His Ghost (York and London, 1642), p. 3. The view of schism 65 66

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Anti-sectarian polemic distorted, misrepresented and invented. It was nevertheless also based on elements of truth. Protestant reformers and moderate puritans were equally alarmed about the rise of separatism during the early months of the Long Parliament. The parliamentarian propagandist Henry Parker, in a tract written in defence of the puritans in 1641, condemned ‘these swarmes of conventiclers which now sequester themselves from us’ as ‘the dregges of the vilest and most ignorant rabble’.73 Dorchester puritans likewise disliked the extremism of the ‘pestilent sects and schismatics’; what they wanted was ‘a pious reformation, not confusion in the church’.74 This was why the anti-sectarian card was such a powerful one for supporters of Charles I to play, since it had the potential to appeal to the moderate middle ground and thus to dislodge people from their previous support for parliament’s reformist agenda. Yet the way the anti-sectarian card was played served to intimate that there was very little difference between conventional puritans and separatists: if one hated the latter, one should also hate the former. Taylor consistently blurred the distinction between puritans and separatists, making it clear to readers that to his mind the two were the same.75 It was an oft-repeated tactic. John Harris subtitled his antipuritan tract of 1641 The Anatomie of a Puritane or Seperatist and wrote of ‘these Seperatists alias Puritanes’.76 By representing the puritans and separatists as posing the real threat to the true Church in England, anti-sectarian polemicists were also able to equate the puritans with papists, giving scope to opponents of parliamentarian reform to neutralize or even invert the parliamentarians’ exploitation of the fear of popery and ‘popish’ innovations under Laud.77 Catalogues of sects listed papists alongside puritans and separatists as threats to the true protestant religion.78 In his Anatomy of the Separatists, Taylor alleged that some sects ‘approve[d] of Popery, because Ignorance is the mother of Devotion’.79 In other writings Taylor equated ‘The Papist and the Schismatique’ because both brought grief to the Church which, like Christ, was

as a cancer or gangrene that needed to be surgically removed in order to preserve the health of the body politic was long-established. See John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006), ch. 5 (esp. pp. 202, 213, 216, 218). 73 [Henry Parker], A Discourse Concerning Puritans (2nd edn, 1641), p. 55. 74 David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 1992), p. 194. 75 See, for example, [John Taylor], The Divisions of the Church of England Crept in at XV Several Doores (1642), frontispiece. 76 Harris, The Puritanes Impuritie (1641), p. 2. 77 G. E. Aylmer, ‘Collective Mentalities in mid-Seventeenth-Century England: II. Royalist Attitudes’, T.R.H.S., 5th series, 37 (1987), 12–13. 78 A Discovery of 29 Sects Here in London (1641); [Taylor], Divisions of the Church of England. 79 [John Taylor], The Anatomy of the Separatists (1642), p. 1. 19

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‘Between two Thieves’.80 Aston claimed that the presbyterians and separatists, by insisting on ‘the subjection of Prince and people to the tyranny of their Discipline’, agreed with ‘the Jesuites’; in Aston’s opinion, it was ‘zealous separatists’ who were ‘likest to give fire to that Popish powder, which would blow up … all Kingly Supremacy, or Magisteriall Superioritie over the Independent Hierarchie’.81 It was an argument also made by the clergy when recruiting subscribers to petitions in defence of the Church. When William Clarke, a petty canon of Chester cathedral, urged his congregation to subscribe Cheshire’s petition in defence of the prayer book of late 1641, he identified ‘Papists and Puritans’ as the ‘two grand Enemyes’ who sought to ‘affect Noveltyes [and] Alterations’ in the Church; it did not matter that papists and puritans thought of each other as enemies, since ‘Herod and Pilat were utter enemyes yet agreed in the Crucifying of Christ’.82 It is clear, then, what the anti-sectarians did not like; but what did they stand for? At the very basic level, they defended what the sectarians attacked – the Church of bishops and prayer book – and thus also what Charles himself proclaimed he was determined to uphold. Taylor acknowledged that ‘some parts of our publike Liturgy’ might need correction, something that the king and parliament were considering, but the separatists went too far in demanding that ‘all formes of publike worship should be utterly abrogated’, ‘our booke of Common-Prayer … quite abolished’, and ‘Episcopacy everlastingly extirpated’.83 Bishops were necessary ‘to curbe’ the ‘execrable insolencies’ of the sects.84 Although not all ceremonies prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer were necessary to salvation, they could be defended on the grounds of tradition: using the sign of the cross in baptism, for example, was ‘an ancient, laudable, and decent ceremony of the Church of England’.85 The lack of respect that the separatists showed for holy places and the threat to order they posed led some explicitly to defend policies associated with Laud in the 1630s. Taylor defended both kneeling and bowing in 1640.86 The Oxford cleric Thomas Cheshire noted how he saw a woman in St Sepulchre’s Church in London ‘dandling and dancing her child upon the Lords holy Table’ a little before divine service, and afterwards noticed ‘a great deal of Water upon the Table’, which he suspected ‘were not teares of devotion’, and asked ‘whether it had not been meeter for the Lords Table to have stood rail’d in, as formerly … then to be so polluted’. Yet invariably opponents of John Taylor, Mad Fashions, Old Fashions, All Out of Fashions (1642), sig. A4. Thomas Aston, A Remonstrance against Presbytery (1641), sig. G2v. 82 Maltby, Prayer Book and People, p. 153. 83 [Taylor], Anatomy of the Separatists, p. 4. 84 Thomas Cheshire, A True Copy of that Sermon which was Preached at S. Pauls the Tenth of October Last (1642), p. 12. 85 John Locke, A Strange and Lamentable Accident that Happened Lately at Mears-Ashby (1642), sig. A3. 86 John Taylor, Differing Worships (1640), p. 5. 80 81

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the sects maintained that they defended the traditional Church of Elizabeth and James. Cheshire himself made it clear that altar rails had existed in St Sepulchre’s long before Laud rose to prominence in the Church and indeed in many churches since ‘time out of mind’.87 One anonymous pamphleteer commented on how those ‘of the meanest condition’ took it upon themselves ‘to lay hands on, and to deface those ornaments their pious Ancestors had with great paines and care laboured to adorne God’s house withall’. His reassuring message, however, was that God would punish these iconoclasts. Thus the churchwarden who destroyed the stained glass window in the parish church of Towcester, Northamptonshire, he related, shortly thereafter ‘fell extreame mad, raving … howling and making a noise untill he died’; his wife likewise fell into extreme pain and died, while his sister, after she had ripped the common prayer book out of her Bible in protest against the liturgy, found that her hands ‘began presently in a most stranger maner to rot, the flesh flying from the bones’, such was ‘how it pleased God to deale with this poore silly Creature’.88 This was a Church that had not only been established by godly monarchs but also confirmed by act of parliament. One champion of episcopacy, while agreeing that parliament was right to seek some reform in the Church, complained how the schismatics ‘raile against us, because wee will not raile against those things which are enacted by former Parliaments’.89 As Taylor put it, ‘The Booke of Common prayer … was established by Act of Parliament by the good and godly King Edward the sixth, and after re-established by another Parliament, by that unparaleld and peerlesse princesse Queen Elizabeth, and continued since … for the service of God these ninetie yeeres.’90 Elsewhere Taylor praised ‘that wonder-working Parliament now assembled’ for the actions it had taken against ‘the Papists in England’, and even wrote of the papists’ ‘hellish Stratagem’ of 1639 to make ‘a breach between the English and Scottish Nations’; his main objective, however, was to take a swipe at the sects, warning that when parliament was done with the papists it would turn its attention to ‘the Brownists’.91 A powerful insight into the political outlook of those who championed the Church of bishops and prayer book was offered by Sir Thomas Aston, the promoter of the Cheshire petition in favour of episcopacy of early 1641. In May of that year he published a lengthy work defending the bishops and Cheshire, True Copy, p. 13. Wonderfull Newes: Or, A True Relation of a Churchwarden in the Town of Toscester (1642), sigs. A2–A3; Anthony Milton, ‘Anglicanism and Royalism in the 1640s’, in The English Civil War: Conflicts and Contexts, 1640–49, ed. John Adamson (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 78–9. 89 Carter, Schistmatick Stigmatized, p. 3. 90 Taylor, Religions Enemies, p. 6. 91 [John Taylor], The Hellish Parliament, Being a Counter-Parliament to this in England (1641), pp. 2–3. 87 88

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condemning presbyterianism, which he dedicated to Charles – justifying his presumption in doing so on the grounds that Charles I had ‘so graciously’ approved of the Cheshire petition in defence of episcopacy – thereby taking it upon himself to act as a propagandist for the king.92 Aston regarded the king as sacred and therefore irresistible: ‘Obedience to Kings’ he held to be ‘a Duty both to God and nature’ and he condemned at great length the resistance theory developed in the mid-sixteenth century by protestants such as Goodman, Knox and Buchanan, which he regarded as popish in origin (and indeed going beyond the views of Jesuits like Bellarmine and Suarez).93 He also maintained that the king had ‘the chiefe Government of all estates Ecclesiasticall and Civill, in all causes within his Dominions’.94 At first glance this might seem to make him a divine-right, royal absolutist. But Aston refused to offer an opinion on whether or not the king ruled by divine right,95 and chose not to invoke the language of royal absolutism. Instead, he credited the bishops with having established limited monarchy in England: ‘Till Bishops help’d to reduce the unbounded wills of Princes to the limits of Lawes, Kings were Tyrants’, but ‘Long ha’s this Nation flourished in the equall dispensation of Lawes, by Divines, Civilians, and Common Lawyers’.96 It was the presbyterians who threatened the rule of law, by denying the royal supremacy and setting up their own system of discipline over and above that of both the existing ecclesiastical and civil authorities. Not only would the king be undermined – ‘Presbyterie inconsistent with Monarchy’ is the title of one of his sections – but so too would parliament: under the presbyterian system of church government by presbyteries, classes, synods, and National Assemblies, Aston asked, what would ‘become of our old superintendent power of Parliaments?’97 ‘I hold my selfe as free-borne as any man’, he proclaimed; it was the presbyterians who would ‘hoyse up unlimited, unbounded Tyranny’: they would ‘trample under feet the sacred Crownes of Kings, the power of Parliaments, the seats of Justice, the use of Magistrates, the efficacie of Lawes, and make themselves Chancellours over our lives and conversations, our wives, our children, our servants, our private families, and our estates’.98

92 Aston, Remonstrance, sig. A2. Aston’s tract is discussed in Maltby, Prayer Book and People, pp. 156–70 and Charles W. Prior, A Confusion of Tongues: Britain’s Wars of Reformation, 1625–42 (Oxford, 2012), ch. 7, though my emphasis differs from both. For Aston’s role in Cheshire politics see, of course, John Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974). 93 Aston, Remonstrance, sigs. *v. His condemnation of resistance theory is mainly in Sections 10 and 11. 94 Ibid., sig. F3v. 95 Ibid., sig. G. 96 Ibid., sig. *v. 97 Ibid., sigs. Gv, L4. 98 Ibid., sigs. E3r–v.

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Aston’s vision was elitist and hierarchical, and Aston himself was deeply worried about the threat posed by the lower orders.99 Yet the presbyterians, he claimed, were merely using ‘the common people’ as ‘their factors for this freedome’; what would ‘these deluded people have of this dreame of libertie’, Aston wondered, if presbyterianism were to triumph?100 People would be subjected ‘to the Tyrannical yoak’ of presbyterian discipline: they would risk being punished twice for the same offence, under both temporal and ecclesiastical law (unless the temporal jurisdiction became extinct), and all sorts of petty crimes not under the jurisdiction of the civil law ‘must bee brought to their Tribunall’. Indeed, the presbyterians ‘must have a rod for the women too, in correcting their lascivious, dissolute, or too sumptuous attire, private or publike dancing, May-games, visiting stage-playes, Tavernes, or Tiplinghouses’. Where, then, would be this ‘promised libertie … when from the legall penalties of positive, and regulated Lawes … whereof we know how to avoyd the breach, or satisfie the penaltie, wee shall become meere Tenants at will of our soules’?101 IV What we see over the course of 1641, then, is a burgeoning royalist identity emerging around Charles I, certainly in tune with what the king was perceived to stand for, but an identity that was not being forged directly by the king himself – in striking contrast here, then, to the crown-sponsored propaganda campaign against the Scots at the time of the Bishops’ Wars. To round out this investigation, one would need to examine how Charles I sought to position himself ideologically with his own interventions in print from late December 1641 onwards, and consider the extent to which he sought to build upon the types of argument documented here or, alternatively, carved out a somewhat distinct ideological position for himself whilst building on the growing support for Church and king that the anti-puritan polemic was helping to generate. Most of Charles’s published declarations in the period leading up to the outbreak of civil war were responses to parliamentarian publications or initiatives – such as the Grand Remonstrance, the Militia Ordinance, of the Nineteen Propositions – which inevitably conditioned the nature of the arguments he developed and shaped the particular ideological agenda he was to pursue, which was not necessarily the same as that of the anti-sectarian / anti-puritan pamphleteers. Charles I’s printed declarations were also less emotionally charged, less sensationalized, and Ibid., sigs. I4v–K. Ibid., sigs. K2r–v. 101 Ibid., sigs. K4r–L2v. This is a striking similarity between Aston’s arguments and those later advanced by Roger L’Estrange during the years of the exclusion crisis and tory reaction. 99

100

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more carefully reasoned than the anti-sectarian polemic considered here – as one would expect, given the different genres. Yet there was clearly overlap: the burgeoning royalist identity being forged by the anti-sectarian writers is clearly compatible with the ideological position Charles chose to stake out for himself both in his self-representations to parliament and in his own interventions in print. Thus in his declarations and proclamations of late 1641 and early 1642 Charles emphasized his commitment to the rule of law, attachment to doing things in a parliamentary way, his defence of the traditional Church, and his vehement opposition to puritan sectarianism.102 One would also need to attempt to measure the impact the anti-sectarian literature might have had on public opinion, although the amount of ink that has already been spilt on trying to ascertain political allegiances at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War testifies how fraught an exercise this is. The sceptic might wonder whether the print polemic of 1641–2 really was that much more effective in rallying support for the crown than the king’s propaganda campaign of 1639–40 against the Scots. One could argue that the result was the same: on both occasions opinion was polarized in England and the result was a war which Charles ended up losing. All the evidence seems to suggest that there was a marked rise in royalist sentiment from 1641 onwards, and most historians seem to agree that Charles was successful in building a royalist party on the eve of the Civil War (indeed, if he had not been, civil war could not have been a possibility). There were nevertheless shortcomings. Although London and Westminster drew up a joint petition in defence of the Church in early 1641, Charles was clearly unable to win over London – hence his flight from the capital in January 1642.103 He also had difficulty dislodging support in other strongly puritan areas, such as Essex, where efforts to generate a pro-episcopacy ultimately failed to bear fruit.104 And it would be a different matter yet again to turn latent support for the king into a willingness to fight for Charles after he had raised his standard at Nottingham.105 Michael Braddick has recently urged us to think in terms of multiple mobilizations (on both the parliamentarian and the royalist side) on the eve of the Civil War.106 Following Braddick’s lead, one might identify the 102 Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, pp. 478–87; Smith, Constitutional Royalism, pp. 88–91. 103 Keith Lindley, ‘Riot Prevention and Control in Early Stuart London’, T.R.H.S., 5th series, 33 (1983), 109–26. 104 John Walter, ‘Confessional Politics in Pre-Civil War Essex: Prayer Books, Profanations, and Petitions’, H.J., 44 (2001), 677–701. 105 Joyce L. Malcolm, ‘A King in Search of Soldiers: Charles I in 1642’, H.J., 21 (1978), 251–73; Michael J. Braddick, ‘Prayer Book and Protestation: Anti-Popery, Anti-­ Puritanism and the Outbreak of the English Civil War’, in England’s Wars of Religion, ed. Prior and Burgess, pp. 138–40. 106 Braddick, ‘Prayer Book and Protestation’; Michael Braddick, ‘Mobilisation, Anxiety and Creativity in England during the 1640s’, in Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political

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following processes at work when attempting to account for the rise of popular royalism on the eve of the Civil War. People, not just in parliament but also out-of-doors, were reacting to developments, to lived experience, to what was going on around them. They were being mobilized and also politicized by the various local petitioning campaigns, being asked to identify themselves with and to pledge their support for a particular cause (with petitions also serving as propaganda since they were read out in public meetings and many of them were published). People were further influenced by cheap print, and the anti-puritan / anti-sectarian literature examined here. And they were also swayed by specific appeals from the crown. These multiple mobilizations did not always overlap – one could sign a petition in support of the bishops without being prepared to enlist in the king’s army – though they often did serve to reinforce each other. The anti-sectarian literature tells us something about royalist identity on the eve of the Civil War, especially in so far the ideological outlook it portrayed was compatible with that found in petitions and royal declarations, but it is not the whole of the story. My ambitions here have thus been somewhat modest. Along with other recent commentators, I have argued that the view that Charles was insensitive to the need to appeal to public opinion is mistaken. Charles I did have a strategy for opinion management, and his regime showed itself at times to be quite sophisticated in its approach to the politics of spin. We have to ask, however, whether the strategy that the Caroline regime chose to pursue was effective. Did it achieve the desired results? Up to 1640 it did not, for a number of reasons. What Charles did was not enough, in terms of scale, and it was not sufficiently in tune with public opinion. It did prove possible to sell Charles I and what he stood for successfully to the public in 1641–2, but then again that was because Charles I, at least initially, was not doing the selling. What was forged in 1641–2 was in essence a party ideology: it was at the same time a royalist ideology, in that it was a party ideology serving to defend the interests of the crown, but of course the king was not supposed to be the leader of a party. And it was an ideology that, whilst being in tune with what the king was perceived to stand for in 1641–2, was created around the king, rather than one forged directly by the king – although the king did eventually insert himself into this media campaign and successfully make himself head of the royalist party that was not initially of his creation.

Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900, ed. John Morrow and Jonathan Scott (Exeter, 2008), pp. 175–98. 25

2

Rethinking Moderation in the English Revolution: The Case of An Apologeticall Narration* Ethan H. Shagan

One noteworthy feature of the English revolution was the desire of virtually all participants to claim the mantle of moderation. We might, depending upon the magnification of our scholarly lens, attribute this tendency either to the peculiarities of English political culture, or to the lingering Aristotelianism of the long European Renaissance, or to the almost infinite capacity of human beings for rationalization. But whatever the reason, it is striking that moderation was everywhere in early modern England’s bloodiest conflict, giving it a somewhat different tone or mood from later European revolutions. John Morrill described nearly four decades ago the intense desire for moderation espoused by neutrals who resisted the ideological extremism that was leading the nation to ruin.1 But similar rhetoric can be found in the writings of the most committed royalists, levellers, presbyterians, independents, and more or less everyone else. A simple word search of Early English Books Online yields 165 books with ‘moderate’ or ‘moderation’ in their titles published between 1640 and 1660. Notable examples include: The Tablet or Moderation of Charles I, Martyr (1649), a royalist panegyric by John Arnway who also, apparently contradictorily, wrote No Peace ’till the King Prospers (1645), insisting that Charles make no concessions; Moderation Iustified (1644), a sermon to the Long Parliament by the presbyterian Thomas Thorowgood denouncing the celebration of Christmas; an attack on parliament for insufficient zeal in bringing Charles I to justice, particularly condemning the wealth of M.P.s, entitled A Moderate and Cleer Relation of the Private Souldierie of Colonell Scroops and Col. Sanders Regiments (1648); * An earlier version of this paper was presented as a plenary lecture at the University of Reading Early Modern Conference in July 2010, and I am grateful to all of the participants, especially Ann Hughes, for their comments. 1 John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650 (1976). 27

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and, perhaps most famously, the revolutionary newspaper and occasional propaganda organ of the Levellers, published in sixty-three weekly issues from June 1648 to September 1649, known simply as The Moderate. It could reasonably be argued that a rhetoric so omnipresent and capacious can have no coherent meaning; it becomes an empty signifier, used to claim virtue rather than to do any serious analytical work, hence it is not worth the effort of the historian to study. On the other hand, it might also reasonably be argued that, if a rhetoric is so omnipresent and capacious, contemporaries must have cared deeply about it; hence historians can only ignore its significance at our peril. We might even consider the possibility that its apparent incoherence is a result of our misunderstanding of its meanings rather than a genuine absence of meaning. That is the argument I made (for the whole of the Tudor-Stuart period rather than the Revolution in particular) in my recent book The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (2011).2 There I argued that the concept of ‘moderation’ in early modern England was synonymous with government, fusing the ethical concept of self-government – what we imagine today to be real moderation – with the political concept of external authority or regulation. Moderation in this sense was an active force of control, and ‘moderators’ were those who provided that control. Human beings were thus moderate both insofar as they controlled their own passions and also insofar as those passions were controlled by others, while the restraint of passions, whether your own or someone else’s, constituted moderation. And since most people were imagined to be incapable of self-control in most circumstances, the normative meaning of the term implied the external restraint of human excesses to produce a middle way. This would imply, for instance, that Arnway’s The Tablet or Moderation of Charles I referred to the king’s ability to rule others as well as to govern his own affections; that Thorowgood’s Moderation Iustified referred to the authority of parliament to moderate the licentiousness of the unregenerate population; that the Moderate and Cleer Relation of the soldiers authorized the army to purge parliament of its excessive members; and that Gilbert Mabbott’s quasi-leveller newspaper The Moderate defended the authority of freeborn Englishmen to moderate the intemperate passions of their would-be governors. Of course, this does not mean that calls for moderation could not be calls for peace and accommodation; but even when they were that, they were also something else, something far more externalized and regulatory, which is why we find the apparent contradiction of so

Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011). Much of the present article was originally intended for The Rule of Moderation but did not fit into the final structure of the book, and I am grateful to the editors of this volume for an opportunity to publish this material here.

2

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many violent proposals and claims falling under this rubric. Perhaps ‘moderation’ was not an empty signifier after all. Applying these ideas to the English revolution would suggest that the ubiquity of calls and claims for ‘moderation’, rather than demonstrating the limited nature of the conflict, actually demonstrates its depth and breadth. These different iterations of moderation are, upon closer examination, divergent visions of authority, and as such they reaffirm a perhaps old-fashioned sense that the English revolution was early modernity’s greatest conflict over the nature of government. Now, that is far too big a claim to substantiate fully in a small chapter. So, in these pages, I will only outline the general nature of the argument and then proceed to a detailed case study, one of the fiercest debates over moderation in the revolutionary decades, the controversy over a seemingly innocuous little pamphlet called An Apologeticall Narration. I On 6 October 1642, George Thomason purchased the first part of a pamphlet defending parliament and opposing Charles I’s commissions of array. On the first page, under the heading ‘Aphorisms of the Kingdom’, the very first line was: ‘1. The parliament is the moderation of monarchy. The laws and not the king do command.’3 The notion of ‘moderation’ inherent in this opening salvo was plainly not the commonplace modern sense of the term, pliable accommodation of difference or an abiding concern for consensus and equanimity. It was, rather, something much closer to the Latin moderatio, which meant government, restraint, or limitation, the active force by which extremes were reduced to a mean. Exactly the same meaning of moderation was employed on the opposite side a few months later by the royalist historian Sir Richard Baker in his A Chronicle of the Kings of England (1643), where (with obvious contemporary parallels) he denounced the populist Calvinism that had overthrown Charles I’s grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots: With a certain insolent liberty they endeavored to prove … that the people of Scotland were above the king, and urged Calvin’s authority also that popular magistrates are constituted for the moderation of the licentiousness of princes, and that it is lawful for them both to imprison kings and, upon just cause, to depose them.4

The Aphorismes of the Kingdome (1642), p. 1. This pamphlet is sometimes attributed to William Prynne, an attribution described by the NSTC as doubtful. 4 Richard Baker, A Chronicle of the Kings of England (1643), ‘The Raigne of Queen Elizabeth’, p. 28. 3

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This understanding of moderation was absolutely standard in the seventeenth century. If we look to the new genre of vernacular English dictionaries, for instance, John Bullokar’s 1616 An English Expositor defined the verb ‘moderate’ as ‘to govern or temper with discretion’. Likewise, Henry Cockeram’s 1623 English Dictionarie defined ‘to moderate’ simply as ‘to govern’.5 Edward Phillips’s 1658 New World of English Words defined the noun ‘moderation’ as ‘temperance, government, discretion’, and defined a ‘moderator’ as ‘a discrete governor, a decider of any controversy’.6 The alienness of these definitions to modern sensibilities becomes manifest when we start exploring usages of these terms in contexts of authority and restraint where they would make little sense today. So, for instance, a 1559 translation of Johannes Ferrarius’s De republica instituenda stressed the role of the prince, ‘in whose government the whole moderation of the common weal consisteth’.7 Edward Forset in 1606 described how sovereigns ‘uphold their government in a strict steadiness, tempering all extremities with an evenness of moderation’.8 In the same year, Barnabe Barnes described how in the Roman Republic the authority of the people was ‘atempered with the moderation of the authorities royal’.9 In these examples, moderation meant governance, but in particular it meant appropriate and measured governance, a middle way between tyranny and anarchy. Moreover, every middle way required the exercise of proper moderation, while every exercise of proper moderation produced a middle way. Hence the language of moderation tracked very closely with the Aristotelian ideal of the ethical mean: talk of means and middle ways was saturated with the language of anarchy and tyranny, because all middle ways depended upon the exercise of restraint that was neither deficient nor excessive. The point, then, is that long before the English revolution, claims for ‘moderation’ or the ‘middle way’ embodied claims about virtuous governance. Crucially for our purposes, this sense of moderation as government was woven into the purported via media of the Church of England from the very beginning. Stephen Gardiner (in a translation he never authorized) defined the royal supremacy over the Church as the authority ‘to bear rule over all the people, to command, remit, and sometimes to bear with all the members thereof as much as tendeth to the use of all the whole body, and so to order and moderate every thing that the glory of God and the profession of the faith may be advanced’.10 The 1535 English translation of Marsilius Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie: or, an Interpreter of Hard English Words (1623). 6 Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words (1658). 7 A Woorke of Ioannes Ferrarius Montanus, Touchynge the Good Orderynge of a Common Weale, trans. William Bavand (1559), f. 166v. 8 Edward Forset, A comparatiue discourse of the bodies natural and politique (1606), p. 31. 9 Barnabe Barnes, Foure Bookes of Offices (1606), p. 65. 10 Stephen Gardiner, De vera obedientia, trans. Michael Wood (1553), sig. E5v. 5

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of Padua’s Defensor pacis claimed that the office of the priesthood consists in ‘all disciplines found out and devised by man’s wit, both speculative and practive, which do moderate, temper, and govern the acts of men as well the inward as the outward acts’.11 For Archbishop Matthew Parker, writing in 1566, the regulation of indifferent ceremonies was moderation: This persuasion [i.e. Christian liberty] a godly man must always retain and keep safe in his mind: but when he cometh to the use and action of [things indifferent], then must he moderate and qualify his liberty, according to charity towards his neighbor, and obedience to his Prince. So though by this knowledge his mind and conscience is always free, yet his doing is, as it were, tied or limited by law or love.12

For the Elizabethan bishop Thomas Bilson, episcopacy was the ‘fatherly moderation’ of the bishops over the ministry, for ‘Where no man doeth govern, what order can be kept? Where no man doeth moderate, what peace can be had?’13 It is therefore instructive, before we return to the English revolution, to examine in depth one sixteenth-century case study of the relationship between moderation and government that will help to put the Apologeticall Narration controversy in context: the Admonition controversy of the 1570s. This was the first great contest over ecclesiastical government in post-Reformation England, fought in a war of words between the presbyterian activist and Cambridge professor Thomas Cartwright and the dean of Lincoln and future archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift. Here, perhaps more clearly that anywhere else in the century before the Revolution, we can see that there was far more than a casual or coincidental relationship between constitutional conflict and moderation-talk.14 When the presbyterian Thomas Cartwright discussed moderation in the Church, he began from the premise that any superiority of one minister over another was a form of tyranny. Quite simply, there could be no such thing as ‘moderate and well-ruled government’ of one minister over another; God had forbidden not merely ambitious or irresponsible superiority but all superiority to the clergy.15 As such, even rule that is ‘moderate and lawful in a prince over his subjects’ would be ‘tyrannical’ and ‘violent in a pastor …

Marsilius of Padua, The defence of peace, trans. William Marshall? (1535), ff. 18r–v. Matthew Parker, A Briefe Examination (1566), sig. ****3v. 13 Thomas Bilson, The Perpetual Gouernement of Christes Church (1593), preface sig. TT4r and p. 2. 14 The following paragraphs summarize and rearrange material from chs 3 and 4 of Shagan, The Rule of Moderation. 15 John Whitgift, The Works of John Whitgift, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge, 3 vols, 1851–3) [hereafter WJW], I, 165–6. 11 12

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over his flock’.16 Rule by bishops was thus by definition ‘tyrannous lordship’, an ‘excess of authority’ or ‘immoderate power’, and Cartwright used numerous metaphors of superfluity and excess to describe episcopacy.17 The bishops were ‘superfluous branches’ which ‘spread their boughs and arms so broad that for the cold shade of them nothing can grow and thrive’; pruning was needed ‘to take away the superfluous lop and spread of their immoderate offices’.18 Likewise, the office of archbishop is a ‘superfluous thing’ that should be ‘thrown out of the Church, as a knob or some lump of flesh, which being no member of the body doth burden it and disfigure it’.19 Since all higher ranks of ministry like bishops and archbishops were antichristian, God had ordained moderation of the Church within and between congregations rather than from above. Most importantly, Cartwright argued that the Church was capable of moderation through proper discipline: its reform of penitent sinners and its purging of unrepentant ones to create a rump or exclusive Church, limited in full membership to the reformed community capable of self-government. But for this discipline to be genuinely moderate, excommunication had to represent the consent of the whole Church rather than either, on one side, the unbridled will of one man over the multitude, or, on the other side, the unbridled will of the multitude over their leaders. This was the rationale for the presbyterians’ elaborate structure of elections, lay elderships, presbyteries, and communal acts of discipline. Excommunication was never to be permitted to one man, which would be the very essence of tyranny, but likewise Cartwright opposed ‘the other extremity, which is to make the estate of the Church too popular, and the people to have too great a sway’.20 Discipline belonged to the presbyteries, the aristocracy of the Church in the form of its elders and pastors; these men were elected, but since they were elected by a body already purged of its extremities they were nonetheless moderate. The classic biblical proof text for excommunication – ‘Tell it to the Church’ in Matthew 18:17 – Cartwright interpreted not as meaning ‘tell it to the pastor alone’, as the conformists argued, nor ‘tell it to the whole congregation’, as the anabaptists argued, but tell it to the ‘pastor with the ancients or elders’.21 Just as discipline required some measure of popular consent to be moderate rather than tyrannous, the government of the Church more broadly also required such consent, but never such a broad role for the populace that the Church would descend into anarchy. For Cartwright, this balance took the form of a classical mixed polity: Thomas Cartwright, The Second Replie of Thomas Cartwright (Heidelberg, 1575), p. 431. See also WJW, II, 20. 17 WJW, I, 140; Cartwright, Second Replie of Thomas Cartwright, p. 551; WJW, II, 265. 18 WJW, I, 39; WJW, II, 80. 19 WJW, II, 99. 20 WJW, III, 257. 21 WJW, III, 168. 16

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For the Church is governed with that kind of government which the philosophers that write of the best commonwealths affirm to be the best. For, in respect of Christ the head, it is a monarchy; and, in respect of the ancients and pastors that govern in common and with like authority amongst themselves, it is an aristocraty [sic], or the rule of the best men; and, in respect that the people are not secluded but have their interest in Church matters, it is a democraty [sic] or a popular estate.22

Cartwright repeatedly described this mixture as a moderation or via media: ‘As there is in this government a defect, so there is an excess, and between both a mean which is to be holden’; judgments in the Church should be ‘handled by a company’ to prevent tyranny, but to refer every issue to a ‘great multitude’ would produce confusion.23 Through elections, the people might be ‘called to some moderation’ of the Church, in other words take their proper role in its governance.24 Repeatedly in Church history, Cartwright wrote, ‘the people bridled the rage of the Scribes and Pharisees against the truth’, protecting Christianity against tyranny.25 One crucial form of moderation within this balance of estates was the creation of ‘moderators’ for presbyteries and synods: if assemblies of the Church were places where the estates of the Church came together, the moderators directed them and prevented their power-sharing from degenerating into anarchy. Moderators were to be elected by their assembly, they were to hold their position for the duration of that assembly only, and their role was to guide the rule of the whole rather than to rule over that whole.26 This ‘moderate rule’, as Cartwright called it, was moderate rather than tyrannical because it was elective and temporary, the very opposite of episcopacy.27 This had been the apostolic government of the Church until the rise of popery; afterwards ‘the further off they were from this moderation … the nearer they came to that tyranny and ambitious power which oppressed and overlaid the Church of God’.28 Thus, rather than being the absence of government, presbyterianism was the essence of government: ‘And withal you see that, as we are far from this tyranny and excessive power which now is in the Church, so we are by the grace of God as far from confusion and disorder.’29 John Whitgift, of course, was having none of this, and in response to this last claim by Cartwright, he responded that ‘this authority, which you WJW, I, 390. On presbyterian arguments for a mixed polity, see Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Monarchy, The Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the xix Propositions (University, Alabama, 1985). 23 Thomas Cartwright, The Rest of the Second Replie (Basel, 1577), pp. 66–7. 24 Cartwright, The Second Replie of Thomas Cartwright, p. 284. 25 Ibid., p. 290. 26 WJW, II, 269–71. 27 WJW, II, 275. 28 WJW, II, 277–8. 29 WJW, II, 280. 22

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call “tyranny and excessive”, is moderate and lawful and according both to the laws of God and man’.30 For Whitgift, the unrestrained excesses of his presbyterian opponents lay somewhere near the root of their dangerous assaults on the Church of England. Puritans, almost by definition, ‘be not able to judge of controversies according to learning and knowledge, [they] therefore are ruled by affection and carried headlong with blind zeal into diverse sinister judgments and erroneous opinions’.31 ‘Every line’ of the Admonition to Parliament contained ‘almost nothing else but ... intemperate speeches’.32 He attacked the ‘excessive raging’ of puritan laymen who spit in the faces of conformist clergy and asked, ‘How did you move the people to this extremity?’33 This presumption of puritan immoderation – unbridled, boiling over, blinded by passions – formed the lynchpin of Whitgift’s claim to moderation. For if the puritans themselves were dangerously ungoverned, it followed that the presbyterian programme for the Church was not a form of government but of ungovernment, a releasing rather than a moderation of sinful affections. The presbyterian platform was essentially a recipe for governance of the Church by the people rather than governance of the people by the Church: ‘Popularity you cannot avoid, seeing you seek so great an equality, commit so many things to the voices of the people, and in sundry places so greatly magnify and extol them.’34 This appeared most explicitly in the presbyterian dependence upon elections, especially the election of ministers by the congregation. Popular elections were ipso facto immoderate because the people are ‘commonly led by affection’ in their votes.35 While in the history of the Church popular elections had at times been permitted, the multitude had long since been ‘secluded from such elections’ precisely because of the ‘marvelous contentions that have been in such kind of elections by the sinister affections of the people’, when ‘the rage of the people’ was sometimes ‘so intemperate that they fell from voices to blows’.36 The election of ministers was thus not a form of moderation but a license that required moderation. In a particularly gleeful moment, Whitgift was able to appropriate the authority of the presbyterian hero Theodore Beza for this view of moderation, translating a long passage: Because the multitude is for the most part ignorant and untractable, and oftentimes the greater part doth overcome the better, even in a popular state lawfully appointed all things are not committed to the unruly people but certain magis-

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

WJW, WJW, WJW, WJW, WJW, WJW, WJW,

II, 280. I, 49. I, 94. II, 2. I, 42. I, 372–3. I, 463. 34

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trates are appointed by consent of the people to govern the common sort and multitude. Now, if this wisdom be required in worldly affairs, much more is a moderation necessary in those things wherein men oftentimes see but little.37

Yet the other side of Whitgift’s via media was opposition to the tyranny of the papacy, arguing that the Bible forbade not clerical government per se but ‘corrupt affections … in desiring the same’, ‘the ambitious desire of the same and the tyrannical usage thereof’. As such, the scriptural passages presbyterians used against English bishops were more appropriately used ‘against the pride, tyranny and ambition of the bishop of Rome, which seeketh tyrannically to rule’.38 The middle way between tyranny and licentious liberty, then, was the moderate restraint of popular affections, not through arbitrary rule or self-aggrandizement, but through law. In this sense, far from civil authority and jurisdiction making the English bishops tyrannical, it was precisely what prevented them from being tyrannical. Episcopal power was moderate because it was limited by law, ‘for the mind of man, even of the best, may be overruled by affection; but so cannot the law’.39 Whitgift told Cartwright: ‘It is no “tyranny” to restrain the people from that liberty that is hurtful to themselves and must of necessity engender contentions, tumults and confusion.’40 For Whitgift, then, moderation was constructed in and through exactly those structures which presbyterians regarded as tyrannical: the law’s investment of bishops with strong and enforceable authority over the Church. Of particular interest here is Whitgift’s discussion of ‘moderators’ to settle controversies in the Church. A key part of the presbyterian platform was that, since there should be no superiority of one minister over another, Church assemblies ought to have ‘moderators’: elected chairmen who maintained order but were merely primes inter pares with no authority over their brethren or permanent office. Whitgift gleefully pointed out the logical contradictions in this attempt to institute order without hierarchy, to create ‘moderators’ who lacked genuine authority over their fellows: how could a moderator be chosen in an orderly way before there was a moderator to moderate the election of a moderator? Who would even have authority to call such an assembly and choose a place for their meeting?41 More broadly, since moderation was government, real ‘moderators’ were not merely Speakers of the House who directed discussion but men who ‘might declare the state of the question’, resolving issues in dispute; otherwise ‘moderation’ was not government but anarchy.42 Quoting John Calvin, Whitgift stressed 37 38 39 40 41 42

WJW, WJW, WJW, WJW, WJW, WJW,

I, 415 and repeated with a slightly different translation ibid., 458. I, 148, 150, 169. II, 240. I, 408. II, 269–71. II, 276. 35

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the need for a ‘moderator’ – that is, a ruler with authority over the rest – in every company: This thing doth nature allow, and the disposition of man require, that in every society, though all be equal in power, yet some should be as it were moderator of the rest, upon whom the other might depend. There is no court without counsel, no session of judges without a praetor or justice, no college without a governor, no society without a master.43

I want to finish by noting that Whitgift’s equation of ‘moderators’ with strong government had powerful resonances even among much more puritan-leaning members of the ecclesiastical establishment. In 1576, when the issue of puritan ‘exercises’ or ‘prophesyings’ burst onto the government’s agenda, the English bishops were asked to report their knowledge and opinion of these unofficial preaching and prayer meetings which seemed dangerously close to creating a structure of religion outside the Church of England’s control. While they disagreed in their assessments, they unanimously agreed that ‘moderators’ with genuine authority were necessary to prevent the proceedings from degenerating into anarchy. Most importantly, Archbishop Edmund Grindal, whose career would soon end as a result of his support for puritans and their exercises, argued that the moderator was to rule the exercise on the government’s behalf. If any speaker ‘glance openly or covertly against any state or any person, public or private ... the moderators shall immediately interrupt him and put him to silence, and notice to be made of the cause of the interruption to the bishop’. Moreover, ‘no man shall be suffered in the said exercises to make any invection against the laws, rites, policies, and discipline of the Church of England’; if anyone does so, ‘he is immediately to be commanded to silence, and the moderator or moderators are therein to satisfy the auditory, and the speaker shall not be admitted to speak any more till he, after public satisfaction made, shall obtain a new admission and approbation of the bishop’.44 For Grindal, nearly as much as for his iron-fisted successor Whitgift, moderators were nothing unless their moderation was rule. II So, to proceed to my case study: on or around New Year’s Day 1644, with the Westminster Assembly poised to create a presbyterian settlement for the Church of England, five leading congregationalist members of the Assembly (Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughes, and WJW, II, 425. B.L., Lansdowne MS 109, ff. 3r–v. The responses of many other bishops are in the first section of Lambeth Palace Library, MS 2003.

43 44

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William Bridge) went over the heads of their presbyterian colleagues and published An Apologeticall Narration, Humbly Submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament.45 This little book set off one of the most violent and protracted printed debates in an era replete with them, definitively splitting the godly community into presbyterian and independent factions. Over the subsequent three years, the debate would pull in such important figures as John Goodwin, John Cotton, Thomas Edwards, Marchamont Nedham, Samuel Hartlib, and many others. Many commented on the debate’s intensity: John Goodwin expressed shock at ‘how many replies, in two or three weeks, appearingly have turned the world, if not the Church, upside down’, while Samuel Hartlib wrote that ‘all the city and parliament rings’ with news of the debate.46 Such a bitter and protracted controversy naturally generated eddies and epicycles as participants responded to replies, especially after the least temperate man in England, Thomas Edwards, jumped into the fray. It is all the more interesting, then, that much of this debate was specifically concerned with the issue of moderation.47 As Ann Hughes has correctly noted, An Apologeticall Narration was ‘deliberately moderate’, a claim to lie within the golden circle of respectability by men who were ecclesiologically experimental but were otherwise

Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughes, and William Bridge, An Apologeticall Narration, Humbly Submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament (1643 or 1644). Whether the book was published in late 1643 or early 1644 is a matter of controversy. Thomason acquired his copy on 3 Jan., but Thomas Edwards expressed absolute certainty (‘I am sure of it’) that it appeared ‘in the month of December, and to my best remembrance toward the latter end of it’: Thomas Edwards, The Second Part of Gangraena, p. 62. It was certainly published after 23 Dec., when the Westminster Assembly licensed its attempted accommodation between presbyterians and independents, Certaine Considerations to Dis-Wade Men from Further Gathering of Churches (1643), acquired by Thomason on 28 Dec. 46 [John Goodwin], M.S. to A.S. with a Plea for Liberty of Conscience in a Church Way (1644), p. 2; Hartlib wrote the prefatory material to [Ezekias Woodward], A Short Letter Modestly Intreating a Friends Judgement upon Mr Edwards his Booke (1644). 47 I would like to express here my profound thanks to Dr. Hunter Powell, who is doing far more thorough work on the Apologeticall Narration and its contexts than I can hope to emulate, and whose conversations with me on these matters saved me from countless errors. When published, Powell’s work will become the standard account. Some of the many works discussing the pamphlet and its contexts include: An Apologeticall Narration: a Facsimile Edition, ed. R. S. Paul (Philadelphia, 1963); David Walker, ‘Thomas Goodwin and the Debate on Church Government’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 34 (1983), 85–99; Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616– 1649 (1977); Avihu Zakai, ‘Religious Toleration and Its Enemies: The Independent Divines and the Issue of Toleration during the English Civil War’, Albion, 21 (1989), 1–33; John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Basingstoke, 1998); Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004). 45

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paragons of order.48 The five authors were self-selected as the most conventionally learned and orthodox of the former exiles in the Netherlands, all men who had fled from successful Church of England livings during the Laudian persecution, and all men respectable enough to have already preached to the Long Parliament. They were careful not to denounce individual presbyterians as ungodly, but rather to claim brotherhood and theological unity with them, differing only in Church government. They used carefully modest language and insisted that their self-controlled and reasonable demeanour was evidence that they were sober ministers who should not be counted amongst the sectarian radicals. They explicitly supported the authority of the civil magistrate over the Church in ways calculated to make themselves appear to parliament more anodyne than the presbyterians. And finally, after describing how they came to reject both presbyterianism as quasi-popish tyranny and Brownism as tantamount to anabaptism or religious anarchy, they confidently announced that they ‘believe the truth to lie and consist in a middle way betwixt that which is falsely charged on us, Brownism, and that which is the contention of these times, the authoritative presbyteriall government’.49 The content of this middle way was not described in detail in this relatively short tract but was clear in broad strokes. While the ‘apologists’ (as they came to be called) admitted that ‘multitudes of the assemblies and parochial congregation in England’ were truly godly, and they sought to remain in communion with that godly remnant, they refused communion with any national Church with promiscuous membership, including both English presbyterians and the ‘Calvinian Reformed Churches’ which still forced the godly to worship with the reprobate.50 Moreover, they elaborately rebutted the charge that ‘independency’ – a term of abuse recently coined by Thomas Edwards – meant independence either from the general opinion of the godly or from civil authority. The so-called independent congregations were not free from the censure of other Christians, but their jurisdiction was absolute in religious matters and they could choose whether to accept that censure; independency was about voluntary Church government, not the absence of Church government. Likewise, the ‘apologists’ argued that unlike the Brownists and anabaptists they fully accepted the authority of civil government and magistracy; they merely asserted their Christian liberty to gather together in churches rather than having churches imposed upon them by the civil state.51 Throughout all this, they were careful not Hughes, Gangraena, pp. 6, 32–54. See similar comments on the deliberate moderation of An Apologeticall Narration in John Coffey, ‘The Toleration Controversy during the English Revolution’, in Religion in Revolutionary England, ed. Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (Manchester, 2006), p. 49. 49 Goodwin et. al., Apologeticall Narration, p. 24. 50 Ibid., pp. 6–7, 22. 51 Ibid., pp. 17–24. 48

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to denounce presbyterianism as unfit for a national Church; they merely argued that the godly could not be constrained within any national Church, hence the ‘middle way’ required the godly to be exempted from whatever form of national Church was established by law. In June 1644, this independent claim to the moderate middle way was strongly reinforced when two of the apologists, Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, wrote a long foreword to a manifesto of congregationalism by the New England minister John Cotton, called The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644). In their foreword, Goodwin and Nye announced We are yet neither afraid nor ashamed to make profession (in the midst of all the high waves on both sides dashing on us) that the substance of this brief extract from the author’s larger discourse is that very middle way (which in our Apology we did in the general intimate and intend) between that which is called Brownism and the Presbyteriall government as it is practiced.52

They particularly stressed moderation in its constitutional sense of balancing democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy in a mixed ecclesiastical polity. ‘In those former dark times’ of popery and episcopacy, they wrote, the clergy alone maintained tyrannical and unbounded power in the Church. Likewise under presbyterianism, that new form of tyranny, the unscriptural synods and assemblies of the national Church, ‘swallow up not only the interests of the people, but even the votes of the Elders’. On the other side, however, Brownism pushed the authority of the people too far: It was the unhappiness of those, who first in these latter times revived this plea of the people’s right, to err on the other extreme … by laying the plea and claim on their behalf unto the whole power; and that the elders set over them did but exercise that power for them, which was properly theirs, and which Christ had (as they contended) radically and originally estated in the people only.

The independent middle way, then, was to balance the power of the people and the elders in each congregation, and to disallow any claims of synods or national assemblies to tyrannical jurisdiction over them. Individual congregations might choose to associate with other congregations, but ‘each single congregation … is endowed with a charter to be a body politic of Christ’.53 In the body of the text, John Cotton laid out parallel arguments for independent moderation. Just as in the establishment of a commonwealth there is nothing more important than ‘balancing of the liberties or privileges of the people (which in a true sense, may be called a power) and the authority of the magistrate’, so the safety of the ‘Church estate’ depends upon ‘the right and due settling and ordering of the holy power of the privileges and liber52 53

John Cotton, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644), To the Reader, sig. A4r. Ibid., To the Reader, sigs A2r–A4r. 39

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ties of the brethren, and the ministerial authority of the elders’. According to Cotton, the Bible ‘alloweth no Church authority (or rule properly so called) to the brethren, but reserveth that wholly to the elders; and yet preventeth the tyranny and oligarchy, and exorbitancy of the elders, by the large and firm establishment of the liberties of the brethren, which ariseth to a power in them’. These liberties of the whole congregation included ‘liberty to choose their officers’, veto power over admittance to the congregation upon ‘just exception’, and co-active power with the elders in judging excommunications.54 Cotton’s distinction between power and rule, which elaborated a distinction made by congregationalists like Henry Jacob and Henry Ainsworth in the 1610s, nearly squared the circle of self-moderation.55 Cotton also followed the apologists in stressing moderation through his rejection of the category of ‘independency’, which suggested immoderation or the refusal to be ruled; Cotton argued that so-called independent congregations were not independent of Christ, scripture, civil authority, or the admonition of other Christians, they were merely capable of their own exercise of ecclesiastical authority.56 The point, then, is that for the apologists, just as much as for John Whitgift or Thomas Cartwright, moderation was a claim for government, only now, much more elaborately than for Cartwright in the 1570s, it was a claim for self-government. The internal moderation of the godly, their sober demeanour and respectability, their abiding concern for due order and balance, all authorized them to gather churches without external control. And since ‘self-government’ is an essentially republican concept, it should be no surprise that generations of historians saw the independents as progenitors of English liberty. But at the same time, the liberty they pursued was attenuated and exclusive, available only to sober and respectable men and predicated upon their ability to foster order and obedience. If half of its middle way opposed presbyterian tyranny, the other half opposed the anarchy of anabaptists who would give a genuine share of government to the people. Importantly, it was this latter sense of moderation as restraint that made the Apologeticall Narration seem genuinely moderate to men like the presbyterian censor Charles Herle, who wrote that it was ‘so full of peaceableness, modesty, and candor’ that however much he himself disagreed with its claims, it was fit for the press as a ‘vindication of the Protestant party in general, from the aspersions of incommunicableness within itself, and incompatibleness with magistracy’.57 Yet at the same time, the moderation of the Apologeticall Narration was immediately attacked by other presbyterians as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a Trojan horse to sneak into England from Amsterdam all manner of heresy 54 55 56 57

Ibid., pp. 12–14. On these antecedents, see Shagan, The Rule of Moderation, p. 176. Cotton, Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven, pp. 49–54. Goodwin et. al., Apologeticall Narration, imprimatur before title page. 40

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and democracy. These bitter presbyterian replies not only denounced the apologists, they also outlined their own, alternative versions of the moderate middle way. Given that the Apologeticall Narration was widely seen as an attack on the Scots, it is no surprise that the earliest replies were written by covenanters. Late in January 1644, the first printed reply came from the Scottish commissioners at the Westminster Assembly, who attacked the apologists precisely on the grounds of immoderation, arguing instead that presbyterianism was moderate Church government ‘in the middle betwixt episcopacy on the one hand and popular confusion on the other’.58 The final third of the tract, in particular, offered an extended argument for the presbyterian via media. According to the commissioners, the ‘two extremes’ were ‘popish and prelatical tyranny, and Brownistical and popular anarchy’, two positions which ‘have their own degrees of tyranny or anarchy in themselves, which is the cause of their subdivisions, fractions, and differences amongst themselves’. In other words, prelacy might not be quite so tyrannical as popery, and independency might not be quite so anarchic as anabaptism, but together they established a spectrum with presbyterianism at the Aristotelian pivot.59 What made presbyterianism so moderate was its national government combined with its discipline. Discipline was indispensable to preserve the Church’s unity, a discipline used ‘with such sharpness and severity, and yet with such caution and moderation, as it hath been very powerful and effectual’. This was an almost perfect double meaning of moderation, since it implied both a moderation of the rigour of the law and a moderation of the people upon whom the law was enforced, and indeed what the authors explicitly meant by this ‘moderation’ was the broad use of excommunication for ‘obstinacy and contempt of ecclesiastical authority’ rather than merely crimes against natural law, as the tolerationists wanted.60 Likewise, ‘common national government’ was indispensable ‘to preserve all the churches in unity and peace’. Without such a common government, people who were excommunicated could simply choose another Church, or else competing factions in churches might excommunicate one another, leading to schism unless there was some superior body to adjudicate. Without such a superior body, discipline became essentially voluntary, and no system based upon ‘persuasion on the one part, and free will on the other, can be supposed to be … efficacious’. Voluntary government was no government, and, just as in civil matters, ‘it is one thing to have ado with our neighbor who hath no

[Alexander Henderson?], Reformation of Church-Government in Scotland, Cleered from Some Mistakes and Prejudices (1644), p. 14. Thomason acquired the tract on 24 Jan. and identified the Scottish commissioners as ‘the Lord Maitland, Mr. Henderson, Mr. Hitherford, Mr. Gilaspey, Mr. Bayly’. 59 Reformation of Church-Government in Scotland, p. 17. 60 Ibid., pp. 20–1. 58

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more authority over us than we have over him; and another thing to have to do with civil power which hath authority over both’.61 This strong government, however, was not tyrannical because it was representative government. The presbyterians agreed with the independents that no congregation had authority over any other, but the structure of synods and assemblies they proposed was ‘aggregative of the officers of many congregations over the particular members of their corporation, even as … one member of parliament, one counselor, or, to go lower, one member of a company, is not subject to another, but everyone to the whole college’. While prelacy had been tyranny because ‘the courts of prelates are altogether foreign and extrinsical to the congregations over which they rule … the power of the presbyteries is intrinsical and natural, they being constitute of the pastors and elders of the particular congregations over which they are set’. This, they wrote, was ‘a most mild and free form of Church government’, in contrast to the schismatic anarchy of the independents.62 A month later the fray was joined by Adam Steuart, the Scottish philosophy professor turned covenanter who acted in 1644 as unofficial publicist to the Scots commissioners in London. Steuart’s Some Observations and Annotations upon the Apologeticall Narration (1644) concurred with his friends the commissioners that ‘Presbyterian government’ was the real ‘middle betwixt popish tyranny and Independent anarchy’.63 He also agreed that parity among churches was anarchy rather than government, since voluntary government is no government at all: Your way cannot so well awe churches, and keep them in their duties … A particular church may think herself no way bound to obey one, for obedience is a virtue in inferiors towards superiors, but if all churches be equal, there can neither be superiors nor inferiors, and consequently no obedience or disobedience.64

More interesting for our purposes were two claims, one dangerous and one telling. The dangerous claim was that the apologists had been misguided to appeal to parliament for reform of Church government rather than keeping their opinions within the Westminster Assembly, since civil magistrates enjoy ‘no directive power in matters of religion’.65 Independents would soon have a field day exploiting this claim, which played directly into the apologists’ attempts to make themselves look like paragons of Erastian law and order against clerical tyranny. The telling claim was a wonderful simile Ibid., pp. 18–24. Ibid., pp. 24–6. 63 [Adam Steuart], Some Observations and Annotations upon the Apologeticall Narration (1644), p. 61. 64 Ibid., p. 45. 65 Ibid., p. 6. 61 62

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likening oxymoronic voluntary government to that most potent symbol of immoderation, the wayward wife: This [Independent] government is a power wherein the party is judged if he will, and so the judgment of the judges suspended upon the judgment of the party judged, which is most ridiculous … a judgment indeed not very unlike to that which is related of a merry man, who said he had the best and most obedient wife in the whole world, because (saith he) she willeth nothing but what I will. And as all men wondered at it (knowing her to be the most disobedient) yea (saith he) but I must first will what she willeth, else she willeth nothing that I will.66

This paper battle between the Scottish commissioners and independents reflected bitter arguments over moderation on the floor of the Westminster Assembly itself. For instance, on 21 March there was a debate over whether congregations might choose their own ministers or whether presbyteries should choose ministers for them. Most presbyterians argued that presbyteries should choose ministers but congregations could be allowed a veto so long as they accepted presybyterial power, while Thomas Goodwin and the independents demanded that the choice of ministers should come from the congregations directly. In the midst of this discussion George Gillespie, one of the Scottish commissioners, asserted forcefully that his position was the via media and the independent position tantamount to extremist populism: ‘Then Mr. Gillespie moved that this proposition might be debated: “He that is to be ordained, be not obtruded against the congregation; for the prelates are for obtrusion, the separation for a popular voting: ergo let us go in a medium.”’ This claim for presbyterian moderation infuriated the independents, who instead ‘moved to have election taken into consideration’. Hours of bitter debate ensued and the issue went unresolved; the next morning language was adopted that omitted the whole question. When Stephen Marshall then ‘moved that we might say something more to this purpose about the power and choice of the people’, he was blocked by parliamentary procedure.67 It was on the basis of this and similar attempts by Marshall to accommodate independents that in a letter of 16 September the Scottish commissioner Robert Baillie bitterly mocked his false moderation: ‘Marshall miskens us altogether; he is for a middle way of his own, and draws a faction in the synod to give ordination and excommunication to congregations, albeit dependently, in case of maladministration. God help us!’68 Another Scottish reply to the apologists was An Anatomy of Independency, Or a Briefe Commentary, and Moderate Discourse upon the Apologeticall NarraIbid., p. 39. The Whole Works of the Rev. John Lightfoot, Master of Catharine Hall, Cambridge, ed. John Rogers Pitman (13 vols, 1822–5), XIII, 230–3. 68 The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh, 3 vols, 1841–2), II, 230–1. 66 67

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tion (1644), attributed to Alexander Forbes, acquired by George Thomason on 14 June (the same day he acquired Cotton’s Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven). Forbes’s title already pointed to its competition for the crown of virtuous mediocrity. Forbes was clearly terrified of the success of the Apologeticall Narration, denouncing it as a work intended to ‘dazzle a popular eye by specious and rhetorical flourishes’, and he devoted most of his tract to unmasking its alleged middle way as nothing more than Brownism in disguise.69 He first explained that the apologists hid their real radicalism by understating their differences with the presbyterians, because they claimed that the ‘truth of Church discipline lieth in a middle way betwixt Brownism and Presbyteriall government … without telling us wherein this middle way doth consist’.70 Second, Forbes argued that ‘the peace of this parliamentary government hath been somewhat disturbed by their mould’, because it is in reality ‘the same with that of the Brownists, to wit, popular government (whatever middle way they tell us of)’.71 To the extent that independency was a middle way, Forbes argued cleverly that it was ‘medium abnegationis in respect of Presbyterial, and medium participationis in respect of Brownistical government’ – in other words that it rejected presbyterianism while incorporating Brownism, making it really Brownism in disguise rather than a middle way at all.72 In general, independency was anarchy in the Church rather than a form of government: the independents were schismatic because they had separated ‘without seeking or obtaining leave of the state’; they were beset with ‘rents and schisms, strife and debate’ within their own ranks; their alleged liberty for the common people meant that officers were ‘enslaved to their corrupt appetites and pleasures’. Most importantly, their claim to have ‘voluntary’ Church government rather than no Church government was a sham because government was precisely a bridle that sinful human beings needed to tame their fallen wills: It is hard for a mixed multitude to keep within bounds when they have the reins of government in their own hands, and have no bound to restrain them but that inward bound of conscience. We have found by experience among them that even when conscience urgeth a thing should be done, yet corruption will keep it back unless an outward authority put in withall.73

Forbes’s proposed alternative, then, was a middle way between the anarchic absence of a national Church and the tyrannical national Church ‘as epis[Alexander Forbes], An Anatomy of Independency, Or, a Brief Commentary, and Moderate Discourse upon the Apologeticall Narration of Mr Thomas Goodwin, and Mr Philip Nye, &c. (1644), p. 7. 70 Ibid., p. 3. 71 Ibid., p. 18. 72 Ibid., p. 27. 73 Ibid., pp. 4, 5, 6, and 49. 69

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copal men absurdly understand it’: a national Church ‘even as we rightly understand it to be meant of all the particular congregations making one entire body, which is represented in a national synod’.74 Within a month of Forbes’s publication, Thomas Edwards published the first full-length English reply to the apologists, his Antapologia: Or, a Full Answer to the Apologeticall Narration (1644). The appearance of Antapologia – a 307-page response to a thirty-one page tract, filled with ad hominem attacks upon men he insisted he loved as brothers – cemented Edwards’s reputation as the least temperate man in England. But nonetheless the work was filled with claims to moderation: he hoped his answer to the apologists would be ‘accounted candid, moderate, my pen dipped in oil and not in vinegar’, and he only attacked the morals and reputations of the apologists because their own claims for the legitimacy of their positions were predicated upon false claims of personal godliness and respectability.75 Moreover, like his later Gangraena, the whole work was in some sense predicated upon the idea that presbyterianism is the true middle way between episcopal tyranny and independent anarchy. Antapologia was based upon the necessity of authority within the Church and the sinfulness of violating or separating from that authority. As such, the apologists’ claim to have arrived at a congregationalist position through scripture and the holy spirit, without outward bias or worldly temptation, was for Edwards not only prideful but the essence of antinomian excess, bursting the due bounds of order. Such claims ‘more suit the conditions of angels, and the spirits of just men made perfect, than men on earth subject to like passions as other men ... Tis such a piece of self-flattery and pride that hardly the pope’s parasites have in the sense of these words exceeded.’76 For Edwards, then, all the differences between semi-separatists, separatists, congregationalists, and anabaptists were irrelevant, since all these positions shared a common disregard for the external authority of synods that moderated the authority of individual congregations and prevented them from flying apart into anarchy. So, for instance, he understood that the apologists wanted to distinguish themselves from the Brownists by giving ‘authority to the officers, and not to the people only’; yet, Edwards wrote, the arch-separatist Francis Johnson had said the same thing thirty years before ‘and yet was guilty of Brownism for all that’. The real extremes were episcopacy and independence, tyranny and anarchy, ‘mutually strengthening each other against Presbyterian government’. Within proper presbyterian government, moreover, Edwards argued that the precise nature of ‘subordinations’ within the Church was indifferent and could change with circumIbid., p. 14. Thomas Edwards, Antapologia: or, a Full Answer to the Apologeticall Narration of Mr Goodwin, Mr Nye, Mr Sympson, Mr Burroughs, Mr Bridge, Members of the Assembly of Divines (1644), sigs A3r–A4r. 76 Ibid., pp. 25–6. 74 75

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stances; there could be various levels of subordination, and various extents of subordination, depending upon the size of the nation and its form of civil polity. What was required ‘according to general rules of the Word’ as well as the ‘common laws of nature’ and human ‘prudence’ was merely the fact of subordination for all churches.77 A somewhat later reply to the apologists, and to John Cotton as well, was Daniel Cawdrey’s Vindiciae Clavium (1645), which announced on the title page its intention to prove ‘the middle way (so called) of Independents, to be the Extreme, or By-way of the Brownists’.78 Cawdrey accepted the Aristotelian argument for a middle way between the ‘double extreme’ of episcopal tyranny on one side and Brownist popularity on the other, but he argued that the independents had missed it.79 The problem was that the independents saw the power of the keys lying originally in the whole congregation, who merely delegated that power to elders; this was to give the people not a balancing power against the elders but an effective veto over them. For Cawdrey, presbyterian government was a middle way because it gives the power of Church government neither to the clergy alone, as the prelacy, nor to the people alone or chiefly, as the Brownists do, but to both. For the presbyteries (classical as well as congregational) consist of pastors and ruling elders who are the representatives of the people, chosen by consent.

By contrast, giving the people their own power to elect, ordain, and censure is simply to put the whole government into their hands, ‘democratical’ like the Brownist ‘extreme’, leading quickly to anarchy: ‘Nor can this balancing power prevent anarchy (whatever it do tyranny) for certainly if the people’s consent and concurrence be necessary to every Church act, it’s an easy thing for them to bring in anarchy, being always the greater number, and so to swallow up the votes of the elders, as Brownists do.’80 As Cawdrey put it in a rhetorical question, ‘Do you mean (as you should if you speak congruously) that the Church receives all power first, then distributes it among the officers respectively? Then (say I) your middle way falls out to be the extreme of the Brownists, who make the people the first subject of all power.’81 At several points this argument was explicitly gendered: if authority in the Church lay jointly in the congregation, then this included women, which was ‘an extreme beyond the Brownists, even downright Anabaptistical’.82 The pres-

Ibid., pp. 206–9. [Daniel Cawdrey], Vindiciae Clavium: Or, a Vindication of the Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven, into the Hands of the Right Owners (1645). 79 Ibid., Epistle to the reader, sigs **1v–A3r. 80 Vicars epistle, sigs **4v–A3r. 81 Cawdrey, Vindiciae Clavium, pp. 50 and 67. 82 Ibid., p. 10. See also pp. 5–7, 72–3. 77 78

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byterian solution, then, was a middle way that used the elders and their synods to balance the powers of the clergy and the people: As in our state, the balancing of the privileges of the people, and the authority of the magistrate supreme, lies in the authority of the parliament where there are knights and burgesses representing the people; so I think it is in the Church, the balancing of the brethren’s privileges, and the ministers’ authority, seems to lie in the ruling elders, who are the representatives of the people. But take away this ballast or poise of the government and it will be either absolutely monarchical, and so easily tyrannical, or else democratical, and so liable to anarchy and confusion; as experience shows us, in the papal and episcopal tyranny, and the separatists’ anarchy, the two extremes before observed.83

These and other presbyterian replies to the Apologeticall Narration of course produced rejoinders from the independents, filled with counter-claims that the presbyterians were the truly immoderate participants in the debate, led by passion rather than reason, their fiery affections rendering them unable to deal peaceably with their brethren.84 This assertion was made considerably more convincing by Thomas Edwards’s participation in the debate, and indeed many of the later tracts lost the thread of the Apologeticall Narration altogether and constituted instead a satellite debate about Edwards and his methods. Here the most famous and amusing example is John Milton’s c.1646 poem ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament’, which mocked the tyrannical pretensions of ‘meer A.S. [Adam Steuart] and Rotherford … shallow Edwards and Scotch what d’ ye call.’85 For our purposes, however, it is most interesting that the existence of this long conflict over moderation between the presbyterians and independents became the vehicle by which other, more radical voices could enter the intense public sphere of London in the 1640s and plausibly assert their own claims to government. Perhaps the most interesting case involved the baptists. In the midst of this swirling controversy between presbyterians and independents, London’s particular baptists met together to establish their own claims to respectability and to distinguish themselves from radical antinomianism. The result was published in October 1644 as The Confession of Faith, of Those Churches which are Commonly (Though Falsely) Called Anabaptists (1644), signed by Ibid., p. 28. See, e.g., Marchamont Nedham, Independencie No Schisme (1646); John Goodwin, M.S. to A.S. with a Plea for Liberty of Conscience (1644); John Goodwin, Anapologesiastes Antapologias (1646); A Coole Conference between the Scottish Commissioners Cleered Reformation and the Holland Ministers Apologeticall Narration (n.p., 1644); [Ezekias Woodward], A Short Letter Modestly Intreating a Friends Judgement upon Mr Edwards his Booke (1644). 85 Accessed online at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/conscience/ index.shtml, 29 Mar. 2012. I owe this reference to Esther Yu. 83 84

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fifteen particular baptist leaders. This confession presented the baptists as epitomizing the position identified by the independents as a moderate middle way: an ascending theory of power in which the Church is ‘a company of visible saints called and separated from the world ... joined to the Lord and each other by mutual agreement’, and ‘being thus joined, every Church has power given to them from Christ for their better well-being to choose to themselves meet persons into the office of pastors, teachers, elders, deacons, being qualified according to the Word … and that none other have power to impose them’.86 Like the apologists, they stressed that this did not make individual congregations ‘independent’ in an anarchic sense: ‘They [are] all to walk by one and the same rule, and by all means convenient to have the counsel and help one of another’, and ‘none ought to separate for faults and corruptions’ from properly constituted churches except in cases of utmost obstinacy where the congregation will not reform itself.87 Like the apologists, they stressed that the middle way between anarchy and tyranny was constituted through a balancing or reciprocating relationship between the congregation and its officers: just as Christ ‘placeth some special men over the Church who by their office are to govern, oversee, visit, and watch, so likewise for the better keeping thereof in all places by the members he hath given authority and laid a duty upon all to watch over one another’, and in this sense of balance, the whole congregation, rather than merely the officers, held the power of the keys.88 All of this was done with the same studious moderation as the Apologeticall Narration itself, presenting the authors as paragons of respectability who disdained Antinomianism, political radicalism, and moral licentiousness. But, of course, there was more going on. By exactly the same logic that the independents insisted that the Church should be a gathered community of saints capable of exercising collective discipline, the baptists argued that only such visible saints should be baptized into the Church, and that the disciplinary power given to the whole Church included not only the power to expel but the power to ‘receive in’ members.89 This was described in four brief heads out of fifty-

The Confession of Faith, of Those Churches which are Commonly (Though Falsely) Called Anabaptists (1644), sigs C1r–v. Much of the Confession was actually based upon, and even copied from, an unpublished separatist confession of 1596: Mark Bell, Apocalypse How? Baptist Movements During the English Revolution (Macon, Georgia, 2000), p. 74; B. R. White, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century (1983), pp. 62–65. White very usefully describes the additions and omissions between 1596 and 1644. 87 Confession of Faith, of Those Churches which are Commonly (Though Falsely) Called Anabaptists, sigs C2v–C3r. 88 Ibid., sigs C2r–v. 89 Ibid., sigs C1v–C2r. There was also some subtle political radicalism in the tract which suggested an ascending theory of power in civil as well as ecclesiastical government (sig. C3r), and there were one or two moments when the anti-legalism of the tract hinted at antinomianism before pulling back to more respectable positions. This may reflect the 86

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two, presented as minor corollaries to an otherwise scrupulously orthodox account of puritan regeneration and its meanings for the visible Church. There is considerable evidence that the authors of the particular baptist Confession had the Apologeticall Narration controversy in mind when they wrote it. B. R. White has suggested, for instance, that the emphasis on ‘associations’ between baptist churches in the 1644 Confession was indebted to John Cotton’s Keys to the Kingdom of Heaven and the introduction to it by Goodwin and Nye.90 More importantly, a controversy over infant baptism in early 1644 directly implicated many of the principals. The issue arose when Hanserd Knollys, a member of the so-called Jessey congregation in London, developed pangs of conscience about having his newborn child baptized. In the controversy that followed William Kiffin, a wealthy and well-connected member of the Jessey congregation who would become first signatory to the baptist Confession of Faith, offered to take Knollys and his allies into schism, forming their own congregation. In response to the crisis, a conference was convened in May 1644 to which the leaders of London Independency were invited as moderators. Who were these independent leaders? They included four of the five authors of the recently published Apologeticall Narration: Goodwin, Nye, Burroughes, and Simpson. At the meeting, the apologists decided that Kiffin and his baptist associates were motivated by ‘tender conscience and holiness’ rather than obstinacy and hence, rather remarkably, gave them their blessing.91 This benefit of the doubt was at least partially motivated by the fact that, four years earlier, Kiffin had written the introductory epistle to Goodwin’s important congregationalist tract Glimpse of Syons Glory (1641). It is clear, then, that Kiffin and his particular baptist allies were close associates of the apologists and they saw their movement as a natural successor to independency. Then on 15 November, a month after the baptist Confession was published, William Kiffin published an astonishing broadside letter addressed ‘To Mr. Thomas Edwards’ in which he challenged Edwards to a public debate and wrote that he hoped Edwards would act in the matter ‘with moderation as becometh Christians’.92 Edwards, not surprisingly, did not rise to the bait. But the following summer Kiffin published yet another tract, A Brief Remonstrance (1645), this time directed against the presbyterians Robert Poole and Josiah Ricraft, the latter of whom was yet another disputant in the Apologeticall Narration controversy. Here again Kiffin studiously agreed with the independents on every point of Church government except the issue of entrance into the Church through baptism, which he argued should influence of Paul Hobson as one of the signatories, whose sermon on Proverbs 28:1 in Practicall Divinity (1646) was explicitly Antinomian and perfectionist. 90 White, English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century, pp. 65–6. 91 ‘Debate on Infant Baptism’, Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society, 1 (1910), 237–45; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, pp. 55–6. 92 William Kiffin, ‘To Mr. Thomas Edwards’. 49

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be included in congregational discipline just like excommunication. The centrepiece of this tract was an extraordinary claim for the moderation of adult believers’ baptism, using the paradigmatic imagery of moderate diet: And as it is with a natural body which is greedy to receive in all, yet wants power to void the excrements, [so] must needs become a rotten, filthy, and unclean body, even so it is with all false spiritual states, who by power and authority given to them by the civil magistrate, are so hasty to command all, both rich and poor subject to their worship, whether their conscience be brought over to see it a truth or no … and having so received them into the common gorge of their Church, have not power to digest them into better conversation, nor to cast them out as dirt and dung though incorrigible, this congregation or society must needs become rotten.93

Here, just as discipline is a mechanism for defecating out the excrement from Christ’s Church, so adult believers’ baptism represents the moderation of intake, limiting membership rather than allowing the greedy, worldly Church to engorge itself on unreformed members it cannot fully digest. In the context of the Aplogeticall Narration, then, not only the independents and the presbyterians but the baptists, too, identified themselves as legitimate claimants to ecclesiastical authority, in and through their alternative arguments for moderation. III To conclude, I want to stress how in all of these complex and contradictory arguments about the Church, what is at stake is government: the participants presented themselves as agents of moderation, restraining and restrained, both embodying and producing the virtuous and godly middle way. There was a reciprocal and transitive relationship between the moderation of the claimant and the moderation of the claim, between the profession of a middle way in the conflicts of the period and the authority to promulgate that middle way as public policy. In this sense, I want to argue, we can see in the Apologeticall Narration controversy the English revolution (or part of it, anyway) in miniature. Just as in the larger Revolution, there were a series of alternative and incommensurate proposals, some more mainstream than others. Just as in the larger Revolution, all of these proposals, no matter how outlandish to most contemporaries, self-identified as moderate. But crucially, that moderation was not simply a result of their alleged equanimity and reasonableness. Their mediocrity principally lay in their constitution of good government, William Kiffin, A Brief Remonstrance or the Reasons and Grounds of those People Commonly Called Anabaptists (1645), p. 9.

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offering a middle way that prevented tyranny while restraining anarchy, literally moderating the passions and affections of the multitude which the Revolution had dangerously unleashed. In this sense, the fact that in the midst of the Apologeticall Narration controversy presbyterians, independents, and even baptists all claimed the mantle of moderation should not be interpreted as meaning that the ideal of moderation lacked coherence or specificity or that contemporaries simply lied when they claimed it for apparently radical, violent, or exclusionary ends. Likewise, it also should not be interpreted as meaning that presbyterians, independents, or baptists were reluctant participants in revolution who genuinely desired peace and stability over conflict. Rather, we should interpret the battle for moderation in the Apologeticall Narration controversy as evidence of a fundamental conflict over the nature of governance, a conflict which could not yet be expressed in the modern idiom of transformative progress. If the English Civil War was, in John Morrill’s famous words, ‘the last of the wars of religion’, this chapter has argued that the moderation of English religion did not ameliorate that conflict but was paradoxically what allowed it to become, simultaneously, the first European revolution.94

John Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 34 (1984), 155–78.

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3

The Parish and the Poor in the English Revolution* Tim Wales

In October 1646, in the context of increasingly bitter political and religious conflicts within Norwich, the anonymous author of Vox Norwici defended the presbyterian ministers of the city against Independent claims that they had been neglecting their responsibilities towards the poor: our whole City knowes that our Ministers have ever, but especially of late laid downe the Doctrine of Charity, and Almes, almost in all their Sermons, and zealously pressed the care of the poore, even till they have reaped much ill will of divers; And God hath made their Ministry so successefull, as that the magistrates have doubled their reliefe by rates; so as the poore have hardly been ever so well provided for as now they be.1

The passage, associating religious and political legitimacy with the proper exercise of charity, opens up a number of important themes in understanding poor relief during the English revolution. Most obviously, given its intent, it highlighted the role of ministers in exhorting their congregations, and rested their authority in part on their alliance with the magistracy, Sword and Word. It presented a puritanism actively pursuing policies to relieve the poor. Moreover, it took it as given that charitable obligations could be exercised through the formal mechanisms of parish relief: implicit is the congruence between the duties of charity and local taxation. In the wake of the first of what would be five bad harvests in a row, it specified a precise policy, doubling the poor rate, with precedents. And indeed, over the course of the next few years levels of relief did rise dramatically and often doubled, both This article originates in research into village government (later modified to a study of parish relief and the poor) in seventeenth-century Norfolk. This was begun so long ago that it was the first postgraduate research project supervised by John Morrill, so it is entirely appropriate (if incredibly belated) that it should appear in this volume. 1 Vox Norwici (1646), pp. 13–14. For the context of the small pamphlet war, see Andrew Hopper, ‘The Civil Wars’, in Norwich since 1550, ed. Carol Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (Hambledon, 2004), pp. 106–13. *

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in Norwich and in the villages and small towns of Norfolk. I shall argue that this period forms a distinctive phase in the development of poor relief, involving significant changes in parochial practice: in levels of rates raised, of numbers relieved, of individual payments made. Not all of this survived significantly beyond 1660, but much did. This paper follows on from the work of A. L. Beier and Ann Hughes on Warwickshire and of John Morrill on Cheshire.2 Together, these works presented counties where the post-war and interregnum years saw benches enforcing the poor law with a new vigour. In both counties the demands of reconstruction, the massive impact of the prolonged economic crisis of the late 1640s, and the social activism of the magistracy drove forward an intensification and reinvigoration of the relief system. That activism was in part a consequence of a more bureaucratic and interventionist style of governance by regimes less secure in their social and political authority than their pre-war predecessors. But it was also evidently the consequence of a puritan social activism of the type that had underpinned welfare schemes in Salisbury and Dorchester before the war.3 Much of this argument still seems convincing and has received no serious challenge as a narrative.4 This paper, drawing largely on the experience of the county of Norfolk, will provide evidence that is, at the least, consistent with the older studies. Norfolk experienced a very different war from Cheshire and Warwickshire, well away from the fighting and plundering. Its quarter sessions sat through the war uninterrupted; its parish relief continued to be collected without the disruption evident in parts of those counties. The pamphlet war of 1646 formed part of a larger set of political and religious discontents protesting against the burden of taxation and religious policies. In Norfolk there were discontinuities in the composition of the bench: at least thirty-eight new J.P.s were appointed between 1646 and 1649. The magistracy which ruled Norfolk from then till the Restoration had its share of new men from outside the traditional ruling groups – soldiers, townsmen, lesser gentry.5 With different inflections, Norfolk faced the same crises of A. L. Beier, ‘Poor Relief in Warwickshire, 1630–1660’, Past and Present, 35 (1966), 77–100; Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 277–8, 280–1, 284; J. S. Morrill, Cheshire, 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974), pp. 92–4, 233–53. G. C. F. Forster, ‘County Government in Yorkshire during the Interregnum’, Northern History, 12 (1976), 90–2, presents a similar picture. 3 Paul Slack, ‘Poverty and Politics in Salisbury, 1597–1666’, in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History, ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack (1972), pp. 164–203; David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992), pp. 61–129, 217–26; Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 29–52. 4 The argument works well in county studies, but less well for towns. Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, pp. 50–1. 5 Robert Ashton, The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution, 1603–1649 2

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reconstruction and political and social legitimacy. And in Norfolk the dearth of the late 1640s was compounded by the dependence of much of Norwich’s hinterland on the textile industry. Vox Norwici suggests ways in which political and religious concerns could be converted into practical changes in poor relief. This paper will approach poor relief in these years from different angles. In part this follows from the limitations of the evidence available: the county records which are so important to these earlier accounts are patchier for Norfolk. It is easier to point to the consistency of the Norfolk experience with other counties than actually to demonstrate the significance of magisterial activity and godly activism. The approaches here reflect a changing historiography which looks more to the agency of those outside the ranks of the county gentry and to the experience of social and religious change in the parish. They also reflect the different approaches and questions that arise once one relies more heavily on overseers’ accounts. Overseers’ accounts yield up much of their meaning only when viewed through time and comparatively, as serial records of income and expenditure from year to year surviving for types of settlement. The evidence for significant changes in poor relief in this period in Norfolk comes from the relatively (if not wholly) consistent patterns of payments to be found across very different parish economies. The impact of the Revolution remains an important question, albeit one where the evidence in Norfolk is often frustratingly inconclusive. The nature of the sources used here, however, pushes us to the consideration of other questions: of local contexts and of long-term cultural and administrative changes. The choices made in the years after 1646 can only be understood in the context of existing relief practices and assumptions, in which parish relief was a distinctive form of charity at one end of a spectrum of individual and collective forms of neighbourly aid. By the mid-1640s formal parish relief was both firmly established and could still be taken as a fit instrument of collective charity. It will be argued that the years after 1646 saw these practices and perceptions intensified and reshaped, a development in which activism evidently played its part alongside religious exhortation and the needs and social stresses exposed by high taxation and a prolonged period of dearth. The consequences were a raising of the levels of rates and a redrawing of the boundaries of levels of need to be met through those rates. I Such a redrawing of boundaries had occurred before in Norfolk with the rapid implementation of the poor laws of 1598 and 1601, when the small(1978), p. 263; Norfolk Quarter Sessions Order Book, 1650–1657, ed. D. E. Howell James (Norfolk Record Soc., 26, 1955), pp. 4–5. 55

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scale and more fragmented forms of parish relief based on the mid-Tudor statutes of 1552 and 1563 were displaced by something far more systematic.6 Then, as fifty years later, rises in relief levels came in times of dearth and economic dislocation as a prolonged crisis exposed the deficiencies of a system dependent or partially dependent on informal aid, after decades of population increase and declining living standards. And, again as fifty years later, change came in the shadow of war and its costs. It is worth briefly discussing that earlier break to illuminate the later. One achievement of Marjorie McIntosh’s recent work on late-medieval and Tudor poor relief has been to demonstrate the significance of the reign of Edward VI for the development of parish relief, and that parish relief under the mid-Tudor legislation was far more widespread than has previously been recognized.7 Yet, looking back from the seventeenth century, what seems most striking in rural and small-town Norfolk is the small-scale nature of relief, the ambiguous nature of much of the evidence for actual practice, and the dramatic changes which followed after 1598. In the one parish for which we do have collectors’ accounts – the market town of North Walsham – what is striking is how limited the relief provided by the parish was before 1598. Between 1585–6 and 1609–10 the boundary between those relieved from the rates and (by implication) the many who were not relieved or were relieved by other means was transformed. The annual bill more than trebled; the number of regular pensioners more than doubled from ten to twenty-four; and the average weekly pension rose by 40 per cent from 3.4d to 5.7d.8 The depth of local taxation had increased and the thresholds of need recognized through the poor rate broadened: these were the same groups of life-cycle needy in both periods, but the net was cast narrower before 1598. The Acts of 1598 and 1601 were adopted rapidly

What follows is an abbreviated account of the changes set in place by the 1598 and 1601 poor laws to provide the context for mid-century developments. The argument will be developed and presented more fully elsewhere. At present by some way the best account of poor relief before 1642 comes from the study of a very different county, Jonathan Healey, ‘The Development of Poor Relief in Lancashire, c. 1598–1680’, H.J., 53 (2010), 551–72. 7 Marjorie K. McIntosh, Poor Relief in England, 1350–1600 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 127–38, 254, CUP Online Appendix 10, www.cambridge.org/mcintosh/appendices under the ‘Resources’ tab. Different emphases on the medieval precedents are presented in McIntosh, Poor Relief, pp. 95–112, emphasizing their limits, and the more positive reading in Christopher Dyer, ‘Poverty and its Relief in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 216 (2012), 41–78, esp. pp. 72–8. 8 N.R.O., PD 711/box 10: North Walsham overseers’ accounts, 1563–73, 1578–88; PD 711/box 10: North Walsham overseers’ accounts, 1608–15. The accounts consulted are rarely foliated, so citation is to the accounting year where that is not given in the text. The accounting year ran from Easter to Easter, hence the rather ugly usage throughout of both years. McIntosh has found this sort of jump in payments after 1598 in Market Deeping, Lincolnshire, and Pitminster, Somerset. McIntosh, Poor Relief, pp. 282–3. 6

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in Norfolk – in parts of the county, very rapidly – as witnessed, for instance, in the papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon and Sir Bassingbourne Gawdy.9 On a cautious reading of very imperfect evidence, this had certainly happened by the 1630s,10 most probably by the late 1610s at the latest, and in much of the county within a year or two of the Acts. The rapid spread of parish relief was, in part, an undoubted response to the disjunction between relief and need, to the implications of decades of population increase and to the declining real wages which were exacerbated by, and cast into stark light, the dearths of the 1590s. A key dimension which changed after 1598 was the systematization of rate-based relief, as indicated by the experience of North Walsham. There were obvious structural reasons why this was a plausible response in 1598 and the years after in Norfolk. Arguably it would be more surprising if the county had seen a slow adoption of the system. A county heavily marked by population increase, social differentiation and the intensification of the market economy, had to face the consequences of lifecycle poverty amongst the labouring poor and possessed the resources and economic structures to meet that need.11 There was also a political dimension to the adoption of the poor rate. As Hassell Smith has demonstrated, the form of rate laid down in the 1598 Statute – rating by value of the land to be imposed on all property held within the parish – provided a model for all rates in a county where the financial burdens of household purveyance and the costs of war had been a cause of discontent, especially in the north of the county where estates held by non-residents could easily spread over several parishes with the owners rateable only in their parish of residence. When the county bench at Lent quarter sessions 1598 adopted this form of rating more generally, they concluded that, ‘the equity of this rule is partly approved by the last statute made for the relief of the poore’.12 In that sense, the poor rate became not only a response to the problems of poverty but to experience of impositions The Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, ed. A. Hassell Smith, Gillian M. Baker, R. W. Kenney, Victor Morgan, Jane Key, Barry Taylor and Elizabeth Rutledge (5 vols., Norfolk Record Soc., 46, 49, 53, 64, 74, 1979–2010), IV, 187–92, 236–8; V, 28–33, 178, 160–6, 276; A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974), p. 106. 10 For a possible exception to this, see T.N.A., SP 16/364, no. 55: report of J.P.s of East and West Flegg, Tunstead and Happing, 24 July 1637. 11 The best contemporary statement of this is the account of the county seeking to argue the damage caused by the regulation of the grain trade submitted in the wake of the 1631 dearth, Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, ed. Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (Oxford, 1972), pp. 343–7. 12 A. Hassell Smith, ‘Militia Rates and Militia Statutes, 1558–1663’, in The English Commonwealth, 1547–1640: Essays in Politics and Society Presented to Joel Hurstfield, ed. Peter Clark, Alan G. R. Smith and Nicholas Tyacke (Leicester, 1979), pp. 93–110 (esp. pp. 103–4); Papers of Nathaniel Bacon, ed. Smith et. al., IV, 68. More generally, Smith, County and Court, pp. 95–9, 277–304. 9

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for the more general demands of the Elizabethan government. Although there is some early evidence of resistance to the poor rate, or arrears due by individuals, what is more significant is the rapid adoption and adaptation of poor rates. II Rate-based relief became ubiquitous and strongly embedded in the structures of parish life. Even where payments dropped to very low levels, the parish continued to raise the poor rate. For instance, in Hanworth the ratebased relief remained, even when payments dropped to 11s 0d and 12s 6¾d in 1627–8 and 1628–9.13 I have elsewhere argued that before mid-century the normal maximum relief payments that an individual might expect to receive – a maximum reached, for an elderly pauper after years as their pension increased as their earnings and ability to work diminished – was 6d per week, increasing to 12d a week in the second half of the century. Sixpence a week would not have been subsistence; twelvepence conceivably was.14 Returning to the material, I am more aware of the raggedness of the picture, note the exceptions more, and would suggest that 6d to 8d a week (still not subsistence) is a fairer estimate for the early seventeenth century. Yet the basic contrast still holds. It seems probable the gap between inadequate earnings and inadequate formal relief was met by the continuing resilience of informal neighbourly aid.15 Thus one sees a new set of boundaries in the levels of relief afforded by the parish in the early seventeenth century, one evidently extending the relief granted in terms of numbers within the groups of the life-cycle needy and in terms of the levels of payments made over what can be gleaned of the pre-1598 situation, but then stabilizing after initial adoption or perhaps creeping up slowly. A set of practices, based on the compatibility of informal and formal aid, fell into place. A bleaker emphasis would look to the economic and demographic stresses of those decades which set limits to relief, limits which were complemented by the toleration of informal relief for those in the penumbra of life-cycle need.16 The poor rate was, of course, a legally enforceable obligation: ‘owre taxations for our poore hath ben duly observed’, as the constables of Hapton N.R.O., Ayl 453: Hanworth overseers’ accounts, 1618–1730. Tim Wales, ‘Poverty, Poor Relief and the Life-Cycle: Some Evidence from Seventeenth-Century Norfolk’, in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, ed. Richard M. Smith (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 355–7. 15 Wales, ‘Life-Cycle’, pp. 359–60. For children, see Tim Wales, ‘Living at Their Own Hands: Policing Poor Households and the Young in Early Modern Rural England’, Agricultural History Review, 61 (2013 forthcoming). 16 Wales, ‘Living at Their Own Hands’. 13 14

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reported in the 1630s.17 And the distinction between the public and the private, the formal and the informal, was recognized. Yet poor relief was a form of charity, one strand in a range of collective and individual charity which stretched from the relief given to the begging neighbour, through more elaborate hospitality, to the rituals around the parish church, including doles at funerals or annual festivals, often distributed by churchwardens, and the communion collection. Like the endowments of town lands to support the business of the parish, rate-based relief was the administrative face of charity.18 It built upon medieval precedents as redefined in a distinctively protestant mode by Tudor legislation: the scything away of the charity and sociability linked with purgatory – lights and parish guilds – and the assertion of ‘the charitable and godlie uses’ in support of the parish and the poor.19 It co-existed with the demands of charity to the poor enjoined upon the individual Christian. Vox Norwici portrayed it as both a tax and the expression of the collective charity of the parish. Indeed, the presbyterians’ polemical opponents had made much the same point when they attacked the ministers for their failings, in the process aligning natural law and statute law: The Lawe of nature, and the Law of the land, teacheth you to looke to the poore and it seems you are but poore Preachers, that you have taught your people no better, but that the Poore are neglected among you … it is your unchristian, and uncharitable neglect … if your poore be not relieved among you.20

This marriage of the Statutes of the Realm with a higher law can be found deployed by William Perkins, when he placed his discussion of the obligations of fellowship, of individual and congregational charity, between the sermon and the distribution of communion: wise and godly men must be chosen to gather and dispense the relief of the poor. By God’s providence, like order is established in this our church and land and because it is the ordinance of God, all men must seek to further it.21

Parish relief was tied to the church, both as congregation and as physical space. According to statute, the churchwardens and overseers were to meet

N.R.O., NAS 1/1/2/134: Hapton constable’s account (n.d., but 1630s). Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift Exchange in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2008) is now the starting point on this topic. For charitable doles, see Wales, ‘Life-Cycle’, pp. 358–9. See also Tim Wales, ‘The Rise of Parish Relief, 1560–1700’ (1986: paper deposited in the Library of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure). 19 43 Elizabeth c. 4, sec. 1. 20 Vox Populi (1646), p. 13. 21 William Perkins, The Works of William Perkins, ed. I. Breward (Appleford, 1970), pp. 315–20 (quotation, pp. 319–20). 17 18

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at least once a month in the afternoon after service.22 Relief was presumably distributed at the church, and this was so obviously the practice that it was only when the custom was breached that it was noted: in April 1674 the North Walsham vestry complained that the overseers ‘did make payments of contribucons to the poore not at the Church where usually they ought to do’.23 Some of the language, and linguistic elisions, around parish relief as charity lie in one of the key words used: ‘collection’. ‘Collection’ could be the money raised for the poor (though the more practical words ‘taxation’ and ‘rate’ probably became more common), but it was also often the money given to the poor – or rather, to a particular subset, those poor receiving regular weekly or monthly payments, who formed the core of relief in most parishes, both in terms of cost and, arguably, symbolically, as against the poor who received more occasional and discretionary payments. So, from many thousands of entries for individual paupers, one might take Widow Bird (whose husband had died of wounds received at Naseby): ‘Item to the Widow Bird for Corlection in Aprill [1647]’.24 In Foulsham ‘collection’ was both the money collected and the monthly pensions paid out.25 The origins of the word defined as what was given is uncertain, though it seems to draw both on the communion collection for the poor as enjoined in the Book of Common Prayer, and the mid-Tudor legislation where ‘Gatherers and Collectors of the Charitable Almes’ of the parish were to solicit weekly contributions on the Sunday after their appointment ‘when the people is at the Churche and hath hardde Goddes hollie worde’.26 The language of charity can be found in petitions for relief. In 1647 or 1648 Alice Lee, a widow, petitioned quarter sessions that she was ‘very poore & cann noe waye mainteine her charge of children without the charitable colleccon of the Inhabitants of Narford, which shee hath received for the space of seven yeares now last past’.27 Collection was of great practical and symbolic significance. Symbolically, it embodied the charity of the parish, and entailed expectations of the relations between parish and poor. Practically, for both parish and the poor it was the heart of relief. Its regular weekly or monthly payments made it generally the highest part of the poor-relief bill for a parish, as against the more occasional and discretionary payments to other poor, in want, need, or sickness, or for the supply of clothing, fuel or rents. For the poor granted 43 Elizabeth c. 2, sec. 1. N.R.O., PD 711/box 11: North Walsham overseers’ accounts, 1648–79. 24 N.R.O., PD 667/10: Stockton churchwardens’ accounts (town book), 1625–1712, 1647 (and for husband’s wounds, 1645). 25 N.R.O., PD 674/47: Foulsham overseers’ accounts, 1640–84, (e.g.) any year in the 1640s. 26 5 & 6 Edward VI, c. 2, sec. 2. 27 N.R.O., C/S 3/box 38a: Norfolk quarter sessions rolls, 1647–8, petition of Alice Lee. 22 23

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collection, it provided regular income maintenance. The groups within the poor who were granted it were the life-cycle indigent – the elderly, the widowed (elderly or with young children), the male labourer overburdened with children – and others who through disability or infirmity were unable to meet their needs through their labour.28 But the difference between relief in North Walsham under Elizabeth and James shows how the inclusiveness of the categories and the levels of relief afforded could change. When the eighty-year-old Edward Messenger of Ashwicken sought relief in the winter of 1647–8 from quarter sessions, he pleaded that he was no longer able ‘to travell abroad to gather releife from charitable people, and is allowed but six pence by the weeke from the towne wherein he inhabiteth, which in these hard times of dearth and scarcitye will not buy any considerable or competent maintenance for his reliefe’.29 The justices ordered his relief doubled. One can note the importance of begging, the inadequacy of the amount granted by the parish, and the impact of dearth. There is also the telling phrase, ‘any considerable or competent maintenance’. Margaret Rowse of Methwold, a year earlier, used another phrase when she pleaded her plight: the town had sent her husband away as a soldier, leaving her with two children, but now refused ‘to give her such collection as is fitt for poore people in such extremitie’.30 What was competent maintenance? What was the collection fit for those in extremity? These were questions whose answers were posed particularly sharply in the late 1640s and whose answers then had long-term consequences. III The dearth of the late 1640s and its repercussions proved a major challenge to the poor and to the responsiveness of local authority. On Bowden’s computations, the harvest years 1646–51 were all poor, reaching their nadir in 1647–9, when (taking the whole period 1640–1749 as an index of 100) the average of all grains reached in those years successively was 173, 166 and 164. Both wheat and barley peaked in these years, but whereas the period of high prices for barley was mainly in those years, the prices of wheat were high in 1646 and 1651.31 In April 1649 quarter sessions doubled the usual Wales, ‘Life-Cycle’, pp. 360–82. Wales, ‘Life-Cycle’, p. 388, quoting N.R.O., C/S 3/box 38. 30 N.R.O., C/S 3/box 37: Norfolk quarter sessions rolls, 1645–6, petition of Margaret Rowse. 31 P. Bowden, Appendix IIIB, ‘Price Indices of Agricultural Commodities: National Annual Averages’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, V: 1640–1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (2 pts, Cambridge, 1985), pt. ii, pp. 830–1. These are national price indices, but the same picture emerges from the incomplete evidence presented in William Windham’s Green Book, 1673–1688, ed. Elizabeth Griffiths (Norfolk Record Soc., 66, 2002), pp. 28 29

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allowance of money for bread for prisoners in Norwich Gaol from 1d to 2d a day, because of the dearness of corn.32 The evidence of parish relief in Norfolk is presented in three charts, drawing on parish accounts which cover both the 1640s and 1650s and a significant number of years either side (where possible 1621–2 to 1680–1). Gaps on the charts are missing years in the accounts. Figure 3.1 takes the experiences of the market towns of North Walsham and Foulsham. Figures 3.2 and 3.3 take a group of smaller parishes whose accounts span the whole period 1640–1665. Both towns lay in that part of the county heavily dependent on sheep-corn husbandry and the new draperies. The villages are more of a miscellaneous group, ranging from the small estate village of Felbrigg in the north-east to Hilgay in the western Fens and to Gissing in the more pastoral south. Four of the parishes – Hanworth, Felbrigg, Wighton and Guestwick – lay in the same northern belt as the market towns. As a source, overseers’ accounts are both very rich and horribly opaque. They enable us to view changes over time through serial records: levels of overall and individual payments and of types of relief granted (pensions, emergency handouts, sickness payments, clothing, medical care, funeral costs). Yet what they measure is often problematic. Inscribed on the page of any set of accounts are the outcomes of a whole set of economic and social relations within a parish, the endpoint of processes which are often obscure.33 However, what we see on any one page (or in any one payment) is the result of a range of contexts and negotiations of which the presence of a particular name on the page, and the absence of others, is the outcome: the economic context, the availability of common rights, employment and by-employments, opportunities for other forms of charity; recipients’ age, family size and health generally; and a whole set of negotiations and choices around the definitions of need and worth. At the level of the annual payments made by the parish, the problems multiply: each line on the graph represents a particular local history, where the misfortunes of one or two families or particular policy decisions can have a dramatic effect on spending levels. The two highest peaks of payments in North Walsham – in 1625 and the mid-1660s – were the consequence of plague outbreaks. This paper draws on this material for a more modest, and more focussed purpose: to sketch out patterns in the parochial experience in the central decades of the seventeenth century. Yet this is only one story to be told from these accounts. Moreover, the trends discernible in these years are the collision and inter-action of changes – economic fluctuations, political and religious concerns, shifting interpretations of need – with underlying local social and 27–8, 32. The harvest year, taken as running from Michaelmas (30 Sept.) starts half-way through the overseers’ accounting year, which began at Easter. 32 Order Book, ed. Howell James, p. 21. 33 John Broad, ‘Parish Economies of Welfare, 1650–1834’, H.J., 42 (1999), 985–1006. 62

Year

22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64 67 70 73 76 79 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 1/ 4/ 7/ 0/ 3/ 6/ 9/ 2/ 5/ 8/ 1/ 4/ 7/ 0/ 3/ 6/ 9/ 2/ 5/ 8/ 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 5 6 6 6 6 7 7 7 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16

0.0

20.0

40.0

60.0

80.0

100.0

120.0

140.0

160.0

180.0

200.0

Figure 3.1: Annual Poor Relief Disbursements, 1621/22–1680/81: North Walsham and Foulsham

Sources: North Walsham N.R.O., PD 711/box 11: overseers’ accounts, 1621–48, 1648–79 Foulsham N.R.O., PD 674/47: overseers’ accounts, 1640–84

Pounds

Foulsham

North Walsham

Year

2 5 8 1 4 7 0 3 6 9 2 5 8 1 4 7 0 3 6 9 /2 /2 /2 /3 /3 /3 /4 /4 /4 /4 /5 /5 /5 /6 /6 /6 /7 /7 /7 /7 21 24 27 30 33 36 39 42 45 48 51 54 57 60 63 66 69 72 75 78 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

Figure 3.2: Annual Poor Relief Disbursements, 1621/22–1680/81: Felbrigg, Gissing, Gressenhall and Guestwick

Guestwick

Gressenhall

Gissing

Felbrigg

Sources: Felbrigg N.R.O., WKC 7/180: overseers’ accounts, 1616–99 Gissing N.R.O., PD 50/43: overseers’ accounts, 1635–86 Gressenhall N.R.O., MR 236 242X1: overseers’ accounts, 1637–77 Guestwick N.R.O., PD 5/31: overseers’ accounts, 1628–99

Pounds

Sources Hanworth N.R.O., Ayl 453: overseers’ accounts, 1618–1730 Wendling N.R.O., COL 3/6: overseers’ accounts, 1631–1700

Hilgay N.R.O., PD 382/34: overseers’ accounts, 1641–64 Wighton N.R.O., PD 553/54: overseers’ accounts, 1642–1713

Figure 3.3: Annual Poor Relief Disbursements, 1621/22–1680/81: Hanworth, Hilgay, Wendling and Wighton

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demographic structures which might amplify or dampen the impact of the former. North Walsham grew rapidly over the seventeenth century, its population rising from about 800 in 1603 to about 1,500 in the 1670s. Foulsham’s population at the latter date was about 600.34 The accounts of both towns show signs of moral discipline being imposed: Foulsham made payments to the poor from fines collected for profane swearing in 1652–3 and 1653–4, whilst North Walsham’s receipts included in 1650–1 £1 from a fine for drawing beer without a licence and in 1654–5 54s 6d for fines collected by the constables. At Foulsham Philip Skippon, major-general of the New Model Army, was resident from 1650 to 1653.35 The stages of the response to dearth recorded in the poor accounts in the market towns are intriguing, with what may have been an initially lagged response, and a move from supplying grain to the poor to throwing the weight of relief onto expanding the number of regular pensioners. The harvest of 1646 was bad, but not as serious as the dearth years that were to follow, so it is unsurprising that there is no sign of its impact on relief levels in 1646–7 (whose last half followed the 1646 harvest). There was little difference in either parish from the years preceding. North Walsham paid out £45 3s 6d to the poor in 1646–7. Of this a mere £8 12s 10d was in discretionary, mainly sickness, payments and repairs to the town house. The rest was through the collection: in the month ending 11 April 1647, twenty people received in all £2 15s 4d (an average of 33.2d per head). But there was little difference in 1647–8, which saw a far worse harvest: there was a very modest increase, turned into a slight drop in the annual total as the accounting year, from Easter to Easter, was five weeks shorter than the previous year.36 There are hints in some of the handouts made: 3s 6d ‘given to the poore at severall tymes’; references to small payments to individuals in their need. Only in 1648–9 did annual disbursements rise dramatically, to £69 4s 1d – their final net total – or £87 4s 1d. The rise occurred largely through the collection: in April 1648 twentyfive collectioners received £3 15s 2d; in March 1649 thirty-six received £4 17s 8d. There was little difference in normal discretionary payments. But the overseers spent £21 17s 0d on rye and barley to sell to the poor underprice, a little over a third of the collection bill, making a loss of £4 2s 0d. The following year, 1649–50, saw a further evolution. The number of collectioners was actually down by the month ending 14 April 1650 (twenty-eight receiving £4 4s 0d). But throughout the year their number was effectively Peter Clark and Jean Hoskings, Population Estimates of English Small Towns, 1550– 1851 (rev. edn, Leicester, 1993), pp. 106–9. For what follows, N.R.O., PD 711/box 11: North Walsham overseers’ accounts, 1621–48, 1648–79; N.R.O, PD 674/47. 35 N.R.O., PD 674/47, 1650–1 to 1653–4. 36 A Handbook of Dates, ed. C. R. Cheney, rev. Michael Jones (Cambridge, 2000), p. 230. 34

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increased a little by regular weekly payments made to named individuals: in the week of 14 April seven people received between 2d and 4d, recorded separately from the monthly pensioners, and receiving less (only one of the latter received less than 2s a month). The overseers spent over twice as much on grain – imported rye – to sell to the poor under-price than in the previous year (£47 2s 0d) and made twice the loss (£9). At Easter 1650, with the new accounting year, policy changed again. The number of collectioners leapt up to forty-two in the month ending 12 May, receiving in all £5 3s 5d (by the following March the number was fortyseven, receiving £6 13s 4d). To these should be added the continuing discretionary payments, including the small weekly payments. But buying grain to sell to the poor under-price seems to have been dropped. The response to the continuing repercussions of the dearth in 1650 was to switch the emphasis to expand further those on the collection. The character of the collectioners looks much the same both before and after the policy change. About two-thirds were women either side of the leap in numbers: eighteen out of twenty-eight in the month before Easter 1650, at least twenty-eight out of forty-two in the month after. This shift to a much larger number of collectioners was maintained in the years following, into the more prosperous mid-1650s. In the two months ending 21 May 1654, for instance, there were forty-five collectioners, and a further thirteen received ‘gifts’ as hand-outs or sickness payments in the same period. The crisis discernible from 1658–9 to 1662–3, was met with much the same policy. A quirk of accountancy elides some of the difference between monthly pensions and discretionary payments. But, taking the two months ending 4 March 1660, the thirteen latter received between 8d and 3s 10d (totalling £2 6s 8d). The forty-three collectioners received in all £15 13s 10d (an average of 43.8d per month per recipient). The average payment per head was itself an advance on the 1640s, when it had ranged up to the early 1650s around 30d–34d. After the Restoration, both the number of collectioners and the average monthly payment remained high: in June and July 1664 forty-seven pensioners receiving on average 41.9d per month. Foulsham shared much of the experience of North Walsham. Again, 1646–7 and 1647–8 showed little change in overall levels of payments. Payment was through the collection, with a very tight grip on discretionary payments. In the mid-1630s the annual collection seems to have been between £22 and £24; for most of the 1640s total annual payments ranged between £14 and £23. The numbers and the average monthly pension remained stable through to 1647–8. Numbers ranged between sixteen and twenty-two. Average payments were much lower than at North Walsham, between 13d and 15.6d per month. Indeed, even in 1648–9, the number rose to twenty-seven only in the second half of the year. But as in North Walsham, that third bad year produced an alternative measure. The parish officers raised ‘a corn rate’. Moreover, they raised a further rate of £5 6s 6d, ‘for the relief of the Poore of the said parish’ according to ‘A warrant directed 67

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from the Justices of the peace’, dated 8 May 1648. Alongside the twentyseven collectioners receiving between 6d and 2s 6d a month, payments of between 1s and 4s 6d were divided amongst eighty poor: the latter group included most of the collectioners, but also fifty-three others. Payments also included 6d, ‘given to 3 poore children to buy bread’.37 This resort to small payments to a large number of poor only lasted one year. The following year, 1649–50, total payments rocketed from £26 to £57: largely through the collection rather than discretionary payments, the former doubling to fifty-four pensioners in the first half of the accounting year. This was a year before the same policy was adopted in North Walsham, and – given that Foulsham was less than half the size of North Walsham – involved taking on a proportionately higher number. This was also evidently an expansion round the core life-cycle categories of need. In the last half of 1648–9, women, mainly widows, had made up nineteen of the twentyseven pensioners (70.4 per cent). In the doubling, women formed a lower proportion, but still a further ten were added to the relief roll, and remained 50 per cent of the total. 1649–50 saw the number of collectioners peak, but the numbers remained high for the rest of the decade, dropping to under forty only in the mid-1650s and only dropping to the numbers of the early 1640s, and below, in the mid-1660s. In the latter part of 1665–6, there were just thirteen collectioners. More striking is the level of average payment. It rose to 20.4d per month for each collectioner in 1649–50, an advance of almost 6d on the previous year. It ranged between that and 28.2d between then and 1657–8. It then rocketed, to almost 50d in 1660–1 and stood at 43.4d in 1665–6. These figures are somewhat misleading, distorted by the presence of orphans in these years. In the latter year, Turner’s children, costing 14s a month, accounted for a third of the monthly bill. Nevertheless, after excluding them, the average payment was 33.5d; even the more modest average of 26d from late 1665–6 (excluding Turner’s children) was still twice the level of the early 1640s. In both North Walsham and Foulsham, the response to dearth was initially in part through the supply of grain, but shifted to be through an expansion of the collection. Discretionary payments certainly became more prominent in both towns, but paled in comparison to the increased weight thrown onto the collection. In Foulsham, where the rise in discretionary payments was from a very low base (usually what was left over from the rates and what had been ‘saved by the death of poore people’38), it was only once more than a fifth of the total budget in the 1650s and early 1660s, and often much less. In 1656–7 payments to thirty-three people (overwhelmingly) for

For rough comparison, there were only seventy householders exempt from the hearth tax in the early 1670s. Wales, ‘Life-Cycle’, p. 358. For Foulsham in the 1630s, see T.N.A., SP 16/329, no. 12. 38 N.R.O., PD 674/47, 1642–3. 37

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sickness in 1656–7, ranging between 6d and 9s, cost Foulsham £3 4s 0d; they spent a further 10s on wood and 15s towards curing a poor child, ‘being dangerously Stabbed with A Redd hott Iron’. In the same year the collection for a month for thirty-three recipients was £3 8s 4d. Both numbers on the collection and average relief payments rose in Foulsham and North Walsham, though in both towns the latter rose more slowly and later in the 1650s. In both parishes total payments dropped in the mid-1650s, only to rise again at the end of the decade. Indeed, were one to take the annual payments at face value, one could argue that the later crisis was worse than the earlier one. Perhaps, but arguably the figures reflect an enhanced responsiveness superimposed upon the stickiness that arose from choosing to relieve through expanding the number whose claims to relief were in large part life-cycle need, and also upon the relief of children, possibly the orphans of fever deaths. The market towns, satellites of Norwich, shadow the experience of the county town. In 1720 John Fransham tabulated the annual expenditure of the fourteen Norwich parishes whose accounts then stretched back a century. The number of collectioners rose by over a half, from just under a hundred per year in the early 1640s to c.150 per year in the early 1660s, with the crisis of the late 1640s as the hinge period. Payments which had rarely been above £150 per annum before the late 1640s never dropped again below £250 per annum, even in the prosperous years of the mid-1650s, and thereafter were rarely below £300. As in the market towns, the peak of the late 1640s and early 1650s was over shadowed by a peak a decade later. 39 Compared to the market towns, the villages betray a riot of variation. This is partly because of the small sums and numbers involved, which, with variations, both structural and random, could heighten or diminish the impact of economic fluctuations. In particular, when so much relief in the villages as in the towns was through payments to the collectioners, it would take very small shifts in local demographic structures and social relations to produce wide variations. In smaller villages the social economy, the network of relations between neighbours and between employers and employees, could also even in the worst years provide something of a shield.40 So the apparent lack of impact in some parishes, such as Wendling (a very small village) or Gissing, where changes seem to have come in the 1660s and 1670s, is probably to be expected.41 Two large villages – Wighton, a parish in the salt marshes just behind John Fransham, An Exact Account of the Charge for Supporting the Poor of the City of Norwich (1720), pp. 30–1. 40 John Walter, ‘The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England’, in Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, ed. John Walter and Roger Schofield (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 75–128. 41 N.R.O., COL 3/6: Wendling overseers’ accounts, 1631–1700; N.R.O., PD 50/43: Gissing overseers’ accounts, 1635–86. 39

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the north coast, and Gressenhall – provide another variant where an immediate response to dearth through the supply of corn is apparent, but where the evidence for changes through the collection are more muted.42 In the former, relief rose steeply in the 1640s from £9 per annum to a peak of almost £41 in 1648–9, fluctuated widely between then and 1662–3 (between £12 and £31), and then had a number of years at low levels of between £5 and £15 until the mid-1670s. Its pattern is obscure, though the levels of c.1660 reflect in part the burden of orphans. Wighton’s overseers’ account shows money paid as emergency relief to the poor during the dearth. In 1648–9 its payments included £1 1s 2d ‘for bread for the poore’, £15 11s 4d ‘for Corne for the poore & Chamberroom’ and £11 11s 0d ‘Distributed to poore people in want within the town’. The following year the core of five pensioners, children and sickness payments was supplemented by payments to at least twenty-nine named individuals, ranging from 4s 3d to 11s 8d. The parish also spent 19s 9d on bread for the poor, and noted 12s 6d lost in selling corn to the poor under-price. At Gressenhall expenditure was stable in the late 1630s and 1640s at between £4 and £5 a year. In 1649–50 payments doubled, to £9 14s 4d. Part of that was £3 10s 11d for ‘Corne delivered to the poore’. The practice of a small group receiving a few shillings each, with one or two regular pensioners, seems to have remained the norm, and a shift to the collection seems to have occurred more in the 1660s. Other parishes show immediate responses to the mid-century crisis, with longer-term consequences obscured by demographic change. Felbrigg and Guestwick both showed peaks during the hard mid-century, largely through payments to collectioners.43 At Felbrigg the high level reached in 1648–9 was maintained to 1657–8, due to payments to its two or three pensioners; by the 1670s annual payments were low, probably the result of job opportunities presented by a great house and settlement policy.44 Guestwick saw peaks in the years around 1650 and 1660, with a dip in the mid-1650s and a prolonged falling-off from the mid-1660s. In the late 1630s and 1640s it was not uncommon there to have five or six collectioners. The payments of 1649–50 to 1651–2 perhaps represent a consolidation of this, and by the early 1660s a weekly pension of 12d a week (admittedly not in itself a sum unknown there before the late 1640s) was being paid to three or four collectioners. By the 1670s the number had dropped to one or two. The shift here is a matter of population change and possibly restriction of settlement in a

N.R.O., PD 553/54: Wighton overseers’ accounts, 1642–1713; N.R.O., MR 236 242X1: Gressenhall overseers’ accounts, 1637–77. 43 N.R.O., WKC 7/180: Felbrigg overseers’ accounts, 1616–99; N.R.O., PD 5/31: Guestwick overseers’ accounts, 1628–99. 44 In 1652–3 there had been three collectioners, receiving between £1 6s 0d and £4 5s 0d. For much of the 1670s there was just one collectioner, John Bond, receiving 4d a week in 1673–4 and 6d a week in 1677–8. For removals, see 1668–9, 1669–70, 1673–4. 42

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village where there were only seven householders too poor to pay the hearth tax in the 1670s.45 Hanworth provides yet another variant.46 As at Guestwick and Felbrigg, the small numbers involved obscure the post-Restoration picture. The picture in the late 1640s and 1650s is less ambiguous. There was a dramatic break following the appearance of a new vicar in 1645. A small parish, its outgoings had dropped in 1643–4 with the death of its one regular collectioner, and the following year a mere £1 9s 2d was paid out. But then nothing was paid out in 1645–6 and 1646–7, and though a rate was raised the following year, only £1 19s 0d was disbursed. The largest of the four payments was a mere 8s 6d, to ‘Joane Butler, a poore & sicke widow at divers times’. The overseers explained that Besides itt beinge held fitter by our Minister to provide for the Poore rather by voluntary contributions then by rates and Collections there accordingly have beene divers Severall Summes of moneye Contributed & distributed amongst these and other poore Persons within the said Parish.47

The exhortation to private charity is not surprising, nor that in a time of dearth it should be answered; the neglect of the formal side is perhaps more surprising. But it did not survive. Under the pressure of dearth, parish relief was intensified, a pragmatic reassertion of parish charity. The following year collection payments resumed, alongside other smaller payments. By 1650–1, there were two collectioners on 12d a week, one on 6d, and one who started on the lower sum and rose to the higher during the year. In total, with rent and fuel payments as well, the parish paid out £11 14s 6d. And, with some changes amongst the names, that level only slowly dropped later in the 1650s, and the core collectioners, once admitted, stayed: in 1654–5 all four collectioners, for most of the year, were on 12d a week. The large fenland parish of Hilgay was closest in its experience to the market towns. It underwent a very rapid rise which remained unusually high into the late-seventeenth century. Ranging between £6 and £8 for much of the 1640s, payments doubled in 1647–8 to £15, rose to £20 in 1648–9, and generally ranged between c.£20 and £30 for the rest of the decade, rising again somewhat in the early 1660s, and evidently continued to rise into the 1670s.48 Understanding the process is less easy: for many years, we only have the totals collected and disbursed, and when we do have detailed accounts again, we cannot be sure that we have the full totals. Still, in 1645–6, £7 2s 8d was paid out, wholly through the weekly collection, to seven women (five at 6d per week, two at 4d), so at most 3s 2d 45 46 47 48

Wales, ‘Life-Cycle’, p. 358n. N.R.O., Ayl 453. N.R.O., Ayl 453, 1647–8. N.R.O., PD 382/34, 35: Hilgay overseers’ accounts, 1641–64, 1672–80. 71

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a week.49 In 1649–50, when annual disbursements reached £26 1s 6d, the monthly disbursements stood at 31s 4d a month (so about two and a half times higher than four years earlier), and about a fifth of the bill went on a limited range of other payments and individuals: house-rents, firing, fuel, keeping one child and apprenticing another. By contrast, in the six months from 12 April 1672, the weekly collection bill ranged from 10s 4d to 16s per week, and totalled £18 19s 2d. Of the eight recipients in the first week (only three of whom were women), six received 1s a week, two 6d. In the same period, discretionary payments came to £8 15s 9d. So by the latter date, the bill for six months was £27 10s 11d; presumably the annual bill was eight times higher than in 1645–6, and twice as high as in 1649–50. There was by 1672 a substantial element of discretionary payments, combined with a significant rise in the level of weekly relief payments. Hilgay’s character as a fenland parish, in contrast to the nucleated arable villages which dominate the surviving village accounts, explains a lot of its distinctiveness, with a population more dependent on the marshlands for food and fuel and more exposed to the market for the provision of food.50 Moreover, the commons seem to have been under threat from fen drainage. In 1656 parcels of land were allocated for the relief of the poor in compensation for lost commons.51 IV The evidence of the parish accounts leads to a number of conclusions. The first is that, even in a period of severe prolonged economic and political crisis, some parishes show little sign of significant response. Their other resources proved resilient enough to take the strain – the bonds of local neighbourly relations, the response to clerical exhortation and the demands of personal charity – or perhaps the demographic and employment structures meant there were fewer in the most vulnerable groups. Some sense of the alternatives is captured at Great Melton, where the annual poor bill In having only payment to collectioners, this is rather an extreme year, and other years in the 1640s had the odd rent paid and some sickness payments. Oddly, the stray account (or accounts) for 1616 and 1617 seems to only have discretionary payments, N.R.O., PD 382/33: Hilgay overseers’ account, 1616–17. 50 In Jan. 1662 the poor of Clacklose hundred (which included Hilgay) complained to quarter sessions ‘that in this deere tyme they cannot gett Corne for theire money by reason the owners thereof will not sell it by small parcells as the said poore are able to buy it’, but instead exported it in large quantities out of the county. N.R.O., C/S 2/2: Norfolk quarter sessions order book, 1657–9, Lynn sessions, Jan. 1662. 51 Further Report of the Commissioners Appointed in Pursuance of an Act of Parliament Made and Passed in the 1st and 2nd Years of His Present Majesty, c. 34, Intituled, “An Act for Appointing Commissioners to Continue the Inquiries Concerning Charities in England and Wales for Two Years, and from Thence to the End of the then Next Session of Parliament”, Part I (1835), p. 515. 49

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may not have changed that much, but where in the 1650s officers recorded payments to the poor arising from gifts and, on 7 July 1650, 12s 8d, ‘Uppon an Exhortation made by the Minister in the behalf of divers sicke and distressed poore people ... gathered in the Church of St Maries’.52 Second, the patterns of responses varied both in the short-term and in their longer-term consequences. The years 1646–51 may have been a turning point, but the route to that turning point varied, as the different policies adopted in Foulsham and North Walsham suggest. In most parishes it was only part-way through the crisis that relief levels obviously changed. The choice of collection as the main method of relief doubtless imposed limits on how far relief could fall back, as it involved a recognition of the life-cycle indigent who, once on in a time of crisis, it was probably less easy to remove from the relief rolls. Nevertheless, there was generally a drop in the mid-1650s, though in a number of parishes what is as significant is that relief did not fall back to pre-1647 levels. The drop is explicable in terms of a period of cheap foodstuffs. Yet, what is also remarkable is that in the market towns levels were higher in the years around 1660 than around 1650. This is somewhat puzzling, especially if takes the price of grains as the yardstick, which indicates that the former was the sharper, more prolonged, crisis. By contrast, though every year from 1656 to 1662 was below average quality, especially 1658, 1659 and 1662, only 1661 was comparable in the height of its prices with 1648 and 1649.53 Yet the later peak demands a wider set of explanations. Lynn Botelho, in her work on the Suffolk parish of Cratfield, only a few miles south from Norfolk, found similar unprecedentedly high levels of relief for much of the 1650s and ascribed it to a wave of fevers.54 Wrigley and Schofield found a series of local mortality crises in most of the parishes in rural Norfolk in their national sample.55 Moreover the problems in the latter period may reflect less the cost of food than the ability to buy it, as the problems of the textile industry threatened the livelihoods not only of the weavers of Norwich and its hinterland but also of the thousands of poor households in the city and county dependent on the profits of spinning to make ends meet. When the Norwich authorities ordered extraordinary relief measures in December 1659 they spoke of how ‘the necessityes of the poore are exceedingly increased for want of worke, by reason of the deadnes of trade, & by sicknes & diseases which have befallen many much occasioned (as

N.R.O., EVL 645, 463X9: Great Melton overseers’ accounts, 1631–94. P. Bowden, Appendix IIIB, ‘Price Indices’, in Agrarian History, ed. Thirsk, V, ii, 830–1. 54 Lynn A. Botelho, Old Age and the English Poor Law, 1500–1700 (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 46–7. 55 E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 678–80. 52 53

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is to be feared) through want & by the sharpnes of the season’.56 Significantly, the later crisis is more evident in the small towns, more vulnerable to depression in the textile industry than the villages with their small numbers and a better mix between agricultural employment and industrial by-employments.57 The later peak of 1658–62 becomes more explicable as a consequence of disease and of unemployment in the textile industry as well as high grain prices. Yet it remains an open question whether the crisis of the late 1650s and early 1660s really did hit the poor harder than its more notorious predecessor. At present, it seems best to read the higher levels as a matter of reacting to a series of demographic and economic problems, but also as a consequence of the changing relief commitments which followed from the earlier crisis. The later crisis was the product of, and further embedded, the earlier changes. V How far can the changes described be seen as a consequence of the English revolution, rather than as just happening at the same time? It would be perfectly possible to provide an account of parish relief which made no mention of the revolution, and the sources themselves rather push in that direction. Overseers’ accounts are, by their nature, not usually the place to look for statements of intent and motive. What appear ‘pragmatic’ changes may be both pragmatic and shaped by a whole set of godly and providentialist assumptions.58 Indeed, the argument of this paper has been that, given a particular understanding of poor relief as the embodiment of collective charity, and the degree to which parish relief had become rooted in local practice, raising relief levels was the appropriate policy to adopt under the impact of social and economic crisis. At Hanworth the attempt to relieve the poor not by the collective, whether church collection or poor rate, but rather by the individual alone, is striking. As we have seen, this policy was defeated by the reality of prolonged dearth. Yet the story is more complicated than that. ‘Our minister’, the intruded vicar of Hanworth and its neighbour parish of Roughton, was Robert Daliell, a Scotsman, a graduate of Edinburgh University in 1640.59 As such, he brought with him the experience of poor relief from his homeN.R.O., Norwich city records, mayor’s court books, XXIII, 1654–66 , unfol., 23 Dec. 1659. 57 Wales, ‘Life-Cycle’, pp. 357–8, for a partial commentary on this. 58 Keith Wrightson and John Walter, ‘Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 71 (1976), 28–9. 59 A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), pp. 155–6; A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), p. 265. 56

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land, where formal relief was much more attenuated.60 He was also a controversial figure: in October 1647, the hundredal jury presented Robert ‘Dallia’ at quarter sessions for not having administered the sacrament to his parishioners for the last two years.61 Perhaps he did not feel able to do so until the establishment of a presbyterian order allowed elders to conduct the necessary preparation of communicants, or perhaps he simply preferred to avoid further contention likely to arise if he attempted to restrict access.62 Either way, it confirms the sense that Daliell’s position on charity, and its relation to the congregation, was that of an outsider to local practice. The force of his position was hardly alien in a culture which laid such emphasis on the demands of individual compassion, but it was attempting to reverse well-established collective practices which even in his own parish were ­reinstated and intensified. How far were these changes the result of pressure from above, from J.P.s? From the evidence of the accounts one would be led to say not much at all. Only in Foulsham is there direct evidence of magistrates exercising their authority, when they ordered extra rates to be raised. Even that is ambiguous: they may well have been responding to overseers wanting to cover themselves against ratepayer resistance. The alternative would have been the experience of Thomas Lisle, overseer of Downham Market: the J.P.s allowed that he was out of pocket £8 7s 3d, but even so he had to appeal to quarter sessions in July 1650 to authorize a parish rate to pay him.63 Yet to remove the magistracy quite so much from the picture is almost certainly to be misled by the sources. Overseers’ accounts simply are not the place to look for parishes’ relations with the county authorities unless a cash payment was involved. There is also an imbalance in the types of sources which survive. Much of our knowledge of the poor law in Norfolk in the early seventeenth century comes from papers once in magistrates’ archives, most notably that of Sir Nathaniel Bacon, but there is nothing equivalent for the 1650s. The county records upon which other studies have relied are incomplete for Norfolk: the quarter sessions order books only begin at Easter 1650. Moreover, without earlier order books, and with so much poor law business always devolved to J.P.s sitting in their local meetings, it is impossible to say whether the poor law orders made represent a significant quickening of tempo.64 It seems very unlikely that the J.P.s of interregnum Norfolk were less active than either their predecessors or their brother justices in other Rosalind Mitchison, The Old Poor Law in Scotland: The Experience of Poverty, 1574– 1845 (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 3–19. 61 N.R.O., C/S 3/box 38a: jury verdict for North Erpingham hundred, 15 Oct. 1647. 62 John Morrill, ‘The Church in England, 1643–9’, in John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (1993), p. 167, provides these suggestions. 63 Order Book, ed. Howell James, p. 27. 64 Ibid., pp. 19–30, 56–66. 60

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counties. Most of the orders made at sessions in Norfolk – as, indeed, in Warwickshire – were reactive, responding to petitions by paupers, aggrieved ratepayers and parish officers, the activity at quarter sessions as much the interplay between a Bench willing to hear and appellants with complaints to bring. Especially in a period of instability, J.P.s could have pressed their policies at their annual audit of accounts. And, amongst the relief and settlement orders recorded, there are occasionally more explicit references pressing the cause of poor relief. In 1653 the parish officers of Briston were indicted for not meeting monthly in the church on Sunday after divine service to provide for the poor of the parish; they were fined 20s each, the money to be used for a stock to set the poor on work.65 The Bench could also make general orders, but in the 1650s these tended to be in response to the demands of others. As it became increasingly clear in the summer of 1659 that the harvest would be a poor one, the J.P.s sitting at Fakenham made a general order for the north of the county to restrict gleaning, acting at the urging of the grand jury.66 Magisterial activism was as much about responding to the pressures brought to bear on them as arbitrators and adjudicators in disputes within and between parishes as about their own intentions. Vox Norwici draws attention to one plausible way in which the magistracy may have provided a spur to activity then adapted to local circumstances in each parish: ordering rates to be doubled. This echoed earlier responses to dearth, as enjoined by the Book of Orders. For instance, in 1622 the J.P.s of Shropham and Guiltcross hundreds had reported that all their towns, ‘did double their Colleccon or provide weekelie Barley’.67 It may well be that in the 1640s the policy was repeated and the evidence allows us to see it refracted in parish policies. Certainly, the rises in relief in so many parishes, and the more than doubling of collectioners at Foulsham, suggest such changes. Finally, the Civil War and Revolution may have shaped parish relief in another way, through the impact of one of its most powerful consequences on local society: the high levels of taxation during and after the war. As in 1598–1601, the demands of war finance reshaped poor relief. Higher direct taxes – rates levied for national purposes – were followed by higher poor rates. The graphs suggest how little impact the unprecedentedly high levels of taxation imposed seem to have had on relief levels during the war: the stability in payment levels is striking. In the late 1640s, poor rates rose in the face of continuing high taxation. Mike Braddick has calculated the annual burden of the assessment on Hanworth as £76 16s, nine times higher than its 1639 ship money rating, and almost seven times more than the highest annual payments to the poor between 1642 and 1660. In 1650 the

65 66 67

Ibid., p. 66. N.R.O., C/S 2/2: Fakenham sessions, July 1659. Bodl., MS Tanner 243, fo. 40r. 76

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annual burden at Felbrigg was more modest, coming to about £14 15s (about £6 more than the poor bill that year).68 Speculatively, high taxation may have encouraged higher parish relief as it put pressure on other forms of aid. In 1638, when the Hertfordshire justices had written to the privy council of the plight of labouring poor left without work by maltsters and farmers, they had claimed that raising the poor rate had discouraged the charity that ratepayers afforded to those who came to their door: ‘And when we raised them in theyr taxes to the maintenance of those labourers, they withdrew theyr Charitie to the impotent poore who dayly repaire to theyr howses for reliefe.’69 In the late 1640s much higher taxes than those known in the 1630s were putting a squeeze on neighbourly purses. Yet the model they provided, when set against the desperate needs of prolonged dearth, provided a solution to that squeeze by reinforcing relief through local taxation. This was probably not without some resistance, as the warrants obtained to raise extra rates in Foulsham or the refusal to pay the overseers’ arrears at Downham Market suggests. In 1649 the stresses of new impositions were present at West Winch, where a petition complained that the overseers were giving out relief to people who did not need it, were misapplying the town stock, and had served warrants on several people for failing to pay a poor rate unauthorized by the parish.70 In 1652–3, the Wighton overseers obtained a warrant ‘to distraine divers who refused payment to our rate’.71 But compliance is more striking than recalcitrance. The rate rises of the late 1640s looked back to previous responses to dearth, but also occurred in the immediate context of high taxation. In Foulsham, the rates rose, despite continuing squabbles over other parish rates – the highway rate in 1652 and the constable’s in 1655.72 VI The experience of Norfolk suggests one account of the political and social history of poor relief in early modern England. Changes in relief in the midseventeenth century were a response to economic instability and political crisis. They were shaped by long-standing assumptions about the relationship between parish relief funded by rates and broader concepts of charity, and by the degree to which the former had long been part of the structure of welfare. They drew on practices deployed in previous dearths and Michael Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England: Local Administration and Response (Woodbridge, 1994), p. 139. 69 T.N.A., P.R.O., SP 16/342, no. 93. 70 Susan D. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988), p. 161. 71 N.R.O., PD 553/54. 72 Order Book, ed. Howell James, pp. 46, 79, 89. 68

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took place in the shadow of war taxation. The relative role of the different actors in the developments is far from clear. If the agency of the magistracy remains shadowy, that of the poor themselves remains even more so. There is nothing to match the quality and abundance of the petitions for poor relief submitted to Lancashire quarter sessions, which have enabled Jonathan Healey to plot the numbers appealing in the late 1640s, making claims of charity and of right.73 It remains most likely that the majority of payments in this period were made upon personal appeal, the approach to a parish officer who was also a near neighbour in a small village or a market town, reinforced in somewhere as large as North Walsham by the weight of numbers. The forms of relief chosen in the 1640s are significant. As we have seen, and unsurprisingly, some relief in crisis was through discretionary payments. But what is most striking is how much relief was granted through the weekly or monthly collection. Why was this choice made? Perhaps it was simply the obvious facts that in desperate times, it met the needs and demands of the poor better and more efficiently than any other option and that economic conditions hit those already most vulnerable first. The preference has a number of implications. In terms of control of disbursements, the collection was evidently determined by the parish vestry; the smaller payments, usually the short-term emergencies where decisions had to be made quickly, at the discretion of the overseers. In terms of the relationship between poor relief and economic conjuncture, it meant that a key weapon against the rising tide of destitution during dearth in these years was to increase systematic income maintenance to a wider circle of the life-cycle needy as dearth or trade depression pulled them down. It reinforced and simplified parish relief as the maintenance of incomes when other forms of support – work or charity – fell away or proved inadequate. Once on the parish, this form of relief often entailed a stickiness which kept many of them there, which helps explain those parishes where annual payments never dropped to pre-1646 levels. The changed relief levels that emerged in mid-century were probably reinforced by that stickiness. Those changes reflected a lagged response to decades of population increase and declining real wages. The shift in levels of relief again points, as in the late 1590s, to a ratcheting up as dearth exposed the deficiencies created by long-term changes, again reflecting both social division and the essential prosperity of the region. Yet the significance of the mid-century changes lies as much in the maintenance of these relief levels in the changed demographic and economic circumstances of the years after 1660, as more than a century of population growth was succeeded by stabilization, as population declined for thirty years from the mid-1650s and then rose

73

Healey, ‘Poor Relief in Lancashire’, 566–9. 78

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modestly, and as living standards did not further decline and indeed made significant advances.74 By inference, the raising of relief payment levels, now more aligned with needs, diminished the significance of begging from neighbours in Norfolk.75 Maintained into the new context of the late seventeenth century, the changed levels reflected a new definition of what constituted a competent maintenance in a context where labour shortage and the further diversification of the economy were increasing the bargaining power of the labouring poor.76 The granting of parish relief was one front upon which appropriate income and the rights and duties of labour were negotiated. And by consolidating and simplifying the relationship between parish relief and the recognition of need, it provided the basis for the next shift upwards in poor relief from the closing years of the century, arguably a further re­adjustment as relief was renegotiated to meet the rising living standards of the poor.77 This paper has suggested that the English revolution had important consequences for the practice of poor relief and its place in the economies of the poor and social relations of the English parish. The evidence for that case in Norfolk remains circumstantial, and the impact is likely to have been indirect, through responses to taxation, as well as direct through godly activism. However, such impact as the Revolution had was shaped by longstanding practices and assumptions which were intensified in those years, intensified to the point of shifting the balance between formal and informal relief and the place of parish relief in the household budgets of the indigent. Moreover, if the Revolution raised questions about the parish and about social and political legitimacy which had repercussions for the practice of poor relief, its impact can only be understood in the context of particular economic and demographic conjunctions. The immediate motor for many of these changes was the prolonged, terrible dearth of the years around 1649. In a broader context, where the changes around the late-Elizabethan poor laws had been followed by further decades of population increase and declining living standards, those of mid-century were followed by decades of demographic stabilization and improved living standards, which consolidated the changes achieved and afforded the poor an enhanced, if still

Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, pp. 210–11, 408–9; Craig Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2011), esp. ch. 5. 75 Wales, ‘Life-Cycle’, pp. 355–7. 76 Wales, ‘Living at Their Own Hands’; Michael Roberts, ‘“Waiting upon Chance”: English Hiring Fairs and their Meanings from the 14th to the 20th Century’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1 (1988), 119–58, esp. 131–3, 154. 77 Joan Kent and Steve King, ‘Changing Patterns of Poor Relief in Some English Rural Parishes, Circa 1650 to 1750’, Rural History, 14 (2003), 119–56. 74

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limited, bargaining space. In that sense, the consequences of the changes in parish relief described here entwined with the social ramifications of that other great rupture which occurred in the mid-seventeenth century, the breaking of the century-long wave of population growth and the social and economic restructuring which ensued.

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4

Body Politics in the English Revolution* John Walter

In early 1641, the fall of the king’s leading minister, the earl of Strafford, dominated the news. Unsurprisingly, Strafford’s fate was widely discussed by the writers of letters and pamphlets. But in reporting his trial and execution, a surprising amount of attention was paid to the gestures that marked Strafford’s passage from trial to execution.1 According to one account, both at his appearance and departure from the Tower, Strafford returned the crowds’ salutes, ‘with great humility and courtesie’. But the Scot Robert Baillie reported that at his departure that day this gesture was not reciprocated: there was ‘no man capping him before whom this morning the greatest of all England would have stood dis-covered’. Brought to the bar of the house of lords Strafford, whose own demands as Lord Deputy in Ireland that the king’s officers there kneel to him had provoked criticism,2 was forced to kneel as a delinquent. During the trial, it was noted that when the king attended he removed his hat deferentially to Strafford as a public mark of his support and that subsequently he sent word that as a favour Strafford should be allowed to sit during his trial. Nevertheless, at key points in the trial Strafford fell to his knees, on one occasion after making ‘3 low congees to ye lords’ as an elaborate acknowledgment of their legitimacy; at another key point of controversy over evidence kneeling and ‘humbly craving pardon’. When in the course of the trial he was accused of procuring the death in Ireland of Lord Mountnorris, Strafford again turned to gesture, protesting that he had sat as party, not judge, in the case, and citing as evidence the

* I am grateful to Colin Davis for helpful comment and discussion of an earlier draft of this chapter. 1 For what follows, see A Briefe and Perfect Relation, Of the Answeres and Replies of Thomas Earle of Strafford, To the Articles Exhibited Against him, by the House of Commons on the Thirteenth of Aprill, An. Dom. 1641 (1647); John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: the Overthrow of Charles I (2007), pp. 110, 204, 221; David Cressy, ‘Revolutionary England 1640–1642’, Past and Present, 181 (2003), 165. 2 C.S.P.D. Ireland, 2, 1633–46, p. 185. 81

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fact that he sat uncovered.3 As the trial proceeded, others reported differences between the lords and commons over the conduct of the trial and their respective roles therein which was again given gestural expression. At the trial, the lords sat covered, the commons uncovered, the commons having sought unsuccessfully to sit with their hats on as co-judges with the lords.4 This attention to gesture continued after Strafford was found guilty of treason. Denied his request the night before his execution to see William Laud, his fellow prisoner in the Tower, Strafford bowed extravagantly – ‘to the ground’ – in the direction of Laud’s cell on his way to the scaffold. At the scaffold, after kneeling in prayer, Strafford was reported to have taken his ‘solemne leave of all considerable persons … giving them his hand’. As this example suggests, gesture had an important role to play in the politics of early modern society. Contemporaries attended to gesture in Strafford’s case because it provided a highly visible and ready index of the shifting distribution of power. In all societies, gesture as non-verbal communication has important work to do in the construction of identities and regulation of relationships. Larger-scale patterns of social structuring depend on everyday forms of social interaction and on the construction of social reality and social power acknowledged and undertaken within those interactions. This was even more the case in early modern society. Forms of domination based on the premise of the inherent and natural superiority claimed by elites were literally inscribed on the body. They depended on embodied rituals of deference in which routinized gestures of acknowledgment of superiority and subordination played an important part.5 In the case of early modern England, the weaknesses in the formal power structures gave body politics an added importance. In the absence of a standing army, police force or professional bureaucracy, royal rule – much of which in the provinces was what has been aptly called ‘self-government at the king’s command’ – depended to a large extent on harnessing the social power of landed and local elites as well as the support of the people. For both crown and elites their social power therefore rested more than they might care to admit on a popular acceptance of their right to rule. This underlined the importance of securing popular gestural acknowledgment of their ‘superiority’ and authority. As the duke of Newcastle asked, after the chastening

John H. Timmis, Thine is the Kingdom: The Trial for Treason of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, First Minister to Charles I, and Last Hope of the English Crown (Alabama, 1974), p. 83. 4 C.S.P.D. 1640–1, p. 559. This dispute rumbled on throughout the period. Nicholas and Charles, who were keen to exploit divisions between Lords and Commons, seem to have paid special attention to it: Diary of John Evelyn, Esq., FRS, to which are added a Selection from his Familiar Letters and the Private Correspondence between King Charles I. and Sir Edward Nicholas …, ed. William Bray (4 vols, 1879), IV, 99. 5 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, 1990), pp. 12, 24, 31, 70. 3

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experience of the 1640s and 1650s: ‘What is a Lorde more then a foot-man withoute seremoneye & order – a dispisde Title.’6 Hierarchy was a central organizing principle in early modern England. As in other societies, the body both as social fact and discursive construction played a central role in representing and articulating this hierarchy.7 This was true at all levels of society and not just in relationships between elites and people. At all levels of early modern society, gestural display calibrated in both subtle and direct ways the level of power at play within the relationships within which it was performed. Questions of entitlement and of who initiated, who received, gesture were important, but the non-verbal quality and therefore plasticity of gesture’s exact meaning meant that it was its performance as much as its privilege that had to be closely observed. And in a society that believed in the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the inward mind and external behaviour, both in terms of gesture expressing and forming correct thoughts, both the quality and timing of the performance had to be scrutinized. Within the dynamics of the performance minute differences in the timing of the offering or receiving, or in underor over-performing a gesture might change, challenge or over-determine its conventional meaning. In the face of unprecedented challenges in Church, state and society in the 1640s and 1650s, contemporary concern with gestural displays became even more marked. In a world turned upside down by civil war and confessional conflict, gesture offered an important way to negotiate and to try to read change. This essay offers an exploratory analysis of how paying proper attention to the contemporary concern with the body politics of the period could enlarge our understanding of events in the English revolution and throw fresh light on some of its big political questions. It highlights gesture, but any agenda for future research would need to analyse the performative role of gesture within the context of the theatre of politics in which space, dress and language also had important roles to play. I Deference in early modern society was marked by a series of everyday social rituals in speech and body language. Subordinates bared the head and stood in the presence of those whose superiority they thus acknowledged. Men bowed, women curtsied. The greater the social distance, the greater the S. A. Strong, A Catalogue of Letters and other Historical Documents Exhibited in the Library at Welbeck (1903), p. 213. 7 For a development of these themes, see John Walter, ‘Gesturing at Authority: Deciphering the Gestural Code of Early Modern England’, in The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives, ed. Michael J. Braddick (Past and Present Supplement, 4, 2009), pp. 96–127. 6

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bodily disarrangement demanded. The degree to which the power of both state and elites depended on routine acceptance of their power through the correct performance of quotidian gesture meant that a refusal to perform appropriate gestures was itself a weapon of protest. This helps to explain why in the English revolution it was gestural dissent that seems especially to have aroused the anxieties of the propertied classes.8 Gestural inversion was a powerful sign of a world turned upside down. In the 1640s (and sometimes before), parish churches and cathedrals became sites of gestural conflict. In the 1630s, the Laudian clergy had sought to celebrate the sacred nature of the church as God’s house through the programme of the beauty of holiness and had choreographed a more elaborate series of gestures (bowing to and kneeling at the altar, signing with the cross) in pursuit of ritual uniformity. As An Humble Remonstrance complained in 1641: ‘From the Altar to the Bell-ropes, all were Sacred, no coming in to the Church, no going out, without uncovering, adoration, prostration, once, twice, thrice, forward, backward …’9 Opponents re-described the Laudian service as a superstitious ‘leg religion’ of ‘upstarting’, ‘ducking’, ‘dopping’, ‘cringing’ and ‘crouching’ and they interpreted these gestures as signalling a return to popery.10 In protesting against these changes, they exploited the deniability that gesture as a form of non-verbal communication offered. Thus in the disorders against Bishop Matthew Wren in godly Ipswich it was reported that young boys had ‘stared in his face very uncivilly … in an insolent manner’, repeatedly overtaking him and repeating the gesture, while to one of Wren’s hated officials, ‘boyes in the streets when they sawe him would bowe their knees & say Jesus’.11 The fashion for some Laudians to bow very low as a sign of utmost reverence had prompted a tradesmen’s maid at godly Northampton helpfully to caution one to ‘heed my nose in bowing’.12

John Walter, ‘The Impact of the English Civil War on Society: A World Turned Upside Down?’, in Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), p. 190; Tamsyn Williams, ‘“Magnetic Figures”: Polemical Prints of the English Revolution’, in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (1990), pp. 86–110. 9 An Humble Remonstrance To The Right Honourable, the Lords in the High Court of Parliament (1641), p. 8v [emphasis in original]. 10 Christopher Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford, 2007); Paul S. Seaver, ‘State Religion and Puritan Resistance in early Seventeenth Century England’, in Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West, ed. James D. Tracy and Marguerite Raynow (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 207–49. 11 Frank Grace, ‘“Schismaticall and Factious Humours”: Opposition in Ipswich to Laudian Church Government in the 1630s’, in Religious Dissent in East Anglia III, ed. David Chadd (Norwich, 1996), p. 99. 12 C.S.P.D. 1640–1, p. 352. 8

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Critics of Laudian forms of worship refused to remove their hats, to bow or to adopt appropriate postures of standing, sitting, and kneeling. They parodied and misperformed the hated gestures, taunting ministers, as at Radwinter in Essex, with cries of ‘down upon yor knees, Hob, with much laughter, scornfully putting of his hat, & clapping it on again, bending the knee, & bidding others do in derision’.13 As a defender of orthodoxy complained: They are peevishly perverse, against the laudable, and Christian orders of our Church. When we stand up reverently, they unmannerly sit on their Bums. When we kneel, they either sit or loll on their elbowes. When we are bareheaded, they have their Bonnets, and hats on their zealous Noddles.14

After 1640 churches became sites of disorder and profanity. Given the interdependence of authority in Church and state, these gestural conflicts were thought to pose a wider threat to political and social hierarchies. Thus, in seeking to justify baring the head in church a Laudian visitation sermon drew attention to the role of uncovering, ‘as a signe of reverence in civill worship; for servants uncover to their masters, children to their parents, subjects to their prince’. Similarly, arguments over kneeling in the early Stuart Church had also seen direct parallels drawn between the necessity of this expression of obedience in both Church and state.15 The pamphleteer John Taylor voiced a more widely held opinion of the perceived meaning of these gestural conflicts when he observed, ominously, that ‘Sacrilege and Rebellion doe usually meet in eodem subjecto’.16 ‘Carry your selves dutifully and humbly towards the rich’ was the conventional advice offered the poor as part of their duties.17 In the context of a civil war that institutionalized plebeian attacks on their betters, the failure to perform such gestures might more easily be taken in this period to be an John Walter, ‘“Abolishing Superstition with Sedition”? The Politics of Popular Iconoclasm in England 1640–2’, Past and Present, 183 (2004), 99–104. 14 Richard Carter, The Schismatick Stigmatized: Wherein All Make-Bates Are Branded (1641), p. 7. 15 William Quelch, Church-Customes Vindicated in Two Sermons Preached at Kingston upon Thames (1636), p. 20; Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers and the Rhetoric of Conformity, 1603–1625 (Stanford, 1998), pp. 140–66; Alexander Rosse, Gods House, or the House of Prayer Vindicated from Prophanenesse and Sacriledge (1642); Julian Davies, Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 18–19; Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1998), ch. 2. 16 [John Taylor], Religions Enemies. With a Brief and Ingenious Relation, as by Anabaptists, Brownists, Papists, Familists, Atheists, and Foolists, saucily presuming to tosse Religion in a Blanquet (1641), pp. 6, 13. 17 Henry Rogers, A Treatise of Love (1629), p. 238. 13

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expression of the politics of class. For a landed elite who expected obedience and honour and to be ‘worshipped with cappe and knee’,18 the failure to acknowledge their status might prove especially troubling. Uncovering – baring the head – was a public acknowledgment of the relative status and power between individuals and within institutions. This helps to explain the recurring conflict between lords and commons over who could and could not retain their hat, a revealing symbol of the deeper power tussles between the two houses. That members of Cromwell’s lower house in his second parliament spent time discussing whether they should go ‘bare’ at meetings with the upper house reflected the belief of many members that after the events of the past decade power lay with the lower house. As one M.P. said, ‘Ceremony is sometimes the essence.’19 The ubiquity of ‘hat honour’ in saluting individuals and acknowledging the authority of office and institutions saw its denial, a common device in early modern inter-personal conflict, politicized. That uncovering was expected not only in the royal presence but even in the presence of images of royalty20 or at the mention of the monarch’s name made the denial of hat honour a political act. Thus the failure of Exeter’s mayor and two aldermen to remove their hats while the king’s proclamation declaring war on their protestant neighbours in Scotland was read as a deliberate expression of opposition to royal policy.21 Not simply failing to remove but also cocking the hat was a more aggressive gesture. In May 1641, M.P.s who had been moved to joy by an accommodating message from the king ‘put off their hats in sign of thankfulness’, but only a few days earlier they had shown their displeasure at Charles’ failure to agree to Strafford’s condemnation on a charge of treason by putting on and then cocking their hats in the royal presence.22 If, as the records of the court of chivalry show, hat honour could become a source of conflict between members of the gentry striving for precedence,23 it could also be a gesture of defiance from ‘inferiors’ to superiors. It was widely noted that when the lord chamberlain, the earl of Pembroke, got out of his coach to try to quieten the crowds surrounding parliament in 1641, he did

Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke, 1994), p. 179. 19 Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq. Member in the Parliaments of Oliver and Richard Cromwell, From 1656 to 1659, ed. John Towill Rutt (4 vols, 1828), IV, 351–7. 20 For example, at Portsmouth the mayor was instructed to ensure that no officer or soldier passed the king’s statue without bowing: C.S.P.D. 1635, p. 443. 21 Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 85–6. 22 C. H. Firth, The House of Lords During the Civil War (1910), p. 81; Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament: House of Commons, ed. Maija Jansson (7 vols, Rochester, NY, 2000–7), IV, 298. 23 www.court-of-chivalry.bham.ac.uk/ sub. ‘hat’ [accessed 30 Aug. 2012]. 18

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so ‘with his hatt in his hand’.24 But as a letter writer noted, the earl of Dorset had less success. Hat off, he argued with the ‘common citizens’ face to face ‘and yet the scoundrels would not move’.25 The crowds (and in particular the women) that surrounded parliament at key moments in the 1640s failed to observe postural protocols and often challenged the related proxemic rules by which spatial distance measured social distance. While the petitions they presented were careful to employ the metaphorical language of kneeling and the – by then slightly archaic – language of prostration required by the protocols of petitioning, in reality petitioners crowded bishops, M.P.s and Lords, denying them the social distance and deferential gestures ordinarily expected. Sir Philip Warwick remembered seeing Sir John Strangeways, ‘so crowded up into a corner by a multitude of people, and so clamoured with this noise, that I truly thought him in danger’.26 Within the social world of Westminster there were elaborate rules guiding salutation and precedence between the occupants of coaches, but in 1641 crowds around St Stephen’s palace peered into coaches and demanded justice of the lords occupying them.27 As the earl of Pembroke told his fellow lords, ‘we hear every base fellow say in the street as we pass by in our coaches, that they hope to see us a foot shortly and to be as good men as the Lords’.28 Of course, elite readings of plebeian dissidence tell us as much about the moral panics they induced as the meanings their performers intended. But sometimes the gestures deployed left little ambiguity in the meanings intended. A report from the very beginning of the period complained of the disrespect shown the royal family: ‘The vile rabble of prentices and other discontented scum of the people in and about London passed by the court gates and made horns with their fingers, with other rude and base gestures of disgrace.’29 Political division meant that parliamentary gentry might be subjected to similar scorn, as the Harleys of Brampton Bryan discovered to their cost.30 And very quickly the emergence of radical religious sects and popular political movements saw explicit statements about the radicalism deliberately intended in their body politics. The Fifth Monarchist Abiezer Coppe described how over several days in 1649 he alternated between standing on the streets of London as the rich passed by in their coaches, ‘with my hand fiercely stretched out, my hat cock’t up, staring on them as

B.L., Add. MS 36828, f. 109r. Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), p. 385. 26 Sir Philip Warwick, Memoires of the Reign of King Charles I (3rd edn, 1703), p. 186. 27 Julia Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster (Manchester, 2005), p. 170 and n. 28 Andy Wood, ‘Fear, Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class’, Journal of Social History, 39/1 (2006), 814. 29 Cressy, England on Edge, p. 116. 30 Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990) pp. 143–5. 24 25

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if I would look through them, gnashing with my teeth’, and falling to the ground to kiss the feet of poor beggars and invalids. This was to reverse a postural order in which superiority was mapped on to a deliberately cultivated uprightness and subordination onto lowering the body.31 Gestural defiance gave form to Coppe’s vision of a new world in which ‘kings, princes, lords, great men, must bow to the poorest peasant’.32 As Coppe’s example suggests, individual acts of dissidence became more threatening when explicitly linked to radical programmes.33 That inveterate republican Henry Marten was reported in the newsbooks to have announced in a charge to the Reading quarter sessions in 1648, that he ‘would not suffer the jury or the people to stand bare before the bench, telling them they ought not, because they were the supreme majesty and authority of England’.34 Later, the Leveller leader John Lilburne’s refusal to kneel at the bar of the house of lords spoke to his denial of the Lords’ authority over commoners.35 For the escaped leader of the November 1647 army mutiny, denial of hat honour expressed his belief that General Fairfax had no jurisdiction over him: ‘Therefore I cannot in the least give you any honour, reverence or respect, wither in word, action, or gesture, and if you by force and compulsion compel me again to come before you I must and will by God’s assistance keep on my hat.’36 The refusal of the diggers’ leaders to acknowledge the authority of the army offices was widely reported. Called before Fairfax in 1649, they refused to remove their hats, adding provocatively that ‘they brought their hats to wear on their heads, and not to hold in their hands’. Since he was ‘but their fellow creature’, and since ‘all men are equal’, ‘they are not to stand bare to any, not to the General, being not his servants’.37 It was later reported of Coppe’s Fifth Monarchists that under examination they ‘will not put off their hats to the Protector, and thou him at every word that they speak to him’.38 For the quakers, uncovering and other gestures of salutation and submission offended God since they represented a worshipping of man. Their Brian Manning, 1649: the Crisis of the English Revolution (1992), p. 118; George Vigarello, ‘The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two, ed. Michel Feher (New York, 1989), pp. 148–99. 32 Brian Manning, The Far Left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (1999), pp. 38, 58. 33 We must await the completion of Jon Vallerius’s Essex doctoral thesis for a fuller history of the radicals’ deployment of gesture. 34 H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961), p. 46. 35 Mercurius Politicus Comprising the Summ of All Intelligence, 85, 15–22 Jan. 1652. 36 Manning, Far Left, pp. 84, 86. 37 The Perfect Weekly Account Containing The Daily Proceedings in Parliament and the Councell of State …, 18–25Apr. 1649, p. 455; Perfect Occurrences Of Every Daies Iournall in Parliament, 121, 20–7 Apr. 1649, pp. 987–8. 38 Writing and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. Wilbur Cortez Abbott (4 vols, Cambridge, Mass., 1937–47), IV, 465. 31

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refusal to engage in everyday gestural exchanges with family, neighbours, parish minister and local magistrate met with physical attacks and imprisonment.39 As Lawrence Stone observed: Everyone, everyday, many times a day, by removing his hat or by putting it on, gave visible proof of his acceptance of the great principle of subordination at work at Court, in the street, in the great household … and even within the family. The particular ferocity with which the Quakers were treated can only be explained if we realise how shattering a psychic blow to the conceptual framework of society was their quiet refusal to remove their headgear.40

What made the refusal of the radicals to observe the protocols of the early modern gestural order particularly threatening was that there was no formal legal sanction for gestures in a normative order that was learned mainly through a process of primary and secondary socialisation. As such, their performance was, as with many gestures, largely out of focal awareness. But the body politics of the radicals brought them into focus. The challenge of the quaker leader George Fox thoroughly discomforted the judge at his trial: ‘Shew mee where Itt is written or printed in any law of England where any such thinge is commanded: shew it mee & I woulde putt off my hatt.’41 ‘Thou cannot produce one Scripture out of the whole Bible, that will prove that Magistrates ought to be honoured with Hat and Knee’, argued another quaker.42 Radicals not only refused to remove their hats in salutation or in acknowledgment, but they criticised what they saw as the asymmetry of the exchange between superior and subordinate: If a poor man come before a rich man it may be the rich man will move his hat, that is called courtesy and humility; but the poor man must stand with his hat off before him and that is called honour and manners and due respect to him.43

In society, failure to perform the expected gesture, at the appropriate time and in the appropriate space, could always offer a political challenge within the micro-politics of that ‘little commonwealth’ of the family and household. Given the investment placed in the correct performance of gestures by those whose superiority they acknowledged, the deliberate withholding by subordinates of appropriate gestures of salutation and submission could

Francis Higginson, A Brief Relation of the Irreligion of the … Quakers (1653), p. 28; Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society 1655–1725 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 45, 49–50, 57–8, 58, 133–5. 40 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 34–5. 41 The Journal of George Fox, ed. Norman Penney (2 vols, Cambridge, 1911), I, 211–12. 42 William Canton, The Moderate Enquirer … (1658), p. 29. 43 Manning, Far Left, p. 59. 39

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prove alarming. In the context of the 1640s and 1650s, the refusal of at least some of the people to adopt the appropriate gestural forms, either in their interactions with their God, their rulers or social betters, was interpreted within the wider politics of Church and state as a radical challenge. As George Williams complained, the radicals’ reading of Christ’s injunction to call no man father on earth and therefore to deny appropriate gestural acknowledgment was the cause of such undutifulnesse and untowardnesse, such contempts of superiors, and such rebellions to Authoritie as is beyond expression; when as by their disloyaltie, being thus bred in them from their cradle, they first despise their father, then their Teachers, then their King, and then God himself.44

II In June 1642 the Commons had notice of an engraving of Sir John Hotham, the man who had denied Charles entry to Hull, which had Hotham ‘riding on horseback in his warlike habit, and the KING standing bare-headed at his horse’s feet’.45 Here was a shockingly graphic depiction of the inversion that supporters of the king feared would be a consequence of political attacks on Charles. As ‘His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions’ complained: ‘We may be waited on bare-headed; We may have Our hand kist; The Style of Majestie Continued to Us … but as to true and reall Power We should remain but the outside, but the Picture, but the signe of a King.’46 Under Charles, the royal court had adopted a greater formality. Insisting upon the appropriate gestural markers of uncovering and (repeatedly) kneeling, and allied with increasingly formalized rituals of reverence, this new ceremonial order sought to emphasize the sacred nature of the monarch. In early modern England, as in other European monarchies, the deliberate appropriation of gestures associated with a christian liturgy of the mass or communion in what has been called the ‘transmigration of the sacred’, and their deployment in carefully choreographed ceremonies like dining ‘in State’, offered an image of sacral monarchy.47 Counsel might have to be given, addresses delivered and the litany read, from a kneeling position.48

George Williams, The Discovery of Mysteries … (Oxford, 1643), pp. 56–7. Helen Pierce, Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (New Haven, 2008), pp. 10–11. 46 His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions … (1642), pp. 135–6. 47 The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime 1500–1750, ed. John Adamson (1999). 48 Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (2005), p. 215; Ovatio Carolina. The Triumph of King Charles, Or The Triumphant Manner And Order, Of Receiving His Maiesty into His City of London … (1641), p. 92. 44 45

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Distance and decorum became the hallmark of a court, to whose spaces increasingly restricted access itself became a careful marker of hierarchy.49 Behind these new orders regulating the court was the stated desire ‘to establish government and order in our court which from thence may spread with more order through all parts of our kingdoms’.50 But there is evidence to suggest that this new gestural order contributed directly to the disorders in Charles’s kingdoms.51 After the Restoration, the duke of Newcastle famously wrote of Charles I’s neglect of the old nobility, those who ‘did not make le Bon Reverance’.52 In Scotland, too, Charles’ austere gestural style brought him problems. There relations at court and between the classes were less formal. And, in contrast to England, the handshake was ubiquitous and appears to have been regularly practised across class boundaries. At the negotiations with the Scots in 1639, Charles’s expectation that the nobility should kneel to him lost him support.53 Despite the allusion in their petition to falling in supplication at the king’s feet, when the covenanters did meet the king at Berwick they sat with their backs to the door, a well-understood gesture of disrespect, and they failed to kneel to him when he entered the tent. For his part, Charles brushed aside the earl of Rothes’s offer to kiss his hand.54 Into the 1640s there seems to have been a realization by the king or by his councillors that he needed to revive the public gestural exchanges with his subjects at which Elizabeth had excelled.55 In 1640 popular protests had driven the king from London, but in November 1641 his return to the City after his journey to Scotland was carefully choreographed to try to recapture support in this vital political centre. Again, gesture played a large part. As John Milton noted, ‘throughout all the City’ Charles, ‘courteously saluted the people by the often putting off his Hat … a favour which till then neither himself or his Father before him had never bestowed upon the vulgar …’56 In a further retreat from royal protocol, Charles embraced the lord mayor on his departure.57 Ceremonies of Charles I: the Note Books of John Finet 1628–1641, ed. Albert J. Loomie (New York, 1987). 50 Sharpe, ‘Image of Virtue’, p. 258. 51 Judith Richards, ‘“His Now Majestie” and the English Monarchy: The Kingship of Charles I before 1640’, Past and Present, 113 (1986), 70–96. 52 Strong, Catalogue, p. 213. 53 David Stevenson, ‘The English Devil of Keeping State: Elite Manners and the Downfall of Charles I in Scotland’, in People and Power in Scotland: Essays in Honour of T. C. Smout, ed. Roy Mason and Norman MacDougall (Edinburgh, 1992), pp. 126–44. 54 N.R.O., Doughty MSS, Ayl 304; C.S.P.D. 1639, p. 310. 55 R. Malcom Smuts, ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: the English Royal Entry in London, 1485–1642’ in The First Modern Society: Essays in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beir, David Cannadine and James S. Rosenheim (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 65–93. 56 John Milton, The Life and Reigne of King Charles … (1651), p. 78. 57 Ovatio Carolina, pp. 13–28. 49

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The evidence suggests that the king and his advisors saw the potential benefits of introducing a new gestural regime. Kissing the royal hand had always been a public mark of royal favour, but into the 1640s this appears to have been granted to a much wider group than office holders and members of the elite. In 1641, the king’s secretary wrote recommending that in his journey through Hertfordshire, ‘ye better sorte may kisse your Royal hand & ye rest be spoken to by yor majestie, it will give them very great contentm[en] t’.58 By contrast, withdrawal of the privilege might express royal disapproval. A 1642 pamphlet reported that when Charles was at Nottingham to raise his banner the mayor, whose loyalty was suspect, was sent for and in the customary ritual surrendered into the royal hand and received back again the town’s mace but – it was noted – the king ‘gave him no hand to kiss’.59 It may be significant that, in sharp contrast to his more reluctant practice before 1640, Charles appears to have freely practised the one gesture that allowed early modern monarchs to set aside gestural protocol and to make bodily contact with the people – touching for the king’s evil.60 Charles may also have tried through gesture to moderate some of the criticism his actions would otherwise have attracted. The accounts of Charles’ attempt to arrest Pym and others in January 1642 suggest that Charles might have attempted – unsuccessfully – to use gesture to lessen the impact of his entry into the house of commons: it was noted that while in the House he uncovered and bowed to the members and ‘left putting off his hat till he came to the doore’.61 The 1640s saw the king become the butt of seditious words, satirical comment, and political attacks. We do not know to what extent this ‘desacralization’ of the monarchy prompted a consequent shift in his gestural acknowledgment. We have suggestive individual episodes. For example, when Charles I summoned Gloucester in 1643, the messengers sent in reply by the citizens and soldiers were said to have turned their backs on the king and clapped on their hats as soon as they had delivered their message. A letter writer reported a more troubling incident. When the king was leaving the Isle of Wight, a man ‘impudently (with his Hat on) stept up into the Coach’ and Charles had physically to push him away.62 According Diary of John Evelyn, IV, 139. A true and Exact Relation of the Manner of his Maiesties setting up His Standard at Nottingham on Munday the 22 of August 1642, p. 1; Truth from Leicester and Nottingham AUGUST 1. Anno Dom. 1642 (1642), p. 1. 60 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 227–33; Richards, ‘“His Now Majestie”’, pp. 88–93. 61 Verney Papers: Notes of Proceedings in the Long Parliament, ed. John Bruce (Camden Soc., 31, 1845), p. 139; The Journal of Sir Simon D’Ewes From the First Recess of The Long Parliament to the Withdrawal of King Charles from London, ed. Willson Havelock Coates (New Haven, 1942), p. 3. 62 Memoirs Of the Two Last Years of that Unparallell’d Prince, of ever Blessed Memory, King Charles (2 vols, 1702), I, 198. 58 59

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to a hostile royalist source, Charles’s touching for the king’s evil, a gesture meant to denote the sacral character of the English monarchy, led to his being called ‘Stroker’ by his guards.63 We do not as yet know whether Charles’s surrender and subsequent capture by the army saw a collapse in his gestural acknowledgment by his captors. But the testimony of a witness at the post-Restoration trial of Hugh Peters is suggestive of a shift in attitude, at least among the troopers. Seeing him put off his hat to the king as he was being brought in a coach from Windsor, the troopers threw him ‘into ditch, horse and all’.64 Given the importance of the king to all sides in the negotiations that followed the end of war, it is likely that Charles continued to be accorded appropriate respect by those with whom he negotiated. As the army’s prisoner, Charles was allowed to continue to hold a presence chamber and to accept the respects of the provincial gentry.65 But amongst the recorded episodes of kissing of the royal hand, we do not know whether the army officers were granted or paid this respect, although the parliamentary commissioners at the various negotiations were said to have done so.66 Brought to St James’s palace, Charles continued to maintain a presence chamber, to dine publicly there and to be served by his servants on bended knee and, according to Sir Thomas Herbert, ‘other accustomed Ceremonies of State [were] observed’.67 However, shortly before his trial the council of officers put a stop to the traditional ceremonies of state and ordered that he be no longer served ‘upon the knee’.68 At his trial it was again the gestural exchange between Charles and the court to which the newsbooks paid attention and by which contemporaries sought to understand events. Reports noted the collapse of hat honour. Some of those who brought him to his trial had failed to uncover in his presence. On his entry into the court Charles ‘immediately seated himself’ ‘not at all moving his hat, or otherwise shewing the least respect to the Court’, a pattern repeated throughout the trial.69 According to the report in The Perfect Weekly Account, Charles sat down ‘without moving of his

Thomas, Decline of Magic, p. 233. Cobbett’s Complete Collection Of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest period to the Present Time (33 vols, 1809–26), V, col. 1126. 65 Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and its Debates 1647–1648 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 114–15. 66 Warwick, Memoirs, I, 7, 69. 67 Memoirs Of the Two Last Years, I, 106, 109. 68 Samuel R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War 1642–1649, (4 vols, 1904), IV, 286. 69 The King’s Tryal Together, With the manner of his bringing before the High Court of Justice (1649), pp. 1–2, 9; State Trials, IV, cols 1069, 1073, 1122; Sean Kelsey, ‘The Trial of Charles I’, E.H.R., 118 (2003), 602–10; Kelsey, ‘The Death of Charles I’, H.J., 45 (2002), 743–5. 63 64

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hat or any such ceremony given him by any of the Court’.70 Bradshaw, the president of the court, was said to have ‘insolently reprehended the King for not having stirred his hat’.71 Other accounts recorded that some of the soldiers present spat in Charles’s face.72 The king’s execution was also a site for a final round of gestural display. While those who accompanied the king were bare-headed, the king knelt to his prayers and in an echo of his gesture at his coronation was forced to prostrate himself on the block.73 III By March 1649, ambassadors were reporting that at an audience mention of the king’s name saw the lords raise their hats, ‘but in the Lower House no one’, though when the States General was mentioned the M.P.s did uncover.74 We do not yet know after the fall of the monarchy and abolition of the house of lords how far, if at all, this led to a shift in the nature of gestural exchanges. John Milton spoke approvingly of a republic ‘wherein they that are greatest … were not elevated above their brethren … walk the streets as other men, may be spoken to freely, familiarly, friendly without adoration’.75 But we lack a sense of how far, if at all, the republic developed new forms of inter-personal exchange. Nor, despite the moral panic of the landed classes, do we know if political change led to changes in the social grammar of the body in civil society. Complaints by country gentlemen or foreigners about their treatment on London’s streets had a long history, but Sir John Reresby’s comments about his return to England in 1657 are intriguing: ‘The citizens and common people of London had then soe far imbibed the custome and manners of a Commonwealth that they could scarce endure the sight of a gentleman, soe that the common salutation to a man well dressed was “French dog” or the like.’76 Below the level of the gentry, the handshake was the preferred gesture of greeting between (male) peers. As such, the handshake in early modern society shared the key meanings later identified by work within the social

The Perfect Weekly Account …, 17–24 Jan. 1648[/9], p. 361. Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (2008), p. 576. 72 The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer …, 295, 16–23 Jan. 1648[/9], p. 1230; State Trials, V, col. 1126. 73 State Trials, IV, col. 1132; R. Malcom Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of the Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1993), p. 201. 74 C.S.P.V., 28, 1647–52, no. 246. 75 Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: the Political Culture of the English Commonwealth 1649–1653 (Manchester, 1997), p. 94. 76 Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. Andrew Browning (2nd edn, 1991), pp. 21–2. 70 71

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sciences. As a gesture that framed social encounters of greeting and parting, to function properly the handshake operates as a sign of access and solidarity. The handshake transforms the offer of the hand into a request for access and acknowledgment; in turn, acceptance of the hand transforms receiving into repaying. Thus as an ‘access ritual’, the physical act of the handshake represented a mutual denial of deference and mutual recognition of worth.77 Requiring the co-ordinated effort of two performers, the integration and effort required in shaking hands can be seen as indicative of solidarity. As John Bulwer noted in his 1644 work on the ‘natural language of the hand’, those who ‘willingly EMBRACE EACH OTHERS HAND signifie that they are both content that their work shall be common’.78 The popular description of the handshake in early modern society as extending ‘the right hand of fellowship’ points to precisely these qualities. It was this that made the handshake a symbol of republicanism, adopted in later revolutions as the ‘ultimate example of the sense of community conveyed by the new [revolutionary] etiquette’.79 In place of the salutations of uncovering and bowing – what radicals dismissed as ‘cap and knee’80 – quakers used the handshake. Within the English revolution, there were those like John Lilburne who talked of good men giving ‘the right hand of fellowship’81 but, quakers apart, we do not yet know whether other radicals in the Revolution adopted this as a deliberate political symbol of the new social and political order they sought to achieve. However, there is some evidence to suggest that one further disturbing aspect of the 1640s was the willingness of plebeians to appropriate the initiative in instigating gestural exchanges. Gentlemen might on occasion extend the hand to their social inferiors, but in these cases it was they who initiated the exchange. As William Cecil was said to have advised his son: Towards thy superiors be humble yet generous, with thy equals familiar yet receptive, towards inferiours shew much humility and some familiarity, as to bow thy body, stretch forth thy hand, uncover thy head and such like popular Complements … [this] gaines a good report, which once gained may easily be kept, for

Deborah Schiffrin, ‘Handwork as Ceremony: The Case of the Handshake’, Semiotica, 12:3 (1974), 189–202; Peter M. Hall and Dee Ann Spencer Hall, ‘The Handshake as Interaction’, Semiotica, 45:3/4 (1983), 249–64. 78 [John Bulwer], Chirologia, or, The natural language of the hand composed of the speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof … (1644), pp. 109–10. 79 Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929 (Oxford, 2000), p. 64. My thanks to Steve Smith for drawing this work to my attention. 80 George H. Sabine, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Ithaca, NY, 1941), pp. 631–2. 81 John Lilburne, A Manifestation from Lieutenant Col. John Lilburne … (1649), p. 4. 77

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high humilities take such roote in the minds of the multitude as they are easilier won by unprofitable curtesies, then by churlish benefits.82

But writing from the army assembled to fight the Scots in 1640, one officer complained how every morning when he first came among his troops, they ‘shake me soe hartely by the hand, that I was once in doubt, I should [have] had my arme shouke of in kuatresie [courtesy]’.83 The familiar tone of irony which members of the early modern elite employed when talking to each other about the behaviour of their inferiors cannot disguise the hint of anxiety at the possible consequences of this. Here, plebeian initiative and over-performance challenged the rule that it was people of higher status who initiated touching subordinates and that subordinates were expected to observe bodily formality while bodily relaxation was restricted to their ‘betters’. Physical violence was to follow this transgression of the gestural order. The troops mutinied and in search of catholics among their officers exacted from those whose faith they doubted proper protestant gestures in the taking of communion, finally in separate episodes ritualistically killing two of their number.84 These were not to be the only examples of plebeian appropriation and over-performance of gestures in inversionary parodies of judicial and Church rituals in the 1640s and 1650s. Both the agency they claimed and the disrespect they displayed alarmed their ‘betters’. IV Publicly, political uncertainty meant that contemporaries were especially alert to the gestural exchanges that signalled the nature and distribution of political power after 1649. The appointment of Sir Oliver Fleming as master of ceremonies to the council of state (he was subsequently to act in a similar role for Cromwell) and the paper he presented on practices in other republics reflected the regime’s recognition of the need to consider how the commonwealth should represent its power.85 Cromwell’s assumption of the protectorship, and with it the return of a single human body to represent the state, raised anew the nature of an appropriate gestural code. Historians have debated whether his investiture, especially the second investiture in 1657 with its more obvious borrowings from royal ritual, presaged a return William Cecil, The Counsell of a Father to his Sonne in ten severall Precepts. Left as a legacie at his death (1611), 8th precept; Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana, 1929), pp. 80–4. 83 T.N.A., P.R.O., SP 16/460/47. 84 I am preparing an article which examines the meanings of these episodes. 85 C.S.P.D. 1649–50, pp. 113–17; Michael J. Seymour, ‘Public Relations in Interregnum England: Aspects of Official and Unofficial Pro-Government Propaganda, 1648–1660’, University of Cambridge Ph.D., ch. 5; Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, passim. 82

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to monarchical forms of government.86 Once again domestic and, especially foreign, observers read carefully the gestures associated with the protector and protectorate to try to establish the nature of Cromwellian government. Paying these closer attention, it is possible to contribute fresh ideas to the debate around Cromwell and kingship. From an early point in his recorded history Cromwell was able to distinguish between his personal and his public body and the differing obligations these distinctions entailed. This is neatly brought out in two contrasting episodes. In the famous episode of iconoclasm at Ely in 1644 when Cromwell came into the cathedral during divine service ‘with his hat on’, the explanation for this was to be found in his then description of himself, ‘as a man under authority’. By contrast, when Cromwell with a troop of horse visited his uncle and godfather Sir Oliver Cromwell to disarm him, in accordance with the gestural code that required children to uncover in front of their betters, ‘he would not keep his hat on in his presence’.87 Details of Cromwell’s personal gestural practice are otherwise hard to recover. Interestingly, his speech to his last parliament showed an awareness and appreciation of the egalitarian social meanings inherent in the practice of shaking hands, talking of his choice of ‘men that can meet you wheresoever you go and shake hands with you and tell you that it is not titles, it is not lordship, it is not this nor that, that they value, but a Christian and an English interest …’88 But of what Cromwell’s own practice was and with whom in shaking hands we have as yet little evidence. We do know that he could register greater intimacy with his social equals by the use of his body. After their meeting, George Fox records Cromwell ‘catching his hand’ as he was to leave.89 He seems regularly to have greeted Colonel John Hutchinson with a ‘brotherly embrace’.90 At the day of public humiliation for success in Ireland he is described in meeting Fairfax as ‘laying his hands in a familiar way on his shoulder’. This contrasts with an earlier episode where following the Self-Denying Ordinance he expected to be discharged from the army and was reported to be going to kiss Fairfax’s hand to take his leave. Perhaps this was a further example of Cromwell’s ability to distinguish the personal Roy Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell (1977); Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealth in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven & London, 2010), pp. 462–537; Seymour, ‘Public Relations’, ch. 6; Andrew Barclay, ‘The Lord Protector and his Court’, in The Cromwellian Protectorate, ed. Patrick Little (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 195–215. 87 John Walker, An Attempt Towards Recovering an Account of the Number and Sufferings of the Clergy of the Church of England … (1714), pt. II, p. 23; Warwick, Memoires, I, 251–2. 88 Writing and Speeches, ed. Abbott, IV, 729–30. My thanks to Colin Davis for this reference. 89 Journal George Fox, p. 167. 90 Burton, Diary, I, 97n.; Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (Oxford, 1973), pp. 80, 211, 212. 86

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and official in his gestural display.91 Unfortunately the sources do not apparently allow us to recover how Cromwell interacted with the king at their meeting, although it might perhaps be assumed that had he not followed conventional gestural practice that this would have attracted hostile royalist comment. Cromwell’s ability to make this distinction between his personal and political body allowed him, when protector, to gesture in a way that honoured the authority his office bore and those from whom he derived his power. This was particularly the case when meeting foreign ambassadors. Convention required that ambassadors be accorded the respect the monarch or republic they represented would receive. As such, embassies were a potential minefield for disputes over gesture and precedent. This concern for their honour made ambassadors some of the most assiduous observers of Cromwellian gesture and their reports of their audiences and of important political events paid particular attention to the gestures Cromwell used and expected from those around him, an interest shared by the newsbooks. Thus the audience with the lords ambassadors for the Dutch republic in early 1654 was widely reported. The audience took place at the Banqueting House with very large numbers present. Within the proxemics and lateral symbolism of the early modern spatial order a ‘very rich’ chair of state was set at the more prestigious upper end of the hall with three high stools for the ambassadors to the (privileged) right-hand side. Cromwell entered first, ‘at whose coming in, all the people put off their hats and stood bare, and his Highness put off his Hat to the people’. He approached, but did not sit in the chair, remaining standing – to its left – and covered while the ambassadors entered. As soon as the ambassadors entered the room, ‘they put off their hats to salute His Highnesse … and His Highnesse did the like to them, and so again a second and a third time as they came near to his Highnesse … and after a low salute of His Highnesse and the Lord Ambassador each to the other’, Cromwell and they put on their hats while all others remained ‘bare’. Still standing, Cromwell and the ambassadors delivered their speeches, ‘putting off their Hats to salute each other’. The audience ended with the ambassadors on their departure turning back three times to salute Cromwell.92 Cromwell’s ability to distinguish between the gestural obligations of his private and political body meant that on public occasions he might appear to act in ways that encouraged those who wanted anyway to believe it that he aspired to rule as king. In January, the Venetian secretary in England, though reporting that Cromwell stood to receive him and uncovered at his

Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, ed. John Morrill (1990), p. 64n. Several Proceedings of State Affairs in England, Scotland and Ireland …, 232, 2–9 Mar. 1654, pp. 3682–4; The Whole Manner of the Treaty, with the Several Speches that Passed in the Banqueting-House at White-hall … (1654).

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entry, remaining so until he began to speak and uncovering each time he bowed on mentioning the Signory, reported: I have been particular in mentioning the details of the ceremony to show the forms observed under the new rule, as well as the tone of sovereign and supreme command assumed by the Protector. He may be said to assume additional state and majesty daily, and lacks nothing of royalty but the name, which he is generally expected to assume when he wants to.93

The gestures that accompanied Cromwell’s rise to protector were of considerable interest, since observers believed that the gestural exchange could reveal both the nature of the power Cromwell exercised and his own conception of his office and authority. Thus contemporaries noted how and when Cromwell was accorded gestural acknowledgment of his authority. Attention again focussed on the most immediate and visible gesture of hat honour. At the dissolution of the Rump parliament in April 1653, Cromwell’s failure to do hat honour signalled the Rump’s loss of power. Sitting initially uncovered among the M.P.s, he stood as he rebuked them, ‘with his hat on his head’. The armed musketeers he called in were also noted as appearing ‘with their hats on their head’. On seizing the mace, Cromwell had uncovered, but he had then put his hat back on after its removal.94 At Cromwell’s entries into the City, reports noted that ‘the people put off their Hats, and had reciprocal respects return’d from him again’. Similarly at his investiture as lord protector, first in 1653 and again in 1657, contemporaries carefully noted that while Cromwell wore his hat those who accompanied and attended the protector were bare (though it is worth pondering the fact that some of the chief officers of the army were reported to have worn their hats).95 While at his first installation in December 1653 he was bareheaded, after his investiture he ‘immediately hereupon sat downe covered’ in the chair of state, ‘the Court continuing all bare’.96 Noting the gestural exchanges that then took place encouraged the Venetian secretary again to think in terms of monarchy: army officers and office-holders – ‘hat in hand’ – did him homage ‘in the obsequious and respectful form observed towards the late kings.’97 Cromwell’s relationships with his subsequent parliaments

C.S.P.V. 29, 1653–54, nos 214, 299. Sydney Papers, Consisting Of a Journal Of the Earl of Leicester, And Original Letters of Algernon Sydney, ed. R. W. Blencoe (1825), pp. 139–40; Kelsey, Republic, pp. 104–5, 166. 95 Several Proceedings, 221, 15–22 Dec. 1653, pp. 3498–9. 96 The Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings of … Armies, 210, 12–19 Dec. 1653, p. 3091; B.L., Harleian MS 991, f. 10v; Several Proceedings …, 221, p. 3499. 97 Burton, Diary, II, 511–15; C.S.P.V. 29, 1653–4, no. 198. Unfortunately the calendared item does not reveal whether the secretary’s report details what precise gesture(s) this entailed. 93 94

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were read also in terms of the gestural exchanges that accompanied his processions and speeches to parliament.98 The failure to recognize Cromwell’s ability to distinguish between his personal and political bodies has encouraged both contemporaries and later historians to read into Cromwell’s use of conventional gestural forms in office evidence that he might have been willing to assume the crown, had there not been marked opposition from within the ranks of the army. But Cromwell’s gestural practice also sharply differed in critical respects from that of monarchy.99 When he dined in public, he appears not to have been served on bended knee, nor does kneeling to the protector feature much, if at all, in social exchanges with him.100 Ironically, when the radical Gerrard Winstanley presented his tract, The Law of Freedom, to Cromwell, ‘humbly prostrating my self and it before you’, he did so only metaphorically in print.101 At meetings with his ambassadors and with his parliaments, Cromwell chose to stand rather than to sit in the chair of state provided. Although hard to prove, it seems that in terms of the control of personal space where the physical distance between self and others served as an index of social power, Cromwell showed himself more relaxed than Charles I.102 He delivered his speeches, as at his first parliament, ‘standing up with his head bare’. In public processions, he engaged in what a sneering account of his triumphant return to London after the Irish expedition called ‘a complementall civilitie’.103 For example, when he went to the City as lord protector in February 1654, it was reported that, ‘as his Highness passed by, the People were uncovered, and his Highness as he went, continually moved his hat to the people’.104 At audiences Cromwell appears to have refused requests to permit his hand to be kissed and on the occasion when this was promised to the Venetian secretary at the very beginning of his protectorship – by his master of ceremonies, Oliver Fleming, not Cromwell himself – there

98 Several Proceedings, 258, 31 Aug.–7 Sept. 1654, p. 4090; The Weekly Post …, no. 195, 5–12 Sept., 1654, p. 1560; C.S.P.V. 29, 1653–4, no. 319; Burton Diary, I, xv–xix; Prestwich’s Respublica; or a Display of the Honours, Ceremonies, Ensigns of the Common-Wealth, Under the Protectorship of Oliver Cromwell (1787), pp. 4–19; Mercurius Politicus, no. 369, 25 June–2 July 1657, pp. 7883–4; Seymour, ‘Public Relations’, pp. 261–2. 99 Paul Hunneyball, ‘Cromwell’s Style: The Architectural Trappings of the Protectorate Regime’, in Cromwellian Protectorate, ed. Little, p. 76. 100 On his servants not kneeling, see Sherwood, Court, p. 70. 101 Sabine, Works, p. 514. My thanks to Jon Vallerius for this reference. 102 But see the comments of Sir John Reresby, Memoirs, p. 23n. 103 Mercurius Pragmaticus (For King Charles) Communicating Intelligence from all Parts Touching all Affaires, Designes, Humors, and Conditions throughout the Kingdome, Pt. 2, no. 52, 30 Apr.–7 May, 1650, Fff2. 104 Certain Passages of Every Dayes Intelligence From the Army and his Highness the Lord Protector .., 4, 3–10 Feb. 1653/4, pp. 30–1.

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is no evidence that this is in fact happened.105 Indeed, when the Dutch ambassadors at their departure in 1654 begged leave to present twenty of their gentlemen to have the honour of kissing his hand, it was noted that ‘instead thereof his Highness advanced near the steps and bowed to all the gentlemen one by one, and put out his hand to them at a distance by way of congratulation’.106 That the significance of Cromwell’s gestural practice was understood by some is reflected in the account of an audience with the lord protector granted the mayor and members of the Guildford corporation. Standing ten paces from them, Cromwell approached nearer, and gave his answer to their request, standing uncovered, ‘which may be truly termed gracious’. Treated ‘with so much courtesy and respect’, the delegation were said to have concluded, ‘that they are confident that his Highness is pleased with those phylacteries and fringes of state (if pleased with them at all) because he must’.107 Contemporaries who longed for the certainties of monarchical rule and former comrades and allies who feared Cromwell’s corruption by kingship saw what they wanted to see. As Kevin Sharpe argues, ‘certainly after early 1653, he made his person inseparable from his power and the representation of his authority a vital means to the establishment and maintenance of his protectoral authority’.108 But despite the attempts of publicists to represent the Cromwellian body in terms of the princely magnificence that hereditary and sacral kingship demanded, Cromwell’s more relaxed body language remained what Laura Knoppers has in another context described as Cromwell’s ‘plain style’.109 Clearly, there is scope here for a careful tracking of Cromwell’s use of body language through his rise to power, but this reading of his gestural practice suggests that he would have found the gesture of the crowning of his effigy at his lying-in state unwelcome. V This chapter has been able to do no more than sketch out what an attention to gesture might have to contribute to a history of the English revolution. The recent shifts in the political history of the period, from the history of C.S.P.V. 29, 1653–4, no. 190. C. H. Firth, ‘The Court of Oliver Cromwell’, The Cornhill Magazine, n.s., III, 15 (Sept. 1897), 357. 107 Firth, ‘Cromwell’, pp. 357–8. 108 Sharpe, Image Wars, p. 465. 109 The Unparalleld Monarch. Or, The Portraiture of a Matchless Prince, exprest in some Shadows of his Highness my Lord Protector (1656), pp. 13–14, 19–20, 76–9, 88–9, 93; Laura Lunger Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge, 2000). 105 106

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high politics to a social history of politics which recognises the deeper social contours to the early modern political and to the history of (a more widely shared) political culture, should see the performative politics of gesture as central, not marginal, to those histories. As we have seen, the role of gesture in expressing and acknowledging forms of authority in early modern England meant that a focus on gesture provides the historian with an index by which to measure the impact of the political and religious conflicts of the period, contemporaries’ understandings of those changes and the range of their responses to them. That contemporaries themselves recognized the importance of gesture in helping to make sense of the political changes they witnessed means that it should be possible to recover a fuller history of the politics of gesture within the public sphere of the English revolution. A period in which parliament fought the king, gentlemen each other and in which plebeians were mobilized to fight their betters on both sides doubtless produced a myriad of situations, which remain to be recovered, in which gestural exchange was used to negotiate the incivilities of a civil war. More elusive is the question of to what extent political and religious change in weakening the traditional structures of control saw a shift in the social history of gesture in this period. Contemporaries certainly believed this to be the case and both print culture and political polemic helped to fashion the belief that in the family, in gender roles, in the Church and the sects and in relations between elite and people traditional gestural forms were being challenged and disregarded. But how far these beliefs captured social reality remains the challenge for further research. But at one level this does not matter. The moral panic that this created helped to ensure the political impetus for the Restoration. It was surely no coincidence that when Charles II was restored he was careful to adopt, and contemporaries quick to note, a gestural regime very different from that of his father: ‘Willing to give them satisfaction, [he] would have none kept out but gave free access to all sorts of people.’ As the Venetian ambassador reported: ‘His majesty stood uncovered, a formality not observed by any crown … but adopted by this king wth everyone, whatever his character, for he excels all other potentates in humanity and affability.’110

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5

The Franchise Debate Revisited: The Levellers and the Army* Philip Baker

Can there be anything left to say about the so-called franchise debate? It is now fifty years since C. B. Macpherson, in a provocative chapter in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, controversially rejected the traditional view of the Levellers as advocates of universal male suffrage. Based on his reading of the Putney debates and the Levellers’ pamphlets and petitions, Macpherson argued that the Levellers consistently supported restrictive franchise proposals that would have excluded all those who, in their opinion, had forfeited their birthright by alienating their property in their labour: namely, beggars, almsmen and servants, with Macpherson taking the latter term to mean all persons receiving wages. What underlay these exclusions, he contended, was the Levellers’ acceptance of the values of a possessive market society, one in which true freedom – and hence the right to vote – is contingent upon full economic independence and the proprietorship of one’s own person and capacities.1 The subsequent scholarly debate over Macpherson’s thesis generated a vast amount of often highly tendentious literature and rumbled on well into the 1980s. Although his arguments found some initial support, this soon gave way to their trenchant rejection by the vast majority of commentators, who raised a number of common objections.2 These included that the Levellers were a far less homogenous group than Macpherson assumed; that they had had no fixed position on * I am grateful to audiences at the universities of Reading and Warwick for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter 1 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962; repr. 1989), pp. 107–59. 2 The summary that follows draws on the work of Macpherson’s most influential critics, including: Peter Laslett, ‘Market Society and Political Theory’, H.J., 7 (1964), 150–4; J. C. Davis, ‘The Levellers and Democracy’, Past and Present, 40 (1968), 174–80; Keith Thomas, ‘The Levellers and the Franchise’, in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–60, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London and Basingstoke, 1972; repr. 1982), pp. 57–78; Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘The Political Theory of the Levellers: Putney, Property and Professor Macpherson’, Political Studies, 24 (1976), 397–422. 103

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the franchise (or on a number of other issues); that far from anticipating the developments of capitalism, the Levellers’ economic ideas were inherently regressive; and that when they spoke of excluding servants from the vote, they were referring to household servants and apprentices, and not all wage-earners. As a result, many scholars continued to see the Levellers as supporters of manhood suffrage, albeit forced to make concessions over the issue in their dealings with the grandees of the New Model Army; while others maintained that their basic proposals would have enfranchised all male householders, with the exception of almsmen. Nevertheless, all were agreed that the question of who should vote at parliamentary elections was never of critical importance to the Levellers, and consequently the issue has been discussed rarely, if at all, in recent decades.3 As one commentator lamented in looking back on the franchise debate in the 1990s, ‘Ironically, the exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) attention devoted to this narrow topic has actually decreased our ability to understand the Levellers.’4 This chapter argues, by contrast, that the topic of the franchise reveals a great deal about the Levellers and the army – and wider issues regarding political participation – once we recognize the need, in the light of recent scholarship, to approach it from new directions. First, although writing on early modern parliamentary elections and voters was abundant in the second half of the twentieth century,5 a trend not entirely unrelated to the franchise debate, the focus of much current research on the expression and representation of political power lies elsewhere. This concerns the extent of self-determination and the breadth and depth of political participation in England’s villages, towns and cities: the so-called ‘unacknowledged republic’ of the dispersed state.6 One of the suggestions of this chapter is that, in the

Useful overviews of the subject by David Wootton can be found in ‘Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1750, III, ed. J. H. Burns with Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 412–42, at pp. 428–34, and ‘The Levellers’, in Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993, ed. John Dunn (Oxford, 1992; repr. 1995), pp. 71–89. Two recent original contributions of note are Samuel Dennis Glover, ‘The Putney Debates: Popular Versus Elitist Republicanism’, Past and Present, 164 (1999), 47–80, and Quentin Skinner, ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006), 156–70, at pp. 160–4. 4 Alan Craig Houston, ‘“A Way of Settlement”: The Levellers, Monopolies and the Public Interest’, History of Political Thought, 14 (1993), 381–420, at p. 417. 5 For example, see J. H. Plumb, ‘The Growth of the Electorate in England from 1600 to 1715’, Past and Present, 45 (1969), 90–116; Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975); Mark A. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986). 6 Influential works on this theme include: Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000); Mark Goldie, ‘“The Unacknowledged Republic”: Office-holding in Early Modern England’, in The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94; Phil Withington, The 3

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case of the Levellers, it may be fruitful to consider how their experiences of local government influenced their proposals for national, parliamentary representation. Indeed, it is contended that the workings and structures of governance in the Levellers’ immediate vicinity, the City of London, had a profound effect on their, in many respects, entirely traditional view of who possessed political rights and agency at the national level. Second, interpretations of the nature of the relationship between the Levellers and the army have been completely transformed since the heyday of the franchise debate, and not least by the work of John Morrill. His early publications had a seminal impact in challenging the notion of a selfevident identity of interest between common soldier and civilian Leveller, and he was prominent also in undermining the idea that either the official or unofficial regimental representatives of the New Model – the so-called agitators and new agents, respectively – were Leveller cohorts. Meanwhile, the significance of his recent research lies in its contention that the Putney debates were more the outcome of internal army discontent than of Leveller infiltration of the ranks.7 This chapter builds on this particular insight by arguing that the army’s calls during the debates for universal male suffrage were above and beyond the demands of the civilian Leveller movement. Yet for all the talk of the rights of ‘the poorest hee’, it is suggested that the compromise the New Model agreed on the franchise at Putney, one which privileged the soldiery above other members of society, was grounded in a conviction that some men were more equal than others. All of this has important implications for our views of both the army and the Levellers, and suggests that it may have been wrong to dismiss elements of Macpherson’s thesis out of hand. But no less significant is what it reveals, more generally, about contemporary perceptions of the relationship between the franchise and political participation in early modern England. I The record of the debates of the General Council of the Army and its committees held at Putney during October and November 1647 has been trawled over endlessly by those interested in the Levellers’ franchise proposals. But in stark contrast to the polarised interpretation of those proposals, it is striking that both Macpherson and his critics approached the debates themselves Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005). 7 John Morrill, ‘Mutiny and Discontent in English Provisional Armies, 1645–47’ and ‘The Army Revolt of 1647’, both reprinted in The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill (Harlow, 1993), pp. 307–58; Morrill and Philip Baker, ‘The Case of the Armie Truly Re-Stated’, in The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State, ed. Michael Mendle (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 103–24. 105

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in identical fashion: as a showdown between the Levellers – as represented by John Wildman, Maximilian Petty and Thomas Rainborough – and the grandees of the New Model Army – principally Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell.8 This reading, which still has its devotees,9 no longer seems tenable.10 For example, although Rainborough’s words at Putney, including his famous declaration ‘that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee’, were once held up consistently as evidence of the Levellers’ desire for a universal franchise,11 Rainborough’s Leveller credentials were openly questioned from the 1970s. By 1987, Austin Woolrych had concluded that his attachment to their cause, such as it was, lasted no more than a matter of weeks.12 Similarly, the presence of Wildman and Petty at the debates is now explained more accurately in terms of their status as the army’s regular civilian counsel than as Leveller delegates, both men having been active in and around army headquarters since at least July 1647.13 This is not to reduce the subject to the level of meaningless arguments about who was, or was not, a Leveller. Rather, it is to recognize that, first and foremost, it is the voices and thinking of the army that we hear at Putney. It would, however, be wrong to exclude the Levellers from this picture entirely. During the summer and autumn of 1647 John Lilburne and Richard Overton, who were both then imprisoned by order of the House of Lords, directed a series of pamphlets at the army, appealing to its men to take up their personal plights, and that of the nation at large, against the common enemy: an intransigent and self-serving parliament.14 This brought some For example, see Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, pp. 120–9; Thomas, ‘Levellers and the Franchise’, pp. 57–8; Hampsher-Monk, ‘Political Theory of the Levellers’, pp. 398–405. 9 For a recent example, see Andrew Bradstock, Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England: A Concise History From the English Civil War to the End of the Commonwealth (2010), pp. 47–8. 10 On this point, see also Mark A. Kishlansky, ‘Consensus Politics and the Structure of Debate at Putney’, Journal of British Studies, 20 (1981), 50–69, at pp. 51–3. 11 For example, see Davis, ‘Levellers and Democracy’, pp. 176–80; Thomas, ‘Levellers and the Franchise’, pp. 66–7; Roger Howell, Jr, and David E. Brewster, ‘Reconsidering the Levellers: The Evidence of The Moderate’, Past and Present, 46 (1970), 68–86, at pp. 69–70. 12 G. E. Aylmer, ‘Introduction’, The Interregnum, pp. 1–28, at p. 8; The Levellers in the English Revolution, ed. G. E. Aylmer (1975), p. 28; Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and its Debates, 1647–48 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 227, 236, 293. 13 Elliot Vernon and Philip Baker, ‘What was the First Agreement of the People?’, H.J., 53 (2010), 39–59, at pp. 42–6. The fact that Petty was a former soldier and that Wildman had probably also seen military service may well provide a further link between both men and the army: see ibid., p. 46; T.N.A., P.R.O., SP28/144, part 10, ff. 69v–70v. I owe the latter reference to the kindness of Tim Wales. 14 For example, see John Lilburne, Ionahs Cry Out of the Whales Belly (n.p., [26 July] 1647) ([B.L., Thomason Tracts] E.400/5); Lilburne, The Ivst Mans Ivstification (2nd 8

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reward in July when, in response to calls from the agitators for their release, Sir Thomas Fairfax and the council of war called on parliament to bring the two men to trial or else set them at liberty.15 But beyond this, the extent to which the Levellers influenced the army and its ideology remains a point of contention. One need not doubt the appeal to the soldiery of Leveller pamphlets invoking the ‘fundamental rights and liberties’ of a ‘freeborn people’ under the ‘law of nature’; but such rhetoric was a standard element of, and was indeed derived from, parliamentarian discourse in general and also wider constitutionalist thought.16 It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find this rhetoric in the army’s own declarations,17 and we need to get away from the idea that particular individuals at Putney spoke a distinctive ‘Leveller language’. There remains the possibility, of course, that Leveller arguments and writing had an impact on the New Model’s programmatic statements. At a general level, however, where we do find the army endorsing civilian grievances wholesale, as with the set of political, economic and legal reforms appended to The Heads of the Proposals in August 1647, they are more readily traceable to the petitioning activities of those London Independents, including William Walwyn, who were the army’s confidants, and not the tracts of Lilburne and Overton.18 But what about the specific issue of the parliamentary franchise? A number of scholars have argued that the Levellers believed in the entitlement of all soldiers to vote, drawing attention to a passage in Lilburne’s Ionahs Cry of July 1647 as evidence of their commitedn, n.p., [7 Sept.] 1647) (E.407/26); Richard Overton, An Appeale From the Degenerate Representative Body the Commons of England ([17 July] 1647) (E.398/28). 15 Worcester College, Oxford, Clarke MS 41, ff. 164v–165r; The Clarke Papers: Selections From the Papers of William Clarke, ed. Sir Charles H. Firth (2 vols, 1891 and 1894; repr. 1992), I, 171; A Declaration of the Engagements … From His Excellency Sir Tho: Fairfax, and the Generall Councel of the Army ([2 Oct.] 1647), p. 97 (E.409/25). It may be noted that the demands of the army did little to bring about the prisoners’ release. 16 Margaret A. Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution: An Essay in Constitutional and Political Thought in England, 1603–45 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1949; repr. 1988), pp. 55–6, 381–3; Andrew Sharp, ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’s Book of Declarations: A Radical’s Exploitation of the Words of Authorities’, History of Political Thought, 9 (1988), 19–44; David Wootton, ‘From Rebellion to Revolution: The Crisis of the Winter of 1642–43 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, E.H.R., 105 (1990), 654–69; Vernon and Baker, ‘Agreement of the People’, pp. 47 and 53. 17 For example, see one of the New Model’s most important public manifestoes, A Declaration, or, Representation From His Excellency, Sir Thomas Fairfax, and the Army Under His Command ([16 June] 1647), title page, pp. 1, 4–6, 9, 11–15 (E.392/27). 18 Philip Baker, ‘“A Despicable Contemptible Generation of Men”?: Cromwell and the Levellers’, in Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives, ed. Patrick Little (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 90–115, at pp. 97–9; Vernon and Baker, ‘Agreement of the People’, pp. 44–5. Both of these essays emphasize the need to differentiate between the activities of Walwyn, Wildman and Petty on the one hand, and those of Lilburne and Overton on the other, in the months preceding the Putney debates. 107

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ment to the enfranchisement of the army as a distinct group within society.19 This stated that ‘according to the principles … agreed on by common consent and mutuall agreement amongst themselves … every individuall private Souldier, whether, Horse or Foot, ought freely to have their vote, to chuse the transactors of their affaires’. Nevertheless, the beginning of the quoted passage and overall theme of the ‘postscript’ from which it is taken, make it abundantly clear that this does not refer to parliamentary elections at all. Rather, it alludes to the provisions under which Lilburne (wrongly) believed the army had operated since June 1647, when it subscribed its Solemn Engagement and called the General Council of the Army into being.20 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, and as we shall see below, it was only under proposals drawn up by the New Model itself that the vote would have been given to all soldiers. The Levellers, in fact, said very little about the parliamentary franchise in their writing before the Putney debates. Given their general ambition to transform the relationship between representative and represented and the sheer volume of their publications,21 this relative silence is puzzling and seemingly supports the contention that they never considered the right to vote a crucial issue. What they did say before Putney, in just five pamphlets published between October 1645 and June 1647,22 is, nevertheless, worthy of note. In calling for annual parliaments in his Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens of July 1646, Overton stated that the voters were to be ‘all men that have a Right to be there’, although whom that entailed was not specified.23 Four months later, the anonymous author of the initial pages of Lilburne’s Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered actually compared the parliamentary franchise favourably with London’s restrictive practices for electing its chief officers.24 This is characteristic of the remaining statements, all of which were made by Lilburne and relate to the entitlement to the vote Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, pp. 135–6, 297; Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ, 1986), pp. 157–8 for a similar reading. 20 Lilburne, Ionahs Cry, pp. 13–15, quotation at p. 13. 21 From the beginning of 1645 until the start of the Putney debates, Lilburne and Overton were responsible for something like forty pamphlets and petitions between them. 22 Hampsher-Monk claims that a statement from Sept. 1647 which explicitly endorses manhood suffrage is found in Francis White’s The Copy of a Letter Sent to His Excellencie Sir Thomas Fairfax (n.p., [11 Nov.] 1647), pp. 13–14 (E.413/17): ‘Political Theory of the Levellers’, p. 405 n. 5. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not White was a Leveller, the tract’s contents and its collection by the London bookseller, George Thomason, in mid-Nov., both clearly establish that it post-dates Putney. 23 [Richard Overton], A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens ([7 July] 1646), p. 20 (E.343/11). 24 John Lilburne, Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered (n.p., [2 Nov.] 1646), pp. 7 and 10 (E.359/17 and /18). 19

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of all ‘free-men’.25 As we shall see, the consistent use of the terms ‘freemen’ or ‘free man’ is undoubtedly significant, because in the vast majority of instances he was referring to the historic voting rights of corporation members in boroughs and cities, not a liberty possessed by all men. Only a passage in his Rash Oaths Unwarrantable of mid-1647 might be read as having a more inclusive intent. In this, Lilburne called for annual parliaments and the destruction of all illegal corporations, so that ‘every free man of England, as well poore as rich, whose life, estate, &c. is to be taken away by law, may have a Vote in chusing those that are to make the law’.26 Perhaps this statement had an impact on the views of the army. But if it did, it seems significant that when members of the soldiery expressed their own demands, they chose to do so in a somewhat different manner. There is, however, more persuasive evidence that Lilburne’s writing on related issues had a direct influence on the New Model.27 In a work of late 1646, Lilburne denounced the inequalities of England’s electoral constituencies and called for their reapportionment on the basis of taxation; these statements were repeated in his Rash Oaths Unwarrantable in the following June.28 Given this, it may well be significant that in the same month a variant edition of the army’s first political manifesto, its Declaration, or, Representation, included an additional clause containing remarkably similar arguments. This called for provision to be made for a more equal distribution of parliamentary seats, perhaps based on each county’s tax burden, ‘to render the Parliament a more equall representative of the whole’.29 If the appearance of this clause denoted support for Lilburne’s views from soldiers outside army headquarters, those views were later seemingly given the official endorsement of the New Model. In August, The Heads of the Proposals, the army’s formal terms for the settlement of the nation, advocated a redis-

The most important passages are conveniently reproduced and discussed in Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, pp. 131–5. 26 Ibid., p. 135. Again, we should beware assuming that when Lilburne used phrases like ‘every free man’, he explicitly meant all men, as recently claimed by Rachel Foxley in ‘John Lilburne and the Citizenship of “Free-Born” Englishmen’, H.J., 47 (2004), 849–74, at pp. 852–4. For contrasting approaches to the argument that such terms were exclusive in their force, see Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, pp. 129, 142–8; and Skinner, ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’, pp. 157–63. 27 On this point, see also John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 6–7. 28 Lilburne, Londons Liberty, pp. 53–4; Lilburne, Rash Oaths Unwarrantable (n.p., [25 June] 1647), pp. 49–50 (E.393/39). Thomason did not collect his copy of the latter tract until 25 June, although Lilburne himself dated it 31 May. The fact that Lilburne hailed from Durham, a region with, as he pointed out himself, no parliamentary representation at all, may well explain his disgruntlement with the existing distribution of seats: see Lilburne, Londons Liberty, p. 53; Lilburne, Rash Oaths Unwarrantable, p. 49. 29 A Representation From His Excellencie S. Thomas Fairfax, and the Army Under His Command (Cambridge, 1647), pp. 11–12, quotation at p. 11 (Wing STC, F231). 25

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tribution of seats based on taxation, using at times the identical wording of the variant edition of the Declaration.30 By the autumn of 1647, however, the entire programme of The Heads was a source of growing resentment and frustration in sections of the army, and this, rather than the impact of any specific political theory, is likely to have inspired the soldiery to develop their own theories about the franchise.31 The fear that a treaty was to be reached with the king before the demands and grievances of the army were met led to the appearance of the new agents and the publication of The Case of the Armie Truly Stated. This tract repudiated a settlement based on The Heads; called the army back to its original engagements; and put forward a programme for securing the rights of the people, at the heart of which was a radical expansion of the parliamentary franchise. Under a ‘law paramount’ unalterable by parliament, biennial elections were to be held at which ‘all the freeborn at the age of 21. yeares and upwards, be the electors, excepting those that have or shall deprive themselves of that their freedome, either for some yeares, or wholly by delinquency’.32 This is far from a restatement of previous Leveller demands. Leaving aside the problematic question of who was to have the vote,33 the notion of a ‘law paramount’ is not in evidence in the earlier writing of the Levellers or of other civilians. Moreover, the call for biennial (rather than annual) parliaments is far more typical of the manifestoes of the New Model Army than those of the Levellers.34 All this strongly indicates that the franchise clause in The Case of the Armie was the work of members of the soldiery themselves. It had been intended that The Case would be the main subject of discussion when the General Council of the Army convened on 28 October 1647, the first day of what we know as the Putney debates. However, the pamphlet

Declaration of the Engagements … From Fairfax, p. 113. As argued in Morrill and Baker, ‘Case of the Armie’, pp. 106, 113–14, and expanded upon below. The case for the impact of classical republicanism on army and Leveller thinking at this time remains unconvincing. It relies on dubious attributions of authorship and undue emphasis on untypical statements (see Glover, ‘Putney Debates’), and even – in their telling absence – the assertion of arguments the Levellers are expected to have made (see Skinner, ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’, p. 163). 32 The Case of the Armie Truly Stated ([19 Oct.] 1647), p. 15 (E.411/9). For the view that this pamphlet was essentially an army document, see Morrill and Baker, ‘Case of the Armie’, pp. 110–14. 33 This has been a point of protracted controversy. The clause can be read as a proposal for manhood suffrage, with the exception of (presumably) royalists excluded on the grounds of their delinquency. But it can also be interpreted as excluding those, such as servants and apprentices, who willingly gave up their freedom on a temporary basis. 34 The Levellers’ preference for annual parliaments has been noted above. For examples of the army’s statements, see Declaration of the Engagements … From Fairfax, pp. 112–13, 156–7. 30 31

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was largely forgotten when the new agent delegation arrived that day with the first Agreement of the People. The Agreement is firmly linked to the idea of universal male suffrage in the popular memory – and in much modern historiography, too – and thus it is deeply ironic that, on a strict reading, it says nothing at all about the right to vote. What it does say, in its first clause, is ‘That the People of England being at this day very unequally distributed by Counties, Cities, & Burroughs, for the election of their Deputies in Parliament, ought to be more indifferently proportioned, according to the number of the Inhabitants’.35 At the beginning of the debate on the franchise on 29 October, Ireton certainly interpreted this as a demand to give the vote to all men. But if he did so deliberately, believing that the principle would find little support among his audience, he was, as John Morrill has argued, gravely mistaken, as the statements from various officers, common soldiers and civilians revealed.36 The army’s concern with the right to vote that was so in evidence at Putney should be considered as a natural outcome of the prospect of peace and their return to civilian life.37 But, at the same time, it is clear that their identity as soldiers had a powerful impact on their arguments and thinking during the debates, and on a number of levels. Michael Mendle, for example, has emphasized the New Model’s obvious anxiety over the need for soldiers to secure indemnity from prosecution for anything said or done during the Civil War.38 More generally, Captain John Merriman and Trooper Edward Sexby both distinguished between the commitments made by the army to the kingdom and people at large, and those to ‘our fellow soldiers’.39 This distinction was developed, and in a significant way, by the new agent Robert Everard in a speech which immediately followed the reading in the General Council of the clauses of the Agreement: ‘I thinke itt will bee strange that wee that are souldiers cannot have them [for] our selves, if nott for the whole Kingedome’.40 The implication here, that the soldiery could possibly be considered as a special case within society, is in complete contradiction to the army’s public statements. Mark Kishlansky has, indeed, argued that the principle that the personal interests of the soldiery were to be subsumed

An Agreement of the People (n.p., [3 Nov.] 1647), p. 2 (E.412/21). For the argument that the immediate origins of this document lay more in the engagements of the army than in the pamphlets of the Levellers, see Vernon and Baker, ‘Agreement of the People’, pp. 50–4. 36 Clarke Papers, ed. Firth, I, 299–301, 318, 320, 338–40; Morrill, ‘Army Revolt’, p. 326. 37 For the impact of prospective peace on the New Model, see Michael Mendle, ‘Putney’s Pronouns: Identity and Indemnity in the Great Debate’, in Putney Debates of 1647, ed. Mendle, pp. 125–47, at pp. 125–6. 38 Ibid., pp. 140–2. 39 Clarke Papers, ed. Firth, I, 227 and 276, quotation at I, 227. 40 Ibid., I, 236. For the identification of ‘Buffecoate’ as Everard, see ibid., I, 285 note c. 35

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to those of the nation at large was central to the New Model’s ideology.41 Yet, and while certainly not ignoring the army’s backing of an extensive franchise at points in the debates, it is clear that some of its men considered the soldiery to be entitled to special privileges when it came to the issue of the vote. Early evidence of this assumption, and of the reasoning behind it, is apparent during the debate on 29 October. For Sexby, the right to elect representatives ‘was the ground that wee tooke uppe armes, and itt is the ground which wee shall maintaine’, and he questioned how the army could fulfil its engagements ‘to the Kingedome when wee deny them to our selves’. To accept the arguments of Ireton and Cromwell, that only those with a propertied interest in the nation were entitled to the vote, would mean, he opined, ‘that wee have fought all this time for nothing’.42 This was a perspective shared no less by Rainborough, who despaired that those ‘that have laid out themselves for the Parliament ... that have ruined themselves by fighting, by hazarding all they had’ were being told ‘They have now nothing to say for themselves’.43 These arguments for the rights of those who had taken up arms or materially assisted the parliamentarian war effort bore fruit on the following day. According to the proposal of an army committee, all those in military service before the battle of Naseby, or who had voluntarily supported the cause with money or supplies before 1642, should be given the vote regardless of any future decisions of the present House of Commons, which was to establish the general requirements for the franchise.44 However, and as argued persuasively by Woolrych, it is highly probable that an alternative and more far-reaching decision on the right to vote was reached on 29 October, one that was formally ratified by the General Council on 2 November.45 That decision is striking for its endorsement of a rhetorically vast electorate: ‘That all Souldiers and others, if they be not servants or beggars, ought to have voyces in electing those which shall represent them in Parliament, although they have not fortie shillings, in the yeare, by free-hold Land.’46 This signified an obvious defeat for the grandees and it was reported that ‘there were … Mark Kishlansky, ‘Ideology and Politics in the Parliamentary Armies, 1645–49’, in Reactions to the English Civil War, 1642–49, ed. John Morrill (London and Basingstoke, 1982), pp. 163–83, at pp. 177–9. 42 Clarke Papers, ed. Firth, I, 329–30. Here it is evident that by ‘we’, Sexby consistently means the army, not the people in general, an identification I am inclined to read as quite deliberate. On the significance of the pronominalisation of the New Model’s statements, see Morrill and Baker, ‘Case of the Armie’, pp. 112 and 118; Mendle, ‘Putney’s Pronouns’, pp. 125–6, 136–8. 43 Clarke Papers, ed. Firth, I, 305, 311, 320, 325, quotations at p. 320. 44 Ibid., I, 365–6. 45 Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, pp. 243–4, 256. 46 A Copy of a Letter Sent by the Agents of Severall Regiments of His Excellencies Army (n.p., [11 Nov.] 1647), p. 1 (E.413/18). 41

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three voyces against’ the motion.47 Equally, it represented a compromise position for those who had argued that the vote was an entitlement of all men, as it was only all soldiers who were to be given that right, with the exclusions referring to other men.48 But the decision is entirely compatible with the language of Sexby and Everard – and with much of Rainborough’s rhetoric, too. Indeed, a pamphlet addressed to ‘all the Souldiers in the … Armie’, claimed that it was nothing less than a victory for ‘this your native freedome’.49 All of this only serves to reinforce the contention that certain members of the New Model believed that their status as a victorious army that had fought the Lord’s battles, as men who had shed blood and put their lives in peril for the parliamentarian cause, had bound them together and set them apart from the rest of society. And from this stemmed their conviction that, in contrast with their fellow countrymen, those who had taken up arms were fully entitled to a voice in the future of the kingdom, regardless of their social and economic status. The agreement reached over the franchise on 29 October was one of the factors that undoubtedly influenced the grandees’ decision to send the agitators back to their regiments and suspend meetings of the General Council. With the generals citing an apparent threat to army unity, the proposals agreed at Putney were cast aside in favour of an army remonstrance containing an ambiguous demand ‘to render the House of Commons as neare as may be an equall Representative of the People that are to elect’.50 The New Model’s unanimous acceptance of the remonstrance demonstrates that the need to preserve its unity was above any specific political goal, however justified some of its men believed that to be, and no further appeals for all soldiers to be enfranchised were heard from the army during the 1640s. As we have seen, the notion that members of the New Model were entitled to the vote was grounded upon a particular self-image of the army, one that regarded the soldiery as a discrete body of citizens who were automatically deserving of specific privileges within society. Such an elitist concept is hard to reconcile with the egalitarian rhetoric in the pamphlets the Levellers directed at the army, which stressed the existence of fundamental civil rights that were common to soldiers and civilians alike. This, in turn, only

Ibid., p. 2. The impact of the preferential treatment given to the army by this decision should not be underestimated. As one contemporary observed, ‘I am very much deceived, if very many in the Army be not servants and Prentices not yet free’: The Case of the Army Soberly Discussed ([3 July] 1647), p. 6 (E.396/10). 49 A Copy of a Letter, pp. 1 and 2, emphasis added. See also Hampsher-Monk, ‘Political Theory of the Levellers’, pp. 404–5 for a similar reading to a different end. 50 A Remonstrance From His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax and His Councell of Warre ([16 Nov.] 1647), p. [4] (E.414/14). In the light of these events, Kishlanky’s allusion to ‘the commitment the army leadership had to securing the franchise for those who had fought in the New Model’ is puzzling, to say the least: ‘Consensus Politics’, p. 52. 47 48

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lends further support to the argument that it was the thinking primarily of the army itself, rather than of civilian Levellers, that determined the dramatic course of events at Putney. II Where does all this leave the Levellers and their views on the parliamentary franchise in particular? Scholars have, of course, argued almost as long and hard over the factors that influenced Leveller thinking on the right to vote as they have over their actual franchise proposals. Some maintain that their ideas were determined by a specific political theory – be it possessive individualism, natural law or classical republicanism – although this approach has failed to convince the majority of commentators.51 Others, meanwhile, reject the impact of abstract theory and contend that the Levellers’ position drew on their knowledge and experience of county elections or of borough consistencies with wide franchises.52 Yet, if the Levellers were aware that all adult males had the vote in certain urban constituencies, they never said as much in their writing. Instead, we find them preoccupied condemning the miniscule number and moral character of the electorate in some corporation franchises.53 Similarly, Lilburne’s complaint that in county constituencies, ‘thousands of people … divers of them men of great estates in money and stock’ were denied the vote because of the 40s freeholder qualification, hardly seems a ringing endorsement of practices there.54 Overall, however, it is surprising just how infrequently the Levellers referred to the existing practices at parliamentary elections, and even then their comments were often vague or inaccurate. They in fact exemplify the more general ‘state of franchisal innocence’ that Derek Hirst has argued was typical of their contemporaries, not least of the Putney debaters.55 Indeed, for all the ink spilt over the franchise debate, it is actually the cause of would-be voters to local elections in London, not to national, parliamentary elections, that is first identifiable as a major theme of Leveller writing. For example, see Macpherson, Possessive Individualism; Richard A. Gleissner, ‘The Levellers and Natural Law: The Putney Debates of 1647’, Journal of British Studies, 20 (1980), 74–89; Glover, ‘Putney Debates’. For criticism of some of these arguments, see above pp. 103–4, 110 and n. 31. 52 Plumb, ‘Growth of the Electorate’, pp. 108 and 109; Wootton, ‘Leveller Democracy’, pp. 432 and 435. 53 Lilburne, Londons Liberty, p. 53. 54 Ibid., p. 53. Lilburne’s criticism may well have been unfounded, as some modern scholars emphasize the relative size and social depth of the county electorate in this period; for example, see Hirst, Representative of the People?, pp. 29–43. Nevertheless, Lilburne’s perception of the situation in the counties remains significant, and could reflect a genuine lack of knowledge. 55 Hirst, Representative of the People?, pp. 3, 21–3, 25, quotation at p. 19. 51

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Although the Levellers’ interest in the franchise in London has been curiously neglected by historians,56 the topic provides an important insight into their thinking about political participation. Lilburne first addressed the theme of elections and voting rights in the capital in a pamphlet of 1645, and in the following year produced two major works on the subject, Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered and its sequel, The Charters of London.57 In these, his central argument was that London’s freemen and citizens – that is, formal members of the city corporation only58 – were being denied their ancient constitutional privileges, above all their right to elect London’s parliamentmen, lord mayor, sheriffs and other local officers.59 At one level, this was an obvious attempt to destabilize the city’s then presbyterian rulers and hence to weaken the presbyterians’ position both locally and nationally in their struggle with the independents. But, at the same time, we find the identical arguments put forward in the Levellers’ more general writing of the mid1640s,60 and their concern with London elections and the historic voting rights of the capital’s freemen is still evident in a number of their great petitions at the end of the decade.61 All this points to a sustained and genuine interest in the subject. Meanwhile, it is noteworthy that John Wildman, a passionate defender of the vote as a natural right at the Putney debates, also had a prolonged interest in the customary voting rights of London’s citizenry. In a debate in 1650 before the city’s court of aldermen, he defended the ancient right of the commonalty to elect the capital’s chief officers, and published an account of the proceedings, London’s Liberties, in the same year. According to the pamphlet’s title page, the arguments within saw ‘the principles of just Government cleared & vindicated’, and Wildman twice For recent attempts to address this neglect, see Philip Baker, ‘The Levellers, Decentralisation and the Agreements of the People’, in The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution, ed. Baker and Elliot Vernon (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 97–116, at pp. 100–6, and Baker, ‘Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered: The Levellers, the Civic Past and Popular Protest in Civil War London’, Huntington Library Quarterly, forthcoming, 2013. 57 [John Lilburne], Englands Birth-Right Justified ([8 Oct.] 1645), pp. 21–5 (E.304/17); Lilburne, Londons Liberty; Lilburne, The Charters of London: Or, The Second Part of Londons Liberty in Chaines Discovered ([18 Dec.] 1646) (E.366/12). 58 This is made explicit through his numerous references to the ‘barons’, ‘cloak-men’, ‘burgesses’, ‘commoners’ etc. of London: see Lilburne, Londons Liberty, pp. 21, 22, 40, 45, 52, 58; Lilburne, Charters of London, title page, pp. 1–6, 64. 59 The city’s royal charter of 1215 provided some justification for this position, although it failed to formally define who the ‘barons’ entitled to elect officers were. 60 For example, see [Richard Overton], A Sacred Decretall (Europe [i.e., London], [6 June] 1645), pp. 22–3 (E.286/15); [Overton], Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, pp. 14–15; [Overton?], The Humble Appeale and Petition of Mary Overton (n.p., [24 Mar.] 1647), p. 9 (E.381/10). 61 The Humble Petition of Divers Wel Affected Persons (n.p., [15 Sept.] 1648), p. 6 (E.464/5) [this is the so-called ‘Large Petition’]; [John Lilburne], Foundations of Freedom; Or An Agreement of the People (n.p., [15 Dec.] 1648), p. 9 (E.476/26). 56

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reprinted the work in the early 1680s as a reminder to London’s freemen of their ancient electoral privileges at a time when the tories had secured the city’s leading offices.62 What does the Levellers’ interest in local elections in London reveal? First, it requires that we abandon the notion that, at some undetermined point in the mid-1640s, the basis of the Levellers’ claims concerning the franchise (and other issues, too) shifted irrevocably from historic right to natural right.63 There was rather a considerable element of pragmatism in the arguments they employed regarding the right to vote throughout their campaign, being quite willing to use which ever language of legitimation best suited their immediate purpose.64 Second, the Levellers’ concern with London presents a challenge to aspects of the recent literature on the unacknowledged republic. Some historians, for example, are now dismissive of the relevance of holding the franchise to contemporary perceptions of citizenship (in its more general sense), placing huge emphasis on office-holding and the process of self-government.65 The significance of office-holding during the early modern period is without question. In the case of the Levellers, we have noted that it was related to their complaints about the extent of political participation in the capital, and was also, as we shall see, something of which a number of them had personal experience. But, and as admirably demonstrated by the example of London, office-holding and self-government could be inextricably linked to the issue of the franchise. Moreover, the Levellers’ argument clearly was that the denial of the right to vote was a denial of the full attributes of the citizenship of London. For Lilburne, ‘the ditfranchising [sic] of … [the] Clokemen of London’ was tantamount to making them ‘slaves & vassals’, ‘for it is a true and just maxim in nature, no man can binde me but by my own consent’. Men ‘disfranchised’ were, indeed, ‘undenezed [sic]’.66 Wildman adopted a comparable position before the court of aldermen in 165067 and we have already seen that Sexby and Rainborough expressed sentiments almost identical to those of Lilburne on the behalf of the soldiery at Putney. But at Putney, the soldiers’ concern was not the voting rights of corporation members. Rather, it centred on an alternative notion of political participation and citizenship: the right

[John Wildman], London’s Liberties ([19 Dec.] 1650; reprinted 1682 and 1683) (E.620/7). 63 For this view, see Thomas, ‘Levellers and the Franchise’, p. 64; Hampsher-Monk, ‘Political Theory of the Levellers’, pp. 412–13. 64 On the pragmatism of the Levellers’ arguments in general, see especially Glenn Burgess, ‘Protestant Polemic: The Leveller Pamphlets’, Parergon, 11 (1993), 45–67. 65 See especially Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged Republic’, pp. 153–4. 66 Lilburne, Londons Liberty, pp. 52–3. For similar arguments, see Lilburne, Charters of London, pp. 1–2, 37–8 (corrected pagination). On Lilburne’s use of the word ‘denizen’ and related terms, see also Foxley, ‘John Lilburne’, pp. 855–8. 67 [Wildman], London’s Liberties, pp. 7, 9, 28–9, 35. 62

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to vote at parliamentary elections. Taken together, these examples demonstrate that some contemporaries saw holding the vote as absolutely integral to their perceptions of the full rights of different notions of citizenship. On this basis, dismissing the issue of the franchise as an anachronistic preoccupation with ‘what is modern and democratic’68 risks overlooking its true contemporary significance. Finally, the Levellers’ championing of the electoral rights of London’s freemen, rather than of all city inhabitants, belies the commonly held assumption that they never supported restrictive franchise proposals before the Putney debates.69 Lilburne and most of the leading Levellers and their associates were city freemen themselves,70 and this must account, at least in part, for their concern with the issue of the franchise in the capital. But this must also mean that they were familiar with, and presumably acceptant of, a situation in which all non-freemen were denied full voting rights at city elections. Here there is perhaps a parallel with the exclusive and self-interested franchise proposals put forward by the army at Putney. Furthermore, there is evidence to indicate that the Levellers were consistent on this point. Certainly, as late as the ‘Large Petition’ of September 1648 – which a number of scholars regard as the most important of their programmatic statements71 – they were still calling for ‘the election of publike Officers for the Citie of London’ to be rectified by ‘restoring the Comunalty [sic] thereof to their just Rights’.72 The realisation that the Levellers were far from reluctant supporters of a restrictive franchise makes their post-Putney statements regarding voters at parliamentary elections look decidedly unsurprising and much less like a tactical compromise on their part. The specific provisions in those statements, which are found in later versions of the Agreement of the People and other petitions,73 are famously inconsistent, both between themselves and Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged Republic’, p. 154. For this view, see Thomas, ‘Levellers and the Franchise’, p. 67; Christopher Thompson, ‘Maximilian Petty and the Putney Debate on the Franchise’, Past and Present, 88 (1980), 63–9, at p. 63. 70 See the respective entries for Lilburne, Walwyn, Petty, Samuel Chidley, William Larner and Thomas Prince in O.D.N.B., ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (60 vols, Oxford, 2004). 71 For example, see H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, ed. Christopher Hill (2nd edn, Nottingham, 1983), p. 350; J. C. Davis, ‘The Levellers and Christianity’, in Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, ed. Brian Manning (1973), pp. 225–50, at pp. 241–2. 72 Humble Petition of Divers Wel Affected Persons, p. 6. 73 See ‘The Earnest Petition of Many Free-Born People of this Nation’, reprinted in [Walter Frost], A Declaration of Some Proceedings of Lt. Col. Iohn Lilburn, and his Associates ([14 Feb.] 1648), pp. 26–34, at pp. 31–2 (E.427/6); [Lilburne], Foundations of Freedom, pp. 7–8; John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince and Richard Overton, An Agreement of the Free People of England ([21 Aug.] 1649), p. 3 (E.552/23). 68 69

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in comparison with the Levellers’ attitude to London elections. But, at the same time, there is a very obvious element of consistency in that all of those statements exclude some men (such as apprentices, servants and beggars) from the right to vote. This is the fundamental problem for those who argue that the Levellers, or at least Lilburne, maintained that all men had a uniform set of citizen entitlements, including the franchise. If, at times, their arguments – and their justifications for those arguments – perhaps suggest that this was the case, it is simply never borne out in any of their programmatic statements.74 The consistently exclusive nature of the Levellers’ franchise proposals also has important implications for the possible origins of their political ideas. For example, it has long been held that their background in London’s nonconformist separate churches provided the inspiration for the belief that all men were entitled to the vote. On this reading, which still remains influential, the Levellers are seen to have directly transferred the equality of believers and ‘democratic decision making’ of the sects to the political sphere.75 In the light of the above, such arguments no longer seem tenable and we need to look elsewhere for the possible source of the Levellers’ limited proposals for the extension of the parliamentary franchise. The following section contends that we would do well to turn our attention to the practices of local government in the City of London. III Although the structures of governance in London had clear oligarchic tendencies, particularly at their higher echelons, there existed nevertheless a strong and contrasting perception of their workings. This stressed the extent to which the capital was self-governing, through thousands of annually elected office-holders from across the social spectrum,76 and was a tradition clearly exploited by the Levellers in their writing on London. If this image of a self-regulating community existed more in the realm of theory than practice, it has nonetheless been estimated that in the seventeenth century

For the problems caused by such a reading, see Foxley, ‘John Lilburne’, p. 870. For example, see D. B. Robertson, The Religious Foundations of Leveller Democracy (New York, 1951); Ian Gentles, ‘London Levellers in the English Revolution: The Chidleys and Their Circle,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 29 (1978), 281–309, at pp. 281–2, quotation at p. 281. This thesis has previously been criticized on the grounds that sectarian churches were far from liberal institutions in the modern sense of the word: see J. C. Davis, ‘Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution’, H.J., 35 (1992), 507–30, esp. pp. 511–12. 76 Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 18–20, 50. 74 75

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one in ten city householders held annually some form of local office.77 Consequently, the subject of local office-holding was not only an issue on which the Levellers campaigned, it was also something of which a number of them had personal experience. Walwyn served as a parish vestryman and wardmote inquestman in the late 1630s and early 1640s;78 Thomas Prince held ward office as a juror in the 1640s;79 and Lilburne was returned as a common councillor for the ward of Farringdon Within in 1649, although the Rump Parliament subsequently declared his election void.80 The Levellers’ experiences of office-holding, in particular those associated with the institution of the wardmote, seem especially relevant to our inquiry. As the annual meeting of the ward, the wardmote was, as highlighted by Valerie Pearl, a ‘genuinely popular as well as populous assembly’ which emphasized the contemporary significance of the status of the male householder.81 Familial headship was normally regarded as endowing the individual with the level of independence and freedom necessary to participate in politics, and thus attendance at the wardmote was compulsory for all householders. Those lacking such independence, and therefore excluded from the assembly, included women, servants, apprentices and vagrants – a list that has obvious parallels with those denied the vote under the Levellers’ proposals for the parliamentary franchise. Attendance at a wardmote would have been a familiar experience for the leading Levellers, all of whom were city inhabitants by the 1640s,82 thus exposing them to a remarkable level of citizen83 participation in local government. The assembly and its officers were responsible for punishing minor social and moral offences; organizing the watch and preserving arms; levying city-wide taxes and local rates; and resolving neighbourly disputes. In addition, wardmotes petitioned the Lord Mayor and court of aldermen on topics concerning everyday life, but also on wider and more sensitive issues pertaining to the overall government of the capital. Although ward officers were often selected according to the cursus honorum, in theory they were appointed at open election at a meeting of the wardmote. There, city freemen alone voted for common councillors, but every rate-paying householder was entitled to a voice in the election of all

Valerie Pearl, ‘Social Policy in Early Modern London’, in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (1981), pp. 115–31, at p. 116. 78 L[ondon] M[etropolitan] A[rchives], P69/JS2/B/001/MS04813/002, f. 3v; L.M.A., P69/JS2/B/001/MS04813/001, ff. 52r–55r. 79 L.M.A., CLC/W/GE/001/MS03461/001, ff. 94r, 98v, 104r. 80 C.J., VI, 337–8. 81 Valerie Pearl, ‘Change and Stability in Seventeenth-Century London’, London Journal, 5 (1979), 3–34, at pp. 15–18, quotation at pp. 15–16. 82 Baker, ‘Londons Liberty’. 83 Unless otherwise qualified, the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘citizenship’ are hereon used in their more general sense. 77

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other officers, who numbered between 100 and 300 according to the size of the ward.84 The suggestion here is that the practices of the wardmote, with its emphasis on the active citizenship of the householder, influenced the Levellers’ ideas regarding political participation and the right to vote at parliamentary elections.85 This certainly fits in with our existing knowledge of the Levellers. Ann Hughes, for example, has argued that the image of the ‘honest householder’ was central to the political identity Leveller writing offered to readers and fully justified ‘the male head of household’s monopoly of formal political rights’.86 Similarly, other scholars interpret the Levellers’ proposals for parliamentary elections as an attempt to implement a type of householder franchise.87 This was explicit – and in a form that mirrors the practices of the wardmote – in the franchise clause in the version of the Agreement of the People Lilburne published as Foundations of Freedom in 1648. According to this, the electors ‘shall be men of one and twenty yeers old, or upwards, and House-keepers’, ‘not persons receiving Alms, but such as are assessed ordinarily towards the relief of the poor; not servants to[o], or receiving wages from any particular person’.88 Foundations of Freedom is justifiably regarded as the most compromised version of the Agreement from a Leveller perspective, as it was based on a draft drawn up by a committee of Levellers, army officers, and London and national politicians. Nevertheless, it seems significant that Lilburne did not alter the draft’s wording of the clause on the franchise, as he did with that on religion, in his published version of the document.89 This would imply that the Levellers, or at least Lilburne, were quite willing to accept the limitation of the electorate to economically independent householders.90 Such a reading is compatible with the Levellers’ earlier, restrictive attitude to the franchise, and lends

Pearl, ‘Change and Stability’, pp. 16–20, 25. For a comparable suggestion, see Mark Knights’s recent argument that the parliamentary franchise proposals of John Locke and his ‘college’ may have drawn on their knowledge of electoral practices in their local constituencies: ‘John Locke and Post-Revolutionary Politics: Electoral Reform and the Franchise’, Past and Present, 213 (2011), 41–86, at pp. 70 and n. 117, 73. 86 Ann Hughes, ‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester, 1995), pp. 162–88, at pp. 171–2, 181, quotation at p. 181. 87 Thomas, ‘Levellers and the Franchise’, pp. 72–3; Wootton, ‘Leveller Democracy’, pp. 431–3. 88 [Lilburne], Foundations of Freedom, p. 7. 89 For Lilburne’s confession to having altered the draft, see his The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England ([18 June] 1649), p. 35 (E.560/14). 90 The obvious counter-argument, that Lilburne did not alter the franchise clause because the right to vote was not of primary concern to the Levellers, is refuted at several points throughout this chapter. 84 85

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some credence to aspects of Macpherson’s argument. Indeed, perhaps inspired by their experiences as London freemen, the whole tenor of the Levellers’ economic programme has often been interpreted – and not least by Macpherson’s critics – as an attempt to create a society of independent proprietors in which all male householders would be free to exercise the right to vote.91 The franchise clause in the May 1649 Agreement dropped the rate-payer qualification and looked towards a more inclusive form of householder political participation of the type seen in wardmote attendance. It seems significant that it is the very first of the pamphlet’s clauses – hardly evidence that the issue of the vote was of lesser importance to the Levellers – and that its specific provisions – which would have enfranchised ‘all men of the age of one and twenty yeers and upwards (not being servants, or receiving alms)’ – were made ‘according to naturall right’,92 for the Levellers’ proposals for a limited extension of the parliamentary franchise were always in harmony with the conventions of a patriarchal society. Moreover, those proposals were not without precedent. Constituencies in which all householders, even all adult males, claimed the vote already existed, albeit they were few in number. Parliament itself had shown its support (admittedly, often for distinctly political reasons) for the extension of the franchise along similar lines, Sir Simonds D’Ewes moving in 1640 ‘that the poorest man ought to have a voice; that it was the birthright of the subjects of England’.93 The true originality of the Levellers lay in their attempt to implement such reform on a national scale and to have it constitutionally entrenched. IV It is now fifty years since historians first put forward the theory, which was never followed through at the time, that the Levellers’ thinking about political participation was influenced by the traditional, everyday practices of institutions in their local communities.94 This chapter has attempted to demonstrate that that theory was correct by highlighting the Levellers’ experiences of local self-government in the City of London. Their thinking regarding active citizenship and the right to vote at parliamentary elections Thomas, ‘Levellers and the Franchise’, pp. 77–8; Hampsher-Monk, ‘Political Theory of the Levellers’, pp. 420–1. 92 Lilburne et. al., Agreement of the Free People, p. 3. 93 Hirst, Representative of the People?, pp. 11–12, 22, 65, 90; Thomas, ‘Levellers and the Franchise’, pp. 62–3, quotation at p. 63. The attitude of D’Ewes seems remarkably similar to that of the Levellers’ in that, in spite of his rhetoric, he too believed that almsmen should be deprived the vote: see ibid., p. 63. 94 Brailsford, Levellers and the English Revolution, pp. 10–11; Thomas, ‘Levellers and the Franchise’, p. 61. 91

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was compatible, in many respects, with the existing practices of the institution of the wardmote, and this may not only provide the possible source of their ideas, but it may also help to explain the limited nature of their franchise proposals, which, to a large extent, were consistent with wider contemporary thinking on the topic. By contrast, the very different experiences of the New Model Army – of bloodshed, sacrifice and military unity – led a section of the soldiery to a far more elitist conclusion: that all those who had taken up arms against the king were fully entitled to the vote, regardless of their social and economic standing. The rhetoric of the Putney debates, which was heavily influenced by the prospect of peace and a return to civilian life, reveals that members of the soldiery, no less than the Levellers, were concerned about the issue of political participation and their right as citizens to vote at parliamentary elections under the future settlement of the nation. Both cases strongly suggest that we need to (re-)emphasize the direct relationship between voting and governance in early modern England, which has been disputed in some recent accounts.95 The republican tradition of active citizenship, of office-holding and self-government, was obviously vitally important in the period. It is the operation of that tradition that we witness in London’s wardmotes and other local institutions. But, as the Levellers’ writing on London testifies, the question of who possessed the right to vote for local office-holders was often a crucial one. Moreover, by revisiting the franchise debate, this chapter has demonstrated that the issue of the vote, at both a local and national, parliamentary level, could be intimately bound up with some contemporaries’ notions of active citizenship. As a result, we may need to look upon the early modern period as one in which the republican tradition of office-holding co-existed with, and was indeed informed by, a more recognisably ‘modern’ preoccupation with the right to vote.

95

For example, see Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged Republic’, pp. 153–4, 156. 122

6

Oliver Cromwell and the Instrument of Government* Blair Worden

The Instrument of Government, the document which ratified the elevation of Oliver Cromwell to the office of lord protector on 16 December 1653, has a distinctive place in English political history. It was the nation’s first written constitution.1 Except for the Humble Petition and Advice, which replaced it in 1657,2 it has been the only one. Perhaps the term ‘written constitution’, which might have been barely intelligible at the time, will seem too grand for either text, at least if it suggests either a start from scratch or a guarantee of static or permanent arrangements. Both documents took for granted the survival of some familiar constitutional practices. Neither of them questioned the supremacy of parliamentary statute or its capacity to amend the new arrangements. Nonetheless the Instrument’s provision for the conduct of government by a single set of rules and procedures, laid down at a single time, was a bold conception. The document drew on two sets of constitutional proposals that had been formulated by the New Model Army in the later 1640s: the Heads of Proposals of 1647 and the Agreement of the People of January 1649.3 But whereas those texts had been drawn up for submission to parliament, the Instrument was a decree. Audaciously it was imposed not on one nation but on three, even though many of its provisions were irrelevant or ill-suited to the conditions of recently conquered Scotland and Ireland. * I first attempted the subject of this chapter a quarter of a century ago in a privately circulated paper (very different from the present text). I was and remain most grateful for the searching comments of Anthony Fletcher, Frances Henderson, John Morrill, and the late Austin Woolrych. In preparing the present version I have profited from the shrewd advice of Peter Gaunt, Henry Reece, Jason Peacey and, again, Frances Henderson. 1 It is conveniently printed in Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, ed. S. R. Gardiner (Oxford, 1889), pp. 405–17 (though in the last line of article 7 ‘present’ should be ‘precedent’). 2 Printed in ibid., pp. 447–59. 3 Printed in ibid., pp. 316–26, 359–71. 123

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The Instrument, like the Humble Petition after it, set conditions of government by which Cromwell, no less than the three nations, was to be bound. He gave his signature to the new constitution during the dour, rapidly improvised ceremony of his installation in the Court of Chancery. The Instrument laid on him obligations equivalent to, though much more concrete than, those which parliamentarians believed the coronation oath to have imposed on kings. But the coronation oath, if it was a contract, was one between king and people. The Instrument did not claim to speak on the people’s behalf, or on anyone’s behalf. It carried no preamble, offered no explanation of its existence, and invoked no sanction or precedent. No one knew what to call it. Its list of provisions was published on 2 January 1654, seventeen days after the ceremony of installation, under the title The Government of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland.4 ‘The Instrument of Government’ was a colloquial term, gradually and never uniformly acquired.5 Assembled, and revised, under pressures of time and events, the constitution is marred by inconsistencies and confusions of statement.6 It nonetheless transformed the politics of the interregnum. The revolution of 1649, which had outlawed rule by a single person, was reversed. The ‘Rump’ of the Long Parliament, which had held power from the time of that revolution until Cromwell’s forcible expulsion of the parliament in April 1653, had claimed a monopoly of sovereignty. Now constitutional authority was to be mixed or shared, in keeping with the earlier principles of the parliament and with the terms of settlement it had proposed to the king. Under the Rump, M.P.s were obliged to disown parliament’s attempt to restore Charles I on negotiated terms in 1648. Now ‘presbyterians’, the party who had favoured those terms, were to be allowed back to Westminster. There was another reversal. Before the civil wars, parliaments had been brief and occasional bodies. Their activities had normally been confined to the passage of legislation, the granting of taxes, and the articulation of public sentiment. In response to the needs of war and revolution the Long Parliament sat for thirteen years and became the executive. From 1642 it governed the country through bodies subordinate and answerable to it. Barebone’s Parliament, in its rule from July It was subsequently reprinted in Scotland, apparently in Jan. 1654: Severall Proceedings of State Affaires, 9–16 Jan. 1654, p. 3576. 5 In common political parlance an ‘instrument’ was a means of conveying authority, not a title for its substance. In July 1653 Cromwell used a document he called an ‘instrument’ to communicate power to Barebone’s Parliament (Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. W. C. Abbott (4 vols, Cambridge, Mass., 1937–47 [hereafter Abbott]), II, 67), which in December returned it to him through another ‘instrument’ (The Clarke Papers, ed. Sir Charles H. Firth (4 vols, Camden Soc., 1891–1901), III, 9). He would call the Humble Petition and Advice parliament’s ‘instrument’: Abbott, IV, 490, 493. 6 Some will be mentioned in this chapter. For another see S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (4 vols, repr. New York, 1965), II, 330n (cf. 336n). 4

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to December 1653, adopted the same arrangement. The Instrument ended it. It did guarantee the holding of triennial parliaments. It also allotted them powers which pre-war parliaments had lacked, most notably a voice in the appointment of leading government officials and advisers and a (qualified) right to overrule the single ruler in the passage of legislation. But the running of the government was mostly beyond their remit. They were to sit no more than five months unless the protector chose otherwise. I Barebone’s Parliament was terminated on 12 December 1653, four days before Cromwell’s installation as protector. It had been nominated by the army officers and summoned by Cromwell as lord general, but had escaped his control. Its proposed legislation, backed by a clamour of radical agitation in the pulpit and press, threatened the whole legal system and the principle of a state Church. The devising of the Instrument seems to have begun at least three weeks or so before the end of Barebone’s,7 though we cannot say how the drafters expected it to be put into effect or whether they anticipated the coup of 12 December. Cromwell told parliament in September 1654 that he had not been ‘privy’ to the ‘counsels’ of ‘the gentlemen that undertook to frame’ the Instrument, ‘and they know it’. But he revealed in the same speech that a draft of the constitution had been presented to him at some point before Barebone’s was dissolved.8 In 1657 he reminded The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, ed. Sir Charles H. Firth (2 vols, Oxford, 1894) [hereafter Ludlow], I, 369, who was in Ireland in 1653 and got his information later from discontented army officers, report John Lambert as telling officers around the time of Cromwell’s inauguration that the Instrument had ‘been under consideration for two months past’ – that is, since October, when Lambert was in Yorkshire. That may well be, though if so we might expect the fact to have been mentioned in other hostile sources from the same milieu. One protesting paper alleged that the Instrument had been ‘preparing 8 or 9 days before’ the end of Barebone’s (A Collection of State Papers of John Thurloe, ed. Thomas Birch (7 vols, 1742) [hereafter Birch], III, 151). That is likely to be an underestimate. A royalist in England on 24 Nov., and Edward Hyde in Paris on the 25th, had heard that Cromwell would become protector, though they did not say under what constitutional arrangements (Bodl., MS Clarendon 47, ff. 113, 115); see too below, n. 35. There survives in the State Papers (T.N.A., SP 18/42, ff. 5–9; cf. below, n. 18) a document containing a series of procedural rules of legislation and administration, with copies of illustrative specimens which are taken from the Caroline regime of 1641 but are now given the date 1 Dec. 1653 – perhaps the date on which the document was drawn up, or perhaps one to which the compilers of the text were looking ahead. The document is usually and plausibly seen as a model drawn up for imitation by a Cromwellian kingship, though conceivably it could have been compiled with a view to the adaptation of the rules to the government of a protector. 8 Abbott, III, 455. The drafters had approached him ‘when they had finished their model in some measure’, words that could not have been aptly applied to the 7

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a group of refractory army officers that when the draft was brought to him it contained the title of king, ‘as some there could witness (pointing at a principal officer, then in his eye), and he refused to accept of the title’.9 It had been dropped from the prospective constitution at some point before Barebone’s ended. Who were ‘the gentleman that undertook to frame’ the Instrument? Their counsels were secretive and left few traces, but we know Major-General John Lambert to have been a leading figure, perhaps the leading one.10 He was an able political thinker and a powerful and ambitious presence in the army’s counsels. He had argued unsuccessfully against the calling of Barebone’s and had later withdrawn to his native Yorkshire. The failure of Barebone’s gave him his chance. He was back in London on 19 November.11 He did not act alone. Cromwell said in 1657 that ‘seven’ of the officers had ‘made’ the Instrument.12 Embittered pamphleteers of 1655 and 1659 alleged that ‘five or six persons’, ‘or very few more’, had ‘at first contrived and brought forth’ the document. Two army officers were alleged to have been involved: James Berry13 and the commander of the soldiers who closed down Barebone’s, Cromwell’s close follower William Goffe.14 Civilian participants were identified too: Cromwell’s old friend Henry Lawrence, whom we know to have been involved in the formation of the regime15 and who became president of the protectoral council; John Thurloe, another close follower of Cromwell, secretary to the council both of Barebone’s and of the protectorate and an eager supporter of the coup; and Thurloe’s patron, and Cromwell’s cousin and intimate adviser, the prominent parliamentarian Oliver St John,16 though he was gravely ill around the time of the coup17 and in 1660 would strenuously deny his involvement.18 circumstances that followed the dissolution. But he may be speaking instead, or also, of the days after the end of Barebone’s when he adds: ‘They told me except I would undertake the government they thought things would hardly come to a composure and settlement, but blood and confusion would break in upon us. I denied it again and again, as God and those persons know, not complimentingly as they also know and as God knows.’ 9 Ibid., IV, 417. Cf. IV, 418; Ludlow, I, 370. 10 Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982) [hereafter Woolrych], pp. 352–3. 11 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: John Lambert. 12 Abbott, IV, 418. 13 Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (1696), pt. i, p. 72. 14 A True Catalogue, or, An Account (1659), p. 3. 15 Bodl., MS Carte 103, f. 198. 16 True Catalogue, p. 3; The Nicholas Papers, ed. G. F. Warner (4 vols, Camden Soc., 1886–20), IV, 139. 17 Bodl., MS Clarendon 47, f. 43. 18 The Case of Oliver St John (1660), pp. 5–6; cf. Birch, VII, 914. Is it an accident that some of the specimens referred to in n. 7 above are copies of documents signed or handled by St John as Solicitor-General in 1641? Had he supplied the specimens? 126

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The moment fatal to Barebone’s was its rejection on 10 December, by two votes, of a proposal which would have ensured the preservation of state backing for the ministry.19 Having evicted the Rump in April, the army could not afford another naked military expulsion. On Monday 12th the moderates arrived early in the House, secured a vote to return to Cromwell the authority he had invested in the assembly in July, and went to Whitehall to present him with a deed of abdication. They found him surrounded by army officers in the Horse Chamber. ‘Presently after’ that, ‘severall’ of the M.P.s met ‘officers of the army’, ‘and upon serious debate concluded th[ere] should [be] a person who should under the title of Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland’.20 By the night of the 12th the decently informed French ambassador expected Cromwell to rule with the title of protector.21 On that day, or possibly the next, he summoned a council of officers, perhaps at his own house,22 ‘and advised how this great burden of governing’ the three nations ‘should be borne, and by whom’. There followed ‘several days seeking of God’ and ‘very earnest deliberations’, during which the terms of his appointment were agreed. While all observers agreed that the events of 12 to 16 December were directed by army officers, ‘other persons of interest’ were also involved,23 among them no doubt those moderates from Barebone’s whom the Instrument would appoint to the protectoral council. II How did the Instrument evolve? How did its drafters come to agree on its contents, and how did they win others to them? The process of composition is mostly invisible to us. Yet we are not without help. There survive six manuscripts which cast light, albeit a dim and fitful one, on the emergence

The essential account for the events of and around Dec. 1653 is Woolrych. I follow it here except when, occasionally, I register alternative interpretations. 20 Clarke Papers, ed. Firth, III, 10. 21 T.N.A., P.R.O. 31/3/92, f. 94. 22 Ibid., f. [92?]. 23 The Faithfull Scout, 9–16 Dec. 1653, p. 1248; Mercurius Politicus, 16–22 Dec., p. 3052. It may be that, to further the discussions, the council of state of Barebone’s, or the Cromwellian moderates among them, continued to sit in the days following the dissolution (though its authority had lapsed with it); or else that the incipient council of the protectorate took it upon itself to meet in the days between the 12th and the 16th. There may however have been a critical meeting about the new constitution from which, on Lambert’s insistence, all civilians were excluded. The Moderate Publisher, 9–16 Dec. 1653, p. 72; Great Brittains Post, 14–21 Dec. 1653, p. 1248; The Weekly Intelligencer, 13–20 Dec. 1653, p. 93; Birch, I, 632; La Revolución inglesa, ed. Ángel Alloza and Glyn Redworth (Madrid, 2011), p. 144. 19

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of the document.24 Each of them is a list which summarizes articles of the prospective constitution that either have been drawn up or are to be drawn up. The manuscripts, or some of them, may have been, or have derived from, leaked documents,25 but all of them can be directly or indirectly related to the composition of the Instrument. We can loosely call them drafts. Interpretation of them is beset with problems, many of them insuperable. Their significance for an understanding of the origins and character of Cromwell’s protectorate has to be teased from shadowy intricacies. Critical questions have only slender or infirm evidence to answer them. We have to weigh probabilities and possibilities and may get them wrong. Ends will remain loose. Yet if we persist amid the minutiae, we may glimpse some significant features of the thought and conduct of Cromwell and his entourage. At least the obstacles are themselves a clue. If the conversion of the drafts into the final version had been a smooth process, assessment of them would no doubt be more straightforward. Instead there are complexities that are best explained as products of division among, or within the minds of, the new rulers, or accounted for by reversals or even re-reversals of their decisions. The drafts are headed unhelpfully or not at all. Some of them are, and all of them may be, copies or dictated versions of other texts, which may have derived from yet others.26 No two of the drafts are quite identical, though some are almost so, and on most matters they all at least broadly agree. Some divergences which may be instructive could alternatively be results merely of transcription or dictation. There are further difficulties. When the final text of the Instrument contains a provision not to be found in the drafts, we often cannot tell whether the difference was produced by a process of revision, or whether the drafters, who were compiling mere summaries, omitted, for the sake of abbreviation, a stipulation which a fuller account would have included. We do not know who wrote the drafts, but two of them have connections to men at or near the centre of the events of December 1653. The first is in the papers of the family of the army officer Sir William Constable,27 who was in Whitehall in that month and signed a letter to the regiments urging support for the new government.28 The second, which for brevity I

More such texts could come to light. All but one of the six (the one cited at n. 32 below) are noticed in Peter Gaunt’s pioneering and perceptive article ‘Defining the Instrument of Government, 1653–1654: A Reappraisal’, Parliamentary History 8 (1989) [hereafter Gaunt], 28–42. I attempt to take Professor Gaunt’s approach further, while sometimes modifying or departing from it. 25 Cf. below, n. 61. 26 Dictation or transcription is suggested by occasional slips of wording (and in one case by a short blank). 27 Hull History Centre, MS U DDEV/68/122 [hereafter Hull]: headed ‘the heads’. 28 True Catalogue, pp. 7–8. 24

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shall call the Thurloe draft, is among papers of John Thurloe.29 It could be a document written within his circle. Alternatively it may have been confiscated by agents of Thurloe anxious to prevent or stop its circulation outside the regime. The second explanation would obviously bestow less authority on the document than the first. But it would not remove its interest, for, as we shall find, what worried the government was the closeness of material in circulation to versions of the constitution that had been drafted but rejected. A third manuscript carries the endorsement ‘Avisoes presented to the Protector Decemb. 1653’.30 A fourth is in the hand, and in the collection, of the bookseller George Thomason.31 A fifth is a copy, made by the royalist conspirator Roger Whitley, of some other, now apparently lost, text.32 The sixth, the fullest and most carefully written of them, is in the papers of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and for convenience will be called the Clarendon draft.33 Its list of articles is unique among the manuscripts in that we can tell it to have been drawn up before the end of Barebone’s, for it refers to measures that ‘are depending before the Parliament’, and describes a bill which the Rump was debating at the time of its dissolution (the ‘bill for a new representative’, from which the drafts and the final version took a scheme for the redistribution of constituencies34) as ‘the last Parliament bill’. As (like all the other drafts) the Clarendon manuscript provides for the ruler to be called protector, it was presumably drawn up at some point after Cromwell had entered the discussions and declined the title of king.35 The other drafts, which we can think of as a group, are in general much closer to each other in wording than to the Clarendon draft, and differ from each other on no points of substance. At least three of them, the Thurloe draft among them,36 were evidently composed later than 12 December, for

B.L., Add. MS 4159, f. 227 (hereafter Thurloe). Bodl., MS Tanner 52, ff. 64–5 (hereafter Tanner). If we knew at what point in ‘Decemb.’, many of our problems might be solved. Another endorsement of the document, in another hand, has: ‘Proposalls offered the Protector’. 31 B.L., 669 f. 17 [hereafter Thomason]: headed ‘The Articles’. 32 Bodl., MS Eng. hist. e. 308, pp. 34–5 [hereafter Whitley]: headed, ‘The Protector, and new Government’. 33 Bodl., MS Clarendon 47, f. 161. 34 Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament 1648–1653 (Cambridge, repr. 1977), ch. 8. 35 Was the document, which allots ‘supreme power’ to ‘the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland’, perhaps the source of the ‘opinion’ voiced on 25 Nov. by Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, in whose papers the text lies, that Cromwell ‘will speedily possess himself either under the title of Protector of the 3 kingdome[s], or of King, the sole power’ (Bodl., MS Clarendon 47, f. 115)? If so the draft, which must have come from a royalist mole, would have reached Paris by the 25th – and the decision to adopt the title of ‘protector’ in place of ‘king’ would have at least been contemplated by the time it was sent. 36 The other two are Hull and Whitley. 29 30

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in them the measures which in the Clarendon text are ‘depending before the Parliament’ are called ‘Acts made by the late Parliaments’.37 To distinguish the final version from the drafts I shall henceforth refer to it, and only to it, as the Instrument. The drafts much more often agree with the Instrument than differ from it. There is, however, an underlying difference of premise. Because the protectorate half-returned to the monarchy which most parliamentarians had never rejected, and which would be lastingly restored in 1660, it is easy to think of it as a logical historical development, and to regard the four years of parliamentary government that preceded it as an aberration. Yet the heart of parliament’s case against the king in the Civil War had been the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. The principle was compatible with that of mixed government, provided it was parliament that ultimately determined the mixture and provided parliament had the authority, at least in emergencies, to alter it. The principle was likewise compatible, on the same premise, with the government of kings or other single rulers, even though in 1649 it was adapted to their absence.38 It was also compatible with, indeed was believed to assist, strong government. M.P.s who asserted a right to rescind or alter the powers of rulers did not, in normal circumstances, expect or hope to exercise it. The parliament of 1654, which jealously asserted the supremacy of parliament over the executive,39 briskly waved through executive decisions which, in accordance with the Instrument, the protector had submitted to it.40 Nonetheless rulers, in parliamentary thinking, were to rule only by parliament’s permission and on parliament’s terms. The Instrument offended parliamentarian opinion not only because it was imposed by the army rather than by parliament, but because it separated the executive from the legislature and made it largely autonomous.41 Article 1 of the Instrument gives joint legislative power to protector and parliament. Article 2, which does not mention parliament, awards ‘the exercise of the chief magistracy and the administration of the government’ to protector and council. An alternative explanation, that the three drafts were drawn up before 12 Dec. but worded in readiness for the time when Barebone’s had been dissolved, seems unlikely. Two drafts (Tanner and Thomason) have ‘the late parliament’, perhaps because they were drawn up before 12 Dec., or perhaps because they were written after it but not brought up to date. Gaunt, p. 41, notes that some provisions of the constitution are mentioned by all the drafts except the Clarendon one. The obvious explanation is that they were additions inserted after the composition of the Clarendon manuscript, but their omission from it could alternatively be explained by abbreviation. 38 Blair Worden, God’s Instruments. Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012), ch. 7. 39 Ibid., ch. 6. 40 Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. J. T. Rutt (4 vols, 1828), I, xli; Journal of the House of Commons, 24 Oct. 1654. 41 See especially [Marchamont Nedham], A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth (1654), pp. 10, 51. 37

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The drafts show how difficult the framers of the Instrument found it to free themselves from the parliamentarian position, or else how nervous they were of challenging it. In the manuscripts, protector and council are indeed to exercise executive power, but only ‘in the intervalls of parliament’. Thus ‘in the intervalls of parliament’ they are to ‘order the affairs of the nation’ and ‘make peace and war’. ‘In the intervalls of parliament’ the protector is to ‘confer honours and places of trust’.42 Those provisions had earlier constitutional proposals behind them, which had given executive bodies a caretaker authority between meetings of parliament. The army’s Agreement of the People of 1649 called for councils of state to govern in the ‘interval[s]’ of parliament ‘according to such instructions and limitations’ as parliament appointed.43 The Rump’s electoral bill of 1653 would have entrusted executive power, in the ‘intervals of parliament’, to a council of state whose members were ‘to give an account of their conduct and management’ to the next parliament.44 The drafts, in outlining the powers of the executive, say nothing of the imposition of parliamentary limitations or of any obligation of the executive to report its conduct to parliament when the intervals ended, and we can only guess whether the drafters envisaged them. The drafters would hardly have expected parliaments, if they were at all content with the conduct of the Cromwellian executive, to reallocate executive power for the duration of their own sessions. But the choice, the drafts leave us to suppose, would have been parliament’s own. So would another choice. The Agreement and the Rump’s bill provided for the ‘intervals’ during which councils would rule to be extensive, for in those schemes parliaments, which were to be biennial, were to sit no more than five months. So long as the accountability of the executive’s authority was secured, the authors of those documents were happy to have long ‘intervals’. The composers of the drafts of the Instrument seem to have been divided about (or anyway to have caused confusion about) the length of time they wanted or expected parliaments to sit.45 They did not need to decide the answer, for, once a parliament had sat five months, the remaining length of its sitting would be for parliament itself to determine. Whereas in the Instrument the power of dissolution, and of adjournment too, is silently

In quoting words which appear in more than one draft I have standardized the spelling. 43 Constitutional Documents, ed. Gardiner, pp. 363, 368 (and see pp. 317 [article I. 4], 319 [article II. 1, 2], 329 [article IV]). 44 Ludlow, I, 351; Worden, Rump Parliament, pp. 372–3; and see Journal of the House of Commons, 11 June 1649. 45 Gaunt, pp. 36–7, notes the army’s ambivalence on this point. The drafts say that no parliament may adjourn (or, in one case, ‘dissolve’) until it has sat for at least five months. But there were reports before the publication of the Instrument that no parliament was to sit longer than five months: Birch, I, 632; A Perfect Account, 21–8 Dec. 1653, p. 36; and see Nedham, True State, pp. 36–7. 42

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left to the protector, who could (and in 1655 would) exercise it after five months, in the drafts ‘no parliament is to be dissolved by the Lord Protector’, and adjournment is likewise parliament’s own concern.46 The phrase ‘in the intervals of parliament’ does survive in four articles of the Instrument.47 They define certain powers which parliament is to enjoy while it is sitting, and leave them to the otherwise independent executive when it is not. But there is no intimation that the issues covered by the articles are preserves of parliamentary sovereignty. Instead there is an air of pragmatic compromise, which leaves readers to wonder on what grounds the executive is to be curtailed during meetings of parliament. The deference of the drafts to the principle of parliamentary sovereignty is by no means uniform. An opposite impulse is also at work in them. If parliamentary sovereignty had met the army’s needs, after all, there would have been no need for the Instrument. Yet only with apparent caginess, and with an uncharacteristic degree of compression, does the Clarendon text reveal the framers’ stance on two fundamental issues on which parliamentary sovereignty was to be denied, and on which the Instrument would concur with the drafts. Parliaments, states the manuscript, are to ‘have power of making all laws save in some cases relating to the Guards of the Commonwealth and matters of Religion’. The meaning of that euphemism emerges from the rest of the draft and from the subsequent versions of the constitution. There is to be a standing army of 30,000 men,48 which parliament may not reduce without the protector’s agreement. And there is to be a guarantee of liberty of conscience, a principle to which parliamentary majorities were customarily averse.

Gaunt, p. 34, says that the drafts give the protector an ‘unstated but assumed’ right to adjourn or prorogue parliaments. In all the drafts, however, parliaments ‘adjourne’, whereas in the Instrument (article 8) they are to ‘be adjourned’. The transfer of the power of dissolution to the protector, which increased the chances that the triennial parliaments would be of short duration, may explain the presence of article 23 in the Instrument, of which there is no equivalent in the drafts, and which allows the protector and council to summon extra parliaments ‘when the necessities of the state shall require it’. That the article is an addition, and an insufficiently considered one, is suggested by a disparity, which must be unintentional, between it and articles 14 and 21. The curious result is that royalists are banned from voting or standing in elections for triennial parliaments but not for other ones. It was a question whether the crown had had the right of adjournment: The Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England (24 vols, 1752–63), XXIII, 68. 47 Nos 4, 25, 29, 34. 48 In Tanner, which in this respect differs from the other drafts, the provision for such a standing army appears only at the end. 46

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III The references in three of the drafts to Barebone’s as a past event indicate that the conversion of the lists they supply into the Instrument must have occurred at a time or times after the termination of the assembly on 12 December. The point is confirmed by the evidence of a newsletter of 13 December in the papers of the army secretary, William Clarke, which is likely to have been written by someone with inside information about the officers’ deliberations. For simplicity I shall call it the Clarke letter. The document reports decisions about the new government reached by civilian M.P.s and the council of officers on the previous day (the 12th) or possibly on the 13th. It is a selective and lopsided account, but it does reveal that the protector is to hold executive powers, one of them ‘to make war and peace’, ‘in the intervalls of Parliaments’.49 In the Instrument, by contrast, parliament has no say in the making of war and peace.50 Another change can be dated later than 12 December. There is a provision at the end of article 30 of the Instrument for the protector and the council to pass ‘laws and ordinances’ in the nine months before the first protectoral parliament, which was to decide whether to endorse them. Neither the drafts nor the army letter of 13 December mentions this striking suspension of parliament’s legislative role.51 On the 15th the French ambassador reported that the protector would not ‘make any new law’ before parliament met,52 a broad statement, perhaps of uncertain meaning, but one he would hardly have made had he known of a plan for interim legislation. That difference between the Instrument and the drafts is the obvious explanation of another contrast, which supports the hypothesis that the provision was an addition to article 30. All but one of the drafts (the Clarendon manuscript) stipulate that it is to be treason to speak against the new government. The Instrument does not. The provision for interim legislation made the article about treason unnecessary. On 21 December the council resolved to deal with treason by a legislative ordinance, which was passed on 19 January.53 Worcester College Oxford, Clarke MS xxv, f. 52 [hereafter Clarke]. The letter is puzzlingly headed; it contains two numerical errors which can be ascribed to dictation or transcription; but its authenticity seems secure. Firth, in his edition of the Clarke Papers, III, 9–10, included only a portion of the letter. I owe my knowledge of the remaining part, which describes the purported constitution, to Frances Henderson, who has given me expert advice about it. 50 Below, n. 67 and n. 119. 51 The Clarke letter does mention the protector’s authority, which in the Instrument is allotted immediately before the words granting interim legislative power, to raise taxes until the parliament meets. 52 T.N.A., P.R.O. 31/3/92, f. 100. 53 Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1653–4 [hereafter C.S.P.D. 1653–4], p. 308; Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, ed. Sir Charles H. Firth and R. S. Rait (3 vols, 1911), 49

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The revisions which reduced the powers and independence of parliaments and enabled interim legislation greatly strengthened the protector’s and the executive’s hand. So would other changes which seem to have been contemplated, and to which we shall come. There was evidently an attempt to aggrandize the new ruler’s title too. Two newsletters in William Clarke’s papers, both written on 13 December (the same day as the newsletter in the same collection that we have already met), reveal that Cromwell is to become ‘Lord Governour’ or ‘chief Governour’, a more imposing title than protector.54 A royalist news writer of 14 December, who had somehow learned, in a slightly inaccurate form, the gist of the forthcoming constitution, stated that he would be ‘lord governor’.55 On the 15th the French ambassador, who three days earlier had expected Cromwell to be ‘protector’, wrote in one letter that Cromwell would be ‘governor’ and in another that he would be ‘governor or protector’.56 The decision to adhere to ‘lord protector’, the title Cromwell accepted on the 16th, seems to have been taken shortly before the ceremony. IV On 2 January 1654 the government declared that the constitution which it published on that day was the text Cromwell had signed at the ceremony on the 16th.57 If that was true, the revision of the drafts must have been effected and completed by that date. But had it? Or were there further amendments at some point or points after the hectic discussions of 12–16 II, 831–5 (though see too articles 19 and 20 of the Instrument). The Instrument, unlike all the drafts, denies the protector the power to pardon treason. 54 The Clarke Papers V, ed. Frances Henderson (Camden Soc. 5th series, 2005), pp. 74, 127, 128. 55 Birch, I, 632. Protectors had customarily been interim rulers. Did the drafters think of the protector as protecting the nation in the intervals between parliaments, and was a change of title contemplated because the protector’s executive authority was instead to be permanent? 56 T.N.A., P.R.O. 31/3/92, ff. 97, 100. Many reports in the days after 12 Dec. state that Cromwell will ‘govern’ the three nations. Bulstrode Whitelocke, who was leading a diplomatic mission to Sweden, received on 13 Jan. 1654 ‘the great news of the dissolving the Parlament in England, and that the General was made Supreme Governor’. Later on the same day he received ‘a copy of the Instrument of Government agreed upon, and sworn by the Protector to be observed upon this change’. Bulstrode Whitelocke, Journal of the Swedish Embassy (2 vols, 1855), I, 313, 315. Perhaps the title had been altered between the dispatch of the first message and that of the second. In two of the drafts (Thurloe and Whitley) – and in the printed ‘abstract’ to which we shall come – Cromwell’s office is to be ‘chief protector’ (cf. Abbott, IV, 467). The openings both of the Clarendon draft and of the Instrument establish first that there is to be a ‘single person’, and only then that his title is to be protector. 57 The Government of the Commonwealth (1654), title page. 134

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December? An underground publication of 23 December, which listed articles that we find in the drafts but not in the Instrument, described them as articles signed by Cromwell on 16 December. So does an endorsement on the Clarendon draft. There are difficulties about those descriptions,58 which could have arisen from confusion in the public mind created by the government’s reticence about the new constitution and by the circulation of inaccurate information about it. Yet there is a case in their favour. In the end the obscurities of the evidence largely prevail. In most cases it proves impossible to say whether the revisions of the drafts were made before or after the 16th. Still, there is progress we can make. The document accepted by Cromwell on the 16th was read out before he signed it, in front of an invited audience. Those present who had not been involved in the formation of the regime arrived with little or no idea what to expect.59 They are unlikely to have grasped all they heard in a reading which took more than half an hour.60 The basic fact of Cromwell’s elevation, and its ceremonial embellishment, may have made prior claims on their attention. We might nonetheless think it unlikely that the government would subsequently have risked, and have got away with, deception about what had happened on the 16th. Yet deception there was. The Instrument, which listed the members of the council, included among them the army officer Philip Skippon, the last name on the list. But Skippon became a member of the council only on the 20th.61 That discrepancy may seem venial.62 Other evidence, however, points to the possibility of alteration on larger fronts. At the end of the Thurloe draft there are two clauses which are absent from the other drafts, even from ones otherwise virtually identical to it. They constitute the only substantial point of divergence among the drafts as a whole. They appear to be undi-

The first (the ‘abstract’ discussed below, p. 140) is only a summary of articles, not the full text its title requires. The second carries a different problem, its retrospective and inaccurate dating: ‘The Heads of the Instrument signed by the Protector at his installment. 1654.’ 59 True Catalogue, p. 13. 60 Severall Proccedings of State Affaires, 15–22 Dec., p. 3493. 61 Gaunt, pp. 31–2. Gaunt is confident that the differences between the Instrument and the drafts were all effected after the 16th. He has a strong case, though his suggestion that the drafts (and other texts which differ from the final version, and to which we shall come) derived from notes taken by people who were present when the constitution was read at the ceremony of installation cannot cover the Clarendon draft, drawn up as it was before 12 Dec. To my mind the drafts have the character not of scribal notes but of position papers (or copies of them). (If notes were indeed taken from a read text, an alternative occasion for them is the first of the two meetings of officers mentioned in Ludlow, I, 369, where Lambert ‘read’ the constitution to his colleagues: below, n. 92.) 62 Woolrych, p. 379, observes that the fact that Skippon was formally made a councillor on the 20th ‘is no proof that he was not chosen earlier’ – but it does disprove the statement in the Instrument. 58

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gested additions, to which the earlier clauses of the document have yet to be adapted. We cannot say whether the additions were made before or after the 16th, but they will lead us to evidence which suggests that, on at least one fundamental issue, the constitution was revised in the second of those periods. The two additions address the constitutional issues on which king and parliament had broken in 1642: the ruler’s power to veto parliamentary legislation; and the control of the militia. On the first subject the main body of the Thurloe draft says, consistently both with the other drafts and with the Instrument, that, ‘Whatsoever bill is proposed’, the protector is to pass it within twenty days, unless the bill contradicts the constitution itself. Likewise the Clarke letter of 13 December states that ‘the Lord Protector hath not a negative voice but is to subscribe’ bills not at odds with the constitution. But one of the added clauses of the Thurloe draft reads ‘The Lord Protector is to have [h]is negative vote.’ Likewise news reports of the 16th, the 17th and the 22nd state that the protector is to have a ‘negative voice’.63 We may suspect from those deviant statements that some inaccurate story was doing the rounds. In any case the statements could mean more than one thing. They could signify not an attempt to enlarge his power of veto but a rebuttal of some move to deny him even the qualified one the Instrument would give him. But when we turn to the other added stipulation of the Thurloe draft, and interpret the draft’s statement about his ‘negative vote’ alongside it, it does look as if a serious effort to enlarge the protector’s prerogatives was being made. The issue of the control of the militia was a headache for the new rulers. Cromwell alluded to the difficulties when addressing parliament in 1654. He then observed that in the Instrument the militia was ‘equally placed’ between himself and parliament, and recalled that ‘desires were to have it so’. He was referring to article 4, which enables the protector and the council to ‘dispose ... the militia’, but, while parliament is sitting, to do so only with the ‘consent’ of parliament. Though that stipulation is far from being a recognition of parliamentary sovereignty, it does make a concession to parliament in the executive sphere of a kind that is unique in the Instrument. The drafts, except at the end of the Thurloe manuscript, say nothing about the control of the militia, and nothing to exempt that subject from their rule that the protector is to ‘order all affaires’ during ‘the intervalls of parliament’. The Clarke letter of 13 December confirms the point: ‘The militia in the intervalls of parliament is to be managed’ by the protector. But the added clause of the Thurloe draft reads: ‘The Lord Protector is to have the government of the militia to his own disposeing.’ What gives force to that assertion is a letter of 19 December by an agent, one ‘W. Wing’, to the Roundhead grandee Lord Wharton. It was written after a conversa63

H.M.C. 7th Report, p. 460; H.M.C., Egmont I, p. 532; Bodl., MS Carte 131, f. 253v. 136

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tion that morning between Wing and the president of the council Henry Lawrence, himself an electoral client of Wharton,64 just before Lawrence attended an urgent meeting with Cromwell. In describing the powers of the protector under the constitution, Wing stated: ‘the militia is solely in his hands’.65 There is apparent support for the agent’s claim in a report in a news book, set up in print on or soon after the 19th, which states that the militia is to be ‘ordered’ by protector and council, and says nothing of a role for parliament (though, as so often, the wording could be the result of abbreviation).66 If Wharton’s agent got it right, then there must have been a move, in the event rejected, to exclude parliament from the running of the militia. Whether the move occurred before the 16th or after it, its rejection must have happened later than Wing’s conversation with Lawrence on the 19th. Article 4 of the Instrument is a compromise between the position apparently identifiable on the 13th – the date of the Clarke letter, which reported the confinement of the protector’s control of the militia to the intervals of parliament – and that apparently identifiable on the 19th. It looks like a belated insertion, or else a belated replacement of an article elsewhere in the constitution, for the wording of article 5 reads as if it was written to follow the end of article 3.67 We cannot say when the compromise, if such it was, was made. On other fronts we can at least establish a date by which basic revisions of the drafts had occurred. The most basic of them, the creation by article 2 of the largely autonomous power of the executive, had been effected by 20 December. We can also say that the clause entitling protector and council to pass interim ‘laws and ordinances’ had been added by the same day. The evidence is a government proclamation, ordered on the 20th and published on the 21st,

David Underdown, ‘Party Management in the Recruiter Elections’, E.H.R. 80 (1968), 242, and the sources at Underdown’s n. 4. 65 Bodl., MS Carte 103, f. 198. The summary of the Instrument in the Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow (i. 371; cf. below, n. 79) states that Cromwell was to ‘have the power of the militia by land and sea’, but he or his editor may have been abbreviating. 66 A Perfect Diurnall, 19–26 Dec., p. 3019); also in Perfect Account, 21–8 Dec. 1653, p. 1234 (under 21 Dec.). 67 If there was a compromise on that front, was there one on another? The drafts entitle the protector to confer offices of trust during ‘the intervals of parliament’. In article 34 of the Instrument such appointments are left to the executive, save that they are to be subject to the consent, or ‘approbation’, of parliament. Wing’s letter, and the news book of the same day that supports it, present the same power as being wholly in the executive’s hands. Those statements may be misleading abbreviations, and but for the striking wording both of Wing’s letter and of the Thurloe draft on the subject of the militia we might assume them to be so. But if they were not, we again find the Instrument standing between two earlier positions. A point perhaps in favour of that interpretation is that the news book, in the sentence which states that the appointment of officers and the ordering of the militia are to lie with the protector, says the same about the power of war and peace, from which the Instrument excludes parliament. 64

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which invoked the wording of both provisions, as subsequent statements by the regime would soon do.68 We can further say that by the 20th the council had decided to proceed with the constitution as it was then meant to stand – which is not necessarily to say that it would keep to its decision. For on the 20th the council instructed Thurloe ‘with all convenient speed’ to ‘perfect what is further to be done about the instrument entitled The Government &c, that so it may be ready for enrolling’.69 (We are left to guess what, and how much or how little, the ‘perfecting’ would have involved.) On the 22nd he was told ‘to bring in the Instrument fitted for enrolment tomorrow morning’.70 Yet he did not do so, and the instruction had to be repeated on 5 January.71 On 27 December the council ordered him ‘to take a speedy course for perfecting what is further to be done to fit’ the Instrument ‘for the press that it may be printed for public view’.72 This time he acted swiftly. The Instrument was set up in print on the 27th, or possibly on the 28th or 29th.73 By now, at least, the final version of the constitution was in place. Yet it was only on 2 January (a Monday) that the printed copies, which the government, if it had wished, could have instantly readied for distribution, became ‘extant’.74 Perhaps they would have been held back still longer had not a news book got hold of, and published under the date 31 December, a version of the final text, which though flawed and incomplete was much the fullest account the public had seen.75

C.S.P.D. 1653–4, p. 300; Mercurius Politicus, 22–9 Dec. 1653, p. 3140. Until the 23rd the council prepared ‘acts’ and ‘bills’ rather than ‘ordinances’, the term it used thereafter: C.S.P.D. 1653–4, pp. 299ff. 69 T.N.A., SP 25/75: 20 Dec. 1653. 70 Ibid.: 22 Dec. 71 T.N.A., SP 25/75: 5 Jan. Thereafter we hear no more until March, when the Instrument was entered in the Court of Chancery: T.N.A., C. 204/23. The enrolled text, which is faithful to that of 2 Jan., reproduced the ‘tenor’ of the text signed by Cromwell on 16 Dec. In seventeenth-century usage ‘tenor’ could have meant either an exact copy or an approximate equivalent. The ambiguity may or may not be intentional. 72 T.N.A., SP 25/75: 21 Dec. 73 This can be deduced from the Instrument’s place in the sequence of government orders, which were continuously paginated, and from the dating of the Instrument in the table of contents of A Catalogue and Collection of all those Ordinances (1654). (The Scottish edition of the Instrument [above, n. 4], today the more easily available of the two editions, was independently paginated.) 74 Perfect Account, 28 Dec.–4 Jan., p. 1245, which adds that the document is published ‘by his Highnesse especial commandment’. 75 The Moderate Publisher, 30 Dec.–6 Jan. [wrongly dated in its title], pp. 90–2. Henry Walker, the editor of Severall Proceedings, appears also to have been responsible for The Moderate Publisher: Joseph Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), p. 246. 68

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V Why did it take the government seventeen days to get the Instrument into print? Professor Woolrych argued that ‘Thurloe and the council simply did not have time to prepare’ the Instrument ‘for the printers until the turn of the year’. The new rulers were indeed extremely busy men, who were operating in the most disordered of political settings; the creation of a working government was more urgent than the precise contents of the constitution on which it rested; and we shall come to evidence of disarray in Thurloe’s office, where delays of business were endemic. The document read on the 16th must have been hastily written out and, as Woolrych says, ‘in rough shape’.76 Yet if, as Woolrych believed, the government was committed to the text read on that day, its preparation for the press would merely have involved tidying and transcription. The regime would hardly have risked the undermining of its authority by taking so long over so small a task. During the seventeen days the content of the constitution was ‘so much enquired after’;77 there was a ‘great expectation of the people, who desire to be informed of the constitution of the Government now established’;78 ‘most men’ were ‘in a maze’ about it.79 Well they might have been. A proclamation published three days after Cromwell’s installation announced that ‘the government of the three nations by a Lord Protector and successive Triennial Parliaments’ had been ‘established’. ‘All persons’ were ‘strictly’ required ‘to conform and submit themselves’ to it.80 Yet the proclamation said nothing else about the form of government to which their conformity and submission were required. It gave no hint even of the existence of a written constitution. The danger for the government was that, in the absence of an authorized version, unauthorized ones would emerge. Between the end of Bare-

Woolrych, p. 362. Perfect Diurnall, 19–26 Dec., p. 3019. 78 Perfect Account, 21–8 Dec., p. 1233. 79 H.M.C. Egmont I (ii), p. 532. Not surprisingly there seems to have been public confusion about the contents of the new constitution. The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow (I, 371) contain a summary of the provisions of the constitution which is probably a compressed version of the text that reached him in Ireland. That was evidently not the final version. Among other differences from the final text the Memoirs report that the nation was to be governed by protector and council ‘in the intervals of parliament’, and states that parliaments were to be ‘chosen by the people’, a stipulation that is recorded (perhaps to distinguish the protectoral parliaments from Barebone’s) in press summaries (e.g. Mercurius Politicus, 22–9 Dec., p. 3053), but not in the Instrument itself. 80 Mercurius Politicus, 15–22 Dec., p. 3054; Severall Proceedings, 15–22 Dec., p. 3501; cf. Clarke Papers, ed. Henderson, p. 128. In the same issue (p. 3493) Severall Proceedings had announced that as well as government by protector and council (which all published accounts led readers to expect) there was ‘a Parliament to be afterwards called, &c’. 76 77

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bone’s and the publication of the Instrument the weekly news books, which were dependent on varying degrees of briefing from Whitehall and which normally repaid it by slanting news in the government’s favour, were given exceptionally little information about the new political order. On 23 December the regime paid the price. That day the council, as its first recorded item of business, ordered a search for a newly printed ‘abstract of the Instrument whereby the Government of the commonwealth is settled’.81 All copies found were to be seized; the presses that had produced them were to be broken; and the printers and their accomplices were to be brought before the council. What appears to be the ‘abstract’ survives. It was plausibly dressed, being printed, as the government’s publications were and as the Instrument would be, under the Seal of the Commonwealth and in Gothic type. It includes, in distinctive wording that had appeared in the drafts, provisions which the Instrument omits or transforms. Most notably it reproduces the clauses which confine the executive power of protector and council to ‘the intervalls of parliament’ and deny the protector the power to dissolve or adjourn parliament. Those provisions must have been supplanted by the decision, which had been taken at least three days before the abstract appeared, to authorize a largely autonomous executive. The ‘abstract’ was the publication that claimed to reproduce the text signed by Cromwell on 16 December. If it was right, the government’s discomfort on learning of its appearance must have been acute. The ‘abstract’ was not the only list of the provisions of the constitution to have got into print by the 23rd. Two others had appeared the previous day, in weekly news books which were closer to the government than the rest and, at least at this time, could be more easily relied on: Severall Proceedings

B.L., 669 f. 72. George Thomason, who privately read the ‘abstract’ alongside the manuscript draft in his possession, dated the latter 2 Jan., and wrote on his copy of the Instrument ‘printed the 23 December. 1653’ (B.L., E1063[5], p. 46). He seems to have shared the confusion caused by the circulation of what proved to be inaccurate versions. But Jason Peacey, to whose advice on this matter I am very grateful, has pointed out to me that the date ‘23 December’ (which is otherwise mystifying) may be a cross-reference, for Thomason’s own eyes, to the abstract. Thomason dates the abstract itself 30 Dec. Perhaps it was not until then that it came into his possession; or perhaps the printers, having been thwarted on the 23rd, tried again, this time successfully, a week later, when transmitters of news had become increasingly eager to get details of the constitution into print. The council, perhaps tentatively, named one of the printers, Robert Wood. The ‘abstract’ gives the name of its publisher, George Horton, who was sometimes Wood’s antagonist, sometimes his collaborator: Frank, Beginnings of the English Newspaper, pp. 248, 249. The relationship between Wood and Horton at this time is perplexing and perhaps perplexed the government. It is doubtful whether the retribution ordered against the printers was carried out. The other publishing activities of Wood and Horton were not interrupted, or at least not seriously. The relations between governments and printers, in which the two sides needed each other but were never unambiguously beholden to each other, are a labyrinthine subject.

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of State Affaires and Mercurius Politicus. They gave the public its first indications of the existence of a written constitution. Evidently sources within a regime which was so unforthcoming in official publications allowed those unofficial channels to put selected information about the document into print. The result shows the government at sixes and sevens about the constitution to which it had committed itself on the 16th. Severall Proceedings reproduces exactly the opening clause of the Clarendon draft, which defined the distribution of legislative power.82 The wording was in itself incompatible with the Instrument only in what from the government’s viewpoint was an innocuous sense,83 but it too had been outdated by the creation of article 2, of whose existence the news book gives no hint. Whoever sanctioned the publication of the list must have been nervous about the reception of article 2 or have hoped for its abandonment. Politicus published a different list, which had probably been set up in print by the 19th.84 Unlike Severall Proceedings, Politicus reproduces nothing from the drafts that is not in the Instrument. Yet, like Severall Proceedings, it conceals or plays down the extent of the authority of the new executive. Its list emphasizes the curbs on the protector’s power and the ‘strict’ provision for the holding of regular parliaments.85 The editor of Politicus was Marchamont Nedham, who worked in Thurloe’s office.86 We can almost hear the chaos around Nedham as he summarizes eight provisions of the constitution. After listing the first six he writes: ‘This is the form of Government in general, particulars having slipt my memory.’ Then the words ‘Only thus much further’ are followed by the other two provisions. Then: ‘These are some passages set down as near as I Severall Proceedings, 15–22 Dec., p. 3500. It states that the protector is to exercise his share of the legislative power ‘assisted with a council’. The words were omitted from the Instrument, which allots no legislative role to the council after Sept. 1654 and confines the body to executive functions. The news book also repeats the clause of the Clarendon draft exempting ‘cases relating to the Guards ... and matters of Religion’. 84 Mercurius Politicus, 15–22 Dec., p. 3053. 85 It goes beyond the drafts in stating, as a uniform principle, that the protector is to govern with not only the ‘advice’ but the ‘consent’ of the council (cf. below, n. 119). It does so again when, in announcing the protector’s power only to suspend, not to veto, the passage of legislation, it omits the critical proviso (which is in all the drafts and in the final version) excluding from that provision bills contrary to the content of the new constitution. Had the honesty of Nedham’s summary been challenged, he might have invoked pressure of space to justify the omission; but he would have known how misleading it was. The qualification is also omitted from the fuller account of the constitution in The Moderate Publisher (above, p. 138 and n. 75), and in news books which followed Nedham’s version (below, n. 87). 86 For his services to Thurloe at this time see Contemporaries of Bulstrode Whitelocke 1605–1675: biographies, illustrated by letters and other documents, ed. Ruth Spalding (Oxford, 1990), p. 218; and his intelligence report (Thurloe’s province) in C.S.P.D. 1653–4, pp. 304–8. 82

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remember, since the day that they were read in publike. Many other particulars there are of great importance, which you may hear of in due time.’ Readers might have expected to ‘hear of’ them on the 29th, in the next issues of the two news books, which however kept silent on the subject. Over the days following the 22nd the lists that the books had published on that day did reappear, in variously adjusted forms, in other weeklies.87 They took readers a little further towards the content of the Instrument, but only a little. Only after the publication of the Instrument on 2 January did Severall Proceedings and Politicus, and then other news books, print full and accurate versions of the final text. VI Was the government, in the aftermath of the inauguration on 16 December, divided over the content of the new constitution? Did the delay in publication owe more to moves (whether successful or unsuccessful) to rewrite it, or to anxiety about the nation’s likely response to the document? Was the government’s reticence influenced by the reactions, or by anxiety about the reactions, of men who might demand alterations to the constitution as a price for joining the regime: of Roundhead grandees whom (as all sources agree) Cromwell was eager to recruit to the council,88 or of law officers or the judiciary?89 We can only speculate. What we do know of is the government’s anxiety about the response of the army, whose loyalty was to Cromwell always a high priority, both political and emotional. The reactions of the forces in Scotland and Ireland, which were closely watched, might take time to gauge,90 but the attitude of the regiments in England, especially of those Descriptions in The Faithfull Scout, Great Brittains Post, and The Weekly Intelligencer descend from that in Severall Proceedings, those in A Perfect Account and A Perfect Diurnall from that in Politicus. 88 Appointments to the council made not in the Instrument but in the aftermath of the coup would need to be confirmed by the parliament of 1654 (article 26), perhaps a disincentive for prospective appointees, and perhaps a reason for the government to recruit as many members as possible before the constitution was published (or to pretend that Philip Skippon had been a member on the 16th: above, p. 135). One could imagine Oliver St John, whom Cromwell was believed to be particularly anxious to appoint, being more favourably (or anyway less unfavourably) disposed to the drafts than to the Instrument (Worden, God’s Instruments, pp. 208–9, 254). 89 One possibility must be that leading lawyers (St John among them), who believed the restoration of kingship essential to the legitimacy of any new regime, were demanding or hoping for a change of title from ‘lord protector’ to ‘king’. See Birch, II, 64. There were apparently army officers who still wanted him to take the royal title: T.N.A., P.R.O. 31/3/92, f. 104. 90 Mercurius Politicus, 22–9 Dec., p. 3154; Scotland and the Commonwealth, ed. Sir Charles 87

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around London, presented an immediate problem. There was particular attention to the reaction of Major-General Thomas Harrison, the champion of Barebone’s and Lambert’s rival in the military counsels of 1653, who lost his commission and was soon ordered to leave the capital. The coups of April and December 1653 divided the army. Alongside the officers who endorsed them there were others suspicious or resentful of Cromwell’s elevation, or outraged by his affronts to parliamentary sovereignty, or distressed by the thwarting of the reform programme that had prevailed in Barebone’s. Mercurius Politicus tried to scare dissidents or potential dissents by indicating that disunion would play into the hands of foreign powers. News had reached Brussels, Nedham reported, ‘that the Army is divided about’ the dissolution of Barebone’s, and that people there ‘expect every hour to hear the certainty thereof’.91 Military protests in December anticipated the grievances that in the year ahead would produce disaffection or conspiracy in regiments in all three nations. Unfortunately our sources for the discontent in that month, all hostile to the regime and all retrospective, suffer from chronological confusion or conflation. There seem to have been protests between the 12th and the 16th,92 but the chronological jumble of our only source for them makes

H. Firth (Scottish History Society, Edinburgh, 1895), p. 301; Severall Proceedings 19–26 Jan., p. 3576. Those reports portray unanimous acceptance among the Scottish forces, but Perfect Account, 1–8 Feb. 1654, p. 1288, implicitly acknowledges dissent among the Irish ones. The Clarke letter of 13 Dec. may have been written to persuade or reassure the army in Scotland. 91 Mercurius Politicus, 29 Dec.–5 Jan., p. 3156. The report appeared in a letter from Brussels which Nedham may have doctored: cf. Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, repr. 2009), pp. 208–14. 92 One of the sources is a pamphlet of 1655, The Protector, (so called), in Part Unveiled, by ‘a late Member of the Army, who was an Eye, and an Ear witnesses to many of those Things’. A passage in it (p. 12) has divided historians. It tells us that ‘several officers of the army were sent for upon pretence of being taken into the consultation’ of the ‘five or six’ who planned and imposed the constitution; ‘yet when they came thither, they did little but walk to and fro in the Room without, whilst the business was carried on by a few within; and staying several times very late at night, still expecting to be sent for, Major-General Lambert comes out to them, and tells them they might go home, for there was no occasion at that time to make use of them’. Gardiner (Commonwealth and Protectorate, II, 330) places the event between the 12th and the 16th, Woolrych (pp. 354–6) before the 12th. Either interpretation is defensible; neither can be clinched. The immediate context of the statement supports Woolrych’s case, but the difficulty is then to reconcile the passage with the pamphleteer’s assertion that before the 12th the devising of the constitution had been a secret closely guarded by the devisers. We should note that the pamphleteer, who supplies evidence of discontent after the 16th, does not indicate that the ‘several officers’ were dissatisfied at the time Lambert kept them waiting. His point is rather that the episode reveals the sinister intentions, which have become evident in retrospect, of the ‘five or six’. 143

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it hard to gauge their character and extent.93 There was certainly discontent after the 16th, even if surviving accounts may have overstated it. ‘Soon after [Cromwell] was Proclaimed Protector’, ‘Many of the chief Officers then about the head quarters and elsewhere’, together with ‘most of the … honest Officers’ in ‘the nation’, were ‘greatly against’ his new appointment. ‘When some told’ the protector of their dissatisfaction, they were answered by Lambert, who ‘replyed, That those that were dissatisfied might leave their commands then: Do you think (says he) we are such Children, having begun a business, not to go through with it’. On the 27th officers in Whitehall who had backed the coup felt it necessary to write to nearby regiments urging them to sign a declaration of support. There were, we are told, refusals, most conspicuously in Cromwell’s own regiment of foot, where Cromwell and Lambert had to hold ‘three or four hours debate’ before getting the declaration through. Major John Wiggan, a religious radical who had been with the regiment since the Scottish campaign of 1650–1, refused to sign it and lost his commission either then or soon afterwards. Officers in other regiments were deprived too.94 News books, in their usual way, were dutiful in recording military support for the regime and in keeping silent about military dissent. Their insistence on the army’s unity in the second half of December is a measure of the regime’s concern to preserve it. On the 23rd a council of officers ‘did

Ludlow, I, 369–70: ‘A council of field-officers was summoned, where Major-General Lambert having rehearsed the several steps and degrees by which things had been brought to the present state where in they were, and pressed the necessity incumbent upon the army to provide something in the room of what was lately taken away, presented to them a paper intituled, “The Instrument of Government,” which he read in his place. Some of the officers … began to declare their unwillingness to concur in it. But they were interrupted by Lambert, who announced that ‘the form of government … was already resolved,’ ‘was not now to be disputed’, and was now ‘brought before them’ only ‘to give them permission to offer any amendments they might think fit, with a promise that they should be taken into consideration’. The officers duly proposed some: no future head of the army should become protector; no relation of ‘the last protector’ should succeed him; and ‘a general council of all the commission officers who were about the town should be summoned to consider thereof. To these propositions they could obtain no other answer, than that they should be offered’ to Cromwell. ‘At the next meeting of officers it was not thought fit to consult with them at all; but they were openly told by Major-General Lambert,’ that Cromwell ‘would take care of managing the civil government; and then having required them to repair to their respective charges, … he dismissed them.’ All this fits the period of the 12th to the 16th. But the Memoirs, a posthumously compressed account, state that the first meeting occurred ‘After a few days’. ‘After’ must mean either following the end of Barebone’s or following some subsequent development. Perhaps events later than the 16th have been absorbed into the account. 94 True Catalogue, pp. 7–9; The Protector, (so called), in part ... Unvailed, pp. 13–14. The meeting of ‘some’ officers with Cromwell is unlikely to have been either of the meetings of officers described in Ludlow’s Memoirs, where Cromwell was evidently not present. 93

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unanimously declare, that they will adventure their lives, and all that is dear to them, in defence of’ the protector ‘and the Government now established’.95 On the 28th, the day after the letter to the regiments had been dispatched, ‘divers’ officers came to Cromwell ‘and signified their full union in the present Government’.96 How secure was that ‘union’? On the 29th protector and council ‘sat very close, in ordering their dispatches to the several forces in England, Scotland, and Ireland’.97 On the 30th the council and ‘the officers of the army’ gathered for a day of fasting and humiliation, often (though not necessarily) a sign that there was disaffection to be overcome.98 Military tensions seem a likely explanation of the delay between the printing of the Instrument on or about 27 December and its publication on 2 January. Some of the feeling in the army is likely to have focussed on article 4, which covered the control of the militia. Even the compromise reached in the Instrument was offensive enough to the principle of parliamentary sovereignty to provoke alarming military protests in 1654.99 Perhaps it was with an eye to such sentiment that in January, when the Instrument had at last been published, a generally comprehensive account of it in an army news book omitted article 4.100 Of all the contentious issues covered by the new constitution, the most inflammatory was religion. Here the wording of the Instrument is riddled with ambiguity and uncertainty.101 The relevant articles, numbers 35 to 38, must have been repeatedly debated and redrafted, though we cannot say when. On no issue did the government show itself more ill at ease or keep its cards closer. The protectorate and the army were committed to liberty of conscience – though there were disagreements about its proper extent. All the drafts promised it – though in the briefest and least specific of terms.102 But the new regime was determined to rally behind it the public opinion that had been shocked by the radicalism of Barebone’s. None of the accounts and summaries of the constitution which appeared in the press before its publication mentioned its provisions for liberty of conscience. Such intimations of the government’s stance as reached the public, or

Moderate Publisher, 23–30 Dec., p. 81. Weekly Intelligencer, 27 Dec.–3 Jan., p. 110. Perhaps that was the meeting at which Wiggan’s (unavailing) protests were made. 97 Whitelocke, Memorials, IV, 75. 98 Severall Proceedings, 29 Dec.–5 Jan., p. 3533. 99 To his Highnesse the Lord Protector ... The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army (1654). Cf. Protector ... Unvailed, p. 37; A Copy of a Letter from an Officer of the Army in Ireland (1656), pp. 3–4, 11–16; Mercurius Politicus, 19–26 Jan. 1654, p. 3216. 100 Faithfull Scout, 30 Dec.–6 Jan., p. 1258; cf. below, n. 105. 101 Worden, God’s Instruments, pp. 76–8. 102 The same is true of the Clarke letter. 95 96

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foreign ­ambassadors, were slanted to stress the regime’s eagerness to eliminate heresy and discourage doctrinal error.103 Then there was the issue of tithes, which the last phase of Barebone’s had made if anything still more explosive. The drafts are silent on the subject, but the Instrument pledged that tithes would be replaced ‘as soon as may be’. The promise does not look at home in a document otherwise concerned with lasting principles and procedures of government. It reads like a concession to pressure. The resolve to end tithes as soon as possible was apparently included in the constitution as it stood on 13 December,104 though there could have been wavering thereafter. Here too the new rulers preserved a cautious public face. None of the summaries printed before the publication of the Instrument mentioned the pledge. When they did address the subject of the maintenance of the ministry, it was to announce that tithes would continue until a better solution could be found.105 At least the pledge of speedy abolition helped Cromwell in his struggle to reconcile men affronted by his repudiation of Barebone’s. During his and Lambert’s altercation with Major Wiggan the protector called the officers of his foot regiment together and ‘caus’d the Instrument of Government to be read unto them, saying, That should be their Magna Charta, and promising that he and his council would do all the good things that had been desired by the good people; and in particular, that that ugly maintenance by Tythes (for those were his very words) should be taken away before’ the parliament of September 1654 met,106 no doubt by an ordinance. VII The Instrument created the office of lord protector and, in a separate article,107 named Cromwell as its first occupant. The leading army officers, worried about the reaction of the garrison at Portsmouth to Cromwell’s elevation, sent Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Kelsey there with a version Moderate Publisher, 16–23 Dec., p. 76; A Declaration concerning the Government of these Nations (B.L., E725[2]), p. 5; T.N.A., P.R.O. 31/3/92, f. 103; The English Civil War. A Contemporary Account [taken from the Calendar of State Papers Venetian], 5 vols (1966), IV, 165–6, 167. 104 Clarke. 105 Mercurius Politicus, 22–9 Dec., p. 3053; Faithfull Scout, 16–23 Dec., p. 1253; Great Brittains Post, 21–8 Dec., pp. 1250–1; Moderate Publisher, 23–30 Dec., p. 92. In its summary of the final version the army news book The Faithfull Scout excludes the words ‘so soon as may be’ from the provision concerning tithes. The Scout was printed by Robert Wood, who, after his troubles over the ‘abstract’, was perhaps likely to follow the guidance of Thurloe, a conservative in such matters. 106 True Catalogue, p. 7. He apparently gave a similar undertaking to the baptist minister Henry Jessey: Protector … Unvailed, p. 51. 107 No. 33. 103

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of the constitution with a blank where the protector’s name was to be inserted.108 We do not know when he left, but it was presumably at a time when Cromwell had yet to commit himself to his appointment.109 There could hardly have been an alternative candidate, and there is no record of anyone after 12 December envisaging any outcome of the crisis other than Cromwell’s appointment as single ruler. Yet he, who professed extreme reluctance to assume the office,110 would have used all his negotiating powers in the discussions both before and after 12 December, as he would do in securing amendments to the Humble Petition and Advice in 1657. Though he took a part, no doubt a critical one, during the discussions between the 12th and the 16th, he kept away from crucial meetings of the council of officers, leaving Lambert to push through proposals which would then be presented to him. Now as in 1657 it suited him to be wooed. He would remember that the end of Barebone’s had left him with ‘boundless’, ‘unlimited’, ‘arbitrary’ power. He had accepted the new constitution, he remembered, because he wanted his authority to be curbed and legitimized. In an obvious sense that was true enough. He never supposed that any lasting government could rest on force alone, though, as the rule of the major-generals shows, he was ready enough to resort to it. In 1654, anxious to refute allegations of self-seeking, he emphasized to parliament the restraints which the Instrument imposed on his authority. He portrayed himself as a temporary ruler who had accepted the government only to end a crisis and restore stability. Yet the Instrument appointed protectors for life and made no provision for their abdication.111 Alongside news reports which drew attention to the limits on his powers and ambitions there came indications, from inside as well as outside the regime, that his power would be at least as great as those of kings before him.112 Word quickly went out that he was to be addressed as ‘his highness’113 – as he soon ubiquitously was; that the council would move its meetings into the old royal council chamber – as it quickly did; and that he would soon be occupying the royal palace of Whitehall114 – as he did in costly state. To him power and dignity were means, not ends. They served goals to which parliamentary sovereignty had been an obstacle. His programme of godly reform had been blocked by the Long Parliament before and after

Articles … Kelsey, pp. 1–2. If so, the sinister explanation of the blank in ibid., pp. 1–2, is unwarranted. 110 Above, n. 9. 111 There is likewise no such provision in the drafts, which give more space to the arrangements for the election of succeeding protectors than to any other subject. 112 T.N.A., P.R.O. 31/3/92, ff. 103, 107; Birch, I, 644; Bodl., MS Carte 103, f. 198; Contemporaries of Bulstrode Whitelocke, ed. Spalding, p. 496. See also Bodl., MS Clarendon 47, f. 251; Moderate Publisher, 30 Dec.–6 Jan., p. 94; Birch, II, 9. 113 T.N.A., P.R.O. 31/3/92, f. 116; Abbott, III, 140. 114 Faithfull Scout, 23–30 Dec. 1653, p. 1264. 108 109

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Pride’s Purge, and then been distorted and discredited by Barebone’s.115 In summoning the army’s nominees to Barebone’s he had hoped that the problem had lain not in the powers of the previous assembly but in its composition. By December 1653 he knew better. Surely he welcomed, and was at least partly responsible for, the shift in favour of the executive achieved by the revision of the drafts. In pursuit of his reform programme he would make eager use of the clause that was added to the constitution to allow extra-parliamentary legislation until September 1654. He stretched it to the interpretative limit, using it not only to introduce emergency laws necessary to supply money or authorize office-holders but to launch the reform programme which parliaments had defeated.116 The revisions of the drafts which weakened the powers of parliament must have been equally gratifying to him. The parliament of 1654 proposed, as an alternative to the Instrument, a bill which would be an amended version of it and which would supply the statutory authority the government badly needed for its rule. In its insistence on parliamentary sovereignty the bill was closer in spirit to the drafts than to the Instrument. Sooner than make substantial concessions to it, Cromwell dissolved the parliament and fell back on military rule. When Cromwell addressed the parliaments of the protectorate the restraint on his authority that he emphasized was the power of the council, whose consent his decisions acquired on a number of fronts.117 He did also mention the parliamentary restraints, but it was primarily for the sake of resisting the more extensive ones which the commons demanded of him that he commended the conciliar ones. The drafts had provided for conciliar restraints. Yet they mentioned the subject with surprising brevity, and we would not guess from them the prominence that would be allotted to the council in the machinery of government created by the Instrument. In 1657 Cromwell proposed additions to the conciliar limitations which the Humble Petition would impose on him.118 Did he do something similar in December 1653? Did he exchange parliamentary constraints for conciliar ones?119 At The Rump and Barebone’s had also fought an epic war against the protestant Dutch which Cromwell, when he became protector, instantly sought to end. 116 For the ordinances see Peter Gaunt, ‘“To Create a Little World out of Chaos”: The Protectoral Ordinances of 1653–1654 Reconsidered’, in The Cromwellian Protectorate, ed. Patrick Little (Woodbridge, 2007), ch. 6. 117 Abbott, III, 455, 460, IV, 488. 118 Abbott, IV, 492–3; Constitutional Documents, ed. Gardiner, p. 461. 119 The recurrent difficulty, in interpreting not only the drafts but other summaries of the constitution in circulation before 2 Jan., is to know whether, when a list accords power to the protector, a fuller account would have revealed that the exercise of that power was to be subject to conciliar approval. The drafts are specific about only one aspect of the council’s authority: ‘the power of war and peace’, which the protector is to exercise with the council’s ‘advice’. Tanner has ‘advice and consent’, which is closer to the Instrument, where (in article 5) the protector needs the ‘consent’ of the council 115

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all events conciliar ones suited him much the better. In the long term – and, unless he lived unexpectedly long, probably not in his lifetime – the Instrument would give parliament, which was to supply short-lists from which councillors were to be chosen when vacancies arose, a large say in the council’s composition.120 But the Instrument itself named the initial membership, which he probably chose himself. The constitutional authority of the protectoral council was impressive on paper but not in substance.121 VIII After the failure of the parliament of 1654 the Instrument lived on borrowed time.122 In 1657 Cromwell told army officers that ‘this Instrument of Government will not do your worke’.123 What undid it was a feature which no one seems to have objected to, perhaps even noticed, earlier, but which was exposed by parliament’s moves in 1656 against the quaker James Nayler: its failure to supply a secondary parliamentary chamber or to prevent the commons from assuming an unlimited judicial power. The checks which the revision of the drafts had placed on parliament proved insufficient after all, in an episode in which the godly cause was at stake. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty had suited Cromwell’s and his army’s political requirements after the execution of the king in 1649, but had subsequently frustrated their programme of reform. In their discussions of late 1653 they groped their way to premises and powers which were incompatible with it – and which no parliament chosen by the party that not only in making war and peace but in all foreign relations (to which the abbreviating drafters may have meant their provision to extend). Was the change from ‘advice’ to ‘consent’ made to compensate for the removal of parliament from that sphere? If so, the Tanner draft was perhaps a stage in the transition. Unfortunately we cannot tell whether it was composed before or after the 12th (above, n. 37). There is a contrast between the reticence of the drafts about the council and the attention given to the machinery of conciliar activity (though not to its powers) in the Clarke letter of 13 Dec. Between the 12th and the 16th news reports encouraged by the government gave prominence to the subject of the council. They announced that an executive council was being formed and, only secondly, that there would be a lord protector (e.g. Mercurius Politicus, 15–22 Dec., p. 3052) – though that order was reversed in Severall Proceedings [see too Birch, I, 632]). Lambert apparently favoured conciliar rule (Ludlow, I, 358; T.N.A., P.R.O. 31/3/92, f. 48; and see Clarke Papers, ed. Firth, I, 212), and was the dominant figure among the protectoral councillors (Worden, God’s Instruments, ch. 5). 120 Article 25. 121 Worden, God’s Instruments, ch. 5. In all the drafts except the Clarendon manuscript (which does not address the issue) the protector is ‘to call to his assistance’ the councillors, which must mean that he would name them. On 15 Dec. the French ambassador expected Cromwell to ‘choose’ the councillors: T.N.A., P.R.O. 31/3/92, f. 97. 122 Thus see Animadversions upon a Letter and Paper (1656), p. 31. 123 Abbott, IV, 419. 149

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had fought Charles I would accept. Cromwell’s parliaments pretended that the Instrument did not exist. The parliament of 1654, even as it worked through the document clause by clause in order to revise it, studiedly avoided mention of it.124 The Humble Petition and Advice, which replaced the Instrument, did not allude to it. In 1658 the protectoral government itself silently wiped it from the record of its rule.125 The illegality of the Instrument, its abiding and insuperable defect, denied it even the dignity of repeal.

Worden, God’s Instruments, p. 247. Compare the table of contents of Catalogue and Collection (above, n. 74) with that of A Collection of Acts and Ordinances (1658). 124 125

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‘de te Fabula narratur’: The Narrative Constitutionalism of James Harrington’s Oceana J. C. Davis

While the importance of James Harrington’s Oceana is generally acknowledged, its meaning and intention, status and context have been the subject of three major controversies in the last sixty years. The first of these was about the work’s linking of property and power and the meaning of Harrington’s attempt to stabilise the relationship between them through an Agrarian Law. The second concerned the nature and sources of his republicanism. The third relates to the ambiguity of the work’s dedication to Oliver Cromwell. Was Harrington sceptical or optimistic in relation to the lord protector’s ability to act in the public interest, without personal ambition? These issues have overshadowed the significance of Oceana’s subtitle citation of Horace – ‘de te Fabula narratur’. That epigraph suggested a number of things, one of which was that narrative was to be critical to the work’s form, intention and audience. The ‘te’ – the audience – whom it addresses embraced not only the lord protector but also mutually antagonistic English, Irish and Scottish political, military and religious groups as well as heads of households, office-holders and taxpayers at parish, hundred, county and Britannic levels, the victors, the defeated and the neuters in Britain’s civil wars.1 Almost all the constitutional proposals of the period, including the Agreements of the People, the Instrument of Government and the Humble Petition and Advice, were lists of propositions, rules, laws or ordini,2 and Almost exactly the groupings and foci that John Morrill has done so much to illuminate. Is Professor Morrill not so much the first of the revisionists as the last of the neo-Harringtonians? 2 So too were the various negotiating positions which were in a very real sense at the heart of the struggle from The XIX Propositions, to The Heads of Proposals and on to the proposals presented to the king at Newport in November 1648. Something like the wiring diagrams beloved of modern management consultants occasionally make their appearance as, for example, in Gerrard Winstanley’s The Law of Freedom. See The 1

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some of Harrington’s own later proposals inclined to this form. Oceana is unique in its exploitation of narrative and it has suffered accordingly from the relative neglect of prose narrative, and narrative fiction in particular, by scholars of the period. Oceana has its thirty constitutional orders (ordini) and is studded with rhetorical exercises. Yet the predominant shape of the work is that of a multilayered narrative in which the ordini and the set speeches are so embedded as to become integral parts of the narrative. Oceana gives us a story of movements in the balance of property ownership or ‘empire’; a history of ‘Authority’; tales of the unravelling of past commonwealths; an account of a fictional debate on a new constitution; and a fictional narrative of the implementation of a new commonwealth and the establishment of the political rituals which will sustain it. It concludes with a fictional ‘history’ of the first fifty years of that new republic. What did it mean to narrate a constitution and why did Harrington choose such a heavily fictionalized narrative form in 1656 only to abandon it in his works of 1658 to 1660? I Both title pages of the first printings of Oceana bear an epigraph taken from Horace which concludes with the admonition ‘mutato nomine, de te Fabula narratur’.3 The source is Horace’s retelling of the story of Tantalus for whom the desperate quest for refreshment was forever frustrated, relief perpetually defying his best efforts to obtain it.4 The pertinence of this would not be lost on Harrington’s first readers in the late autumn of 1656. In the previous sixteen years, they had experienced three civil wars (1642–6, 1648, 1651), three invasions (1640, 1648, 1651) and the removal of those symbolic bastions of order and hierarchy, the monarchy, the house of lords and the Church of England. Ireland and Scotland had been conquered and something like a British state had emerged. But this turmoil and its outcome in victory, revolution and conquest had brought neither stability nor security. The declaration, in 1649, that England was a ‘Free State’ had been both preceded and followed by bewildering mutability. Since 1648 there had been five ‘parliaments’ and four parliamentary systems, and, by the autumn of 1656, a fifth version was under consideration.5 Meanwhile, a ‘governComplete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein (2 vols, Oxford, 2009), I, 321. Winstanley’s final proposals in that work are, of course, lists of rules or laws. 3 The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), p. 155 n (henceforth PWJH). 4 The quotation is taken from Horace, Satires, I, i, 68–70. See Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (1955), pp. 9–10. 5 Harrington’s own estimate of ‘our late changes of government’ since 1642 was eight. See Politicaster, in PWJH, p. 709. 152

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ment in exile’ looked to benefit from continuing uncertainty and economic distress exacerbated by high taxes. Its supporters posed what was thought to be a considerable (but possibly exaggerated) security threat, demonstrated as recently as 1655 in Penruddock’s rising, the suppression of which had led to draconian security measures. Indeed, the situation had oscillated unnervingly between military detachment (1649–53; 1653; 1654) and military intervention (December 1648; April 1653; December 1653; August 1655– September 1656). The army’s constitution of December 1653, the Instrument of Government, looked incapable of ‘healing and settling’ and in need of replacement. The question to which minds now turned was ‘With what?’ England’s relief, like that of Tantalus, seemed in danger of being forever out of reach. In the summer and early autumn of 1656 the English revolution was stalling. Protectoral government was at an impasse, even contemplating something like a return to the ancien régime, in effect, as it seemed to many, a counter-revolution. Harrington was not alone in thinking that such a move would be both futile and disastrous, a reaching out for what was beyond grasp. There was no shortage of alternative prescriptions on offer. Marchamont Nedham’s The Excellency of a Free State and Sir Henry Vane’s The Healing Question, both also published in 1656, have, along with Oceana, been seen as the key contemporary reflections on this crisis.6 Why at this moment, this Machiavellian occasione, did Harrington not speak directly, assembling his proposals as cogently as possible and directing them with immediacy to the widest and most influential audience? Why did he not adopt the multiple but direct discursive strategies of 1658–60 in 1656? Of one thing I think we can be reasonably certain and that is that Harrington’s adoption of a narrative form in 1656 was a deliberate choice. Scholars have tended to regard Harrington as at best a clumsy, amateurish writer. Charles Blitzer described Oceana as ‘large, ponderous, and rather badly written’.7 Others have noted his ‘boffin-like preoccupation with constitutional machinery’.8 But there is more to Harrington the literary stylist than this would suggest.9 His interest and versatility in the practice of genre are well known. He was a published poet who had shared the

See, for example, the remarks of John Pocock in PWJH, p. 38. Charles Blitzer, An Immortal Commonwealth. The Political Thought of James Harrington (New Haven, 1970), p. 32. 8 Blair Worden, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism’, in Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society 1649–1776, ed. David Wootton (Stanford, Ca., 1994), p. 99. However, for a more sympathetic evaluation of Harrington as a writer see Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England. John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford, 2007), pp. 105, 111, 220–2. 9 For remarks suggestive of a different perspective on the literary stance and quality of the work see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic. Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge 1999), pp. 8, 160, 359. 6 7

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page with John Milton, a lyricist who had set words to the music of Henry Lawes and a translator of Virgil.10 In the first volume of that translation he reflected on literary form and the relationship between ‘phansie’ and reason.11 Like others trying to find ways of using the theatre for public and political purposes,12 Harrington’s Oceana made provision for publicly funded theatre at a time when, officially, dramatic representations were regarded with suspicion.13 One of his critics, Richard Baxter, sneered at ‘such jingles as Mr. Harrington and others do lay so great stress upon’ and suggested that he had taken the easy way of narrative fiction rather than the harder path of proposing practical solutions.14 The point here is that Harrington was a writer with considerable interest in style and the implications of genre. As an advocate of constitutional change, he was soon to go further in demonstrating flexibility of mode and address, finding different ways to present essentially the same constitutional proposals as those made in Oceana. The Prerogative of Popular Government (1658) amplified, clarified and vindicated the first Preliminaries of Oceana in a mocking rebuttal of his early critics. He used the epistle or epistolary exchange in The Stumbling Block of Disobedience and Rebellion (1658) and Pian Piano (1657). Brief Directions (1658) and Seven Models of a Commonwealth (1658) were both exercises in the comparative analysis of alternative models of government. Maxims were deployed in A Discourse Showing that the Spirit of Parliaments ... is not to be trusted for a Settlement (1659) and aphorisms in both Aphorisms Political (1659) and A System of Politics (written 1661, published posthumously). A straight exposition of a series of justified propositions with a description of their practical working was attempted in The Art of Lawgiving (1659) (especially Book III). Politicaster (1659) was ‘A Comical Discourse’15 set forth in acts and scenes with verse and theatrical speeches. And, ‘having tried all other means’, Valerius and Publicola (1659) was a dialogue in which the pros and cons of the dialogue form were discussed and in which a petiFor his verse see Henry and William Lawes, Choice Psalmes (1648), sig. aiv; for the lyrics see Henry Lawes, The Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues, For One, Two and Three Voices (1655) pp. 33–8; for the translations of Virgil see James Harrington, An Essay Upon two of Virgil’s Eclogues and Two Books of his Aeneis (1658) and Virgil’s Aeneis the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Books. Translated by James Harrington (1659). 11 An Essay, Epistle to the Reader. 12 See James R. Jacob and Timothy Raylor, ‘Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie by Sir William Davenant’, The Seventeenth Century, 6 (1991), 205–33. 13 David Norwood has gone as far as to say that ‘Harrington turned the whole republic into an elaborate piece of public theatre’ and to suggest that ‘Harrington Virgilianized republicanism’ and republicanised Virgil. Writing the English Republic, pp. 364, 365, and see also 358–9 and 374. 14 See Richard Baxter: A Holy Commonwealth, ed. William Lamont (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 166, 139. 15 Title page. 10

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tion was reprinted.16 Genre and its tactical potential were clearly important to Harrington. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the choice and nature of narrative were critical to Harrington’s purposes in presenting Oceana in the form that he did. What then was the value of narrative in presenting a republican solution to the dilemmas of the protectorate in 1656?17 II In early modern manuals of rhetorical technique, ‘narratio’ had a technical meaning, borrowed from the classics. For Thomas Wilson it was the second stage of every oration. Coming after the introduction and before the proposition, it provided an outline of, or a setting for, the argument to be made. It opened up the matter in hand, showing what the issues were and was presented as a statement of fact.18 But even by Cicero’s time it had taken on a second meaning, embracing pleasant, artful or inventive story telling, though such narratives could still be regarded as a branch of rhetoric.19 This second meaning was also picked up by Renaissance scholars, so that from the thirteenth century narrare could mean to relate, recount or plead in a court of law. The English word ‘narration’ appeared in the mid-fifteenth century, and the first use of ‘narrate’ in the sense of to ‘recount; to give an account of, to tell as a narrative’ was coincidentally in 1656.20 Certainly, narrative in this sense was ubiquitous in the early modern world. Some anthropologists would suggest that in any cohesive society it functions as a means by which the world is structured and represented.21 The maintenance of a sense of continuous community may be dependent on a narra-

Valerius and Publicola (1659), in PWJH, pp. 782, 801–2. One of the few to offer some comments on this narrative aspect of the work has been John Pocock. See PWJH, pp. [43], [47], [50], [75–6]. 18 See, for example, Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique 1560, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford, 1909), pp. 7, 106. Edward P. J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (4th edn, New York and Oxford, 1999), pp. 270–6. 19 Jan Swearing, ‘The Narration of Dialogue and Narration within Dialogue: The Transition from Story to Logic’, in Narrative Thought and Narrative Language, Bruce K. Britton and Anthony D. Pelligrini (New Jersey, 1990), pp. 173–97; see especially pp. 174–6, 183, 191. 20 OED. The work cited there is [Samuel Holland], Don Zara Del Fogo (1656), I.ii.14. 21 On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago, 1981), p. viii. See also the remarks by Hayden White and Victor Turner in the same volume, pp. 3, 137–64. Strategic Narrative. New Perspectives on the Power of Personal and Cultural Stories, ed. Wendy Patterson (Lanham, Md., 2002); Richard J, Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds. On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven, 1993); Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York, 1985/2007); Robert Scholes, James Phelan and Robert Kellog, The Nature of Narrative. Fortieth Anniversary Edition (New York, 2006). 16 17

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tive, a history of that community’s past.22 Equally, some would argue, radical discontinuity heightens the need for narrative. ‘Where historical life itself fails to make sense in terms that formerly held good, narrative and cultural drama may have the task of poesis, that is, of remaking cultural sense, even when they seem to be dismantling ancient edifices of meaning that can no longer redress our … “dramas of living”.’23 What resources did English society have when it found itself in exactly this situation in the mid-seventeenth century? The story of continuity, associated with the ancient and immemorial constitution, collapsed with the key features of that edifice.24 The liturgical year and indeed the calendar as a dual, but interlinked, narrative of the Old and New Testaments was besieged by laws banning key festivals and the proscription of the old liturgy without effective replacement.25 Divine history now appeared open to myriad interpretations and cut across by the unpredictable will of God acting providentially.26 Stories in newsbooks and printed matter generally were available on a scale hitherto unknown but their reliability was increasingly in question as the stories they told competed and called the ‘facts’ into question. Not only had civil war undermined the narrative of the English as a cohesive community, but by 1649 the defeated were also struggling with the constitutional elimination of virtually all they had fought for, while the victors faced the evaporation of their coalition into competing narratives. Struggling with the collapse of their own political narratives, politicians could turn to the ancient narratives of God’s chosen people, to those of classical Greece and Rome or to fictional narrative. The five books of Moses might be held up as a political constitution but, if it was such, it was a narrative constitution.27 Just as Harrington translated Virgil so Thomas Hobbes translated the histories of Thucydides and the stories of Homer. Milton pondered the value of epic and tragedy as means of envisaging and communicating liberty and wondered ‘whether those Dramatick Constitutions wherein Sophocles and Euripides raigne shall be found more This claim underpins much of the work of J. G. A. Pocock. For an early expression of it see his ‘The Origins of Study of the Past: A Comparative Approach’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 4:2 (1962), 209–46. 23 Victor Turner, ‘Social Dramas and Stories about Them’ in On Narrative, ed. Mitchell, pp. 137–64 (citation from p. 164). 24 As Andrew Sharp points out, a deontology in disarray has need of oaths and covenants but by the 1650s they too were conflicting. Political Ideas of the English Civil Wars, ed. Andrew Sharp (1983), p. 23. 25 John Morrill, ‘The Church in England 1642–1649’, in Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (1993), pp. 148–75. 26 For an illustration of this see Stanley Fish, ‘“Void of Storie”: the Struggle for Insincerity in Herbert’s Prose and Poetry’, in Writing and Political Engagement in SeventeenthCentury England, ed. Derek Hirst and Richard Strier (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 31–51. 27 For the significance of this touchstone see Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic. Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), esp. p. 14. 22

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doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation ...’.28 In the wake of the collapse of the old constitution, the prose romance burgeoned. Theophania (1655), Richard Braithwaite’s Panthalia (1659), Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa (parts I–V (1651– 6); part VI (1665)) and Sir Percy Herbert’s The Princess Cloria (1661) have, with some notable exceptions,29 been too readily dismissed as escapist, royalist fiction. Like Samuel Gott’s Nova Solyma (1648–9) before them, they grappled with seriously disturbing political issues in terms of their personal and social implications and did so by engaging with narrative fiction.30 For a time it may have been possible to see the dramatic rise from apparent obscurity of Oliver Cromwell and the drama of his military and political victories as the basis for a new history of conquest and reformation. But for republicans Cromwell remained a deeply ambiguous figure, a potential, and even a proven, threat as much as a source of hope.31 By 1656, after two years of embattled protectoral rule, the Cromwellian story seemed to have run into a cul de sac and to be in urgent need of an alternative trajectory if something like a restoration of the status quo ante bellum was to be averted. Given that the collapse of the narrative underpinnings of both traditional and post-revolutionary politics confronted English politicians with the challenge of generating a new and convincing narrative, how did Harrington approach that task in his Oceana? III Narration is central to the form, purpose and function of Oceana, its single most important distinguishing feature.32 For Harrington, it was the basis John Milton, ‘The Reason of Church-government Urg’d against Prelatry by Mr John Milton’ (1641), in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven, 1953), I, pp. 814–15. 29 The most important exception is Victoria Kahn, ‘Reinventing Romance, or the Surprising Effects of Sympathy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 55 (2002), 625–61. 30 J. C. Davis, ‘The Prose Romance of the 1650s as a Context for Oceana’, in Perspectives on Revolutionary English Republicanism, ed. Gaby Mahlberg and Dirk Wiemann (forthcoming). 31 The historian who has done most to illuminate these ambiguities is Blair Worden. See, for example, his Literature and Politics. 32 To categorize this as ‘playful fictional garb’ is to miss this point. Blair Worden, ‘Harrington’s ‘Oceana’: Origins and Aftermath, 1651–1660’, in Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society, ed. Wootton, p. 126. (Though I take issue with Worden’s judgment here I would like to acknowledge the importance and lasting value of his contribution to our contextualization of Harrington.) More seriously astray, as I hope to show, is Nigel Smith’s observation that ‘romance narration – or at least a highly idiosyncratic version of narration – frequently interrupts Harrington’s political analysis’. Rather than interruption, the narration is critical to the substance of the work and the effect it aspires to achieve. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), p. 246. 28

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on which the problems faced by a newly imperial British power and the solutions advocated by him, in a complex exercise in political architecture, could be made comprehensible. There were two immediate factors behind this narrative imperative. The first was the exhaustion of language and the necessity to replace words with deeds. The second was the problem of complexity. The liberation of pulpit and press in the collapse of Charles I’s government meant that political and military conflict were shadowed and fuelled by a war of words. But, as words became weapons, their signification was in danger of becoming secondary to their destructive or bolstering effects. In ‘a restless age of printing’33 and preaching, the sense of linguistic degradation and loss of a common set of linguistic assumptions, the ‘Babel effect’34, was commonplace. For Andrew Marvell the ‘candid age’ of the 1630s had been replaced by a present of ‘Word-peckers, Paper-rats, Book-scorpions’.35 ‘Having more news meant, for many, not more truth but less.’36 As the ancient constitution was demolished in 1649, Francis Rous observed that the urgent problem of reconciling power and authority (a problem central to Harrington’s work) should be work for the casuists but that the doctors of conscience were rendered incapable of it since they had come to inhabit a Babel of their own.37 Suspicion of the war of words and a fear that even meaningless language could be seductive led to anxieties about the gullible reader and a concern to re-educate the literate to become responsible readers.38 Other answers to linguistic anarchy included wholesale reform of language and the redefinition and stabilization of key terms.39 But for some, including John Hall, Paradoxes (1656) To the Reader (by John Davies). Smith, Literature and Revolution, p. 25. See also Sharon Achinstein, ‘The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution’, in Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution, ed. James Holstun (1992), pp. 14–44. 35 The citation is from a letter to Richard Lovelace. See Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism 1628–1660 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 7, 351. Compare the retrospective contrast between the harmonious idyll of the 1630s with the ‘Chaos and Confusion’, ‘A Babel and a Bedlam’ which replaced it in A Vision Concerning his late Pretended Highnesse Cromwell, the Wicked (1661), pp. 5–6. 36 Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing. Royalist Literature 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 5. For similar reactions to a competitive and partisan plethora of words see the magisterial study of later Stuart linguistic instability in Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain. Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005). 37 [Francis Rous], The Lawfulnes of obeying the Present Government Proposed (1649). 38 Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, 1989), pp. 73–4, 122, 140–1, 175. Potter, Secret Rites, p. 27. Jan Comenius was also concerned, as an educationalist, with how to use images to clarify and stabilise the meaning of words, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983), pp. 93–6 and ch. 5. 39 On language reform in the period see Rhodri Lewis, Language. Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge, 2007). Among the contrasting exponents of redefinition as a means of stabilizing the signification of words 33 34

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Harrington, part of the answer lay in reducing the effect of verbal slipperiness by supplementing (or even replacing) words with things or substituting the obdurate unequivocalness of deeds for the ambiguous potential of words. As he himself put it: ‘The people are deceived by names, but not by things.’40 Focussing on things or things acted, deeds, could be seen as not only mitigating the ambiguities inherent in words but also as dealing a blow at hypocrisy, which was frequently taken to mean the divergence of words and deeds. The rendering of deeds as morally neutral could be profoundly shocking to Harrington’s contemporaries but it could also be a way of sidestepping the contentious potential implicit in a contested language of morality. When Harrington depicted the dissolution of the monarchy as an event as natural as the death of a man, he may have shocked royalist readers, but he also defused the charge and counter-charge implications of the act and opened up the possibility of a more neutral and dispassionate examination of the causes and consequences of such action.41 But, if the focus of Oceana was to be deeds, the appropriate mode for depicting deeds, especially sequences of actings, was narrative and, as we shall see, the rhetorical exercises which are incorporated into the fictional narrative of the work are constrained and critically contained by its narrative framework. The speech acts of Oceanic orators themselves become deeds and part of the story being told. If narrative was one means of addressing semantic exhaustion it was obviously an ambiguous one since it too involved words. But there was another reason why Harrington chose the narrative form. Narrative was not only a means of imposing order on the experience of fragmentation42 but a way of bringing complexity within the intellectual grasp of the widest range of people. Amidst the shattered narratives of both the old order and the cause that had overthrown it, he sought to generate new narratives which could penetrate beyond surface appearances and the centrifugal debate over them. Explaining how civil conflict had become inescapable for, even integral to, the ancient constitution, such a narrative would also demonstrate the processes by which England, and Britain, might escape the nightmare it had endured since 1642, by producing a more perfect authority than it had hitherto experienced and one reconciled in a stable relationship with contemporary structures of power.

were Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan and Gerrard Winstanley in The Law of Freedom, both of which appeared in 1651. 40 Aphorisms Political (1659), in PWJH, p. 764. The preference for things rather than words was commonly derived from Seneca and echoed by Francis Bacon. George Williamson, ‘Senecan Style in the Seventeenth Century’, in Seventeenth-Century Prose. Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Stanley E. Fish (New York, 1971), pp. 112–46. 41 Compare Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time. Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana and Chicago, 1986), p. 11. 42 For some comments on this use of narrative see Jerome de Groot, Royalist Identities (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 144–5. 159

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IV From the very beginning of Oceana, Harrington the story-teller could barely resist the narrative mode. We are immediately told the story of his draft of the work and its dispersal to three presses. The result was a number of faults. The reader is called upon to correct them and is provided with guidance on how to do so. The Epistle to the Reader was then an introduction both to the work and to the author’s intended relationship with the reader. It is one of complicity. The book is divided into four parts: the Preliminaries, giving an historical account of the principles of government; the Council of Legislators which relates the fictional setting up of an ideal way of devising a commonwealth; the Model of the Commonwealth of Oceana which provides an account of how such a commonwealth may be constituted and instituted; and the Corollary which narrates the consequences of such government and the first fifty years of its ‘history’.43 Each of these sections played its part in unfolding a grand narrative, obliging readers to focus on events or deeds and enabling them, Harrington hoped, to navigate complexity. The first part of the Preliminaries (161–87)44 is devoted to the description of the principles of government, in relation to both power (empire) and authority. The sources are classical and Renaissance and, although stories are told (including the famous one of the girls and the cake (172)), the emphasis is on analysis. The second part of the Preliminaries (188–207) shifts into the narrative mode which prevails throughout the rest of Oceana. Here the story was a non-fictional history of the late governments of Oceana and of ‘the rise, progress and declination of modern prudence’. Essentially, it was a history of feudalism and the gothic balance with particular reference to England. But, towards the very end of this account, the narration shifted from history to fiction with the appearance of ‘the most victorious captain and incomparable patriot’, Olphaeus Megaletor,45 who was to remain the central figure throughout the fictional narrative of Oceana. He reads Machiavelli and is inspired by the idea that the creation of a new political architecture must be the vision of one man and be brought into being in one fell swoop. Olphaeus Megaletor is elected Lord Archon, or sole legislator, ‘by the universal suffrage of the army’. Fifty advisors, the Council of Legislators,

PWJH, pp. 156, 160. Page references in parentheses are all from PWJH. 45 There are strong and obvious correspondences between this figure and Oliver Cromwell to whom Oceana is addressed but, equally, Olphaeus Megaletor’s behaviour diverges considerably from that associated with the lord protector and his character is, in one sense, a call to Cromwell to remodel himself as well as England. See Davis, ‘Prose Romance’. 43 44

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are appointed to labour ‘in the mines of ancient prudence’ and to assist the Lord Archon with the fruits of their researches and advice (206–7). A ‘full and perfect narrative’ of the process whereby the Council of Legislators developed the model of Oceana, and promulgated it to the people, was then introduced (208–9). But, while narrative fiction might be the form which Harrington was exploiting, the Lord Archon was keen to warn against the dangers of ‘fancy in the fabric of a commonwealth’. Fiction was to be constrained by an imagination grounded in observation and learning. ‘… the archives of ancient prudence should be ransacked before any counsellor should presume to offer any other matter in order to the work in hand, or towards the consideration to be had by the council upon a model of government’ (208). Alternatively, since the people ‘were neither safely to be admitted unto, nor conveniently to be excluded from the framing of their commonwealth’, a deception or fiction was to be entered into so that, while being substantially excluded from the process of devising the constitution, they would ‘verily believe when it came forth that it was no other than that whereof they themselves had been the makers’ (209). There were then multiple levels of fiction as well as multiple levels of narration at work in Oceana. The ‘factual’ story of how the balance of property in land had shifted from an aristocratic to a popular basis since the time of Henry VII was balanced by the fictional story of how a heroic military commander might become equipped to legislate so as to accommodate a new constitution to that shift and to stabilise it as a perfect and immortal commonwealth. The fictional narrative of the ransacking of the archives of ancient prudence had been prefigured in an historical account of the decline from the ‘ancient prudence’ of the classical world to a ‘modern prudence’ represented in the works of Machiavelli and Hobbes, a prudence which was incapable of dealing with the challenges of political architecture in the modern world. Arriving at ‘The Model of the Commonwealth of Oceana’, Harrington announced, ‘I come unto the narrative, divided into two parts’: first the institution and then the constitution of the commonwealth. But this section also incorporated the debates over each provision of the constitution and within many of the speeches arising from those debates were further subordinate narratives.46 The account of the implementation of the new constitution used narrative ‘practically’ (210) since writing perplexed and practice clarified (222–3).47 Just as deeds were more reliable than words, what was done was more important than what was said and the appropriate For example 253–6 and the defence of the Councils of the Senate and especially of the Dictator; or 268–72 on the Roman experience of a popular assembly; or 337–8 the narrative of Philadelphus on Caesar’s self-destructive ambition, itself a story illustrating the outcome when passion is destructively triumphant over reason. 47 Like Moses and Lycurgus, the Lord Archon is more interested in putting the constitution in execution rather than writing about it. (210) 46

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mode of accounting for deeds was narrative. The story of the establishment of the Oceanic commonwealth was also an account of the institution of social processes of regularity and custom, processes performed according to a regular calendar and thereby reshaping the second nature of Oceanic citizens. Many of the orders of the constitution were themselves narratives of process, of motion through time and space.48 They read like scenes from a play or pageant with detailed stage directions. They articulated the emergence of a new commonwealth and its continuance through their ritual performance of an exact, explicit calendar of meetings, ballots and rotations. The process invoked by the fifth order, for example, is one whereby upon the first Monday next ensuing the last of December, the bigger bell in every parish throughout the nation be rung at eight of the clock in the morning, and continue ringing for the space of one hour; and that all the elders of the parish respectively repair unto the church before the bell have done ringing, where, dividing themselves unto five equal numbers, or as near as equal as may be, they shall take their places according to their dignities, if they be of divers qualities, and according to their seniority, if they be of the same, the one half on the one side and the other half on the other, in the body of the church.

Then followed the election of parish office-holders and the deputies who were to represent the parish at the hundredal elections, with detailed instructions for how the elections were to be conducted and recorded.49 On the first Monday in February a comparable process took place at the level of the hundred and on the first Monday of March for the county or ‘tribe’. On the following day, the first Tuesday in March, representatives for the senate and assembly were elected and on the first Monday of April the bicameral parliament reconvened.50 The detail of this orchestration had something to do with the prevention of fraud, ‘of tricks or foul play’ (218), but a great deal to do with the prevention of parties and the corruption of the republic by a descent into partisan politics which would frustrate the pursuit of the common interest.51 This sequence of carefully choreographed acts was the process by which ‘the parishes annually pour themselves into the hundreds, the hundred into the tribes, and the tribes into the galaxies’ (245). Civil society was reconstituted and renewed annually from the grass See, for example, orders 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 25, 26, 29 and 30. There are parallel narratives for the constitution of the various levels of the militia on the first Wednesdays of January, February and March (orders 7, 8, 10, 11, 21, 22, 28, 29). See also 19 on the academy of provosts, a kind of narrative within a wider order describing various councils. Arrangements for the assembling of the Senate are spelled out in detail (Mondays at 7.00 in the summer and 8.00 in the winter) with detailed ‘stage directions’ for processing and seating. PWJH, pp. 245–7. 49 PWJH, pp. 214–15. 50 Orders 5 to 12. 51 PWJH, pp. 221, 281 and compare 424, 745. 48

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roots up or, to put it another way, the ‘unacknowledged republic’, on which peacetime governance had relied and which had been so badly mauled by war and revolution, was now acknowledged and reconstituted.52 In that sense, Harrington was responding to the call that ‘the People in generall (viz. the Counties, Cities, and Towns corporate)’ be sustained as the ultimate authority, even against parliamentary absolutism.53 These processes involved the movement of substantial numbers of citizens and younger men through time, in carefully calendared sequences, and space, from parishes to the capitals of hundred to the shire towns and then to the seat of the parliamentary assemblies. The stage directions for these performances are scripted in detail and in many cases with an overt air of theatricality.54 Oceana was, fundamentally, an account of acting in space and time or, as Harrington put it, of motion. ‘...neither by reason nor by her experience is it impossible that the commonwealth should be immortal, seeing the people, being the materials, never dies, and the form, which is motion, must without opposition be endless’ (229, my emphasis; see also 248, 298–9). Surveying his achievement as lawmaker, the Lord Archon contemplates not only the joy and harmony but also the ‘rapture of motion’ of his new constitution (342).55 But orchestrated motion was familiar to a society, even in its post-reformation form, habituated to the spectacle of public ritual and display. ‘In a broader sense, Harrington turned the whole republic into an elaborate piece of public theatre … [he] created a realm in which the kind of balletic grace that had been cultivated in court masques became democratized and extended to the nation as a whole.’56 We are reminded that, in Cicero’s view, intemperate speech, unscripted words, in ‘assemblies of the people’, could be dangerous and the safest popular assemblies might be ones in which business could be conducted while ‘never speaking

52 Patrick Collinson, De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge, 1990), p. 16; Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in The Politics of the Excluded c.1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94; J. C. Davis, ‘Afterword: Reassessing Radicalism in a Traditional Society: Two Questions’, in English Radicalism 1550–1850, ed. Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 360–3; Phil Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship and State Formation in Early Modern England’, American Historical Review, 112:4 (2007), 1016–38. 53 See William Ball, Constitutio Liberi Populi. OR, THE RULE OF A Free-Born People (1646), p. 12. 54 For examples of the theatricality of Oceanic orders and political rites see PWJH, pp. 88, 214–15, 145–6, 344–5. 55 On this critical theme see Jonathan Scott, ‘The rapture of motion: James Harrington’s republicanism’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 139–63. Harrington is here following both Hobbes, in reflecting the new physics of motion, and Harvey, in relating the circulation of the blood in the human body to motion in the body politic. 56 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, p. 364.

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a word’.57 Motion, deeds, acts were to be preferred to words as the basis for republican interaction. But an account of deeds was best given by narration. Narrative was called upon to perform another vital function, that of making complexity comprehensible. Provision against fraud, deference and partisan, self or sectional interest might require detailed regulation of performance (220, 222), but Harrington was aware that his apparent obsession with detail could be mocked (214) or induce bafflement. He had, so he claimed, ‘used my best skill to abbreviate in such manner as might show no more of it than is necessary unto the understanding of the whole’ (253). Statesmen who baulked at the necessary complexities of political architecture were as foolish as sailors neglecting the latest aids to navigation simply because they were hard to understand. The former might be ‘very many, and difficult’, but ‘what seaman casts away his card because it hath four and twenty points of the compass? And yet those are very near as many and as difficult as the orders in the whole circumference of your commonwealth’ (265). ‘For a nation still to be upon the cast of a die, to be ever in trepidation as to the main chance of government, is a dreadful state of things. Such indeed with us hath been the constitution of late governments, of which therefore not any can be called a commonwealth.’58 Harrington knew that the operation of rescuing the republic from the confusions which had come to appear endemic to it involved complexity and the risk of incomprehension, but, at the same time, he believed that he had depicted the operation of a perfect and immortal commonwealth with a lucidity that brought it within the intellectual grasp of his fellow countrymen. What was that confidence based on? V Narrative was capable of conveying action, practice and experience making an innovatory social and political system comprehensible in a way which words alone, description, could not. Those who were impatient of the description of such a system would find that in practice the ‘four days’ election in a whole year (one at the parish, one at the hundred and two at the tribe)’ would seem ‘like milk unto babes’ (280). And, throughout his writings, Harrington gave priority over comprehension to acting and the establishment of customary behaviour. The people could manage a proper form of government even though they could not understand it.59 Acting, practice, in habituating the people to those proper forms, was always preferable to writing.60 The people could not see but they could feel. They were deceived 57 58 59 60

PWJH, pp. 267–8. ‘The Art of Lawgiving’, in PWJH, p. 692. Ibid. p. 659. ‘Brief Directions’, in PWJH, p. 597; ‘Valerius and Publicola’, ibid., pp. 784, 799. 164

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by names but not by things. Nevertheless, while they might nourish their bodies without understanding them, to be effective the republican lawmaker (the Lord Archon) had to understand the body politic.61 When the people acted in accordance with Harrington’s script for the ballot, even though they did not understand it, they could not go wrong. So that, ‘To philosophise further upon this art, though there be nothing more rational, were not worth the while, because in writing it will be perplexed, and the first practice of it gives the demonstration’ (222).62 Again, ‘The frame of a commonwealth may be dreamed on, or proposed, two ways: the one notionally, in which it is of facile understanding but of difficult practice; the other practicably, in which it is of difficult understanding but of facile use.’63 Indeed, the constraints of performance without comprehension might have a saving grace. The mariner trusteth not unto the sea, but to his ship. The spirit of the people is no wise to be trusted with their liberty, but by stated laws or orders; so the trust is not in the spirit of the people, but in the frame of those orders, which, as they are tight or leaky, are the ship out of which the people being once embarked, cannot stir, and without which they can have no motion.64

Just as the soul of man worked in God’s creation without understanding it so the body of a people … embarked in the true form of a government, do all the functions of the same, not that they understand it – for how much understood they the late monarchy, when it was in the greatest vigour? – but that, through the necessity of the form, except it come to be insufficient (as through the late decay of the church and nobility), they can work no otherwise than according to the nature of it.65

The people’s reservations about, or aversion to, the Oceanic constitution arose not from malice but ‘through mere want of acquaintance with such things as they can no wise understand but by trial’.66 Only when the story, which was based on comprehension of the past, gave form to the peoples’ motion in the present would its efficacy become apparent. Only then would ‘Aphorisms Political’, in PWJH, pp. 762, 764, 776. In a similar way, natural philosophy, because it dealt in happenings that we could all observe, was easy while anatomy, dealing with underlying structures, was hard. ‘The Art of Lawgiving’, in ibid., p. 656. This passage introduces one of Harrington’s most sustained justifications of complexity as essential in the building of a lasting commonwealth. 62 There are obvious parallels here with Baconian experimental science. For similar comments on the facility of use and the difficulty of comprehension see The Art of Lawgiving, in PWJH, p. 659. 63 Ibid., p. 661. 64 ‘A discourse upon this Saying …’, in PWJH, pp. 737–8. 65 ‘A Discourse Showing …’, ibid., p. 751 66 Ibid. 61

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they realise the full value of the story Harrington was already telling them. So he provided not only a narrative making sense of the country’s descent into institutional instability, but another which could bestow a new identity and the capacity to rise above chaos and generate permanent order. Given the commencement of that second narrative, Harrington had no doubts that the problems of limited comprehension could be overcome by the tuition of custom or habit, complexity would become intelligible through the observation of behaviour, and repeated routines would reshape the second nature of citizens so that even wicked men could be good citizens. There remained a further task for narrative and that was to show how the man of power could come to set aside the temptations of personal ambition and enact the perfect and immortal commonwealth with which he had been presented. Cromwell could only become Lycurgus if he were told the story of the consequences of such self effacement.67 VI The final section of Oceana was entitled ‘The Corollary’ and, true to its title, presented the practical consequences of what had gone before. Its mode was again narrative, both historical and fictional. The first story, taken from Plutarch, was that of Lycurgus and his actions after completing his constitution for Sparta. In a direct allusion to the opening of Hobbes’s Leviathan, Harrington depicted a deeply moved Lycurgus contemplating the new government, firmly established and in motion. ‘For in the art of man, being the imitation of nature which is the art of God, there is nothing so like the first call of beautiful order out of chaos and confusion as the architecture of a well-ordered commonwealth.’68 There was both an aesthetic and a religious satisfaction in implementing a political order which brought order out of chaos and Lycurgus wished to render that order ‘unalterable and immortal’. Having bound all the people to an oath that they ‘would observe his laws, In the central essay of an important and illuminating trilogy of essays on mid-seventeenth-century English republicanism, Blair Worden argues that by the time he wrote Oceana, if not before, Harrington’s attitude to Cromwell had moved from ambivalence to despair and what amounts to latent hostility. In this view, the work’s dedication to Cromwell is an anti-dedication; the Lord Archon is an anti-Cromwell. It will be obvious that I disagree with this, seeing the work as balanced between hope and suspicion and still striving to inspire the remodeling of the Lord Protector as the Lord Archon. This is the only reading that makes sense, for me, of ‘The Corollary’. Compare Worden, ‘Oceana Origins and Aftermath’, in Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society, ed. Wootton, pp. 120–4; Worden, Literature and Politics, pp. 109–10. Davis, ‘The Prose Romance’; Jonathan Scott, ‘James Harrington’s prescription for healing and settling’, in The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland; Essays for John Morrill, ed. Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 190–209. 68 Compare Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), p. 9. 67

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without any change or alteration whatsoever’, he withdrew to consult the oracle of Apollo at Delphos. The answer to his question as to whether the constitution he had established would sustain a virtuous and happy life was that ‘his policy was exquisite and that his city, holding unto the strict observation of his form of government, should attain unto the height of fame and glory’ (341). Knowing then that his people were covenanted to sustain an ideal constitution, Lycurgus chose to starve himself to death. Since he could do no more for the commonwealth, his civic existence had been rendered meaningless (342). In the fictional story which followed, the Lord Archon, having ‘beheld not only the rapture of motion, but of joy and harmony’ which his new constitution embodied, abdicated (since as a Christian he could not commit suicide) and retired to the country. The withdrawal of the single person who might overawe (and thus undermine) the commonwealth was essential but, faced with the problem of how to show the people’s gratitude, the Senate ordered a muster of the people. The procession associated with that event is described in elaborate detail and it is proposed that the Lord Archon be made ‘protector of the commonwealth’ for life with a substantial revenue, the duty of receiving foreign ambassadors and a standing army for three years ‘governed, directed and commanded’ by the council of war to protect the commonwealth against ‘dissenting parties’. Other proposals guaranteed the equality of sworn citizens and the expulsion of persons or parties ‘not conformable to the civil government’. There followed a detailed account of the process of voting and upholding these proposals and the speeches following that outcome (343–9). In accepting these arrangements, the Lord Archon observed that ‘experience would show every party their own interest in this government’ so that, even if all those elected to office were ex-royalists, they would be no threat to the republic (350–1). We are then given a history of the first fifty years of that experience. During it, republican frugality enabled the state to end most taxation while maintaining a substantial military force. The landholdings of the republic were themselves limited making it, too, subject to a kind of agrarian (352, 355–6). Protected annuities, a kind of wardship, were established for orphan girls. Manners were reformed. Two publicly funded theatres were established in the capital, each with an overseeing magistrate, one for tragedy, one for comedy. Some of their revenues were used to support a poet laureate. ‘These things among us are sure enough to be censured, but by such only as do not know the nature of a commonwealth; for to tell men that they are free, and yet to curb the genius of a people in a lawful recreation unto which they are naturally inclined is to tell the tale of a tub’ (353–5).69 After fifty years the Lord Archon died aged 116. He

Harrington’s literary interests are thus as prevalent at the end of Oceana as they are its beginning.

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was compared to Timoleon who, having in the fourth century B.C. restored peace to Sicily, remodeled its government and then retired into private life while remaining until the end of his life the adviser of the people. Cromwell was thus offered the historical examples of Lycurgus and Timoleon as well as the fictional example of the Lord Archon. His own narrative could be transformed from that of a beleaguered and floundering politician contemplating a return to a discredited – but familiar – constitution into that of The The The The

Greatest of Captains, Best of Princes, Happiest of Legislators, Most Sincere of Christians.70

Oceana ended then with fictional narrative which was intended to be an exemplary completion of its historical narrative. Despite the fact that some might mock its storytelling – ‘seeing by men wholly ignorant of antiquity, I am accused of writing a romance’ (358) – Harrington’s ‘romance’ was designed to enable his fellow citizens, and Oliver Cromwell in particular, to visualize and then actualize the means of their liberation from chronic instability and frustration, restoring their country to order, harmony, reconciliation and greatness and investing Cromwell with the glory of immortal fame. It was a narration of deadly serious intent.71 VII In 1656 narrative was important, perhaps essential. It overcame both complexity and the descent of words into hypocrisy, cant and ambiguity by literally showing how the deeds required of Harrington’s fellow citizens might be performed. It gave imaginative entry to a world of different behaviours enabling them to overcome disorder, confusion and instability. In other words, it took readers beyond description or the enunciation of rules that they and others would be expected to observe, to the actions that would enable them to do so. The detail of processions, dress, assemblies, procedures, seating arrangements, voting arrangements and the rest (seen by an informal society, like our own, as verging on the obsessive) were This is part of the epitaph inscribed on the monument to the Lord Archon. (357–9) Davis, The Prose Romance’. There is a complementary study to be made of rhetoric in Oceana. Of the twelve speeches, reproduced from the Council of Legislator’s deliberations, most are either deliberative, demonstrative or a mixture of both. Only two speeches engage in epidectic oratory; one unavailingly mocking proposals for popular rule, the other praising the Lord Archon’s self-effacement. See also, Gary Remer, ‘James Harrington’s New Deliberative Rhetoric: Reflection of an Anticlassical Republicanism’, History of Political Thought, 16:4 (1995), 532–57. 70 71

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to Harrington amongst those things that would give his contemporaries a feeling of verisimilitude about the things they would have to do. Even the ordini were more than rules. They were also chronologically developed sequences of events in time and space through which the commonwealth was mapped, embodied, ritualised and renewed its story. Through them the republic was given form and motion and its citizens (and to some extent its non-citizens) were drawn into sequences of actions which made them communities and a unitary polity (which was remarkable for its inclusivity). They became participant citizens, performers and actors on the stage of the theatre which was the polity or civil society. What they did, and would do, in its narrative sequences, would generate, sustain and renew the immortal commonwealth. Immortality in Oceana was never about stasis but always about becoming.72 But, if narrative was so important to Harrington in conveying his message in 1656, why was it inappropriate, when the message was almost identical, in his diverse works of 1658 to 1660? If we assume, as I do, that Harrington was self-conscious and deliberate in his choice of genre, why was narrative essential in 1656 but not in 1658–60? What was the difference between the two contexts? A sense of the tragic disintegration of an unstable political system and the need for its replacement, if the commonwealth were to be rescued, was no less in the later period than in the earlier. The futility of recommencing or reassembling a broken narrative, be it that of the ancient constitution or of an oligarchy backed by the military, was, if one accepted Harrington’s analysis of the historically changed relationship between empire and authority, the same. With the shift in the balance of property in land from an aristocratic to a popular basis, the preconditions of both the ancient constitution and oligarchy had gone and the theatre of narrative had also been transformed from an English to a truly British frame of reference. In these respects, the need for a new narrative, a new narrative imperative, might seem as strong in 1658–60 as it had been in 1656, especially from a republican perspective. Why, then, did Harrington turn his back on narrative in the later period? What was missing? In 1658 Olphaeus Megaletor’s doppelganger, Oliver Cromwell, left the stage for good. Cromwell, rather than being a slyly mocked, marginal figure in Harrington’s political epic,73 was central to the whole narrative enterprise. If Harrington ‘went deeper into historical analysis than any English writer before him’74 it was in order to offer an escape from the unregulated flow of history into the regulated flow of narrative, a narrative which could become the history of the future. To effect that transition from narrative Compare this as a theme in early modern state formation in Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000). 73 Compare Worden in works cited at n. 67. 74 James Harrington: The Commonwealth of Oceana and a System of Politics, ed J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1992), p. xxi. 72

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to actuality required a single heroic figure. In the highly partisan, fractured political world of the 1650s, it could not be done by a representative assembly, nor, Harrington (unlike Milton, Vane, Baxter and Stubbe) believed, by an elite, revolutionary minority. Experience had shown that even the few were all too likely to be divided or impotently unrelated to the many who now owned the balance of property. Whereas for Milton change could be embodied by either an heroic elite or, less satisfactorily, by an heroic individual,75 for Harrington only the latter was, under certain conditions, possible. Not only was an elite likely to be paralysed or conflict ridden by internal division, but it lacked the balance of empire. Given the existing distribution of empire, a single person would also lack the balance of ownership in land but was, at least, univocal and capable of decision. Ironically, the fact that the individual also lacked the power conveyed by the balance of empire was one of the circumstances which made the role of single legislator temporarily acceptable, since his proposals would have to be endorsed by the people (who did hold the balance of empire). The other condition was that, having proposed a popular constitution to the people, the legislator should follow the example of Lycurgus and Timoleon, withdrawing from public life. In 1656, there was an individual who, with some fictional suspension of disbelief, might be reconstructed to fit this brief and meet these conditions. He died in 1658. Cromwell in 1656 was a figure of ambivalent power and greatness. His rise, his military achievements, his apparent godliness, his political centrality, all gave cause for comparison with the famous heroes (and, for some, the villains) of history. Either way, he could seem both to bestride and transcend his times. But Harrington needed someone who understood them. In 1656 Cromwell was struggling blindly to find his way out of a politicalmilitary impasse. In Oceana, Harrington could be seen as offering a heroic coda to a story which had some of the qualities of a romance but which otherwise looked in danger of sputtering out in failure and frustration. If God’s favour to the parliamentary cause in the civil wars had been to ‘settle our Liberty upon so right a foundation’, that remained an objective still to be realised in the 1650s. The protectorate may have been the answer to a political vacuum but its efforts to realise that goal seemed similarly ineffectual.76 Cromwell’s own narrative could be seen as either faltering77 or at a cross roads. Harrington then might be seen as making a perfectly serious offer of an alternative narrative to the lord protector. The rhetorical purpose behind Oceana was, in part at least, ‘to see to it that Cromwell becomes Joshua or Lycurgus rather than Saul or Julius Caesar, a dictator/legislator Guibbory, Map of Time, p. 203. Compare [John Hall], Confusion Confounded (1654), pp. 2, 6–8, 19. 77 For a critical illustration of this see Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan’, in History, Society and the Churches, ed. Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 125–45. 75 76

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rather than a dictator/tyrant’.78 The divided Cromwell, standing at the cross roads, must be manoeuvred into taking the right direction. The creation of a new language would not be sufficient to this task and the resources of the old were depleted.79 For the man of action it was deeds and the narration of them that must have seemed more appropriate. So that, while the task of rendering the new political community intelligible might have been done by Oceana’s forward projection of narrative in 1656, the critical difference was the absence of a single, heroic figure to cast in the role of lawmaker after Cromwell’s death in September 1658. VII The use of prose fiction and its narrative potential in the politics of the later 1640s and 1650s is a topic which calls out for more vigorous and thorough investigation. Even five years ago it was still thought appropriate to write a general history of seventeenth-century English literature which marginalized or ignored it.80 This essay offers no more than a sketchy and superficial look at one writer, albeit a key one, in this respect. Nevertheless some preliminary observations may be offered by way of conclusion. If Hayden White is right that the precondition of history proper is that at least two narratives can be envisaged,81 Harrington offered his countrymen two alternatives to a number of broken historical narratives. One was a continuation of the narrative of frustration which had become the underJames Holstun, A Rational Millennium. Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (New York and Oxford, 1987), p. 225. The kind of flexibility of personality assumed here was far from unimaginable in the early modern period. See for example Sir Thomas Browne’s observation: ‘To see our selves againe, we need not looke for Platoes yeare: every man is not onely himselfe: there have beene many Diogenes and as many Timons, though but few of that name: men are lived over againe, the world is now as it was in ages past; there was none then, but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and is as it were his revived selfe.’ Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643), in The Prose Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Norman Endicott (New York/London, 1968), p. 12. 79 For some suggestive remarks in this direction see Elizabeth Skerpan, The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution (Columbia, 1992), pp. 84, 153, 198, 225. 80 See Thomas N. Corns, A History of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Oxford, 2007). Throughout the book there is a conspicuous failure to tackle narrative prose fiction. Likewise in Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot, 2006) scant attention is given to the political prose fiction of the 1650s. In his survey of early modern English prose fiction Paul Salzman brushed aside political fiction as of interest only to the political historian and not to the literary critic. See Salzman, English Prose Fiction 1558–1700 (Oxford, 1985), p. 292. More serious consideration of political prose fiction in the period is given by Kahn, ‘Reinventing Romance’. 81 On Narrative, ed. Mitchell, p. 19. 78

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lying story of the ‘ancient constitution’ since the early sixteenth century. The second was a narrative which reconciled the balance of property and a form of popular government, which provided for informed, but not decisive, leadership, high levels of participation in office-holding and the generation of a powerful citizen militia. It was not so much an escape from history as the opening narrative of a new history which Harrington saw as almost within the grasp of Oliver Cromwell and his fellow countrymen. Similarly, if we accept Victoria Kahn’s identification of a limitation of early modern rhetoric, as an instrument of ideological closure, arising from its assumption that there was always something to be said on the other side of the argument, it is significant that Harrington offered narrative with its powerful capacities for engaging closure and containing rhetoric.82 Eric Nelson has recently bracketed Harrington with Milton and Sidney as a ‘republican exclusivist’, one who believes that the only acceptable form of government is a republican one.83 But this is to miss the force and importance of narrative in Harrington’s work. Republics were only appropriate and workable in certain historical circumstances. To grasp that, they had to be seen in their narrative context, and a crucial part of Harrington’s narrative is that of the ultimate failure of every republic prior to that of Oceana. Whatever his preferences for the republican form, Harrington remained a republican relativist and that relativism had to be expressed through historical and fictional narrative – the stories of what had been and what might be.84 Hobbes, like Harrington, feared the inconstant signification of words and the potential for misunderstanding and conflict associated with linguistic instability. The former’s answer was to attribute to the sovereign perhaps the most absolute of his capacities, linguistic sovereignty backed, since words were not enough, by the sword. The necessity of a linguistic sovereign for Hobbes was substantially bound up with the fact that the state was brought into being by a powerful, even if sometimes fictional, speech act, a covenant. By contrast, Harrington sought to move as far as possible from words to deeds, expressed in the acts of the lawgiver, and the ritual performance of annual cycles of actions and roles by the citizens, most of whom acted speechlessly

See Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric. From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton, 1994), p. 84. 83 Nelson, Hebrew Republic; idem, ‘“Talmudic Commonwealthsmen” and the Rise of Republican Exclusivism’, H.J., 50:4 (2007), 809–35. Compare too the comments in [Matthew Wren], Consideration on Mr Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana: Restrained to the first part of the Preliminaries (1657), pp. 37–40. 84 It is possible to argue that for Harrington, the servant of a defeated king, reconciliation took precedence over republicanism. This is an extrapolation from Scott’s ‘James Harrington’s prescription for healing and settling’. I hope to write further about this elsewhere. 82

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while those who did speak publicly never decided.85 Another way of looking at this may be to focus on the materialism of both Hobbes and Harrington. Neither contemplation nor description were adequate to capture the dynamic of matter in motion. Rather that dynamic could provide the necessary basis for narrative. In Hobbes, when the narrative of the state of nature is ended by the creation of civil society, the function of the sovereign is to still that motion, and because of this and the unpredictability of the sovereign will, the narrative ceases. In Harrington the motion and the narrative never ceases and can be, as it is in the Corollary, projected into the future. It is rather contained, constrained and directed by the orders of the perfect and immortal commonwealth.86 As David Norbrook has perceptively suggested, a central dilemma of republican thought in the 1650s was that a republican political culture might only be sustainable in a republican state but that a republican state might only flourish if infused by a republican political culture. Military strength might be used to break this cycle but only at the cost of undermining the values of civility.87 Harrington offered to escape this dilemma, not by force majeure but by the construction of an alternative narrative. His remaining vulnerability was that the inauguration of that narrative in real time depended on Oliver Cromwell being, or becoming, a single person without personal ambition and one persuaded to act out the role of Olphaeus Megaletor. Whatever his reservations about that dependency, Harrington was, like others before him,88 prepared to set them aside in his narrative masterwork of 1656, Oceana.

Instructive here is Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts. The Crisis of Political Obligation in England 1640–1674 (Princeton, 2004), pp. 1, 6, 38, 121. See also Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom. The Shadows of Time (New Haven, 1994). 86 See Scott, ‘Rapture of Motion’ and idem, Commonwealth Principles. Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 180–4; Kahn, Wayward Contracts. 87 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, pp. 189–91. 88 Two examples: Gerrard Winstanley in his dedication of The Law of Freedom and William Hickman in his letter to Cromwell of November 1650, Originall Letters and Papers of State Addressed to Oliver Cromwell, ed. John Nickolls (1743), pp. 29, 31. 85

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Democracy in 1659: Harrington and the Good Old Cause Rachel Foxley

Between the death of Oliver Cromwell in September 1658 and the return of Charles Stuart as Charles II in May 1660, political reversals and upheavals succeeded each other with astonishing speed. A fresh phase of contestation of the protectorate under Richard Cromwell was ended by the power of the army, as was the restored Rump which followed from May to October 1659. Beyond that point expedients failed and a succession of restorations – first of the Rump and then of the Long Parliament’s excluded members – paved the way for the return of the Stuart monarchy.1 Historians have tended to characterize the republican and constitutional debate of this period as vague, visionary, and nostalgic – nostalgic, indeed, for a republican moment in the early 1650s which had never really existed and was now only hazily imagined. The ‘Good Old Cause’, itself a conveniently loose formulation, stirred impulses which were ‘always more emotional than rational’.2 The fervent, or desperate, hopes and fears of 1659 were chiliastic, prophetic; the republican debate with which sectarian desires were intertwined has sometimes seemed like a by-product of the same irrational ‘enthusiasm’. Squabbles between the republican thinkers themselves, and among the political constituencies backing some version of the Good Old Cause, have featured prominently in the historiography, adding to the sense of political stalemate and dysfunction, with the various factions acting out the hopeless endgame of the interregnum before an inevitable monarchical restoration.3 See the narratives in Godfrey Davies, Restoration of Charles II, 1658–1660 (San Marino, 1955); Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658–1667 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 21–123; Austin Woolrych, ‘Introduction’, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Volume VII, 1659–60, ed. Robert W. Ayers (New Haven and London, 1980). 2 A. H. Woolrych, ‘The Good Old Cause and the Fall of the Protectorate’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 13 (1957), 133–4 (quotation), 136, 152. 3 John H. F. Hughes, ‘The Commonwealthmen Divided: Edmund Ludlowe, Sir Henry Vane and the Good Old Cause 1653–1659’, The Seventeenth Century, 5 (1990). 1

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I want to draw attention to a surprising development within this apparently futile republican hubbub: a discussion of democracy so influential that it pushed republicans to frame their proposals in democratic terms, or to justify their reluctance to do so. This debate may have been fleeting, but it marks an important moment in the mid-seventeenth-century turn away from the ‘complete hegemony’ of ‘constitutional pluralism’.4 Here I will trace the source of that debate in James Harrington’s arguments about the nature of a genuine ‘commonwealth’, and ask how Harrington himself transformed classical constitutional thought to reach his controversial and idiosyncratic democratic conclusions. If in 1659 republicanism is seen as tearing itself apart, the republican writing of the 1650s in general has been characterized in ways which might also question its political efficacy if not its political seriousness. Pocock famously characterized English republicanism as a ‘language’ which people reached for in the wake of the regicide, in order to grapple with the world they found themselves in, rather than a ‘programme’ which had generated that kingless state.5 The constraints of the politics of the 1650s, as well as the inherent qualities of some strands of republican thought, meant that republican writing was often less than prescriptive in constitutional terms. Indeed, those who feel that ‘republicanism’ cannot meaningfully be attributed to writers who did not commit themselves to a specific constitutional form, and in particular a non-monarchical one, may end up excluding key figures from the 1650s republican canon – and have difficulty explaining the similar concerns and approaches of writers who did and did not meet these criteria.6 John Milton, for example, used classical languages and the language of natural rights in his polemics against the new regime’s enemies, but the pressures of service to the commonwealth and protectorate, in combination with his Aristotelian analysis of constitutional legitimacy, meant that he did not even prescribe non-monarchical government on principle through the 1650s. Marchamont Nedham was bold enough, at least at particular moments and in particular outlets, to be a little more specific about the successive, single-chamber parliaments which he hoped would succeed the Rump (and, less realistically, the protectorate), and yet Worden has shown how productive it can be to read his output alongside Milton’s.7 Even with

Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish sources and the transformation of European political thought (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), p. 3. 5 Pocock, ‘Historical Introduction’, in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977) (hereafter PWJH), p. 15. 6 See Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience’, in Republicanism : A Shared European Heritage: Vol. 1. Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Quentin Skinner and Martin Van Gelderen (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 307–8, 317–27 on these questions of definition and exclusion. 7 Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford, 2007). 4

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Nedham at his most outspoken, however, we are hardly dealing with elaborate constitutional architecture. James Harrington’s remarkable Oceana, however central it has been to the interpretation of 1650s republicanism, stands out as an exception in its attempt to enact in writing not only a detailed constitution, but the steps its founding legislator would need to take to bring it about. Against the backdrop of this diverse and diffuse English republican literature, the debates of 1658–60 look rather less futile. For all the genuine divisions among advocates of some form of republic, we can gain, perhaps for the first time in the 1650s, a sense of voices from across the republican spectrum addressing the same questions. The definitional and normative issues which republicans had rarely engaged with earlier in the decade suddenly became central to the debates between them. In the year and a half before the Restoration, there was a real, principled debate about one simple question: what constitutional form did the polity have to take in order to be considered a ‘commonwealth’, and hence to be legitimate? Ruth Mayers has pointed out that the divergent and argumentative strands of republican thought in 1659 were united by some key common principles: ‘all republicans by definition believed that a “Commonwealth” without single person or peers was the only government capable of a just and equal provision for the “common good” of all interests’. As she points out, the debates of 1659 challenge the theory that republicans were not doctrinaire anti-monarchists. Either this is an illusion created by the caution of the later commonwealthmen under the restored monarchy, or the ‘open climate’ and urgency of 1659 drew republicans to be more explicit about their constitutional commitments.8 This new sense of precision and commitment is most obviously visible in Milton’s novel and belated constitutional prescriptions on the eve of Restoration in early 1660, when his deeply-held principles finally crystallized into urgent pleas for a secure and non-monarchical settlement. However, Mayers’s account of the republicans’ unity about the type of ‘commonwealth’ they wanted obscures a more precise definitional dispute which became prominent in this period. The ‘house of peers’ ruled out by republicans was the old house of lords, but much of the overt disagreement between republicans centred on the question of whether authority was to be placed in a single chamber or in two, and what their characters would be. There was thus considerable scope for republicans to attach differing constitutional labels to their preferred schemes of government. Alongside the debate about unicameral and bicameral arrangements, republicans began to debate where a true commonwealth might fall among the classical scheme of simple and mixed constitutional forms. Much to the alarm of their opponents within and outside republicanism, a significant body of republicans

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began to argue that only a democracy or ‘popular government’ could truly be described as a commonwealth. The claim that a commonwealth must, by definition, be a democracy was highly controversial, whether considered in its immediate political context or within the longer span of ancient and early modern political thought. ‘Commonwealth’, like the Latin ‘respublica’ with which the English term was often aligned, might often simply mean a polity, or at most a legitimate polity which was governed lawfully, with a view to the public good. Even James Harrington – as we shall see, the key figure in this definitional debate – occasionally used the term commonwealth in this neutral sense: ‘A commonwealth is but a civil society of men.’9 David Wootton has traced no ancient use of the word ‘respublica’ in the more precise sense of a nonmonarchical or popular government that would have been known to early modern writers (the one such usage is put into the mouth of a speaker in the part of Cicero’s De Re Publica which was not yet rediscovered). Wootton locates the modern beginnings of the ‘republican’ meaning of ‘republic’ in late fifteenth-century Florence (where Savonarola and his partisans drew on Ptolemy of Lucca), with Machiavelli as one of the first to take up this novel understanding of ‘repubblica’ and transmit it beyond that particular Florentine context.10 In sixteenth-century England, humanist authors infused ‘commonwealth’ or ‘commonweal’ with some of the connotations of Ciceronian respublica, but the exact terminology which might properly represent ‘res publica’ in English was controversial. Elyot objected to ‘common weal’ as a translation, preferring ‘public weal’; ‘common weal’ to him implied democracy, the commons being the equivalent not of the whole society but of the Roman plebs. In spite of the sometimes oppositional power which the term ‘commonwealth’ could mobilize, however, it still almost always did so because it referred to the good of society as a whole, rather than because it embodied any constitutional prescription about which kind of government could fulfil that demand.11 Following the execution of Charles I, the interregnum regime declared England a ‘Commonwealth and Free State’, and the term became contested by republicans seeking to argue that the interregnum governments needed to be remade to transform England into a PWJH, p. 172. David Wootton, ‘The True Origins of Republicanism: The Disciples of Baron and the Counter-Example of Venturi’, in Il Repubblicanesimo Moderno: L’idea Di Repubblica Nella Riflessione Storica Di Franco Venturi, ed. Manuela Albertone (Naples, 2006), pp. 272–96. 11 Mark Knights and Early Modern Research Group, ‘Commonwealth: The Social, Cultural, and Conceptual Contexts of an Early Modern Keyword’, H.J., 54 (2011), 659–71; John Watts, ‘Public or Plebs: the Changing Meaning of “the Commons”, 1381–1549’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Huw Pryce and John Watts (Oxford, 2007), p. 257 on the distancing of ‘commonwealth’ from a newly limited sense of ‘commons’; Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 137–49; see p. 148 for a suggestion that commonwealth might imply ‘democracy’. 9

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genuine commonwealth, and opponents who wanted to keep the term more open to allow for some political breadth and conciliation.12 The debates of 1659 took this struggle for ownership of the term ‘commonwealth’ to a new level. However, even those who wished to claim ‘commonwealth’ as an exclusively republican concept did not need to identify it with democracy. If ‘commonwealth’ might be thought to translate ‘res publica’, ‘res publica’ might similarly be taken to translate the Greek ‘politeia’. This was the Greek title attached to Plato’s far from democratic ‘Republic’, and it was also the term which Aristotle both applied to the valid form of popular government, suggesting that it was similar in some ways to aristocracy (he tendentiously reserved ‘democracy’ for the illegitimate form) and extended to his ideal constitution which shared some of the same elements.13 The Polybian theory of the mixed constitution, which grew out of Greek constitutional terminology and the Greeks’ notion of a cycle of constitutional types, could also be grafted on to the complex of ideas connoted by ‘res publica’ and ‘commonwealth’, and has formed a prominent element in some modern characterizations of early modern republicanism.14 All this offered republicans numerous ways of describing and justifying a non-monarchical state without resorting to any simple endorsement of democracy or popular government in its unmixed form. It is noticeable, in fact, that the most populist of the political thinkers of the 1640s and 1650s tended to avoid the term, even when it seems to us most applicable to their constitutional proposals. The Leveller movement of the 1640s had agitated for a singlechamber Representative elected on a much widened franchise and exercising the political power which ultimately derived from and belonged to the people themselves. While the Levellers’ opponents were only too quick to seize on that populism – and in the case of Nedham, defending the republic from the Leveller threat, to describe the Levellers’ aims using the classical tropes of licentious democracy – the Levellers themselves almost entirely avoided the classical language of constitutional classification, referring neither to ‘democracy’ nor to the Latinate and rather more common ‘popular government’. The populist republicans who partially followed in the Levellers’ footsteps – Nedham himself in his advocacy of successive elected single-chamber parliaments, and the army republican John Streater – used the language of classical republicanism in a way that the Levellers Joad Raymond, ‘The King Is a Thing’, in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (Cambridge, 2002), p. 87; Knights et al., ‘Commonwealth: The Social, Cultural, and Conceptual Contexts of an Early Modern Keyword’, pp. 679–80. 13 Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, 2004), p. 1; Christopher Rowe, ‘Aristotelian Constitutions’, in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 384–7. 14 Zera Silver Fink, The Classical Republicans. An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evanston, 1945). 12

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had not, but had not, before 1659, gone out of their way to classify their own preferences in the terms of the ancient constitutional types. Streater had discussed the Aristotelian classifications in his Observations Historical, Political, and Philosophical, upon Aristotles first book of political government, published in newsbook form in 1654, and had followed Aristotle in arguing for the moral equivalence of the uncorrupted simple forms of government; he also recommended a mixture of aristocracy and democracy in preference to a pure aristocracy. He made an intriguing distinction between commonwealth and popular government, and his argument that one of the common changes of government was when ‘the Gouernment of the Common-wealth, or Free-State, [changes] to the Popular State’ implied that the popular state was the corrupt equivalent of a commonwealth.15 In 1659, the nature of the debate was very different. One republican pamphleteer commented in October 1659 that ‘every Book-sellers Basket and Shop hath some new thing to shew for a Popular Government’.16 By 1659, John Streater had not only explicitly come down in favour of democratic government, but had begun to equate it with ‘commonwealth’ in a way which was typical of one side of the political debate of that year: ‘Democracy is a Government, where the Governours are Elected by the People out of themselves; sometimes called Free-State, or Popular State, or Common-wealth: This kind of Government by the People, is the most Natural, and best sort of all Governments.’17 It is probably not a coincidence that Streater was associated with James Harrington, and had been involved in the printing of Harrington’s Oceana in 1656, for this sudden turn towards the explicit endorsement of popular government, and the equation of this ‘democracy’ with ‘commonwealth’ itself, appears to have been Harrington’s doing. Harringtonians were only one strand in the republican ferment of 1659,18 but to a remarkable extent they seem to have set the terms of the debate. The texts from 1659–60 which explicitly recommended ‘democracy’ on their title pages tended to have a Harringtonian cast or Harringtonian connections. A Proposition In order to the proposing of A Commonwealth or [John Streater], Observations Historical, Political, and Philosophical, upon Aristotles first book of political government, no. 1. 4–11 Apr. 1654, pp. 1, 6. His definition of ‘democracy’ as rule ‘by the better sort of the people, without respect of Nobility or Riches at their constituting’ does, however, seem benign, and it appears to be aligned with monarchy and aristocracy as a legitimate form of rule (p. 6). 16 The Grand Concernments of ENGLAND ENSURED, October 1659, quoted in Mayers, 1659, p. 182. 17 Streater, Government Described, p. 4. 18 Mayers’s survey of the material published under or in relation to the restored Rump Parliament identifies three overlapping strands: Harringtonian, theocratic, and neo-Leveller. Mayers, 1659, pp. 209, 213–25; Woolrych, ‘The Good Old Cause and the Fall of the Protectorate’, 157, sees Harringtonianism as a ‘minor current’ in the agitation for a commonwealth. 15

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Democracy (June 1659) made precisely Harrington’s move of identifying a commonwealth as necessarily democratic, and consisted of a request, apparently endorsed by Harrington himself, that he be invited to present his proposals to a committee of the House, much enlarged by the addition of a roster of named individuals not all of whom could have been expected to show enthusiasm for a Harringtonian commonwealth – as at least one mocking pamphlet reply pointed out.19 Another text from the period of the Rump in the middle months of 1659 again propounded a democracy on its title page: A Model of A Democraticall Government, Humbly tendered to Consideration, by a Friend and Wel-Wisher to this Common-Wealth (August). It did not name Harrington, but its proposals were unmistakably, perhaps verbatim, Harringtonian, although some crucial features of his system were omitted. The fad for Harringtonian theory in 1659 was encouraged by Harrington himself, who proceeded to expand on, defend, and promote the scheme set out in his Oceana of 1656 in a sequence of direct interventions in the print debates of 1659–60. As we will see, the surprising emphasis on democracy came directly from Harrington himself. I It is odd that it was Harrington whose influence apparently brought proposals for ‘democracy’ or ‘popular government’ onto the bookstalls in the pre-Restoration crisis. He was an unlikely republican theorist. An educated gentleman of private means, he had travelled on the continent, and appears not to have participated in the political upheavals of the Civil War before becoming a personal attendant of Charles I while he was in the custody of the parliamentarians from 1647 until shortly before his execution. Harrington’s political writings were produced in a burst of activity in the later part of the interregnum, appearing from 1656–60, and, although he gathered republican allies, relatively little is known about his personal links with republican opposition to the protectorate before the publication of his great work Oceana in 1656. In 1659–60 he reached the high tide of his influence, particularly in the Rota club which gathered to debate constitutional schemes for a few months at the turn of the year, and became rather fashionable. His work rested on an analysis of mid-seventeenthcentury England and was a calculated intervention into the politics of the mid- and late-1650s, but Harrington succeeded in conveying the impression that its structuring principles were disinterested and of universal application. His system of politics appears to be meticulously constructed from an analysis of key principles in ‘ancient prudence’ and founded on Harrington’s

An Answer to a Proposition In order to the proposing of A Commonwealth or Democracy (1659).

19

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own analysis of the importance of the balance of property to political form. However, a closer look at his discussion of constitutional form, and particularly popular government, suggests that these foundational principles were not always logically prior to the constitutional conclusions he wanted to draw from them. Harrington argued that England had been plunged into civil war because its government by monarchy with the essential support of the nobility had collapsed. This had happened because this ‘Gothic balance’ relied on a predominance of landed property in the monarch and nobility which had been whittled away by political and religious developments under the Tudors, leaving the balance of property in the people. The only natural form of government for such a people was a commonwealth or popular government, and Harrington hoped either to inspire or to become the great legislator who would establish the ordini required for a stable popular government in England.20 However, Harrington’s recommendation of popular government was not merely contingent on the property balance. He argued that even a perfect monarchy was not a perfect form of government, retaining dangerous flaws; whereas ‘popular government, reaching the perfection of the kind, reacheth the perfection of government and hath no flaw in it’.21 The peculiarity of all this is that, while the blueprint of a polity which Harrington constructed in such great detail could certainly be defended as a commonwealth, it did not need to be labelled a democracy or popular government. There were numerous reasons why Harrington might have avoided doing so, particularly given the persistently pejorative connotations of unmixed ‘democracy’ or popular government well beyond the mid-seventeenth century. Furthermore, Harrington’s own system of government was far less clearly an example of popular government than the directly-elected single-chamber successive parliaments advocated by the Levellers, Nedham and many republican politicians and writers of the late 1650s. He was also far from the populist instincts of the Levellers or of John Streater, who both urged their readers to understand and defend their own liberties, and credited them with the ability to do so. Harro Höpfl has rightly remarked on the oddness of Harrington’s ‘aggressive’ promotion of ‘“popular government” (or even “democracy”) and “equality” at a time when these were virtually synonymous with disorder’, and offers as one solution the possibility that Harrington may have been using these terms in a characteristically ‘idiosyncratic and perhaps deliberately provocative’ way.22 Harrington was certainly fond of creating terms of art, and in his denser theoretical passages layered them onto each other in a rather dizzying way; his delight in redefining terms for his own purposes was almost equal to Hobbes’s. Harrington’s

20 21 22

Pocock, ‘Historical Introduction’, PWJH, p. 114. PWJH, p. 179. O.D.N.B., s.v. ‘Harrington, James’. 182

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notion of what was ‘equal’ played on the relatively wide semantic range of that term in early modern English, but even so his was clearly an unconventional usage. The unexpectedly central and positive role which Harrington gave to ‘equality’ – whatever he meant by it – meshed with his positive treatment of ‘popular government’, but was similarly prone to alarmist interpretation by his contemporaries.23 Pocock remarks that Harrington ‘was designing a system of proportionate rather than geometrical equality’, which may go some way to elucidating his use of the term; but Pocock’s following comment that ‘the respective weights assigned to aristocracy and democracy mattered less than the functional and ethical relationships between them’ suggests that ‘equality’ here has moved beyond the strictly proportionate, quasi-measurable weighting of virtue rather than number, and become a more abstract principle in the functioning of government itself.24 For Eric Nelson, Harrington’s decision to use the ‘stigmatized’ term ‘democracy’, rather than simply calling his commonwealth a ‘republic’ reflects his alignment with a Greek rather than Roman political ethics, and his unease with the unharmonious Roman Republic whose tumults had been seen as a tool for liberty by Machiavelli.25 While it is true that Harrington did sometimes make use of the ‘more learned’ Greek term,26 he tended to avoid it in favour of ‘popular government’, which was a double translation through Roman political writing into English. More significant, though, was Harrington’s equation of this popular government, whether Greek or Roman in conception, with ‘commonwealth’: ‘a democracy or equal commonwealth’, a ‘commonwealth or democracy’.27 This naturalizes rather than erases the concept of ‘republic’, and provocatively equates it with democracy in a way that, on the face of it, does not sit easily with the Platonic notions of justice and harmony which form the core of Nelson’s Greek republican tradition. Yet many historians have reached for the term ‘aristocratic’ rather than ‘democratic’ to describe Harrington’s republicanism. For Jonathan Scott, the hollowing out of the participatory and genuinely civic aspects of Harrington’s professed classical republicanism left his version of humanism ‘aristocratic and circumspect’.28 Pocock, too, acknowledges the enormous importance of aristocracy to Harrington: the task facing the legislator is to

J. C. Davis, ‘Equality in an Unequal Commonwealth: James Harrington’s Republicanism and the Meaning of Equality’, in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution, ed. Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (Cambridge, 1998), especially pp. 236–7, 241. 24 Pocock, ‘Historical Introduction’, PWJH, p. 67. 25 Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, pp. 108–9. 26 PWJH, p. 162. 27 PWJH, p. 770. 28 Jonathan Scott, ‘The Rapture of Motion: James Harrington’s Republicanism’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), p. 162. 23

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remedy ‘the failure of democracy as a simple form of government’, and to prevent it from falling into anarchy, by the restitution of aristocracy to the system. For Pocock, the debate of 1658–60, largely centred around the question of a second house or senate, was conceptualized by Harrington as a struggle to avoid the imposition of an oligarchy, whether that was a standing senate or an unbalanced unicameral assembly. Thus ‘his politics were aristocratic as those of the Levellers were not’, but retained a radically democratic side. The key to Harrington’s defence of popular government is what he meant by it: ‘a proper relationship between aristocracy and democracy’.29 Harrington’s insistence that the government must be popular did not spring from a positive assessment of the capacities, or even the potential capacities, of the people. (If his system was intended to be educative of the people, it did not put its trust in the results.30) In his Aphorisms Political, the fifth aphorism is brief but telling: ‘The people cannot see, but they can feel.’31 Harrington insisted that the understanding of the people was not necessary to the functioning of a perfect commonwealth, even though, by definition, that commonwealth would be popular. The instinctive responses of the people, guided fundamentally by their interest, enabled them to judge what was presented to them, but a higher understanding of the system within which they lived was not to be expected of them. Harrington exalted the role of the lawgiver who had the ‘invention’ to frame a system of government, but insisted that the people’s lack of this power of invention in no way told ‘against the sufficiency of a people in the management of a proper form, being once introduced, though they should never come to a perfect understanding of it’. It was a sad irony that the only constitutional arrangements complex and intricate enough to serve the people’s interests were too complex for them ever to understand, and this left Harrington despairing about whether he would ever be able to ‘render that which is practicable facile’.32 Harrington, in fact, was committed to the notion that there was a ‘natural aristocracy’ – his phrase – among any group of men. About a third of the group would be found to be wiser than the rest and emerge as natural leaders. The remainder he was even prepared to describe as the ‘natural democracy’. In accordance with this, he presented an account of ‘popular government’ which was actually a careful combination of aristocracy and democracy.33 In The Art of Lawgiving, indeed, Harrington conceded that Pocock, ‘Historical Introduction’, PWJH, pp. 46, 53, 66–7, 104, 107. Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient & Modern. Vol 2: New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought (3 vols, Carolina, 1994), II, 191. 31 PWJH, p. 762. 32 PWJH, p. 659: The Art of Lawgiving. 33 PWJH, p. 416. This may not have been purely a matter of his belief in the existence of a natural aristocracy: he was prepared to contemplate, as a hypothetical possibility, a polity of equals. When he set out at the start of the Art of Lawgiving to establish the 29 30

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‘though for discourse sake politicians speak of pure aristocracy and pure democracy, there is no such thing as either in nature, art or example’. He argued for the instability of aristocratic government but gave little reason for his additional comment: ‘Nor is there, without a senate or mixture of aristocracy, any popular government.’34 It was this belief which resulted in his elaborate bicameral system, which both acknowledged the natural differential between the leaders and the rest of the population and translated the ancient categories of rule by social groups into a kind of separation of powers. Harrington’s system was contrived in such a way that those who sat – in rotation, of course – in the popular assembly were merely to vote in silence on the proposals drawn up by the senate of prudent men, who had the power to propose but not to enact laws. As Paul Rahe remarks of this silent popular assembly, ‘With Harrington, for the first time, in a definitive way, popular consent has replaced public deliberation as the fundamental principle of republican politics.’35 Yet that consent was not the citizenly, self-conscious and capable consent envisaged by the Levellers and by more ‘classical’ republicans. Harrington insisted that this system meant that in legislation ‘the wisdom of the nation propose and the interest of the nation resolve’. That interest might be almost mechanical, and, while Harrington insisted that the people in their popular assembly had the power of judgment, this appeared not to derive from any power of judgment inherent in the individuals of the population. In his Aphorisms Political, he insisted that the ‘diffusive body of the people is not in a natural capacity of judging’, and that their entire power had to be located in their collective bodies, ‘or there can be no commonwealth’. It was a nonsense to declare that these collective bodies only had power in some matters – the implicit target here is a revival of Leveller ideas about reserved powers – or to ‘lay any appeal whatsoever from a political capacity of judging’ to the incapable diffusive body of the people outside their legislature – another attack on the Leveller notion of appealing to the people.36 If Harrington’s advocacy of popular government had little to do with the example of the Levellers – articulated through the language of rights natural types of government, he set up an extraordinary argument that monarchists had failed to notice one of the possible types of family. The monarchical family consisted of a man with a thousand pounds a year who married a wife and had children and servants depending on him; but a ‘popular family’ was also possible: ‘for suppose six or ten, having each three hundred pounds a year or so, shall agree to dwell together as one family; can any one of these pretend to be lord and master of the same?’ As far as Harrington chose to develop this rather strained analogy, it envisaged an entirely uniform population. In a commonwealth, however, that uniformity could not be translated into a properly balanced mechanism of rule. 34 PWJH, p. 611. 35 Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, p. 333. 36 PWJH, pp. 772–3. 185

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rather than through a classical republican emphasis on participation – it may have had more to do with the classical thought which Harrington insisted he was following. But again, Harrington’s proclamation of himself as a disciple of ‘ancient prudence’ has been met with some scepticism by his modern readers. Admittedly John Pocock asserted in the first line of his contextualization of Harrington’s thought that ‘Harrington was a classical republican’; in this he followed Zera Fink and has been followed by others including Eric Nelson.37 Colin Davis found the classical republican elements of Harrington’s thought threatened by the concomitant utopian impulse towards control, which left little scope within Harrington’s commonwealth for the free and meaningful participation of citizens in virtuous self-government.38 More recent scholarship has launched more aggressive attacks on the notion that Harrington was in any meaningful way a classical republican, even if he depicted himself as one. Disguise is something of a trope in such interpretations of Harrington: Jonathan Scott’s exhilarating attack on Harrington’s hollowed-out classical republicanism depicts him as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, while Paul Rahe similarly argues that Harrington ‘virtually wraps himself in a toga’ in his misleading eagerness to align himself with ancient rather than modern prudence.39 Even as he drew his distinction between ancient and modern prudence, Harrington laid the foundations for this charge, because he picked from the modern world two thinkers as emblems of (revived) ancient and degenerate modern prudence: Machiavelli and Hobbes. Machiavelli’s own departures from the political morality of the ancients can thus be seen behind Harrington’s dubiously ‘classical’ republicanism – even before one takes account of the fact that Hobbes was not merely an enemy to Harrington, but a profound influence too. Harrington’s argument for popular government, I will argue, lay in his very particular transformation of the terms of ancient prudence. Indeed, for Harrington, popular government was itself encoded in and almost equivalent to ancient prudence, although his first exposition of it in Oceana in 1656 was very coy about that fact.40 In order to make ancient prudence entail popular government, Harrington had to jettison key features of it, even while putting them to transformative uses. When Harrington first introduced the distinction between ancient and modern prudence, in the first part of the ‘Preliminaries’ of Oceana, he glossed Pocock, ‘Historical Introduction’, PWJH, p. 15; Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, p. 125 still concedes Harrington’s ‘genuine eclecticism’. 38 J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 207–39. 39 Jonathan Scott, ‘The Rapture of Motion’, p. 141; Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, pp. 323–4; his account here develops that given in Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, II, 179–96. 40 Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, II, 179–80, notes this without noting the change in Harrington’s discussion after Oceana. 37

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them in ways which pointed to deep distinctions of morality and principle. He first indicated that ancient prudence defined government de jure, while modern prudence defined it de facto; the question of legitimacy was thus entirely sidestepped by modern prudence. He then went on to elaborate the contrast between ancient and modern prudence by the use of two pairs of binaries which were deeply rooted in ancient political thought. According to ancient prudence, government ‘is an art whereby a civil society of men is instituted and preserved upon the foundation of common right or interest’, whereas for modern prudence it is ‘an art whereby some man, or some few men, subject a city or a nation, and rule it according unto his or their private interest’. Harrington transformed the Greek classification of constitutions as legitimate or illegitimate according to the ends for which they were ruled into a distinction between ancient and modern prudence. Citing Aristotle and Livy, Harrington invoked the connected ancient distinction between government by laws and government by men; again, modern prudence had sacrificed legitimacy and government had become ‘the empire of men and not of laws’.41 Harrington’s allegiances are thus superficially clear, and even in the framing of the distinction between ancient and modern analyses of government, Harrington made use of the principles of ancient political thought. ‘Modern prudence’ was judged against the moral standards intrinsic to ancient political theory, and fell short of them. Harrington adopted the Aristotelian distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of government in order to assert the superiority of ancient over modern prudence. However, he tellingly failed to reproduce Aristotle’s theoretical indifference between the three unmixed constitutional forms. For Harrington, government not for the common good but for the good of the ruler was a perversion which could occur when ‘some man, or some few men’ dominated a regime; he did not at this point mention the equally self-interested domination of a state by a ruling group which Aristotle called by the name of ‘democracy’, and which other ancient writers agreed was possible even if they disagreed with Aristotle’s nomenclature. This may have been a temporary oversight, as Harrington did subsequently bring his account of the degenerate forms of government into line with one version of the ancient distinctions, supplying ‘anarchy’ as the perversion of democracy.42 It is however noticeable that he did not follow Aristotle in his admittedly rather unsuccessful attempt to redefine democracy as the bad form of government by the many; and he did not automatically think of the rule of the mob as the natural parallel to self-interested tyranny and oligarchy. Harrington could only align an illegitimate form of rule by the many with the illegitimate forms of rule by the one and the few by changing the criteria of legitimacy and illegitimacy. ‘Anarchy’ was the corruption of

41 42

PWJH, p. 161. PWJH, p. 162. 187

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democracy because passion rather than reason ruled, not because the people were ruling in their own interest.43 When passion drove out rationality, it could corrupt any of the three types of rule; but when the people pursued their own interests in a rational way through the proper mechanisms of a popular government, that was not a form of corruption but a genuine expression of the common good. Harrington further transformed the ancient distinction between the legitimate and illegitimate rule of the one, few, and many by assimilating it to a very different aspect of his own thought. According to Harrington, the distribution of property, especially land, within a polity would naturally determine the constitutional form of that polity, with a clear overbalance of property in king or people leading to stable absolutist or popular government, an overbalance in the nobility leading to the ‘Gothic balance’ of a mixed monarchy, and more unstable political situations following from two property-owning groups being in balance. This was a pragmatic account of the way in which the distribution of the ‘goods of fortune’ underlaid the constitutional forms of particular states; it sits beyond ethical questions, and on the face of it might seem to lead to a Hobbesian rejection of the ancient theory that each type of polity was subject to corruption into a defective equivalent.44 Each type of government was simply possible, and recommended, if it was founded in the property balance. Harrington vehemently objected to Hobbes’s obliteration of the ancient test of legitimacy for each type of constitution, but within his discourse of the ‘goods of fortune’ he rescued the appearance of the ancient distinction only by a sleight of hand: the bad forms of constitution in any given situation were those which did not correspond to the balance of dominion. Some ethical element was indirectly introduced by the fact that such a regime, unnatural as it was, would have to be maintained by violence.45 One of the challenges of Harrington’s argument about government, advertised so prominently as a recovery of the ancient ethical foundations of politics, was to reconcile his amoral analysis of ‘power’ – resting on the ‘goods of fortune’ – with his prescriptive discussion of the foundation of ‘authority’ in the ‘goods of the mind’.46 Harrington made this transition – perhaps rather speciously – by adopting another ancient trope, the equivalence of city and soul. Harrington’s whole polity possessed a soul (government), which could exhibit reason and virtue.47 Even though Harrington repudiated ‘modern prudence’, its de facto and interest-based perspective was imported into the foundation of his argument, the theory of empire following dominion. He then struggled to connect this story to an ethical story which did meet the criteria of ancient prudence. 43 44 45 46 47

PWJH, p. 162. Rahe, Republics Ancient & Modern, II, 181. PWJH, p. 164. PWJH, p. 169. PWJH, p. 170. 188

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Harrington developed largely separate arguments for his constitutional preferences at the pragmatic and the ethical levels of his theory. While the theory of the balance of property might seem to be constitutionally neutral, simply prescribing whichever constitution best fitted the property balance, Harrington offered reasons for thinking that monarchical governments, whether absolutist or mixed, were always vulnerable because of their reliance either on the arms of janissaries or on the power of their nobility. But Harrington’s deep preference for a government which he described – however idiosyncratically – as ‘popular’ did not really, I think, spring from this pragmatic analysis. Rather, it genuinely rested on some of the conclusions which Harrington drew from ‘ancient prudence’, but which were transformed in Harrington’s distinctive style. Harrington transformed the ancient ethical prescriptions about government into an exclusivist argument for popular government. This move was disguised but not rendered unproblematic by his superficial argument for a Polybian mixed constitution; ultimately, however, his commonwealth was popular in nature and mixed only in its administration in the common interest.48 For ancient authors, any of the three constitutional forms might serve the interests of the governed, at least under some circumstances; for Harrington, apparently under any circumstances (in spite of his stipulations about an appropriate property balance) ‘the interest of popular government come[s] nearest to the interest of mankind’.49 The ethical requirements of ancient political thought – transformed into the modern language of interest – all led in one direction for Harrington, regardless of the ancients’ own openness about constitutional form. Where Harrington in 1656 had recommended the principles of ancient prudence, by the time he was defending his scheme against the attacks of Matthew Wren in 1658, in his Prerogative of Popular Government, Harrington came clean about what ancient and modern prudence actually meant to him: ‘by ancient prudence I understand the policy of a commonwealth, and by modern prudence that of king, lords and commons’.50 In the Preliminaries to Oceana, Harrington had tellingly demarcated the period of ancient prudence, which lasted until the ‘arms of Caesar’ ended liberty and barbarian tribes overran the Roman Empire, a curious compression of time which served to elide the rule of Rome by the emperors, while placing a telling focus on the moment when some Romans felt that not only liberty but the ‘res publica’ was lost.51 Ancient prudence denoted the time of popular republics, above all else. In modern times, Hobbes symbolized See Arihiro Fukuda, Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 1997), pp. 116, 125, for a more positive assessment of Polybian mixed government in Harrington’s thought, and p. 102 for his move away from the Aristotelian/Polybian triad of elements in the mixed government. 49 PWJH, p. 172. 50 PWJH, p. 397. 51 Wootton, ‘The True Origins of Republicanism’, pp. 273–5, 279–83. 48

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all that was hateful about modern prudence because of his preference for monarchy; Machiavelli symbolized the revival of ancient prudence because of his advocacy of popular republics. Modern scholars have questioned the notion of Machiavelli as a reviver of the ethical thought underlying ancient republican politics, but Harrington was surely attracted as much by the conclusions as by the nature of the thought itself. There is a story – in The Examination of James Harrington, printed by John Toland from unknown manuscript sources – that Harrington began his unlikely career as an authority on government when approached by ‘some sober men’ to resolve the question of ‘what a commonwealth was’, Oliver Cromwell having challenged those murmuring for a commonwealth to explain what they meant by it.52 Whatever the authenticity of the report, the focus on the question of what a commonwealth was is entirely Harringtonian. Harrington followed those who gave moral force to the notion of ‘commonwealth’ rather than taking it as a neutral description for any polity, and he again applied moral distinctions which he derived from the ancients. He reported that Aristotle and Livy thought that ‘a commonwealth is an empire of laws and not of men’, thus effectively restricting ‘commonwealth’ to the legitimate forms of government rather than the degenerate forms.53 However, Harrington restricted the signification of ‘commonwealth’ still further, and it is a restriction which reveals how much more lay behind Harrington’s thinking than just his famous analysis of the balance of property and its relation to political dominion. He erased the apparent constitutional neutrality of the criterion of rule by law, acknowledging in 1658 that he was defining ‘a commonwealth … to be a government of laws and not of men, and a monarchy to be a government of some man or few men, and not of laws’.54 These conclusions were drawn from Harrington’s non-ancient interpretation of ancient principles: the interest of the commonwealth was simply the aggregate or collective interest of the whole people; the law in order not to reflect merely private interest must be made by the legislative will of the whole people, which could only happen in a popular government. Harrington’s rejection of ‘modern prudence’ was thus a rejection of the genuine, if reluctant, constitutional neutrality of Hobbes much more than it was a rejection of the politics of interest. II Harrington’s provocative recommendation of democracy as the only constitutional form which could claim to be a commonwealth did not escape

52 53 54

PWJH, pp. xii, 859. PWJH, p. 170. PWJH, p. 401. 190

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contemporaries. While the exhaustive detail of Harrington’s account might invite ridicule rather than minute analysis from unsympathetic commentators, particularly royalists or supporters of the protectorate keen to demonstrate that proponents of commonwealth were brainsick utopians, it is striking that they could still pick up and challenge the broad outline of Harrington’s argument. Richard Baxter, the Worcestershire minister, published his book A Holy Commonwealth in 1659, responding to the republican proposals of the day with a vision for a holy commonwealth, whose goodness would not depend on niceties of constitutional form but on its protection of ‘the interest of God, and the well-fare of his Universall Kingdom’. In it, he railed against ‘the new Popularists among us, calling Democracie only “a Common-wealth”’. In contrast, it was one of Baxter’s theses that ‘The true formal nature of a Common-weal is in every one of the Modes or Species now in question; so that it is absurd to appropriate the Title of a Commonwealth to any one of them alone.’55 When, a couple of lengthy chapters later, Baxter moved on to discussing Harrington himself, he made his opinion of Harrington’s constitutional scheme bracingly clear: ‘And he knoweth not Oceana (Mr. Harrington’s Common-wealth) that knoweth not that the ignorant and ungodly rabble are made the Lord and Rulers of all.’56 Baxter’s sweeping statement of the popular character of Harrington’s government was based on some engagement with some of the details of Harrington’s texts, although it quickly descended into a clichéd and extended discussion of the ignorance and immorality of the rabble. Baxter focussed in on Harrington’s electoral arrangements: ‘The whole scope of the design is by the Ballot and Rotation to secure us from the danger of a probability of being Ruled by Wise or Honest men, and put the business out of doubt, that strangers to Prudence, and enemies to Piety shall be our ordinary Rulers.’57 Baxter fixed immediately on the electoral power of the people and insisted that in spite of all his protestations, Harrington was committed to making the quality of rule dependent on the wisdom and goodness of the ordinary citizens. He merely hinted at the separation of the power of proposing from the power of resolving, and ignored Harrington’s senate. He then turned on Harrington’s other treasured mechanism, to complain that ‘lest we should have any hope they should grow wiser by experience, the Rotation must turn them out before they well know where they are’.58 Of course, it is no surprise that their enemies painted republicans as dangerous populists; more of a surprise is that Harrington chose to give them so much scope to do so. The more meaningful debates of the pre-­ Restoration period were between the different supporters of the Good Old Cause. Dis­agreements about the powers and status of a popular assembly, 55 56 57 58

Baxter, Baxter, Baxter, Baxter,

A A A A

Holy Holy Holy Holy

Commonwealth, Commonwealth, Commonwealth, Commonwealth,

p. 77. p. 136. p. 136. pp. 136–40. 191

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and a push from some, particularly the army men, to institute some kind of upper house partly as a control on the lower, came under the influence of Harrington’s elaborately-theorized bicameral model. But while Harrington’s bicameralism might have been thought to offer an olive branch to the more ‘aristocratic’ republican theorists, his insistence upon this as an embodiment of popular government or democracy was problematic for them. His habit of describing the perfectly-engineered bicameral democracy as an ‘equal’ commonwealth provided further grist to the mills of both allies and enemies, who sometimes seem as baffled as modern commentators about the exact nature of the ‘equality’ alluded to here. The way in which Harrington’s language was used, sometimes defensively, by other republicans, suggests that it exerted an unexpected degree of influence on contemporaries even when they disagreed with his arguments. It was not only Harrington’s anti-republican opponents who took seriously his claim to be advocating democracy. Other republicans engaged with it too. In Richard Cromwell’s parliament a key debate had been the recognition of the Other House introduced under the Humble Petition and Advice.59 By the time the protectorate had been swept away on a tide of agitation for the Good Old Cause, and the Rump Parliament restored, the competing republican proposals listed by Ludlow agreed that the future government should include some kind of popular chamber; they disagreed on the nature of this chamber and whether it needed any institutional check on its powers in the form of a senate or ‘ephors’ to preserve the fundamentals of the government.60 Harrington’s popularly-elected senate as a proposer of legislation, sharing the principle of rotation with the popular chamber who voted on those proposals, was one option; but the Harringtonians opposed the military-backed notion of a standing senate as well as the idea of a popular unicameral government. Once the Rump had again been evicted in October 1659, the chain of reversals and expedients which ensued raised justified fears of anarchy, and helped to usher in the Stuart restoration at the hands of General Monck. It was in the midst of these events that Milton finally intervened in the debates about constitutional form, issuing an extreme republican challenge to Harrington’s championing of popular government by threatening to do away not with the senate but with the popular chamber itself, but again with a surprising degree of acknowledgment of Harrington’s language.

Gaby Mahlberg, Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester, 2009), pp. 151–5; Jonathan Fitzgibbons, ‘The Cromwellian “Other House” and the search for a settlement, 1656–1659’, University of Oxford D.Phil., 2011, pp. 248–61. 60 The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow: Lieutenant-General of the Horse in the Army of the Commonwealth of England 1625–1672, ed. Sir Charles H. Firth (2 vols, Oxford, 1894), II, 99. 59

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The ‘godly republicans’ of the period were distinguished by their fundamentally millenarian emphasis on the rule of Christ, but accepted some human structures established in the light of, and compatible with, that ultimate goal. Sir Henry Vane had attempted to forge a political elect from the fusion of the godly and the other supporters of the Good Old Cause; there was some rapprochement with Fifth Monarchists such as John Rogers, who now moved towards an acceptance first of the Rump and then of further republican schemes. Theocratic principles tended to express themselves – when they solidified into concrete political proposals at all – through rather aristocratic structures, with the godly acting as an aristocracy of virtue. Such writers responded ambivalently to Harrington’s peculiarly aristocratic version of democracy. Harrington mocked John Rogers for his apparent desire to have an independent people submit to rule ‘by none other but such as himself’, excluding the people. But popular government was in many ways an easier target than such exclusivity, and for all his godly concerns, Rogers’ attack had mobilized classical example against the popular element of Harrington’s scheme. Rogers interpreted the rotation as a form of ostracism, arguing that at Athens ostracism was used to drive out good men from the city. Rogers compared Athens unfavourably with the more sober and meritocratic habits of Sparta and Thebes. Where these polities might ‘keep out the Joans and Toms’, Harrington’s rotation ‘bolts them into the government and their betters out’.61 As Jennifer Roberts points out, the accusation that Athens and other democratic states expelled their most capable and virtuous citizens was a recurrent feature of the anti-democratic tradition.62 Henry Vane’s anonymous A Needful Corrective or Balance in Popular Government offered a critique of Harrington which trod cautiously in its revisions of Harrington’s scheme, and claimed that its own modification was also designed to create ‘the most exact platforme of the purest kind of popular Government’, although Vane placed Israel as the lone example and the word of God as the overriding authority for his scheme. Vane however confessed some ‘dissatisfaction … in reference to the definition you make of an equal Common-wealth’, and picked up, as many including some very thorough Harringtonians did too, on one key feature of Harrington’s polity – its refusal to set a political qualification for citizenship, accepting royalist, Cromwellian and republican alike.63 Vane’s protégé Henry Stubbe, while paying similar tribute to Harrington, took up the theme of Harrington’s ‘equal’ commonwealth rather more sharply, but to the same effect. He more explicitly identified the ‘equality’ of Harrington’s commonwealth with its inclusion of all political constituencies in citizenship, but tellingly attacked that equality through the tropes of anti-democratic argument. Harrington PWJH, p. 758. Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton, N.J., 1994), for example pp. 104ff, 120–1, 127, 150–2. 63 A Needful Corrective or Balance in Popular Government (1659), pp. 8, 10. 61 62

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had in fact imposed serious restrictions on citizenship, excluding ‘servants’ as a matter of course; had divided his citizens into property-based orders of horse and foot, differentially represented in the senate and the popular assembly; and had established an age qualification for office. Social hierarchy was in many ways prominent in Harrington’s commonwealth. Yet his promotion of an ‘equal’ commonwealth, embodying popular rule, and including citizens without any check on their past or present loyalties, was for Stubbe vulnerable to the classic anti-democratic jibe at absolute rather than proportional equality: that ‘it is a very unequall common-wealth which doth regard equally men of different qualifications’. In similar vein, he objected that Harrington was bowing to the tyranny of mere numbers in giving citizen rights to the defeated enemy: ‘In battailes number may be counterpoised by valour, and skill, or the like, but in an equall Commonwealth, when … all hopes of prevailing depend upon a majority’, the proponents of commonwealth were bound to be defeated.64 In the summer or autumn of 1659 Stubbe was still prepared to pay lip service to the idea that in due course an equal commonwealth would and should be created, while slyly undermining the democratic connotations of ‘equality’ with well-worn anti-democratic tropes. Later in 1659, and with even more contempt in 1660 when, as he admitted, his discourse had been rendered rather irrelevant by events, he took on more directly Harrington’s advocacy of popular government, through an attack on one of Harrington’s many argumentative hostages to fortune. Harrington invited some incredulity from contemporaries as well as modern scholars in his assertions that Venice and Sparta were popular governments. Stubbe took on the case of Sparta and pointed out that Harrington’s insistence on inclusion of all meeting the property qualification as citizens did not sit neatly with the very ‘unequal’ commonwealth of Sparta which had excluded the helots.65 Even considering the Spartan commonwealth solely in relation to those who enjoyed citizenship, he took delight in challenging the idea that a commonwealth such as the Spartan one could meaningfully be called ‘popular’. His argument rested partly on a dispute about the powers of the Spartan senate, but he also brushed aside a couple of ancient references to Sparta as a democracy to emphasize their deep commitment to a more oligarchic model. By the time of the Peloponnesian War, Spartans were flourishing under ‘this government: which they, from the great power of the Senate, called an Oligarchy, and Aristocracy, … and were so endeared thereunto … that they advised their neighbouring Democracies to the like reiglement’.66 Sparta, far from being a model of democracy, had been an avowed enemy to it. Henry Stubbe, An Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause (1659), unpaginated preface. 65 Henry Stubbe, A Letter to an Officer of the Army Concerning a Select Senate (1659), p. 6. 66 Henry Stubbe, The Common-Wealth of Oceana Put into the Ballance, and found too light. 64

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These are examples of opponents picking up on – and possibly exaggerating – the ‘democratic’ features of Harrington’s thought. But some republican critics of a Harringtonian scheme might be positively rather than negatively influenced by his characterization of any true commonwealth as a democracy. The comment which I am tempted to read in this way is found in John Milton’s first surviving discussion of the strictly political (as opposed to religious) import of the turbulent events of this period, his manuscript ‘Letter to a Friend’ of 20 October 1659. His new-found commitment to avoiding the rule of a single person at all costs was presumably based on the possibilities opened up by the collapse of the protectorate, his fears of the unworthiness of any ‘single person’ who might succeed to the highest office in the state, and his lingering hopes that the English people might eventually become fitted to pursue virtue within the framework of a republican government. Milton’s letter was written a week after Lambert’s breaking of the Rump, in the confused interim before the army’s expedient, a Committee of Safety, was appointed two weeks later. The ‘friend’ is real but unidentified.67 Milton, horrified by the naked exercise of military power in the expulsion of the Rump, urged the establishment of a senate of life members, perhaps based once again on a recalled Rump, who would be required to commit themselves to liberty of conscience and against the rule of a single person. He airily dismissed concerns about this alarming constitutional expedient: ‘And whether the civill government be an annuall democracy or a perpetuall Aristocracy, is too nice a consideracion for the extremities wherein wee are.’ Yet no sooner had he dismissed questions of constitutional form than he returned to them, rejecting on grounds of numbers the anticipated – and highly Harringtonian – accusation that his senate would be an oligarchy, and noting that there would be committees of the well-affected in the counties to support it. These, and the fact that the government would after all keep away monarchy and ensure liberty of conscience, ‘may give this government the resemblance & effects of a perfect democracie’.68 This is an extraordinary statement. Milton had proposed something which clearly fulfilled the criteria of a ‘perpetuall Aristocracy’; but not content with insisting that it really did not matter that this was not an ‘annuall democracy’ (presumably

Or An Account of the Republick of Sparta, with occasional Animadversions upon Mr. James Harrington and the Oceanistical Model (1660), p. 11. 67 Woolrych, ‘Introduction’, p. 121; Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ayers, VII, 324 n.; Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford, 2008), pp. 290–1. Bradshaw was dying, but remains more likely than Vane, another suggestion, who was to sit on the Committee of Safety and was too implicated in Lambert’s actions at this time for Milton to have written to him with such harsh words about the army’s actions: Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ayers, VII, 325–9. Worden, Literature and Politics, p. 347, emphasizes Milton’s continued friendship with Nedham, who had of course been an advocate of ‘annuall democracy’. 68 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ayers, VII, 331. 195

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an annually-elected sovereign single chamber), he argued that in fact it had the ‘resemblance’ and ‘effects’ of a ‘perfect democracie’. It was, I suggest, due to Harrington’s unlikely and extraordinary influence that an even more unlikely democrat felt the need to defend himself in this way.

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The Restoration of the Church of England, 1660–1662: Ordination, Re-ordination and Conformity* Kenneth Fincham

and

Stephen Taylor

Modern accounts of the re-establishment of the Church of England in 1660–2 have usually focussed on the politics of court and parliament, on set pieces such as the Worcester House and Savoy conferences, and on the revival of cathedral communities and the machinery of diocesan government. Ordination, by contrast, has been largely neglected. Robert Bosher declared that it was ‘not a major issue’; other historians have noted that re-ordination, namely the requirement that presbyterians take episcopal orders to remain within the ministry, was highly contentious and that its inclusion in the Act of Uniformity of 1662 helped to swell the numbers ejected after St Bartholomew’s day, but even this important point has not been systematically pursued.1 A thorough study of the number and pattern * We are grateful for the comments and assistance of Nicholas Cranfield, Andrew Foster, Martin Jones, Grant Tapsell, Elliot Vernon and David Wykes. Earlier versions of this paper were given at the Early Modern Seminar, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 2005 and 2011, at the Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading, in 2005, at the British History in the 17th Century Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London, in 2010, at the Ecclesiastical History Seminar at the University of Durham in 2011, at the British Studies Seminar at Vanderbilt University and at ‘“1662”: in Historical and Ecumenical Perspective’ at the University of Exeter in 2012. At all these events we received much useful comment and criticism. Regular reference will be made in the footnotes below to Clergy ID numbers taken from The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540–1835 (CCEd), http://www. theclergydatabase.org.uk. CCEd itself remains a work in progress, the aim of which is to construct a relational database detailing the careers of all clergy of the Church of England between the Reformation and the mid-nineteenth century. We are grateful to all those who worked on the project, without whose efforts this article could not have been written, and particularly to our co-director, Professor Arthur Burns. See www.theclergydatabase.org.uk/about/personnel.html. 1 R. S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement: the Influence of the Laudians (1951), chs 4–5, esp. pp. 273–4; A. Whiteman, ‘The Re-Establishment of the Church of England, 1660–1663’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 5 (1955),

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of ordinations in 1660–2, building on evidence in the Clergy of the Church of England Database, gives us a rather different view of the restoration of the Church in three important ways. First, this was an extraordinary and unsettled period. Very large numbers of candidates, among them many former presbyterians, obtained episcopal orders. These were dispensed by a minority of bishops, including several holding Scottish and Irish sees, with little regard for canonical regulations. The return of the customary administration of ordination only dates from the very end of 1662. Second, the fact that only a handful of bishops regularly conferred orders reveals starkly different practices of ordination among the episcopate and the paradox of high churchmen, such as Sheldon, leaving the restocking of the parish ministry to bishops who were more accommodating to tender puritan consciences. Third, the episcopate as a group emerges as a more influential player in the Restoration settlement than is usually acknowledged. From the earliest days of the Restoration and long before the full return of the pre-war Church was assured, bishops were insisting that presbyterians be re-ordained as a condition for institution to livings. In other words they were demanding a significant element of conformity, which had the effect of weakening and dividing the presbyterian interest. Nor did most bishops make any effort to breathe life into the concessions made to presbyterians in the Worcester House declaration, and instead encouraged this ‘highwatermark’ of comprehension to recede.2 The argument which follows is divided into two sections. First, having examined the sources on which this study is based, we make the case for the exceptional character of the period 1660–2, in terms of the numbers receiving orders and the different responses of the episcopate to ordination. In the second part of the essay, we consider the troubling and divisive problem of re-ordination, and trace its significant impact on the Restoration settlement of the Church.

pp. 111–31; From Uniformity to Unity, 1662–1962, ed. G. F. Nuttall and O. Chadwick (1962), chs 1–3; G. Abernathy, ‘The English Presbyterians and the Stuart Restoration, 1648–1663’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, ns, 55 (1965), pp. 50–93; I. M. Green, The Re-Establishment of the Church of England 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 9, 54, 127, 130–1, 150–1; J. H. Pruett, The Parish Clergy under the Later Stuarts (Urbana, 1978), ch. 1; R. Hutton, The Restoration (Oxford, 1985), pp. 143–8, 166–80; J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England 1646–1689 (Yale, 1991), pp. 29–42; B. Till, ‘The Worcester House Declaration and the Restoration of the Church of England’, Historical Research, 70 (1997), pp. 203–30; N. H. Keeble, The Restoration. England in the 1660s (Oxford, 2002), ch. 5. See also R. A. Beddard, ‘Nonconformist Responses to the Onset of Anglican Uniformity, 1661–1664: Letters to John Thornton, the Earl of Bedford’s Presbyterian Chaplain’, Bodleian Library Quarterly, 17 (2000), pp. 106–49. 2 The phrase is from Till, ‘Worcester House’, p. 230. 198

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I The sources for the study of the Church between 1660 and 1662, while better than those available for the preceding twenty years, are often incomplete and sometimes fragmentary. The reconstruction of the administrative structures of the Church was a process which proceeded unevenly across England and Wales, and the historical record has doubtless been further affected by accidents of survival. No register or subscription book survives for Henry King, bishop of Chichester, despite the fact that he was ordaining regularly from the time of the king’s return. So was William Piers, bishop of Bath and Wells, although his earliest extant subscription book only begins in November 1661, and, even more oddly, his post-Restoration register, which opens with three institutions on 23 June 1660, does not include any ordinations until December 1662.3 The archives of some other dioceses, such as Exeter, Lincoln and Oxford, are rather better served.4 But for our knowledge of ordinations, we are heavily dependent on retrospective evidence in exhibit books, compiled by officials at visitations, when the clergy were obliged to produce – or ‘exhibit’ – their instruments, that is their letters of ordination, presentation, institution, dispensation, and so on, which demonstrated their legal right to exercise their offices. Indeed, we know of the activities of three of the six most active bishops in the period from May 1660 to August 1662 only through the exhibit books.5 But the latter offer, at best, a partial record of Restoration ordinations: exhibit books for 1660–90 survive in only seventeen of the twenty-seven dioceses of England and Wales, and in a mere nine cases do they provide a reasonably full and complete record of the clergy beneficed in that diocese.6 Moreover, they Somerset Heritage Centre (hereafter SHC), D/D/BS/1; D/D/N.Reg/20, ff. 79v–135v. Devon Heritage Centre (hereafter DHC), Chanter 24, 50, 151b; Lincolnshire Archives (hereafter LA), Register XXXI, ff. 129–57; Register XXXII; Sub. II (a); Oxfordshire Record Office (hereafter ORO), MS Oxf. dioc. papers d. 106, ff. 1–15. 5 Henry King (Chichester), Thomas Fulwar (Ardfert) and Thomas Sydserf (Galloway). The same point is also true of eight of the most active twenty-one bishops: these three, plus John Bramhall (Derry), George Hall (Chester), Hugh Lloyd (Llandaff), William Roberts (Bangor) and Brian Walton (Chester). 6 The nine dioceses are: Bath and Wells, Carlisle, Chester, Gloucester, Hereford, Lincoln, London, Norwich and York. SHC, D/D/Vc 41–8; Cheshire RO, EDV 2/8–10; Gloucestershire RO, GDR 249A, 260; Herefordshire RO, HD 5/2/23, 28; Leicestershire RO, 1D 41/12/6; LA, L.C.V–X, XII, XIV; London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), 9537/16, ff. 5v–60r; Norfolk RO, DN/VSC/3/5–8; Borthwick Institute for Archives, V.1662–3 Exh.Bk, V.1667 Exh.Bk, V.1669–70 Exh. Bk (which includes Chester and Carlisle dioceses), ER.V Exh.Bk 1; Nottingham University Library, AN/ CL 166/36, 75, 170/1/1, 38, 172/3/1, 40, 176/1/1, 40. The other eight dioceses, with more fragmentary exhibit books, are: Canterbury, Chichester, Durham, Ely, Lichfield and Coventry, Peterborough, St David’s and Winchester. Canterbury Cathedral Archives (hereafter CCA), Dcb/V/V/56; West Sussex RO, Ep.I/19/11–12, II/10/4, ff. 1–7, II/11/4, 3 4

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record the details only of those clergy holding office at the date on which they were compiled. Any calculation of the number of clergy ordained in the first two years of the Restoration will significantly underestimate the total, and the distortion will be the greater when comparing the activity of individual bishops, as we possess full records for some but merely very partial records for others. Bearing these caveats in mind, what can we say about the pattern of ordinations between the restoration of the king in May 1660 and St Bartholomew’s day 1662, the day on which the Act of Uniformity came into effect and thus the deadline by which all ministers who wished to continue to serve within the Church of England had to receive episcopal ordination? What emerges very clearly is that these were extraordinary times. Not until December 1662 did the practice of ordination return to something like normalcy, by which we mean that the total number of ordinands reverted to near pre-civil war levels, that ordinations were normally performed during the ember seasons,7 that the ratio of deacons to priests had returned to around 2:1, and that the canonical gap of twelve months between ordination as deacon and priest was being widely (though far from universally) observed. There are three conspicuous features of this exceptional period of 1660–2. First, a very large number of men were ordained during this period. Collating all the available sources,8 it is possible to identify 1,681 men who were ordained priest, but we know that total was greater – and possibly significantly greater – than this. Nearly 500 of this total were ordained by bishops, the only evidence of whose activity is provided by exhibit books.9 It is difficult to know how many other ordinands were not recorded in the surviving exhibit books, but it could be a substantial number. Anthony Wood stated that Robert Skinner of Oxford ordained 103 candidates in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey immediately after the king’s return. The most likely date for this service is 5 June 1660, but the names of only four ff. 2–33, 38–66; Durham University Library, DDR/EV/VIS/1/4, ff. 126–42; Cambridge University Library (hereafter CUL), EDR B/2/58, 67; Lichfield RO (hereafter LRO), B/V/1/68, 77; Northamptonshire RO, PDR Visitation Book 9; National Library of Wales (hereafter NLW), SD/VC/2; Hampshire RO, 21M65 B1/43, 46, 49, 51. There is additional data available in exhibit books after 1690, especially for Canterbury, Lichfield and Coventry, Llandaff and Peterborough: CCA, Dcb/V/V/89; LRO, B/V/1/89A; Northamptonshire RO, PDR Visitation Book 15; NLW, LL/VC/1. 7 The ember days, set aside for prayer and fasting, fell after St Lucy (13 Dec.), Ash Wednesday, Whitsunday and Holy Cross (14 Sept.) and according to canon 31 of 1604 ordinations were only to take place on the Sundays immediately following them. 8 That is, all sources included in CCEd. This does not, therefore, include clergy who we know from literary sources were ordained in 1660–2, but for whom the precise details of ordination (e.g., the date or the ordaining bishop) are not certain. 9 Conservatively, those 500 names probably represent between a quarter and a third of those ordained by that group of bishops. 200

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ordinands from that date are to be found in the exhibit books.10 Even 1,681 is an impressive figure: it is approximately five times the number of priests ordained each year during the 1670s. What is less clear is whether we should be surprised by it. The traditional answer is probably not, that in addition to a large number of time-servers who needed to qualify for service in the state Church there was considerable pent-up demand from those who had been unable to obtain episcopal ordination in the previous decade. But our earlier work demonstrating the large numbers being ordained during the interregnum would suggest that the reasons were more complex.11 The second point is that the return to ‘normalcy’ was a gradual and uneven process. This can be seen by looking at the pattern of ordinations between May 1660 and December 1662, as presented in Figure 9.1, which plots the monthly totals of ordinands. The May 1660 figures relate only to the period from 9 May, the day after Charles II was proclaimed in London, but thereafter the graph plots monthly totals for the number of men ordained deacon only, priest only, deacon and priest on the same day or within a week of each other, and all priests, that is the total of those ordained priest only and deacon and priest. Note that this graph includes the ordination of deacons as well as priests, whereas the total of 1,681 given above was simply for priests. Figure 9.1 is best analysed by dividing the period into three: from the restoration of the monarchy until the autumn and early winter of 1660–1, when, in three group consecrations between 28 October and 13 January 1661, the vacancies in all but two of the twenty-seven dioceses of England and Wales were filled; then the period through to the passage of the Act of Uniformity on 19 May 1662; and finally the months from then until the deadline for subscribing according to that Act came into force on St Bartholomew’s day. In the first of these periods there were only nine surviving English and Welsh bishops, assisted by one Scottish and two Irish bishops.12 What might be described as the supply side thus resembled the situation in the 1650s, though the context was different. A very high number of candidates was ordained through the summer months from May to September. How do we account for this? Are we witnessing a flood of applications from those A. Wood, Athenae Oxonieneses, ed. P. Bliss (4 vols, London, 1813–20), IV, col. 873. Skinner’s register does not recommence until 28 July 1660 (ORO, MS Oxf. dioc. papers d. 106, f. 9r). The four are CCEd, ‘George Adney’ (Clergy ID 39194), ‘John Hooker’ (97401), ‘John Ousley’ (100008) and ‘Richard Peare’ (144632). 11 K. Fincham and S. Taylor, ‘Vital Statistics: Episcopal Ordination and Ordinands in England, 1646–60’, E.H.R., 126 (2011), 319–44. 12 Brian Duppa (Salisbury), Accepted Frewen (Lichfield and Coventry), William Juxon (London), Henry King (Chichester), William Piers (Bath and Wells), William Roberts (Bangor), Robert Skinner (Oxford), John Warner (Rochester) and Matthew Wren (Ely); Thomas Sydserf (Galloway); John Bramhall (Derry) and Thomas Fulwar (Ardfert). There were also six other Irish bishops (Clogher, Clonfert, Down, Kilmore, Ossory and Raphoe) still alive and resident in Ireland. 10

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Number

0 e ly st er er er er 1 ry h ril y e ly st er er er er 2 ry h ril y e ly st er er er er 66 Jun Ju ugu mb t ob mb m b 166 rua arc Ap Ma Jun Ju ugu mb t ob mb m b 166 rua arc Ap Ma Jun Ju ugu mb t ob mb m b 1 A pt e Oc ve ece ry eb M A pt e Oc ve ece ry eb M A pt e Oc ve ece ay M No D nua F No D nua F No D Se Se Se Ja Ja

0

50

100

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Figure 9.1: Ordinations 9 May 1660–Dec. 1662

All priests

D&P

Priests

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who had desired episcopal orders since 1646 but had been denied them with the proscription of episcopacy? There may be an element of truth in this suggestion: for the first time in years, bishops were available on the ground in Somerset, Sussex, and Yorkshire, as William Piers, Henry King and John Bramhall began to ordain. But equally we now know that many had been able to find bishops to ordain them in the interregnum, to an estimated total of over 2,700 individuals, so committed episcopalians probably constituted only a small proportion of the 350 or so known to have been ordained between May and October 1660.13 Many more are likely to have been former presbyterians, joined by some of those already serving in the ministry who had never been ordained. While some may have recognized that episcopalianism was the coming force, others, as we shall see, were pressurised into taking episcopal orders. The poor survival of the records of presbyterian ordinations from the 1640s and 1650s makes it hard to come to any firm conclusions, but some suggestive evidence does survive. The very high proportion of candidates who were ordained both deacon and priest on the same day between May and September is striking; many were more mature men who were already serving in the Church and the universities. Among the latter were four fellows of Jesus College, Cambridge, who appear to have travelled to Oxford as a group in order to obtain ordination from Robert Skinner on 20 September 1660, all of whom had been appointed as fellows between 1655 and 1657.14 From the autumn and early winter of 1660 through to the summer of 1662, the pattern changes in some significant ways. With the filling of the vacant sees and the re-establishment of a diocesan episcopacy, there is clear evidence that the bishops were trying to return to the established, canonical ways. The ordinal was reprinted in the summer of 1660 and again in 1661.15 From December 1660, as we can see from Figure 9.1, ordination services were concentrated in the ember seasons, the only exception, for reasons which are unclear, being December 1661. But these were still extraordinary times. By the early spring of 1661, the number of ordinations had declined, but it was still greater than we would expect to see in ‘normal’ times. Moreover, right through to the spring of 1662 the largest single group of ordinands was those being ordained deacon and priest together. From the end of 1660, the number of people being ordained only as deacon began to Fincham and Taylor, ‘Vital Statistics’, pp. 323–4. CCEd, ‘Edmund Hough’ (Clergy ID 130227), ‘Samuel Jewell’ (23062), ‘Alexander Jones’ (23064) and ‘William Shelton’ (23091). At the same time they were incorporated at Oxford University, and on 28 Nov. 1660 were re-admitted to their fellowships by Bishop Wren of Ely (Jesus College, Cambridge, Archives, Col.1.1.). 15 The Form and Manner of Making and Consecrating Bishops, Priests, and Deacons: according to the Appointment of the Church of England (n.d.), Wing C4105, purchased by Thomason on 6 Aug. 1660; The Form and Manner of Making and Consecrating Bishops, Priests, and Deacons (1661), Wing C4106. 13 14

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rise, but it was not until the very end of 1661 that it began consistently to exceed the number being ordained only as priest. This would suggest that, while there was an increasing number of young men, fresh from university, taking deacon’s orders as the first step on a clerical career, the bulk of those being ordained in this period were still a combination of those who had been ministers in the interregnum Church along with some who had been unwilling to serve under the regimes of the 1650s. The context within which both bishops and clergy were working changed on 19 May 1662, when the Act of Uniformity received the royal assent. Although the legislation did not come into effect until 24 August, it was clear from mid-May that all clergy in office would have to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity, most controversially – certainly most problematically for former presbyterians – giving their assent and consent to the revised Book of Common Prayer prescribed under the terms of the Act. The Act also required all clergy who had not been episcopally ordained to take orders by St Bartholomew’s day on pain of deprivation from their offices. In the summer of 1662, therefore, former presbyterians and other ministers who had not received episcopal ordination found themselves pulled in two directions: if they wished to continue to serve their congregations and remain part of the Church of England, they knew that they now had only a matter of weeks to secure ordination at the hands of a bishop, but such conformity required not only acceptance of the Book of Common Prayer and a form of episcopal government which they believed, at the least, fell some way short of the best pattern for the organization and worship of God’s Church, but also the performance of an act which implied renunciation of their previous orders. The summer saw a scramble of candidates seeking ordination. Between the embertide ordination ceremonies in May and September 1662, the number rose sharply in July and again in August, which produced the highest monthly total of ordinands during the Restoration. Some of these were certainly former presbyterians who, facing deprivation, finally decided to conform. For example, all three of the presbyters ordained by the Bury classis in the 1650s who were subsequently re-ordained between 1660 and 1662 received orders in August 1662.16 Over 160 men were ordained deacon and priest on the same day in July and August 1662, more than in Minutes of the Bury Presbyterian Classis 1647–1657, ed. W. A. Shaw (2 vols, Chetham Society 36 and 41, 1896–8), I, 107, 118, 139; CCEd, ‘Samuel Felgate’ (Clergy ID 139819), ‘Thomas Isherwood’ (84898) and ‘James Livesey’ (73295). In contrast, the figures for the Wirksworth and the Fourth London classis are significantly lower: 4 out of 13 for Wirksworth and 2 out of 14 for London. J. C. Cox, ‘Minute Book of the Wirksworth Classis, 1651–1658’, Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 2 (1880), 150–222; H. Smith, ‘Ordinations by the Fourth Classis of London’, E.H.R., 41 (1926), 103–8. These are minimal figures, representing those presbyters known with certainty to have been re-ordained in 1660–2.

16

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any similar period since the late summer and early autumn of 1660, and a number of bishops known to be sympathetic to puritans were particularly active ordainers in the late summer of 1662, notably Robert Sanderson and Edward Reynolds, though we should remember that they were also bishops of the two largest dioceses in the southern province. At the same time, there were countervailing tendencies. In contrast to the summer of 1660 and, indeed, most of the period through to the early summer of 1662, the largest single category of ordinands was not those receiving both orders on the same day, but rather those being ordained only as deacons. There could be various reasons for this. It is possible, for example, that some were Oxbridge fellows, curates, or lecturers, forced now to seek ordination to conform to the provisions of the Act of Uniformity, but who did not need to be in priest’s orders. The evidence suggests, however, that the main cause was an influx of younger men ordained on the titles to their first curacies or livings. Some perhaps had delayed seeking ordination until the Church settlement was in place, deterred hitherto not so much by the re-imposition of strict terms of conformity as by their absence. One cannot claim that, after St Bartholomew’s day, things returned to normal – the number of candidates presenting themselves for ordination still remained high and, within that, the number being ordained deacon and priest on the same day, while the smallest single group, was large. But it is certainly possible to see the restoration of more ‘normal’, more canonical practice: most ordinations now occurred in the ember seasons and twenty of the twenty-eight English and Welsh bishops are known to have conducted a ceremony during at least one of the embertides before the end of 1662.17 The third and, in many respects, most remarkable feature of these ‘extraordinary times’ is who was doing the ordaining. One might expect that the massive task of re-stocking the Church would have called on the collective effort of the whole episcopal bench; at first glance, indeed, all but five of the bishops were involved in the enterprise. Apart from Henry Ferne of Chester, who died a month after his consecration, only Seth Ward, bishop of Exeter from 20 July 1662, Nicholas Monk, bishop of Hereford, John Warner, bishop of Rochester, and William Juxon, bishop of London then archbishop of Canterbury, did not ordain anyone before St Bartholomew’s day, and it was uncommon for archbishops of Canterbury to ordain in person.18 In fact, the work was divided very unevenly between the bishops (Figure 9.2). The known exceptions are William Juxon of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon of London, Richard Sterne of Carlisle, John Warner of Rochester, John Gauden of Worcester, who died on 20 Sept. 1662, and his successor John Earles (consecrated on 30 Nov.). This may also be true for William Roberts of Bangor and Samuel Rutter of Sodor and Man, but evidence of their ordinations for 1662 survives only in exhibit books. 18 Calamy stated that Robert Dodd was ordained by Juxon in the summer of 1660, but there is no independent evidence to support this. A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), p. 166; CCEd, ‘Robert Dodd’ (Clergy ID 155057). In 1662 Juxon did 17

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Figure 9.2: Ordination of priests 9 May 1660–24 Aug. 1662

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During the summer months of 1660, before the filling of the vacant sees, the heavy burden of ordaining was carried by just five of the surviving bishops, notably Skinner, King and Fulwar, supported by Piers and Bramhall. Through the period as a whole only four – Sanderson of Lincoln, Skinner of Oxford, Sydserf of Galloway and King of Chichester – were responsible for 50 per cent of all ordinations; these four plus Reynolds of Norwich, Fulwar of Ardfert, Piers of Bath and Wells, and John Gauden of Exeter (and then Worcester) accounted for 75 per cent. Some aspects of this list might be expected: in Exeter access to bishops appears to have been particularly difficult during the 1650s and, like Lincoln and Norwich, it was a sprawling diocese. Skinner had been one of the leading ordainers during the interregnum – he had managed to retain the living at Launton near Oxford where (on his own account, though it seems plausible) he had ordained between 400 and 500 men drawn from much of the country west and south of Oxford.19 He continued to be exceptionally active in the summer of 1660, holding ceremonies in Christ Church cathedral and New College chapel in Oxford and in the royal peculiar of Westminster Abbey in London, but, after the end of the year, he appears to have reverted to behaving more as a traditional diocesan bishop, in other words ordaining only those with titles to serve in his diocese. King and Piers were two other survivors from the Caroline bench who played a significant role in responding to the demand for episcopal orders in the summer months of 1660. They, too, took a traditional, diocesan view of their function, certainly after the autumn of 1660. More unexpected is the presence in this list of one Scottish and two Irish bishops – Sydserf, Fulwar and Bramhall. Together these bishops performed 17 per cent of known ordinations, a figure which would be much higher if we possessed their registers. Fulwar was active in the summer of 1660, busily continuing the work that he had done throughout the interregnum, when he had ordained more clergymen than any other bishop, while Bramhall, shortly to become archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland, held ordination ceremonies in his native county of Yorkshire in the autumn of 1660, at a time when all five northern sees were vacant and where possibly no ordinations had been held since the death of Henry Tilson, bishop of Elphin, in 1655.20 The most interesting figure, however, is Thomas Sydserf, bishop of Galloway, whom we know to have been responsible for the ordination of 159 priests and who was probably more active in the period 1660–2 than any other bishop. The role of this group may appear limited when compared to the 50 per cent of ordinations performed by Irish bishops between 1646 and 1660,21 but it is still remarkable, illustrating clearly the issue letters dimissory and ‘licences’ for ordination. See Lambeth Palace Library (hereafter LPL), VG 1/1, ff.110r, 115v–32r. 19 Fincham and Taylor, ‘Vital Statistics’, pp. 332–3. 20 Ibid., 327–8. 21 Ibid., 326–7. 207

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continuities between the interregnum and the early years of the Restoration and the extent to which these were disordered times. It is possible that the activity of Bramhall and even Fulwar was condoned by the emerging authorities in the Church, but that of Sydserf certainly was not. Whereas Bramhall and Fulwar ceased ordaining and returned to Ireland as a full diocesan episcopate was restored in England, that was precisely the time at which Sydserf began work, continuing through to April 1662, when he finally appears to have returned to Scotland to become bishop of Orkney. Indeed Sydserf stands apart from the rest of the episcopate, as the only bishop from the Church of Scotland and the only bishop notorious as a slack ordainer. He had been promoted to the episcopate in the 1630s, first to Brechin and then to Galloway, and with several others fled south of the border in 1639. Over the next twenty years all we have are occasional glimpses of his whereabouts: in Leiden in 1644, ordaining in England in 1646 and at the court in exile in Paris in 1650, back in Edinburgh by 1657, and then returning once more to England in 1659 to reside in Westminster.22 From December 1660 to April 1662 Sydserf was regularly ordaining, and quickly became known to be an undemanding examiner of ordinands. Among those who were admitted by him was the puritan George Sanderson who was recommended to go to Sydserf by Reynolds of Norwich, and, as Sanderson himself put it, ‘had orders from him, without rigid (and indeed feared) impositions’; Robert Pierson, who acquired orders to retain his living at Spalding, but remained a nonconformist and offered a disputation with a neighbouring minister to prove ‘the legality and validity of Presbyterian ordination’; and Thomas Palmer, an independent who was arrested in November 1662 for illicit preaching.23 On the other hand there were many of Sydserf’s ordinands who took the Act of Uniformity and served out their careers in the Church, the most conspicuous example being John Tillotson, the future archbishop of Canterbury.24 The hard-line presbyterian Zachary Crofton has left a splendid if coloured condemnation of Sydserf at work: Re-ordination … being done in a private chamber, or [sic] any (nay almost every) day of the week (if not month and year) by him who ordains out of poverty for profit, making a trade of making ministers, which looks very much like simony … passing deacon and priest in one day, contrary to the canons of our church,

Bodl., MS Rawlinson D 318, pp. 21–3, 238–40; Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. 443; The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (6 vols, Oxford, 1955), III, 8–9; Folger Shakespeare Library, DC (hereafter FSL), V. b. 287; see also The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed. D. Laing (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1842), III, 390, 406. 23 CCEd, ‘George Sanderson’ (Clergy ID 147617), ‘Robert Pierson’ (100975); Bodl., Rawlinson Letters 52, f. 303r; CUL, MS Dd 9.43, pp. 9–20; Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. 380; T.N.A., P.R.O., SP 29/62, f. 191. 24 CCEd, ‘John Tillotson’ (Clergy ID 128164); see also ‘Jonathan Clapham’ (123846), ‘James Hargreaves’ (117825) and ‘Tobias Henshaw’ (63857). 22

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and that … by a person enjoying the title of bishop … having been degraded, if not excommunicated and exil’d by both church and kingdom, of which he was a subject, and he out of his own diocess, so as that his authority is disputable, and by ancient canons his ordination null … and that which is worst of all publishing under his hand and seal notorious falshood, viz that the persons ordained have subscribed to the articles directed; which … they did not do: and that he had ordained them according to the form and order appointed in the Church of England, when scarcely anything thereof is observed.25

Perhaps it is true that Sydserf was ordaining to make money; certainly, his activity is comparable to the Irish bishops such as Fulwar who had ordained so many in the 1650s, and reveals the continuities between 1660–­2 and the previous decade.26 Given his notoriety, and the fact that he appears to have been ordaining in Westminster, we may wonder why he was tolerated by the senior English bishops.27 They may have had no choice. Sydserf had served at the royal court in 1650; later he enjoyed powerful lay backing from the earl of Middleton, who presumably secured him promotion to the bishopric of Orkney in November 1661, and in April 1662 he returned to Scotland. But we are left in little doubt about how he was regarded by the English hierarchy: despite being the only Scottish bishop to survive from before the Civil War, he was pointedly excluded by Sheldon from the consecration of four new Scottish bishops at Westminster Abbey on 15 December 1661.28 Sydserf’s flouting of all notions of diocesan authority was astonishing and underlines just how far 1660–2 remained extraordinary times. Other bishops were less provocative, but their activity still revealed characteristics which were unconventional and uncanonical. Samuel Rutter, bishop of Sodor and Man and a prebendary of Lichfield, held ordination ceremonies in Lichfield cathedral in the summer of 1661, while the see remained

Z. Crofton, A Serious Review of Presbyters Re-ordination by Bishops (1661), pp. 30–1. See a rare surviving letter of orders, or certificate, issued by Sydserf at the ordination of Francis Ashenhurst on 22 November 1661, which states that Ashenhurst subscribed to the 39 articles. That Sydserf was conferring orders on a large scale is clear from internal evidence: the standard phraseology is written in one hand, with gaps left for the name of the ordinand and the date of the ceremony, which are here filled in by a second hand. Derbyshire RO, D37 M/RF 9; CCEd, ‘Francis Ashenhurst’ (Clergy ID 39338). 26 Fincham and Taylor, ‘Vital Statistics’, pp. 326–9. 27 There is some direct evidence that Sydserf was based at Westminster: see FSL, V. b. 287; Derbyshire RO, D37 M/RF 9. There is also the circumstantial evidence that he ordained men on the same day that they were instituted to livings by Sheldon in London. See CCEd, ‘Thomas Martin’ (Clergy ID 155028) and ‘Thomas Witham’ (155029). 28 J. Buckroyd, Church and State in Scotland 1660–1681 (Edinburgh, 1980); R. Wodrow, The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, from the Restauration to the Revolution (Edinburgh, 1731), pp. 102–3. Further evidence of Sydserf’s court connections is the fact that in July 1660 he secured a presentation from the crown to Overton rectory in Hampshire: T.N.A., P.R.O. S0 3/13. 25

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vacant.29 Robert Sanderson was consecrated to the see of Lincoln on 28 October 1660 and was among the first batch of Charles II’s new bishops. His conciliatory approach to ‘moderate’ presbyterians during the interregnum, and his willingness to adapt the Prayer Book, to the consternation of Henry Hammond, suggests that Sanderson’s appointment was intended to reassure the presbyterians that there would be no reversion to the ecclesiastical policies of Charles I’s reign. There is also a certain amount of circumstantial evidence that he may indeed have been quietly encouraging presbyterians to accept re-ordination – most of his ordinands, even as late as the summer of 1662, received deacon’s and priest’s orders within a few days of each other, and it is notable that, in contrast to Skinner, his activity increased markedly following the passage of the Act of Uniformity. Indeed, the former baptist and quaker Edmund Hickeringill was persuaded by Sanderson to receive orders from him in May 1662. Hickeringill was later to dub him the ‘Presbyterian bishop’.30 The large number of ordinations that Sanderson performed cannot be accounted for only by the enormous size of his diocese. A minimum of 20 per cent of the candidates who presented themselves to him had titles from outside the diocese of Lincoln, including a significant number from London and Canterbury, and smaller groups from seven other dioceses, including Chester and York in the north, as well as over two dozen fellows from Oxford and Cambridge. While a few came with recommendations from other bishops, most were probably ordained without letters dimissory, the use of which appears to have been rare in this period.31 Given the scale of the task faced by the episcopate in re-stocking the Church and, after May 1662, in ensuring the conformity of the clergy in office, it is surprising that so many bishops played so little or no part in the work of ordination. Among the bishops who had survived the Civil War, John Warner conferred no orders after the Restoration, continuing his practice of the 1650s, notwithstanding the traditional role of the bishop of Rochester as suffragan to Canterbury and principal ordainer for the county of Kent. The behaviour of Brian Duppa is, if anything, even more puzzling,

LRO, D/30/1/2/62, ff. 5v–14r and passim; CCEd, ‘Samuel Rutter’ (Clergy ID 31549). See, for example, ‘John Kelsall’ (51879), ‘James Maddock’ (53665) and ‘Thomas Tooth’ (59801). There was no bishop of Lichfield and Coventry between the translation of Accepted Frewen to York in Sept. 1660 and the consecration of John Hacket as the new bishop in Dec. 1661. 30 Bosher, Restoration Settlement, pp. 16–23; R. Sanderson XXXIII Sermons (1657), sig. (F); E. Hickeringill, The Ceremony-Monger, His Character (1689), p. 2; CCEd, ‘Edmund Hickeringill’ (Clergy ID 97230). See also J. Champion and L. McNulty, ‘Making Orthodoxy in late Restoration England: the Trials of Edmund Hickeringill 1662–1710’, in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. M. Braddick and J. Walter (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 227–48, 302–5. 31 For recommendations from Bishops Cosin and Ward, see LA, L.TD 1662, nos 457, 464; for a rare letter dimissory (from Archbishop Frewen of York), see no. 465. 29

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as he had admitted numerous men to the ministry in the later 1650s, but at the Restoration he effectively ceased to offer orders, even after his promotion in August 1660 to the major – and large – see of Winchester.32 Age may explain the behaviour of some, but it cannot explain the relative inactivity of a large group, including such major figures in the Restoration Church as George Morley of Worcester and then Winchester, Richard Sterne of Carlisle, Benjamin Laney of Peterborough, Henry Henchman of Salisbury, and John Cosin of Durham.33 How do we account for this? There is strong evidence that the answer to the puzzle lies in one conception of the episcopal office that had developed in some parts of the Church of England before the Civil War. Some bishops came to see ordination as a key component of their office, but one to be exercised with such discretion and discrimination that it was better not to admit unworthy candidates than run the risk of lowering ministerial standards. Accepted Frewen was translated to the archbishopric of York in September 1660 and chose not to confer any orders until 17 August 1662, a week before St Bartholomew’s day, when he ordained forty-seven men into the ministry. Similarly Gilbert Sheldon was consecrated bishop at the end of October 1660 and had plenty of opportunity to hold ordination ceremonies in 1660–2, but admitted no more than two ordinands until 21 August 1662, when he laid hands on thirty-five men.34 This ordination service was a very public matter. It was trailed in Mercurius Publicus a week before the ordination, and then was the first item of news in the next edition, which read as follows: London, August 21. This day the right reverend father in God Gilbert lord bishop of London (according to the former notice affixed upon the door of St. Pauls cathedral, whereof also we heretofore told you) ordained many priests and deacons, diverse whereof had before been under the hands of the Presbytery onely, but now (according to the … re-established laws of this kingdom as well as the practice of the primitive catholick church of Christ) received episcopal ordination from the hands of this prudent and most worthy prelate, wherein their pious mother the Church of England, freely opened her armes to receive such as the fraud and iniquity of the late times had seduced.

In fact the ordinands were a mix of newly-minted graduates as well as former presbyterians belatedly coming on board; but for Sheldon’s purposes, it was presumably important for him publicly to be seen to give a last-minute Duppa only ordained seven priests between May 1660 and his death in March 1662. See Figure 9.2, which provides a comparative table of the ordination of priests by all the bishops. 34 LMA, 10144A, ff. 1r–3v. The evidence for the two ordinands is from exhibit books in other dioceses, and in the second case it may be a scribal error. See CCEd, ‘Clement Heigham’ (Clergy ID 125559), ‘John Holmes’ (155124). 32 33

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opportunity for potential conformists, and the emphasis on ex-presbyterians coming forward suited his purposes of weakening the unity of nonconformist ministers.35 But once St Bartholomew had passed, in his few remaining months as bishop of London Sheldon resumed his custom of not conferring orders.36 This might well seem extraordinary, since London was traditionally one of the three major ordaining centres, with Oxford and Cambridge (served by Ely and Peterborough). But in fact Sheldon’s predecessor William Juxon had never celebrated ordination as bishop in twenty-seven years as bishop of London, nor in turn had William Laud, Juxon’s predecessor there. It appears that some churchmen, mostly Laudians, were reluctant to ordain, and preferred to admit only those of great merit and potential – a tendency (like much else) we can trace back, in the English protestant tradition at least, to Lancelot Andrewes as bishop of three sees between 1605 and his death in 1626. In Andrewes’s view, some Oxbridge colleges ‘have much to answer for to God, for voiding out continually … unworthy ministers and so hazard mens soules’. Thus in twenty-one years he ordained just twenty-one men, among them distinguished divines such Joseph Mede and Christopher Wren, and the future bishop James Wedderburn. This practice became more prevalent in the 1630s, under royal instructions not to ordain ‘unworthy persons’. As Archbishop Neile of York wrote to Charles I in 1637: I humbly informe your gratious maiestie, that I am so carefull nothing may be amisse in my ordinations, that (in a sort) I abstaine from them. In truth, there hath not these three yeares last past, any man of worth come to me: and upon unworthy men, I will not lay my hands.37

For the period 1660–2, this attitude may account for the very limited number of ordinands admitted by Wren of Ely (despite his proximity to Cambridge), Henchman of Salisbury, Sterne of Carlisle and Laney of Peterborough, all of whom can be placed within a post-Laudian style of churchmanship. This scruple or, if we prefer, high-mindedness of course simply passed the problem on to other bishops, who faced the need to staff the parishes Mercurius Publicus, 33 (14–21 Aug. 1662), p. 554, 34 (21–28 Aug. 1662), pp. 563–4. For probable ex-presbyterians among Sheldon’s ordinands, see CCEd, ‘John Beard’ (Clergy ID 106619), ‘Edward Coppin’ (80697), ‘Francis Hill’ (154729) and ‘Isaac Smithies’ (154719); for recent graduates, ‘Walter Bromesgrove’ (ID 5011), ‘James Crooke’ (154838), ‘John Heigham’ (125560) and ‘Erasmus Warren’ (6755). 36 Sheldon’s successor, Henchman, in contrast, ordained significant numbers most embertides after his translation to London, as did Frewen until his death in 1664, but in the case of the latter the number of ordinands was never large given the size of his diocese. 37 BL, Additional MS 11055, f. 9r; CCEd, ‘Joseph Mede’ (Clergy ID 30942), ‘Christopher Wren’ (16255), ‘James Wedderburn’ (33184); K. Fincham (ed.), ‘Annual Accounts of the Church of England, 1632–1639’ in From the Reformation to the Permissive Society, ed. M. Barber, S. Taylor and G. Sewell (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 79, 122. 35

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of England and Wales. In the 1630s several bishops from dioceses such as Gloucester, Carlisle and Bangor had reported that they had no choice but to ordain ‘meane scholars’ so that cures could continue to be served.38 At the Restoration, the disinclination of some bishops to ordain is particularly puzzling, both because of the scale of the problem and because of the sympathies of the bishops to whom the work of ordination – including the ordination of clergy to serve in the dioceses of their more scrupulous colleagues – fell. Sanderson, as we have seen, was well known to be sympathetic to moderate presbyterians. So too were Reynolds of Norwich and Gauden of Exeter, who both worked hard to persuade presbyterians to remain within the ministry and, as we shall see, were prepared to compromise on the terms of subscription to accomplish this.39 Sydserf’s disregard for Church order was another matter, and perhaps the English hierarchy had no control over him. Nonetheless, the reluctance of a significant group to ordain meant that many candidates had little option but to resort to men like Sanderson and Sydserf. It also meant that entry into the ministry in the restored Church was largely in the hands of a group of bishops whose theology, in some cases ‘latitude’, and, in the case of Sydserf at least, laxity marked them out as men of a very different stamp from the leading figures in the hierarchy. The fact that these bishops were allowed such influence over the composition of the ministry is even more perplexing in the light of the rigorous policy pursued by the episcopate with regard to re-ordination, to which we shall now turn. II It is well known that official pressure for presbyterian ministers to be re-ordained in order to remain within the episcopal Church was very divisive and bitterly resented by some.40 What is less familiar is the vital link between re-ordination and institution. From 1660 almost all bishops insisted that the pre-requisite for instituting or admitting a clergyman into a living was the possession of episcopal orders. At a time of rapid change in incumbencies, here was a formidable weapon to force many presbyterians into conformity, and to divide and weaken the presbyterian interest as mutual recriminations broke out between those who chose to take episcopal orders and those who refused. This insistence on re-ordination prior to institution, moreover, seems to have been orchestrated by senior bishops from the earliest days of the Restoration. Ibid., pp. 100, 108, 119, 135. See below, pp. 217, 219–20. 40 Bosher, Restoration Settlement, pp. 174, 186, 189–90, 207; A. Whiteman, ‘The Restoration of the Church of England’ and G. F. Nuttall, ‘The First Nonconformists’ in From Uniformity to Unity, ed. Nuttall and Chadwick, pp. 72–5, 158, 170–82; Green, Re-Establishment, p. 9; Till, ‘Worcester House’, pp. 210–13, 217. 38 39

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On 4 May 1660, three weeks before Charles II’s return to England, George Morley reported to his patron Edward Hyde that his talks with leading London presbyterians had gone well. They seemed willing to accept episcopal government and a public liturgy, but he foresaw the ‘main difficulty’ to be ordination.41 Episcopalians could not accept presbyterian orders as lawful, since only bishops could confer orders in a properly ordered Church, such as had obtained in England until it had been wantonly destroyed in the 1640s, and hardliners amongst them viewed presbyters as no better than laymen meddling in sacred offices. In turn, presbyterians would not accept their orders to be unlawful, let alone ‘mere nullities’, and claimed scriptural authority to ordain presbyters to the ministry. Since they believed bishops and presbyters differed in grade not order, it followed that presbyterian orders were valid. This was a battleground fought over time and again in the 1640s and 1650s; the novelty now was the prospect that bishops would return to power and enforce their views.42 Morley’s solution was re-ordination, which was inflammatory to many presbyterians. As John Howe, Cromwell’s former chaplain, observed, the notion of re-ordination was ‘an absurdity, since nothing can have two beginnings. I am sure I am a minister of Christ … but I cannot begin again to be a minister’. Others objected that it amounted to a tacit condemnation of their ministry in the 1640s and 1650s, and had no historical precedent.43 The struggle over re-ordination had begun. In July 1660, in early negotiations with Charles II, presbyterian spokesmen requested that they would not have to renounce their orders. At the same time, the Convention Parliament began debating the bill for ‘Confirming and Restoreing of Ministers’ in the parishes. Some episcopalian M.P.s demanded ‘that all ministers ordained by presbyters during our late troubles should be put from their livings and ministry, unlesse they were reordained by bishops within one moneth’, but in the event, this proposal was defeated and the Act gave security of possession to all ministers, howsoever ordained, the only exception being if they occupied a sequestered living and the ejected incumbent was still alive. In and outside parliament, William Prynne complained that bishops were insisting on re-ordination before they would admit former presbyteBodl., Clarendon MS 72, f. 199, partially printed in State Papers collected by Edward Earl of Clarendon (3 vols, 1767), III, 738. 42 There is a large literature on this debate. See A. J. Mason, The Church of England and Episcopacy (Cambridge, 1914), pp. 118–45, 159–237; N. Sykes, Old Priest and New Presbyter (Cambridge, 1956), ch. 4; J. W. Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism 1643– 1660 (Manchester, 1969), ch. 5; Spurr, Restoration Church, pp. 138–44. For contrasting contemporary views, see Queen’s College Oxford, MS 280, ff. 59r–61v; G. F[irmin], Presbyterial Ordination Vindicated (1660), pp. 1–29. 43 Bodl., Clarendon MS 72, f. 199v; H. Rogers, The Life and Character of John Howe (1836), pp. 151–2; The Life of the Rev. Philip Henry, ed. M. Henry (1825), p. 97; Bodl., Tanner MS 49, f. 143r; Crofton, Serious Review, pp. 5–10; R. A[lleine], Cheirothesia tou Presbyteriou, or a Letter to a Friend (1661), p. 8. 41

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rians into livings or fellowships.44 As we shall see, Prynne’s claim seems to be accurate. The anxiety among presbyterians at this episcopal tactic helped to inform the discussions at Worcester House on 22 October, as the king tried to thrash out an agreement over ceremonies and Church government. In preparation for the meeting, presbyterians proposed that none be required to renounce his presbyterian orders or be denied institution for want of episcopal ordination. At the conference itself, there was a lengthy and acrimonious exchange about re-ordination between episcopalians and presbyterians. As George Morley wrote the following day: there remaines one thing, and but one, which wee are not as yet agreed on, namely whether such as are ordained by Presbyters only, should bee instituted by the bishops, who said they could not with a safe conscience comitt the cure of souls and administration of the sacraments to those, whom they believed to bee noe priests.45

Further negotiations failed to break the deadlock. Shortly afterwards the results of the conference were published as His Maiesties Declaration … concerning Ecclesiastical Affairs, which contained substantial concessions to opponents of the old order and prayer book, pending a final settlement of the Church. These included the instruction that at ordination ceremonies, as with Church censures, bishops were to act with the advice and assistance of the dean and chapter and an equal number of the ‘most learned pious and discreet presbyters of the same diocess’; those receiving ordination and institution were excused taking the oaths of canonical obedience to the bishop and subscribing to canon 36 of 1604, which required a clergyman to accept the royal supremacy, the prayer book, the ordinal and the 39 articles. Nothing, however, was said about re-ordination and institution.46 Morley had evidently failed to persuade presbyterians to embrace re-ordination, but, more significantly, the declaration did not tie the hands of the bishops, who remained free to deny institution to those without episcopal orders. In this respect, at least, the silence of the declaration was a clear victory for the episcopalian cause. It is no surprise that London presbyterians, when thanking the king for ‘his gracious concessions’ in the declaration, still pleaded that re-ordination ‘may not be imposed’.47 They were to be disap-

BL, Harleian MS 3784, f. 2r; Bodl., Ms Dep f 9, f. 136r; W. Prynne, The Unbishoping of Timothy and Titus (2nd edn, 1660), pp. 27–8, 33. 45 M. Sylvester, Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), I. ii. 265, 276, 277; Till, ‘Worcester House’, pp. 209–10; A[lleine], Letter to a Friend, p. 7; National Library of Scotland (hereafter NLS), Wodrow MS Folio XXXII, item 9, f. 15v. We are most grateful to Jacqueline Rose for supplying us with a transcription of this document. 46 His Maiesties Declaration to all his Loving Subjects of his Kingdom of England, and Dominion of Wales, concerning Ecclesiastical Affairs (1660), pp. 5–6, 8–9. 47 Sylvester, Reliquiae, I. ii. 284–5. 44

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pointed, and a sign of the increasingly hostile climate was the decision by Cambridge University, in April 1661, to rescind its preaching licences to all who were not yet episcopally ordained; at the same time, according to Baxter, many bishops excluded those without episcopal orders from voting for the proctors to represent them in the lower house of Convocation. In December 1661 Bishop Sheldon supervised the consecration of four Scottish bishops at Westminster Abbey, and insisted that the two presbyterians amongst them first receive episcopal ordination.48 Presbyterian concerns about pressure for re-ordination were wellfounded. Since late June 1660 the nine surviving bishops in England and Wales had resumed instituting clergy to livings, as from July had the dean and chapter of Canterbury for the thirteen vacant livings in the southern province of Canterbury. From surviving evidence, incomplete as it is on dates of ordination, it appears that these ordinaries consistently demanded re-ordination from all who did not possess episcopal orders before admitting them to livings. The same requirement was observed by most of the bishops newly consecrated in 1660–1. Facing an entrenched presbyterian ministry in the city parishes, Sheldon of London declared in March 1661 that he was resolved ‘not to give institution and induction to any except of episcopall ordination’.49 If we examine the institutions for 1660–2 in a representative sample of fourteen of the twenty-seven dioceses in England and Wales, it is clear that only a handful of presbyterians slipped through the net.50 Sanderson of Lincoln, for example, admitted the presbyterian Samuel Rolles to a Buckinghamshire living in 1661, but this seems to be the only occasion he waived the need to have episcopal orders. Nevertheless, it became known. In March 1662 Sanderson refused to admit Sampson Wilson to a living since he lacked episcopal orders and told Wilson that ‘himselfe had beene blamed for passing one [like Wilson] … and promised not to doe the like againe’. It is very likely that it was Sheldon who had checked Sanderson: although a friend and admirer, Sheldon would have remembered his conciliatory attitude to presbyterians in the early 1650s.51 Elsewhere, King at Chichester, Piers at Bath and Wells, Sterne at Carlisle, C. H. Cooper, Annals of Cambridge (5 vols, Cambridge, 1842–1908), III, 493; Sylvester, Reliquiae, I. ii. 333; Wodrow, Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, pp. 102–3; J. Buckroyd, The Life of James Sharp, Archbishop of St Andrews 1618–1679 (Edinburgh, 1987), p. 73. 49 T.N.A., P.R.O. SP 29/32, f. 167. The same letter discloses that Sheldon was pressurising William Taylor, settled in a city living, to be re-ordained. For Taylor, see Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. 479. 50 Namely Bath and Wells, Carlisle, Chester, Chichester, Ely, Exeter, Lincoln, London, Norwich, Oxford, Peterborough, Salisbury, Worcester and York. 51 CCEd, ‘Samuel Rolles’ (Clergy ID 102153); Bodl., Tanner MS 49, f. 143r; Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. 537; K. Fincham and S. Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity 1646–60’ in Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum, ed. J. McElligott and D. L. Smith (Manchester, 2010), p. 23. 48

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Walton at Chester, Wren at Ely, Sheldon at London, Skinner at Oxford, Laney at Peterborough, Duppa and Henchman at Salisbury, Morley at Worcester and Frewen at York seem almost invariably to have demanded episcopal orders as the price for institution.52 A notable exception, however, was Gauden of Exeter. John Gauden was a self-proclaimed and self-fashioned moderate, who in the 1640s had been chaplain to the parliamentary leader the second earl of Warwick, and in the 1650s, without much success, had pursued unity among conformist episcopalians and presbyterians. His elevation to the episcopate in 1660 came in the teeth of opposition from Sheldon. Gauden instituted at least six presbyters to livings in Exeter diocese in 1661–2. Among them was Thomas Aishford, admitted to Axminster vicarage in February 1661, who delayed taking episcopal orders until August 1662, when he did so in order to retain his living under the Act of Uniformity.53 It is possible that Edward Reynolds of Norwich practised the same latitude. Reynolds was an ex-­presbyterian, who accepted the bishopric of Norwich on the understanding that ‘he took a bishop and Presbyter to differ not ordine but gradu, and the bishop was but the chief Presbyter’. He instituted two ministers to livings months before conferring orders on them; he also admitted six others to incumbencies in 1661, all of whom were ejected or resigned in 1662–4 and for whom there is no evidence that they were episcopally ordained in a diocese with full ordination records.54 The widespread requirement for episcopal ordination before institution affected vast numbers of clergy seeking institution in 1660–1.55 In every diocese the volume of institutions was far higher than in more settled times. For, in addition to the normal filling of vacancies as clergy died or moved on, now many incumbents were looking for re-institution to corroborate or strengthen their title in face of challenges from rival claimants or aggrieved patrons. Another 695 or so clergy, ejected under the Act of September 1660 for ‘Confirming and Restoreing of Ministers’, were in search of another living. Both groups contained many presbyterians and independents, for whom re-ordination presented a barrier to re-employment in the Church. See the Appendix, ‘Ordination and institution 1660–2’. R. A. Beddard, ‘A Reward for Services Rendered: Charles II and the Restoration Bishopric of Worcester, 1660–1663’, Midland History, 29 (2004), pp. 67–72; CCEd, ‘Thomas Aishford’ (Clergy ID 153016); also ‘Joshua Bowden’ (49465), ‘Edward Nosworthy’ (153078), ‘Nathaniel Rumbelow’ (153057), ‘Nicholas Stephens’ (102412) and ‘Tobias Tredwell’ (153024). See also the Appendix. 54 Sylvester, Reliquiae, I. ii. 283; CCEd, ‘Alexander Anderson’ (Clergy ID 121300) and ‘Roger Skipper’ (127255); and see the Appendix. 55 The records in CCEd demonstrate time and again in 1660–2 that clergy were instituted immediately following their ordination, in some cases on the same day. See, for example, CCEd, ‘William Avery’ (Clergy ID 61112), ‘Samuel Fleet’ (68999), ‘George Inman’ (72445), ‘John Kirshaw’ (73313), ‘Nathaniel Ludlam’ (99434), ‘Edward Penton’ (100890), ‘John Vine’ (71115), ‘John Whiting’ (104970) and ‘William Wood’ (105197). 52 53

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Some chose to cross it. John Dowell, ordained a presbyter in 1649, was re-ordained by Bishop King on 22 September 1660 and instituted to Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire four days later. George Ringe had been ordained a presbyter to Netheravon in 1653, received episcopal orders from Henchman of Salisbury in 1661 and was effectively re-instituted to Netheravon early in January 1662. John Flower was an intruder who lost his living of Staunton in Nottinghamshire under the Act of 1660, and was instituted to an Essex living in January 1662 having been re-ordained by Sydserf of Galloway.56 Many others, however, ejected in 1660, did not rejoin the ministry and, as we shall see, opposition to re-ordination played a part in such decisions. So widespread was the requirement for re-ordination, and so rapid was its imposition from June 1660, that it seems plausible to describe it as a national policy devised and orchestrated by senior bishops. In his talks with London presbyterians in May 1660, George Morley had confronted the problem of non-episcopal orders among the English clergy. He had two solutions: either to ignore the matter, and treat all orders as lawful, or else to require hypothetical or conditional re-ordination, which would acknowledge the illegality of other orders in an episcopalian Church and an uncertainty about their validity, ‘which if it were good the after ordination is a nullity; but if it were not good, then the super-ordination is necessary’. Morley’s preference was for the second expedient, though he communicated both to Sheldon and to Bishop Duppa of Salisbury who, he reported, ‘doe approve of them’. Within a matter of weeks, Sheldon and Morley emerged as key figures in the restored hierarchy: Sheldon was appointed dean of the chapel royal, and was usually resident at Whitehall, while Morley, already a royal chaplain, received the deanery of Christ Church, Oxford. Later in the year, both were elevated to bishoprics, and both attended the Worcester House conference. Given their importance, it seems likely that the pair ensured that re-ordination was observed across the country. Morley himself tried to get conditional re-ordination accepted by presbyterians in the immediate aftermath of the Worcester House talks, but to no avail.57 In view of Charles II’s attempts to find a comprehensive Church settlement, it may seem surprising that he tolerated so stringent a requirement as re-ordination, despite the protests about it that he received from presbyterians. The probable explanation is that the policy enjoyed the wholehearted backing of his chief minister, and Morley’s long-standing patron, the earl of Clarendon. Notwithstanding his sympathy for the king’s more tolerant policy, here, as on some other CCEd, ‘John Dowell’ (Clergy ID 87839), ‘George Ringe’ (22578), ‘John Flower’ (154620). Among many other examples, see ‘William Aspin’ (85724), ‘Joseph Birch’ (86310), ‘Robert Daliell’ (124650), ‘Thomas Lewis’ (22402) and ‘Josiah Whiston’ (104937). 57 Bodl., Clarendon MS 72, f. 199v; NLS, Wodrow MS Folio XXXII, item 9, f. 15v, from which the first quotation is taken; J. Humfrey, A Second Discourse about Re-Ordination (1662), p. 25. For Sheldon at Whitehall, see LMA, 9531/16, ff. 10r–31v. 56

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issues, Clarendon was prepared to support the bishops’ hard-line attitudes. According to Morley, Clarendon remarked at the Worcester House meeting that, quite apart from the question of the validity of their orders, presbyterians were not legally ordained and ‘could have noe right to their tythes’, a radical view which, if implemented, would have undercut the parochial maintenance of presbyterians and driven many from their posts.58 Did the concessions on subscription granted in the Worcester House declaration make re-ordination before institution more palatable to some presbyterians? In fact, for most dioceses, there is little sign that they were used, which may mean that either bishops did not offer them or ministers did not request exemption. Subscription books in Bath and Wells, Bristol, Ely, Lincoln and Worcester dioceses, for example, show full subscription exacted to canon 36, which included the acceptance of the prayer book and government by bishops.59 Archbishop Juxon permitted three to subscribe according to the royal declaration and Bishop Sheldon appears to have allowed two clergy to drop the oath of canonical obedience, but these seem highly unusual.60 The exceptions, once again, are Bishops Gauden and Reynolds, who embraced the spirit and letter of the king’s declaration. At his first ordination service at Exeter cathedral, on 13 January 1661, Gauden delivered a Latin oration which he then had published, accompanied by an English translation. In it he affirmed that he was ordaining ‘after the ancient and Catholic manner of this and all churches of Christ, by the hands, prayers and benediction of a bishop, assisted with the company and counsel of his venerable presbyters’. He allowed seven of the forty-one ordinands to avoid subscribing to canon 36, and a further two subscribed according to the royal declaration.61 Rather similarly, at Norwich under Reynolds, a number of ordinands and clergy on institution subscribed ‘according to the king’s

NLS, Wodrow MS Folio XXXII, item 9, f. 15v. We hope to explore the political settlement of the Church in 1660–2 and Clarendon’s role within it in greater detail elsewhere. 59 SHC, D/D/BS/1; Bristol RO, EP/A/10/1/1, p. 17ff; LPL, VX 1A/2e, ff. 65r–86v; LA, Sub II (α); Worcestershire RO, 716.051 (BA 2697), parcel 1, ff. 1r, 2v; 732.1 (BA 2736), ff. 1r–17v, 122v–31v. Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. 148, states that Francis Cross was ordained by Gilbert Ironside of Bristol in August 1662 ‘without subscription’. In fact, he twice subscribed and then the entries were cancelled, and it is unclear whether he proceeded to ordination (Bristol RO, EP/A/10/1/1, p. 40). Although there are no surviving subscription books for Oxford diocese for 1660–2, Skinner’s register indicates that all clergy subscribed to canon 36 on institution (ORO, MS Oxf. dioc. papers d. 106, ff. 1r–15r). 60 LPL, VG 1/1, ff. 94r, 103r (George Hamond, Humphrey Ellis and George Morgan; the subscription of a fourth, Thomas Arnold, is crossed out); LMA, 9531/16, ff. 13r, 19v (Nathaniel Ranew and John Meriton); see also Sylvester, Reliquiae, I. ii. 302. 61 DHC, Chanter 50, 151b [both unfol]. The seven non-subscribers were John Cowbridge, George Cope, Thomas Finney, John Gidleigh, John Hopping, Thomas Lethbridge and Samuel Symonds; the two subscribers were James Rowe and Richard Whiteway. 58

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declaration’. Reynolds himself had spoken up at Worcester House in favour of bishops exercising their authority with the consent of senior clergy; at his first major ordination ceremony at Norwich he mounted the pulpit to expound on the ‘weighty work of preaching’ by ministers, and in the preface to the published text he promised to follow the example of ‘primitive’ bishops of the early Church and confer with local clergy ‘in matters of weight and difficulty’, all this redolent of the moderate or reduced episcopacy which many presbyterians could applaud.62 From this, we might suppose that the majority of presbyterians would flock to Reynolds and Gauden for re-ordination, but this does not seem to be the case: neither held many ordination ceremonies in 1661–2, and their ordinands were mostly local men. Other reforms promised in the Worcester House declaration seem to have been quickly shelved. There is no sign in 1660–1, for example, that Charles II was being encouraged by court prelates such as Juxon or Sheldon to appoint suffragan bishops, nor that annual elections were being planned in the dioceses for senior presbyters, who were to assist with ordination and spiritual censures.63 Many bishops tried to sweeten the pill of re-ordination, often by stressing the illegality rather than the invalidity of presbyterian orders. Morley of Worcester no doubt explained his ‘expedient’ of hypothetical re-ordination to any presbyterians seeking orders from him. Cosin of Durham may have followed Morley’s approach. Certainly he offered to re-ordain Richard Frankland ‘conditionally, with such words as these, if thou hast not been ordained, I ordain thee’, and also in private, to soften the ordeal.64 Bramhall of Derry, ordaining in the north in 1660, may have adopted the stance he later deployed as archbishop of Armagh: that episcopal orders were a legal necessity for service within the Church of England and did not invalidate orders already conferred. Sanderson of Lincoln probably shared this view. He held an ordination ceremony after his confirmation as bishop, but the day before his consecration, which implies that he saw ordination as primarily a legal requirement rather than the conferring of grace through the apostolic succession of bishops.65 Later hostile sources, intent on explaining away the decision to submit to re-ordination, maintained that some bishops bounced Norfolk RO, DN/SUB/1/1, p. 238; 1/2 [unfol: James Fenwick, Thomas Risley, Thomas Grigg, John Berrow, John Elwood, Francis Willes]; The Works of the late Reverend and Learned William Bates DD (1723), p. 725; E. Reynolds, Preaching of Christ. Opened in a Sermon preached at St Peters Church in the City of Norwich at an Ordination, Septemb. 22 1661 (1662), dedicatory epistle and p. 6. 63 His Maiesties Declaration, pp. 5–6. 64 Matthews, Calamy Revised, pp. 211–12. In the 1650s Cosin had acknowledged French Huguenot orders were valid, if irregular, although he denied that he extended this to English presbyterians. See Mason, Church of England and Episcopacy, pp. 223–30; A. Milton, ‘John Cosin’ in O.D.N.B. 65 The Works of … John Bramhall (5 vols, Oxford, 1842–5), I, xxxvii; LA, Register XXXII, f. 1r. 62

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presbyterians into being re-ordained. John Humfrey claimed in 1660 that Piers of Bath and Wells had assured him that his presbyterian orders were valid and that the bishop ‘knew not any thing against iteration of orders if there were need’, so Humfrey accepted re-ordination, before having the chance to study the argument, and came to regret his decision. Humfrey added that he was excused the canonical oath of obedience and subscription to the canons, which was ‘very common’, although the subscription books of Bath and Wells, which start in a little later in 1661, do not support this claim.66 Similarly it was probably King of Chichester who tempted Nathaniel Beaton into re-ordination, describing it as ‘a recognition of his ordination formally receiv’d’, but Beaton was rattled by the ordination ceremony itself, as he witnessed King endeavouring ‘to raise himself to the highest pitch of devotion’, and he also felt it was ‘discernably beneath’ his original ordination as a presbyter, and he resigned his living on the eve of St Bartholomew.67 The least intrusive was Sydserf of Galloway, according to his critic Zachary Crofton. Sydserf, he alleged, refused to enquire into the views of candidates on their re-ordination, but equally (which gives Crofton’s account more credibility) the bishop would not condone the belief that re-ordination merely represented a licence to exercise the ministerial office. As importantly, we know of only one bishop – Hall of Chester – who insisted that presbyterians openly renounce their former orders before being re-ordained.68 Since bishops were able to insist on re-ordination before institution, most probably felt they could afford to be conciliatory in the way they presented it. In 1660–1, therefore, at a time when the settlement of the Church was still under discussion in court and parliament, bishops were using their powers as gatekeepers to livings to force many puritans to choose between their conscience and their livelihood, and, long before the Act of Uniformity was passed, were imposing an important measure of conformity by preventing those presbyterians and independents unwilling to take episcopal orders from re-entering the ministry. Clergy in post could also face pressure from parishioners to take episcopal orders.69 We should not assume, however, that all presbyters were reluctant to be re-ordained. John Angier had been ordained a presbyter in 1657, albeit with some difficulty over allegations of his unsatisfactory conduct, and in 1661 received episcopal orders, as he later recalled, ‘not upon the account of worldly concernes, but upon 66 J. H[umfrey], A Defence of the Proposition (1668), p. 79; idem, The Healing Paper (1678), pp. 5, 22; SHC, D/D/BS/1. We owe our knowledge of both tracts to Philip Wainwright. 67 Matthews, Calamy Revised, pp. 42–3. 68 Crofton, Serious Review, pp. 4–5, 20; Life of Philip Henry, ed. Henry, p. 97; Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. 396. 69 This subject deserves fuller treatment than we can provide here. See CUL, MS Dd 9.43, pp. 9, 16; J. Humfrey, The Question of Re-ordination (1661), pp. 93–4; idem, A Second Discourse, pp. 40–1.

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well bottomed principles of judgement and conscience’. But it came at the cost of alienating his family.70 Such divisions occurred on the national stage in 1660–2 as presbyterians argued in print about re-ordination. This debate reveals that the link between re-ordination and institution was well understood. For unyielding presbyterians one target was the external threat of episcopalians, who regarded their orders as invalid.71 Their more pressing concern, however, was the case in favour of re-ordination made by former presbyters, led by John Humfrey, the Somerset presbyterian who had taken episcopal orders in 1660. Humfrey argued that re-ordination meant no more than being authorized to exercise his ministry in an episcopal Church, and, when he came under attack in three different tracts, published another defence of his position. Humfrey wrote to justify his own conduct (though under pressure, he was later to repudiate his episcopal orders) and to support others who had chosen to be re-ordained and give them ‘peace in it’.72 His presbyterian opponents rounded on Humfrey and his ilk, fearing that their arguments were seducing ‘learned, acute and ingenuous’ divines into taking episcopal order – a significant loss to the presbyterian party, whose credibility was being undermined. ‘Will not the people, who observe the debate between bishops and Presbyters, conclude the Presbyters in an error, when they see them renouncing their own principle by coming under the bishops hands to be re-ordained?’ Re-ordination would also ‘prove the greatest scandal’ to the Reformed Churches and make ‘such a wide breach betwixt our selves and them’.73 In effect, re-ordination was a wedge, exploited by the bishops, to split and weaken the presbyterians, as this largely internal dispute makes clear. As one opponent of re-ordination exclaimed, with passion and precision, ‘Oh I wish again and again, that they [the bishops] had never questioned our ordination, for sure I am, it hath exceedingly hindred an accommodation of the old differences, and promoted also new dissensions.’74 Further fragmentation occurred with the gadarene rush by many presbyterians to be episcopally ordained in the weeks before St Bartholomew in 1662. Yet looking at the whole period 1660–2, how successful had this sustained pressure for re-ordination been? An exact answer is irrecoverable, since there are only fragmentary lists of those ordained presbyters in c.1644– 60, and incomplete though fuller records of episcopal ordinands in 1660–2.

CCEd, ‘John Angier’ (Clergy ID 39319); Lancashire RO, DDKE/acc. 7840, H.M.C./319. 71 Humfrey, Question of Re-ordination, p. 45; Crofton, Serious Review, pp. 20, 25–6; R. I., A Peaceable Enquiry into that Novel Controversie about Reordination (1661), p. 59; A[lleine], Letter, pp. 2, 8; F[irmin], Presbyterial Ordination, pp. 1–28. 72 Humfrey, Question of Re-ordination, pp. 18–19, 21, 44; idem, A Second Discourse; idem, Defence of the Proposition, pp. 79–82. 73 Crofton, Serious Review, pp. 27, 32–3; R. I., Peaceable Enquiry, pp. 36–8; A[lleine], Letter, sig. A2iv. 74 R. I., Peaceable Enquiry, sig. A4ir. Our emphasis. 70

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However, if we take the surviving lists of presbyters, ordained by the Fourth London Classis in 1647–59, the Manchester Classis in 1647–60, the Bury Classis in 1647–57 and the Wirksworth Classis in Derbyshire in 1651–8, we find twenty-two out of seventy-seven (28 per cent) in London, eighteen out of forty-nine at Manchester (37 per cent), five out of seventeen at Bury (29 per cent), and thirteen out of forty-eight (26 per cent) at Wirksworth took episcopal orders in 1660–2.75 That at least a quarter of the presbyterian clergy stayed within the episcopalian Church testifies to the external pressures for conformity and a commitment to service in a national Church as well as the desire to protect office and income. It is worth pondering, too, the longer term impact of so sizeable a puritan cohort in the ministry of the Restoration Church. Not all new ordinands, however, remained in the re-established Church after 1662. Matthews long ago observed that ‘at least 45 ministers’ received episcopal ordination in 1660–2, encouraged by ‘the liberal character’ of the royal declaration of October 1660, and were subsequently ejected. Unfortunately he did not list them.76 If we include those who took orders but did not enter the ministry in 1660–2, our total comes to a minimum of forty-nine and a maximum of fifty-eight and, given the vagaries of the sources, the real total may be a little higher than this.77 The most famous of these are Baxter’s editor Matthew Sylvester and the distinguished naturalist John Wray (or Ray).78 Of the forty-nine, a minority took orders so as to be instituted to livings;79 a handful seem not to have joined the parish ministry on ordination, and therefore were not ejected in 1662;80 most, however, were already in post and did not seek re-institution, and were ordained or re-ordained to give them greater security.81 The publication of the king’s declaration was not as decisive as Matthews proposed, since less than half (42 per cent) were re-ordained in the six months after October 1660. What we have here, surely, is the slow and often agonizing process of wrestling with conformity, of which ordination was but a part, which could result in sudden switches of direction. The presbyterian Philip Henry recorded in August 1661 that ‘Mr Bruce, after great professions, and high expressions to the contrary, I heare Smith, ‘Ordinations by the Fourth Classis of London’, pp. 103–8; Minutes of the Bury Presbyterian Classis, ed. Shaw; Minutes of the Manchester Presbyterian Classis, ed. W. A. Shaw (3 vols, Manchester, 1890–1); Cox, ‘Minute Book of the Wirksworth Classis’, pp. 150–222. 76 Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. lxi. 77 In due course we intend to publish such a list. 78 CCEd, ‘Matthew Sylvester’ (Clergy ID 103635), ‘John Wray’ (105246). 79 For example, CCEd, ‘Thomas Holborough’ (Clergy ID 125354), ‘John Saunders’ (102328), and ‘William Sparrow’ (127477). 80 For example, CCEd, ‘William Colly’ (Clergy ID 125900), ‘John Gidleigh’ (97249), and ‘James Janeway’ (50670). 81 For example, CCEd, ‘John Brice’ (Clergy ID 49487), ‘Stephen Fowler’ (125074), and ‘Henry Watts’ (104806). 75

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is reordayned … wherefore let him that thinks he stands, take heed he fall’. The following year Bruce either resigned or was ejected, eventually taking out a licence as a presbyterian in 1672. An extreme example would be John Courtman, re-ordained in June 1662, after the Act of Uniformity was passed, and ejected later that summer.82 It is also revealing to which bishops these forty-nine clergy resorted for re-ordination. The most popular were Sydserf, Skinner and Sanderson, followed by Reynolds and Gauden, in that order. All were known as moderates. The first three were the busiest ordainers on the bench in 1660–2, while Sydserf’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach was clearly attractive to those reluctantly undergoing re-ordination. Despite his Laudian pedigree in the 1630s, Skinner had, uniquely for an English and Welsh bishop, continued to serve in the parochial ministry throughout the 1650s; the allegation that in August 1660 he allowed Nicholas Sherwill to escape without subscribing is not implausible.83 Friendship might count too: hence the choice of Hacket of Lichfield and Coventry by his intimate William Dillingham, master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, ordained in January 1662 and ejected for non-subscription later that year.84 How important was the requirement to have episcopal orders in the decision of many ministers not to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity? Clearly it was crucial for many clergy, whose opposition to re-ordination was pronounced, such as John Humfrey, who changed his mind after being re-ordained and tore up his letters of orders, and Nathaniel Beaton, who felt ‘decoyed’ into being re-ordained. Others who resisted re-ordination as unprecedented and unacceptable were Joshua Barnett, James Calvert, Richard Frankland, and John Howe; and doubtless many more, whose motives for leaving the Church are unrecorded. There was, of course, much else being demanded by the Act: acceptance of the prayer book and episcopal government, repudiation of the solemn league and covenant and renunciation of the right of resistance. It was a combination of objections which led some individuals to refuse to take the oaths, a well-documented example being Philip Henry, who rejected re-ordination, but was also unwilling to give ‘unfeigned assent’ to the prayer book and particularly opposed its requirement to receive communion kneeling. Sometimes the stumbling block was not re-ordination at all but other clauses in the Act. Laurence Fogg, for example, took episcopal orders and accepted the prayer book, but he rejected the oath of non-resistance. The fact that Richard Kidder, a future bishop, did not Nuttall, ‘First Nonconformists’, p. 179; CCEd, ‘William Bruice’ (Clergy ID 86588), ‘John Courtman’ (124366); Matthews, Calamy Revised, pp. 82, 138–9. For the locus classicus of this struggle over conformity and ordination, see Isaac Archer’s account in Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729: Isaac Archer and Thomas Coe, ed. M. Storey (Suffolk Record Society, 36, 1994), pp. 64–85. 83 Fincham and Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Conformity’, p. 22; Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. 439; CCEd, ‘Nicholas Sherwill’ (Clergy ID 82818). 84 Matthews, Calamy Revised, p.164; CCEd, ‘William Dillingham’ (Clergy ID 154649). 82

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subscribe because he had not had the chance to read through the revised prayer book by the deadline of 24 August, reminds us that other reasons could be decisive.85 III What broad conclusions may be drawn from this detailed analysis? First and foremost, this essay reveals the importance of re-ordination in the process of the restoration of the Church of England between 1660 and 1662. It has long been recognized that the debate over re-ordination was vibrant and controversial, and that the demand that those who had been ordained as presbyters and had served in the parochial ministry during the 1640s and 1650s submit to re-ordination was a major reason for the exodus of presbyterian clergy from the Church of England after St Bartholomew’s day 1662. What has not been appreciated hitherto is the way in which the bishops used re-ordination as a tool of policy. More or less from the moment of the king’s return in May 1660 bishops insisted on episcopal ordination as a condition of institution to livings, forcing the substantial number of presbyters who were searching for new livings or seeking confirmation in their existing ones to decide whether they were going to accept this key symbol of conformity to the old order in the Church. This strategy had the effect of undermining the concessions made in the Worcester House declaration, as only two bishops, Gauden and, probably, Reynolds, were prepared to break ranks by instituting presbyters into benefices. A further consequence of this strategy was that it divided, and thus weakened, presbyterianism during the crucial months when the Church was being settled – the debate about re-ordination was largely conducted, often with some asperity, between moderate and rigid presbyterians, while episcopalians observed from the sidelines. This argument has significant implications for our understanding of both the chronology and dynamics of the restoration settlement of religion. The assumption that presbyterian clergy were not put under real pressure until the passage of the Act of Uniformity in May 1662 is simply incorrect. From the summer of 1660 they were forced to come to terms with the reality that bishops and prayer book had returned, in much the same form as before Nuttall, ‘First Nonconformists’, pp. 151–87; N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester, 1987), pp. 33–45; D. J. Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day. Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity (Manchester, 2007), pp. 27–35; H[umfrey], Defence of the Proposition, pp. 80–1; Matthews, Calamy Revised, pp. 29–30, 99, 100, 284; E. Calamy, An Abridgement of Mr. Baxter’s History of his Life and Times. With an Account of the Ministers, &c. who were ejected after the Restauration (2 vols, 1713), II, 286; Rogers, Life of Howe, pp. 132–52; The Life of Richard Kidder … Written by Himself, ed. A. E. Robinson (Somerset Record Society, 1924), pp. 9–10.

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the Civil War, and that the Worcester House declaration, whether or not it represented a genuine attempt by the king to advance a more comprehensive policy, was undermined by concerted action and inaction on the part of the episcopate: insisting on episcopal orders for institution, and doing nothing to implement other reforms outlined in the declaration. Second, episcopal policy on re-ordination between 1660 and 1662 was a national policy, applied in a concerted way right across the country, and there is strong evidence, though it is largely circumstantial, that Sheldon and Morley were its authors, with the significant support of Lord Chancellor Clarendon. Historiographically, then, this essay might be seen as a reversion to the interpretation advanced by Robert Bosher about the making of the Restoration settlement over half a century ago. To view it in this way, however, would be a mistake. Rather, we argue that the process was far more complex than has been recognized by either Bosher or Green, a point that is highlighted by our third conclusion, that there were very significant limits to the control exercised by Sheldon and Morley over ecclesiastical policy. In part, this is revealed by the role played by Bishop Sydserf of Galloway in the work of ordination: a Scottish bishop, exercising his authority in open defiance of the canons and traditions of the Church and with a laxity which can only have appalled the English hierarchy. More generally, almost all of the bishops who played a major part in the re-stocking of the ministry – Sanderson, Skinner, Reynolds, King, Fulwar, Gauden, Piers – might be described as moderates, certainly in the context of the early 1660s. The hardliners, men like Henchman, Cosin and Wren, as well as Sheldon and Morley, remained largely aloof from the work of ordination. There is a paradox here, in that those who were driving the policy of insisting on episcopal ordination as the prerequisite for institution stepped back from the work of ordination right up until the eve of St Bartholomew’s day, leaving it in the hands of bishops whose standards they can only have regarded as insufficiently rigorous and who were certainly much more sympathetic to the scruples of presbyterians. There is a further paradox – Sydserf may have been protected by a faction at court, but the decision not to participate in the work of ordination was a voluntary one on the part of Sheldon, Morley and others. Fourth, the pattern and practice of ordination between 1660 and 1662 reveals some interesting differences in conceptions of the episcopal office. It is important not to over-simplify a situation in which there was a wide variety of opinion and practice, but a clear distinction can be discerned between someone like Skinner, on the one hand, and Wren or Sheldon on the other. For Skinner, ordination was central to his understanding of what it meant to be a bishop. He ordained regularly throughout his career, continuing even during the interregnum, when he managed to balance a degree of conformity to the regime with the clandestine practice of his episcopal office. There is no evidence, however, that his practice was in any sense lax, and he maintained a system of examination of candidates, in conjunc226

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tion with his chaplains, even when forced by circumstances to ordain in his parlour at Launton. Wren and Sheldon were, by contrast, infrequent ordainers. At the Restoration, this meant that they barely ordained at all, but throughout their careers they were remarkably discriminating about whom they admitted to the ministry. Their practice between 1660 and 1662 was, therefore, a manifestation of what might be described as a very ‘high’ view of the office of ordination, which aimed at restricting the ministry of the Church only to those of most unimpeachable piety, learning and orthodoxy. Fifth, the years between 1660 and 1662 were ‘extraordinary times’. Above all, very large numbers of men were seeking ordination, reflecting both the relative lack of opportunities during the 1640s and 1650s and the changing political circumstances. But, except in terms of numbers, this period is remarkable for the continuities with the preceding decade and a half. Then three Irish bishops were the leaders in providing illegal episcopal ordination. Now, a Scottish and two Irish bishops were active ordainers; in 1660–2, as in 1646–60, many clergy resorted to a bishop of their choice for ordination; many were being ordained deacon and priest at the same time; most were ordained outside the traditional ordination seasons. But, despite the obvious demand and the need to re-stock the parochial ministry, many bishops played little or no part in this work. Gradually, normalcy was restored: by the end of 1662, most bishops were conducting ordination ceremonies during the ember seasons, the normal gap of twelve months between being made deacon and priest was widely insisted upon, and the number being ordained returned to pre-civil war levels.86 Finally, it is worth asking what this essay tells us about the character of the Restoration Church of England. When we combine what we now know about the large number of episcopalian conformists ordained in the 1640s and 1650s with the role of the moderate bishops in re-staffing the Church between 1660 and 1662, it becomes very clear that those who might be described as ‘high churchmen’ played remarkably little part in creating the personnel of the Restoration Church. Sheldon and his allies may have been the key ecclesiastical figures behind the legal framework of the Church settle-

By the 1670s the pattern of ordination that was to persist throughout the eighteenth century had been firmly established, with most bishops performing at least one ordination ceremony each year (generally in the summer or autumn, while resident in their dioceses), the candidates having titles to serve in their sees. The size of these ceremonies varied, depending on the size of the dioceses, except that London, Oxford, Ely and, to a lesser extent, Peterborough emerged as major centres of ordination – Oxford, Ely and Peterborough swept up many candidates ordained on titles to fellowships or curacies of college livings, while London pulled in many young men who were going to serve the many curacies and lectureships in the capital, along with increasing numbers of naval chaplains and missionaries for the American colonies.

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ment; the same group may well have helped to ensure that the 1662 Book of Common Prayer made few concessions to puritan opinion and thus pushed many former presbyterians out of the Church; and members of what is sometimes described as the Sheldon circle, notably Hammond and Thorndike, may have done much to determine the theological character of anglicanism in the later seventeenth century; but the high churchmen demonstrated strikingly little interest in the practical task of ensuring that the Restoration Church was adequately staffed with ministers who had received their orders at the hands of bishops, instead leaving the task to men, many of whom had either been conformists or who at least had accommodated themselves in some way to the regimes of the 1650s and whose experience in that decade left at least some of them much more sympathetic to the dilemmas and crises of conscience faced by so many clergymen in 1660–2. As a result, it is clear that many presbyterians – quite possibly as many as 25 per cent of those ordained as presbyters in the 1640s and 1650s – were able to accept re-ordination between 1660 and 1662 and remain within the Church after the passage of the Act of Uniformity. It is evident that the Church’s policy-makers, Sheldon and Morley, took a hard line on the imposition of episcopal (re-)ordination as a symbol of conformity, but were prepared to tolerate some flexibility in how it was administered, facilitating the salving of some consciences. But what influence did this sizeable group of conformist puritans have on the Church over the next generation? And what was the influence of the even larger group who accommodated themselves to the restored monarchy as they had to the regimes of the Republic? Much work needs to be done before we can answer this question, but it is difficult to believe that it was not considerable.

Appendix: Ordination and institution 1660–2 The institution records for 1660–2 in fourteen dioceses (Bath and Wells, Carlisle, Chester, Chichester, Ely, Exeter, Lincoln, London, Norwich, Oxford, Peterborough, Salisbury, Worcester and York) and during the sede vacante in Canterbury province from 20 July to 19 September 1660 were studied in order to establish whether or not bishops and ordinaries were requiring candidates for admission into a parochial living to possess episcopal orders. For most of these dioceses, while records of institution are fairly complete, evidence of orders is often patchy. While at Ely, we have details of ordinations for 83 per cent of clergy being instituted, this drops to 38 per cent for Oxford and 22 per cent for Worcester. Thus in many cases we cannot know for certain whether or not a clergyman was episcopally ordained on institution. Nor, given the poor survival of records for presbyterian ordination in the 1640s and 1650s, is it usually possible to cross-check to see if a clergyman had been ordained a presbyter. The findings below are constructed on this 228

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uneven documentation. It presents two lists. The first is of clergy whom we can prove were episcopally ordained after institution; this happened very rarely and, when it did, ordination sometimes followed quite quickly (see Stephens, Jolliffe and Farmer). The notable exception was Bishop Gauden’s time at Exeter diocese. The second list is of clergy, who were instituted in 1660–2 and were then ejected, or resigned, as nonconformists at or after St Bartholomew’s day 1662, for whom there is no evidence whether or not they had been episcopally ordained on institution. These clergy are likely to have included some of those most opposed to episcopal ordination; nevertheless, it may be that some, many and possibly all had episcopal orders on institution, but their names do not occur in the limited number of extant ordination registers, and, since they left the ministry in 1662, their details were never entered in exhibit books. However, it is striking that two large groups occur in Exeter and Norwich dioceses, whose bishops are known to have instituted clergy who had not undergone episcopal ordination. Even if every minister in the second list did not have episcopal orders, the two lists together only amount to 35 institutions, a tiny minority of more than 1800 institutions which took place in these fourteen dioceses and in Canterbury province sede vacante in 1660–2. Clergy known to have been instituted in 1660–2 prior to receiving episcopal orders87 Bath & Wells Mathew Paul (Clergy ID 154615): instituted to Rimpton 23.1.1661; ordained deacon 10.7.1662 and priest 17.8.1662. Carlisle John Bell (Clergy ID 153176): admitted to Kirkbampton 31.10.1660 during the sede vacante in York province; ordained deacon 10.7.1662 by Sydserf of Orkney88 and priest 17.8.1662. Chester Christopher Matteson (Clergy ID 57730): instituted to Harrington 20.9.1661 but not inducted until 22.2.1662; ordained deacon 15.2.1662 and priest 8.3.1662, both by Skinner of Oxford. Evidently induction was not granted until Matteson was in episcopal orders.

Unless otherwise specified, it is the local bishop who granted institution and conferred orders. Dates are new style. 88 By July 1662 Sydserf had returned to Scotland, so this date may well be inaccurate. 87

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Exeter Nicholas Stephens (Clergy ID 102412): instituted to Holne 24.12.1660; ordained deacon and priest 13.1.1661. Joshua Bowden (Clergy ID 49465): instituted to Ashburton 23.1.1661; ejected 1662; ordained deacon 25.9.1664 by Ironside of Bristol. Nathaniel Rumbelow (Clergy ID 153057): collated to Quethiock 24.1.1661; ordained deacon 16.8.1662 and priest 17.8.1662, both by Piers of Bath and Wells. Thomas Aishford (Clergy ID 153016): instituted to Axminster 13.2.1661; ordained deacon and priest 8.8.1662 by Piers of Bath and Wells. Tobias Tredwell (Clergy ID 153024): instituted to Culmstock 15.3.1661; ordained deacon and priest 19.10.1661. Edward Nosworthy (Clergy ID 153078): instituted to Diptford 3.2.1662; ordained deacon and priest 17.8.1662 by Piers of Bath and Wells. Lincoln Samuel Rolles (Clergy ID 102153): instituted to Dunton 15.1.1661; ejected 1662; ordained deacon and priest 23.9.1677 by Compton of London. London Richard Bowes (Clergy ID 86438): instituted to Great Bromley 13.1.1661 and 13.1.1662; ordained deacon 28.5.1661 and priest 22.12.1661, both by Sanderson of Lincoln. This is a puzzling set of events: the two entries of his institution are not duplicates, and on 27.12.1661 Bowes obtained a dispensation to be instituted to Great Bowes, being under canonical age of 24 – he was clearly too young to have been first ordained as a presbyter. Norwich Alexander Anderson (Clergy ID 121300): instituted to Barney 3.5.1661; ordained deacon and priest 22.9.1661. Roger Skipper (Clergy ID 127255): instituted to South Elmham 1.6.1661; ordained deacon and priest 8.8.1662. Peterborough James Jolliffe (Clergy ID 121808): instituted to Irthlingborough 18.9.1661; ordained deacon and priest 22.9.1661. Salisbury Edward Farmer (Clergy ID 118986): instituted to Letcombe Regis 19.11.1660; ordained deacon and priest 23.12.1660 by Sanderson of Lincoln. Farmer had been ejected from New College in 1648 by the parliamentary Visitors, so he was unlikely to have been a presbyterian.

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Clergy instituted in 1660–2 and ejected or resigned as nonconformists after St Bartholomew’s day 1662, for whom there is no evidence whether or not they were episcopally ordained on institution89 Bath and Wells Edward Warr (Clergy ID 154595): instituted to Cheddon Fitzpaine 9.7.1660.90 Laurence Musgrave (Clergy ID 154596): instituted to Angersleigh 10.7.1660.91 George Day (Clergy ID 154597): instituted to Wiveliscombe 24.1.1661.92 Exeter Lewis Facye (Clergy ID 153011): instituted to Upton Hellions 24.1.1661.93 Robert Atkins (Clergy ID 153013): instituted to St John’s Exeter 31.1.1661.94 Richard Saunders (Clergy ID 153015): instituted to Loxbeare 6.2.1661.95 Lincoln George Swinnock (Clergy ID 103625): instituted to Great Kimble 18.1.1661.96 London Robert Davy (Clergy ID 155105): instituted to Gestingthorpe 11.9.1661.97 Norwich Daniel Wall (Clergy ID 128491): instituted to Stratford 25.1.1661.98 Thomas Kinge (Clergy ID 125968): instituted to Wrentham 19.3.1661.99 Samuel Spring (Clergy ID 127519): instituted to Creeting All Saints 9.5.1661.100 Thomas Danson (Clergy ID 124109): instituted to Sibton 3.6.1661.101

Omitted here are those listed in Calamy Revised who obtained a presentation from the crown to secure their title to their current living but who were not re-instituted. 90 See Calamy Revised, pp. 510–11. 91 Ibid., p. 360. 92 Ibid., p. 160. 93 Ibid., p. 187. 94 Ibid., p. 18. 95 Ibid., p. 426. 96 Ibid., p. 473. 97 Ibid., p. 158. 98 Ibid., p. 507. 99 Ibid., p. 310. 100 Ibid., p. 46. 101 Ibid., pp. 156–7. 89

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John Elwood (Clergy ID 124831): instituted to East Ruston 7.11.1661 and collated to Happisburgh 30.11.1661.102 Robert Bayes (Clergy ID 122550): instituted to Weybread 8.11.1661.103 Peterborough Richard Hooke (Clergy ID 155108): instituted to Rothersthorpe 14.3.1661 and Great Creaton 17.10.1661.104 Salisbury Henry Blake (Clergy ID 17601): instituted to Clyffe Pypard 18.1.1661.105 Daniel Reyner (Clergy ID 22983): instituted to Purley 10.10.1661.106 York John Blunt (Clergy ID 150721): instituted to Hilston 8.12.1660.107

102 Ibid., p. 183. Ellwood subscribed according to the Worcester House declaration on his collation to Happisburgh (Norfolk RO, DN/SUB/1/2). 103 Calamy Revised, pp. 39–40. 104 Ibid., p. 274. 105 Ibid., p. 60. 106 Ibid., pp. 407–8. 107 Ibid., p. 62.

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Style, Wit and Religion in Restoration England* John Spurr

This paper elevates style above substance. It speculates on the significance of literary style in debates over religious difference during the reign of Charles II, and it does so because contemporaries frequently remarked upon an author’s ‘style’. The notorious clerical controversialist Samuel Parker boasted ‘a brave, flourishing, lofty stile’ or, to another’s mind, ‘writ in a stile so vindictive and poynant’, while Simon Patrick displayed a ‘flouting, scoffing, jeering style’, and Andrew Marvell ‘led the way’ in the fashion for ‘a buffooning, burlesquing and ridiculing way and stile’.1 ‘Your style is so Exasperating,’ complained a critic of John Eachard’s writings: it is ‘Lofty and Swaggering’.2 It was precisely ‘the Ornament of their Style, and the pleasantness of their method, and subtilty of their Wit’ that might allow dangerously heterodox writers to beguile and mislead their readers.3 Even Sir Robert Filmer’s ‘plausible Stile’ made an effective case, conceded Locke, if not a sound argument, for his glib nonsense.4 ‘Style’ as used in these and other examples has a meaning that lies somewhere between the modern * I am grateful to the University of Cambridge for the award of a CRASSH Visiting Fellowship which allowed me to begin work on this topic and to Yale University for an opportunity to try out a very early version of this paper in 2008. 1 Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, ed. P. Bliss (1820), IV, col. 231; Philagathus [Samuel Rolle], A Sober Answer to the Friendly Debate (1669); Andrew Marvell, The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. A. Patterson, M. Dzelzainis, N. H. Keeble, and N. von Maltzahn (2 vols, New Haven, 2003), I, 87 (Rehearsal Transprosed), also see I, 9, 51, 52, 55, 199 and II, 37, 43–4, 55, 67; [Simon Patrick], A Further Continuation of the Friendly Debate (1670), p. xiv. 2 An Answer to Two Letters of T.B. (1673), pp. 58, 64. 3 Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors of Church and State in Mr Hobbes’s Book, Entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), p. 2; also see Roger L’Estrange, Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press (1663), p. 10. 4 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690), sigs [A3v–A4]; ‘Incoherences in Matter and Suppositions, without Proofs put handsomly together in good Words and a 233

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conception of that quality which characterises a text or an author and the traditional notion of elocutio, the ornamentation of one’s words, one of the five components of classical rhetoric.5 The Restoration’s broad use of the term matched the diversity of stylistic practice among contemporary prose writers. Despite strident calls ‘to reject all the amplifications, digressions and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words’, there was no simple battle line drawn between a ‘plain style’ and a more exuberant one luxuriantly decked out with tropes, metaphors and other deliberately ambiguous figures.6 Neither was finally attainable or universally applicable; both served specific functions in particular cases. The perennial tension between the demands of semantic precision and effective persuasion was as familiar to every individual prose author, whether preacher, philosopher or pamphleteer, in the seventeenth century as it is today.7 Whether the balance between the two was changed by the English revolution is a separate question. The commonplace assumption that Restoration England was throwing off the godly ‘precision’ and ‘enthusiasm’ of the previous generation might tempt some to make the sweeping claim that style counted for more in post-1660 debates than it had in those of earlier decades. But this is to condense too much literary and religious history. We are on safer ground in recognizing that while the changes to be documented in this essay inevitably bear witness to twenty years of civil war, puritanism and revolution, and to their complex legacies, they also reveal other influences and point to emerging stylistic possibilities that would contribute to the next great upheaval in English religious and cultural life – the advent of an early and distinctive form of Enlightenment in England after 1689. plausible Stile, are apt to pass for strong Reason and good Sense, till they come to be look’d into with Attention’ (p. 26). 5 The others are inventio, dispositio, memoria and pronunciatio. The techniques of classical rhetoric as re-discovered in the Renaissance applied to oratory and their translation to written and printed texts is not a straightforward matter, nor is the increasing prominence given to elocutio and to the classification of figures of speech in early modern rhetoric. On rhetoric see Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002); Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1985); Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1988). 6 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667), p.113. The dated academic controversy on ‘plain style’ is conveniently approached through the collection Seventeenth-Century Prose – Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. S. E. Fish (New York, 1970); also see P. Arakelin, ‘The Myth of a Restoration Style Shift’, Eighteenth Century, 20 (1979), 227–45; R. Pooley, ‘Language and Loyalty: Plain Style at the Restoration’, Literature and History, 6 (1980), 2–18. 7 Hobbes is perhaps the most famous example of an individual torn between unattainable dreams of linguistic precision and a commitment to the techniques of rhetoric: see Hannah Dawson, Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 137–43; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996). 234

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In Restoration England persuasion was the heart of the matter. The recent ‘rhetorical turn’ in seventeenth-century studies has directed our attention to the role of ‘affect’ in moving individuals to action.8 What hack writers took as axiomatic – ‘people generally judge by their affections rather than their judgments’ – is now seen by scholars not as simple condescension towards the limited capabilities of the vulgar masses, but as a starting point for a full appreciation of how political, religious and social loyalties were created, mobilized and maintained.9 Affect is where literary style can be presumed to have its principal effect. Seventeenth-century writers knew this and that was why questions of style mattered to them.10 They had taken up their pens to exert an influence: while they expected to marshal their arguments, to assert and defend their principles, they also recognized that reason alone would rarely win the day: ‘When plain declarations will not enlighten people, to discern the truth and weight of things, and blunt arguments will not penetrate, to convince or persuade them to their duty; then doth Reason freely resign its place to Wit, allowing it to undertake its work of instruction and reproof.’11 To convince and persuade, to rouse the passions and move the affections, required imagination and fancy – the ‘wit’ invoked here – or a ‘plausible style’. And that was a matter of literary technique. I The relentless methods of seventeenth-century controversialists will be familiar to anyone who has spent much time in their company.12 The For some examples of this trend see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric; Susan James, Passion and Action. The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford, 1997); Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts. The Crisis of Political Obligation in England 1640–1674 (Princeton, 2004); Christopher Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph over Reason. A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester (Oxford, 2007); Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions. The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge, 2003). 9 A Free and Impartial Inquiry into the Causes of that very great Esteem and Honour that the Nonconforming Preachers are generally in with their Followers (1673), p. 16. To move ‘the Vulgar,’ asserted L’Estrange in 1679, one must apply ‘not to their Understandings, but to their Passions and Appetites’: see Peter Hinds, ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’. Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London (Oxford, 2010), p. 131. 10 Dawson, Locke, Language and Early-modern Philosophy, p. 83. 11 Isaac Barrow, Several Sermons against Evil-Speaking (1678), p. 50. 12 Little scholarly attention has been paid to the prose style of Restoration controversialists since the debate on plain style, but the material and cultural context is well understood thanks to works such as Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book. Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998); Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003); Hinds, ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’; Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture, ed. Anne Dunan-Page and Beth Lynch (Aldershot, 2008); Lois G. Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr Henry Care. Restoration Publicist (Baltimore, 2001); 8

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compulsion ‘to answer every Clause, Period, and Proposition’ of their adversary, often in the same order as the original text, the dogged pursuit of citations and authorities, the appeal to histories or etymologies, the sheer accumulation of detail and quotation, make for tedious reading.13 But not all authors were dry as dust. Some were self-consciously and deliberately entertaining. ‘Whoever Sauces not his Earnest with a Tang of Fooling, misses his Marque,’ claimed Roger L’Estrange.14 These writers deployed irony, sarcasm, irreverence, innuendo, puns and parody, even bawdy and scurrility, in their attempt to amuse and cajole their readers. This kind of writing defines itself as witty and accessible, as colloquial and popular, without necessarily being plebeian; but it makes demands too, especially upon modern readers, by its habitual use of several voices, the rapid shifts between levity and earnestness, the ‘personation’ of different viewpoints, and the density of its allusions to previous texts: intertextuality was second nature to these writers. Some of the most favoured techniques of this ‘fooling’ style are catalogued by an expert in the art, Simon Patrick, as part of a disingenuous complaint against an adversary: For setting aside his calumnies; his unjust complaints of railing, jeering, and what not? his falsities boldly asserted, his mistakes of the Question; his impertinent allegation of Authorities; his idle stories, frivolous observations, uncharitable surmises, and odious insinuations; his mis-representing of my words, his cropping or inlarging them; his false glosses and commentaries, and suchlike things; I can finde very little that looks like so much as an endeavour of a direct Answer.15

The accusation that an opponent is hiding behind trickery, that intentionally or not style is impeding, or even supplanting, argument, is characteristic of Restoration pamphleteers: ‘your wit is strangely fluent upon such passages as are altogether collateral to the drift and substance of my discourses,’

Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain. Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005); Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee. The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, 2005); Lawrence Klein, ‘Coffeehouse Civility, 1660– 1714: an Aspect of Post-courtly Culture in England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 59 (1997), 30–51; Helen Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture in late-Stuart England. The Cultural World of the ‘Athenian Mercury’ (Aldershot, 2003); Melissa Mowry, The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714. Political Pornography and Prostitution (Aldershot, 2004); Harold Love, English Clandestine Satire 1660–1702 (Oxford, 2004); Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993). 13 Clarendon, Brief View, p. 1. 14 Quoted by Geoff Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, in Fear, Exclusion and Revolution. Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, ed. Jason McElligott (Woodbridge, 2006), p. 86. 15 [Simon Patrick], An Appendix to the Third Part of the Friendly Debate (1670), pp. 146–7. See [Richard Leigh], The Transproser Rehears’d (Oxford, 1673), p. 32, on the supposed rhetoric of raillery. 236

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complains one.16 ‘To carpe at phrases [and] expressions’ rather than engage with argument is ‘unmanly’, protests another.17 Most modern readers of these witty exchanges will also have noticed a reluctance to answer headon, a failure to square up to opponents’ arguments and to demolish them on logical and factual grounds, and some readers, perhaps, will have been intrigued by the controversialists’ preference for satire, mockery and wit. The ‘flouting, scoffing, jeering style’ was bred of a competitive, combative, world of pamphleteering. Authors rushed into print to savage opponents even if they had little to contribute to the argument. Every book seemed to provoke a torrent of ‘Reflections, Observations, Answers, Replications and Exceptions’ often ‘in this New Canting Drolling Way’.18 And, to add to the fun, most of these were anonymous or published under the author’s initials. Nameless opponents were dubbed with mocking pseudonyms – the ‘animadverter’, the ‘casuist’, and, of course, ‘Bayes’ – and writers indulged in all manner of speculation about their adversary’s identity, even when it was an open secret: ‘some ghesses [sic] have been who you are by the roughness of your hands and the smartness of the blow’.19 It was all part of the game to take an antagonist’s arguments or stylistic traits – an unfortunate metaphor, an ill-judged simile, or a maladroit allusion – and play with it, re-present or exaggerate it, inflate it to the limits of hyperbole or elevate it into a flight of fancy.20 Delicious opportunities arose to extend the discussion from one genre into another. An unguarded or pretentious reference to a play or romance gave one’s opponent the chance for long, sarcastic comparisons with Hudibras or Don Quixote – all the while protesting that ‘you must laugh at him, and not at me, for they are his words’.21 The conflation of different genres and quarrels had the effect of cutting them all down to size. When Marvell laughingly observed that ‘the Peeks [piques] of Players among themselves, or of Poet against Poet, or of a Conformist-Divine against a Nonconformist, are dangerous, and of late times have caused great disturbance’, the implied equivalence between the rivalries of poets and the theological debates of protestant clergymen served to diminish the latter.22 All in all, it would appear that there were few more effective tactics in Restoration controversy than refusing to take an opponent seriously.

Samuel Parker, A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed (1673), p. 234 – instead his adversary prefers to ‘picqueer at single words … and animadvert upon them with the Similitude, the Aphorism, the Rithm [sic], the Story and the Parenthesis’. 17 [John Owen], Truth and Innocence (1669), pp. 16–17. 18 Raillerie a la Mode (1673), pp. 22–3, 7. 19 [Norton], Humble Apology, p. 147. 20 Although rhetorical figures such as tapinosis and paradiastole are occasionally discernible in these publications, they are neither consistent nor prominent and I have therefore not drawn attention to them in what follows. 21 Patrick, Further Continuation, p. 19. 22 Marvell, Prose Works, I, 87. 16

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Everyone played the same game of deploring their opponents’ rhetoric, or at least its misleading excesses, and pleading for plain argument: ‘whether History or Controversy, let him be pleas’d so long to abate of the exuberancy of his Fancy and Wit; to dispense with his Ornaments and superfluencies of Invention and Satyre, and then a man may consider whether he may believe his Story, and submit to his Argument.’23 Curtailing this exuberant invention, as Marvell (apparently) demands in the interests of argument, is easier said than done. In some genres – one thinks of the revelations of ‘secret histories’, travel writing, the anatomies of a nation’s ‘interest’, or even sermons – arguments are embedded in the style,24 while in other cases, and particularly those railing, scoffing exchanges with which this paper is concerned, style is entwined with argument and occasionally comes close to overwhelming it: the temptation to descend into abuse or play for laughs was not always easily resisted; ‘you cannot for your life forbear to lead me now and then to some mirth’.25 The balance of mirth and seriousness is not simply a question of proportion, but also one of tone: a note of levity, once established in a text, can undercut even the most earnest of later passages. Moreover, stylistic issues are entangled with the author’s intention and the reader’s reaction. A point made with a witty sally may be a well-turned argument, or it may simply be a display of wit. An author may sincerely hope to convince his adversaries, or he may have grasped an opportunity for self-advertisement and personal profit by dashing off a piece for the press. Authors presented their texts with careful carelessness: this is a ‘letter’ not a ‘treatise’, and meant merely as ‘an hour’s divertisement’.26 Such statements said as much about the implied reader as about the author. Since the readers’ attention had to be captured and retained, authors (and their booksellers) had to make fine calculations of what might appeal. What kind of individual might respond to a bantering prose that casually mixed religious controversy with allusions to the stage or popular literature? How was one to appeal effectively to men of judgment and authority, to magistrates and parliamentarians, who might be moved by different authors to enforce the penal laws more stringently, or ameliorate the plight of dissenters, or improve the standing of the parish clergy? And most hotly contested of all, how was this writing to constitute its own properly qualified and appreciative readership?27 Ibid., p. 72. ‘His Words are more than his Matter, his Rhetorick far beyond his Logick’: [Norton], Humble Apology (1669), sig. A4r. 24 See Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 6; Rebecca Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure 1674–1725. Secret History Narratives (2009); Kate Loveman, Reading Fictions, 1660–1740. Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (Aldershot, 2008). 25 Patrick, A Continuation, p. 36 26 Free and Impartial Inquiry, p. 65. 27 Studies of Restoration drama and poetry have made some headway with precisely this 23

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II Such questions demand detailed consideration in a specific controversial context. One such context is provided by the religious and political debates of the late 1660s and early 1670s. In 1667 the initial certainties of the restored monarchy had collapsed with Clarendon’s ministry and as new political possibilities arose – in religious and foreign policy, in ministerial and royal direction – the level of anxiety, polemic and debate increased. Different interests jockeyed for influence at Whitehall, Westminster and among the political nation: the ‘talk of the town’ was fuelled by print and scribal publications; the uncertainty elicited wide-scale public debate on foreign policy, parliamentary corruption, the mores of the royal court, national impiety and profanity, and the religious situation.28 The last was itself a tangle of issues and perceptions, including atheism, the royal supremacy, and anti-popery, but the central and most politically urgent problem was the legal division of English protestantism into two camps, the established Church of England and the miscellaneous groups massed under the label nonconformity. The opposing positions were clear and entrenched. On the nonconformist side, it was commonly believed that the Church of England had been captured by proud prelates and their acolytes who, in a betrayal of the Church’s past, imposed ceremonies and other requirements that ‘symbolised’ with popery and placed unwonted limits on godly obligations such as extemporary prayer and additional preaching. Shaped by anti-Laudian tropes, the nonconformist case was that ‘these Episcopal Bigots’ had made uniformity their god and would brook no compromise: ‘that Popery and Fanaticism are to be resisted by comprehension, is day light: But these High Conformists are blind, obstinate, perverse’.29 Inherently cruel because their power depends upon stigmatizing their victims as heretics and demanding their persecution, bishops will always flatter kings with talk of divine right all the better to lead them by the ear, and, if need be, to overawe them. The bishops will rise on the royal coat tails and then foment mistrust between ruler and subject question, but little close attention has been paid to prose writers and their readership: the principal exceptions are Marvell, Bunyan, Milton, Marchamont Nedham, Sir John Berkenhead, and Sir Roger L’Estrange. See the sources in note 1 above; Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007); John Creaser, ‘Prosodic Style and Conceptions of Liberty in Milton and Marvell’, Milton Quarterly, 34 (2000), 1–13; Alan Roper, ‘Innuendo in the Restoration’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 100 (2001), 22–39. 28 See John Spurr, England in the 1670s. ‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford, 2000); G. De Krey, ‘Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases for Conscience 1667–1672’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 53–83; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings on Law and Politics 1667–1683, ed. J. R. Milton and Philip Milton (Oxford, 2006). 29 John Humfrey, The Authority of the Magistrate (1672), pp. 10–11. 239

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– or as Marvell sarcastically observed, ‘a Bishop might sit with a Prince in a Junto, to consult wisely how to preserve him [the King] from those people that never meant him any harm’.30 The Church’s demands amounted to an infringement of the nonconformists’ christian liberty and an affront or ‘scandal’ to tender consciences. Conscience was sacrosanct: ‘exempt Conscience from an absolute, immediate, entire, universal dependence on the Authority, Will, and Judgement of God, according to what Conceptions it hath of them, and you disturb the whole harmony of divine Providence in the Government of the World; and break the first link of that great chain whereon all Religion and Government in the world do depend’.31 In turn anglicans regarded nonconformity as led by hypocritical and selfinterested ministers who bamboozled their followers with specious theology and inflated talk of the rights of conscience.32 Nonconformists were guilty of ecclesiastical schism and political disobedience. Past history was ransacked for examples of how intolerant the godly had been when they had the upper hand or how submissive the truly conscientious puritans had been when they could not adapt to the requirements of the Jacobean Church. The hard rock of individual conscience was the point to which the debates usually returned. And to conformists like Simon Patrick, the issue was plain. The Question, you remember, was, Who shall judge what Laws are for the Peoples Weal, i.e. the Common Good of them all? Why, the Magistrate may judge thus far, as to make Laws; but the People themselves must judge, as to their obedience, i.e. they are not bound to do anything he bids them, unless they think it is for their welfare. Why so? Because, saith he, every man is made by God the Judge of his own Actions. I cannot for my life see how that follows from this, though I have put his reasoning into the plainest form that ever I could.33

The churchmen were of one mind – conscience was free, but practice was not; an honest conscience would not countenance disobedience and subversion: ‘this mischief of not obeying, is greater than the hurt that is done the people by obedience’.34 The two sides were at an impasse. Starting from such dramatically different positions, anglicans and nonconformists could only argue past each other. Of course these were serious issues and much of the debate – in print and in the pulpit – was conducted with high seriousness.35 Yet at the same time a growing number of writers were resorting to the age-old weapons 30 31 32 33 34 35

Marvell, Prose Works, II, 169–70. Owen, Truth and Innocence, p. 70. William Assheton, Cases of Scandal and Persecution (1674), sig. a5r. Patrick, Appendix, p. 185. Patrick, Appendix, p. 202. See C. H. Whiting, Studies in English Puritanism from the Restoration to the Revolution 240

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of mirth and mockery.36 A slew of books and pamphlets engaged with the political and religious agenda, and did so in a distinctive ‘joco-serio’ manner, using the coffeehouse style of banter and dialogue, and playing with the different genres of prose, drama, and disputation. The interaction of politics and cross-generic writing has attracted the attention of the current generation of literary and historical scholars.37 But analysis of the stylistic features of the ‘joco-serio’ is under-developed: no-one has yet drawn out the implications of a style that aimed not to convince opponents, but rather to discomfort them and unsettle their followers, while strengthening the backbones of the writer’s own party and winning over the undecided. One implication was clearly about the kind of reader that might be affected by this style. Provoking laughter, arousing the emotions of contempt for and superiority over others, was dangerous work. Who could tell where an appeal to the ‘affections’ might lead? III Closer investigation of these issues can begin with three prominent anglican authors of the late 1660s. Simon Patrick’s anonymous dialogue A Friendly Debate appeared in October 1668. A scathing attack on the theological and personal integrity of presbyterian and independent ministers, the book was an instant success and, according to Baxter, ‘was greedily read by all that desired matter of contempt and scorn against both Nonconformity and piety’.38 Patrick published a number of sequels in reply to nonconformist critics: A Continuation of the Friendly Debate was ready by April 1669; A Further Continuation and Defence: or, a Third Part of the Friendly Debate was complete by October 1669 and replied to Samuel Rolle’s Sober Answer; in January 1670 Patrick had completed An Appendix to the Third Part which took on a Humble Apology (possibly by John Norton). This performance 1660–1688 (London, 1968); John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England 1648–1688 (New Haven, 1991). 36 On the tradition of humour in religious debate see Raymond A. Anselment, ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’. Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift and the Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto, 1979). 37 Prominent exponents are the editors of Marvell’s prose (see n. 1 above), Steve Zwicker and Derek Hirst. Hirst offers a suggestive model of ‘a broad reading across the textual register of a moment’ in his essay ‘Samuel Parker, Andrew Marvell, and political culture, 1667–73’, in Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Derek Hirst and Richard Strier (Cambridge, 1999), p. 144; also see Lana Cable, ‘Licensing Metaphor: Parker, Marvell, and the Debate over Conscience’, in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia, 2002), pp. 243–60. 38 Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. M. Sylvester (3 parts in 1 vol., 1696), iii, 40. Patrick concentrated his fire on writings by Thomas Watson and William Bridge. 241

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made Patrick the cynosure of the anglicans.39 He was congratulated on revealing ‘with so much Perspicuity of Wit’ the pretence, prevarication and knavery of the nonconformist leaders and the simplicity of their flocks.40 Thomas Pittis did Patrick the double honour of following suit with his own dialogue ‘between a rich alderman and a poor country vicar’ and including within that dialogue a scene where the vicar lends the alderman a copy of The Friendly Debate and they then discuss the danger to the state posed by nonconformity and the deficiencies of the Sober Answer.41 Samuel Parker, ‘the wonder of his age’ according to one admirer, is well known as the author of The Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, published in 1669 but dated ‘1670’ on the title page. John Owen’s response to the discourse, and Parker’s own combativeness, led Parker to publish A Defence and Continuation in 1671 and a preface to Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication in 1672 that attracted the attention of John Humfrey and, more famously, Andrew Marvell.42 Marvell thought Simon Patrick’s Friendly Debate was ‘the midwife’ of Parker’s Discourse.43 Parker and Patrick formed a mutual admiration society. Patrick described the Discourse as ‘a work of equal strength and beauty’ that needed no defence from him, especially as its author had already bestowed ‘commendations ... on my poor endeavours’.44 Nevertheless he contributed a twenty-six page ‘letter’ to Parker’s Defence and Continuation in justification of the tradition of ‘a pleasant and jesting disputation’ in matters of religion.45 The third clerical author is John Eachard, whose anonymous A Letter of Inquiry into the Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy appeared in 1670. The supposed lay author of this letter offers a diagnosis of the Whether Patrick was officially sponsored is not known, but Arlington did call in the sheets of what I take to be Rolle’s reply: Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1668–9 (1894), p. 409 (13 July 1669). Patrick maintained his own sincere intention was to remedy error and heal division in the preface to the enlarged ‘sixth edition’ of 1684 and in his own autobiography: see The Works of Symon Patrick, D.D., ed. A. Alexander (9 vols, Cambridge, 1858). 40 Samuel Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1670), p. xiii. 41 Thomas Pittis, A Private Conference, pp. 156–75 (imprimatur 14 July 1669); also see Assheton, Cases, p. 71. 42 John Humfrey, The Authority of the Magistrate (1672); [Andrew Marvell], The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672); Parker responded with A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed (1673). On Parker see Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Ecclesiastical Polity of Samuel Parker’, The Seventeenth Century, 25 (2011), 350–75; Gordon Schochet, ‘Samuel Parker, Religious Diversity, and the Ideology of Persecution’, in Margins of Orthodoxy, ed. R. D. Lund (Cambridge, 1996); Gordon Schochet, ‘Between Lambeth and Leviathan: Samuel Parker, the Church of England, and Political Order’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern England, ed. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1993). 43 Marvell, Prose Works, I, 111; for other allusions to the relationship see I, 121, 151, 312. 44 Patrick, Appendix, sig. A5v–A6r. 45 Parker, A Defence and Continuation (1671), pp. 724–50, quotation at p. 726. 39

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anglican clergy’s poor public standing. Ignorance and poverty are the key failings: inappropriately trained young men are sent to preach in country parishes, while too much clerical income is siphoned off by dignitaries, lay impropriators, and patrons. This unexceptionable analysis is pursued with ‘the Spirit and Liberty of a Farce’.46 Eachard has a lot of fun at the expense of schoolteachers and the universities, pretentious preachers, cashstrapped vicars with their ‘single melancholy cow’ and a growing brood of children, and other easy targets. Eachard’s ‘Style and manner’ would surely make the clergy ridiculous in the eyes of the laity. ‘There are many of our Countrey Neighbours, who seldom or never see any Playes: But I fancy his Letter looks like such a piece of merriment sent among them.’47 In some ways Eachard’s book stands at a slight angle to those of Patrick and Parker: it seems to target the conformists more than the dissenters, and offers a breezy social, educational and pastoral analysis rather than a denominational attack; but its stylistic affinities and other features convinced contemporaries that it should be measured against Patrick’s work. Eachard claimed a relationship with the Friendly Debate and others denied such a debt.48 In subsequent works Eachard ‘would be thought to take another Bias, in turning the Point of Satyr upon the Nonconformity’, and later against Hobbes, but he also repeatedly asserted his admiration of Simon Patrick.49 In short, Patrick, Parker and Eachard approached religious and political issues from a similar direction and shared a witty literary style that was appreciated by some readers and loathed by others. Inevitably controversies of this kind tend to branch out in many different directions. All three of these authors found themselves entangled with earlier anglican-nonconformist debates on toleration, with the looming shadow of Thomas Hobbes, and with the highly significant but still under-appreciated pamphlet war on soteriology that involved authors as diverse as John Bunyan, William Sherlock, Edward Fowler, Charles Wolseley and Robert Ferguson.50 The involvement of Marvell and his invocation of Dryden and mockery of the Howard and Buckingham comedy, The Rehearsal, also connected these exchanges with squibs produced by selfdefined literary wits.51 But Patrick, Parker and Eachard merit closer consideration here principally because the controversies in which they were involved gave such prominence to questions of language, representation and style.

A Vindication of the Clergy (1672), sig. A4v. W. S., An Answer to a Letter of Enquiry (1671), sig. A5r. 48 Eachard, Letter of Enquiry, p. 276; Vindication of the Clergy, p. 74. 49 Vindication of the Clergy, sig. A7v; Eachard, Some Observations, p. 103; Eachard, Five Letters, p. 114. 50 For partial accounts of these complex debates see Spurr, Restoration Church, pp. 296–327; Stephen Hampton, Anti-Arminians. The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008), chs 1–3. 51 See for example [Leigh], Transproser Rehears’d; S’too him Bayes (Oxford, 1673); [Henry Stubbe], Rosemary and Bayes (1673). 46 47

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First, and most obviously, these exchanges were slanging matches. Complaints of abuse, ridicule and misrepresentation flew to and fro. ‘How many are there that preach not, except they have a sling at Nonconformists? Are not Nonconformists scorned and scoffed at on the Stage, from the Press and from the Pulpit? How are they jeered at, and made a May-game, by this in name Friendly (but really Unfriendly) Debate.’52 Whatever it takes, retorted the anglicans: ‘Clamour and Confidence make stronger Impressions upon the common People, than strength of Reason,’ asserted Parker, but seeing that ‘we are not so ill-bred as to oppose Clamour to Clamour’, we must supply our lack of noise with ‘Sharpness and Severity’.53 ‘Ugly words’ and ‘reproachful Nick-names’ drove the controversies.54 To conformists, the dissenters were ‘pharisees’, hypocrites and worse. ‘We will not suffer you to ingross to your party, the name and reputation of Godliness,’ raged Patrick, for whom the issue was a long-standing obsession.55 Indeed nonconformists dismissed the episcopalian clergy as ‘mere moral men’, purveyors of a carnal religion denuded of grace and hope, a mere recipe of works, and as self-interested, cruel and uncharitable.56 Patrick alleged that nonconformists spoke of their churchgoing neighbours ‘as if they were the people of a strange God’, and that they denounced anglican clergymen as corrupt, formalists, time-servers, popishly-affected, or even ‘Sons of Perdition’.57 In response, nonconformists could only disavow such language: ‘I do not love a biting tongue,’ wrote one, and advised nonconformists to stay at home rather than attend any ‘Private-meetings that use railing and reviling speeches’. But they would not forego any chance to turn the charge back on their critics: any nonconformist who sought ‘scoffing and reviling language, they might have a Dictionary of such hard words out of the Friendly Debate’.58 The sight of the anglican clergy ‘impudently rail[ing] against their dissenting brethren’ strengthened perceptions of them as grasping, censorious, and uncharitable.59 Conformists alleged that nonconformists ‘divide our very language’ with a ‘cant’ that not only marks them out socially but is intended to express their favoured spiritual status. This is the ‘Language of Canaan’, the cant [Norton], Humble Apology, p. 90; Owen described the Friendly Debate as ‘this unparalleled heap of Revilings, Scoffings, despightful Reproaches, Sarcasms, Scornful contemptuous Expressions, false Criminations’ and ‘Sanguinary affections’ towards nonconformity: Truth and Innocence, p. 11. 53 Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, pp. xi–xii. 54 Patrick, Friendly Debate, p. 117; Patrick, Continuation, sig. A4v. 55 Patrick, Continuation, p. 75. See his earlier works like Jewish Hypocrisy. A Caveat to the Present Generation (1660). Also see Free and Impartial Inquiry, pp. 138–42; Eachard, Some Observations, p. 121. 56 Parker, Preface to Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication (1672), sig. a2v. 57 Patrick, Continuation, p. 358. 58 [Norton], Humble Apology, p. 137. 59 Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration, pp. 310, 311. 52

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of ‘experience’ and ‘spirituality’, a mere ‘system of empty phrases’, and a notional, airy, empty faith.60 Nonconformist preachers bewitch their congregations with ‘Magical sounds’ and ‘Mystical words’ – they ‘never tell them plainly what Faith is’.61 The anglican controversialists were keen to point out that they were as committed to preaching about faith as any; but what I condemn is mens roving in general about these things; which indeed may work upon mens Passions, heat their heads, but not at all rightly inform their judgement, nor benefit the life of action. What benefit gain I by hearing a loud Harangue about the excellency of Faith? The happiness of being interested in Christ? While I neither am told the true nature of the one, nor directed to the right and proper means of obtaining the other?62

Simon Patrick ‘has at large discovered the intolerable foolerie of this way of talking’, said Eachard.63 Patrick was lionised for his relentless pursuit of the nonconformists’ cloudy vocabulary: he has stopt all their Suberfuges, as he proceeds, by preventing their shifting of Phrases, and hiding themselves in a maze of Words; For, where as ’tis their usual Artifice to tire out the Wise, and amuse the Simple, by rowling up and down in canting and ambiguous Expressions, he has been at pains to ferret them from Phrase to Phrase, and never left his pursuit till they were left quite naked and defenceless.64

The dissenters countered that theirs was the language of the gospel, the language of grace, ‘the very words of the Holy Ghost in Scripture’.65 ‘Do they suppose by crying out canting, phrases, silly, non-sense, Metaphors, they shall shame the Non-conformists out of the Profession of the Gospel?’66 Dissenters turned the tables, ridiculing the conformists’ claims to promote ‘reason’ and their desiccated notion of ‘practical religion’. Samuel Rolle claimed that ‘the Rationall Divines (as some would have them called)’ had rendered ‘all our Practicall Divines, such as Scudder, Culverwell, Rogers, etc, quite out of request’ at the booksellers’ stalls. Religion would suffer greatly, he believed, as a consequence of people trusting in the anglicans’ ‘high pretensions to Reason’. Furthermore he suggested that many of these divines ‘are fallen rather into a Romance way of preaching and writing, as if they meant to Evangelize Sr Philip Sydney, and thought that all Divinity might well be 60 Patrick, Continuation, p. 1; [Rolle], Sober Answer, A7; Patrick, Friendly Debate, pp. 11, 16, 55, 83. 61 Patrick, Continuation, p. 231. 62 Free and Impartial Inquiry, pp. 96–7. 63 Eachard, A Letter of Enquiry, p. 61. 64 Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, pp. xvii–xviii. 65 [Rolle], Sober Answer, sig. Br. 66 Owen, Truth and Innocence, p. 15.

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planted within the Compasse of his Arcadia’.67 On all sides it was clear that the misuse of language was a source of theological error. As will be plain, these were exchanges about religion, about endangering souls and securing eternal salvation. Simon Patrick was just one of a group of mainly younger anglican clergy whose aim was to refute a mistaken theology of salvation. They were concerned that reliance on the bare promise of salvation would produce spiritual pride and neglect of duty.68 In their eyes, much of the previous generation’s theology, and most current nonconformist theology, tended towards antinomianism.69 This tendency was implicit in the language of nonconformist piety. ‘Do not Nonconformists vaunt too much of their Assurances, Comforts, Experiences?’70 Or as Parker complained, they ‘tell fine Romances of the secret amours between the Believing Soul and the Lord Christ, and prodigious stories of the miraculous feats of Faith in the Lord Christ’.71 The ‘phrase mongering’ of nonconformists not only compromised their doctrine, it undermined their prayer and their preaching. One of the great arguments for set forms of prayer, for an obligatory prayer book, was the un-edifying example of nonconformist extempore prayer. Overcome with emotion or at a loss for words, they might offer their God the insult of repetitive, formless, clumsy prayer.72 In reply the dissenters castigated the dead and formal prayers ‘read’ in church. The same concerns lay beneath the discussion of contemporary preaching. So while Patrick and Eachard derided sermons that were too pretentious to reach the people or too mystical to teach christian practice, nonconformist authors directed their criticism at formal preachers and ‘rational divines’. Rolle complained that ‘the strain of preaching in many places is well known to be less practicall, earnest and searching, but more obscure than it hath some times been’.73

[Rolle], Sober Answer, sigs [A7v–A8r]. Patrick, Friendly Debate, pp. 36, 42, 44, 47. ‘’Tis an uncharitable censure of the Nonconformists, by the Author of the Debate, that they do not preach obedience to the Moral Law, as well as Faith in Christ; and the Duties of the Second Table of the Law, as well as of the First’ [Norton], Humble Apology, p. 77. 69 On balance the use of labels like ‘latitudinarian’ obscures more than it illuminates. Contemporaries did see affinities – sometimes signalled by terms like ‘rational divines’ – between a number of younger anglican divines writing on these themes, such as Edward Fowler, Patrick, Parker, etc., but there were numerous cross-currents that complicate any simple notion of an ecclesiastical party; see John Spurr, ‘“Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration Church’, H.J., 31 (1988), 61–82; Jon Parkin, ‘Liberty Transpros’d in Andrew Marvell and Samuel Parker’, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. W. Chernaik and M. Dzelzainis (1999), p. 272. 70 [Norton], Humble Apology, p. 70 [in the persona of the conformist questioner]; cf. Friendly Debate, pp. 173–7. 71 Parker, Reproof, p. 56; also see Parker, Defence and Continuation, pp. 161–5. 72 Patrick, Friendly Debate, pp. 85–6, 92–3. 73 [Rolle] Sober Answer, sig. [A8r]. 67 68

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John Norton contrasted the ‘Jingling’, the ‘Rational Philosophical’ and the ‘Rational scriptural’ ways of preaching. His preference was for the third with its ‘Reasons out of Scripture, and Testimonies from Scripture’, and its welltried formula of ‘Doctrine, Reason and Use’.74 To emphasize the predominantly spiritual issues at the heart of this debate, and to stress the role of vocabulary, is not to diminish the significance of political realities. They repeatedly intrude into the debate and they too are linguistic: nonconformists called Parker an Erastian and a Hobbist, Patrick a persecutor and a bigot – ‘the author of the Debate hath endeavoured with his Sparks of Wit and Fire, to inflame light-headed and hot-headed Persons, (if it be possible) to make a combination contrary to … the great Law of Love and Peace, the Act of Oblivion’.75 Was it ‘seasonable’, asked the Humble Apology, to publish the Friendly Debate just as king and parliament were considering comprehension?76 For Parker, nonconformist fears of scandal and cries of persecution rang hollow: ‘this is but seizing upon words, and forcing them to sound or signifie anything to your own purpose’.77 To the churchmen, ‘scandal’, ‘impositions’, ‘persecution’ and ‘conscience’ were all examples of the way that nonconformists abused words. ‘It may as well be call’d Pride, Ignorance, Passion, Humour, Peevishness, Melancholy, Rudeness, Frenzy and Superstition, as Conscience; for whenever a mans mind is possest or abused with any of these unhappy positions, that to him is his Conscience.’78 ‘Christian liberty is but a Phrase and signifies nothing,’ pronounced Patrick.79 Whether in theology or political theory, the crux was this alleged ‘power to appropriate new names to things’.80 The sovereign can decide on ceremonies without trespassing on the conscience of his subjects, just as he can define the meaning of obscure words or ambiguous phrases: ‘that is the parallel of our Case, viz. That whereas these men have from time to time and at all times raised such prodigious yells and clamours of Conscience against the determination of significant Ceremonies, ’tis enough to shew that their signification is of the very same use and nature with that of words.’81 Much of the argument was about how language moved people to action. Preaching was a case in point. Eachard devoted a large part of his Letter to the ‘harsh metaphors, childish similitudes, and ill applied tales’ that had disfigured preaching over the last century. Others pointed directly at nonconformist preachers ‘squeeking, and roaring beyond the example of 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

[Norton], Humble Apology, pp. 65–7. [Norton], Humble Apology, sig. A4r. [Norton], Humble Apology, p. 147. Parker, Reproof, p. 86. Parker, Reproof, p. 88. Continuation, p. 432; also see Edward Fowler, Libertas Evangelica (1680), pp. 220–5. Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, p. 460; Marvell, Prose Works, I, 52. Parker, Reproof, p. 213. 247

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any Lunatick’.82 The ‘conformist’ in Patrick’s Friendly Debate stated the issue precisely: I have been taught, that there are two wayes to come at the Affections: One by the Senses and Imagination; and so we see people mightily affected with a Puppet-play, with a Beggar’s tone, and with a lamentable Look, or anything of the like nature. The other is, by the Reason and Judgment; when the evidence of any Truth convincing the Mind, engages the affections to its side, and makes them move according to its direction. Now, I believe your Affections are moved in the first way very often; by melting Tones, pretty Similitudes, riming Sentences, kind and loving Smiles, and sometimes dismally sad Looks; besides several Actions or Gestures which are very taking. And the truth is, you are like to be moved very seldom in our Churches by these means. For the better sort of Hearers are now out of love with these things: nor do they think there is any power either in a puling and whining, or in roaring and tearing voice. But if you can be moved by such strength of reason, as can conquer the Judgment, and so pass to demand submission from the Affection; you may find power enough (I think) in our Pulpits.

Patrick’s conformist explains that the ‘Passions thus excited’ through the senses are bestial: ‘for one may be affected, whether he will or no by Objects of Sense: but Reason convinces and moves us by sober consideration, and laying things seriously to heart’. Those unmoved by the preaching of conformists should consider whether the cause was not their own failings: ‘That you took no pains with your self; i.e. you would not be a Man, but was contented to be moved in Religion like a meer Puppet, whose motions depend upon the power of other Agents, and not its own.’83 Would that matters were so simple, with reason stacked against imagination, logic against rhetoric, anglican against dissenter. In reality all controversialists sought to manipulate their readers through appeals to the senses and imagination – and none more so than Simon Patrick. One of the best instances is Patrick’s decision to use the dialogue form in The Friendly Debate – ‘in which way of writing (they [the nonconformists] say) a witty man may make anything look as uncouth and ridiculous as he pleases’.84 Patrick candidly explained how the dialogue aided the realism of his account and prevented his readers falling asleep. As a format it allows an author to invest characters with personality and to dramatise the process of persuasion; for example, Patrick’s nonconformist complains that he is not being allowed his turn to speak, stumbles in his replies, and at several points concedes ground with a piteous ‘I am ashamed’. This formula of free-flowing colloquial prose allowed for digressions and sudden changes of tack, and its dynamism 82 83 84

Free and Impartial Inquiry, p. 119. Patrick, Friendly Debate, pp. 15–16. Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, p. xv. 248

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disguised for the most part the dull trading of quotations and authorities that constitutes the matter of the book and its sequels. Patrick’s adversaries found his manner of writing as infuriating as his quotation of unrepresentative puritan writings, distortion of their opinions, and other misrepresentation. One complained that Patrick’s style of writing ‘might better become some Ecclesiastical Hudibras; a Ben-Johnson, a Doctor of the Stage, than a Rabbi, or a grave Doctor of the Church’.85 ‘You might have considered the temper of the age you live in,’ remonstrated another, ‘which is almost all froth, Air, humor, Droll, Hudibras feathers, yea alamode of France, you might as well persuade men to drink more, who are drunk already, as perswade an age to be more merry then it is, which is already almost mad with mirth’.86 A third, John Owen, drew a parallel between Patrick’s dealing with the nonconformists and Aristophanes’ treatment of Socrates in The Clouds. ‘Sundry’ Athenians, wearied by his example of and exhortation to ‘Uprightness’ and ‘Integrity’, contrived to ruin Socrates. They hired ‘poor, witty’ Aristophanes to write his comedy ‘wherein Socrates is introduced and personated, talking at as contemptible and ridiculous rate, as any one can represent the Non-Conformists to do; and yet withal to commend himself as the only man considerable amongst them’. The playwright’s skill, the ‘Elegancy of words, and Composure of his verses, with such a semblance of relating the words and expressing the manner of Socrates’, carried all before them. The people were ‘pleased and tickled with the ridiculous Representation … wherein there was much of Appearance and nothing of Truth’. In due course Socrates was charged with ‘Non-conformity, or that he did not comply with the Religion which the Supream Magistrate had enacted’. As Owen stressed, this was a public-relations exercise: ‘Without some such preparation of the peoples minds, his enemies thought it impossible to obtain his Persecution and Destruction; and they failed not in their Projection.’87 In vain did Owen assert that the real ‘cause under contest’ in his own day had nothing to do with expression or language, when it was apparent to all that these controversies were preoccupied with how words can arouse passions, how language can sway affections, and with the power of ridicule, satire and wit.88

[Norton], Humble Apology, p. 35; cf. Patrick, Appendix, p. 120. [Rolle], Sober Answer, sig. B2. 87 Owen, Truth and Innocence, pp. 48–9. Aristophanes on Socrates is also cited by W. S., An Answer to Two Letters, pp. 62–3. Owen’s interpretation is disputed in Parker, Defence and Continuation, pp. 171–80, 740–5 (this latter section by Simon Patrick). 88 Owen, Truth and Innocence, p. 60. 85 86

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IV ‘The great design’ of your pamphlet, Eachard was told, ‘is to magnifie your own way of talking (or Wit as you call it)’.89 ‘Wit’ was a motif of Restoration culture, yet it was too much a part of that evanescent ‘genius of the age’ to which Parker appealed, too bound up with prevailing tastes, attitudes and arguments, to be neatly pinned down.90 It has affinities with scepticism, with moral and political suppleness, and with individuals – Halifax, Nedham, Dryden, Rochester, Hobbes – who refuse to be pigeon-holed. Leaving aside its more directly literary characteristics, its relationship to ‘fancy’ and the imagination, which are more properly the province of the playwrights, critics and poets, the aggressive wit that we encounter in controversial pamphleteering was associated with knockabout ‘raillery’ and ‘poor, pitiful and spightful’ abuse. This mocking wit created a looking-glass world that outraged some. ‘Making a man ridiculous, it concludes him at the same time unworthy,’ spluttered the whig lawyer Thomas Hunt, ‘and to confute the most avowed Truths, there needs no more than to raise a fit of laughter upon it; which has the same effect with the men of wit, and their vain admirers, as reducing a false proposition to an absurdity: Thus the reason of this Age is governed by our risibility.’91 Risibility was what sold in Charles II’s England: ‘True it is that Sportiveness and Drollery is so much the humour of the times, that if you had written after another fashion, some hundreds of Copies might have lain upon the Booksellers hands.’92 It was a robust, teasing, way of writing, distinct from the poetic or conversational wit of courtiers and the comedy’s ‘gay couples’, but still a broad enough category to embrace the burlesque of Hudibras, the free form comedy of the Rehearsal Transpos’d, and the ‘smart Ironicks, scornful invectives, facetious sarcasmes and satyricisme’ with which Eachard had turned ‘Divinity into drollery’.93 Wit of this kind could excuse itself as satire. There is nothing ‘in my book that bites, but only the Truth’, Patrick told his critics; anything sharp that it contained ‘was only to give you a quicker sense of your errors’. His dialogue continues, Answer to Two Letters, p. 35. Parker, Preface, sig. A2. On ‘this monstrous witty age’ see Spurr, England in the 1670s, pp. 102–10, and my further planned writings on the seventeenth-century history of wit. Much can be learned from, among others, Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits. Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007); Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars. Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford, 2008); D. J. Milburn, The Age of Wit 1650–1750 (New York: Macmillan, 1966); John Sitter, Arguments of Augustan Wit (Cambridge, 1991). 91 Thomas Hunt, Mr Hunt’s Postscript (1682), pp. 16–17. 92 W. S., An Answer to a Letter of Enquiry (1671), p. 79. 93 D. I., Hieragonisticon (1672), p. 13. 89 90

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N[on]-C[onformist]. You can make smooth and handsome Apologies for any thing. But study as long as you will to blanch the matter, they will believe your tooth is black: and that your voice may indeed be the voice of Jacob, but your hands the hands of Esau: as hairie and rough as a Satyre. C[onformist]. You are marvellously witty. And as I have heard you commend a sanctified wit, so it seems there is a sanctified scurrility: and one of you may rail with good Approbation, provided he do it in Scripture phrases.94

This exchange is a nice example of wit discussing wit. As so often, wit is its own vehicle: one does not advertise or promote wit, one demonstrates it. ‘Wit is not a thing to be studied or learnt; men lose it (as is apparent by this man) in seeking for it; and while they labour to be facetious they become ridiculous.’95 Wit was a self-regarding exercise and an inordinate amount of time was spent being witty at the expense of those who mistakenly thought they were witty. These and other passages cruelly expose the dangers of falling into error. There were so many ways to be cheated: ‘there is a blustering Language which looks like Rhetorick, ridiculous Conceits which make a show of Wit’.96 Wit was vulnerable to partisan (mis-) interpretation: ‘You shall hear them call that Salt and Smartness of wit in one whom they love; which is Bitterness and jeering in him whom they hate. And that passes for innocent Mirth and Pleasantness in one of their party; which is Levity and Frothiness in one of ours.’97 Just as there was room for argument about which parties and writers possessed wit or the talent to use it, there was debate over where and when it was an appropriate tactic. Tongue-in-cheek ‘advice for some of the clergy ... written on the occasion of the Second Part of the Rehearsal Transpos’d’, counselled them to withdraw ‘into privacy, and retirement; for the sea is too rough for them’: if a clergyman takes on the ‘sects’ he will be charged as an enemy to religion; and he will only provoke the railers and jesters if he reprehends ‘the pretended Wit, and Wits of the age, with spirit and smartness, and endeavours to render the drollers and buffoons odious and contemptible, as they deserve’.98 Nonconformists would often disdain wit as the last refuge of a desperate cause. But then they were repeatedly told that wit was not their metier; or accused of being in denial about their secret inclination towards it:

Patrick, Continuation, p. 77. There are allusions here, too, to the distinct Juvenalian and Horatian traditions of satire. 95 Patrick, A Further Continuation, pp. 384–5. 96 Patrick, A Further Continuation, sig. xxi. 97 Patrick, Continuation, p. 70. 98 An Apology and Advice for Some of the Clergy (1672), pp. 11, 3, 4. 94

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N[on]-C[onformist]. We do not regard Wit, nor pretend to it. C[onformist]. It is not because you do not love it. For according to the Proverb; John would wipe his Nose if he had it. N.C. There is wit in picking a lock; but it is better to let it alone. And therefore I will not vie Proverbs with you. C. You are just like the Gentlemen we are speaking of, who do things and know it not: nay then do them, when they say they will not.99

Nonconformists did, of course, dally with wit. Robert Wild the poet and Vincent Alsop, presbyterian pastor and controversialist, the ‘main witmonger’ of the dissenters in the 1680s, were indisputably witty on the page.100 Above all, Andrew Marvell took the nonconformist cause into new controversial territory. It was alleged that the nonconformists, finding Parker’s case unanswerable, resorted to humour: he that could not be disputed and argued out of his assertion, must now be laughed and jested out of it; what the grave Doctor could not do, the Jester is set on to Essay, the Jack-Pudding is set up in the Room of his Master, and the Monkey ‘tis hoped may once again prove the abler Physician. From sober words it’s come to downright raillery, and him whom they could not fairly conquer, yet at least they’l curse and scould at.101

Wit was to be found in pens not parties. As a literary quality and a controversial strategy it challenged and confused the ideological categories of Restoration England: on account of his literary style Eachard was accused by one anglican of being simultaneously ‘a Bartolomean-Gentleman’ and ‘some a la mode Spark’.102 There was something both competitive and collaborative about witty writing: like the alehouse or dinner-table group composition that was such a feature of lampoons, libels and satires in this period, the pamphleteers needed their antagonists to egg them on. They were literary brawlers; they were duellists. Anthony Wood reported that the ‘pen-combat’ between Parker and Marvell was managed with ‘smart, cutting and satyrical wit on both sides’. In the final analysis, Parker ‘thro’ too loose and unwary Patrick, Continuation, pp. 86–7. See George Southcombe, ‘“A Prophet and a Poet Both!”: Nonconformist Culture and the Literary Afterlives of Robert Wild’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010), 249–62; idem (ed.), English Nonconformist Poetry, 1660–1700 (3 vols, 2012), I, xviii-xxi. (I am grateful to Grant Tapsell for alerting me to these references.) Vincent Alsop, AntiSozzo (1675), sig. A5r, alludes to ‘the Kennels and Common Sewers of Friendly Debates, Ecclesiastical Politicians’ and the like. However, Wood, who thought Alsop (mistaking his first name) ‘did put in very eagerly to succeed Marvell in buffoonery’, did not find his wit convincing: Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, IV, cols 232–3. 101 Free and Impartial Inquiry, p. 34. 102 Hieragonisticon, p. 65 (the reference is to the expulsion of nonconforming ministers from their livings on St Bartholomew’s day (24 August), 1662). 99

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handling of the debate (tho’ in a brave, flourishing and lofty stile) laid himself too open to the severe strokes of his snearing adversary’. But it was ‘a perfect trial of each others skill and parts in a jerking, flirting way of writing, entertaining the reader with a great variety of sport and mirth, in seeing two such right cocks of the game so keenly engaging with sharp and dangerous weapons’.103 The free spirit that was the essence of wit also raised the prospect of some unholy alliances. In his 1672 Preface to Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication, Samuel Parker invoked the spectre of nonconformity combining with atheism and irreligion to bring down the Church: fanaticism and atheism in combination were like ‘the mixture of Nitre mixed with Charcoal, it carries all before it without Mercy or Resistance’. The crowded picture that he conjures is of presumptuous nonconformists in the coffee houses laughing at the Church of England because they expect Charles II to abandon it; of atheists drinking and exercising their wit on the clergy, the ‘black coats’; and of ‘crafty and sacrilegious statesmen’ or politicians. At the root of all this is diabolic pride.104 In the early 1670s many readers could readily fill in the blanks and supply the names of suspect politicians and courtiers, those behind the Declaration of Indulgence, for instance. The duke of Buckingham, who knew nothing of the secret French negotiations, was just such a dangerous wit, libertine and enemy to parliaments in the eyes of those parliamentarians who attacked him in the winter of 1673–4. The king and nation were in danger, said William Russell M.P., ‘from a knot of persons that meet at the duke’s, who love neither morality nor Christianity, who turn our saviour and parliaments into ridicule, and contrive prorogations’. Robert Sawyer thundered against ‘this new light, a thing called wit, is little less than fanaticism, one degree below madness: of Democritus’s family, he laughs always at all religion and true wisdom’.105 ‘I am represented as a constant companion of drolls and lampoons and as one that abuses all serious things,’ lamented Buckingham in his draft defence; but the only ‘grave things’ he had deliberately ridiculed were ‘grave follies’ in the belief ‘that some follies are more foolish for being grave’.106 Laughing at the clergy was Buckingham’s forte. The interests of the wit and the nonconformist converged in anticlericalism. The witty gentleman never refers to ‘a Paltry Parson’ ‘but with the deepest accent of scorn and Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, IV, col. 231. Parker, Preface, sigs d4, e, e6. Parker was repeatedly accused of drolling on religion, see Insolence and Impudence Triumphant (1669). 105 A. Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, from the year 1667 to the year 1694 (10 vols, 1763), II, 257. 106 A. Pritchard, ‘A Defence of His Private Life by the Second Duke of Buckingham’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 44 (1980–1), 169; on Buckingham using ‘some well placed nonsense’ in the House of Lords to thwart the episcopal-Cavalier alliance, see Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration, ed. Milton and Milton, pp. 88, 372. 103 104

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disdain’.107 ‘Good morrow Parson, if the word Parson be humoursomly and slurringly pronounced’ is accounted very funny by those with pretensions to wit, reported Eachard; and they go into a rapture whenever they ask ‘how Mrs Parson did’.108 The wits want us to ‘confess we have been fools all this while, and miserably bewitched into vain hopes, by the charming voices of a company of crafty Priests’.109 The bishops were the subject of particular hatred: the attacks were personal and lurid – ‘in faith erroneous, and in life profane / These hypocrites their faith and linen stain’ – and sought to make them ‘odiously ridiculous’ (as Marvell reported of Buckingham’s sallies).110 One response to Eachard dwells upon the ‘atheistically disposed’ enemies of the Church, who beneath their mask of outward conformity ‘laugh at all things sacred’ and seek to wound religion through the sides of the bishops.111 Anglican authors routinely alleged that nonconformists fostered anticlericalism by casting aspersions against the conforming clergy.112 The dissenters were indeed fond of blanket denunciations – ‘the Pride of the Clergy (with their Covetousness) hath for above twelve hundred years been a greater plague for the Church throughout the Christian world than all the cruelties of the Laity’ – and saw little reason to moderate this view when it came to their own contemporaries – ‘for it is these Sons of the Horsleech, whose voice is give, give, that will never be contented with a single Portion’.113 Sneering at the established Church and its idle avaricious clergy had become habitual. Robert Wild welcomed the 1672 Indulgence with a prediction: Their Church shall be the Mother, ours the Nurse. Peter shall preach, Judas shall bear the purse. No Bishops, Parsons, Vicars, Curates, we But only Ministers desire to be. We’l preach in Sackcloth, they shall read in Silk. We’l feed the Flock, and let them take the Milk.114

Clement Ellis, The Gentile Sinner (Oxford, 1661), p. 35. Eachard, Some Observations, p. 182. 109 Clement Ellis, The Vanity of Scoffing (1674), p. 7. 110 The Loyall Scot, lines 170–1 (The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (2003; rev. edn, 2007), p. 408); Patrick, Friendly Debate, p. 235. 111 A Vindication of the Clergy (1672), pp. 100–1: ‘they fear not to revile Gods highest Priests, to deride, slander and lampoon the most renowned Prelate, even when he hath his most solemn audience, when he is delivering his Embassie from the great Monarch of Heaven, to his Vicegerent here on Earth’. This allusion to an episcopal sermon before the king has yet to be traced. 112 Patrick, Friendly Debate, pp. 156–8, 187, on the mocking use of ‘parson’. 113 Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, ed. N. H. Keeble and G. F. Nuttall (2 vols, Oxford, 1991), II, 78 (783: 1671); John Humfrey, Peaceable Design (1675), pp. 75–6. 114 Robert Wild, Dr Wild’s Humble Thanks for His Majesties Gracious Declaration for Liberty of Conscience (1672). 107 108

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And while Marvell’s deadpan recommendation of the Bible to the clergy, ‘Tis a very good book, and if a man read it carefully, will make him much wiser’, was a joke (if not a particularly good one), it speaks volumes of the way that wits and nonconformists conspired to represent the anglican clergy.115 Laughing at the clerical profession was only the tip of an iceberg of impiety. ‘There was never any other Age, in which sacred and serious things have been so rudely and impudently assaulted by the prophane abuses of Jesters and Buffoons,’ protested Joseph Glanvill. ‘We are Wits upon terms more generous, and more easie’ than our predecessors: We see the folly and ignorance of our fore-fathers; and laugh at the Tales with which crafty Priests abused their easiness, and credulity. Spiritual substance! Immortal souls! Authority of Scripture! Fictions, Ideas, Phantomes, Jargon: Here is demonstration against the spiritual Trade and spiritual men. The rest of the work is for Songs and Plays; for the wit and humour of agreeable conversation. Thus far we are come, and the infection spreads; so that there is scarce a little vain Thing that hath a mind to be modish, but sets up for a derider of God, and of Religion; and makes a scoff of the most serious thoughts, and profession of the wisest men of all Ages. Heaven and Hell are become words of sport, and Devils and Angels, Fairyes and Chimeras: ‘tis Foppish to speak of Religion, but in Railery; or to mention such a thing as Scripture; except it be to burlesque and deride it.116

Burlesquing on scripture was one of the worst excesses of the wits. It ranged from straight-faced discussion of the inconsistencies and internal contradictions of Holy Writ to puerile jokes and puns. Determined scoffers often pretended to ‘explain’ the text or ‘translate’ terms: for instance, Hobbes presumes to give such unnatural explanations, descriptions, and definitions to several words and terms, which in themselves have no difficulty, as disturbs the whole Analogy of Scripture, and exposes those expressions, which are dictated by the Spirit of God, in his light and comical interpretations, to the mirth of those who are too much inclin’d to be merry with the Scripture, and to the scandal of all men who are piously affected.117

At the other end of the spectrum lay frivolous uses of holy writ such as casually remarking ‘straight is the way’ when one lost one’s way, or ‘lift up your heads, o ye gates’ when a porter was slow to answer the door.118

Marvell, Prose Works, II, 173; to be precise Marvell urges the bishops to recommend the Bible to their clergy on these grounds, which adds another layer of insult, this time to the bishops. 116 Joseph Glanvill, Seasonable Reflections (1676), ‘The sin and danger of scoffing at religion’, pp. 6–7. 117 Hyde, Brief View, p. 199. 118 Eachard, Some Observations, pp. 187–90. 115

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The witty style was a double-edged weapon when wielded in the cause of orthodoxy: religious controversialists risked causing collateral damage. Marvell, for example, pretends at one point to be concerned that the churchman Parker ‘by a perverse Wit and Representation might travesteere the Scripture, and render all the carefull and serious part of Religion odious and contemptible’.119 Yet Marvell’s critics complained of his own ‘Scripture Raillery’.120 The nonconformist John Humfrey rued that ‘Religion should be brought on as it were the Stage, and made Comical in the Friendly Debate’.121 Behind such laments lay the fear that associations would be made with the style and language of the outright opponents of religion, with that Hobbesian scoffing that many castigated as ‘an empty prophane sort of discourse, which themselves call Wit’.122 Hobbes cast a long stylistic shadow – ‘the Malmesbury stile’ was feared as much as it was applauded. In Roger Lund’s opinion, Hobbes’s ‘dissimulation, irreverent skepticism, ironic indirection and epigrammatic wit’ led many to read Leviathan as an exercise in ‘philosophic drollery’, an unsettling, if exhilarating, mixture of reason and raillery aimed at clerical and religious targets.123 When hubris tempted religious apologists to venture onto the terrain associated with wit, there was no doubt that even the most orthodox of writers was stepping out onto a dangerously icy slope. V In speculating on the significance of literary style, perspective is paramount. The coincidence of political crisis and literary style in 1672 was, on any balanced judgment, remarkable. Given the prevalent tide of anticlericalism, impiety, wit and Hobbism, reinforced by the assertiveness of protestant nonconformity and the betrayal of the Church of England by its own nursing father, Samuel Marvell, Prose Works, I, 87. [Leigh], Transproser Rehears’d, p. 144. 121 Humfrey, Case of Conscience, p. 9. 122 Sir Charles Wolseley, The Reasonableness of Scripture Belief (1672), sig. A3r–4. 123 Roger D. Lund, ‘The Bite of Leviathan: Hobbes and Philosophic Drollery’, ELH, 65 (1998), 825–55. Also see Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan. The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2007); John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture. Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and ‘Early Enlightenment’ Europe (Cambridge, 2006). On the intellectual arguments – J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken. The Church of England and its enemies 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992); idem, Republican Learning. John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003); B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England. Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998). Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment. A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780 (2 vols, Cambridge, 1991, 2000); Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson – Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge, 2006). 119 120

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Parker’s anglican nightmare vision of a descent into popery and arbitrary government through the coalescence of dissent, ‘atheists’, and Machiavellian politicians was not that far-fetched.124 Yet within a year or two the threat had receded, a cavalier-Church political alliance had emerged, and the wits and nonconformists increasingly went their separate ways. A moment had passed. And a modern scholar can remark that the Parker-Marvell exchanges of the early 1670s ‘contain little that moved the political/religious debate along’.125 But that is, perhaps, to miss some of the wider significance of these clashes, to overlook their style and resonance. ‘We still read Marvel’s Answer to Parker with Pleasure,’ remarked Jonathan Swift in 1704, ‘tho’ the Book it answers be sunk long ago’, and John Eachard had provoked numerous retorts ‘whose Memory’ were solely ‘kept alive by his Replies’.126 The pleasure is the key: the arguments may have been long overtaken, but the pleasure afforded by the style persists. This observation brings us back to the nature of a distinct literary tradition. English religious controversy had helped to forge a popular, comic, prose style over many decades – Marprelate was an obvious and acknowledged predecessor of the Restoration pamphleteers: ‘as Martyn was just such another Wit as you,’ Parker told Marvell, ‘so are you just such another fool as Martyn’.127 Thirty years later, the third earl of Shaftesbury was to remark that modern ‘Church controversy’ had adopted the form of dialogue ‘with an attempt of raillery and humour, as a more successful method of dealing with heresy and infidelity. The burlesque divinity grows mightily in vogue. And the cried-up answers to heterodox discourses are generally such as are written in drollery or with resemblance of the facetious and humorous language of conversation.’128 No writers, agreed Anthony Collins, were more prone to ‘Insult, Buffoonery, Banter, Ridicule and Irony, Mockery and bitter Railing’ than the orthodox Christian controversialists of recent decades.129 Shaftesbury developed his point in characteristically ironic tones by praising ‘the reverend authors’ who used the ‘popular style’ of ‘lay wit’: they will in time, no doubt, refine their manner and improve this jocular method, to the edification of the polite world, who have been so long seduced by the way of raillery and wit. They may do wonders by their comic muse and may thus,

Parker, Preface, sigs d4, e, e6. Gordon Schochet, whose contribution has been remarkable in rescuing figures such as Filmer and Parker from misunderstanding, comments thus in ‘Samuel Parker, Religious Diversity, and the Ideology of Persecution’, p. 136. 126 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704), An Apology. 127 Parker, Reproof, p. 96. 128 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, 1999), p. 461 (Miscellany V). 129 Anthony Collins, A Discourse concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729), p. 5. 124 125

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perhaps, find means to laugh gentlemen into their religion, who have unfortunately been laughed out of it.130

Laughing people ‘into’ or ‘out of’ their religion is where literary style has an obvious effect. Although some saw the provocation of laughter about religion as a design to ‘corrupt the heart’ rather than ‘inform the understanding’, the use of wit was a more complex matter than this stark judgment allows.131 The witty, scoffing, merry, style espoused by christians like Patrick, Parker and Eachard, and attempted by some of their adversaries and followers, exposed the verbal and rhetorical techniques of all sides, the partisan appropriation and twisting of words, the raillery, abuse and misrepresentation, and in doing so it often succeeded in rendering certain idioms rebarbative or foolish in the minds of readers or depicting some positions as out of date or un-gentlemanly in the increasingly ‘polite world’ of Restoration and Augustan England. It effectively promoted what was called the ‘test of ridicule’, the moral or aesthetic judgment that what is ugly or deformed must inevitably arouse contempt and ridicule: anything that rightminded men find ridiculous is ipso facto unworthy – as Thomas Hunt had complained. While the witty style called upon a range of affective responses it did so primarily by creating and exploiting a sense of intellectual and often social superiority in its readers. Of course, the sophisticated, rational, discerning reader implied by the witty style was often an outrageous flattery of the dull squires and clerks who actually read these tracts.132 So the next task for a modern analyst of the witty style might be to tease out in more detail the nature of the readers that this style, whether exercised in prose, poetry or on the stage, called into being. For now it must suffice to note the significance of the witty style for the nature of religious belief. Religious commitment ebbs and flows throughout English history, and while there was no long melancholy withdrawing roar in the late seventeenth century, the tide did appear to be turning, in part because of the gravitational pull of powerful intellectual forces – ancient materialism, scepticism, the new and the natural philosophies – and in part because of strong affective motivation. As yet barely grasped by scholars, the emotional forces that disposed individuals to embrace the incipient values of the early Enlightenment are

Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. Klein, p. 461. ‘Abhor all such books as turn religion into jest and mirth ... When you meet with any Book upon the Subject of Religion, that is written in a ludicrous or unserious manner; take it for granted that it proceeds from a deprav’d mind, and is written with an irreligious design. Such Books are calculated not to inform the Understanding, but to corrupt the Heart.’ Edmund Gibson, The Bishop of London’s Three Pastoral Letters (1732), p. 10. 132 As other pamphleteers observed when protesting at the posturing and pretension of the empty-headed, window-breaking, heavy-drinking, self-proclaimed ‘wits’ and ‘Hobbists’. 130 131

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many and mysterious: one significant component in creating and mobilizing such individuals is, I suggest, the style of controversy that has been discussed in this paper.133 Putting style above substance does not sever the intellectual power of the argument from its emotional punch: the two are inseparable. The purpose of this exercise has been simply to suggest that we can recover more than we have assumed of what gave past arguments some purchase on human hearts.

133 There are many ways into these questions and many components – from ‘individualism’ and ‘capitalism’ to suspicion of ‘enthusiasm’ – see Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self. Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2004) for one invigorating discussion.

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A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism under the Later Stuarts* Grant Tapsell

Twenty years ago John Morrill offered a searching and combative account of the interactions between the state Churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland under the early Stuarts in a festschrift for Patrick Collinson.1 Conrad Russell was wrong to delineate efforts to achieve English ecclesiastical hegemony across the British Isles: there was simply no court-based, Laudian plan to entrench a ‘British patriarchy’ that would subordinate the Churches of Scotland and Ireland to control from Canterbury. In keeping with Morrill’s broader thinking on ‘the British problem’, this was certainly not to deny significant and increasingly controversial interactions between the three kingdoms.2 James VI & I may not have sought a clear union of the three Churches, but he did become ‘sloppy’ about protecting the * I am grateful to John Morrill for quietly striking out with his own pen the word ‘England’ in my draft doctoral proposal, circa November 1998, and inking in ‘British monarchies’ instead. Some of the research for this chapter was undertaken during a period of leave from the University of St Andrews, partly funded internally, and partly with an Early Career Fellowship from the AHRC that I am happy to acknowledge here. I am also indebted to George Southcombe and Stephen Taylor for their comments on a draft version of this chapter. 1 John Morrill, ‘A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism under the Early Stuarts’, in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain. Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 209–37. On this theme, see also Joong Lak Kim, ‘Firing in Unison? The Scottish Canons of 1636 and the English Canons of 1640’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 28 (1998), 55–76. 2 Amongst many other works, see esp. his introductory chapters to The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context, ed. John Morrill (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 1–30, and The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 1–38. For developments in his thinking, see more recently “Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown”: Dynastic Crises in Tudor and Stewart Britain, 1504–1746 (The Stenton Lecture: Reading, 2005 for 2003) and the forthcoming version of his 2006 Ford Lectures, ‘Living with Revolution’. 261

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autonomy and equality of the state Churches beyond England as he strove for ‘congruity’.3 Charles I did not aim to impose complete uniformity of religious practice throughout the islands of Britain and Ireland, but he did have a ‘British policy’, one that placed a common stress on the discretionary powers of the crown.4 In this account, Laud aided and instructed Charles in how best to achieve his goals within each kingdom, but did not covet immediate personal powers over Scottish and Irish clergy. Furthermore, Laud’s influence beyond England varied considerably. In Ireland he enjoyed a close personal relationship with Wentworth, and could rely on active support from John Bramhall, bishop of Derry. But in Scotland he had to be ‘far more circumspect’ in his activity.5 This chapter will extend coverage of Morrill’s theme into the later Stuart period. In order to do so, two important questions will be addressed in turn. First, how much contact was there between the episcopates of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the Restoration period? And, secondly, how significant was that contact, both in terms of the wider course of public affairs and what it reveals about the thinking of those at the apex of the Restoration regime? Relatively little attention has been paid to such issues under the later Stuarts, despite the resurgence of interest in the era over the last two decades.6 This partly reflects an increasing general concern amongst early modern historians with ‘popular politics’, ‘political cultures’, and imagemaking, at the expense of high politics and ecclesiastical history.7 More specifically, it also reflects the tangled religious histories of Scotland and Ireland. As a result of the abrupt political resurrection of a presbyterian structure for the established Church after the Williamite revolution, the episcopal Restoration years could look like a violent and doomed departure from the longer-term character of post-Reformation Scottish religious affairs.8 The ‘debilitated and introverted’ Restoration Church of Ireland has also seemed pallid by comparison to vibrant new Irish protestant dissenting communities, and to the enduring numerical dominance of roman catholics, whose leaders formed ‘the Internal and Mystical Government of Ireland’, whatever the outward appearance of state-sponsored protestantism might suggest to incoming English administrators.9 Finally, from an English histoMorrill, ‘A British Patriarchy?’, pp. 218, 216. Ibid., pp. 225–6. 5 Ibid., p. 231. 6 Capped by Tim Harris’s two magisterial volumes Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (2005) and Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (2006). 7 For astringent commentary on parts of this trend, see C. S. L. Davies, ‘Representation, Repute, Reality’ [review article], E.H.R., 124 (2009), 1432–47. 8 For correctives, see Clare Jackson, Restoration Scotland 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003); Alasdair Raffe, The Culture of Controversy: Religious Arguments in Scotland, 1660–1714 (Woodbridge, 2012). 9 T. C. Barnard, ‘Protestants and the Irish Language, c. 1675–1725’, Journal of 3 4

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riographical perspective more attention has probably been paid to the post1660 relations of the Church of England with other protestant Churches in continental Europe than with her sister Churches in Scotland and Ireland, though there are signs that this is beginning to change.10 Despite these problems, we are fortunate to have substantial extant collections of relevant documents to illustrate the interactions of the three established Churches. The key Stuart satraps of Scotland and Ireland – the dukes of Lauderdale and Ormond – have left vast runs of richly revealing correspondence. So too have leading members of the episcopates of the three kingdoms, many surviving within the papers of archbishops Sheldon and Sancroft.11 Making heavy use of these papers, it will be argued in what follows that a paradox may be observed: far less concerted effort was made explicitly to render the three Stuart Churches ‘congruent’ in the Restoration period compared to the pre-civil war Caroline era; but in practice the power and influence of successive archbishops of Canterbury was actually even greater than Laud had enjoyed thanks to the relative decline in confidence and resources of the episcopal hierarchies of Scotland and Ireland. I His Majesty when he was restored to his Crown, God did assist him to restore the Bishops to their Sees, and the Churchmen to their Cures in England, Scotland and Ireland … (Edward Wolley, bishop of Clonfert, 1673)12 Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), 266; Sir William Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland... (1691; repr. Shannon, 1970), pp. 38–9. Key modern accounts of the Church of Ireland in our period include As By Law Established. The Church of Ireland Since the Reformation, ed. Alan Ford, James McGuire, and Kenneth Milne (Dublin, 1995); Toby Barnard, ‘“Almoners of Providence”: The Clergy, 1647 to c. 1780’, in The Clergy of the Church of Ireland, 1000–2000, ed. T. C. Barnard and W. G. Neely (Dublin, 2006), pp. 78–105; Kenneth Milne, ‘Restoration and Reorganisation, 1660–1830’, in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. A History, ed. Kenneth Milne (Dublin, 2000), pp. 255–97. 10 For the best recent account, see Clare Jackson ‘The Later Stuart Church as “National Church” in Scotland and Ireland’, in The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714, ed. Grant Tapsell (Manchester, 2012), pp. 127–49; and, much more briefly, Grant Tapsell, The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 177–9. 11 Although I use the original letters from Bodl., MSS Tanner throughout this chapter, useful printed collections include: The Lauderdale Papers, ed. Osmund Airy (3 vols, Camden Soc., new ser., XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVIII, 1884–5), II, app. A (‘Letters from Archbishops Sharp and Burnet to Archbishop Sheldon’); A Collection of Letters Addressed by Prelates and Individuals of High Rank in Scotland... to Sancroft Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. William Nelson Clarke (Edinburgh, 1848); The Tanner Letters. Original Documents and Notices of Irish Affairs in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Charles McNeill (Dublin, 1943). 12 Edward Wolley, Altare Evangelium. A Sermon Preached at Christ-Church in Dublin... (Dublin, 1673), p. 34 [Wing W3263]. 263

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Now this excellent government [of bishops in Scotland] is indeed restored, but alas its not animat wt the ancient spirit... hath the king and parliament restored yow only for the name of Episcopacy? (Gilbert Burnet, future bishop of Salisbury, 1666)13

Bishops were at the heart of ‘England’s troubles’, and Britain’s, throughout the seventeenth century.14 They were the basis for some of the most prominent catchphrases, conflicts, and causes célèbres of the era: ‘no bishop, no king’ (James VI & I); the Bishops’ Wars (1639–40); the trial of the Seven Bishops (1688). Charles I had died a martyr for the episcopal Church of England.15 The return of Charles II to England in 1660 foreshadowed the return of bishops in not one, but three kingdoms. This episcopal recovery was undoubtedly contested, its translation into local reality varied, and its long-term prospects uncertain, but it nevertheless featured some spectacular set pieces. On 27 January 1661, two archbishops and ten bishops were consecrated in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. The sung anthems emphasised that crown and mitre had fallen and risen together; the sermon similarly proclaimed that ‘Episcopacy is the great stabiliment of Monarchy’.16 This reassuring core message of stability was further propagated through the printed texts describing the day’s events, not least the appearance of significant numbers of nobles and vast, well-behaved crowds that were said to have displayed ‘extraordinary reverence’ to the new bishops.17 Although they could not quite match this powerful reassertion of episcopal Church government, three of the four new Scottish bishops who had earlier been consecrated in Westminster Abbey entered Edinburgh in spring 1662 ‘as Gilbert Burnet, ‘A Memorial of Diverse Grievances and Abuses in this Church’, in ‘Certain Papers of Robert Burnet, Afterwards Lord Crimond, Gilbert Burnet, Afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, and Robert Leighton, Sometime Archbishop of Glasgow’, ed. H. C. Foxcroft, in Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, II (Edinburgh, 1904), p. 342. 14 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles. Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000) tends, though, to focus more on ideas than institutions. Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State. England, Scotland, and the Union 1603–1714 (Oxford, 1987), ch. 4 (‘religious and ecclesiastical union’) is weak on the 1660s–80s. 15 The importance of the myth can be traced in Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2003), even if we now appreciate how the efforts Charles I made to save his monarchy involved compromising on bishops, to the fury of some contemporaries: Anthony Milton, ‘“Vailing his Crown”: Royalist Criticism of Charles I’s Kingship in the 1650s’, in Royalists and Royalism During the Interregnum, ed. Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (Manchester, 2010), pp. 85–105. 16 An Antheme Sung at the Consecration of the Arch-bishops and Bishops of Ireland... (1661) [Wing A3472]; Jeremy Taylor, A Sermon Preached at the Consecration of two Archbishops and ten Bishops, in the Cathedral Church of S. Patrick in Dublin, January 27. 1660 (Dublin, 1661), p. 33 [Wing T391]. 17 Dudley Loftus, The Proceedings Observed In Order to, and in the Consecration of the Twelve Bishops... (London, 1660[/1]), p. 8 [Wing L2826]. 13

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in triumph’, greeted by the lord chancellor, nobility, privy council, and city magistrates.18 Small wonder that those predisposed to dislike episcopacy were stimulated to new denunciations when they sensed the way the ecclesiological wind was blowing. According to the Scottish presbyterian Robert Baillie in June 1660: ‘It’s a scorne to tell us of moderat Episcopacy, a moderat Papacy! the world knows that Bishops and Popes could never keep caveats: The Episcopall faction... were never more immoderat than this day.’19 An independent minister in Dublin in 1660 similarly denounced prelacy as ‘the image of that beast the papacy’.20 Old habits of mind, old arguments, and old hopes and fears were inevitably central to a process of Restoration after 1660 that set so much store by recovering an old world after a period of upheaval and crisis. The continued prominence of controversial figures from the pre-civil war era naturally provided particular grounds for argument. Baillie’s anxieties in the summer of 1660 were stoked by news of the activity of Matthew Wren, bishop of Ely, ‘the worst Bishop of our age after Dr Laud’.21 Other aged bishops returned to their places at the helm of the national Churches, notably William Juxon in England, and John Bramhall in Ireland.22 For much of Charles II’s reign public affairs were dominated by clerics and laymen whose outlook had been shaped by the civil wars and interregnum. Baillie himself was one such; at the other end of the spectrum, so were Gilbert Sheldon and William Sancroft. The octogenarian bishop of Rochester, John Warner (d. 1666), was so scarred by the disruptive activity of Scottish presbyterians in the 1630s and 1640s that he left provision in his will for £80 p.a. to go to Balliol College, Oxford to support scholarships for Scots so that, as he acidly noted, ‘there may never be wanting in Scotland some who shall support the ecclesiastical establishment of England’.23 When the duke of Lauderdale (b. 1616)

Burnet’s History of My Own Time, ed. Osmund Airy (2 vols, Oxford, 1897–1900), I, 248, 251–2. The fourth bishop, Robert Leighton, avoided the ceremonial entry as ‘he hated all the appearances of vanity’. Ibid., I, 251. 19 The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1842), III, 406: Robert Baillie to earl of Lauderdale, 16 June 1660. 20 Samuel Mather, quoted in S. J. Connolly, Divided Kingdom: Ireland 1630–1800 (Oxford, 2008), p. 140. 21 Letters and Journals, ed. Laing, III, 405. 22 For searching analysis of Bramhall’s pre-civil war career, see John McCafferty, The Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland: Bishop Bramhall and the Laudian Reforms, 1633– 1641 (Cambridge, 2007). Even the eminent preacher at his funeral noted Bramhall’s great age and decline after the Restoration: Jeremy Taylor, A Sermon Preached in Christ-Church, Dublin: at the Funeral of... John, Late Lord Archbishop of Armagh (1663), p. 38 [Wing T395]. Juxon (b. 1582) has recently been described as ‘out of touch’ at the Restoration, and ‘overshadowed’ by Sheldon: Brian Quintrell, ‘William Juxon’, O.D.N.B. 23 Quoted in Edward Lee-Warner, ‘John Warner’, D.N.B. For the marquess of Atholl’s effort to solicit English support for one of his friends to gain this scholarship, see Bodl., MS Tanner 39, f. 67. 18

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was alarmed by calls from provincial synods in 1674 to call a national synod of the Church of Scotland, he chose to express that alarm in what for him was the most pointed way possible: invocation of the covenanting past. The current agitation was simply a repeat of the tumultuous petitioning of 1638: ‘I wish some may not be intending the same Play over again, but a burn’d Child dreads the fire.’24 The recent past, and its ‘British’ dimension, was ecclesiastically inescapable, sometimes in surprising and submerged ways. The pioneering work of Ken Fincham and Stephen Taylor has demonstrated that huge numbers of clerics sought episcopal ordination even during the dark days of the interregnum.25 Much of that work was undertaken by Scottish and Irish bishops, the field having been partially ceded by English episcopal death, decline, or despair. The Church of England after 1662 thus owed a significant, but rarely acknowledged, debt for its survival to clerics from beyond its territory.26 Scottish and Irish clerics would also long continue to spend time in England due to adverse conditions at home. ‘About twenty’ conscientious Scottish ministers of the Church of Scotland came to England after passage of the controversial Test Act of 1681, where Gilbert Burnet busied himself finding them employment.27 During the crisis of 1688/9 clerics were amongst the protestant exodus from Tyrconnell’s aggressively re-Catholicising regime in Ireland, notably the bishop of Kilmore, who by December 1690 was destitute in Jermyn Street, London.28 Scottish episcopal ministers who had been ‘rabbled’ out of their livings by vengeful presbyterians sent agents to lobby at the royal court.29 Some English commentators across the seventeenth century predictably expressed anxiety that English church resources (especially those in the metropolis) would fall prey to impecunious Scottish and Irish clergy.30 Nevertheless, geographical mobility was an ongoing feature of clerical life during the Restoration. Most obviously, numerous English Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, III, 52–3: Lauderdale to archbishop of Glasgow, 18 June 1674. See also ibid., II, xvi–xvii; II, ii–iii. 25 ‘Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity, 1646–1660’, in Royalists and Royalism During the Interregnum, ed. McElligott and Smith, pp. 18–43; ‘Vital Statistics: Episcopal Ordination and Ordinands in England, 1646–60’, E.H.R., 126 (2011), 319–44. 26 See the chapter by Fincham and Taylor in this volume for the activity of Scottish and Irish bishops in England during the period 1660–2. 27 Burnet’s History, ed. Airy, II, 318. For the context, see Jackson, Restoration Scotland, pp. 149–52; Gillian H. MacIntosh, The Scottish Parliament under Charles II, 1660–1685 (Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 194–7. 28 Harris, Revolution, p. 427; Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Irish Protestants and James II, 1688–90’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1992), 129–30; Bodl., MS Tanner 27, f. 231; Richard Bagwell, rev. James McGuire, ‘William Sheridan’, O.D.N.B. 29 T. N. Clarke, ‘The Scottish Episcopalians 1688–1720’, University of Edinburgh Ph.D., 1987, pp. 30–2, 55–6. 30 Levack, Formation of the British State, pp. 118–19. For resentment in Ireland about English and Scottish clerical interlopers preying on the resources of the Church of 24

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clerics gained livings and appointments in Ireland, including on the episcopal bench.31 For some, this represented being fobbed off in dead-end posts like Raphoe, ‘this bad corner of the world’, this ‘barbarous village’, or a perceived life-sentence in ‘a Bogg’; for others, a welcome escape route from their prior difficulties in the English localities.32 The ecclesiastical boundaries between the three Stuart Churches remained porous after 1660, even though there may not have been efforts as enterprising as those initiated by James VI & I to use the ecclesiastical personnel of one kingdom to improve another, notably Andrew Knox, simultaneously bishop of the Isles in Scotland and Raphoe in Ireland.33 It seems clear that high-level clerical interaction was a common, if not quite quotidian, aspect of the Restoration era. This may be further illustrated at two levels, the epistolary, and the courtly. II The letters that were written by, and often passed between, the hierarchies of the three established Churches during the Restoration were focused preeminently on rebuilding the political, social, and economic cachet that had been lost in the 1640s and 1650s. Scottish and Irish bishops faced massive problems of authority in their respective localities, and needed the help of secular government within those kingdoms if they were to survive and prosper. Lauderdale and Ormond, in particular, were deluged with sycophantic clerical praise. The former was lavishly thanked by eleven archbishops and bishops in September 1667 for his favour and care of the Church, which was crucial because ‘wee find our interest how wigorously soever imployed insufficient to prevaile’ over the forces hostile to them.34 More than a decade later, Lauderdale was still called ‘the great patron of the Ireland, see Toby Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (New Haven and London, 2003), pp. 99–100. 31 By January 1661, the re-stocked bench of twenty-one Church of Ireland bishops featured nine men born in England, as well as two Welsh and four Scots. Jackson, ‘Later Stuart Church as “National Church”’, in Later Stuart Church, ed. Tapsell, p. 129. 32 Bodl., MSS Tanner 37, f. 116: bishop of Raphoe (Ezekiel Hopkins) to Sancroft, Raphoe, 13 Aug. 1680; 36, f. 127: same to same, Raphoe, 3 Oct. 1681; ibid., 34, f. 179: Dr Robert Huntington to Sancroft, Dublin, 13 Oct. 1683 (the bog could have been a lot worse – it was Trinity College). For a cleric eager to escape Bristol, see Bodl., MS Tanner 39, f. 98. 33 James Kirk, ‘Andrew Knox’, O.D.N.B. I learned of Knox’s dual service from Alan Ford, ‘Divergent Reformations in early seventeenth-century Gaelic Scotland and Ireland’, paper delivered at the Early Modern Britain Seminar at Merton College, Oxford, 3 Nov. 2011. 34 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, II, 60: Scottish bishops to Lauderdale, Edinburgh, 16 Sept. 1667. For eleven members of the Irish episcopate similarly joining forces to praise Ormond in 1661, see Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 59. 267

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Church next under God and our Royall Master’ by a bloc of bishops.35 For his part, Ormond thanked the bishop of Meath, Henry Jones, for an eloquent sermon, and urged him to print it, whilst claiming to find the praise of his own actions, as being the ‘great Hand’ to whom the Irish Church and state owed most for its settlement ‘next and unto His Majesty’, excessive: ‘What you are pleased to say of me in your epistle to me is the only questionable parte of the worke: but if I have not been what you say, you teach me what I should be.’36 Supporters of the Churches of Scotland and Ireland appreciated that their ingratiating efforts might most effectively be pursued via powerful proxies: senior figures within the Church of England. Sheldon and Morley of Winchester took care to praise Ormond’s actions on behalf of the Church of Ireland.37 Successive strongmen at the helm of Scottish government attracted similar attention. James Sharp, archbishop of St Andrews, expressed satisfaction to Lauderdale that the duke and Archbishop Sheldon ‘keep kindnes and freedom’ at court in London, and promised ‘to further it what I can’.38 Sancroft would later receive calls from the archbishop of Glasgow openly to thank Lauderdale at court for his care of the Scottish Church at a time when visiting discontented nobles might be expected to brief the king against him.39 After Lauderdale’s political demise, and the arrival of the king’s brother, James, duke of Albany and York, in Scotland, the bishops seamlessly transferred their praise to the heir to the throne. Sancroft was told that James was continuing his father’s work and concern for the Scottish Church, and that he had redeemed the episcopal order north of the Border from contempt and ruin.40 In this particular game of call and response, the English bishops took care to reply with jointly signed letters of thanks.41 For all this apparent harmony, the interactions of the three Churches could certainly create strains and tensions. Ormond’s experiences offer a particularly good case study. His friend George Morley, bishop of Winchester, praised him as a colossus bestriding the Stuarts’ territories: ‘noe one person in any of ye 3 kingdomes is able to doe God and ye king & ye Church, and

Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, III, 175: Scottish bishops to Lauderdale, Edinburgh, 18 July 1679. 36 Henry Jones, A Sermon Preached at the Consecration of the Right Reverend Father in God Ambrose Lord Bishop of Kildare (Dublin, 1667), sigs. C[r–v]; Bodl., MS Carte 147, f. 3: Ormond to bishop of Meath (Henry Jones), 16 Aug. 1667 (copy). (Ormond’s letter was reprinted by Jones between the epistle dedicatory and the preface to his sermon.) 37 Bodl., MS Carte 45, ff. 147, 151. 38 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, I, 195: Sharp to Lauderdale, Edinburgh, 21 Apr. 1664. 39 Bodl., MS Tanner 39, f. 70. 40 Bodl., MS Tanner 35, ff. 211, 219. 41 E.g. Bodl., MSS Tanner 38, ff. 119r–v (pr. in A Collection of Letters, ed. Clarke, pp. 6–8); 37, f. 33 (pr. in ibid., pp. 10–12) 35

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ye state more service then yo[u]r Grace’.42 But if Ormond received praise from English bishops, he also had to respond to their efforts to solicit plum Irish ecclesiastical appointments for their friends.43 Such tensions went right to the top. It is particularly intriguing to see his developing relations with Sheldon as archbishop of Canterbury. In the summer of 1663, newly nominated as primate of all England, Sheldon was capable of adopting a rather high hand with regard to Irish clerical appointments, merely informing Ormond of a likely episcopal translation from Ferns and Leighlin to Bangor, and unsubtly lobbying to fill the vacancy with his own choice.44 Over the next three years, though, the tone of Sheldon’s correspondence changed to a more deferential register, with emphasis placed on early and frequent consultation across St George’s Channel: ‘I shall readily comply w[i]th y[ou] r Graces desires’.45 It was nevertheless necessary for Ormond to continue to manage Sheldon robustly. A persistent concern of the Irish chief governor was to advance deserving clerics of Irish birth – ‘yonger and very worthy men of the birth and breeding of this Kingdome’ – a cause not best served by interventions from London.46 Here epistolary skill was of great importance to a chief governor usually based in Dublin, or on his family estates in Kilkenny. In one bravura performance in January 1666, for instance, Ormond superficially acceded to Sheldon’s suggestion of promotion in Ireland being given to an English cleric, before setting out at great length the qualifications that anyone aspiring to be bishop of the diocese under discussion would require. Ormond’s implication was clear: the see needed an Irishman, and a tough one, to combat difficult local circumstances. His closing comment – ‘And so I leave that affayre entirely to your Graces direction’ – could not have been taken at face value by any able contemporary politician.47 Sheldon’s reply offered a similar mix of acknowledgment and implicit direction. After denying any partiality for the English candidate for the see, the archbishop went on: ‘as long as you have so worthy men w[i]th you, and make so very good of ye best, w[hi]ch I am confident you will ever doe, I shall endeavour to keep you free from any recom[m]endations from hence’.48 This was agreement, but conditional agreement, and very far from a patronage blank cheque.

Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 109: Morley to Ormond, Hampton Court, 24 July 1662. E.g., H.M.C., Ormonde, n.s., IV, 306–7; Bodl., MS Carte 50, f. 279. 44 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 169. 45 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 179: Sheldon to Ormond, All Souls College, Oxford, 5 Dec. 1665. 46 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 181v: Ormond to Sheldon, Dublin, 4 Jan. 1665/6 (copy). For Boyle’s similar concern to avoid losing out to London-based agendas, see H.M.C., Ormonde, new ser., IV, 194. 47 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 181: Ormond to Sheldon, Dublin, 4 Jan. 1665/6 (copy). 48 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 183: Sheldon to Ormond, All Souls College, Oxford, 13 Jan. 1665/6. 42 43

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Anglo-Scottish ecclesiastical connections could also prove double-edged. In the first years of the Restoration, Sharp had expressed reluctance to allow significant interference by the Church of England in ecclesiastical affairs north of the Border despite, or because, of his acquiescence in receiving episcopal orders at the hands of Gilbert Sheldon when he was bishop of London.49 Nevertheless, he rapidly graduated to peppering Sheldon with letters urging him to praise the activities of lay ministers of state on behalf of the Church of Scotland. In 1674, for instance, his response to co-ordinated petitions from provincial synods for the calling of a national synod – a campaign that would have undermined his own control of the Church of Scotland – was to write to Sheldon as ‘My dear Lord and brother’. Sharp raged against the ‘sones of our owne bosome who, viper lyke, seek out to destroy that quhich produced them’. Without support from England, Sharp feared imminent ruin: ‘Iff I be not supported by his Majesteis speciall favor through your Graces recommendatione I will inevitablie suffer shipwracke.’ He was also quick to couch his call to action in terms that would evoke memories of the Scottish and Irish triggers for the mid-century upheavals within England: I hope your Grace will consider your owne hazard and quhat disorders followed in England upone our distempers in Scotland. Quhen our neighbours house is on fyre it is then tyme to look to our owne.50

Warnings about likely ‘contagion’ or ‘infection’ of Church of England affairs from Scottish upheavals would frequently be used by clerics urging ecclesiastical solidarity in hostile times, and struck a chord with ‘very apprehensive’ English bishops.51 Indeed this was an even more potent theme than in the pre-war period: the hierarchy of the Church of England was only too aware of the fact that Charles II did not share his father’s whole-hearted commitment to the established Church.52 Episcopal solidarity across the three kingdoms could be a matter of political self-interest as well as charitable sentiment. Episcopal letters from the period clearly demonstrate the extent to which bishops were deeply entangled in contemporary politics. This was a matter of regret not only to many lay politicians, who directed powerful fire at

Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, I, 43; John Spurr, ‘Gilbert Sheldon’, O.D.N.B. H.M.C., Laing, I, 396: Sharp to Sheldon, June 1674. 51 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, I, 58; III, 243: archbishop of Glasgow (Burnet) to Lauderdale, London, 27 Apr. 1678. 52 Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘The Restoration Bishops and the Royal Supremacy’, Church History, 68 (1999), 549–80; Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The Politics of The Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 3. 49 50

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the whole exercise of ‘priestcraft’, but also to a number of clergy.53 Perhaps most obviously, Robert Leighton, archbishop of Glasgow, who spent years trying to retire from the high office he had reached, decried an obsessive focus on ‘our little wretched interests and humors’, the pursuit of which he thought nothing nobler than ‘a drunken scuffle in the dark’.54 He eventually retired to an English parish and a life that mixed meditation and bitter letters about the deepening failure of episcopal government of the Church of Scotland.55 For others, though, engagement with secular affairs was a natural concomitant of high office within the Church. The simultaneous holding of key offices within the state and the Church may have been a declining feature within England, after the Laudian high noon of the 1630s,56 but it remained an aspect of Scottish and Irish affairs for long after 1660. Although it did not come to pass, contemporaries fully expected a cleric to be appointed Chancellor of Scotland in 1664.57 Michael Boyle did actually spend two decades as lord chancellor of Ireland alongside his episcopal duties. His actions have attracted some sympathy from modern commentators, but faced considerable contemporary criticism, and his position was heavily based on support from Ormond, who thought him ‘a man of honour as well as piety learning and prudence’.58 Boyle’s dominance of Irish high offices led to criticism within England, especially when he was raised to the Irish primacy during the deteriorating political environment triggered by the Popish Plot, and some peers in the house of lords decried his efforts to ‘engross the great charges of Church and State in his own family’ through promoting relatives.59 But he had nevertheless recently been viewed by a commentator as well placed as the clerk of the privy council to

Justin A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992). 54 ‘Certain Papers’, ed. Foxcroft, p. 362: Leighton to Gilbert Burnet, Bradhurst, 23 Jan. [c.1681–4]; Letters and Papers, ed. Airy, III, 76: Leighton (as archbishop of Glasgow) to Lauderdale, 17 Dec. [1674]. 55 Rev. D. Butler, The Life and Letters of Robert Leighton, Restoration Bishop of Dunblane and Archbishop of Glasgow (1903), ch. XIII. 56 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Laudianism and Political Power’, in his Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans (1987), pp. 40–119; Brian Quintrell, ‘The Church Triumphant? The Emergence of a Spiritual Lord Treasurer, 1635–1636’, in The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641, ed. Julia F. Merritt (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 81–108. 57 H.M.C., Laing, I, 342. 58 H.M.C., Ormonde, old ser., II, 266: Ormond to Sir Robert Southwell, Dublin, 18 Dec. 1677. James McGuire’s account – ‘Michael Boyle’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography, ed. James McGuire and James Quinn (9 vols, Cambridge, 2009), I, 722–7 – is rather more positive than Toby Barnard, ‘Michael Boyle’, O.D.N.B. 59 H.M.C., Ormonde, new ser., V, 39: Henry Coventry to Ormond, Whitehall, 8 Apr. 1679. For Boyle’s lengthy defence of his position and actions, see ibid., V, 45. 53

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be a serious contender for the archbishopric of Canterbury after the death of Gilbert Sheldon.60 North of the Border it was widely noted that many Scottish bishops spent extended periods of time in Edinburgh rather than residing in their sees, even though the Scottish parliament met far less frequently than its English counterpart.61 For many of the ‘hard-faced, ambitious, and energetic’ men of Scottish government in the Restoration era, this was a source of regret, or outright scorn.62 The earl of Tweeddale, for one, was felt by many bishops to be too sympathetic to presbyterians, something that led to episcopal hostility during the 1670s, and his weary comment to Gilbert Burnet ‘that more than two parts in three of the whole business of the government [of Scotland] related to the church’.63 Lauderdale’s vast correspondence is particularly revealing in this regard. To key clerics – notably Sharp – Lauderdale was capable of alternating between warm support and scarcely veiled threats.64 But to lay allies the mask slipped, and mocking nicknames –‘L.F.’ for ‘longifacies’, or ‘long nez’, for Alexander Burnet, archbishop of Glasgow – were exchanged in letters marked by disdain for clerical pretension.65 Reacting to his tone, or more generally sharing his views, other Scottish politicians derided the ‘meddling’ of bishops in state affairs, or else mocked Sharp’s tendency to panic in the face of difficult events.66 The bishop of Edinburgh’s incessant efforts to ingratiate himself with the town authorities of his see, and to ameliorate excise demands from the centre, led John Drummond of Lundin – the future earl of Melfort – sneeringly to describe him as ‘Mr Pious’ or ‘Pope Pious’.67 Small wonder that the Scottish episcopate so often felt the need for support from their English counterparts. Such ties deepened across the 1680s – part, perhaps, of a wider trend that Toby Barnard has delineated of increasing imperial connections across the three kingdoms during this crucial decade.68 The Scottish bishops took to H.M.C., Ormonde, new ser., IV, 385, 388. Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, II, 114. Leighton was an exceptionally diligent figure within his dioceses: Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, VI (1939), 236; Butler, Life and Letters, esp. pp. 366–413. W. R. Foster sets the bar pretty low in order to argue that Scottish bishops discharged their diocesan duties reasonably diligently: Bishop and Presbytery: The Church of Scotland, 1661–88 (1958), pp. 36–8. 62 Ronald Hutton, Charles II: King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), p. 413. 63 Burnet’s History, ed. Airy, I, 442. 64 Contrast, for instance, Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, II, 41, and ibid., II, 171–2. 65 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, I, 248 & n. b; II, 76–7, 83, 90, 105; Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, VI, 163. 66 H.M.C., Buccleuch, II, 125; H.M.C., Laing, I, 381. 67 H.M.C., Buccleuch, II, 133, 141: John Drummond of Lundin to marquess of Queensberry, Winchester, 13 Sept. 1683, London, 3 Oct. 1683. For scurrilous popular criticism of Paterson, see Raffe, Culture of Controversy, pp. 159–60. 68 T. C. Barnard, ‘Scotland and Ireland in the Later Stewart Monarchy’, in Conquest 60 61

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sending frequent collectively signed letters to Sancroft, emphasising their close links and mutual regard – letters that were carefully reciprocated. This ‘fraternall correspondence’, as the Scots put it, was part of a lofty ideal: we shall not faile (Since the happiness of a perfect union, twixt the tuo sister Churches, in this Island, is through the unhappines and distraction of the tymes, Denyed us) by frequent Communicative Letters, to improve our mutuall affection and communication …69

Anglo-Irish links were not quite so prominent, but the archbishop of Armagh was nevertheless grateful to Sancroft for his ‘protection’ in deflecting criticism of the widespread pluralism of the Irish bench – in their eyes, an inevitable product of the extreme poverty of many of the sees: we live here at a distance from ye Court, and may be misrepresented, & perhaps to[o] much credited in such an age as this, before wee can be heard to speake for our selves; but wee are in a greate measure secured against any reall mischiefe by any untrue suggestions or surprize while wee are taken under yr Grace’s patronadge70

These archipelagic associations are again suggestive of the greater vulnerability, and decline in self-sufficiency, of the Scottish and Irish Churches over the seventeenth century. III Epistolary connections across the three kingdoms were important for the established Churches, but these were supplemented and buttressed by crucial personal contacts at the royal court. This was obviously the great clearing house of patronage, and the home of the supreme governor of the Churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Charles II was only too well aware of the attractions of access to the royal person. In his capacity as a royal chaplain, Gilbert Burnet claimed to have heard the king railing against bishops ‘for neglecting the true concerns of the church, and following courts so much, and being so engaged in parties’.71 Charles certainly entertained mordant views on what clerics really cared about. He expressed sardonic surprise in

and Union: Fashioning a British State 1485–1725, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (Harlow, 1995), p. 259. 69 Bodl., MS Tanner 37, f. 64v: 8 archbishops and bishops of Scotland to Sancroft, Edinburgh, 9 July 1680. 70 Bodl., MS Tanner 37, f. 199a: archbishop of Armagh (Boyle) to Sancroft, Dublin, 9 Nov. 1680. 71 Burnet’s History, ed. Airy, II, 28. 274

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1678 that the bishop of Rochester refused to become archbishop of Dublin and chancellor of Ireland since the post was worth £4,000 per annum: ‘he believed most Bishops would think that gain is great godliness’.72 And he was said to have rewarded a chaplain he described as a ‘blockhead’ with an Irish bishopric – part of a broader indifference to the Church of Ireland that fed Ormond’s vexation that a client of his eldest son was being run close in his race for an Irish see by ‘one of the most inconsiderable men in the Church, taking in vicars and curates’, thanks to outside influence.73 Contempt for, or indifference to, importunate clergy came easily to a man of Charles’s sardonic character, but his views were also the product of prolonged experience of clerical courtly activity. Senior clerics were amongst the most active and determined lobbyists at the Stuart court. The convocation of the Church of Ireland was not a dynamic presence in the reign of Charles II. In 1661 it nevertheless showed a clear-sighted appreciation of political reality in deputing two bishops to act as ‘procurators’ at court ‘to take care of ye interest of ye ch[urc]h’, voting a tax of £665 to support their expenses.74 Individual Church of Ireland clerics were also illusionless about where they needed to direct important appeals. Jeremy Taylor immediately recognised the degree of local hostility he faced from Scottish presbyterians in the north of Ireland, and learned that they were abstracting statements from his published works to send to ‘their agent in England’ in an effort to stymie his activity as bishop of Down and Connor. Taylor enlisted the support of Ormond to see off these endeavours.75 Clouds of place-seekers for Irish appointments certainly hovered around London. All this activity was, however, dwarfed by the systematic and sustained pressure applied by the Scottish bishops. Despite repeated flattery of Lauderdale, and thanks for his care of their interests, the Scottish bishops graduated from sending letters to London in the 1660s to appearing themselves during the 1670s and 1680s. Already by 1675 the archbishop of Glasgow could plainly tell the archbishop of St Andrews that ‘Your attendance at Court is certainly more necessary and usefull for us then your presence here’ in Scotland.76 Despite superficial appearances, this was not a back-handed compliment but a simple reflection of the power dynamic within the three H.M.C., Ormonde, new ser., IV, 149: earl of Arran to Ormond, London, 15 June 1678. Burnet’s History, ed. Airy, I, 464–5; H.M.C., Ormonde, new ser., IV, 323: Ormond to earl of Ossory, Dublin, 13 Feb. 1678/9. (Lauderdale reported Sharp’s sycophantic laughter when he joked that he would propose translating Alexander Burnet, archbishop of Glasgow, to an Irish see in order to get him out of the way in 1668: Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, VI, 163.) 74 Bodl., MS Carte 64, f. 287. (The clergy also voted a gift of £100 to Sir George Lane, Ormond’s secretary, intending half of it to cover the cost of writing and posting letters, and the other half for Lane to buy plate for himself: Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 63.) 75 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 38. 76 H.M.C., Laing, I, 406: John Paterson, archbishop of Glasgow, to Sharp, Edinburgh, 3 July 1675. 72 73

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kingdoms. Scottish bishops stayed in London for extended periods of time by the later 1670s, regularly dining at Lambeth or Fulham at the behest of the archbishop of Canterbury or bishop of London, and mingling there with the English bishops then in the capital.77 Compton was described as ‘firme as a rocke’ to the interests of the Scottish Church, and Morley was similarly described as ‘Worthy Winchester’.78 When the archbishop of Glasgow met the archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops in the spring of 1678, he was easily able to agree ‘upon the method we are to observe in our correspondence’, and confidently blessed God that ‘I find it no difficult worke to persuade them to owne and affect our interest’. This was important because, just as Jeremy Taylor had faced opposition from presbyterians in the north of Ireland with access to agents at court, so too the Scottish bishops needed to confound ‘restlesse and vigilant sollicitors, very diligent in promoting strange stories, who are severe in their reflections upon us who attend here’.79 Loitering with intent around the royal court was of course hardly a new development in the Restoration. John Maxwell, bishop of Ross, had, for instance, played a very active role dashing up and down the Great North Road to liaise about a new prayer book for Scotland in the 1630s.80 As in so many other things, Restoration practice represented an extension or intensification of pre-civil war political activity. This activity became most pointed at the very end of the 1670s and throughout the 1680s. The access that the Scottish bishops enjoyed to the corridors of power in England was greatly boosted by the time that James spent in Edinburgh during his exile from London at the height of the Exclusion Crisis.81 His support for the Scottish episcopate within Scotland was typically uncompromising and clear. In his eyes they were the guardians of the Church established by law, and thus a key support for Stuart power against anti-monarchical covenanting rebels. As the bishop of Edinburgh eagerly informed Sancroft in March 1683, James ‘so fullie understands the state of this kingdom and that the Church is so necessarie a support to the monarchie, that he openlie and upon all sutable occasions, makes our enemies know, that he looks upon all who would hurt the former as destroyers of the latter’.82 This powerful backing extended to influencing Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, III, 119, 123, 125. Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, III, 243: archbishop of Glasgow (Burnet) to Lauderdale, London, 27 Apr. 1678. 79 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, III, 244: archbishop of Glasgow (Burnet) to Lauderdale, London, 30 Apr. 1678. 80 Gordon Donaldson, The Making of the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637 (Edinburgh, 1954), pp. 41–2, 44, 47–8, 57. 81 Harris, Restoration, ch. 6; Kathleen Mary Colquhoun, ‘“Issue of the Late Civill Wars”: James, Duke of York and the Government of Scotland 1679–1689’, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Ph.D., 1993, esp. chs 2–3. 82 Bodl., MS Tanner 35, f. 211: bishop of Edinburgh (Paterson) to Sancroft, Edinburgh, 7 Mar. 1682/3. 77 78

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perceptions of the Scottish bishops in England. Although James could criticise episcopal ‘meddling’ in some of his private letters, in general he worked to deflect criticism of visits by Scottish bishops to London, and cooperated with episcopal efforts to ‘prepare’ his royal brother’s opinion over Church preferments.83 Such a close alliance with the royal family was paralleled by ongoing efforts to cultivate William Sancroft as archbishop in succession to Sheldon. As a keen student of his predecessor’s papers, Sancroft cannot have been surprised by the volume of letters he received from beyond England, especially from the archbishops of St Andrews, Glasgow, Armagh, and Dublin. These were pre-eminently concerned with gaining Sancroft’s goodwill and services as a broker at the royal court in London. When congratulating him on his rise to the English primacy, the archbishop of Dublin was careful to spell out a subservient agenda: wee who live in this North parte of ye world may perhaps bee looked upon as somewhat remoate from yr Grace’s more imediate care and consideration, But Relligion is ye Comon Interest of us all; and though wee are at some distance from ye Roote, wee are yet under ye shelter of yr Branches; and wee reckon upon yr Grace as ye Greate protector of this church under his M[ajes]ties Government …84

Such subservience became even more pointed from the Scottish episcopate after the scare they collectively received from the assassination of the archbishop of St Andrews by radical covenanters in 1679. The archbishop of Glasgow made clear his view that ‘we will undoubtedly perish’ without the support of the English episcopate, begging Sancroft for advice and assuring him that ‘your commands shall be exactly observed and obeyed’.85 It has rightly been noted that the Irish hierarchy lacked a really powerful personality at its highest levels after the death of John Bramhall in 1663 (at least until the rise of William King).86 Much the same could be said of Scotland after the death of Sharp.

H.M.C., Buccleuch, I, 190; II, 124. Bodl., MS Tanner 40, f. 188: archbishop of Dublin (Boyle) to Sancroft, Dublin, 6 Feb. 1677/8. 85 Bodl., MS Tanner 38, ff. 21, 29: 8 & 22 May 1679. 86 McGuire, ‘Policy and patronage’, pp. 118–19. For King, see Philip O’Regan, Archbishop William King of Dublin (1650–1729) and the Constitution in Church and State (Dublin, 2000); Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Context 1688–1729, ed. Christopher J. Fauske (Dublin, 2004). 83 84

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IV The Churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland evidently maintained substantial connections across the Restoration period. Large numbers of letters between clerics, and frequent meetings in London, helped to maintain a sense of common purpose in the face of opposition from protestant dissenters, catholics, and Erastians. How significant were such interactions for the course of public affairs? Powerful contemporaries were in no doubt that Scottish and Irish Church affairs mattered, and they attracted discussion across the three kingdoms. Attention has already been drawn to the hostility of some members of the English house of lords to the promotion of Michael Boyle to the archbishopric of Armagh whilst he was still chancellor of Ireland. This reflected two currents of wider political criticism. The first, well delineated by Mark Goldie, is a ‘country’ or ‘whig’ disdain for clerical pretension, in particular the extent to which bishops as members of the house of lords worked to buttress the position of favoured ministers of the crown in England like Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby.87 Criticising Boyle tapped into a long-term anti-clerical impulse. It also reflected a more specific English anxiety about the entrenchment of Stuart power in Scotland and Ireland, and the way that those countries might be used to overawe opponents of crown policy within England.88 The maintenance of crown power in an archipelagic sense had certainly always been at the forefront of Lauderdale’s mind when he dominated Scottish politics. The passage of the Scottish Supremacy Act in 1669, which allowed the crown, amongst other things, to translate or dismiss bishops at will, prompted Lauderdale’s boast to his royal master that this situation gave the king greater power than he enjoyed over the Church of England: it ‘makes you Soveraigne in the Church ... no meeting, nor Ecclesiastick Person in it, can ever trouble you more unles you please’.89 In reality, things were never quite so simple, either within Scotland or elsewhere. Archbishop Sharp was deeply troubled by the impact of the 1669 Supremacy Act on the Church of Scotland.90 According to Lauderdale’s sardonic account, as soon as Sharp saw a draft of the Act ‘he tooke the alarum wondrous haisty, and said wilde things to E[arl] of Tweeddale, that all King Henry the 8ths ten yeers’ work was to be done in 3 days, that 4 Mark Goldie, ‘Danby, the bishops, and the Whigs’, in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Oxford, 1990), pp. 75–105. 88 Tapsell, Personal Rule, pp. 159–60; George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion, and Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1660–1714 (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 109–17. 89 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, II, 164: Lauderdale to Charles II, Holyroodhouse, 16 Nov. 1669. 90 For the context, see MacIntosh, Scottish Parliament, ch. 4. 87

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lines in this act were more comprehensive than a hundred & odd sheets of H[enry] 8’. Sharp went so far as to argue that Lauderdale could not in himself exercise the royal supremacy in his capacity as high commissioner if there was not a parliament sitting, ‘for the supremacy is personal and can not be delegat’. Or else, if it could be delegated, it could only go to the archbishop of St Andrews as primate ‘to be his wicar [vicar]’.91 Efforts to re-write the bill in narrower terms were easily seen off by Lauderdale. But he was nonetheless anxious about the capacity of the Scottish bishops to appeal over his head to their southern brethren, and he urged his agent at court, Sir Robert Moray, to ‘Guard well against any assaults from the English Clergie’ – it helped that Moray was on good terms with Sheldon.92 Such fears reflected an awareness that English bishops might be nervous about a wholly untrammelled exercise of royal supremacy over the Church in Scotland as it could set a precedent for England.93 Even at a time of considerable political success for the Church of England in the early 1680s, Scottish politicians found that their efforts to get the troublesome bishop of Edinburgh transferred to Ross as a means of shutting him up excited alarm amongst the English episcopate: they were ‘allermed at the precedent’, it ‘not being for ther turne’.94 The archbishop of Canterbury did not in the end aggressively engage with the issue, but his anxiety about translating a bishop purely on the grounds of political expediency nevertheless proved frustrating to lay Scottish observers, and led the politicians to claim they would settle for getting him off the Scottish privy council.95 This incident is suggestive of the extent to which Scottish and Irish political operators recognised that they needed to handle successive archbishops of Canterbury carefully. The extent of the archbishops’ powers need not be exaggerated here, not least as Sheldon endured periods of deep royal disfavour, and virtual exile from court. But nor should we ignore the extent H.M.C., Laing, I, 372–3: earl of Tweeddale to Lauderdale, Edinburgh, 22 July 1669. Although they did not attract significant attention, efforts were made in a matter of Church discipline in 1682 to claim that ‘his Majesties power did not reach that far to medle with the power of the keys and intrinsick government of the Church’. Ibid., 425 (fragment of a diary detailing the case of Vivian Paterson, minister at Libberton). 92 Lauderdale Papers, ed. Airy, II, 152–3: Lauderdale to Sir Robert Moray, Holyroodhouse, 2 Nov. 1669. Frances Harris notes the personal strains on the Lauderdale/Moray relationship at this time, but the level of Lauderdale’s political confidence in his friend was evidently still high: ‘Lady Sophia’s Visions: Sir Robert Moray, the Earl of Lauderdale and the Restoration Government of Scotland’, The Seventeenth Century, 24 (2009), 129–55, esp. 143–9. 93 For careful discussion of the English episcopate and the supremacy, see Rose, Godly Kingship, ch. 3. 94 H.M.C., Buccleuch, II, 147: John Drummond of Lundin to marquess of Queensberry, London, 12 Oct. 1683; ibid., 146: same to same, London, 8 Oct. 1683. See also Tapsell, Personal Rule, p. 179. 95 H.M.C., Buccleuch, II, 151. 91

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to which the three episcopates worked according to certain shared goals and priorities, most importantly the defence of the Church establishments against all-comers. Sheldon is well known as a parliamentary and courtly operator, but Sancroft too maintained Lambeth as a significant headquarters for the operations of a ‘church interest’ in Restoration London, even if he proved unwilling or unable to spearhead it during the most crucial time of all over the winter of 1688–9.96 Prudent archbishops of Canterbury did what they could to pre-empt problems and likely sources of lay criticism of the established Churches across all three kingdoms. Sheldon successfully lobbied Ormond to get the Irish parliament to legislate against clerics holding livings in both Ireland and England, claiming that he had been diffident about introducing such legislation first in England for fear that critics of the Church would use it as an excuse to ‘doe more then we desire they should’.97 In the other direction, Michael Boyle carefully briefed Sancroft about the extent of episcopal poverty in Ireland in order to help him deflect English parliamentary criticism of the rampant pluralism on the Irish bench.98 For all the vulnerability of the various Church hierarchies, they were nonetheless deeply enmeshed in the parliamentary politics of their respective states, the English and Irish bishops sitting en bloc in houses of lords, the Scottish bishops playing a significant role as the first estate in Scotland, not least in helping to choose the lords of the articles who were so significant in organising and controlling parliamentary affairs north of the Border.99 Such transnational personal and political connections as existed between the three episcopates should ultimately be viewed as a mixed blessing for the later Stuart monarchs.100 At times of crisis, events in one kingdom could certainly be used to political advantage in others. When the archbishop of St Andrews was assassinated, Charles II was said to have ‘took notice’ of the ‘barbarous murder’ in the English house of lords, ‘particularly to my Lord Wharton’.101 Wharton was a former leading parliamentarian peer and ongoing sympathiser and spokesman for English nonconformists in parliament: the king’s baleful glare clearly hit a carefully chosen target in a polemical environment where the excesses of protestant zealots in 96 James Jones, ‘The Friends of the Constitution in Church and State’, in Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling, ed. Michael Bentley (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 17–33; Robert Beddard, ‘The Unexpected Whig Revolution of 1688’, in The Revolutions of 1688, ed. Beddard (Oxford, 1991), p. 44. 97 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 169: Sheldon to Ormond, Lambeth House, 22 Aug. 1663. (The legislation took time: see ibid., f. 181v, and was then tweaked by the English parliament, ibid., f. 185.) 98 Bodl., MS Tanner 37, f. 199a. 99 MacIntosh, Scottish Parliament, pp. 38–9, 48, 52. 100 For recent emphasis on issues of ‘cross-border representation and misrepresentation’ in terms of religious polemic, see Raffe, Culture of Controversy, pp. 19–20. 101 H.M.C., Ormonde, new ser., V, 88–9: Col. Edward Cooke to Ormonde, London, 10 May 1679.

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one country could be used to ram home their dangerous unreliability in another.102 Charles was also grandstanding in an English political context then enlivened by a parliamentary battle to impeach the earl of Danby, whose champions were eager to maintain the English bishops’ right to vote (in his favour), even in cases of potential judicial bloodletting.103 To draw attention to the ultimate outcome of hostility to bishops in Scotland at such a juncture was polemically powerful. Nevertheless, in other circumstances, leading figures in Scotland and Ireland could go out of their way to nerve the English episcopate to stand up to overbearing monarchical activity. During the ‘seven bishops’ crisis in the summer of 1688, the Scottish lord advocate Sir George Mackenzie took care to write with news of support for the English bishops from an unlikely quarter: Scottish presbyterians.104 As events darkened towards the end of that critical year, Sancroft received frantic calls for help from the other established Churches. The archbishop of Armagh begged for advice on how to ensure that the Church of Ireland would act in a unanimous way with the Church of England; the archbishop of Glasgow desperately sought assistance from Sancroft with the Prince of Orange to help episcopacy and episcopal ministers in Scotland.105 Sancroft’s psychological paralysis at this time meant the calls were unavailing, but they represented a natural extension of earlier contacts and dialogues between the clerical elites of three kingdoms that faced common problems, albeit mediated by different local circumstances. V In the final analysis, we lack any extensive account by Sheldon or Sancroft of how they imagined their status as archbishops of Canterbury to relate to the ‘other’ Churches established by law within the Stuart kingdoms. This lack of systematic thinking does ‘feel’ rather different to the early Stuart situation discussed by Morrill. The changed character of the relationship between the three Churches and their supreme governor was clearly crucial: Charles II simply lacked his father’s ultimately self-destructive drive to impose systems and forms on his kingdoms that would alike magnify royal authority. Instead he tended to pursue divide-and-rule schemes, promoting interactions between the kingdoms in an opportunistic way only when they served to help extricate him from political problems generated primarily

102 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Lord Wharton’, The Seventeenth Century, 18 (2003), 252–65; Sean Kelsey, ‘Philip Wharton’, O.D.N.B. 103 Goldie, ‘Danby’, pp. 90–6. 104 Bodl., MS Tanner 28, f. 113. 105 Bodl., MS Tanner 28, ff. 294, 334.

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within England.106 In such a context, Sheldon and Sancroft often needed all the allies they could get, and were helped in their pursuit of such by the weakness of the Scottish and Irish hierarchies. The upheavals of the midcentury period had eroded still further their already relatively weak positions within society and public life in general. Although Scottish bishops under the early Stuarts had not been serious rivals in terms of wealth to the senior English sees, many had nevertheless possessed significant resources.107 By the early 1670s, however, the bishop of Brechin claimed that his see was worth only around £150 p.a., and was reduced to pathetically petitioning the crown for payment of the arrears of a pension.108 Furthermore, the accidents of birth and death threw up relatively few really significant and impressive archbishops of Armagh, Dublin, St Andrews, or Glasgow to dilute or impede the practical primacy of Canterbury. Lacking extensive and programmatic documents, we must infer a good deal from the actions and incidental remarks of archbishops of Canterbury and their interlocutors. At times of pastoral difficulty, for instance, those anxious for the spiritual welfare of non-English lay peers evidently thought it appropriate to solicit the intervention of the English primate as some kind of higher authority.109 Sheldon clearly regarded himself as exercising a supervisory, or admonitory, function over senior members of the Irish clergy. After the death of Jeremy Taylor, for instance, Sheldon expressed admiration for his learning, but lamented his temper: ‘I have had till of late yeares, much to doe w[i]th him to keep him in order, and to find diversions for him.’110 Sancroft spent significant time and effort organising and expressing the English episcopate’s sense of solidarity with the Scottish bishops. The extensive correspondence between bishops across the three Stuart kingdoms, and the deepening personal contacts they maintained in London by the 1680s, all point to a good deal of de facto co-operation and shared agendas. A single monarch, usually based in London, remained the centre of political gravity – and patronage – for all three Church hierarchies. Robert Baillie’s fears in the spring of 1661 that the reintroduction of episcopacy in Scotland would bring ‘bak upon us the Canterburian tyms, the same designs, the same practises’ were natural for a man of his presbyterian beliefs, but did the activity discussed in this chapter justify his alarm about pan-Britannic ecclesiastical governance from Canterbury?111 It is tempting to dismiss Baillie as too partial an observer. One of the few scholars to inves106 I hope soon to argue this point further in relation to ecclesiastical affairs in an article on the commission for ecclesiastical promotions of 1681–4. 107 Walter Roland Foster, The Church before the Covenants: The Church of Scotland 1596– 1638 (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 43–4. 108 H.M.C., Laing, I, 385; Foster, Bishop and Presbytery, pp. 35–6. 109 Bodl., MSS Tanner 37, f. 39; 34, f. 252. 110 Bodl., MS Carte 45, f. 222: Sheldon to Ormond, 27 Aug. 1667. 111 Quoted in Jackson, Restoration Scotland, p. 107.

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tigate the relations between the Churches of England and Scotland in this period in any detail has emphasised the continuing differences in structure and worship between them, and the absence of claims for English canonical authority over the northern Church: ‘Except for the fact that it derived its episcopal succession from the Church of England, the Church of Scotland was no more Anglican than was the Church of Sweden.’112 More generally, leading historians have emphasised the extent to which England and Scotland diverged in the Restoration period, not least because of contemporaries’ awareness that ‘British’ problems resulting from close interaction might once more trigger a descent into political crisis and civil war.113 We have already seen the regret collectively expressed by many Scottish bishops that there was no ‘perfect union, twixt the tuo sister Churches, in this Island’.114 One dimension of that was the lack of a uniform liturgy for the Churches of Scotland and England: the Book of Common Prayer was only made permissible for use in family worship by the Scottish Privy Council as late as 1680.115 Visiting members of the Church of England would have found most services in Scottish churches in the 1660s and 1670s to be alien to their own religious experience. Less obvious are the often low-key divergences between the Churches of Ireland and England. Raymond Gillespie has noted, for instance, that the short prayers for everyday events such as going to bed or beginning work that are given in the Irish Book of Common Prayer after 1662 do not precisely echo those set out in the English version.116 And ongoing research into national prayers and thanksgivings suggests that although the Churches of Ireland and England promoted many of the same fast days – for instance after the plague of 1665, or the Great Fire of London – in Ireland there were no set forms of prayer for such days until the 1679 fast day to mark deliverance from the Popish Plot.117 Just as Morrill emphasised the different character of Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Irish ecclesiastical links in the pre-civil war era, so we must certainly avoid describing an un-nuanced ‘three kingdoms’ experience after 1660. Nevertheless, it is possible to conclude with more emphasis on religious contacts between England, Scotland, and Ireland, and even a sense of growing congruity in religious practice, to set alongside the political and

Foster, Bishop and Presbytery, pp. 162–73 (quote at p. 172). Notably Mark Goldie, ‘Divergence and Union: Scotland and England, 1660–1707’, in British Problem, ed. Bradshaw and Morrill, pp. 220–8. 114 Above, p. 273. 115 G. D. Henderson, Religious Life in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Cambridge, 1937), pp. 148–54. 116 Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997), pp. 21 and 36 n. 9. 117 Here I am entirely dependent on the generosity of Stephen Taylor in sharing the developing findings of the AHRC-funded project on ‘British state prayers, fasts and thanksgivings, 1540s–1940s’, hosted at Durham University. 112 113

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patronage-based engagements within the hierarchies that have been the main focus of this chapter. Again, the 1680s seem to have been particularly significant. The prominent contacts between Scottish and English bishops helped to foster anxiety in presbyterian circles that pre-civil war efforts to promote the English liturgy north of the Border might be resurrected.118 This may not have been simple paranoia. Contemporary English visitors to Edinburgh reported that ‘great numbers’ of Books of Common Prayer were being sold there in 1681, while recent scholarship has discerned increasing support for fixed forms of prayer and ceremony in several parts of Scotland at this time.119 In Charles II’s western kingdom, the long-term historical development of the Church of Ireland continued to prompt close relations with the Church of England in terms of ecclesiastical personnel, structures of ecclesiastical government, and worship. In part due to the zeal of a small number of vigorous bishops, ‘English in origin or by extraction, royalist in politics and high church in ethos’, the Restoration period witnessed significant use of the Book of Common Prayer in Ireland.120 This may have underpinned an increasing emphasis – at least in some decently documented parishes within Dublin – on frequent communion.121 That would certainly have reflected the clear and consistent pressure for the provision of regular communion in prominent Church of England settings during the 1680s that was maintained by Sancroft.122 Religious dynamics in the pre-civil war three kingdoms rested crucially on the close working relationship between an exceptionally vigorous archbishop of Canterbury, and a monarch obsessed with imposing monarchical authority. There was no re-run of this relationship after 1660. Sheldon and Sancroft were in general simply too busy rebuilding the Church of England after the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s to resurrect all of Laud’s broader ambitions and projects during the 1660s and 1670s. Charles II’s engagement with Scottish and Irish affairs was more fitful than his father’s, and his views on clerical hierarchies much less sympathetic. Paradoxically, however, clerical weaknesses, monarchical irresolution, and external threats combined by the 1680s to promote very significant and multi-faceted interactions between the three established Churches. Sancroft lacked Laud’s overtly domineering Tapsell, Personal Rule, p. 178 and the sources cited there in n. 135. Ibid., p. 179; Raffe, Culture of Controversy, pp. 50–1; Tristram Clarke, ‘Politics and Prayer Books: The Book of Common Prayer in Scotland, c. 1705–1714’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 6 (1993), 58. 120 Jim Smyth, ‘The Communities of Ireland and the British State, 1660–1707’, in British Problem, ed. Bradshaw and Morrill, p. 250; Gillespie, Devoted People, pp. 26–7, 95; Raymond Gillespie, ‘Lay Spirituality and Worship, 1558–1750: Holy Books and Godly Readers’, in The Laity and the Church of Ireland, 1000–2000: All Sorts and Conditions, ed. Raymond Gillespie and W. G. Neely (Dublin, 2002), pp. 140–6. 121 Gillespie, Devoted People, pp. 97–9. 122 Tapsell, Personal Rule, p. 126 and the sources listed there in n. 16; R.A.P.J. Beddard, ‘William Sancroft’, O.D.N.B. 118 119

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Index

absolutism 22 acts of parliament for Confirming and Restoreing of Ministers (1660)  214, 217–18 of Oblivion (1660)  247 of Supremacy [Scottish] (1669)  277 Test [Scottish] (1681)  266 of Uniformity (1662)  197, 200–1, 204–5, 208, 210, 217, 221, 224–5, 228 Adamites 17 Adamson, John  4 admonition controversy  31 Admonition to Parliament (1572) 34 Adney, George  201 n. 10 agitators 105 agrarian law  151 Agreement of the People (1647)  111, 117, 151 (1649)  123, 131 Ainsworth, Henry  40 Aishford, Thomas  217 and n. 53, 230 Alsop, Vincent  252 and n. 100 altars  7, 16, 18, 20–1, 84 Amsterdam  18, 40 anabaptists  17, 32, 38, 40–1, 45 An Anatomy of Independency... (1644) 43–4 The Anatomy of the Separatists... (1642) 19 Anderson, Alexander  217 and n. 54, 230 Andrewes, Bishop Lancelot  212 Angier, John  221–2 and n. 70 Annesley, Francis  81–2 Antapologia: Or, a Full Answer to the Apologetical Narration (1644) 45 antinomianism  45, 47–9 and n. 89, 246 Aphorisms Political ... (1659)  154, 184–5 An Apologeticall Narration ... (1643/4) 29, 31, 37–51

An Appendix to the Third Part... (1670) 241 Archer, Isaac  224 n. 82 Aristophanes  249 and n. 87 Aristotelianism  27, 30, 41, 46, 176, 179–80, 187, 189 n. 48, 190 Arlington, earl of see Bennet, Henry Arminianism 9 Arnold, Thomas  219 n. 60 Arnway, John  27–8 Art of Lawgiving (1659)  154, 184–5 and n. 33 Ashenhurst, Francis  209 n. 25 Ashley Cooper, Anthony  257–8 Ashwicken (Norf.)  61 Aspin, William  218 n. 56 Aston, Sir Thomas  14, 16, 20, 21–3 atheism  239, 253 Atholl, marquess of see Murray, John Atkins, Robert  231 Avery, William  217 n. 55 Axminster 217 Bacchanalians 17 Bacon, Francis  159 n. 40 Bacon, Sir Nathaniel  57, 75 Baillie, Robert  41 n. 58, 43, 81, 265, 281 Baker, Sir Richard  29 Balcanquhall, Walter  9, 10, 17 Baptists  47–51, 146 n. 106 Barnard, Toby  272 Barnes, Barnaby  30 Barnett, Joshua  224 Bartholomew’s Day (1662), Black see ‘Great Ejection’ Baxter, Richard  154, 170, 191, 216, 223, 241 Bayes, Robert  231 Beard, John  212 n. 35 Beaton, Nathaniel  221, 224 285

INDEX ‘beauty of holiness’  7, 84 Beier, A. L.  54 Bell, John  229 Bellarmine, Cardinal Robert  22 Bennet, Henry  242 n. 39 Berkenhead, Sir John  239 n. 27 Berrow, John  220 n. 62 Berry, Maj.-Gen. James  126 Berwick-upon-Tweed 91 Beza, Theadore  34 Bilson, Bishop Thomas  31 Birch, Joseph  218 n. 56 Bird, Widow  60 Bishops’ Wars (1639–40)  13, 23, 264 Blake, Henry  232 Blitzer, Charles  153 Blunt, John  232 Book of Common Prayer  12–14, 16, 20–1, 60, 204, 210, 219, 224–5, 228, 246, 282–3 Book of Orders (1631)  76 Book of Sports (1633)  7 Bosher, Robert  197, 226 Botelho, Lynn  73 Bowden, Joshua  217 n. 53, 230 Bowes, Richard  230 Boyle, Archbishop Michael  271 and n. 59, 273, 276–7, 279–80 Boyle, Roger  157 Braddick, Michael  24, 76 Bradshaw, John  94, 195 n. 67 Bramhall, Archbishop John  199 n. 5, 201 n. 12, 203, 207–8, 220, 242, 262, 265 and n. 22, 276 Brampton Bryan (Herefs.)  87 Brice, James 223 n. 81 Bridge, William  37, 241 n. 38 Brief Directions ... (1658) 154 A Brief Remonstrance ... (1645) 49 Briston (Norf.)  76 Bromesgrove, Walter  212 n. 35 Browne, Sir Thomas  171 n. 78 Brownists  17–18, 21, 38–9, 41, 44, 46 Bruice, William  223–4 and n. 82 Brussels  143 and n. 91 Buchanan, George  22 Buckingham, 2nd duke of see Villiers, George Buckinghamshire 216 Bullokar, John  30 Bulwer, John  95

Bunyan, John  239 n. 27, 243 Burnet, Archbishop Alexander  268, 272, 275–6 Burnet, Bishop Gilbert  264, 266, 272–3 Burroughes, Jeremiah  36, 49 Burton, Henry  7 Bury classis  223 Butler, James   263, 267–9, 271, 274 and n. 74, 279 Butler, Joane   71 Cade, Godfrey  12 Calvert, James  224 Calvin, John  29, 35–6 Calvinist  7, 9, 17, 29, 38 Cambridge 212 Cambridge University  216 Emmanuel College  224 St John’s College  203 and n. 14 Cartwright, Thomas  31–3, 35, 40 Cary, Lucius  15 The Case of the Armie Truly Stated ... (1647) 110–11 cathedrals 84 Cavendish, William  1, 5, 82–3, 91 Cawdrey, Daniel  46 Cecil, William  95–6 censorship 7 charity  53, 55, 59–62, 71, 74–5, 77–8 Charles I  1–25, 27, 29, 81–2 and n. 4, 86, 90–4, 97, 100, 102, 110, 122, 124, 130, 136, 149–51 and n. 2, 158, 178, 181, 210, 212, 262, 264 and n. 15, 268, 270, 280, 283 arse of  12 Personal Rule of (1629–40)  11, 13, 17 Charles II  1, 4, 7, 102, 175, 199–201, 210, 214–15, 218, 220, 226, 233, 250, 253, 264–5, 270, 273–4, 277, 279–80, 283–4 The Charters of London ... (1646) 115 Cheshire  13, 16, 20–2, 54 Cheshire, Thomas  20–1 Chidley, Samuel  117 n. 70 children  60–1, 68–70, 72, 83, 97, 144, 185 n. 33, 243 A Chronicle of the Kings of England ... (1643) 29 Church of England  6–7, 9, 11–16, 286

INDEX 17–22, 23–4, 30, 34, 36, 38, 152, 197–232, 239, 253, 256, 261–84 convocation 216 Cicero  155, 163–4, 178 civil wars  2, 4, 17, 23–5, 51, 76, 83, 102, 111, 124, 151–2, 156, 170, 181–2, 209, 211, 226–7, 234, 265 Clapham, Jonathan  208 n. 24 Clarendon, earl of see Hyde, Sir Edward Clarke, Canon William  20 Clarke, William  133–4 Cockeram, Henry  30 coffee house  253 Colley, William  223 n. 80 Collins, Anthony  257 Collinson, Patrick  261 Comenius, Jan  158 n. 38 commissions of array  29 Committee of Safety  195 comprehension  198, 218, 239 Compton, Bishop Henry  230, 275 The Conference of Faith ... (1644) 47–9 congregationalism  39, 45 Constable, Sir William  128 A Continuation of the Friendly Debate ... (1669) 241 Cope, George  219 n. 61 Coppe, Abiezer  87–8 Coppin, Edward  212 n. 35 corantos see newsbooks Corbet, John  9–10 Cosin, Bishop John  210 n. 31, 211, 220 and n. 64, 226 Cotton, John  37, 39–40, 44, 46, 49 Council of State  96, 130–1, 133, 135–41 and nn. 79–81, 83, 85, 145, 148–9 and n. 119 Courtman, John  224 and n. 82 Court of Chancery  124, 138 n. 71 Court of Chivalry  86 Court of Star Chamber  12 Covenant, National (1638)  9 Solemn League and (1643)  224 covenanters  8–11, 12–13, 17, 42, 91, 266, 275 Cowbridge, John  219 n. 61 Cratfield (Suff.)  73 Crofton, Zachary  208–9, 221 Cromwell, Sir Oliver  97 Cromwell, Oliver (Lord Protector)  86, 88, 96–101, 106, 112, 123–9 and

nn. 5, 7, 134–40 and nn. 56, 65, 71, 142–51 and nn. 93–4, 115, 121, 157, 160 n. 45, 166 and n. 67, 168–73, 175, 190, 214 Cromwell, Richard (Lord Protector) 175, 192 Crooke, James  212 n. 35 Cross, Francis  219 n. 59 Culmer, Richard  12 Culpepper, John  15 Daliell, Robert  74–5, 218 n. 56 Danby, earl of see Osborne, Thomas Danson, Thomas  231 Davis, J. C.  186 Davy, Robert  231 Day, George  231 declarations see proclamations A Defence and Continuation ... (1671) 242 democracy 175–96 De republica instituenda ... (1559) 30 Devon 14 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds  121 and n. 93 dictionaries 29–30 Diggers 88 Dillingham, William  224 and n. 84 The Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669/70) 242 A Discourse Showing that the Spirit of Parliaments ... (1659) 154 A Discovery of 29 Sects here in London (1641) 17 The Divisions of the Church of England ... (1642) 17 Dodd, Robert  205 n. 18 Dolben, Archbishop John  274 Dorchester  19, 54 Dorset, earl of see Sackville, Edward Dow, Christopher  7 Dowell, John  218 and n. 56 Downham Market (Norf.)  75, 77 Drummond, John  272 Dryden, John  243, 250 Dublin  269, 283 St Patrick’s cathedral  264–5 du Moulin, Peter  9 Duppa, Bishop Brian  201 n. 12, 210–11 and n. 32, 217–18 Durham  109 n. 28 cathedral 9 287

INDEX Dutch Republic  38, 98, 148 n. 115 States General of  94 Eachard, John  233, 242–3, 245–7, 250, 252, 254, 257–8 Earles, Bishop John  205 n. 17 Edinburgh  14, 208, 264, 272, 275, 283 University 74 Edward VI  21, 56 Edwards, Thomas  37 and n. 45, 38, 45, 47, 49 Elizabeth I  1, 3, 15, 21, 61, 91 Ellis, Humphrey  219 n. 60 Elwood, John  220 n. 62, 231 Ely 97 cathedral 97 Elyot, Sir Thomas  178 The English Dictionarie ... (1623) 30 An English Expositor ... (1616) 30 Enlightenment  234, 258 episcopacy  2, 10, 13–14, 18, 20–2, 31–2, 35, 39, 42, 45–7, 197–231, 264 petitions in favour of (1641–2) 13–14, 16, 21–2, 24–5 erastianism 42 Essex  24, 218 Euripides 156 Everard, Robert  111 and n. 40, 113 The Excellency of a Free State ... (1656) 153 Exclusion Crisis  23 n. 101, 275 Exeter 86 cathedral 219 excommunication  32, 40–1, 43, 50 Facye, Lewis  231 Fairfax, Sir Thomas  88, 97, 107 Fakenham (Norf.)  76 Falkland, Viscount see Cary, Lucius Familists 17 Farmer, Edward  229–30 Farringdon Within  119 Felbrigg (Norf.)  62, 64, 70–1, 76 Felgate, Samuel  204 n. 16 fen drainage  72 Fenwick, James  220 n. 62 Ferguson, Robert  243 Ferne, Bishop Henry  205 Ferrarius, Johannes  30 Fewler, Raiphe  12–13 and n. 46 Fifth Monarchists  87–8, 193

Filmer, Sir Robert  233, 257 n. 125 Fincham, Kenneth  266 and n. 26 Fink, Zera  186 Finney, Thomas  219 n. 61 Fleet, Samuel  217 n. 55 Fleming, Sir Oliver  96 Florence 178 Flower, John  218 and n. 56 Fogg, Laurence  224 Forbes, Alexander  44–5 Forced Loan (1626–8)  6 Forset, Edward  30 Foulsham (Norf.)  60, 62–3, 66, 68–9, 73, 75–7 Foundations of Freedom ... (1648) 120 Fowler, Edward  243, 246 n. 69 Fox, George  89, 97 Fox, John  13 Fowler, Stephen  223 n. 81 France 249 franchise 103–22 Frankland, Richard  220, 224 Fransham, John  69 Frewen, Archbishop Accepted  201 n. 12, 210 nn. 29, 31, 211–12 and n. 36, 217 A Friendly Debate ... (1668) 241–3, 247–8, 256 Fulham 275 Fulwar, Bishop Thomas  199 n. 5, 201 n. 12, 207–9, 226 A Further Continuation and Defence ... (1669) 241 Gangraena ... (1646) 45 Gardiner, Bishop Stephen  30 Gauden, Bishop John  205 n. 17, 207, 213, 217, 219–20, 224–6, 229 Gawdy, Sir Bassingbourne  57 General Council of the Army  105, 108, 110–13 gesture 81–102 Gidleigh, John  219 n. 61, 223 n. 80 Gillespie, George  41 n. 58, 43 Gillespie, Raymond  282 Gissing (Norf.)  62, 64, 69 Glanvill, Joseph  255 Glimpse of Syons Glory ... (1641) 49 Gloucester 92 Goffe, Maj.-Gen. William  126 Goldie, Mark  277

288

INDEX Goodman, Christopher  22 ‘Good Old Cause’  175–96 Goodwin, John  37 Goodwin, Thomas  36, 39, 43, 49 Gott, Samuel  157 Grand Remonstrance (1641)  14, 23 ‘Great Ejection’ (1662)  197, 200–1, 204–5, 211–12, 221–6, 229, 231–2, 252 and n. 102 Great Melton (Norf.)  72–3 Green, Ian  226 Gressenhall (Norf.)  64, 70 Grigg, Thomas  220 n. 62 Grindal, Archbishop Edmund  36 Guestwick (Norf.)  62, 64, 70–1 Guildford 101 Guiltcross hundred (Norf.)  76 Hacket, Bishop John  210 n. 29, 224 Halifax, marquess of see Savile, George Hall, Bishop George  199 n. 5, 221 Hammond, Henry  210, 228 Hamond, George  219 n. 60 handshake  91, 94–7 Hanworth (Norf.)  58, 62, 65, 71, 74–6 Hapton (Norf.)  58–9 Hargreaves, James  208 n. 24 Harley family  87 Harrington, James  151–73, 175–96 Harris, Edward  18 Harrison, Maj.-Gen. Thomas  143 Hartlib, Samuel  37 Harvey, William  163 n. 55 hat honour  81–2, 86–9, 92–4, 98–100, 102 Hay, John  272, 277 The Heads of the Proposals ... (1647) 107, 109–10, 123, 151 n. 2 Healey, Jonathan  78 The Healing Question ... (1656) 153 heathens 17 Heigham, Clement  211 n. 34 Heigham, John  212 n. 35 Henchman, Bishop Henry  211–12 and n. 36, 217, 226 Henderson, Alexander  41 n. 58 Henderson, Frances  133 n. 49 Henrietta Maria  2 Henry VII  161 Henry VIII  277–8 Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales  12

Henry, Philip  223–4 Henshaw, Tobias  208 n. 24 Herbert, Sir Percy  157 Herbert, Philip  86–7 Herbert, Thomas  93 Herle, Charles  40 Hertfordshire  77, 92 Heylyn, Peter  1, 4–5, 7–8 and n. 24 Hickeringill, Edmund  210 and n. 30 Hickman, William  173 n. 88 Hilgay (Norf.)  62, 65, 71–2 Hill, Francis  212 n. 35 Hirst, Derek  114, 241 n. 37 His Majesties Answer to the XIX Propositions (1642) 90 Hitherford see Rutherford, Samuel Hobbes, Thomas  156, 159 n. 39, 161, 163 n. 55, 166, 172–3, 182, 186, 188–90, 234 n. 7, 243, 250, 255–6 Hobson, Paul  49 n. 89 Holborough, Thomas  223 n. 79 Holmes, John  211 n. 34 A Holy Commonwealth ... (1659) 191 Hooke, Richard  232 Hooker, John  201 n. 10 Höpfl, Harro  182 Hopping, John  219 n. 61 Horace 151–2 Horton, George  140 n. 81 hospitality 59 Hotham, Sir John  90 Hough, Edmund  203 n. 14 House of Commons  82 and n. 4, 86, 90, 92, 94, 112–13, 148–9 see also parliament House of Lords  15–16, 81–2 and n. 4, 86, 88, 94, 106, 152, 177, 277 see also parliament Howard, Edward  243 Howe, John  214, 224 Hughes, Ann  37, 54, 120 Huguenots  9, 220 n. 64 Hull 90 The Humble Petition and Advice (1657) 123–4 and n. 5, 147, 150–1 An Humble Remonstrance To ... the High Court of Parliament (1641) 84 Humfrey, John  221–2, 242, 256 Hunt, Thomas  250, 258 Hutchinson, Col. John  97

289

INDEX Hyde, Sir Edward  15, 125 n. 7, 129 and n. 35, 214, 218–19 and n. 58, 226, 239 iconoclasm  21, 97 idolatry 12–13 independents  27, 37–45, 47–51, 53, 107, 115, 208, 221, 265 Inman, George  217 n. 55 The Instrument of Government (1653)  123–51, 153 Ionah’s Cry Out of the Whales Belly (1647) 107–8 Ipswich 84 Ireland  81, 123, 125 n. 7, 127, 129 n. 35, 139 n. 79, 142, 145, 151–2, 198, 201, 207, 262, 265, 280, 282–3 Church of  261–84 convocation 274 parliament of  279 Ireton, Henry  106, 111–12 Ironside, Bishop Gilbert  219 n. 59, 230 Isherwood, Thomas  204 n. 16 Isle of Wight  92 Jacob, Henry  40 James VI and I  21, 61, 91, 261, 264, 267 James, duke of Albany and York  268, 275–6 Janeway, James  223 n. 80 ‘Jessey congregation’  49 Jessey, Henry  146 n. 106 Jesuits  10, 20, 22 Jewell, Samuel  203 n. 14 Johnson, Francis  45 Jolliffe, James  229–30 Jones, Alexander  203 n. 14 Jones, Bishop Henry  268 and n. 36 Jonson, Ben  249 Juxon, Bishop William  201 n. 11, 205 and nn. 17–18, 212, 219–20, 265 Kahn, Victoria  172 Kelsall, John  210 n. 29 Kelsey, Lieut.-Col. Thomas  146 Kent 12 The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644)  39, 44, 49 Kidder, Richard  224–5 Kiffin, William  49–50 Kilkenny 269

King, Bishop Henry  199 and n. 5, 201 n. 12, 203, 207, 216, 218, 221, 226 King, Archbishop William  276 Kinge, Thomas  231 King’s Evil, touching for  2, 92–3 Kirshaw, John  217 n. 55 Kishlansky, Mark  2, 3, 111–13 and n. 50 Knights, Mark  120 n. 85 Knollys, Hanserd  49 Knoppers, Laura Lunger  101 Knox, Bishop Andrew  267 and n. 33 Knox, John  22 Lake, Peter  7 Lambert, Maj-Gen. John  125 n. 7, 126–7 and n. 23, 135 n. 61, 143 n. 92, 144 and n. 93, 146–7, 149 n. 119, 195 and n. 67 Lambeth  12, 275, 279 Lancashire 78 Lane, Sir George  274 n. 74 Laney, Bishop Benjamin  211–12, 217 A Large Declaration Concerning the Late Tumults in Scotland (1639) 9 Larner, William  117 latitudinarian  246 n. 69 Laud, Archbishop William  1, 7–8, 12, 17, 19–21, 82, 212, 262–3, 265, 283 Lauderdale, earl of see Maitland, John Laudian  7, 8, 12, 38, 84–5, 212, 224, 239, 261, 271 Launton (Oxfords.)  207, 227 Laurie, Bishop Robert  281 The Law of Freedom ... (1651/2) 100, 151 n. 2, 159 n. 39 Lawes, Henry  154 Lawrence, Henry (Lord President)  126, 137 Lee, Alice  60 Leiden 208 Leighton, Archbishop Robert  265 n. 18, 271–2 and n. 61 Leslie, Bishop Henry  9 Leslie, John  91 L’Estrange, Sir Roger  1, 4, 23 n. 101, 235 n. 9, 236, 239 n. 27 Lethbridge, Thomas  219 n. 61 A Letter of Enquiry into the ... Contempt of the Clergy (1670)  242, 247 Levellers  28, 88, 103–22, 179, 182, 184–5

290

INDEX Leviathan ... (1651)  159 n. 39, 166, 256 Lewis, Thomas  218 n. 56 liberty of conscience  132, 145, 240, 247 licensing (of the press)  6, 17 Lilburne, John  88, 95, 106–9 and nn. 18, 28, 114–20 and nn. 54, 66, 70, 89–90 Lisle, Thomas  75 Livesey, James  204 n. 16 Livy  187, 190 Lloyd, Bishop Hugh  199 n. 5 Locke, John  120 n. 85, 233 London  2–4, 8, 11, 12, 14–15, 24, 37, 42, 47, 49, 87, 91, 94, 99–100, 105, 107–8 and n. 22, 114–22, 126, 143, 201, 209 n. 27, 211–12, 214–16, 218, 266, 268–9, 274–7, 279, 281 Banqueting House  15–16, 98 Fourth classis  223 Great Fire (1666)  282 St James’s Palace  93 St Paul’s cathedral  211 St Sepulchre’s  20 Tower of  81–2 London’s Liberty in Chains Discovered (1646)  108, 115 Ludlam, Nathaniel  217 n. 55 Ludlow, Edmund  139 n. 79, 192 Lund, Roger  256 Mabbott, Gilbert  28 Machiavelli, Niccolò  160–1, 178, 183, 186, 190 McIntosh, Marjorie  56 and n. 8 Mackenzie, Sir George  280 Macpherson, C.B.  103, 105, 121 Maddock, James  210 n. 29 Maitland, John  41 n. 58, 263, 265–8, 272, 274, 277–8 and n. 92 Manchester classis  223 Market Deeping (Lincs.)  56 n. 8 Marprelate controversy  257 Marshall, Stephen  43 Marsilius of Padua  30–1 Marten, Henry  88 Martin, Thomas  209 n. 27 Marvell, Andrew  158, 233, 237–42 and nn. 27, 37, 252, 254–7 and n. 115 Mary Queen of Scots  29 Matteson, Christopher  229 Maxwell, Bishop John  275

Mayers, Ruth  177, 180 n. 18 Mede, Joseph  212 and n. 37 Melfort, earl of see Drummond, John Melton Mowbray (Leics.)  218 Mendle, Michael  111 Mercurius Politicus  141–3 and n. 87 Mercurius Publicus  211 Meriton, John  219 n. 60 Merriman, Capt. John  111 Messenger, Edward  61 Methwold (Norf.)  61 Middleton, John (earl of)  209 militia  136–7, 145, 172 Militia Ordinance (1642)  23 Milton, Anthony  7 Milton, John  47, 91, 94, 154, 156–7, 170, 172, 176–7, 192, 195 and n. 67, 239 n. 27 A Model of a Democraticall Government ... (1659) 181 The Moderate 28 A Moderate and Cleer Relation of the Private Soulderie ... (1648) 27 Moderation Justified (1644) 27–8 Monck, General George  192 Mon(c)k, Bishop Nicholas  205 Monmouthshire 18 Moray, Sir Robert  278 and n. 92 Morgan, George  219 n. 60 Morley, Bishop George  211, 214–15, 217–20, 226, 228, 268–9, 275 Morrill, John  4, 13, 27, 51, 54, 105, 111, 151 n. 1, 261–2, 280, 282, 284 Morton, Thomas  9–10 Mountnorris, Lord see Annesley, Francis Murray, John  265 n. 23 Musgrave, Laurence  231 Narford (Norf.)  60 Naseby, battle of (1645)  60, 112 natural law  41, 59, 107, 114 Nayler, James  149 Nedham, Marchamont  37, 141–3 and nn. 85–6, 91, 153, 176–7, 179, 182, 195 n. 67, 239 n. 27, 250 A Needful Corrective or Balance in Popular Government (1659) 193 Neile, Archbishop Neile  212 Nelson, Eric  172, 183 Netheravon 218 Netherlands see Dutch Republic 291

INDEX Newcastle, duke of see Cavendish, William Newcastle-upon-Tyne 12 New England  11, 39 The New English World of English Words (1658) 30 New Model Army  104–13 and nn. 17, 35, 37, 42, 48, 50, 117, 122–3, 126–7, 130–1 and n. 45, 133, 153 Newport (Isle of Wight)  151 n. 2 newsbooks  1, 6, 88, 98, 140–2 and n. 85, 144, 146 n. 105, 156, 180 Nicholas, Sir Edward  14, 82 n. 4 The Nineteen Propositions (1642)  23, 151 n. 2 No Peace ‘Till the King Prospers (1645) 27 Norbrook, David  173 Norfolk 53–79 Northampton 84 Northamptonshire 13 North Walsham (Norf.)  56–7, 60–3, 66–9, 73, 78 Norton, John  241, 247 Norwich  53–4, 55, 62, 69, 73, 220 Nosworthy, Edward  217 n. 53, 230 Nottingham 24 Nottinghamshire  14, 92 Nova Solyma ... (1648–9) 157 Nye, Philip  36, 39, 49 Observations ... upon Aristotles first book of political government (1654) 180 Oceana ... (1656)  151–73, 177 Oceana. The Prerogative of Popular Government (1658) 154 ordination  43, 197–232 Ormond, 1st duke of see Butler, James Osborne, Thomas  277, 280 Ousley, Ian  201 n. 10 Overton, Richard  106–8 and n. 18 Oxford  203, 207, 212 Balliol College  265 and n. 23 Christ Church  218 Christ Church cathedral  207 New College  230 University College  203 n. 14 Owen, John  242, 244 n. 52, 249 and n. 87 Palmer, Thomas  208

Panonians 17 Paris  129 n. 35, 208 Parker, Henry  19 Parker, Archbishop Matthew  31 Parker, Bishop Samuel  233, 236–7, 242–4 and n. 42, 246–7 and n. 69, 250, 252–3 and n. 104, 256–8 and n. 125 parliament  10, 12, 15, 19, 21–3, 29, 37, 42, 99–100, 102, 106–7, 109–12 and n. 34, 121, 123–4, 130–4 and nn. 45–6, 55, 137, 139, 141, 148–9, 152, 182, 221, 253 of 1625–6  6 of 1629  6 of 1654  130, 136, 142 n. 88, 146–7, 149–50 of 1658  97 Barebones (1653)  124–7 and nn. 5, 7, 8, 23, 129, 130 n. 37, 133–4 and n. 56, 139–40, 143, 144–8 and n. 93 Convention (1660)  214 elections to  104, 108–10, 114, 117, 120 Long (1640–8)  3, 13–14, 17, 19, 20, 27, 38, 47, 86–7, 124, 136, 147–8, 175 Ricardian and restored Rump (1659– 60)  175, 180–1 and n. 18, 192–3, 195 Rump (1648–53)  99, 124, 127, 129, 131, 175–6 Upper House of  86, 192 see also House of Commons; House of Lords Parthenissa (1651–6) 157 Paterson, Archbishop John  272 and n. 67, 275, 278 Patrick, Bishop Simon  233, 236, 240–9 and nn. 38–9, 69, 87, 258 Paul, Matthew  229 Peacey, Jason  140 n. 81 Peare, Richard  201 n. 10 Pearl, Valerie  119 Pembroke, earl of see Herbert, Philip Penruddock’s Rising (1655)  153 Penton, Edward  217 n. 55 Perkins, William  59 Peters, Hugh  93

292

INDEX Petty, Maximilian  105–7 and nn. 13, 18, 117 n. 70 Phillips, Edward  30 Pian Piano (1657) 154 Piers, Bishop William  199 n. 5, 201 n. 12, 203, 207, 216, 221, 226, 230 Pierson, Robert  208 and n. 23 Pincus, Steve  7 Pitminster (Somerset)  56 n. 8 Pittis, Thomas  242 plague 62 Plato 179 Plutarch 166 Pocklington, John  7–8 Pocock, J. G. A.  176, 183–4, 186 Politicaster (1659) 154 Polybius  179, 189 and n. 48 Poole, Robert  49 poor 53–80 laws (1598, 1601)  55–7 and n. 6, 79 rates 53–80 popery  10, 12, 19, 39, 41–2, 47, 239, 257 Popish Plot  271, 282 popularity  1, 4, 34, 43 Portsmouth  86 n. 20, 146 Preface to Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication ... (1672) 253 Prerogative of Popular Government (1658) 189 presbyterians  20, 22–3, 27, 31–5 and n. 22, 37–47 and n. 45, 49–51, 53, 59, 75, 115, 124, 198, 203–4, 208, 210–28 and n. 64, 230, 241, 265, 280–1, 283 press  1, 5, 7, 14, 17, 139, 158, 238, 244 Pride’s Purge (1648)  148 Prince, Thomas  117 n. 70, 119 The Princess Cloria (1661) 157 proclamations  3, 6, 10, 14, 16, 24 prophesyings 36 A Proposition In order to the proposing of a Commonwealth ... (1659) 180–1 providence  59, 74, 240 Prynne, William  214–15 Ptolemy of Lucca  178 public opinion  1–25 ‘public sphere’ 6–7 and n. 20, 47 purgatory 59 puritans  7, 12–20, 24, 34, 36, 53, 198, 208, 221, 223, 228, 234, 240 The Puritanes Impurity ... (1641) 19

Putney Debates (1647)  103, 105–8 and nn. 21–2, 110–11, 113–17, 122 Pym, John  92 Quakers  88–9, 95 quarter sessions  54, 60, 75–6, 88 Radwinter (Essex)  85 Rahe, Paul  185–6 Rainborough, Col. Thomas  105, 112–13, 116 Ranew, Nathaniel  219 n. 60 Raphoe 267 Rash Oaths Unwarrantable (1647)  109 Reading  13, 88 The Rehearsal ... (1672) 243 A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (1646) 108 A Representation from His Excellencie S. Thomas Fairfax ... (1647) 109 Reresby, Sir John  94 resistance theory  22 and n. 93 Reyner, Daniel  232 Reynolds, Bishop Edward  205, 207–8, 213, 217, 219–20, 224–6 rhetorical figures  155, 234 and n. 5, 237 n. 20 Rich, Robert  217 Ricraft, Josiah  49 Ring, George  218 and n. 56 Risley, Thomas  220 n. 62 Roberts, Jennifer  193 Roberts, Bishop William  199 n. 5, 201 n. 12, 205 n. 17 Rochester, earl of see Wilmot, John Rogers, John  193 Rolles, Samuel  216 and n. 51, 230, 241–2 and n. 39, 245–6 Roman Catholic Church  10, 35, 262 Root and Branch petitions  13, 15–16 Rota Club  181 Rothes, earl of see Leslie, John Roughton (Norf.)  74 Rous, Francis  158 Rowe, James  219 n. 61 Rowse, Margaret  61 royalism/ists  13–14, 15, 17, 23, 25, 27, 125 n. 7, 129 and n. 35, 132 n. 46, 134, 159, 167 ‘constitutional’  15, 22 royal court  90–1, 239, 273–6, 278 293

INDEX royal supremacy  20, 22, 30, 239, 278 n. 93 Scottish  277–8 and n. 91 Rumbelow, Nathaniel  217 n. 53, 230 Russell, Conrad  261 Russell, William  253 Rutherford, Samuel  41 n. 58, 47 Rutter, Bishop Samuel  205 n. 17, 209–10 and n. 29 Sackville, Edward  87 St John, Oliver  126 and n. 18, 142 nn. 88–9 Salisbury 54 Salisbury, earl of see Cecil, William Sancroft, Archbishop William  263, 265, 268, 273, 275–6, 278–81, 283–4 Sanderson, George  208 and n. 23 Sanderson, Bishop Robert  205, 207, 210, 213, 216, 220, 224, 226, 230 saturnians 17 Saunders, John  223 n. 79 Saunders, Richard  231 Savile, George  250 Savonarola, Girolamo  178 Savoy Conference (1661)  197 Sawyer, Robert  253 Schofield, R. S.  73 Scotland  2–3, 8, 11, 12–13, 21, 86, 91, 123–4 and n. 4, 127, 129 n. 35, 142–3 and n. 90, 144–5, 151–2, 198, 201, 208–9, 262, 270, 275, 280, 282–3 Church of  261–84 parliament of  3, 14, 272 Scots  3, 5, 8–13, 17, 23–4, 41, 91, 96 Scott, Jonathan  183, 186 Self-Denying Ordinance (1645)  97 Seneca  159 n. 40 sermons  6–10, 27, 53, 59, 85, 220, 246, 254 n. 111 Seven Bishops crisis (1688)  280 Seven Models of a Commonwealth (1658) 154 Severall Proceedings of State Affairs  140–2 and n. 87 Sexby, Trooper Edward  111–13 and n. 42, 116 Shaftesbury, 3rd earl of see Ashley Cooper, Anthony Sharp, Archbishop James  268, 270, 272, 274 and n. 73, 276–9

Sharpe, Kevin  2–3, 11, 101 Sheldon, Archbishop Gilbert  198, 205 n. 17, 209 and n. 27, 211–12, 216–20 and nn. 49, 57, 226–8, 263, 265, 268–70, 272, 278–81, 283 Shelton, William  203 n. 14 Sheridan, Bishop William  266 Sherlock, William  243 Sherwill, Nicholas  224 and n. 83 Ship Money  12, 76 Shropham hundred (Norf.)  76 Sidney, Sir Philip  172, 245–6 Simpson, Sidrach  36, 49 Skinner, Bishop Robert  200–1 and n. 12, 203, 207, 210, 217, 219 n. 59, 224, 226, 229 Skipper, Roger  217 n. 54, 230 Skippon, Maj.-Gen. Philip  66, 135 and n. 62, 142 n. 88 Smith, A. Hassell  57 Smith, Nigel  157 n. 32 Smithies, Isaac  212 n. 35 Sober Answer ... (1669) 241 socinians 17 Socrates  249 and n. 87 Solemn Engagement of the Army (1647) 108 Some Observations and Annotations upon the Apologeticall Narration (1644) 42 Somerset  14, 203 Sophocles 156 Southwark  12, 15 Spalding (Lincs.)  208 Sparrow, William  223 n. 79 Spier, Henry  13 Spring, Samuel  231 Staunton (Notts.)  218 Stephens, Nicholas  217 n. 53, 229–30 Sterne, Bishop Richard  205 n. 17, 211–12, 216 Steuart, Adam  42, 47 Stockport 12 Stone, Lawrence  89 Strafford, earl of see Wentworth, Thomas Strangeways, Sir John  87 Streater, John  179–80, 182 Stubbe, Henry  170, 193–4 The Stumbling Block of Disobedience and Rebellion (1658) 154 Suarez, Francisco de  22 Sussex 203

294

INDEX Sweden  134 n. 56 Swift, Jonathan  257 Swinnock, George  231 Sydserf, Bishop Thomas  199 n. 5, 201 n. 12, 207–9 and nn. 25, 27–8, 213, 218, 221, 224, 226, 229 and n. 88, 231 Sylvester, Matthew  223 and n. 78 Symonds, Samuel  219 n. 61 A System of Politics ... (written 1661) 154 The Tablet or Moderation of Charles I, Martyr (1649)  27–8 Talbot, Richard  266 taxation  53, 55–6, 59–60, 76–9, 119, 124, 153 Taylor, Bishop Jeremy  274–5, 281 Taylor, John  17–21, 85 Taylor, Stephen  266 and n. 26 Taylor, William  216 n. 49 Theophania ... (1655) 157 Thomason, George  29, 37 n. 45, 41 n. 58, 44, 108 n. 22, 129, 140 n. 81 Thorndike, Herbert  228 Thorowgood, Thomas  27–8 Thucydides 156 Thurloe, John  126, 129, 138–9, 141 n. 86, 146 n. 105 Tillotson, Archbishop John  208 and n. 24 Tilson, Bishop Henry  207 tithes 146 Toland, John  190 Tooth, Thomas  210 n. 29 tories  10, 116 Tory Reaction (1681–5)  23 n. 101 Towcester 21 treason 133 Tredwell, Tobias  217 n. 53, 230 Tweeddale, earl of see Hay, John Tyrconnell, earl of see Talbot, Richard universities 18 Valerius and Publicola (1659) 154 Vane, Sir Henry  153, 170, 193, 195 n. 67 Venice 194 ambassador of  4, 11, 98–100, 102 doge of  15 via media  33, 35, 41, 43

Villiers, George  243, 253–4 Vindiciae Clavium (1645)  46 Vine, John  217 n. 55 Virgil  154 and nn. 10, 13, 156 Vox Norwici (1646)  53, 55, 59, 76 Wales 14 Walker, Henry  138 n. 75 Wall, Daniel  231 Walton, Bishop Brian  199 n. 5, 217 Walwyn, William  107 and n. 18, 117 n. 70, 119 Ward, Bishop Seth  205, 210 n. 31 Warner, Bishop John  201 n. 12, 205 and n. 17, 210, 265 Warr, Edward  231 Warren, Erasmus  212 n. 35 Warwick, earl of see Rich, Robert Warwick, Sir Philip  87 Warwickshire  54, 76 Watson, Thomas  241 n. 38 Watts, Henry  223 n. 81 Wedderburn, James  212 and n. 37 Wendling (Norf.)  65, 69 Wentworth, Thomas  9, 13, 81–2, 86, 262 Westminster  4, 15, 24, 87, 124, 208–9, 239 Abbey  200, 207, 209, 216, 264 St Stephen’s Palace  87 Westminster Assembly  36–7 and n. 45, 41–3 West Winch (Norf.)  77 Wharton, Philip (Baron)  136–7, 279–80 whigs  7, 250, 277 Whiston, Josiah  218 n. 56 White, B. R.  49 White, Bishop Francis  7 White, Francis  108 n. 22 White, Hayden  155 n. 21, 171 Whitehall  4, 127–8, 140, 144, 218, 239 Palace of  147 Whitelocke, Bulstrode  134 n. 56 Whiteway, Richard  219 n. 61 Whitgift, Archbishop John  31, 33–6, 40 Whiting, John  217 n. 55 Whitley, Col. Roger  129 and n. 32 Wiggan, Maj. John  144–6 and n. 96 Wighton (Norf.)  62, 65, 69–70, 77 Wild, Robert  252, 254

295

INDEX Wildman, John  105–7 and nn. 13, 18, 115–16 Willes, Francis  220 n. 62 William of Orange  280 Williams, George  90 Wilmot, John  250 Wilson, Sampson  216 Wilson, Thomas  155 Windsor 93 Winstanley, Gerrard  100, 151–2 n. 2, 159 n. 39, 173 n. 88 Wirksworth classis (Derbys.)  223 Witham, Thomas  209 n. 27 Wolley, Bishop Edward  263 Wolseley, Charles  243 women  18, 23, 43, 46, 67–8, 72, 83, 87, 119 Wood, Anthony  200, 252 and n. 100 Wood, Robert  140 n. 81, 146 n. 105 Wood, William  217 n. 55

Woodford, Robert  13 Woolrych, Austin  106, 112, 139, 143 n. 92 Worcester House Conference (1660) 197, 215, 218–20 Declaration  198, 215, 219–20, 223, 225–6, 232 n. 102 Worden, Blair  157 nn. 31–2, 166 n. 67, 176 Wootton, David  178 Wray, John  223 and n. 78 Wren, Christopher  212 and n. 37 Wren, Bishop Matthew  84, 189, 201 n. 12, 203 n. 14, 212, 217, 226–7, 265 Wrigley, E. A.  73 York 15 Yorkshire  125–6 and n. 7, 203, 207 Zwicker, Steve  241 n. 37

296

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY I Women of Quality Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 Ingrid H. Tague II Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690 Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas Clare Jackson III Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 Andrew C. Thompson IV Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 Nick Harding V The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 Grant Tapsell VI Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England Jason McElligott VII The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 Politics, Culture and Ideology Gabriel Glickman VIII England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion Joseph Cope IX Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 Matthew Jenkinson X Commune, Country and Commonwealth: The People of Cirencester, 1117–1643 David Rollison XI An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain Lord Shelburne in Context, 1737–1805 Edited by Nigel Aston and Clarissa Campbell Orr

XII London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War Jayne E. E. Boys XIII God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720 Brodie Waddell XIV Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England Edited by Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter XV Common Law and Enlightenment in England, 1689–1750 Julia Rudolph XVI The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688–91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts Edited by Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor XVII The Civil Wars after 1660 Public Remembering in Late Stuart England Matthew Neufeld

NatureofEnglishRevolution_PPC 21/03/2013 13:08 Page 1

STEPHEN TAYLOR is Professor in the History of Early

Cover illustrations: Details from a print of a painted glass window of Farndon Church containing portraits of Cheshire gentlemen who attended King Charles I at the siege of Chester. Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library.

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History

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THE NATURE OF

THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION REVISITED

Taylor, Tapsell (eds)

Modern England at the University of Durham. GRANT TAPSELL is Lecturer in Early Modern History, University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor at Lady Margaret Hall.

THE NATURE OF THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION REVISITED

T

he nature of the English revolution remains one of the most contested of all historical issues. Scholars are unable to agree on what caused it, when precisely it happened, how significant it was in terms of political, social, economic, and intellectual impact, or even whether it merits being described as a ‘revolution’ at all. Over the past twenty years these debates have become more complex, but also richer. This volume brings together new essays by a group of leading scholars of the revolutionary period and will provide readers with a provocative and stimulating introduction to current research. All the essays engage with one or more of three themes which lie at the heart of recent debate: the importance of the connection between individuals and ideas; the power and influence of religious ideas; and the most appropriate chronological context for discussion of the revolution.

Edited by Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell