Westminster 1640–60: A royal city in a time of revolution 9781526112354

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. Westminster 1640–60 A royal city in a time of revolution

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J . F. M E R R I T T

Westminster 1640–60

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Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain General editors professor ann hughes p r o f e s s o r anthony milton professor peter l ake This important series publishes monographs that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in Britain between 1500 and the mid-eighteenth century. It counteracts the fragmentation of current historiography through encouraging a variety of approaches which attempt to redefine the political, social and cultural worlds, and to explore their interconnection in a flexible and creative fashion. All the volumes in the series question and transcend traditional interdisciplinary boundaries, such as those between political history and literary studies, social history and divinity, urban history and anthropology. They thus contribute to a broader understanding of crucial developments in early modern Britain. Recently published in the series

Chaplains in early modern England: Patronage, literature and religion hugh adlington, tom lockwood and gillian wright (eds) The Cooke sisters: Education, piety and patronage in early modern England gemma allen Black Bartholomew’s Day  david j. appleby Insular Christianity  robert armstrong and tadhg ó hannrachain (eds) Reading and politics in early modern England  geoff baker ‘No historie so meete’  jan broadway Republican learning  justin champion This England  patrick collinson Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and the patriotic monarch  cesare cuttica Brave community  john gurney ‘Black Tom’  andrew hopper

Impostures in early modern England: Represenations and perceptions of frauduent identities  tobias b. hug The politics of the public sphere in early modern England peter lake and steven pincus (eds) Henry Neville and English republican culture  gaby mahlberg Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum  jason mcelligott and david l. smith Laudian and Royalist polemic in Stuart England  anthony milton The later Stuart Church, 1660–1714  grant tapsell (ed.) Civic portraiture and political culture in the English local community robert tittler Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700  nicholas tyacke Charitable hatred  alexandra walsham Crowds and popular politics in early modern England  john walter Deism in enlightenment  jeffrey r. wigelsworth

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. Westminster 1640–60 A royal city in a time of revolution

. J. F. MERRITT

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © J. F. Merritt 2013 The right of J. F. Merritt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester m13 9nr, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, bc, Canada v6t 1z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for isbn 978 0 7190 9040 0 hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Scala with Pastonchi display by Koinonia, Manchester

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Contents

. list of illustrations—vii acknowledgements—ix list of abbreviations—xi Introduction

1

  1 The eye of the storm? Westminster, 1640–42 11 Before and after the Short Parliament 11 The Long Parliament 21 ‘The persecution is so fearfully cruel and hot’: Roman Catholics in Westminster 24 Religious change and radicalism 30 Public order, the trained bands and the ‘December days’ 33 The aftermath of the king’s departure 44 Conclusion 50   2 ‘The perpetual marching of troops, the ceaseless noise of drums and trumpets’: the militarization of Westminster Militarization in the 1640s The military in Westminster, 1649–60 The military and Westminster society

51 54 70 80

  3 Westminster and the state: sites and rites, 1642–60 Spectacle and display: ecclesiastical buildings Spectacle and display: secular buildings and spaces State accommodation Conclusion

93 95 116 121 130

  4 Allegiance and government, 1643–60 The peace petitions Malignants and delinquents Government by committee: the limits of local government? The purging of Westminster? Negotiating local government Incorporation: a ‘city’ at last?

133 135 143 154 162 167 171

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Contents Politics and the Abbey Conclusion

177 184

  5 Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ 186 The 1640s: wartime disruption 187 Fashionable society under the republic and protectorate 191 Elite sociability, public spaces and the limits of fashionable society 207 Conclusion 217   6 Religion, politics and society in revolutionary Westminster 219 Religious reforms 220 The limits of reform 225 Religion and the community in 1650s Westminster 234 Conclusion 258 Conclusion

259

bibliography: selected manuscript sources—264 index—268

vi

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List of illustrations

. 1 Westminster and its environs c. 1660

page 2

2 Portion of Newcourt and Faithorne’s 1658 map, showing the area around New Palace Yard and Westminster Abbey

12

3 Portion of Newcourt and Faithorne’s 1658 map, showing the area around Charing Cross and the Mews

52

4 Portion of Newcourt and Faithorne’s 1658 map, showing the Strand

94

All illustrations taken from the Newcourt and Faithorne map (Figures 2, 3 and   4) reproduced by kind permission of the Westminster Archives Centre.

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Acknowledgements

. I would like to thank the many people and institutions from whose assistance and encouragement I have benefited while writing this book. In a difficult time for libraries and archives, it has been a pleasure to have worked in places such as the Westminster Archives Centre, where Alison Kenney’s good-humoured assistance and knowledge has made it such a satisfying place to work. My research would also not have been possible without many long hours in the atmospheric surroundings of the Westminster Abbey Muniment room, in the scholarly company of Richard Mortimer, Christine Reynolds and Tony Trowles. I would also like to thank the Dean and Chapter of Westminster for allowing me to consult their Chapter act books. Staff at the London Metropolitan Archives, the British Library, the National Archives, the Bodleian Library and Cambridge University Library have all at various times proved enormously helpful. I would also like to thank Amanda Savage at Queen’s College, Oxford for facilitating access to the records of the Military Company of Westminster at short notice. I am also grateful to the History Department at the University of Nottingham and my colleagues there for their support and for a period of study leave. This was also supplemented by a term of leave awarded by the Dean’s Fund at the University of Nottingham, which enabled me to make substantial inroads into the research and writing for this book, in conjunction with financial assistance from the British Academy. Stimulating discussions and encouragement came additionally from Alan Ford, Julie Sanders and Jeremy Wood, my early modern colleagues in departments outside of History. Among historians elsewhere, references, helpful comments and invigorating conversation have been provided by Peter Lake, Ann Hughes, Ken Fincham, Andrew Foster, Lynn Hulse, Caroline Barron, Ian Archer and Vanessa Harding. Valuable comments by the anonymous readers for Manchester University Press (MUP) also greatly assisted in the final stages of writing the book. I have also been very fortunate to have had as my editor at MUP Emma Brennan, who has cheerfully and efficiently dealt with each phase of the book’s production, and Judith Oppenheimer as my eagle-eyed copy-editor. As a historian of the capital, I am always grateful to the speakers and members of the Medieval and Tudor London seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, a varied and interdisciplinary group of men and women, who keep me from viewing the early modern period in isolation. More generally, Mark Goldie, Alex Walsham, John Morrill, Martin Ingram, Lori Ann Ferrell, Cynthia Herrup and David Como have at various times very kindly offered hospitality or the opportunity to present papers relating to this research. Over the years, Lynn Hulse has provided extraordinarily generous hospitality, friendship and many a thought-provoking conversation about the broader cultural history of early modern England. Finally, I could not end this list without mentioning my husband, Anthony Milton, whose unbounded enthusiasm for this project has driven me forward and kept my

ix

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Acknowledgements own interest fresh, and whose thoughtful questions have spurred me on at exactly the right moments. This book is dedicated to him with love and thanks. JFM August 2012

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Abbreviations

. A&O

C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait (eds), Acts and ordinances of the interregnum, 1642–1660 (2 vols, 1911) Add. MSS Additional manuscripts G. Aylmer, The State’s servants: the civil service of the English Republic, Aylmer 1649–1660 (1973) Baillie Robert Baillie, Letters and journals 1637–62, ed. D. Laing (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1841–42) BL British Library Bodl. Bodleian Library Burton T. Rutt (ed.), Diary of Thomas Burton, esq. ... 1656–59 (1828) CalCAM M.A.E. Green (ed.), Calendar of the Committee for the Advance of Money (3 vols, 1888) CalCC M.A.E. Green (ed.), Calendar of the Committee for Compounding (5 vols, 1889–92) CJ Journals of the House of Commons Clarke C.H. Firth (ed.), The Clarke Papers (4 vols, 1965) CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic CSPVen Calendar of State Papers Venetian CUL Cambridge University Library D’Ewes W.H. Coates (ed.), The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, from the first recess of the Long Parliament to the withdrawal of King Charles I from London (New Haven, 1942) DUL Durham University Library DWL Doctor Williams’s Library Evelyn E.S. De Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn (6 vols, Oxford, 1955) Gardiner, HCP S.R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate 1649-56 (4 vols, Adlestrop, 1988) P. Guillery, ‘The Broadway Chapel: A Forgotten Exemplar’, London Guillery Topographical Record XXVI (1990) HL Huntingdon Library HLRO House of Lords Record Office HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission Huygens Lodewijck Huygens: the English journal 1651–1652 (Leiden, 1982) M. Jansson (ed.), Proceedings in the opening session of the Long ParliaJansson ment, the House of Commons (7 vols, Rochester, N.Y., 2000–7) Jeaffreson J.C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records vol. 3: 1625–67 (1888) Kelsey S. Kelsey, Inventing a republic. The political culture of the English commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester, 1997)

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Abbreviations Lindley Liu LJ LMA LPL Merritt Nagel ODNB PJ Rugg Shaw SL

Spraggon SRP Thurloe TNA Verney WAC WAM

K. Lindley, Popular politics and religion in civil war London (Aldershot, 1997) T. Liu, Puritan London: a study of religion and society in the city parishes (Newark, 1986) Journals of the House of Lords London Metropolitan Archives Lambeth Palace Library J.F. Merritt, The social world of early modern Westminster: abbey, court and community, 1525–1640 (Manchester, 2005) L.C. Nagel, ‘The Militia of London, 1641–49’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1982) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography W.H. Coates, A.S. Young and V. Snow (eds), The private journals of the Long Parliament 3 January to 5 March 1642 (Yale, 1982) W.L. Sachse (ed.), The diurnal of Thomas Rugg, 1659–1661 (Camden Society, 3rd ser., 91, 1961) W.A. Shaw, History of the English Church during the civil wars and under the Commonwealth, 1640–1660 (2 vols, 1900) Survey of London (London County Council, 1900–63; Greater London Council, 1966–83; Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, 1985–) J. Spraggon, Puritan iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003) Stuart royal proclamations, ed. J.F. Larkin and P.L. Hughes (2 vols, Oxford, 1973–83) T. Birch (ed.), A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe (7 vols, 1742) The National Archives, London F.P. Verney and M. Verney (eds), Memoirs of the Verney family (2 vols, 1907) Westminster Archives Centre Westminster Abbey Muniments

For printed works the place of publication is London, unless otherwise stated.

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Introduction

. T

he years between 1640 and 1660 were witness to a revolution: from the political breakdown amid popular tumults in 1640–42, civil war, the emergence of parliamentarian regimes, the second civil war and the execution of the monarch, to the republic, the protectorate, the restoration of the republic, struggles between a restored parliament and the army, and the ultimate restoration of the monarchy. Yet almost all the defining events of this dramatic period took place in just a single portion of the capital, defined by the boundaries of the town of Westminster. It was here that the royal and protectoral courts were located, that the Long Parliament and its successors met, that the king was tried and executed, and it was in its streets that rival military factions squared up to each other in the final chaotic months of 1659. While these events are famous and much-visited episodes of national history, the venue in which they took place has been curiously invisible to historians’ gaze. Yet Westminster is a very large place to have become invisible; it was by 1640 one of the most populous and influential towns in England. Part of the problem has been that, as one of Westminster’s inhabitants Thomas Fuller wrote in 1662, its proximity to London has meant that Westminster has been obscured, ‘as a proper man seemeth a Dwarfe, when placed next to a Giant’.1 But Westminster has its own history. My earlier monograph The Social World of Early Modern Westminster (2005) sought to demonstrate the importance of Westminster as an area of study in its own right. This uniquely important urban centre was one of the largest towns in early modern England, encompassing a complex local society and culture where artisans, the royal court, seasonal gentry residents, victuallers, servants and desperately poor rural immigrants lived in close proximity. The years 1640–60 span a remarkable period when national and local history became uniquely intertwined in Westminster. Never before had the country’s executive and legislative authority been so continuously resident there, and accordingly, never before had the work of government been quite so highly centralized and intensive. The state in all its changing permutations had a profound impact on all aspects of the locality, as the great spaces and buildings of Westminster came more directly under its sway, sometimes brushing aside the local community in a way that had not happened earlier, when parliaments had been intermittent events and even the royal court sometimes decamped

1 Thomas Fuller, History of the Worthies of England (1662), pt ii, 235.

1

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Westminster 1640–60

Figure 1  Map of Westminster and its environs c. 1660

from Whitehall. In addition, the public life of successive regimes was now played out in the town, and changes in national government policy (which may sometimes have had limited impact in the rest of the country) were often manifested dramatically in the streets of Westminster. If the presence of national government had a transformative effect on the town, Westminster itself sometimes shaped the nature of the political crises that happened in its midst. Westminster’s distinctiveness as a locality could potentially have significant implications for the political events that unfolded in its streets. To begin with, there was the geographical vulnerability of the area, which made it difficult to defend in times of crisis. As we will see, this could crucially affect how the crown, parliament and the protectoral regimes 2

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Introduction sought to manage their own defences, how far they were vulnerable to popular demonstrations and disorders, and how necessary it was for them to rely on the potentially inflammatory presence of garrisoned troops. This exposure to popular tumults could be exacerbated further by the weakness of local government in Westminster: its lack of a lord mayor or town council meant that decisive action could not easily be taken without explicit direction by the crown or (increasingly) by parliament, and where these two could not agree on a course of action, then it would be difficult to suppress popular demonstrations. More generally, as the various regimes chose to occupy the buildings and spaces of Westminster, so they inevitably had to adapt to the distinctive topography and institutions of the area. There was a distinctive cultural geography to contend with as well. Westminster was a centre of fashionable gentry society and elite consumerism, as well as having long been a haunt of socially elevated Roman Catholics. These forces could provide both a challenge and a spur to action and national policy formulation for incumbent regimes. Investigating the topographical and cultural context in which national government operated is also of potential value in enabling us to gain a properly integrated sense of the cultural and social politics of this period. Historical debates on the nature of military rule, parliamentary politics, the political character or culture of the interregnum regimes, or the development of fashionable society all share a principal focus on events in Westminster. The failure to establish their common topographical context, however, has led to atomized, separate historiographies, and the interplay of these different forces has therefore not been analysed. Westminster in this period was the location not only of the organs and personnel of government, but also of the military forces required to defend it, of the buildings and spaces in which its power and legitimacy were displayed, and also of the nation’s fashionable elite society. A unified, integrated study of Westminster itself can enable us to study for the first time the relationship between these different elements. To study the town of Westminster’s own experience of national government in these years it will be necessary to address the fundamental question of how this centre of monarchical government accommodated itself to the parliamentarian, republican and protectoral regimes. After all, to pre-civil war commentators, Westminster was, in contradistinction to London, the royal city, the site of Whitehall Palace and the royal courts of justice, its Abbey was the ‘house of kings’, its inhabitants were the instinctive followers of king and court. Westminster was also a locality which, contemporaries assumed, had a basic loyalty to the Stuart sovereign, and yet after January 1642 the monarch no longer resided there, and after 1649 there was no monarchy. Instead the town hosted regicidal regimes whose most prominent members occupied highly visible roles in local society and controlled its iconic buildings. How easily, then, did Westminster adapt to its new masters? Did the locality still 3

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Westminster 1640–60 remain wedded to the royalist cause, as contemporaries often suggested, or did local inhabitants adjust seamlessly to serving the new regimes? Westminster’s unique situation consistently raises the question of how, and how far, political or religious conservatism could exist near the physical heart of the interregnum regimes. The governments of this period were new and of doubtful legitimacy, and did not rest on the consent of the populace. For this reason it is particularly valuable to explore what was happening on their doorstep in religious and political terms. The control of the central spaces and organs of power was critical. The practicalities of how that space was controlled, the extent of military defence deemed necessary and how it was managed, the scale of local opposition, the degree to which conservative political and religious forces were active in the area – all can provide a sense both of how deep were the roots that interregnum regimes were able to establish and also of how far dissent could be tolerated and negotiated. This was also a time of major religious change, with the creation of an ambiguous, tolerationist Cromwellian settlement, yet we still lack any study of religious life in the area immediately around Whitehall and parliament. As we will see, conservative religious behaviour and ideas can be uncovered even in the central spaces and buildings of the interregnum government. One other distinctive feature of these years that has cried out for attention is the military occupation of Westminster, something that has been dealt with in only a fragmented way in studies of the metropolis and of national government in these years. Despite the absence of military conflict on its streets, there was a significant military presence in Westminster throughout the period. This in turn had consequences for internal Westminster politics, spilling over into the national history of the later 1640s. It also affected how regimes defended by this military presence chose to employ martial resources and symbols in their self-representation. This book will seek for the first time to assess the nature and impact of this unparalleled military presence at the heart of government. To ensure a fully integrated analysis of Westminster in these years, the ensuing book follows a largely thematic structure. After a chapter examining the complex events in the period 1640–42, when Westminster was the unwilling but crucially influential venue for the breakdown of relations between king and parliament, the following chapter traces the tensions produced by the militarization of local society through the 1640s and 1650s. This was one of the most tangible manifestations in Westminster of the revolutionary changes of these years, and it establishes the vital background for the political and cultural developments discussed in the rest of the book. Chapter 3 investigates the role that Westminster performed as both the administrative and ceremonial heart of the series of parliamentary and protec4

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Introduction toral regimes that occupied it. Chapter 4 uncovers how a town whose local government had been so closely bound up with the crown, the privy council and deans of Westminster operated in the absence of those authorities. The chapter also examines the enduring nature and prevalence of royalism within the ‘royal city’ and among local officials, including those at the heart of its powerful parishes. Chapter 5 explores one of the most distinctive aspects of Westminster’s cultural geography, the fashionable society of the West End. It reveals the tensions and contradictions involved in its perpetuation at the geographical centre of a regime bent on moral regulation and reform which actively persecuted many of elite society’s royalist denizens. The important topic of religious life in Westminster provides the focus for the final chapter and further develops the themes of cultural change and the persistence of conservatism on the doorstep of parliament in these decades. This book therefore seeks to explore how this major urban centre, the political capital of the English monarchy and site of parliaments, became the political, administrative and cultural centre of the parliamentary, republican and protectoral regimes that replaced monarchy, and how Westminster’s particular spaces and structures helped to shape political events and institutions, while also analysing the ways in which Westminster itself responded to and was changed by these events. It is intended to offer a history that draws out the dialectic between national and local history, in a place and at a time when the two were necessarily tightly interwoven, and to provide an integrated account of the problematic nature of cultural change in a time of political conflict. Understanding Westminster in the ­mid-seventeenth century To understand much of what took place in the years 1640 to 1660, it will be important to have a sense of Westminster’s distinctive urban landscape, the character of its different neighbourhoods and the nature of government and jurisdiction in the area. In 1657 the royalist James Howell sought to do precisely this in the latter sections of his study of the capital, Londinopolis. For all of his desire to magnify the importance of London in comparison with other European cities, Howell was adamant that Westminster was not only a place of major significance in its own right, but was also one that in some senses was superior to London. While Howell compared London’s Guildhall with Westminster Hall, and St Paul’s cathedral with Westminster Abbey, he confessed that London had to defer to Westminster ‘for the quality of inhabitants ... most of the Nobility and Gentry residing in, or about’ it. Most of all, though, Westminster was superior to London because it was the site of the royal court, or, as Howell was obliged to add in 1657, ‘the residence of the Sovereign Magistrate’. Westminster’s glory was thus ‘that she hath the chiefest 5

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Westminster 1640–60 Courts of Justice, the chiefest Court of the Prince, and the chiefest Court of the King of Heaven’ (Westminster Abbey, which ‘hath bin always held the greatest Sanctuary, and rendevouze of devotion of the whole Iland’).2 After some initial comments on the Duchy of Lancaster, Howell began his account of Westminster – as seventeenth-century writers usually did – at Temple Bar. This marked the boundary between the City of London and the town of early modern Westminster. It was here that James I had been welcomed into his ‘royal city’ at the end of his coronation procession through London in 1603. The king had been greeted at Temple Bar by a triumphal arch in the form of a rainbow supported on two 70-foot-high pyramids. A speech composed by the dramatist, and native of Westminster, Ben Jonson, explained that the king, having passed through ‘thy Chamber’ [i.e. London], had now arrived at ‘this place, which claimes to be the seate/ Of all thy kingly race: the cabinet/ To all thy counsels; and the iudging chayre/ To this thy speciall kingdome’.3 It was at Temple Bar, too, that great chains and posts were set across the road during the Civil War to protect the City of London. In the medieval period, the highway leading from the City of London to Westminster was already one of the most important in the capital. The road from Temple Bar, down the Strand to Charing Cross, and subsequently along King Street to Whitehall Palace, Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey, was both celebrated and satirized in the early modern period. In a time when few maps of the capital were available, most people navigated the capital’s crowded streets in terms of its notable buildings and landmarks. Yet our period saw the destruction of one of the most famous points of navigation in the capital – Charing Cross, pulled down around 1647 as a monument of superstition. A contemporary poem mischievously envisaged confused lawyers hopelessly losing their way when trying to travel from the City to the law courts at Westminster Hall.4 It is helpful to reconstruct that oft-trodden walk from Temple Bar to the heart of Westminster in order to identify the social and political spaces of the town of Westminster, some of which would undergo considerable change during our period.5 Walking from Temple Bar, a visitor would have come almost immediately to the church of St Clement Danes and, virtually adjacent to it, to Butchers Row. The latter was the legacy of a medieval policy of expelling noxious trades to places just outside the City, but in the 1650s the long-term presence of butchers in the parish of St Clement’s also provided a rationale for the new development of Clare Market. Perhaps more famously, St Clement’s 2 James Howell, Londinopolis (1657), p. 346. 3 The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C.H.H. Percy, P. Simpson and E.M.S. Simpson (11 vols, Oxford, 1925–32), VII, 106–8. 4 John Phillips, Sportive wit (1656), p. 63. 5 For information in the paragraphs that follow, see J.F. Merritt, The social world of early modern Westminster: abbey, court and community, 1525–1640 (Manchester, 2005), especially, ch. 5. See also Figure 1, p. 2.

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Introduction formed part of the legal quarter of the capital, which spilled over the boundary of the City, and its parishioners would have included men from St Clement’s Inn, Lyon’s Inn, New Inn and possibly Lincoln’s Inn, part of whose premises fell within the parish. These prosperous residents and passing trade along the highway doubtless accounted for the presence of a large contingent of tailors and shoemakers within St Clement Danes. Moving further west along the Strand, the main thoroughfare here, one soon came to Arundel House, the first of a string of aristocratic mansions lining the Strand, including Somerset House, all of which fronted the river Thames. Somerset House had been a royal property and in the early Stuart period had been refurbished for Queen Anne and then subsequently modified to include a sumptuous Catholic chapel for Henrietta Maria. In the aftermath of the king’s execution in 1649, however, like other royal properties it came into the hands of the state and its chapel, suitably altered, now provided a pulpit for radical preachers, including soldiers and women.6 Nearby, the impressive bulk of the Savoy housed a chapel that served as the parish church to the inhabitants of St Mary le Strand, whose own church had been demolished under Edward VI. Most of these mansions that lined the Strand had been the town-houses of the country’s bishops, but these had largely fallen into the hands of the aristocracy after the Reformation. Many had medieval cores and their frontage on the Strand was defensive in appearance, with gatehouses restricting access, although those along the riverside also boasted attractive, fashionable gardens running down to the Thames. One of these houses, Salisbury House, marked the boundary between St Clement Danes and the fashionable parish of St Martin in the Fields. There were further town-houses along this part of the Strand leading up to Charing Cross. By the Caroline period, these included Durham House, Suffolk House (later Northumberland House) and York House. These were prestigious, if unwieldy, properties, but their initial rationale – to accommodate the retinues of medieval bishops and magnates – meant that they contrasted markedly with the planned urban development of Covent Garden, which was built in the 1630s. This was also located in the parish of St Martin in the Fields, just to the north of the Strand, behind the earl of Bedford’s older town-house, although in the 1640s Covent Garden would finally be established as a separate parish. Here in Covent Garden the arcaded portico houses of the ‘Piazza’ called to mind the modes of comfortable and sophisticated urban living found in Italian cities, while more generally the houses of its wealthy residents gave directly onto spacious streets, letting in plenty of light and with little thought of defence. This development is often associated with the emergence of a gentrified West End, and its residents were doubtless customers of the New Exchange (popularly known as ‘Britain’s Burse’), the luxury shopping devel 6 See Chapter 6.

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Westminster 1640–60 opment by Salisbury House, which had opened in 1609, partly competing for trade with the City’s Royal Exchange. Another fashionable area in St Martin’s parish was St Martin’s Lane, a turning to the north of the Strand just before Charing Cross. It included the church of St Martin’s, which had been partly rebuilt in the Jacobean period to accommodate a burgeoning population, especially its increasing numbers of gentry and aristocratic residents. The huge parish of St Martin’s was unusual in that it comprised not only heavily built-up areas along the Strand and Charing Cross, but also the royal hunting ground of Hyde Park and large tracts of open fields, extending west as far as Knightsbridge. Hyde Park was already becoming famous as a place of fashionable entertainment and display in the pre-war period; by the Restoration its pre-eminence would be unrivalled. Much of the land in St Martin’s parish was only beginning to undergo development in the early seventeenth century, but this new building included substantial mansions erected in their own grounds for members of the nobility, such as Leicester House and Newport House, whose rural setting was reflected in the fact that their owners were required to recompense the parish for violating what had traditionally been common land used by local people for grazing cattle. The same area also provided an exercise ground for the Westminster Military Company, a voluntary organization of would-be civic soldiery established in the early Stuart period, whose military training would be all too pertinent by 1642. Finally, our tour needs to return to Charing Cross, which marks a great turning in the river Thames. This was the site of the royal Mews, which became a substantial garrison for much of the 1640s and 1650s. From here the traveller passed along King Street, which led down to a great complex of nationally important buildings – Whitehall Palace, Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey. This area all fell within the parish of St Margaret’s, a church virtually adjacent to the Abbey, whose more prosperous residents (including brewers, butchers, bakers and minor civil servants) were associated with the Westminster Court of Burgesses, one of the few administrative bodies that regulated the town of Westminster as a whole. The residents of this parish often had close economic and other ties to the Abbey, which continued to be the principal owner of land in the parish in the years between the Reformation and the Civil War. The abolition of deans and chapters in 1645 would thus have potentially momentous consequences for the locality and its inhabitants. Like St Martin’s, St Margaret’s also included large rural areas to the west, including the unenclosed expanse of Tothill Fields and the more refined St James’s Park, adjacent to St James’s Palace, a venue often occupied by soldiers or political prisoners during our period. Despite its concentration of nationally prominent buildings, Westminster constituted a curiously disorganized and vulnerable location for national 8

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Introduction government. The main thoroughfare of King Street was a busy commercial street, crammed with medieval inns and taverns to serve passing trade, which nevertheless passed through the precincts of the palace of Whitehall, a maze of rambling buildings which sprawled in an ungainly fashion over the area. Because the palace had been built on an already cramped and heavily developed site, the security of the palace (and later of parliament itself) was always a problem, and the question of the safety of whichever government was resident in Westminster was to prove a constant source of anxiety throughout the 1640s and 1650s. This geographical vulnerability was exacerbated by the fact that there were no gates or defences to protect Westminster from the west. The City of London, by contrast, was relatively easily secured – with its series of defensible gates, chains across the streets and secure stronghold of the Tower. The rebels of 1381 had only managed to gain entry to the City, where they wrought destruction, because they were allowed in, but they had been able to burn down the Temple and the Savoy with little trouble. When Wyatt’s rebels came up from Kent in 1554 they were unable to cross over the river Thames to the City, but they were easily able to cross the river by travelling further west, crossing at Kingston, at which point they moved through Knightsbridge into Westminster and to Charing Cross virtually unopposed.7 After completing his account of Westminster’s streets, and after some observations concerning the courts of justice, Howell concluded with a brief account of Westminster’s ‘modern Civil Government’.8 He sought, as usual, to draw comparisons with London, comparing Westminster’s division into twelve wards with London’s partition into twenty-six. But he did not attempt to compare Westminster’s local government – the Court of Burgesses – with the City of London’s Court of Aldermen, and with good reason. Although Westminster had been granted the courtesy title of ‘City’ and a coat of arms in 1601,9 it is misleading to think of it in these terms, given its crucial lack of a single corporate body to govern the town, and that is why in both this and my earlier monograph I refer throughout to Westminster as a town rather than a ‘City’. There was nothing truly analogous to London’s lord mayor and Court of Aldermen. The nearest that Westminster had to a government was the Court of Burgesses, established by Act of parliament in 1585, but this was essentially a revamped leet court. The relic of a half-achieved Elizabethan incorporation of the town, the Court had potentially wide powers to regulate local markets and to control and punish various forms of disorder, including problems of immigration and ‘inmates’ (which were controlled through a systematic testimonial system), illegal building, scolding and a range of moral 7 Froissart’s chronicles, ed. J. Jolliffe (2001), pp. 243–4; D. Loades, The Wyatt rebellion (2000), pp. 21–3; Merritt, Social world, p. 56. 8 Howell, Londinopolis, p. 379. 9 Merritt, Social world, pp. 27, 91

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Westminster 1640–60 offences.10 But it had no power to make laws or raise taxes, and no income to pay an independent bureaucracy. These shortcomings were readily evident to local inhabitants, who had made several unsuccessful attempts to secure the full incorporation of the town by converting the Court of Burgesses into a formal civic governing body, most recently in 1633.11 The 1650s saw further efforts to secure Westminster’s full incorporation (one of which had been made just three years before Howell’s book was published). These were not successful, however, and in practice the town was effectively governed via its large parishes, each one with its own powerful vestry. The quasi-corporate status of the town perpetuated a range of ambiguities in Westminster’s government, and in jurisdiction over it. The limitation on the powers of the Court of Burgesses had helped to perpetuate the authority of the Abbey and its dean in the area, as well as that of the high steward (a post that was effectively in the crown’s gift and was used to reward royal favourites). The town elected its own MPs to parliament, separately from those elected for Middlesex, and yet it fell within the jurisdiction of Middlesex in other ways. While Westminster’s own separate sessions had been established in 1619, it still formed a sub-set of the Middlesex sessions, and local cases were heard at both types of session meetings. In religious matters, while St Martin’s and St Clement’s fell under the jurisdiction of the bishop of London, St Margaret’s parish came under the direct government of the dean and chapter. Many of these jurisdictional distinctions were not observed as precisely during the civil war and interregnum periods, when the exigencies of war and the generation of new forms of government and revenue raising often involved the transgression of earlier jurisdictions, and for administrative purposes all of Westminster could sometimes find itself absorbed within Middlesex, or combined with other suburban jurisdictions, or even brought under the authority of the City of London. Given the weaknesses of the Court of Burgesses, it was often incumbent on other authorities to step in when decisive executive action was needed in the locality. In the years before 1640 the privy council often intervened decisively in matters of public order and plague regulation. The prerogative courts could also provide important summary justice for local people. For day-to-day government, however, a vital role was performed by Westminster’s parishes: not only were these remarkably populous, but parish officials also commanded large budgets and undertook many major responsibilities. Howell’s Westminster occupies an anomalous position: located in Howell’s volume as a mere appendix to the City of London, yet it is acknowledged to have its own distinctive and in some ways superior identity. It is this distinctive character of Westminster that will provide the focus for the following chapters. 10 Ibid., ch. 7. 11 Ibid., pp. 87–99, 225–56.

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Chapter 1

.

The eye of the storm? Westminster, 1640–42

Before and after the Short Parliament

O

n 13 April 1640 Westminster played host to a piece of political pageantry that had not taken place for some years, as the king proceeded to Westminster Abbey for the opening of parliament. The streets were thronged, and good vantage points for the procession were both hard and expensive to come by. John Castle, a Westminster resident, had been charged by the earl of Bridgewater to find a window from which the earl’s wife could watch the procession, but he had to report to the earl several days beforehand that he could find only two rooms still available in all of Westminster’s main thoroughfare of King Street, one of which had a fair window ‘that will take 5 or 6 at it’, but would not be let for under £5. Closer to the time, he warned that it was vital that the earl’s wife and her company should occupy the room by 6 a.m. at the latest, as after that ‘there will be too much difficultie to passe into the house; for the streets will be full before 5 a clocke, and the space within the Rayles quickly after, choaked up with the presse of the multitude’.1 People were understandably excited to witness the spectacle surrounding the opening of parliament, as there had been no session called for eleven years, but over the next two and a half years Westminster would also play host to the disintegration of Charles’s regime, sustained political deadlock and the descent into civil war. The eyes of the political nation would often be focused on events in the buildings and spaces of Westminster over these months. Yet Westminster was not a mere empty stage upon which these events would be enacted, nor were its inhabitants mere spectators watching from their windows in King Street. As we will see, Westminster’s own characteristic features – its distinctive streetscape, its anomalous structures of local authority, its population of politically inflammatory Roman Catholics – would help to shape the 1 Huntingdon Library (hereafter HL), Ellesmere MSS 7830, 7831.

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Figure 2  Portion of Newcourt and Faithorne’s 1658 map, showing the area around New Palace Yard and  ­Westminster Abbey, with Tothill Fields chapel on far left

The eye of the storm? course of the events that followed, and its inhabitants would play their own, sometimes unwilling, roles in the drama that unfolded. When Charles proceeded through Westminster in April 1640 he may have considered himself to be among friends. This was, after all, a ‘royal city’ – the centre of royal government, populated by many courtiers, officials and minor royal servants, as well as a large service sector that partly depended on the economic boost that the royal court provided to the area. The window renters of King Street were not the only local people who profited from the opportunities and consumption associated with the royal presence. Westminster might therefore seem to be an unlikely venue for major and dramatic opposition to royal policies. The town’s ties to the court and government administration meant that traditionally it was regarded as politically ‘safe’. Indeed, in the 1620s the town had been specifically selected for the introduction of what became the forced loan because it was seen as politically quiescent. Nevertheless, even then, although the parishes of St Martin’s and St Margaret’s generally lent to the king at the required level, it was reported that St Clement’s, the Strand, the Duchy of Lancaster and the Savoy had all refused to contribute. The 1628 parliamentary election should have provided a rude awakening in this regard, as the preferred candidate of the duke of Buckingham (the king’s favourite) was decisively rejected, as was another former local MP, ‘because, as is said, they had discontented their neighbours in urging the payment of the loan’.2 In fact, as well as the expected compliance, the 1630s had seen opposition to Charles’s rule in the heart of Westminster. This had been most notable in the shape of the dean of Westminster, John Williams, bishop of Lincoln and ex-Lord Keeper. In the 1630s Williams was playing a major role in pamphlet opposition to Laudian policies, engaged in venomous exchanges in print with the Westminster prebendary Peter Heylyn. He swiftly became a focus for opposition to Personal Rule policies, and this seems to have been a conscious move on Williams’s part: as early as 1632 he was reported as saying that he had made a strong position for himself, even if the king was against him, and that he would be back in power with the next parliament.3 The prosecution of Williams was also a significant moment in Westminster’s history. Deans of Westminster had tended to play a prominent role in local administration, but the 1630s saw the dean’s rule suspended for the first time since 1558. Williams had tried in vain to keep his toe-hold at Westminster, trying to use his oath of residence as dean to avoid the king’s directions to all bishops to attend their dioceses, and had strenuously resisted the king’s attempts to force him 2 R.F. Williams (ed.), The court and times of Charles I (2 vols, 1848), I, 130–1, 133, 151, 154, 157, 159, 166, 327. 3 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic (hereafter CSPD) 1631–3, p. 391; A. Milton, ‘Canon fire: Peter Heylyn at Westminster’, in C.S. Knighton and R. Mortimer (eds), Westminster Abbey reformed 1540–1640 (Aldershot, 2003).

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Westminster 1640–60 to resign the deanery.4 Williams himself was imprisoned, and the Abbey – a major political institution in the town – was run instead by a royal commission. Charles showed little hesitation in subduing the Abbey as he thought fit, peremptorily claiming the power to appoint all Abbey officers and to dispose of all the Abbey’s fines and leases ‘according to our royal will and pleasure’.5 Williams’s fall from grace amid the contested politics of the 1630s was manifested in very tangible fashion before Westminster’s inhabitants. Not only was he tried a stone’s throw from the Abbey, in the Star Chamber, but his sentence was directed to be announced publicly in the Abbey in the time of divine service, when the greater part of the congregation had assembled. The master of Westminster School – Lambert Osbaldeston – was denounced at the same trial, and while Osbaldeston made good his escape by fleeing into hiding in the City of London, he was nevertheless sentenced to have each ear nailed to the pillory in the presence of his pupils.6 Flight meant that the sentence was not carried out, but three other famous figures who were not so lucky were Henry Burton, John Bastwick and William Prynne, who were pilloried in the same year in New Palace Yard, a short distance from the Abbey. But the sympathetic response of the crowd to their suffering signalled a potential sea-change in popular responses to the regime.7 There may not necessarily have been many local people in the crowds who supported the puritan ‘martyrs’ in 1637,8 but Westminster supplied a ‘martyr’ of its own in 1638 in the shape of the baronet Sir Richard Wiseman. Wiseman, who seems to have been resident in St Martin’s parish, was prosecuted in Star Chamber for having accused Lord Keeper Coventry of receiving bribes, and his punishment was severe. Not only was he fined £18,000 and imprisoned indefinitely, but he was also sentenced to lose his baronetcy and to undergo 4 CSPD 1631–3, p. 214; John Hacket, Scrinia reserata (1693), ii, p. 89; Historical Manuscripts Commission (hereafter HMC), Cowper I, 329; II, 112. In fact, Williams did not finally relinquish the deanery to the king until 1644. 5 Westminster Abbey Muniments (hereafter WAM), Chapter Act Bk II, fol. 64v. WAM, 25109 is the memorandum of the appointment of a royal commission to hold a visitation of Westminster college. See also, The National Archives (hereafter TNA), PC2/50, p. 232 (3 Apr 1639), where the council’s commission for the visitation of the Abbey took it upon itself to allocate a prebendal house. 6 J.F. Merritt, The social world of early modern Westminster: abbey, court and community, 1525–1640 (Manchester, 2005) (hereafter Merritt), p. 343; CSPD 1637, p. 326; Hacket, Scrinia, ii, pp. 110–37. For the sentences against Williams and Osbaldeston see Sheffield City Archives, Strafford Papers 18/177; Magdalen College Cambridge, Pepys MS 2099 (5). 7 See The earle of Strafforde’s letters and despatches, ed. W. Knowler (2 vols, 1739), II, 85–7; K. Sharpe, The personal rule of Charles I (1992), pp. 758–65. 8 One who may have done was a St Margaret’s parishioner who left £10 in his will to Bastwick while the latter was imprisoned in the Westminster Gatehouse: Westminster Archives Centre (hereafter WAC), PCW, 31 Todd.

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The eye of the storm? the public punishment of having his ears cut off, and to stand in the pillory with papers describing his offence, to be disabled from giving testimony and to have a ‘whetstone around his neck’.9 The impecunious Wiseman suffered in the Fleet prison, where he was reported as ‘being in great Misery and Want, having neither Cloaths nor Money to buy him Bread, nor any Bed to lie on but Straw’, and where (he later claimed) he ‘suffered more then the Torments of a Spanish Inquisition’. Small wonder that the House of Lords was shocked and considered him ‘an Object of great Pity’ when he was brought before it in January 1641.10 No other Westminster inhabitant suffered in the same way as Wiseman, but heavy-handed intervention by the government in a number of areas may nevertheless have bred some local resentment. This was especially true of the behaviour of William Laud. The archbishop had suspended one puritan lecturer in St Martin’s parish, and had then summoned his replacement for examination when the parish chose someone equally inflammatory. The parish had been brought to heel with the appointment of Laud’s chaplain, William Bray, as its vicar, but while St Martin’s did not manifest any direct hostility to the Laudian reforms it cannot be assumed that the parishioners were all willing participants in them. Laud and Bray had also intervened to curb the independence of the new chapelry of Covent Garden.11 Other government policies in the area may also have caused resentment among some local residents. The New Incorporation of the Suburbs had superseded local bids for a separate incorporation of the town of Westminster and few locals benefited from the intensified economic regulation that it brought with it. The reinvigorated regulations on new building in the area and the proclamations against gentry residence in the capital – both more systematically enforced than in the past – undoubtedly caused inconvenience to some local people, and the drive to prevent brewing with sea coal in the area led to at least two prosperous and influential local brewers being forcibly relocated. More generally, the crown and privy council seem to have been intervening more consistently and directly in local affairs than they had previously, with the crown often seeming to prefer to revive old royal powers and courts rather than to strengthen the powers of local institutions and organizations.12 ­Undoubtedly, 9 Bodleian Library (hereafter Bodl.), Rawlinson MS C.827, 6 June, 14 Charles I; TNA, SP16/392, fols 37r–40v. See also CSPD 1637–8, pp. 213–14, 416; J.C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, old series (4 vols, 1888–92), p. e 32. 10 HMC, Buccleuch III, 405; Journals of the House of Lords (hereafter LJ), 4 Jan 1641; House of Lords Record Office (hereafter HLRO), Main Papers, 10 Jan 1641. 11 Merritt, pp. 345–8; J.F. Merritt, ‘“Voluntary bounty and devotion to the service of God”? Lay Patronage, Protest and the Creation of the Parish of St Paul Covent Garden, 1629–41’, English Historical Review 125 (2010). 12 Merritt, pp. 99–100, 152–3, 185, 191–4. On the New Incorporation and some of the new monopolies see R. Ashton, The city and the court 1603–1643 (Cambridge, 1979), ch. 4.

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Westminster 1640–60 minor resentments and frustrations were generated among many local inhabitants, but there was no coordinated opposition, and many of those who were inconvenienced were themselves courtiers or royal officials.13 Overall, objections to government policy were muted and indirect. On the vital issue of ship money, Westminster complained over its rating, and St Margaret’s employed the services of John Glynne – soon to become a famous parliamentarian lawyer – in advising ‘the town’ on the matter. Glynne may have helped to prompt eight letters from the parish to the privy council asking for the abatement of their ship money assessments.14 But the parish’s objections were concentrated more on the timing of the levy for the locality, troubled as it was with the escalating costs of plague and poor relief, rather than on challenging the legitimacy of ship money itself.15 The locality became more sluggardly in its payment – in September 1639 it was still owing nearly a quarter of its 1637 assessment – but this was not exceptionally slow, compared with other parts of the country, and local complaints of indebtedness due to heavy local rates were based on a genuine and documentable financial crisis (even if in some places the concentration on rating disagreements rather than on challenging the constitutional propriety of the levy was a pragmatic response).16 The legal challenge to ship money was, however, well known in Westminster, and many of those involved in the challenge to the legality of ship money had links to the town. Not only did the court that decided the case meet in

13 14

15

16

The notorious Westminster Corporation of Soapmakers had three houses, none of which was in Westminster (Bodl., Bankes MS 43/60). Those prosecuted for illegal building included Sir Edward Wardour, the Clerk of the Pells and future royalist: CSPD 1635–6, p. 25. See also CSPD 1631–3, p. 240. WAC, E20. Glynne and the future Long Parliament MP John Maynard (M.F. Keeler, The Long Parliament 1640–41: a biographical study of its members [Philadelphia, 1954], pp. 271–2) also gave the parish advice concerning the parson’s tithes – another matter of increasing dispute in the 1630s metropolis. Glynne was Steward of Westminster by 1639, having already served as a Westminster JP, and as a member of the sewers commission for Middlesex for some years (ibid., p. 187). He was not an ‘opposition’ figure as such in this period. He was appointed by the privy council in January 1639 to join the Westminster JPs to help settle a case with legal complications, for example TNA, PC2/50, p. 38. Glynne may also have been involved in this latter case because one of the JPs – Peter Heywood – was one of the trustees involved in the case. For the report on the case by Glynne and the others, see TNA, PC2/50, pp. 321–2. This at least was the thrust of a petition signed by the JP Peter Heywood and twenty-two other Westminster inhabitants that was presented in 1637, in which they asked for the remission of ship money because of the extra burden of plague and poor relief, whereby ‘the ordinary sort of inhabitants’ were burdened whereas ‘the better sort’ had moved out of the area: CSPD 1637, pp. 341, 357. Note also ibid., pp. 132 and 502 on the problem of ship money defaulters in Westminster. CSPD 1634–5, pp. 345, 602; CSPD 1639 p. 491; P. Lake, ‘The collection of ship money in Cheshire during the sixteen thirties’, Northern History 17 (1981). On Westminster’s parochial funding crisis in the late 1630s see Merritt, pp. 305–6.

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The eye of the storm? Westminster, but John Hampden’s mother, Elizabeth, owned a town-house in Whitehall and was a prominent member of St Margaret’s parish (where Sir Robert Pye, the father-in-law of Hampden’s daughter, sat on the vestry), and his defence counsels were Oliver St John (a client and legal advisor of the earl of Bedford, who was busy with his new Covent Garden development) and Robert Holborne (who would contest Westminster’s own parliamentary seat in 1640). It may also be significant that one of the earl of Bedford’s principal clients in Covent Garden, Anthony Wither, was found in possession of a copy of Prynne’s ‘Remonstrance against ship money’ tract in 1637.17 The calling of the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640 prompted local parliamentary elections, which offer an interesting barometer of the political mood in the town of Westminster at this time. The elections proved to be sharply contested, with no fewer than six different candidates competing for the two seats. The earl of Leicester’s agent, William Hawkins, reported that in the election proceedings at Westminster there ‘is the greatest noyse about the businesse that ever there was in the place’. The six candidates were Sir Robert Pye (a previous MP, and prominent exchequer official), Sir Edward Wardour (Clerk of the Pells and a prominent St Martin’s parishioner), ‘Mr Porter’ (probably George, son of the courtier Endymion Porter), John Glynne (‘our Recorder’), ‘Mr Holbourne the lawyer’ (who had been involved in the Hampden defence, as we have noted) and the St Margaret’s apothecary William Bell. Hawkins opined that Holborne and Bell would win the selection ‘because they have least relation to the Court, for the streame runnes that way’.18 On the day of the election large numbers of townspeople attended – indeed, there were far too many. One observer reported that ‘they had been all this morning and some part of yesterday numbering by Powle [poll] but finding that way to be so verie difficult and tedious that they must of necessity have spent 4 or 5 dayes about it, they thought it best to cause al the Candidates to drawe their severall numbers into Tuthill [Fields] where the choice was pronounced by the viewe’. Mass assembly in Tothill Fields would continue to be the preferred method of trying to determine the excessively populous and discordant election meetings in Westminster over the next twenty years.19 In the event, Hawkins was half right: the relatively obscure local apothecary Bell was elected, but the other MP chosen was John Glynne. The other lawyer, Holborne, declared his intention of questioning the return, and it was reported that ‘The People say that his number exceeded that of all others which were chosen by 500 persons at least’.20 Holborne would appear to have thought better of this threat, however, and ultimately he was able to secure election for Southwark. 17 Lambeth Palace Library (hereafter LPL), MS 1030, fol. 133; Merritt, ‘“Voluntary bounty”’. 18 HMC, De l’Isle and Dudley VI, 235–6. 19 See Chapter 4. 20 HL, Ellesmere MSS 7825.

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Westminster 1640–60 The particularly divisive nature of Westminster’s Short Parliament election may have been a partial reflection of the fact that the dean of Westminster was in prison and was therefore unable to express his own preference (there was in theory an assumption that the dean would choose one candidate, and the high steward the other, although elections were rarely quite so straightforward in practice).21 It is interesting, though, that it was the less experienced local apothecary Bell, rather than the more prominent opposition figure Holborne, who was elected. This may reflect the same concerns that were evident among the Westminster electorate in 1628, when antipathy towards government policies (in particular the forced loan) made it difficult for those close to the court to be elected in Westminster, but the instinct in the locality would appear to have been to elect more local vestrymen, rather than prominent opponents of royal policies.22 The other MP, John Glynne, was a familiar local figure who had advised the locality on the issue of ship money (as we have seen), but it is also possible that his election reflected the preference of the high steward the earl of Pembroke (whose client Glynne would appear to have been). Certainly, Sir Edward Villiers’ repeated election as Westminster MP in the 1620s seems to have reflected the influence of his brother the duke of Buckingham, Westminster’s then high steward. The fact that so many candidates contested the 1640 election, and that an informed observer was unable to predict Glynne’s election, suggests, however, that the local electorate was not so biddable.23 In the Short Parliament itself, and in the words and activities of Westminster’s MP and Recorder John Glynne, hitherto implicit criticism of the Personal Rule found a more emphatic voice, while Bell was (perhaps predictably) silent. On the issue of ship money, Glynne’s interventions initially reflected the pragmatism that had presumably informed his advice to St Margaret’s parish. He warned against complaining of its legality (as this might disadvantage them while the ship money legal judgment stood), but nevertheless he stressed that there was ‘noe doubt’ that the execution of the levy was a grievance.24 In fact, however, Glynne had swiftly joined the ranks of Pym and others as opponents of the king’s strategy in the Short Parliament, as he emphasized that supply could not be proceeded with until grievances such as ship money were removed.25 It is, of course, unclear how far (if at all) Glynne’s 21 Merritt, pp. 82–7. 22 Ibid., p. 83. 23 It is possible, of course, that Hawkins was correct to assume that Holborne would receive the most votes (as was independently reported) and that Glynne’s selection represented the intervention of the bailiff acting on the high steward’s behalf. For the apparent manipulation of the bailiff by the dean of Westminster to secure the election of a preferred parliamentary candidate in 1621 see Merritt, pp. 83–5. 24 J.D. Maltby (ed.), The Short Parliament (1640) diary of Sir Thomas Aston, Camden Society 4th ser., 35 (1988), p. 56 (see also pp. 105–6). 25 E.g. ibid., pp. 40, 68–9; E.S. Cope (ed.), Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640, Camden Society 4th ser., 19 (1977), p. 179.

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The eye of the storm? behaviour reflected the views of his electorate, but it may be significant that, while Middlesex submitted a petition to parliament (presented by their MP Sir Gilbert Gerrard) against religious innovations and ship money, no such petition emerged from Westminster.26 In the event, the Short Parliament was dissolved in a matter of weeks. The dissolution of the parliament was also the signal for public demonstrations in Westminster which offered a striking warning of what was to come the following year. Unrest focused on the Abbey, where Convocation continued to meet after the dissolving of parliament, and the building was surrounded by several companies of the Middlesex trained bands under Endymion Porter, in its defence.27 In the wake of the riots in Lambeth (which involved at least one rioter from St Margaret’s parish) double watches were ordered in Westminster by the privy council in May 1640 ‘to prevent disorders and tumultuous Assemblies’, with all householders to ‘bee answerable for the peaceable and quiet behaviour of all his Apprentices and Servants’. A particular watch was also kept on Tothill Fields.28 After fears were raised that those behind the riots in Lambeth and Southwark intended to attack St James’s palace, where the Queen Mother was resident, the privy council ordered a watch of ‘50 able and sufficient men’ to stand all night and every night until the threat receded.29 The privy council clearly believed that the rioters would come from south of the river, rather than having any concern that they originated in Westminster itself. Nevertheless, concern over public order led to a privy council order in June 1640 requiring all members of the Westminster Court of Burgesses to remain in Westminster ‘all this next vacation’ and forbidding them to leave without express leave from the king or council, so that they would be ready ‘for the preventing and Suppressing of all Tumultuous Assemblies and Riots or other Disorders’.30 Few Westminster residents seem to have been involved in the protests them­­­­ selves, but the town did get dragged into public order issues – most nota­­­bly in providing a defence for Laud at Lambeth Palace. John Castle reported on 12 May that Peter Heywood ‘and some other of the Justices of this Towne [Westminster] with their Constables and what force they could get along with them’ were forced to spend all night at Lambeth to defend it against ‘well near 1200 prentices and others’ who did not leave until 2.30 a.m., when it 26 Cope, Proceedings, pp. 157, 234. 27 Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (1668) p. 430. I owe this reference to Anthony Milton. 28 TNA, PC2/52, pp. 482–3. Similar watches were ordered in the rest of London and Southwark: K. Lindley, ‘Riot prevention and control in early Stuart London’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 33 (1983). On the Lambeth riots and the (limited) involvement of Westminster parishioners see K. Lindley, Popular politics and religion in civil war London (Aldershot, 1997) (hereafter Lindley), pp. 4–8, 26–8, 35. The Westminster suspect was Humphrey Landon, a glazier from St Margaret’s (ibid., p. 27). 29 TNA, PC2/52, pp. 493–4; Lindley, p. 6. 30 TNA, PC2/52, p. 568. On the Court of Burgesses see p. 9.

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Westminster 1640–60 was clear that the archbishop was not there. Castle had been told that the soldiers of Westminster’s Military Company – a voluntary association with no official status – were appointed to be at Westminster the following night (although Laud still intended to remain safe at Whitehall).31 Three days later Castle had to report that the deployment of the trained bands in Westminster and Lambeth had not worried the mob ‘or secured any great security in the places neere abouts’. Part of the problem was that – not knowing in advance where the protesters were aiming – the trained bands could be caught on the wrong side of the river. Thus, Castle reported that though Endymion Porter ‘with a hundred of his band’ watched at Lambeth the previous night, yet three thousand protesters ‘came up to the Towne [Westminster] in the night’.32 As the mob spoke not just of tracking down Laud but also of dealing with ‘the swarmes of the French’ at St James, Whitehall itself began to be fortified, with arms brought from the Tower to be stored under the Masking house and taken to St James to defend the French.33 These tumults gradually dissipated, but the summer months witnessed further tensions in the area. In June 1640 a Westminster woman was com­­­ mitted to the Gatehouse accused of ‘the indiscreet speaking of words’ against the king,34 while in October a group at cards in Mrs Black’s house in St Martin’s Lane used abusive language towards Laud and the earl of Dorset while expressing pro-Scottish sentiments.35 Meanwhile the Middlesex ship money sheriffs (along with those of London and six other counties) were marked for Star Chamber prosecution.36 During the Second Bishops’ War against the Scots the fiscal pressure on Westminster had increased: Middlesex was required to send as many foot soldiers as the City of London.37 Lists of those refusing to pay coat-and-conduct money seem to survive only for St Clement Danes, where sixty-four people are named.38 Tensions were not dampened by the inflammatory behaviour of the crypto-catholic JP Sir Henry Spiller. At the Middlesex sessions, Spiller published a letter signed by Strafford commanding all men ‘to conform in all levies and other commands’, and Sir Gilbert Gerrard later testified that Spiller required constables to swear an oath to gather ship money and coat-and-conduct money.39 31 32 33 34 35 36

HL, Ellesmere MSS 7833. On the Military Company see below, pp. 52–3. HL, Ellesmere MSS 7834. HL, Ellesmere MSS 7834, 7835. Lindley, p. 9. TNA, SP16/469 fol. 191r. A.A.M. Gill, ‘Ship money during the personal rule of Charles I: politics, ideology and the law, 1634 to 1640’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 1990), p. 557. 37 M.C. Fissel, The bishops’ wars (Cambridge, 1994), p. 208. On coat and conduct money for the Second Bishops’ War, see ibid., pp. 134–5; TNA, SP16/460/80; PC2/52, pp. 573–5. 38 TNA, SP16/461, fol. 191r–v. 39 M. Jansson (ed.), Proceedings in the opening session of the Long Parliament, the House of Commons (7 vols, Rochester, N, 2000–7) (hereafter Jansson), I, 146n, 234–5, 241.

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The eye of the storm? There were some manifestations of popular support for the king in Westminster. When Charles left Somerset House for the North in August, Castle reported that ‘the acclamation of the people that had thronged about the Gate, and so through Covent garden, was verie great and loud, That God would blesse him in his Journey, and send him well back againe hither’.40 But this may have been more a matter of the self-interest of local inhabitants, concerned that the royal presence should rapidly be restored to their locality. The Long Parliament The summoning of the Long Parliament was destined to transform Westminster in dramatic ways. Initially, however, there was little change, although the king’s cancelling of the parliament-day procession was significant. Those charging for access to windows in King Street lost their windfall, and it would be many years before they would get the chance to cash in again.41 The town again elected Glynne and Bell, and if this election was contested by other candidates the evidence does not appear to have survived. Two Westminster residents who had contested the Short Parliament election – Sir Robert Pye and Robert Holborne – managed to find seats in other constituencies (though Wardour did not). A number of other Westminster JPs, including William Wheeler and Laurence Whitaker, were also elected to parliament. For all of the additional provocations of the summer of 1640, and the example offered by other towns and parishes, Westminster did not generate any petitions opposing Personal Rule policies or individual ministers. No charges were drawn up by Westminster parishioners against their clergymen, although the Commons’ Committee for Scandalous Ministers received more than 800 petitions in the first few months of the parliament.42 Two local petitioners who did eventually emerge were the brewers Michael Arnold and John Bond, who strove to represent their prosecutions for using sea coal as examples of the spiteful vindictiveness of a vengeful Archbishop Laud and the frustrated proselytizing of the Queen Mother. They thereby disguised the fact that they had had close working relationships with Catholic courtiers, including the Queen’s physician, and that they had received remarkably lenient treatment from a provoked privy council.43 Some milestones in the dismantling of the Personal Rule were celebrated 40 HL, Ellesmere MSS 7852. 41 J. Adamson, The noble revolt (2007), p. 92. 42 W.A. Shaw, History of the English Church during the civil wars and under the Commonwealth, 1640–1660 (2 vols, 1900) (hereafter Shaw), II, 177; J.S. Morrill, The nature of the English revolution (Harlow, 1993), p. 71. 43 CSPD 1641–3, p. 524; TNA, PC2/50, pp. 213, 343–4, 452, 525–6, 582–3, 650; HLRO, Main Papers, 24 Feb 1641; TNA, SP16/257/104; Ashton, City and court, pp. 76–8. Bodl., Bankes MSS 11/19.

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Westminster 1640–60 in the Westminster streets and churches. Most notably, the church bells of St Margaret’s and St Martin’s rang to celebrate the passing of the Triennial Act. St Martin’s accounts noted unenthusiastically that this had been done at the command of the Commons (although it had actually been at the behest of the Lords).44 The puritan Robert Woodford claimed that there was much rejoicing and ‘very many bonfires’ in the capital, although the churchwardens’ accounts of St Clement’s and St Mary le Strand suggest that they did not ring their bells on this occasion. This may reflect the fact that the parliamentary order ‘that Bonfires be made, and Bells be rung’ was given to the dean of Westminster John Williams (now back in office), whose eyes may have been focused more on the nearby parishes of St Margaret’s and St Martin’s.45 Some significant local opponents of the previous regime were released. Sir Richard Wiseman emerged from prison to attend the Lords, who immediately freed him and granted him £50, he ‘having neither Cloaths nor Money to buy him Bread’. The House of Lords not only ordered a review of his trial in Star Chamber, but at the same time resolved ‘to examine the Institution and Power of the Court of Star Chamber’ itself. Wiseman was destined to play a further, final role in Westminster’s public disorders, as we will see.46 For Westminster, a more significant release from imprisonment, though, was that of John Williams, the dean of Westminster and now archbishop of York. When he was liberated from the Tower he ‘was met (as it were in triumph) both by most of the upper and lower house’, who conducted him to Westminster. William Hawkins noted that the day after Williams was restored to the Lords he officiated as dean in the Abbey, and commented ‘wee thinke him as complete as he was at the time of his committment’.47 He was soon deep in the king’s counsels, and hence preoccupied with national policy, but Williams had always clung tenaciously to his office and powers as dean of Westminster. Westminster had never had a dean as powerful politically since Williams himself had occupied the post of Lord Keeper in the early 1620s. Williams’s pre-eminence also coincided in potentially significant ways with the rising fortunes of Westminster’s other principal dignitary, the high steward the earl of Pembroke.48 Pembroke’s increasing political prominence found its 44 The Lords proposed to the Commons that they join them in a request to the king ‘that Bonfires be made, and Bells to be rung, both in London and Westminster’ (LJ, 16 Feb 1641). 45 WAC, E23 (1640–41); F3 (1640–41); HMC, Ninth report, pt. 2, p. 499; LJ, 16 Feb 1641. 46 HMC, Buccleuch III, 405; LJ, 4 and 5 Jan 1641. 47 HMC, De l’Isle VI, p. 342; D. Gardiner (ed.), The Oxinden letters 1607–1642 (1933), p. 187. 48 Pembroke’s influence in parliament at this time was reflected when the election for New Sarum of his secretary, the local Westminster worthy Michael Oldisworth, was challenged. Simonds D’Ewes observed that many voted in March 1641 to allow Oldisworth to remain in parliament ‘for the sake of the earl of Pembroke’ (Jansson, II, 613). Oldisworth also acted as a man of business for Pembroke.

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The eye of the storm? greatest manifestation in the spring of 1641, when he secured possession of the enormous mansion of Durham House, on the Strand, by an Act of parliament. Pembroke appears to have had grandiose plans for the rebuilding of this imposing waterside town-house, which would have helped to symbolize his new-found importance.49 As in the case of Williams, Pembroke’s Westminster office was not a merely honorary one. He had made a point of exercising his power to appoint the town bailiff and escheator, and would also seem to have secured the post of recorder for his relative, Edward Herbert. He had also thrown his weight behind attempts to secure the town’s incorporation in the 1630s, which had also received the backing of dean Williams.50 An effective reforming alliance of Westminster’s two principal power brokers at the height of their power and influence could potentially have transformed the government of the locality and heightened the profile of the town vis-à-vis the City of London, had they shown a readiness to renew their support for incorporation. But the fast-moving national political crisis meant that nothing would come of this potentially fortunate constellation of events. Westminster’s chief elected MP, John Glynne, soon emerged as a supporter of John Pym’s parliamentary junto, and would play a significant role in the proceedings against the earl of Strafford.51 In a less emphatic manner, as the political initiative increasingly swung towards parliament, so Westminster’s office-holding elites moved seamlessly from royal into parliamentarian government. Figures such as Sir Robert Pye and William Wheeler (both vestrymen of St Margaret’s) were experienced financial administrators whose expertise as crown servants meant that they moved easily into the committee work of the Commons. As one historian has put it, ‘the officials were simply adapting their work to the division of authority’.52 The long-serving Westminster JP Laurence Whitaker seems to have embarked upon a similar transition. In pursuing his career as a crown agent, as late as February 1639 he had been eagerly supplying Laud with material against the archbishop’s enemy John Williams, asserting that the duke of Buckingham had once told him that Williams had been a means of his mother’s conversion to Catholicism, and that Williams had expected to gain a cardinal’s hat from the Spanish marriage.53 It was 49 For the scale of Pembroke’s proposal, ‘which would have rivalled the nearby Northumberland House in grandeur and greatly outshone it architecturally’, see J. Bold, John Webb (1990), pp. 69–74, although the surviving designs are mostly dated 1649. For the Act conveying Durham House to the earl see Jansson, VI, 259. See also the petition to make Pembroke Lord Steward and his fellow Westminster peer, Salisbury, Lord Treasurer (ibid., VI, pp. 311, 318). 50 Merritt, pp. 82, 98. 51 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter ODNB), s.n. John Glynne. 52 D. Pennington, ‘The making of the war, 1640–1642’ in D. Pennington and K. Thomas (eds), Puritans and revolutionaries (Oxford, 1978), pp. 164–5. 53 Bodl., Cherry MSS 2, fol. 189; ODNB, s.n. Laurence Whitaker.

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Westminster 1640–60 claimed in 1642 that in the aftermath of the Short Parliament, Whitaker had personally searched John Hampden’s pockets and seized his papers.54 But as power shifted towards the Commons, so Whitaker extricated himself from his career as a court agent and emerged instead as a dedicated parliamentarian, not least as he soon found targets more amenable to the parliament, in the shape of Roman Catholics. ‘The persecution is so fearfully cruel and hot’: Roman Catholics in Westminster On 21 November 1640, in the opening weeks of the Long Parliament, the Westminster JP Peter Heywood was in Westminster Hall, showing a friend a list that he had drawn up, acting on the instructions of the authorities, ‘of such suspected and notorious Papists as were about Westminster’. Heywood was no stranger to Roman Catholics – indeed, in November 1605 he had seized the lamp when Guy Fawkes was arrested in the cellars beneath the Houses of Parliament (the lamp would be passed down in his family).55 But on this occasion Heywood himself was at the centre of events, as a man in Westminster Hall suddenly stepped forward and stabbed him. Uproar ensued, his assailant was seized, and news of the assault rapidly spread.56 The stabbing of Heywood introduces a phenomenon that would serve consistently to raise the political temperature in Westminster over the next two years. This was the perceived prevalence of dangerous Roman Catholics in the western suburbs, in close proximity to parliament. That there were significant numbers of Catholics in Westminster at this time was not to be doubted, and amid the feverish anxieties of the early 1640s the idea that they posed a subversive threat was difficult to dislodge. Thus, in the case of Heywood’s assailant, John James, while an examination soon revealed that he was deranged,57 54 A complaint to the Commons (1642), p. 12. This may possibly represent a garbled account of Whitaker’s involvement in seizing the papers of Sir John Eliot in the 1620s, for which he was briefly imprisoned in 1641. 55 Merritt, p. 334. Heywood was also governor of the New Incorporation of the Suburbs (ibid., p. 100). 56 HMC, De l’Isle and Dudley, VI, 344–5; W.H. Coates (ed.), The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, from the first recess of the Long Parliament to the withdrawal of King Charles I from London (New Haven, 1942) (hereafter D’Ewes), p. 53; M. Jansson (ed.), Two diaries of the Long Parliament (Gloucester, 1984), p. 137; British Library (hereafter BL), Add MS 38856/5, fols 18, 37; Gardiner (ed.), Oxinden letters, p. 186; Jansson, I, 230; HMC, Various collections, II, 260. 57 See also HMC, Seventh report, p. 234, where Captain Barry (a Catholic) reported of James that the ‘rogue’ claimed he did this ‘because the justice set him in the stocks almost a month ago, he being a gentleman’. Roman Catholics would understandably have been more than ready to believe this account, although it may well be accurate. Initial rumours even had it that James was a ‘popish priest’ (HMC, Ninth report, pt. 2, p. 499).

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The eye of the storm? parliament and people proved notably reluctant to accept this reading of events. John Moore reported in his parliamentary diary that James stabbed Heywood ‘as it was conceived, the reason was because Heywood did provide a guard upon the fast and was likewise to have provided another tomorrow. And this day had in his hand a catalog of all the recusants in Westminster.’58 Glynne reported to the House on 23 November that James had refused to take the oath of supremacy (although he would take the oath of allegiance), would confess nothing except that he was a recusant, would not say when he had last attended mass and ‘seems to be a distracted person’, but only one parliamentary diarist out of seven recorded this latter point.59 A further report to the House by the committee investigating the assault was made by Sir Arthur Ingram on 27 November, and again those reporting seemed unwilling to accept the evidence that no popish plot was involved. Ingram reported that a search of James’s lodgings had revealed little save a letter from the Catholic convert Tobie Matthew ‘to counsel him from committing such outrages as it seems he had then done’, but only the Commons’ own journal reported this evidence, which none of the seven diarists mention. It was referred back to the committee ‘to examine of his lunacy’, yet in the same session Pym moved that James’s hand should be cut off, as well as his lands and goods forfeited, along with the imposing of a sentence of perpetual imprisonment. Summarizing events in a letter written the same day, James Oxinden reported that James was ‘some saye a Jesuit, others a madman, other a discontented’.60 But people still showed a remarkable disinclination to accept that James was a madman. Publications continued to dwell on the event.61 A further pamphlet – The Rat-Trap: or The Jesuites taken in their owne Net – included a woodcut depicting the stabbing and directly associated the deed with a series of Jesuit plots dating back to Gunpowder Plot. The attack on Heywood, it was claimed, ‘was by the Iesuiticall faction held a meritorious act’. The author made it clear that James had thought ‘by a pretended madnesse to colour his notorious mischiefe’, and had attacked Heywood ‘with a rusty dagger’ ‘in the very face of the Iudiciall Courts’ in Westminster Hall.62 In April 1641 the bill for James’s hand to be cut off was twice read and committed in the Commons, and it was passed in August, and it was not until December of the same year that a Lords’ committee finally resolved against the mutilation.63 58 Jansson, I, 239. 59 It was also reported to the House that James had previously stabbed others: Jansson, I, 249, 251, 254–5, 258. 60 Jansson, I, 333, 339, 340–1, 343; Gardiner (ed.), Oxinden letters, p. 186. 61 E.g. John Jackson, The true evangelical temper (1641), pp. 200–2. 62 The rat-trap: or The Jesuites taken in their owne net (1641), p. 25–7. 63 Jansson, I, 247n, LJ, 11 Dec 1641. While James’s hand remained intact, a Bill to settle two parts of his land on Heywood’s widow was passed in 1642 (Journals of the House of Commons [hereafter CJ], 8 Apr 1642; cf. 7 Oct 1643, 10 Dec 1644).

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Westminster 1640–60 Regardless of the reluctant conclusions reached regarding James’ mental state, the impact of his stabbing of Heywood was immediate. The House of Commons sat just next door to Westminster Hall, so there were immediate anxious discussions about the need for a guard to defend MPs. It was objected, though, that while such a guard might save members individually, yet ‘the fear now is a general assassination’.64 In the meantime, the scheduled c­ ommunion service for MPs at the adjacent St Margaret’s church was postponed.65 An anxious London petition received by the Commons on 23 November even urged ‘that there may be a difference of apparel between Protestants and papists’.66 There would be recurrent panics about Catholics in the immediate vicinity of parliament. On 28 January 1641 Sir Robert Pye, ‘being a justice of peace of Westminster’, was sent out to examine a suspected Roman Catholic who had crept into the chamber, and was instructed to make him take the oath of supremacy.67 The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 still haunted MPs’ perceptions of the current crisis. Thus, amid further panics, on 10 May 1641 order was given to the local MPs Wheeler, Sir Arthur Ingram, William Bell, John Glynne and Thomas Tomkins ‘to search the Houses, rooms and places about the parliament house to prevent the designs and danger that may happen by persons ill-affected’.68 Searches of the cellars under the parliament house would be a regular event in the following years. The stabbing of Heywood could not have come at a more sensitive time. As Sir Thomas Knyvett wrote, John James ‘could not ... have done the Catholic cause a greater injury, for this act has exasperated all men’s hearts against them’.69 Just ten days before the stabbing a royal proclamation had noted ‘the extraordinary resort and confluence at this time of Popish Recusants to the Cities of London and Westminster’, and parliament had been preoccupied with reports of large numbers of Catholics in the immediate vicinity of parliament.70 The most visible increase in the number of Catholics in the area was among those attending masses at ambassadors’ houses, and at the Catholic chapel built for Henrietta Maria at Somerset House, which also included a friary staffed by Capuchins.71 Worshippers attending the queen’s chapel had already been stoned by a crowd less than a week before Heywood was stabbed 64 Jansson, I, 251. 65 Ibid., I, 305n. 66 Ibid., I, 252, 259. 67 Ibid., II, 298. 68 CJ, 10 May 1641, Jansson, IV, 292. 69 HMC, Various collections, II, 260. 70 Jansson, I, pp. 60, 70; Stuart royal proclamations, ed. J.F. Larkin and P.L. Hughes (2 vols, Oxford, 1973–83) (hereafter SRP), II, 736–7. 71 Merritt, pp. 349–50; C. Hibbard, ‘The Somerset House chapel and the topography of London Catholicism’ and S. Thurley, ‘The politics of court space in early Stuart London’ in M. Smuts (ed.), The politics of space (2009).

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The eye of the storm? (requiring the intervention of a city magistrate to break up the fight), and in the wake of the stabbing there were petitions that all papists and priests should depart along with the friars from Somerset House, while the Middlesex MP Sir Gilbert Gerrard urged that all dangerous recusants should be forthwith apprehended and kept close.72 Ambassadors’ residences continued to excite particular alarm, and in this case parliamentary and popular fears were mutually reinforcing.73 Thus the Venetian ambassador reported that learning that on Easter day [25th April] a number of Catholics had gathered in the houses of the ambassadors of Spain and Portugal, to hear mass as usual, a great crowd assembled and proceeded to the spot, where they heaped insults on the Portuguese, aspersing the honour of their ladies, and attempted to force the doors of the Spanish ambassador and take away his very goods.74

Less than two weeks later, it was reported that ‘several bills were posted at Somerset House ... inviting the people to proceed again to the embassies of Spain and Portugal, and to that of Venice also, to overthrow entirely what they call their idolatry’.75 On 10 May, after hearing from one MP that he had seen nearly three hundred people coming out of the Portuguese ambassador’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields from mass, the Commons gave orders to Middlesex and Westminster JPs to prevent the king’s subjects from frequenting the houses of any ambassadors, Somerset House or St James to hear mass. As Lindley comments, the Commons thereby ‘effectively acknowledged the legitimacy of this [popular] anger’.76 The first Sunday after parliament’s order, at the same Somerset House where the hostile bills had been posted earlier, a number of English people were arrested and questioned by the local JP John Hooker for attending mass there.77 The problem would not go away. A year later parliament was still complaining of the practice: it was claimed that the Spanish ambassador entertained no fewer than forty Scottish and English priests.78 There was an obvious recipe here for violent confrontation, and this was realized in the case of the Portuguese embassy. It was complained on 9 May 1642 in parliament that the Portuguese ambassador had come onto the 72 Jansson, I, 259; Calendar of State Papers Venetian (hereafter CSPVen) 1640–42, p. 97. Lindley (p. 75) misdates the attack on the queen’s chapel to the day after Heywood’s stabbing, but the Venetian agent uses the Gregorian calendar, so that the assault described in a letter dated 30 November as taking place the previous Sunday must refer to an event on 15 November (old style). The Heywood incident (on 21 November, old style) is recounted by the agent in a letter dated 7 December (i.e. 27 November old style). 73 Hibbard, ‘Somerset House’. 74 CSPVen 1640–42, pp. 145–6; TNA, SP16/485/50; Lindley, p. 75. 75 CSPVen 1640–42, pp. 148–9. 76 Jansson, IV, 292, 295; Lindley, p. 75. 77 Jansson, IV, 412. 78 W.H. Coates, A.S. Young and V. Snow (eds), The private journals of the Long Parliament 3 January to 5 March 1642 (Yale, 1982) (hereafter PJ), II, 208.

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Westminster 1640–60 balcony of his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields ‘and encouraged his servants to come out with their swords and kill such constables and other officers as had seized some of the king’s subjects who came from his house from mass’.79 It was inevitable in these circumstances that local informers on the look-out for popish priests would infringe on diplomatic immunity by breaking into an ambassador’s house and arresting his servants.80 Roman Catholic priests were undoubtedly active in Westminster in 1640–42, and the one that created the greatest stir, John Goodman, was based in St Mary le Strand. The king’s attempts to grant Goodman a reprieve from execution caused a political crisis. By contrast, it was the Westminster MP and JP John Glynne who played the principal role in the parliamentary investigation of Goodman, and who was most insistent and outspoken in his demands for the priest’s execution, while whipping up fears of platoons of priests, friars and Jesuits ‘walking at noonday’ and claiming ‘that divers went as ordinarily and frequently to mass to Denmark [i.e. Somerset] House and St. James and to the chapels of foreign ambassadors as to any church in London’.81 The role of Westminster MPs in escalating fears of the ubiquity and inviolability of Catholic priests, and whipping up the paranoia about huge numbers of Roman Catholics in the immediate neighbourhood of parliament, deserves special emphasis. The two men chiefly responsible for this were Glynne and Whitaker. Glynne claimed to have heard it observed in open court ‘that one of these neighbouring parishes had above 6,000 recusants in it’, and of Westminster itself he observed how ‘of late days both great persons and others together with priests and Jesuits have taken houses here’. Because Westminster was their primary residence they could not therefore easily be ejected from there. There was a whole Catholic economy in the area: Glynne noted darkly ‘the making of beads in this town’.82 Whitaker was no less apocalyptic in his accounts of the numbers of Catholics in the area. This had been a prominent theme in his speeches to parliament back in the late 1620s, when he had claimed that in his neighbourhood of Covent Garden papists outnumbered Protestants by a factor of three to one, and had set up their own autonomous community, a ‘colony of papists’ that the law could not touch. He was still sounding the same note in 1641. On 7 May he reported to the Commons on the words of a priest that papists had ‘a popish commonwealth’ within the kingdom, and that there were 375 papists ‘in St Giles’ fields’. He added his own observation that ‘I see priests in the court, in Westminster Hall, and at every 79 Ibid., II, 295–6. 80 See the protests of the Florentine ambassador in November 1641: CJ, 13 Nov 1641; PJ, II, 168; D’Ewes, p. 132n. 81 Jansson, II, 279–80, 288–90, 292–3; C. Russell, The fall of the British monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 258–62. Somerset House was still sometimes called ‘Denmark House’, as the former residence of Anne of Denmark. 82 Jansson, I, 352, 354, 357, 358, 361, 406.

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The eye of the storm? committee in the Painted Chamber’.83 These inflammatory claims helped to prompt proclamations excluding Catholics from the metropolis and a renewed series of ever more anxious searches for priests and recusants in Westminster, which became increasingly aggressive.84 While searches for recusants were conducted on a national scale, they were always intended to begin in the capital,85 and it was the discoveries in Westminster that inevitably generated most anxieties among MPs, especially when it was suggested that elite Catholics were protecting co-religionists from investigation. In making his subsequent report to the Commons, Glynne noted how Lawrence Ellison, a constable of the Duchy liberty of St Clement Danes, had been threatened by a servant of the earl of Arundel not to return the names of Arundel, Lord Stafford (Arundel’s son) or any of Arundel’s household.86 It was on Glynne’s motion on 27 April 1641 that the bill for John James’s hand to be cut off was read a second time.87 Searches for recusants were combined with an ever more intensive policy of administering the oaths of allegiance and supremacy to suspected papists, and Whitaker and Glynne were themselves closely involved in this campaign as local JPs.88 As Glynne and Whitaker helped to stoke up an atmosphere of constant panic over legions of papists in the streets surrounding the parliament house, so living conditions became increasingly intolerable for Westminster’s Catholics. Teighe O’Brien, a Catholic living in Covent Garden, wrote to a friend in September 1641 that although he was a sworn servant to the king and queen, yet he dared not go out of doors, ‘the persecution is so fearfully cruel and hot’.89 It is worth noting that these comments were written before the outbreak of the Irish rebellion, and reflected the intense fears of popery that were generated by parliament’s location in the western suburbs. Anti-popery has been discussed by historians as a central feature of political discourse and conspiracy-mongering in the tense politics of 1640–41, but it was much more than a discourse, and was not simply an oblique way of attacking the royal court. Anti-Catholicism had a particular resonance, given the specific location of parliament and the determination of Westminster’s JPs to maintain levels 83 Ibid., IV, 248, 253. 84 Ibid., IV, 190–1, 376, 402, 489–90, 503, 514; HLRO, Main Papers, 13 Nov 1641. On the increasing violence involved, see for example the account of the searching of recusants’ houses such as the Marquess of Worcester’s in the Strand and that of Sir Basil Brooke in November 1641 (CSPD 1641–3, p. 169). 85 A proclamation of 11 Nov 1640 was prompted specifically by ‘the extraordinary resort and confluence at this time of Popish Recusants to the Cities of London and Westminster’ and directed that they should not come to the royal court or within ten miles of London without a licence (SRP, II, 736–7). 86 Jansson, I, 553–4, 556–8, 566. 87 Ibid., IV, 111. 88 Ibid., IV, 490, 507, 578, 583, 657, 739–40, 741–2, 744. 89 HMC, Egmont, I, p. 142.

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Westminster 1640–60 of anxiety about Catholic activities in the very streets where MPs worked and resided. The stabbing of one of their number in Westminster Hall by the deranged John James gave the subsequent scaremongering by Westminster’s JPs a tone of urgent objectivity. Religious change and radicalism Religious tensions in Westminster were not raised just by Roman Catholics, however. Like other parts of the country, Westminster experienced a minor religious revolution in the first year of the Long Parliament, as Laudian policies were dismantled. But Westminster’s parish churches also provided a focus and pretext for some of the decisive shifts in national policy. St Margaret’s church, for example, was the scene of some very public reversals of Laudian policy. When Henry Burton preached there before the Commons in June 1641 he could not resist observing that ‘this very moneth 4 yeares agoe’ he had preached ‘in another kind of Pulpit, not far from this place’ [i.e. the pillory erected in New Palace Yard where he had had his ears cut off]. Two months earlier, St Margaret’s had also been the venue where Laud’s chaplain William Bray, the minister of St Martin’s, preached a sermon officially and publicly recanting his errors, which included, among other things, his complicity in licensing a notorious Laudian work by John Pocklington.90 St Margaret’s itself had been a conservative parish, but the tone of its services rapidly altered as the Commons took to meeting in the church. In the first weeks of the new parliament, a Commons specially appointed committee to discuss the matter urged (on Sir Robert Harley’s suggestion) that when they took collective communion in St Margaret’s ‘for the discovery of papists amongst us’ the communion table there should be brought down into the body of the church. The Westminster MPs Bell and Glynne were deputed to convey this desire to the dean, Bishop Williams, who (after his clashes over the issue in the 1630s) professed himself happy to do this for any parish under his jurisdiction that wished it.91 This was the first public, official reversal of the Laudian altar policy, and, as would often happen, it was practical change in Westminster that first flagged shifts in national policy. It was not just the interior arrangements of St Margaret’s church that began to see significant change. The parish had not been a haunt of godly preachers in the past; indeed, unlike many parishes in the capital (including its sister parish of St Martin in the Fields), St Margaret’s had not even sustained a proper parish lectureship. In the autumn of 1640 all this changed. Now there were usually two sermons on Sundays (as well as other days), and the preachers were mostly puritans. After the first few 90 Henry Burton, Englands bondage and hope of deliverance (1641), p. 1; William Bray, A sermon of the blessed sacrament of the Lords Supper (1641), pp. 50–63. 91 Jansson, I, 188, 190, 207, 217–18; D’Ewes, pp. 46, 48; Lindley, p. 38.

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The eye of the storm? weeks of the parliament’s sitting, Lord Montagu switched from attending the private chapel of his kinsman the earl of Manchester’s on Sundays to going to St Margaret’s, where the preachers whom he recorded hearing included such puritan luminaries as Thomas Case, John Brinsley and John White of Dorchester.92 The rejuvenation of preaching in Westminster was presumably accompanied by the removal of some of the Laudian features of church interiors, in particular the communion rails, but parish officials seem to have moved warily. A printed Commons order of September 1641 urged the removal of monuments of idolatry and levelling of chancels, and in apparent compliance with this order the chancel steps were removed in the Savoy chapel (the parish church of St Mary le Strand), and there may have been an attempt to board over images.93 St Mary’s churchwardens’ accounts are exceptionally detailed, and it is possible that some of these reforms may have been taking place simultaneously in the other Westminster parishes. But this is not certain, and there was in fact a notable degree of circumspection in how some of Westminster’s parishes behaved at this time of religious change. This is especially evident in the records of the vestry of St Martin in the Fields.94 Even though an order was made on 4 February 1641 specifying that vestry meetings should be held on the first Thursday of every month ‘until a Contradictory order’, no such meetings are recorded, and no meetings whatsoever are recorded between April and November 1641.95 It is inconceivable that vestry meetings did not take place during this period, but a decision would appear to have been taken not to enter details of such meetings in the official record.96 It also began to be more common for individual vestrymen not to sign the minutes of meetings, but instead to append the phrase ‘per le Vestry’. In 1641 more vestry orders and meetings were said to be agreed by the ‘Auncients of the parish’, or even simply ‘the Ancients’.97 This may represent a cover for those of lower social status, but it is more than likely that the intention behind these and other unspecific terms was to avoid personal accountability for implementing what were often controversial decisions. A sudden change in political fortunes might easily 92 HMC, Buccleuch III, 386–410. On the dearth of earlier preaching in St Margaret’s see Merritt, pp. 322–7. 93 See Chapter 6. 94 Note also the appeals for moderation and a balanced church peace sermon preached in November 1640 at ‘St Martin in the Strand’ by John Jackson (John Jackson, The true evangelical temper [1641], p. 220). 95 WAC, F2002, fol. 116. 96 For an example three decades earlier of this practice of refraining from recording disputatious or controversial vestry meetings at St Martin’s, see J.F. Merritt, ‘The Social Context of the Parish Church in Early Modern Westminster’, Urban History Yearbook 18 (1991). 97 WAC, F2002, fols 114v–119.

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Westminster 1640–60 leave the king rather than the Commons in the ascendant, and there were clear dangers for those living so close to the court to be implicated in measures which might suddenly incur the opprobrium of the government. While much of the silence of official records may reflect the existence of serious divisions in the locality, one also gains the strong impression – as the nation’s gaze fixed ever more urgently on Westminster – of a community ducking its head below the parapet, and waiting for the storm to pass. Sometimes, too, there are indications that some local people were not entirely happy with having their religious lives taken over by parliament’s favoured preachers. It was complained in February 1641 that the parish clerk of St Martin’s had begun a psalm as a way of preventing the officiating minister from praying after his sermon.98 By June 1641 a petition of ‘the poorer sort’ of St Margaret’s parish appealed to the Commons for the restoration of the sub-curate, Robert White, who had been vigilant in working with the poor at times of pestilence and dearth (when the curate, Wimberley, was sometimes absent). It was pointedly observed that White had been removed ‘for the private ends, and the zeal of some persons (and not many)’.99 The following month St Margaret’s church rang to the tones of one Mr Hollingworth, whose sermon was complained of in the Commons ‘for traducing the parliament, saying that we were sacrilegious shavers’.100 It was more radical religious preachers, however, who were increasingly more likely to be heard in Westminster’s pulpits. Henry Burton’s sermon in St Margaret’s in June 1641 had urged (in what opponents called ‘a most rayling sermon’) the destruction of highway crosses (especially that of Cheapside) and had urged parliament to remove innovations, not just of recent times, but those which had been in the church ever since the Apostles.101 When, the following month, the Lords expressed their anxiety about dangerous and seditious doctrine being preached at St Margaret’s, and urged the dean, Bishop Williams, to exercise more careful control over the choice of Sunday preachers there, they urged the examination of the sermon preached by Burton, as well as the anti-parliamentarian one given by Hollingworth.102 Sometimes the 98 The case was reported in parliament, and while some MPs wanted the clerk sent for as delinquent, Speaker Lenthall (a parishioner of St Martin’s) said that he would speak with the minister about it and would take order that it would not happen again (Jansson, II, 518). 99 HLRO, Main Papers, [1642], petition of the poor inhabitants of the City of Westminster; Lindley, p. 55. White was active in plague-ridden Westminster in Wimberley’s absence in 1636 (Merritt, p. 349). For White’s involvement in distributing private alms for ‘divers charitable persons’, including Edward Nicholas, see TNA, SP16/365/69, SP16/331/93. 100 Jansson, VI, 66. 101 Burton, Englands bondage, p. 31; Cambridge University Library (hereafter CUL), MS Mm/1/45, p. 38. 102 LJ, 5 July 1641; Jansson, VI, 63, 66.

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The eye of the storm? problem came not from the pulpit, but from individuals disrupting services. Thus, in June 1641 a minister was verbally abused by two people (although neither was a parishioner) during a baptism in St Clement Danes. In the same month, ‘a companie of Brownestes’ nearly 100-strong reportedly demonstrated outside Westminster Abbey and St Margaret’s on a Sunday, declaring parish churches to be ‘noe holyer then an howse of office’ and threatening to haul the minister out of the pulpit.103 In these events the radical protesters do not seem to have been local residents. It would appear that Westminster was the place for grandstanding, public protests by people from the City of London and other suburban areas – not necessarily by the inhabitants themselves. This is not to suggest that there were no native religious radicals active in Westminster at all in these months. Included in the lists of heretics in The Brownists Synagogue (1641) were ‘Eaton the famous Button-maker of St Martin’s (now dead)’ and one John Bennet, who was described as teaching various errors near Love lane in Westminster, including allegedly disallowing human learning because some of Christ’s followers were fishermen.104 Nevertheless, these would appear to have been isolated figures, and they were certainly dwarfed by the large numbers of radical figures described as active in the City and other parts of the heaving metropolis. Rather than embarking on zealous religious reforms, or pre-empting anti-Laudian legislation, Westminster’s parishes in the early 1640s seem more to have had religious reform done to them, with varying levels of active and passive compliance among parishioners.105 Nevertheless, as we shall see in a later chapter, the churches of Westminster came to play an increasingly prominent role in hosting nationally important preaching and public events.106 Public order, the trained bands and  the  ‘December  days’ One of the recurring problems of the tense months of 1640–41 was that of maintaining public order in the streets of Westminster. Westminster’s unincorporated status, and the consequent absence of a lord mayor, town council or a local court with pro-active, executive powers, had always made control of local disorder a problematic issue.107 As in other aspects of Westminster’s government, it often required swift and decisive intervention by the privy council and the prerogative courts to order local JPs and the trained bands into action. At 103 BL, Add. MSS 6521, fol. 200r–v; Lindley, p. 88. 104 The Brownists Synagogue (1641), sigs A2v, A3v. 105 For the rich variety of local responses to religious reforms in the parishes in the 1640s and 1650s see Chapter 6. 106 See Chapter 3. 107 See pp. 9–10; Merritt, ch. 7.

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Westminster 1640–60 a time of political stalemate, when monarchical government was suffering a crisis of legitimacy, when the privy council was increasingly passive, and yet when many targets of political resentment were walking the streets of Westminster, the potential for violent confrontation in the area was all too apparent. The summer of 1640 had already seen major problems when the dissolution of the Short Parliament had triggered demonstrations in the town, which offered a striking warning of what was to come the following year. This was also a time when the whole country was experiencing an increasing breakdown of public order and the system of church courts.108 In Westminster this tendency was exacerbated by the decentralized character of local government. Ironically, the crisis in national politics and political order being played out between parliament and the crown took place in a town where a coordinated, centralized response to emergencies was particularly difficult to organize, especially when the different national authorities had increasingly conflicting interests. The town of Westminster was thus caught between two simultaneous crises of order, and arguably suffered the most extreme versions of both types of breakdown. As the political crisis escalated and the struggle increasingly spilled out into the streets surrounding parliament and the royal court, Westminster’s law-enforcement bodies – and most of all its trained bands – would find themselves increasingly compromised in a situation where public order was a deeply contested and politicized matter. The declining role of the privy council and the eclipse of Star Chamber were soon causing problems for Westminster’s authorities in dealing with even unpoliticized social problems. By July 1641, Westminster’s inhabitants were urgently petitioning the House of Lords that the dissolving of the Court of Star Chamber had led to uncertainties over what (if any) legal status could still be commanded by Star Chamber decrees, privy council orders and royal proclamations relating to poor relief, plague-prevention measures and the suppression of vagrants and illegal immigrants. They therefore begged for a Lords’ order requiring that the JPs and local administrators perform these earlier orders ‘or that some such order may bee speedily sett down by your Lordshipps’.109 It is not apparent that they got much joy of this. It was not until September 1641 that parliament finally intervened in the face of the increasing spread of plague in both London and Westminster, with a committee of both houses being ordered to peruse plague orders formerly made by the privy council and Star Chamber, and new plague orders were finally issued two days later.110 The following month, though, parliament’s recess committee was still expressing 108 D. Cressy, England on edge (Oxford, 2006). 109 HLRO, Main Papers, 21 July 1641. For the parliamentary response see LJ, 6 and 8 Sept, 20 Oct 1641. 110 LJ, 6 and 8 Sept 1641. The privy council had given additional plague orders to Westminster JPs in October 1638: TNA, SP16/398/139. The legality of crucially important plague rates would have been an obvious issue of concern here, given their unpopularity.

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The eye of the storm? concern that plague orders were not being duly observed in the Westminster parishes, and the matter was entrusted to the care of the Westminster Court of Burgesses.111 By November 1641 the Westminster JPs certified that they were struggling to control the increasing numbers of ‘inmates’, and feared that despite their best efforts ‘the number of the poore Inhabitants in Westminster’ was such that ‘they may yet bee troublesome & offensive’ to parliament.112 Parliament was potentially menaced by more than the ‘offensive’ local poor. A wholly different form of local disorder came in the form of the mass petitions presented to parliament. These had initially been large and orderly processions of county elites to accompany county petitions to parliament. But the presentations of mass petitions by large numbers of petitioners gradually became rather more menacing in tone. Large crowds delivered the ‘root and branch’ petition, and went down to Westminster Hall on 8 February 1641 as the petition was debated. Large and angry crowds also accompanied the Londoners’ petition for the execution of justice against the earl of Strafford in April 1641, and on 3 and 4 May, when Strafford’s bill of attainder was debated in the House of Lords. Hostile crowds also kept a vigil outside the palace gate as the king struggled with his conscience before agreeing to pass the bill.113 But there were also fears of a potential military assault on parliament, and this raised the vexed question of parliament’s guard. In the wake of Heywood’s stabbing, Alderman Pennington had conveyed an offer from the City of London to provide a guard of some 100 citizens armed with swords about the door of parliament (having already made such an offer eleven days earlier, when fears were expressed about the large numbers of armed Irishmen about town). A guard from the City of London was approved by the MPs Sir Robert Harley, John Hampden and Harbottle Grimston (all Westminster residents), but the Commons then seems to have changed its mind and decided that ‘one of the trained bands’ would suffice.114 The question of the need for a parliamentary guard, as well as the puzzle of precisely who should be trusted to provide it, would, however, become a matter for critical debate later the following year, at which time Westminster’s own forces were pitched into the centre of a ­political crisis. The final months of 1641 are, famously, ones in which the area around parliament and Whitehall became the focus of mounting civil unrest. There were the famous popular tumults of December, when angry crowds of apprentices repeatedly massed outside parliament, and the dramatic events of early January, when the king with armed followers marched on parliament and attempted to arrest the Five Members. While Westminster provided the 111 LJ, 20 Oct 1641. 112 HLRO, Main Papers, 1 Nov 1641. 113 On the changing social composition of the crowds see B. Manning, The English people and the English revolution (2nd edn, 1991), ch. 1; Adamson, Noble revolt, p. 298. 114 Jansson, I, 118, 122, 248, 249–52, 255.

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Westminster 1640–60 stage on which these dramatic events unfolded, its own inhabitants have been strangely invisible in historians’ accounts of these events, which have focused on the clash between king and parliament, each fearing the intentions of the other. As with the tumults of the summer of 1640, there is little evidence to suggest that Westminster’s inhabitants played a leading role in the popular tumults, which normally consisted of London apprentices and others marching into Westminster from the City of London. Rather, it was Westminster’s forces of law and order – and especially its trained bands – that were caught awkwardly and unwillingly in the cross-fire. Their role has been misunderstood because of an assumption that it was City of London forces that were generally used by parliament to defend itself. In addition, the aristocratic swordsmen active in the conflicts at the end of December and in early January have tended to be confused with the local trained bands, an assumption presumably deriving from the town’s aristocratic associations. In fact, neither the social class nor the political allegiance of the trained bands are as apparent as such readings would suggest – the key political issues concerned who was to deploy the Westminster troops and when, and what should be taken to constitute ‘disorder’.115 Nevertheless, the question of the allegiance of these forces, and whether Westminster’s men would be instinctively more loyal to the court rather than to parliament, would become an issue of major importance by the beginning of January 1642. It was in fact parliament itself which first sought to use Westminster’s trained bands to provide a guard. There had been fears during the summer over the presence of disbanded soldiers in Westminster, and in an order rich in symbolism the JP Peter Heywood, who had helped to apprehend Guy Fawkes in 1605 (and had only partly recovered from his stabbing by John James the previous year), was deputed to search the cellars under the Upper House for gunpowder on 18 August 1641.116 By the time that parliament was reconvening in full session on 20 October there were additional security fears for MPs, in the wake of reports of the king’s apparent involvement in a plot to kidnap and possibly assassinate Covenanter leaders in Scotland.117 When the two Houses met they discovered that the Westminster trained bands had already been assembled in the New and Old Palace Yards for their protection, and after some initial consternation the Lords were happy to continue with their Westminster guard under the orders of the parliamentarian earl of Essex.118 115 L.C. Nagel, ‘The Militia of London, 1641–49’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1982) (hereafter Nagel), pp. 26–9. 116 LJ, 18 Aug 1641. 117 This was the so-called ‘Incident’ – a bungled plot to seize and possibly murder the Covenanter leader, the earl of Argyll, and the king’s ex-minister, the marquis of Hamilton, whom Charles suspected of treason. 118 LJ, 20 Oct 1641. The Commons also urged ‘That a strong Guard be kept in the City of Westminster and London’ (CJ, 20 Oct 1641). Pym reported that he had sent an order

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The eye of the storm? The necessity of this guard was only reinforced when a band of ex-soldiers attacked and threatened the trained bands two days later.119 Writing on 29 October, the St Margaret’s vestryman William Catherens reported to his friend Edward Pitt (teller of the exchequer) that ‘we still live heare as in a guarresson Towne continually guarded nighte and day by some of the Trayned Bandes both in the newe and olde pallace’.120 The trained bands themselves may not have been happy with this arrangement: on the petition of one of their captains, parliament on 6 November ordered their discharge after saying that it found ‘some Inconveniency by the Trained Bands, which do watch a Nights about the Parliament Houses’, although the Commons still ordered that Pye, Glynne, Wheeler and the other Westminster JPs should take care ‘that there be a strong and sufficient Watch kept every Night in and about Westminster.’.121 There was no suggestion at this stage that Westminster’s trained bands were not seen as being trustworthy in the defence of parliament – indeed, earlier in the year they had been entrusted with the task of guarding the accused earl of Strafford when he was taken to Westminster Hall for his trial.122 But the position of the Westminster trained bands became more problematic as, from late November 1641 onwards, parliament started to be confronted not by poor disbanded soldiers but by a surge in tumultuous crowds attacking the bishops. There was consternation on 29 November when a large body of citizens armed with staves and swords gathered in the Court of Requests to lobby MPs, and in his attempt to clear them from the area the lord lieutenant of Middlesex, the earl of Dorset, ordered the trained bands under his command to fire on the demonstrators. The Commons peremptorily dismissed the guard on its own authority, and Pym then asked Glynne and Wheeler, as Westminster JPs, to require the high constable of Westminster to provide ‘a strong and sufficient Watch’ instead (in default of a guard under their own command). Already, fearful MPs were starting to wonder whether Westminster was sufficiently safe for them to meet, and some spoke of adjourning to the Guildhall for safety.123 the previous day to the Middlesex and Westminster JPs to place convenient guards to protect parliament and to await further orders from Essex (the lord chamberlain). Essex had replaced Pembroke as lord chamberlain in July, after the latter had been dismissed from the post, ostensibly for his having struck Lord Maltravers with his staff in a committee of the House of lords: ODNB, s.n. Philip Herbert, first earl of Montgomery and fourth earl of Pembroke. 119 LJ, 23 Oct 1641. 120 BL, Add MSS 29974, fol. 338r. Catherens would later sign the Westminster peace petition but ultimately leave for royalist Oxford; his correspondent, Pitt, was also later sequestered for delinquency. 121 CJ, 6 Nov 1641; LJ, 6 Nov 1641. 122 A briefe and perfect relation of the answeres and replies of Thomas earle of Strafford (1647), p. 1. 123 CJ, 30 Nov 1641; D’Ewes, p. 219; A. Fletcher, The outbreak of the English civil war (1981), p. 175; HMC, Buccleuch, I, 286–7; Manning, English people, pp. 110–11; Lindley, pp. 96–8.

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Westminster 1640–60 Crowds agitating against the bishops now regularly gathered in Westminster, but the first time that the Westminster forces found themselves seriously politicized was on 10 December 1641. Previous days had seen increasing disorder and unrest. On 9 December writs were issued by the Lord Keeper to the JPs of Surrey, Middlesex and Westminster to prevent assemblies and riots.124 The Middlesex JP George Long almost immediately felt compelled to act upon these instructions when (as he later claimed) he was solicited to sign a petition that was planned to be presented to parliament by large crowds on the following day. Long concluded that the writs pertained to just such an event, and he resolved to act. He summoned six other JPs to meet with him early in the morning of 10 December in his office in Lincoln’s Inn. There, Long and the other JPs (John Hooker, Mr Shepheard, Mr Roberts, Mr Duncon, Richard Lowther and Thomas Darcy) and the under-sheriff, Mr Frend, signed three warrants – each instructing the high constable concerned to assemble 100 men to go to the palace of Westminster to prevent ‘tumults and assemblies of people’ and to suppress ‘riots and routs’. The warrant addressed to Thomas Darling, a St Margaret’s vestryman and high constable of Westminster, required him to warn all householders within his division ‘that they bee ready upon all occasions to assist and ioyne’ with the sherriff and bailiff of Westminster in this action ‘as they and you will answeare the contrary att your perills’.125 As a result, parliament was alarmed to find itself suddenly under the guard of 200 men with halberds. MPs had to conduct their own enquiries to find out who their guards were, and were informed that the guard consisted of ‘the most of them howseholders dwelling between Templebarr and Westminster’, under the command of the bailiff of the Liberty of the Duchy of Lancaster and some constables. They had come ‘by virtue of a Warrant from the High Constable, to be ready this Day to attend the Houses of Parliament, because a Riot is likely to be in Westminster’.126 An anxious parliament, surrounded by a guard which it had not requested and which was potentially not under its direct command, abruptly dismissed the guard and sent Long to the Tower. Some MPs moved for the other Middlesex JPs who had signed the warrant to be punished as well.127 Long’s royalist convictions would appear more evident the following year,128 but the other JPs 124 Most of the order was printed in His Majesties speciall command to the lord mayor of London (but see also London Metropolitan Archives [hereafter LMA], Journals of the Court of Common Council 39, fol. 235v). The House of Lords had itself issued the order to the Lord Keeper on 2 December: LJ, 2 Dec 1641. 125 The warrant sent to Darling survives in HLRO, Main Papers, 10 Dec 1641. Another warrant was sent to Mr Edward Buckley, high constable of the hundred of Ossulston (D’Ewes, p. 267). 126 LJ, 10 Dec 1641; CJ, 11 Dec 1641; D’Ewes, p. 263. 127 D’Ewes, p. 276. 128 Long was accused in October 1642 of doing nothing to prosecute a soldier who had fled

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The eye of the storm? involved were certainly not obvious crypto-royalists. Most remained active on the bench during the 1640s, and Hooker, in particular, was a famously pro-active puritan justice under the succession of regimes in the 1640s and 1650s.129 Their support for Long’s actions may in some cases have been secured under false pretences (Hooker, for example, claimed that he was told by a clerk that the writ came from the House of Commons). But their dilemma epitomized the problems facing all of Westminster’s officials. Above all, the events of 10 December had given them a stark warning of the dangers of acting on their own initiative when it came to evaluating what constituted a threat to public order.130 They would not make the same mistake again, but the trained bands themselves were at the mercy of whichever side chose to deploy them, and in the final weeks of December this would be the crown. Two weeks later, Westminster’s trained bands now began to be deployed, not to defend the parliament, but to defend the palace of Whitehall. We need not assume any reluctance to defend the royal court as such. Westminster’s inhabitants had every incentive to see order restored in the area, and especially to ensure that the king remained in residence at Whitehall (local residents and citizens begged the king to reside at Whitehall over Christmas in order to revive the capital’s trade, while Charles was already warning his servants that he would have to break up house after Christmas because of his lack of money).131 But Westminster forces were destined not merely to offer an honorary guard, but to be more directly involved. Their summons to Whitehall was in response to a significant escalation of violence around parliament on 27 December 1641. That day, a band of London apprentices who came down to Westminster armed with staves and swords clashed in Westminster Hall and the nearby Westminster courts with the notorious Colonel Lunsford. Lunsford had the popular reputation of being a violent desperado, whose temporary appointment as constable of the Tower by the king had created a storm of protest.132 Lunsford was accompanied in Westminster Hall on this particular day by a band of thirty or forty of his fellow officers, who were themselves armed with swords and rapiers. Further crowds of apprentices came down to Westminster on hearing the news of this confrontation, and into the evening ‘ten thousand prentices were betwixt York House and Charing Cross with halberds, staves and some swords’, searching inside coaches to see whether there were any bishops inside. The king therefore resolved to command the his colours, and his servant was accused of wearing the king’s colours in his hat: CJ, 14 and 15 Oct 1642; Lindley, p. 238. 129 See Chapters 4 and 6. 130 Clarendon saw Long’s censure as crucial in facilitating the tumults that followed: Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, The history of the rebellion and civil wars in England, I, ed. W.D. Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), I, 453–4. 131 See CSPD 1641–3, pp. 192, 201, 203, 212. 132 ODNB, s.n. Thomas Lunsford.

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Westminster 1640–60 raising of the trained bands of Middlesex and Westminster ‘to guard his own person and the Queen at Whitehall’, and they reportedly continued their attendance there ‘day and night by order from his Majesty’.133 The following day saw further tumultuous crowds gather in Westminster to attack the bishops, and a linked attack on Westminster Abbey in the evening. This latter assault seems to have been prompted by reports that apprentices arrested after the previous day’s events were being interrogated by Dean Williams in the Abbey. A number of apprentices reportedly attempted to enter the building ‘to pull downe the organs and altar’, but were thrown back by the dean and his servants ‘with some other gentlemen that came to them’.134 It should be noted that the attack upon the Abbey marked the final public appearance of Westminster’s ‘martyr’ Sir Richard Wiseman, who reportedly led the crowds in the assault and who was fatally wounded by a stone thrown down from the roof.135 He had been involved the previous day in the Lunsford incident, but apparently by accident. Wiseman had been clearly reaching the end of his tether. Although he had been released from prison, he found his case repeatedly delayed and, as usual, believed that official corruption was the explanation. In August he accused the assistant clerk of the House of Lords, one Throckmorton, of taking another bribe to suppress the justice of his cause, and struck him in Westminster Hall with a cudgel after threatening that he would have Throckmorton turned out of his place ‘and that he would have his Skynn pulled over his Eares’. Wiseman was, in his turn, struck by Viscount Andover, who called him ‘an insolent lying fellowe’, and Wiseman found himself briefly imprisoned once again for ‘misdemeaning himself’ before Lord Howard de Charlton.136 The process of Wiseman’s alienation and radicalization must have been almost complete by this point, and we can assume that he was in a resentful and defensive mood on 27 December as he pursued his case in the Court of Requests. When he saw people being attacked by Lunsford and the other soldiers he reportedly declared ‘I will ... spend my dearest and best blood in defence of the House of Commons, come ... fall on’, and wielded his sword to good effect, leading the others in driving Lunsford and his company from the building.137 If his initial involvement in the Lunsford events was unintentional, it seems likely that Wiseman was 133 Diurnall Occurrences (27 Dec 1641–2 Jan 1642), p. 2; Manning, English people, pp. 137–9; Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 172. 134 See the accounts in CSPD 1641–3, p. 217; Cressy, England on edge, p. 390; Diurnall Occurrences (27 Dec 1641–2 Jan 1642), pp. 3–4. 135 Note St Margaret’s payment to the coroner who led the inquiry into Wiseman’s death: WAC, E23, 1641–2. 136 HLRO, Main Papers, 10 Jan, 4 and 5 Aug 1641; LJ, 11 Aug 1641. 137 A bloody masacre plotted by the papists (1642), pp. 4–5; Lindley, p. 107. Vane’s clerk, Sidney Bere, claimed, however, that Wiseman was actually ‘one of their chief leaders’ (CSPD 1641–3, p. 216).

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The eye of the storm? indeed playing a more leading role in the attack on the Abbey. Wiseman’s death brought him notable prominence.138 His obsequies attracted significant attention and a broadsheet was published in his honour. It is notable, though, that by this stage the London apprentices had claimed him as one of their own: Wiseman’s body was conducted from King Street in Westminster to the radical City stronghold of St Stephen Coleman Street, accompanied by ‘above two hundred Apprentises, with swords and black Ribbands in Funeral equipage; and with above four hundred Citizens, all in mourning, with each man his sword in their Procession’.139 Westminster’s part-time soldiery, in the meantime, continued to be sucked into the conflict. Historical accounts of the defence of Whitehall Palace at this time have tended to emphasize the role played by freelance and disbanded soldiers such as Lunsford, or the 500 gentlemen of the Inns of Court who flocked to Whitehall to offer their support.140 Here was an almost archetypally ‘cavalier’ force ranged against the citizens of London. But Westminster’s own forces were caught up in the defence of Whitehall as well. As the Westminster trained bands had been summoned to defend the palace and were in constant attendance, it seems likely that they were at least some of the forces who were expected to be accommodated in the new court of guard that was built at the gate of Whitehall on 28 December, which therefore did not consist solely of disbanded and freelance soldiers, as is usually suggested.141 The court of guard is notorious for the events that occurred on 29 December. A large crowd exchanged insults with the soldiers behind the rails, accusing them of being a knot of papists, and it was supposedly in the course of these exchanges that the fateful terms ‘roundhead’ and ‘cavalier’ were first employed. Provoked by the insults, a number of ‘gentlemen’ then leapt over the rails, swords were drawn on both sides, and many apprentices were wounded in the subsequent melee. The event is usually taken to epitomize the casual violence and braggadocio of the ‘reformadoes’ who had flocked to the king’s side, but Westminster’s own trained bands may well have responded in similar fashion. That Westminster troops were at least in the immediate vicinity is confirmed by the 138 When the Commons ordered an examination of the events of later December and early January, 28 December was described as ‘that evening when Sir Richard Wiseman was hurt’ (PJ, I, 91–2). See also Bloody masacre, p. 6. 139 Londons tears, upon the ... death of Sir Richard Wiseman (1642). Wiseman’s posthumous reputation as a hero of the people is ironic, given his reported exchange with Throckmorton the previous August. On being accused of accepting bribes, Throckmorton retorted that, apart from Wiseman’s knighthood, ‘he [Throckmorton] had as good blood runne in his veanes as he’, and when Wiseman replied that he kept as good men as Throckmorton the clerk accused him of lying, prompting Wiseman to strike him with his cudgel (HLRO, Main Papers, 5 Aug 1641). 140 CSPD 1641–3, pp. 215–18. 141 TNA, LC5/135 unfol., 28 Dec 1641 order.

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Westminster 1640–60 fact that eight or nine apprentices were reportedly arrested by guards drawn together by the London and Middlesex sheriffs, and were committed to the local Gatehouse prison.142 The Commons certainly felt that the Westminster trained bands were complicit in the assault. Their complaint over the incident protested that disorders had been committed by ‘certain Persons in the Habits of Gentlemen, who are reported to be Officers in the late English Army, and are now in Whitehall, or some Places thereabouts’. Crucially, however, these men were said to have been ‘backed and countenanced by a Guard of the Trained Bands attending about Whitehall’.143 Even now, Westminster’s forces of law and order were not immediately seen as wedded exclusively to the king’s cause, and it is striking that all actors in the political crisis still seem to have felt that they had the right to command the local troops’ deployment. On 29 December the Lords ordered Westminster’s JPs to attend the House regularly to take direction from them, and on the same day the Commons ordered ‘that the Justices of Peace, the Bailiffs, and other Officers of Westminster, and the Suburbs thereof, be required, from this House, to take care, that a double Watch and Guard may be kept about this City and Suburbs, this Night’. Yet at the same time the trained bands were encamped in the court of guard at Whitehall, under the orders of the crown. At the same session in which the Commons ordered a double watch, they were also expressing alarm at discovering a guard of soldiers nearby at the Abbey, yet this guard would itself seem to have been comprised of members of Westminster’s trained bands.144 The following day, it was reported that Westminster’s Military Company had been called down to assist the trained bands massing in the court of guard, but it is simply not clear who was instructing them.145 It is impossible to determine the extent to which the militia was content to perform tasks allotted to it on these occasions. There are some occasional indications of reluctance. The earl of Holland (the lord lieutenant of Middlesex) had found his guard of musketeers reluctant to defend St James’s Palace in May, when an attack had been feared on the Catholic Queen Mother, Marie de Medicis.146 One can only speculate about how happy some of them had been to defend Laud at Lambeth Palace, and the members of Convocation in the Abbey, in the summer of 1640. Whatever the feelings of the soldiers, some of the frustration of Westminster’s officials may, however, be glimpsed when the 142 Manning, English people, pp. 146–7; HMC, Cowper, II, 302; Bloody masacre; Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 172; CJ, 29 Dec 1641; Lindley, pp. 11–12. 143 LJ, 29 Dec 1641. See also Diurnall Occurrences (27 Dec 1641–2 Jan 1642), p. 4. 144 CJ, 29 Dec 1641; LJ, 29 Dec 1641. The Abbey Treasurer’s Accounts for 1642 include 100 shillings given to ‘certayne Captaynes ... for defending the church’ and 74 shillings more ‘paid ... to another Company of the trayne bands’, as well as more than £35 for ‘Musketts Pikes Pistolls’ (WAM, 33690). 145 TNA, SP16/486, fol. 225. 146 Lindley, p. 25.

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The eye of the storm? Lords sent for the Middlesex and London sheriffs and ‘some of the Justices of the Peace for the city of Westminster’ on 29 December to demand why they had not obeyed the king’s writ to prevent riots by stopping the armed crowds that had marched to Westminster that morning. By way of explanation, the sheriffs promptly offered a brief history lesson of the frustrating events of 10 December last, when the Middlesex JPs had obeyed a writ and had guards sent to the Houses of Parliament, only to find that ‘upon this they were questioned by the House of Commons, and the Guards were dismissed’.147 The tumultuous crowds ceased to appear after the bloodshed of 29 December, but parliament was now seriously anxious for its own safety. Officially, the court of guard may have been posted at Whitehall to defend the palace, rather than to threaten parliament, but the distance between the two buildings was so short that parliament’s fears were understandable. Failing to receive any assurance from the king, despite its urgent pleas that he permit a parliamentary guard of City of London trained bands under the command of the earl of Essex to be mounted immediately, the Commons resolved on 31 December to adjourn for the next two days. It met instead in committee in the City of London, in the Guildhall, and it was from its safe stronghold here that it summoned the gentlemen of the Inns of Court to come and explain their recent behaviour.148 When parliament reconvened on 3 January its worries were not allayed when Charles ignored further requests by parliament that the guard at Whitehall should be removed (reasoning that it had been established without consent of parliament and therefore constituted a breach of privilege), and that parliament should instead be able to choose its own guard. It is hardly surprising that in the meantime the Commons proposed that the Lords should ‘take into Consideration to adjourn to another Place, where they may sit in Security’, if parliament was not granted the choice of its own guard.149 By now the Westminster trained bands were fully ensconced in the court of guard at Whitehall, and it was far clearer that parliament could not hope to have exclusive control over the local Westminster forces. In a telling exchange on 4 January, when the Westminster officer Lieutenant Jenkin was asked by whose authority his men were assembled at the court of guard, he answered that they were commanded to obey Sir William Fleming, a leading Scots courtier who played a major role in managing the king’s attempt to arrest the Five Members.150 It was hardly surprising, in these circumstances, that the Commons had stipulated that it wished its own guard to be supplied by the trained bands of the City of London. It is not apparent, however, that Jenkin and Westminster’s trained bands 147 LJ, 29 Dec 1641. 148 CJ, 31 Dec 1641; D’Ewes, p. 373; Diurnall Occurrences (27 Dec 1641–2 Jan 1642), pp. 5–6. 149 PJ, I, 4; CJ, 3 and 4 Jan 1642; LJ, 3 Jan 1642. 150 PJ, I, 9, 25; Adamson, Noble revolt, pp. 481, 490, 495–7.

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Westminster 1640–60 were directly involved in the next dramatic and fateful development that afternoon, when the king led a body of armed men into parliament in a failed attempt to arrest five members of the House of Commons under a charge of treason. The surviving sources, including the Commons’ own subsequent investigation, generally agree that it was large numbers of armed gentlemen, including the gentlemen pensioners, who accompanied the king from Whitehall to Westminster Hall, from whence he proceeded to the Commons with a company made up of some officers from the late army ‘and some other loose persons’. There is no suggestion that the trained bands participated in this final inflammatory act.151 The following day the Commons departed from its vulnerable seat in Westminster and adjourned to the safety of the City of London, where it met in committee over the following days.152 When Charles entered London in pursuit of the accused MPs and demanded that the Common Council deliver them up to him the Council refused, and the king found himself surrounded by hostile crowds. Unnerved, the king evidently concluded that the trained bands and other troops could not offer him sufficient security, and he fled his ‘royal city’ for Windsor on 10 January. He would not return to Westminster until his trial in January 1649. The aftermath of the king’s departure The king’s flight from London and the triumphant return of MPs to Westminster the following day are familiar events. There was a dramatic procession down the Strand as MPs were escorted by eight City companies, with large crowds, drums, trumpets and a fleet of boats firing volleys of shot back to Westminster.153 But Westminster had not played any role in the triumphant return of parliament, and it was now an open question whether parliament would continue to meet in regular session in the vulnerable western part of the metropolis. Historians’ accounts of parliament’s triumphant home-coming to West­­ minster seriously underestimate the degree to which MPs remained anxious about their security in the less well-defended western suburbs in the first weeks after their return. The Gunpowder Plot still cast long shadows: the parliament house and cellars were searched on the basis of a supposed letter to Orlando Bridgeman in which he ‘with the rest of my Lord of Straffords friends’ was advised not to attend the House ‘least he perished in the hubub with the puritans’.154 Even with the king gone, many of those involved in his march on the Commons were still in the vicinity. There had been panic on 6 151 PJ, I, 9; CSPD 1641–3, pp. 241–2. 152 PJ, I, 14–31. 153 Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 184–5. 154 BL, Add. MSS 29974, fol. 344r; CJ, 11 Jan 1642.

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The eye of the storm? January when a group of gentlemen drinking to the accompaniment of three drummers in Covent Garden had drawn swords on each other, prompting news in the City ‘that the Rebels of Coven Garden were coming to assault the City’, with the result that the City trained bands were called out to repel the feared invasion.155 As we will see, it was not until 24 January that Endymion Porter, one of the king’s grooms of the bedchamber, was finally removed as captain of the trained bands of St Martin’s, and a petition to parliament from the City of London presented the following day was still complaining of ‘many thousands of unknown people that lay in Covent Garden and thereabouts’. It was not until February that it was reported that the cavaliers who had attended the court ever since the king went out of town were now all dismissed, which (the writer commented) had rid the town of the fears of taking arms.156 In fact, over the first two weeks that followed its return to Westminster, parliament continued to invest its powers in executive committees that met in the City of London during its periodic adjournments. On 17 January the Commons also instructed its own committee, meeting in Grocers’ Hall, to ‘consider how, and in what Manner, the House may adjourn itself to any Place from Westminster; and to search Precedents to that Purpose’.157 In the first three weeks following the attempted arrest of the Five Members, the Commons met more often in committee in the City of London than it did in full session in Westminster. This is the crucial context in which we should read a petition bearing 372 signatures that was addressed to parliament by the inhabitants of Westminster and delivered to the Commons by Westminster’s own MP, John Glynne, when parliament reconvened in Westminster on 11 January. The petition itself avows the locality’s dedicated support for parliament, affirming that as there are none who do more affectionately love, so there shall not be any who shall more readily obey and observe the Commands of the same, nor more willingly expose both their Persons and Estates for Defence of the Rights and Privileges of Parliament; wherein, your Petitioners humbly conceive, do consist the Security of Religion, the Safety of his Majesty’s Royal Person, and the due Execution of our Laws. In real Testimony whereof, the Petitioners humbly offer their Service to this 158 Honourable House, when it shall please them to command it.

Lindley has dubbed this Westminster’s ‘radical petition’.159 He notes that three of its signatories were separately accused of uttering seditious words against 155 The rebellion in Coven Garden (1642), p. 3. 156 PJ, I, 168; CSPD 1641–3, p. 282. 157 CJ, 17 Jan 1642. 158 CJ, 11 Jan 1642. 159 Lindley, pp. 27, 35. The fact that Humphrey Landon and his two sureties signed this 11 January petition is mentioned no fewer than three times in Lindley’s text (pp. 27, 28n, 35, 146).

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Westminster 1640–60 the king160 and others had radical associations, with one being a suspected assailant of Lambeth Palace (another two signatories having acted as his sureties) and another accused of being a lay preacher.161 A closer study of the petition’s signatories, however, paints a very different picture. Some of the radical names might reflect the fact of the involvement of the trained bands. But what is just as striking is that a substantial number of signatures are those of prominent figures in Westminster’s local government. The petition bears the signatures of almost half the membership of the Court of Burgesses162 and of a good many other local worthies who cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as ‘radicals’. These include a number of vestrymen as well as other minor parish officials; Aquila Wykes, the keeper of the Gatehouse prison; and also the ministers Thomas Fuller (of St Mary le Strand) and Gilbert Wimberley (of St Margaret’s). Many of these signatories were of politically moderate or even crypto-royalist sentiments. As we will see, at least ninety of them would later sign Westminster’s December 1642 peace petition.163 Such signatures are understandable when we recall the immediate context. There was an obvious need for the trained bands to reassure parliament of their goodwill, given how they had been so recently caught up in the hostilities while defending Whitehall and had previously been the source of anxiety in their forming an unrequested guard on parliament. But also, with the king departed, it was doubly important for the town of Westminster to remain on good terms with the de facto government, and local inhabitants had every reason to seek to assuage any fears about the loyalty of Westminster’s local armed forces. In the very same session in which the Commons received this petition, the House had heard the content of a supposedly intercepted letter in which a Catholic plotter declared ‘that our Party is strong in the City, especially Holborne, the New Buildings, and Westminster’ (and the same day there was an alleged French plot to poison a number of the parliamentarian peers in the earl of Leicester’s house in St Martin’s Lane).164 Undoubtedly, for some signatories the petition was also a chance to emphasize a parliamentarian allegiance. But for many this was surely more a matter of local society emphasizing its recognition of the power and legitimacy of the one part of the executive that remained in its midst. The petition’s wording of support for parliament is 160 Charles Best, Robert Burrowes and Robert Locker (Lindley, p. 146). 161 Humphrey Landon was the suspected assailant, and his two sureties were Thomas Ellis (glover) and Randall Andrewes (vintner), while John Bennett was named as a lay preacher in The Brownists synagogue (Lindley, p. 146). 162 Members of the Court of Burgesses who signed the petition include the burgesses Arthur Cundall, George Prinne, Thomas Kirke and Thomas Style; and the assistant burgesses Edward Martin, John Fennell, John Biscoe, John Foster, Thomas Perkins and Bryan Barniby. 163 HLRO, Main Papers, 11 Jan 1644 (vere 1642). See also Chapter 5. 164 CJ, 11 Jan 1642; A Happy deliverance (1642).

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The eye of the storm? important, but it is just as significant that it carries no explicitly anti-royalist message, nor indeed any reference at all to the king’s supporters. Its greatest concern is specifically ‘that there have been some Doubts and Jealousies raised of your Petitioners Duty and Affection to this Honourable House’.165 It would be seriously misleading, then, to characterize this document as a ‘radical petition’, or as an index of the strength of ‘parliamentarian’ allegiance in Westminster. Certainly it is nothing like the Middlesex petition which was presented at Sir Gilbert Gerrard’s motion later the same month. Bearing over 7,500 signatures, this petition urges ‘the Punishment of Delinquents, and purging out what is amiss in Church and Commonwealth’ and the removal of popish lords and bishops. It condemns ‘the Prelates and Papists, with their Adherents, and others ill affected in this Kingdom, whose dangerous Practices and Designs had almost ruined our Religion, Laws, and Liberties’ and deplores the ‘evil Counsels, crafty Devices, desperate Plots, and apparent Opposition, from that malignant Party’.166 Westminster’s 11 January petition would seem to have worked. The Commons thanked the petitioners for the ‘great Deal of Affection ... unto this House’ in their petition, and assured them that ‘this House had never any Cause to be jealous of them; and shall make use of them as there shall be Occasion’.167 There was still discussion of whether parliament might be relocated, but by late January the issue had been dropped altogether. Also, the local trained bands soon began to resume responsibilities for guarding parliament. When Simonds D’Ewes left the House on 11 January he saw in Westminster Hall the 2,400 men of the London companies, but noted among them ‘some companies of the City of Westminster’ (who had clearly lingered after the presentation of their petition).168 Just two days later the sheriffs of Middlesex were instructed to secure the Strand and Westminster. While London’s trained bands had been initially preferred for parliament’s guard, as early as 15 January Skippon was given power to ask for guards for parliament from either London or Middlesex, and by mid-February at the latest Middlesex forces (probably including those from Westminster) were taking turns on parliamentary guard duty.169 In the meantime, a petition signed by roughly 400 members of St Martin’s trained bands was presented to parliament 165 CJ, 11 Jan 1642. 166 LJ, 26 Jan 1642; PJ, I, 145, 152, 156, 157. Gerrard’s involvement in the presentation of the petition would strongly suggest that it represented the county outside the confines of Westminster. 167 PJ, I, 32–3; CJ, 11 Jan 1642. 168 PJ, I, 39. 169 Ibid., I, 77; CJ, 15 Jan 1642; Nagel, p. 103. The companies from the Westminster parishes were under the authority of the deputy lieutenants and sheriffs of Middlesex at this time, as were companies in St Giles in the Fields, parts of St Sepulchre without Newgate and St Andrew Holborn.

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Westminster 1640–60 (at Glynne’s motion), complaining that they were called ‘the popish band’ because of their crypto-Catholic commander, the courtier Endymion Porter, ‘and his other officers’. They successfully requested that the absent Porter be replaced as their commander by Robert Cecil, the younger son of the parliamentarian earl of Salisbury (whose family from Lord Burghley onwards had enjoyd a prominent profile in the parish), and promised to hazard their lives and fortunes for parliament.170 It is possible, of course, that in their request for a new commander and their petition assuring parliament of their support, we are hearing the voices of members of the trained bands who had felt mounting repugnance for the role that they had been required to perform in December. But their concern that they were seen as being anti-parliamentarian could also have been laced with self-interest. Moreover, it is easy enough to find occasional evidence of lack of enthusiasm for their parliamentary duties as well. It was being reported in May 1642 that half of the companies of Middlesex had refused to train in Tothill Fields in the presence of MPs.171 Later on in the year Captain Michael Miller (leading one of the Middlesex companies) complained that only 32 of 300 men answered a summons to guard duty, and that this minority said they would not do it again unless the defaulters played their part. He also accused one of his men of pawning a halberd.172 As we will see, the western suburbs would never lose their association with potential opposition to parliament.173 Zealous parliamentarians may not have been particularly popular with their neighbours, however. The constable Peter Scott – a St Martin’s brewer who is one of the very few Westminster officials who can be identified as probably being complicit with the December rioters – was the frequent recipient of verbal and physical abuse while serving as constable in the following months (on one occasion being called a ‘brownest and cropeare’), and twice sought the protection of the Commons from legal proceedings against him by local ‘cavaliers’.174 Religious radicals may also have been causing increasing concern in these months, even if those responsible still tended to be from outside Westminster itself. Thus it was a Blackfriars shoemaker – one Robert Rookwood – who disturbed the congregation ‘beinge in prayers’ in Covent Garden church in July 1642, and in the ensuing tumult ‘many Ladies and Gentlewomen were trodden under foot, dispoyled of their Iewels, and Lives 170 PJ, I, 143–4, 150–1, 155; CJ, 24 Jan 1642; J.F. Merritt, ‘The Cecils and Westminster 1558–1612: the development of an urban power base’ in P. Croft (ed.), Patronage, culture and power (New Haven, 2002). 171 PJ, II, 372, 378. 172 Nagel, 103. 173 See Chapter 4. 174 HLRO, Main Papers, 15 Jan 1642; LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/28, p. 15; MJ & WJ/SB/B/29, p. 2; Lindley, pp. 108, 109, 147.

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The eye of the storm? brought in great danger’.175 Other irreligious behaviour was becoming more overt. The following month ‘a company of Boyes came with a Drumme’ into Westminster Abbey in the middle of divine service while the organ was playing and ‘fell a Dancing with their hats on’.176 There were some popular expressions of hostility in Westminster towards parliamentarians. On 5 March Colonel Francis Edmunds reportedly said in the Balcony Tavern in Covent Garden that he hoped the king ‘would set up his royal standard and maintain his prerogative by force of arms’ and that if he knew where Pym, Hampden and Strode were ‘he would ease the king of further trouble by them’.177 In the same month, a royalist letter was found in Palace Yard by two Westminster watchmen,178 while two months later Thomas Taylor, a coachman of St Martin’s, was brought before the Westminster sessions for base and scandalous speeches against the Commons.179 Local royalist attitudes were potentially exposed by a royal declaration of 21 June 1642 against the raising of the parliamentarian militia. A parliamentary order of 5 July forbade its publication, but three Westminster ministers – Dukeson of St Clement’s, his curate Smyth and Francis Hall, the minister at Covent Garden (who had been appointed by Laud’s chaplain, William Bray) – were summoned before the Commons to answer charges that they had had the declaration read in church. Dukeson was questioned by the Commons and briefly imprisoned because he ‘did most insolently prevaricate with the House; and gave nothing but shuffling Answers’.180 Another official caught reading the declaration was Mr Frend, the under-sheriff of Middlesex. Frend had already been cross-examined by the Commons seven months previously over his involvement in the events of 10 December, when he had issued the writ that brought the trained bands to parliament. Accused of publishing the king’s proclamation, he confessed that he had kept it by him for four days without reading it, until he was at last sufficiently terrified that he read it.181

175 The parliaments lamentation for the distractions of the kingdom (1642) p. 6; LMA, MJ & WJ/ SB/B/29, p. 25; Lindley, p. 48. 176 A Perfect Diurnall, no. 8 (1–8 August 1642), sig. I3v. 177 PJ, II, 8–9. 178 The letter was read out in the Commons by the Westminster JP Laurence Whitaker, and it was at Glynne’s motion that the two watchmen were summoned to the bar of the Commons to report where they had found it (PJ, II, 40, 45, 61). 179 LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/29, p. 10. 180 CJ, 5, 13 and 21 July 1642; Some Speciall Passages, no. 8 (12–19 July 1642), p. 47. Hall was later reported to be with Bray in the cavalier army (CJ, 12 Jan 1643). 181 D’Ewes, pp. 263–9; PJ, III, 231.

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Westminster 1640–60 Conclusion Dukeson’s audacity may have made him seem a lone voice among Westminster’s inhabitants. But, as we will see, by December of the same year Dukeson had apparently managed to make common cause with a much broader swathe of Westminster opinion – including those who had signed the pro-parliament petition of 11 January – in his promotion of the town’s peace petition to the House of Lords. The petition struck a deliberately non-partisan tone, and appealed for ‘a speedy, seasonable, and happy Accommodation between His Gracious Majesty and both Houses of Parliament’ that would bring peace and stability, not least to Westminster itself, and the nearly 3,000 signatures inscribed on it suggest that it spoke for many Westminster inhabitants who were not convinced adherents of either side.182 After all, Westminster’s inhabitants had not played an active role in the political crisis that had unfolded in their midst over the previous two years. It would seem that there were few political or religious radicals who were prominent in the town, and few residents who became involved in the popular demonstrations. Typically, it was people from outside the town who targeted the streets and churches of Westminster for public demonstrations. Westminster’s own trained bands had been dragged into the middle of the conflicts of December 1641, but had mostly managed to avoid being associated indelibly with either side. Nevertheless, much of the shape of the national political crisis had reflected the distinctive nature of Westminster itself, in its geographical vulnerability to attack and its lack of clear government or effective control of public order in its streets. All of this both facilitated the development of popular tumults and also complicated the problem of how they should be dealt with, and thereby invited further fears and tensions as parliament and the crown struggled to find an agreed means of controlling the disorders. With the departure of the monarch, it would now be parliament’s task to find effective ways of filling the gaps in the government of Westminster. For Westminster’s inhabitants, though, the outbreak of civil war did not just mean the loss of the royal court, and the need to manage relations with the newly dominant parliament. It also introduced a new and alarming element into the western suburbs, which would be a constant feature of Westminster life throughout the next two decades. This was the presence of armed soldiers.

182 See Chapter 5.

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Chapter 2

.

‘The perpetual marching of troops, the  ceaseless noise of drums and trumpets’: the militarization of Westminster

E

arly Stuart Westminster was no stranger to the spectacle of soldiers drilling in an artillery yard and marching in formation through the area. This was not, however, a normal military regiment, but a band of civilians known as the Military Company of Westminster. Established in 1616, this was one of a number of companies of part-time amateurs aided by a few trained soldiers that were set up in major cities in the later Jacobean period as a focus for Protestant civic militarism in the wake of the confessional warfare on the Continent. With their own military yard for drilling, and a series of buildings arranged like a mini-fortress, protected by a drawbridge, with ‘spikes and tenterhooks’ about the bridge and walls, the Westminster company could act out the role of a garrison, and its members could put on a brave display on the small number of occasions every year when they assembled. But the troops were mostly vintners and other local tradesmen, and their most important duties were essentially ceremonial ones – parading on the king’s birthday and St James’s day – and, while a new armoury was built in the 1630s, funds were also spent on rounds of feasts and on the elaborate decoration of the assembly rooms (which were later described as containing a library as well as busts of emperors).1 It would be easy to mock these armchair amateur soldiers, and indeed Shirley’s West End-based play The lady of pleasure takes a side-swipe at them when one of the characters declares that ‘we’ll feast the parish in the

1 Merritt, pp. 342–3; Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 77; TNA, C5/486/26; TNA, E317/ MIDDX/55. On other military companies see W. Hunt, ‘Civic chivalry and the English civil war’ in A. Grafton and A. Blair (eds), The transmission of culture in early modern Europe (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 215–18. While evidence concerning these military companies is very sparse, I have recently discovered an account book of the Westminster Company for the period 1622–39 which throws important new light on its membership and activities in the pre-war period. I will publish a more detailed discussion of this material elsewhere.

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Figure 3  Portion of Newcourt and Faithorne’s 1658 map, showing the area around  Charing  Cross and the Mews

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The militarization of Westminster field, and teach/ The military men new discipline’.2 Yet the ordnance which the company owned was real enough to be requisitioned when war broke out, and some of the Company’s members would become captains in the local regiments in the ensuing hostilities.3 Nevertheless, the Company’s occasional voluntary military pageantry in the 1630s was a world away from the large-scale daily presence of trained, professional military regiments, armed to defend the government and to enforce a political settlement, which became one of the most remarkable features of Westminster during the 1640s and 1650s. In Westminster, as in no other place in the country, the symbolic authority of successive regimes was on display, but conversely, the fragility and insecurity of these regimes was also evident in the very streets of Westminster through the heavy military presence there. The military was a visual symbol of the power and authority of the state – troops played a prominent role in state pageantry. But it was not just a symbol: troops were an integral part of local policing, and were necessarily involved in regular contact with the civilian population. A sustained militarization was the most visually striking and distinctive development for Westminster in the whole period – a feature unique in its history. Yet histories of the metropolis often tend to be written as if the military were not there, while published histories of the war and of its impact generally tend to ignore the capital.4 There seems often to be an assumption that because no civil war battles or sieges were fought in the parliamentarian metropolis, therefore the army was not a visible or intrusive presence. Yet, as we will see, there was a significant military presence throughout these decades in Westminster, especially after the civil war had been fought. The end of the civil war marked the beginning of a fluctuating series of military incursions into Westminster, which would culminate in the 1650s when permanent garrisons were established in its very heart.5 2 James Shirley, The lady of pleasure, ed. R. Huebert (Manchester, 1986), p. 70. 3 CJ, 11 Feb 1643. Company members who became captains in the Westminster forces include Thomas Constable and Michael Barkstead (Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 77; Nagel, pp. 104, 109). On the potential military significance of London’s larger Artillery Company see J. Adamson, The noble revolt (2007), pp. 65–7. 4 E.g. C. Carlton, Going to the wars (1992); M. Bennett, The civil wars experienced: Britain and Ireland 1638–61 (2000); M. Wanklyn and F. Jones, A military history of the English civil war 1642–1646 (Harlow, 2005); M. Bennett, The civil war in Britain and Ireland 1638–1651 (Oxford, 1997). There are very brief references to London in B. Donagan, War in England 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 67–8 and J. Kenyon and J. Ohlmeyer (eds), The civil wars. A military history of England, Scotland and Ireland 1638–1660 (Oxford, 1998). 5 It should be noted that this heavy military presence in the 1650s was far more marked in Westminster than it was elsewhere in the metropolis. After 1649, there was no garrison in the City of London for nearly eight years (apart from the Tower regiment) until Sindercomb’s plot in 1657 prompted the return of the garrison at St Paul’s (H.M. Reece, ‘The Military presence in England, 1649–1660’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1981, p. 143).

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Westminster 1640–60 The existence of permanent garrisons of soldiers in the heart of Westminster had a broader impact on the locality, visible in their sometimes fractious interactions with townspeople, which culminated in armed conflict and fatalities at the parliamentary elections of 1656. It was also evident in the disruption of trade and movement by guards, in the involvement of soldiers in enforcing moral legislation and carrying out house searches and in the martial atmosphere that foreign visitors instantly remarked upon. ­Westminster also served as a centre for detaining prisoners of war, and was witness to the appalling calamity when no fewer than 1,200 Scottish soldiers died while confined in makeshift camps in and around St Margaret’s new chapel, only a stone’s throw from the heart of the regime in Whitehall. Westminster’s 1650s militarization establishes a problematic context for the study of the town’s role as a centre of elite, fashionable society, as we will see in a later chapter. Before the social impact of the 1650s occupation can be discussed, however, it will be necessary to examine the fluctuating military presence in the area in the 1640s. Militarization in the 1640s The first civil war The king’s initial march towards London in October and November 1642 placed the capital briefly at the heart of the civil war conflict. On 15 October the Commons ordered the setting up of posts, bars, chains and houses for courts of guard in all the Westminster parishes. St Margaret’s vestry had already instructed the churchwardens to provide chains and posts and whatever else was thought necessary ‘for the safety of this Towne’ a month previously (at a meeting notable for the sudden and very rare attendance of the MP John Glynne). In response to the Commons’ order, another vestry meeting (attended – uniquely – by Westminster’s other MP, William Bell) directed that £50 should be laid aside for the building ‘of Courtes of guard and other works and fortifications in and about this Towne for the safety thereof in theise times of dainger’.6 The capital remained on high alert for at least a month, and Westminster’s own militia was closely involved. The accounts of Lieutenant Michael Barkstead (an erstwhile member of the Military Company) of the trained band in the Strand’s duchy liberty show that from the battle of Edgehill until a week after the battle of Turnham Green the company was on duty (mostly in St James’s Field) almost every day.7 In November, troops serving in Westminster were primed for immediate action. The lieutenant of the St Martin in the Fields company guarding parliament was called in by the Commons on 8 November to check that the soldiers had been supplied with 6 CJ, 15 Oct 1642; WAC, E2413, fols 17v, 19. 7 TNA, SP28/232; Nagel, p. 104.

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The militarization of Westminster powder and bullets.8 Similarly, four days later two MPs resident in Westminster – Sir Robert Pye and William Wheeler – were instructed to ensure that ‘the Train Bands, and the Soldiers in the Works about Westminster’ were furnished in the same manner. The threat to Westminster was believed to be so acute at this point that parliament was prepared to send away its own guards to ‘go into the Works, about Hide Parke, for the Defence of those Trenches’, while the London militia was instructed to draw its forces ‘into the City of Westminster, and the Suburbs thereof; and to beat up their Drums for Volunteers; and to arm those Volunteers with the Arms of such of the Train Bands as shall not voluntarily go into the Trenches, to guard and defend the Cities and Suburbs’.9 After the battle of Turnham Green tensions were relaxed and guard numbers gradually reduced. However, March of the following year was marked by what was probably the most famous militarization of the metropolis in this period. This saw the building of defensive earthworks on a large scale encompassing London and the suburbs. Not only did this profoundly affect the landscape and practical arrangements, but the earthworks had a long-term administrative impact. ‘Within the lines of communication’ continued to be a term used to designate the metropolitical area for years after the earthworks themselves had been removed, and the creation of metropolitical administrative units was a distinctive aspect of the period. The initial construction of the earthworks was a task imposed upon all citizens, exhorted by their parish ministers, with those of Westminster playing their part. This would be celebrated as a popular mobilization of enthusiastic local forces, but it should be remembered that there had also been popular support for the peace petitions circulated less than three months earlier, and that the parliamentary order empowered deputy lieutenants and JPs to levy charges on householders and tenants to pay the costs of erecting the fortifications.10 Some six forts of this circuit of fortifications were located in Westminster, and the militia was tasked with guarding them.11 Perhaps the most striking aspect of the militarization of the town of West­­ minster in this period was the military presence in Whitehall. The Scottish 8 Nagel, p. 104. 9 CJ, 12 Nov 1642. 10 CJ, 7 Mar 1643; V. Smith and P. Kelsey, ‘The lines of communication: the civil war defences of London’ in S. Porter (ed.), London and the Civil War, pp. 142–3. This could involve considerable disruption to properties where the defences were created. In Bloomsbury, for example, the construction of a fort caused the demolition of a number of houses belonging to the earl of Southampton, resulting in losses of over £100 p.a. in rental and a capital loss later valued at £1,600: L. Stone, Family and fortune (Oxford, 1973), p. 235. Other landowners were still trying as late as 1654 to claim back-rent for land and property that had been made use of in the lines of communication: see TNA, SP24/16, fol. 144r (cf. SP24/1 fols 115v–116r). 11 Smith and Kelsey, ‘Lines of communication’, pp. 135–6, 141.

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Westminster 1640–60 traveller William Lithgow described how, in April 1643, he saw parliament’s guard from the London trained bands ‘placed in two courts of Guard, the one before the Hall in the palace court near to the water staires, the other Court du Guard standeth in the Parliament yard ... Both Houses of Peeres and Commons having double Centinels with Picke and Musquet at the entrie of their sitting places’. Lithgow was particularly struck by how ‘I found the Street-enravelld Court before White hall gate, guarded also with a Court du Guard, a noveltie beyond novelties, and what was more rare, the guard growing deep in the royall Courts of the Kings House, which was indeed a lamentable sight’.12 Some of this initial militarization was quite short lived. Once the initial royalist threat to the area receded, the court of guard is described as being taken down in St James Street in 1643–44.13 The boundary fortifications and the forts at Hyde Park and Tothill Fields remained, though.14 The large fort with four bastions raised at Hyde Park and its court of guard were famous to contemporaries (some of the ground disturbance of Hyde Park fort is still visible today, and is marked on the Ordnance Survey).15 The court of guard even appeared in the prophecies of Lady Eleanor Davies.16 For Westminster’s residents and visitors, though, the guard would have been most noticeable for its zeal in restricting the passage of people and goods (from September 1643 courts of guard were required to search ‘all Trunks and other Carriages that come out of the City’).17 Newsbooks regularly reported the interception of royalist gentlemen and letters by the court of guard, but the soldiers also seized gold lace from tradesmen and were accused of behaving disrespectfully towards the earl of Holland and his wife.18 When the Hyde Park guards searched the servants of the earl of Lincoln the matter was raised in the House of Lords, amid general complaints of ‘uncivil Carriage to Peers and their Servants’ by courts of guard.19 In April 1646 the 12 William Lithgow, The present surveigh of London and Englands state (1643), sig. A4r–v. In October 1643 the Commons also directed the repair of the courts of guard ‘in the old and new Palace of Westminster’ (CJ, 10 Oct 1643). 13 WAC, E24, 1643–4, fol. 2v. The Commons ordered as early as 3 July 1643 ‘That it be referred to the Committee for the Safety of the Kingdom, to consider of removing the Guards from St. James’s, if they shall see Cause’ (CJ). See also CJ, 16 July 1645. 14 There is a reference to a court of guard built at ‘Tuttle fort’: CSPD 1645–7, p. 381. 15 Smith and Kelsey, ‘Lines of communication’, p. 135. The guard at Hyde Park was evidently three times the size of the other courts of guard erected in Westminster in 1642: see the collier’s bill in TNA, SP28/262, fol. 132r. 16 Prophetic writings of Lady Eleanor Davies, ed. E.S. Cope (Oxford, 1995), p. 106. 17 CJ, 23 Sept 1643. 18 LJ, 25 July 1643 (cf. LJ, 1 May 1643). Perfect Diurnall, no. 33 (23–30 Jan 1643), sig. Kk4v describes a ‘Coster’ with a bag full of writings and letters intercepted by Hyde Park courts of guard. Gold lace and other goods that were reported as being seized from London tradesmen by the court of guard at Hyde Park were restored in June 1643 (CSPD 1641–3, p. 513). 19 LJ, 3 Nov 1643.

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The militarization of Westminster Committee of Both Kingdoms was forced to intervene with the captain of the guard at Hyde Park Corner after the guard had insisted on seizing a horse of the earl of Northampton because he had appeared with one more servant than his pass had allowed.20 The guards were also a drain on local resources in their need for firewood and the requirement that the local assize provide them with bread and beer, although they were also employed to prevent others from cutting down trees and killing deer in Hyde Park.21 These courts of guards were just one manifestation of significant low-level military interference in civilian life. The collection of tax arrears and assessments was often backed up by military officers, and this reached a particular height in Westminster in 1643. In April the Commons ordered ‘that Captain Crompton be enjoined and required to aid the Collectors, in gathering the Monies upon the weekly Assessments ... within the Liberties of Westminster, St. Katharine’s, and other Parts adjacent’, and a week later directed That the Committee for Examinations shall have power to appoint what TrainBands shall be assisting the Collectors, in distraining upon such as refuse to pay the weekly Assessments in the Suburbs of London and Westminster, and Liberties; and to send for such as abuse the Collectors; and to commit them, upon Examination; and to release them, upon their conforming to pay.22

A royalist newsbook reported that month that ‘there was great spoile com­­­ mitted in the Citie of Westminster’, with officials ‘spoiling and robbing every one, of what sort soever, who had denied to yield his purse at the first demand’ to pay the new assessment.23 The seizure of horses was similarly a source of regular complaint in the early stages of the war, in Westminster as elsewhere.24 An initial parliamentary ordinance of June 1642 – ‘the Propositions’ – had appealed for the provision of horses and horsemen (as well as arms, money and plate), but eleven months later an order noted ‘the great Abuses in the several Counties of this Kingdom, by the Taking of Horses for the Service of the Parliament, by reason the Officers assigned for that Purpose can neither judge of the Affections nor Abilities of the People, not knowing what they have contributed, nor in what Proportion, to the Propositions’. A further ordinance later in May 1643 specified that horses might be taken even from proven supporters of parliament if necessary, although the horses would be properly valued and the owners repaid ‘upon the publique Faith’. The proviso that horses should not be taken from MPs or members of the peerage is significant and may partly reflect complaints in Westminster of inconveniences 20 CSPD 1645–7, p. 402. 21 WAM, 42424; CJ, 7 and 26 Oct 1643, 14 Oct 1644. On courts of guard more generally see Nagel, pp. 160–1. 22 CJ, 11 and 18 Apr 1643. 23 Mercurius Aulicus, no. 15 (9–15 Apr 1643), p. 181. 24 E.g. CJ, 17 and 21 Apr 1643; LJ, 21 June, 14 July 1643.

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Westminster 1640–60 suffered by aristocrats such as the earls of Leicester and Warwick and Lady Castlehaven. The high quota of horses demanded from London and Westminster meant that abuses and complaints inevitably continued, however.25 Government fears about spies and ‘malignants’ in the area drove a constant round of armed searches of private properties and petty infringements of personal liberties.26 Trunks could be searched and their contents sequestered (as happened to Lady Rivers, Lady Newport and the earl of Bedford, among others), and copies required of personal family letters.27 Nobody was immune: Lawrence Swetnam, a committed parliamentarian who would be elected to the Westminster Militia Committee, as well as serving as a local JP, had his house searched by soldiers when they were informed (perhaps maliciously) that a neighbouring recusant had moved ammunition, money and plate into it. It was only after the search was completed that it was learned that Swetnam ‘was a gentleman of worth, and well affected to the Protestant Religion; so that there was not the least suspicion of his fidelity to the Parliament’.28 In September 1644 the Commons ordered that the commissioners for martial law should appoint a ‘Provost Martial’ ‘to attend Westminster Hall, and the Places about the Houses, and in these Parts, to apprehend such as they shall have Information to be Spies and Enemies to the Proceedings of Parliament’. Military control actually intensified in the last months of the war, with new parliament orders on 31 March 1646 directing the expulsion of Roman Catholics and ex-royalist soldiers and requiring the militia committee ‘to keep strict Guards and Watches, and cause frequent Searches to be made’. A further order in July ordered that ex-royalist soldiers in the capital should not bear or keep arms and must observe a curfew and formally engage themselves not to bear arms against parliament, while all ex-royalist ‘Papists’ and Irish were required to remain at least twenty miles away from the lines of communication.29 Westminster would appear to have mostly been spared the systematic quartering of troops on private houses, which seems to have been more of a problem in rural Middlesex.30 Nevertheless, a contemporary newsbook referred to Westminster as ‘a Garrison Town’, and disorders among troops were an intermittent but alarming feature of the locality in this period. Even 25 C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait (eds), Acts and ordinances of the interregnum, 1642–1660 (2 vols, 1911) (hereafter A&O), I, 6–9, 162–3; CJ, 12 June, 18 July 1643; LJ, 21 June, 14 July 1643; P. Edwards, Dealing in death (2000), pp. 159–64. 26 See the accounts of searches by the Westminster trained bands in Exact & True Diurnall (15–22 Aug 1642), pp. 4–5; (22–29 Aug 1642), pp. 2, 3. 27 CJ, 12 and 24 June, 15 Aug, 16 Sept 1643. In November 1645 Lady Fane, living in St Martin’s Lane, was allowed by the Committee of Both Kingdoms to forward a letter to Lady Butler at Oxford to send her son back, but she was required to leave a copy of it with the Committee (CSPD 1645–7, p. 234). 28 Exact & True Diurnall (22–29 August 1642), p. 2; A&O, I, 267–71; CJ, 26 Aug 1646. 29 CJ, 31 Mar, 2 and 10 July 1646. 30 See CSPD 1644–5, pp. 441, 443. See also TNA, SP28/237, pts 1 and 4.

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The militarization of Westminster before Westminster regiments were involved in military campaigns, local trained bands were active in tracking down soldiers in the area who had either failed to report to their colours in the earl of Essex’s army or who had fled their colours.31 Soldiers begging in the streets of Westminster were a familiar sight: the Commons in November 1644 was forced to request some means of distinguishing parliament soldiers about the streets from the king’s soldiers, so that they ‘may be so disposed of, and provided for, that they may not, upon any Pretence, go up-and-down the Streets, begging’.32 There were clashes between rival troops: in late May 1643 there was a confrontation between John Flood (captain of a company of Westminster Auxiliaries) and Captain Oliver Vaughan of the Finsbury company of the Middlesex Trained Bands in the presence of ‘divers Men and Women to the Number of Three Thousand’, in which swords were drawn and earth was thrown, along with ‘base reviling speeches’.33 A court martial was established for the metropolitical area in August 1644 and regularly renewed thereafter.34 In November 1644 the Committee for Both Kingdoms ordered that the earl of Essex should be advised that the ‘particular insolencies’ complained of by the gentlemen of Middlesex should be inquired into and punished, and those troops speedily removed to remoter quarters.35 In April 1645 there were disorders at the heart of Westminster, this time involving Fairfax’s troops. On 29 April the Commons listened aghast as it was told of an affray the previous night in Covent Garden. According to one report, a group of officers who had been drinking all day emerged around midnight from the backside of the fashionable Spring Garden into the Strand. They ‘offered many abuses to the Constable and Watch’ when questioned, and went ‘running up and downe the streets with their Swords drawne, breaking of windows, and spoiling as much as is valued at 100 pounds, about the Strand, Coven-garden and St Martins-lane, to the great terour and affrightment of the inhabitants thereabouts’. When confronted by the constable and officers, they ran one through the thigh, another through the kidneys, and cut a third in the face, before finally being arrested and brought before Westminster JPs the next day. Two of those assaulted – Thomas Bolton, a cook, and an unnamed shoemaker of St Martin’s Lane – were reported dead. The constable, Mr Wright of the Goat in Covent Garden, was thought not likely to recover, as he had six other wounds in addition to the injury to his face.36 One newsbook characterized the incident as ‘a Tumult or kind of Insurrection’.37 The account 31 32 33 34 35 36

CJ, 9 Mar 1643; cf. 8 and 17 Apr 1643. CJ, 8 Nov 1644. LJ, 26 May 1643; Nagel, pp. 105–6. A&O, I, 486–88, 498, 564, 842–45; CJ, 30 Dec 1644. CSPD 1644–5, p. 144. Mercurius Civicus, no. 101 (24 Apr–1 May 1645), pp. 903–4; Mercurius Veridicus, no. 3 (26 Apr–3 May 1645), p. 19; LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/56, p. 92. 37 The Moderate Intelligencer, no. 9 (24 Apr–1 May 1645), sig. I4v.

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Westminster 1640–60 of events in Mercurius civicus, while it was the most detailed, carefully made no allusion to the fact that those involved were army officers. It was clearly felt to be important to hide the military credentials of the malefactors, presumably so as to avoid further alarm and confrontations. The newsbook referred only to ‘Divers Gentlemen’ far gone in drink, and warned piously at the end that this should provide a lesson to ‘all young Gentlemen’ to aspire to more sobriety, ‘and to consider (this being a Garrison Town) that they ought to be carefull to repaire in due time to their lodging, or at least not abuse such officers as are imployed for the safety of the City’. The Commons drew a different moral from events: it ordered that Fairfax ‘be desired to take speciall care ... that the Discipline of Warre may be duely executed, and that hee bee likewise desired to keepe his Officers and Commanders to their duties’.38 Newsbooks were similarly circumspect four months later over an even more serious confrontation which led to a civilian death at the hands of the military. This occurred at Southampton House, near Gray’s Inn, where ex-royalist soldiers were being held prior to being shipped over for service in Ireland. Local supporters regularly gathered to bait the parliamentarian soldiers and to help the imprisoned troops to escape, and in one ‘great tumult with words unsufferable & throwing stones’ by up to 600 ‘idle people’ an officer killed a tradesman.39 Newsbooks sought to play down the incident. Mercurius civicus remarked that ‘we might acquaint you of the killing of a Tradesman on the Lords day last, neere Southampton-house by a Lieut.Colonell, but you have had it often mentioned already’, and drew the moral that malignants should not be allowed access to the ex-royalist soldiers there. The Kingdomes weekly intelligencer similarly refused to be drawn – ‘we shall not insist upon the particulars’ – but struck a more hostile note in trusting ‘that Justice will be executed upon the Murtherer according to his demerits’.40 Westminster’s own trained bands and auxiliaries were a very visible and active presence in the area. While the forts at Whitehall and Hyde Park corner were manned partly in rotation by City of London troops, the greatly expanded ranks of the local trained bands and auxiliaries were also a constant presence, required to carry out a host of policing and guard duties. They did not wear uniforms, but they were an armed presence that added a distinctly coercive threat to policing measures, in searching houses and in guarding the parliamentary officials who removed stained glass and monuments from St ­Margaret’s.41 Of these forces, Westminster’s volunteer auxiliary companies were 38 Perfect Diurnall (28 Apr–5 May 1645), p. 729; Mercurius Civicus, no. 101 (24 Apr–1 May 1645), pp. 903–4 [my italics]; CJ, 29 Apr 1645. 39 HLRO, Main Papers, 11 Aug 1645 (petition to the Commons of Lieutenant-Colonel John McAdam); CJ, 11 and 15 Aug 1645. 40 Mercurius Civicus, no. 116 (7–14 Aug 1645), pp. 1028–9; Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, no. 112 (5–12 Aug 1645), p. 901. 41 Mercurius Aulicus, no. 15 (9–15 Apr 1643), p. 181; no. 18 (30 Apr–6 May 1643), p. 228;

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The militarization of Westminster regarded as being the most loyal to parliament, and were probably entrusted with some of the more inflammatory intrusions. It was Thomas Kequick’s auxiliaries that were later called upon to disarm the less-trusted trained bands. While initially restricted to police and guard duties, from the autumn of 1643 the Westminster trained bands and auxiliaries were deployed in a number of military campaigns outside the metropolis. Most notably, they were involved in campaigns in Hampshire, to Basing and Alton in 1643 and to Newbury in 1644. Although they were not involved in actual service after this, summons for several further campaigns meant that they were required to be in constant readiness for further campaigning.42 The auxiliary regiments recruited again in 1645–46 to prepare for a final general muster on 19 May in Hyde Park of all the trained bands and auxiliaries within the lines of communication. It was observed that the large number of tents being used were ‘built like a town or Camp’, as some 18,000 soldiers, with ‘all or the most part of the Lords and Commons ... [come] to see them, likewise such a number of Nobles, Gentry, Citizens and common people as the oldest man in London hath hardly seen together’.43 The Moderate Intelligencer remarked with satisfaction that ‘England is now in a hundred times better warlike posture then when the war began.’ The body entrusted with the funding and organization of Westminster’s military contribution to the parliamentarian war effort – the Westminster Militia Committee – was originally formed as a sub-committee of the larger London Militia Committee, but its members were eager to emphasize the distinctive role that their troops had played in the war.44 When protesting in 1646 against the City’s attempt to continue its overall control over the militia sub-committees in the suburbs, the gentlemen of Westminster, Middlesex and Surrey emphasized their substantial contribution to the war effort and their special relationship with parliament, ‘some of their Houses being near to the Parliament, and are as their Praetorian Bands and Guards’.45 This contribution to the war effort had begun rather inauspiciously, however. Initially, there had been a sluggish response when the drum was beaten in Westminster in October 1643, signalling the trained band to report to its colours. A royalist newsbook reported gleefully that only a third of those summoned actually appeared, and that their officer, Falconbridge, had some of these imprisoned ‘for crying “One and all” when they refused to march away’. Struggling to find a positive gloss to place on these events, a parliamentarian newsbook

42 43 44 45

Nagel, pp. 104–5, 107n. The trained bands were also used to protect those carrying out iconoclasm at Somerset House: Mercurius Aulicus, no. 14 (2–8 Apr 1643), pp. 172–3. A&O, I, 130–1; CJ, 12 Apr 1643; Nagel, pp. 108–9, 234–5, 238–9. The Moderate Intelligencer, no. 63 (14–21 May 1646), p. 453; Nagel, pp. 238–9. On the relationship between the Westminster and London militia committees see also Chapter 4. CJ, 16 Feb 1646. On the long-running opposition to the attempts to absorb Westminster’s forces within the London Militia Committee see Chapter 4.

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Westminster 1640–60 could only manage the unconvincing claim that ‘they desire to stay to keep up trading, that they may the better maintaine the war against you’.46 Various efforts were made in the capital to encourage the war effort more generally. For example, the London Militia Committee directed that every parish from which assigned regiments were drawn (which would have included Westminster) should swiftly prepare a large table fixed within the church ‘where in shall be inscribed the Names of all such Souldiers that shall voluntarily in person expresse their alacrity and courage in so commendable a service, as a testimony of their good affections and a perpetuall memoriall to the honour of them and their posterity’. But any soldiers failing to be ready to march away were to suffer fines and ‘then their Shops shall be shut up and shall be deprived of Trade and be liable to expulsion out of the Lines of Communication’.47 Those who fled the Basing campaign and returned to London were soon after at the beating of the drum commanded on pain of death to return to the army. It was reported that ‘many houses were searched in the night time for them’, and a number were imprisoned in Westminster.48 Similar problems arose during mustering troops for the Westminster Yellow Auxiliaries in April 1644 under Colonel James Prince.49 These military campaigns and musters had a significant impact on the locality. Considerable numbers of local men were involved: the Westminster Red Regiment under Harrington, when full, consisted of 1,900 troops.50 All local people were required to provide men for the trained bands, and this constituted a significant financial burden.51 Not only were there regular drives to press troops among Westminster’s population,52 but parishes also found themselves obliged to look after maimed soldiers, widows and orphans from among their own parishioners. Thus St Clement Danes paid £1 to Anne Stanton, ‘whose husband was slayne at Edghill’, albeit on the basis of her ‘promisseinge never to trouble the Parish’ and to settle with her father in Derbyshire.53 All such charges were of course in addition to the sizeable tax 46 Mercurius Aulicus, no. 42 (15–21 Oct 1643), p. 597; Mercurius Britanicus, no. 6 (17–26 Oct 1643), p. 70. See also Chapter 4 for a discussion of contemporary perceptions of the loyalty of Westminster’s troops. 47 Mercurius Aulicus, no. 44 (29 Oct–4 Nov 1643), p. 620; A declaration of the Committee for the Militia (1643), p. 4. 48 CJ, 18 Nov 1643; The Weekly Account, no. 12 (15–22 Nov 1643), p. 6. 49 Nagel, pp. 181, 199. 50 Mercurius Civicus, no. 72 (3–10 Oct 1644), p. 673. 51 See TNA, E179/253/12, fols 13–28; Nagel, p. 108. On London militia rates see also B. Coates, The impact of the English civil war on the economy of London, 1642–50 (2004), p. 47. 52 E.g. CJ, 18 Aug 1643, 10 July 1644, 2 June 1645, 1 July 1645. 53 WAC, B11 (1643–44). A Commons order of 4 Mar 1643 (CJ) required that every parish in which a maimed or slain parliamentary soldier ‘did last inhabit before their going forth to the aforesaid Service, shall raise a competent Stock of Money, by way of Assessment, upon the Inhabitants of the said several Parishes, for the Relief of the said maimed

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The militarization of Westminster burden that the war imposed on Westminster’s residents. Not only were there the twentieth part, weekly and monthly assessments, but also specific assessments and forced loans to raise money for particular military campaigns, which also hit rental income.54 Westminster householders were also probably, like their London counterparts, required to guard the city fortifications.55 A new regiment was finally raised in 1645 – ‘the new model at the forts’ – specifically to guard the fortifications, but actually Westminster’s trained bands still continued to serve at the courts of guard from time to time: the Red Trained Band was paid for drawing out to the forts until 12 November.56 Demilitarization, remilitarization and the second civil war, 1647–49 With the end of the civil war, demilitarization began throughout the country. This was rarely a rapid or straightforward process, however, and in the capital (and especially in Westminster) demilitarization raised distinctive problems. One concern that was consistently raised was the physical vulnerability of parliament based at Westminster. The authorities were still acutely aware of the threat from ex-royalists, as we have seen. Parliament ordered on 30 October 1646 that guards should be continued on the lines of communication (manned by 1,200 troops) for six months ‘for the safety of the Parliament and City’, although ordnance was removed from the forts and the trained bands of Westminster and other suburbs were spared such duties.57 But by December parliament was still sufficiently worried about the danger posed by ‘the Multitude of disaffected Persons continuing in and about London and Westminster’ that it ordered the revival of a parliamentary committee to advise regularly with the Militia Committee to monitor the situation.58 Soldiers, and the Widows and fatherless Children of the said slain Persons’. Churchwardens were empowered to levy and collect rates for this, with the accounts to be submitted annually to the General Sessions (unfortunately they do not therefore survive among the normal overseers’ accounts). St Margaret’s managed to have parliament’s fast-day collections retained to relieve poor maimed soldiers in the parish (e.g. CJ, 25 Apr, 25 July 1643). This may reflect unusually high numbers of maimed soldiers there, although the parish was generally adept at securing at least part of the money collected on parliamentary occasions. By September 1643 this money was routinely being extended to St Martin’s and Covent Garden (CJ, 5 Sept 1643; cf. CJ, 21 Oct 1643). This becomes a standard entry in the Commons Journals (although tending over time no longer to be specified as being for poor soldiers). 54 Coates, Impact of the English civil war, ch. 2. On the tax burden, see also W.P. Harper, ‘Public borrowing 1640–60’, unpublished M.Sc. (Econ) thesis University of London, 1927. 55 See CJ, 25 Oct 1644. 56 Nagel, pp. 227–8, 231–2. See also Mercurius Civicus, no. 71 (26 Sept–3 Oct 1644), pp. 666–7. 57 CJ, 30 Oct 1646. 58 CJ, 7 and 10 Dec 1646.

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Westminster 1640–60 Increasingly, however, moves towards demilitarization in the capital were affected, not by the perceived threat from ex-royalists, but rather by the growing threat from the army itself. The contentious issue at this time was the disbanding of soldiers, and the Presbyterian-dominated parliament’s determination to enforce the choice of either immediate disbandment or enlistment to serve in Ireland, with no guarantee for soldiers that the enormous arrears in pay would be met. As opposition spread in the army, a worried parliament passed an ordinance on 9 July 1647 directing that all disbanded officers and soldiers should by the 15th leave the cities of Westminster and London, where their tumultuous meetings not only disturbed parliament but also conduced to the spreading of plague. However, this order was not to extend to officers and soldiers of trained bands or auxiliaries within the lines of communication, or to colonels or other officers of quality.59 Indeed, a sense that local troops might provide important military assistance against the army may well have lain behind parliament’s decision in May to assist in the revival of Westminster’s Military Company. While parliament was reluctant to settle the pay arrears of the main army, the Lords nevertheless directed that the considerable sum of £500 should be paid to the Company ‘for the Re-edifying and Repairing the ... Military Ground, and the Houses and Buildings there, which have been made Use of for the Public Service by Order of both Houses of Parliament and much impaired and endamaged thereby’.60 The courting of Westminster’s local troops may not have been in vain. When the army began to march towards the capital in June, and the Presbyterian-dominated Commons gave the London Militia Committee the power to raise cavalry to defend the capital, Westminster’s trained bands proved more reliable than other companies in answering a summons, and it was they who were then called upon to send ‘a considerable guard’ to defend parliament itself.61 A further attempt to mass local forces to defend the capital occurred after pro-Presbyterian crowds invaded the Westminster parliament on 26 July, and Independent MPs fled the capital. Parliament reassembled without its speakers, and frantically sought to build up its own defences to protect itself against the army. Orders were passed to build up the capital’s defences and for fortifications to be manned by trained bands and supplied with guns, while reformadoes (disbanded officers and soldiers) were directed to assemble in St James Fields. In addition, horses were ordered to be seized and shops to be shut.62 This citizen-led remilitarization was, however, short lived. A general muster was ordered, but very few 59 LJ, 9 July 1647; A&O, I, 986–7. 60 LJ, 28 May 1647. 61 C.H. Firth (ed.), The Clarke Papers (4 vols, 1965) (hereafter Clarke), I, 132–3; The Journal of Thomas Juxon 1644–1647, ed. K. Lindley and D. Scott (Camden Society 5th ser. 13, 1999), pp. 159–60; Nagel, pp. 271–5. 62 Journal of Thomas Juxon, pp. 163–4; Nagel, pp. 283–4.

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The militarization of Westminster responded. As Fairfax’s army approached, many people fled the capital, and London swiftly capitulated.63 It is unclear how far Westminster’s trained bands or Military Company had been involved in the attempts to defend the capital. St Margaret’s churchwardens’ accounts record expenses ‘when (by order) wee sent forth Scouts, to bring Intelligence of the Armies approach towards the Cittie’, but once Fairfax arrived, St Martin’s had the good sense to ring the church bells in celebration.64 With the arrival of Fairfax in the capital, the army entrenched itself much more solidly in Westminster. It was noted that all of the soldiers wore laurel in their hats as they marched through Hyde Park, but their military intent was unmistakable.65 Certain aspects of demilitarization were speeded up – most notably the removal of the outer fortifications and courts of guard. This was, allegedly, to ‘ease the charge of maintaining and keeping them’, but more likely to remove the capital’s capacity to defend itself against the army. The demolition was ordered to take place ‘immediately’ and all householders were required either personally ‘to perform the said Work, till it be finished’, or to ‘send what Men they can, with Tools’.66 An ordinance allowed the London and Westminster militia to pull down guardhouses and lines, and to sell the timber.67 But these fortifications were replaced by others which the army could more easily control in order to secure their hold over the metropolis, leading to a rapid and systematic remilitarization of Westminster in particular. A royalist newsletter in January 1648 described the new fortification of Whitehall: in W:-Hall they Fortify and plant Ordinance. They have made a Tarras [terrace] between those lodgings that were my Lord Carlisles and the bricke wall that goes from the end of the Banquetting house to the gate by the Tilt yard, soe that the Souldiours can walke there, and see over the Wall any that comes to and from Charing place. The Windowes over that gate are stopt up, and loopeholes made to shoot out at. They have made a half moone and planted Ordinance in Scotland yard next to the water side.68

Many of these features would remain in place until the eighteenth century. The heart of Westminster would now be literally under the eye of the soldiers. The Venetian ambassador commented that Fairfax ‘is laying the foundations of three forts in different places which will be three citadels to bridle the city and all the people’.69 The establishment of a garrison at Whitehall (soon 63 Journal of Thomas Juxon, pp. 164–5. Nehemiah Wallington advised a friend to leave London before it was too late: I. Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1991), p. 494 n. 20. 64 WAC, E27; F4, p. 39. 65 John Rushworth, Historical Collections (1721), VII, 756. 66 CJ, 7 and 9 Sept 1647. 67 Smith and Kelsey, ‘Lines of communication’, p. 144. 68 Bodl., Clarendon MSS 30, fol. 273v. 69 CSPVen 1647–52, p. 23.

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Westminster 1640–60 supplemented by one at St James) would provide a basic bastion of military force in the area right through to 1660. Whitehall Palace was also increasingly becoming the army’s national political base: Fairfax directed in February 1648 that the Committee of Officers should meet there every day in the morning and afternoon to receive petitions and consider army affairs.70 Significantly, Fairfax’s own base in the capital at this time lay nearby in Covent Garden. While military historians have dubbed the months of January and February 1648 the time of ‘the Great Disbandment’ of soldiers in arms,71 for Westminster the precise opposite was the case. It is true that Fairfax’s lifeguard was disbanded, which prompted the alarming spectacle in February of 100 disgruntled soldiers marching to Fairfax’s house in Queen Street demanding arrears, and seeking to stir up local regiments to join them.72 But in fact the remilitarization of Westminster in January 1648 was marked by a substantial rise in the number of soldiers based in the area. It was ordered by the Commons on 14 January that Fairfax should send ‘not less than Two thousand’ horse and foot ‘for the safety and Security of the Parliament’, with these forces to be quartered in Whitehall and the royal Mews at Charing Cross (necessitating the removal of MPs and the Prince Elector, who were lodging at Whitehall at that point). It was also stipulated that the guards attending parliament and their commander should quarter at Whitehall.73 These new military forces were an active and very visible presence in Westminster: they were authorized to use ‘such of their Forces as they shall think fit to employ’ to apprehend papists and malignants in the area, and were also required to aid the Provost Marshall of Westminster in carrying such local delinquents to jail and guarding them there.74 When, at the end of May 1648, Colonel Barkstead’s regiment in Whitehall and Colonel Nathaniel Rich’s regiment in the Mews were removed to deal with royalist rebellions elsewhere in the country, the Derby House Committee (a forerunner of the Council of State) panicked and wondered ‘how the House may sit’ without such defence. In response, Fairfax was emphatic that forces in Whitehall and the Mews must be free to follow his orders.75 70 Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, no. 249 (22–29 Feb 1648), p. 853. 71 Gentles, New Model Army, p. 231. 72 Bodl., Clarendon MSS 29, fol. 134r–v. 73 CJ, 14 Jan 1648. S.R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (4 vols, 1987), IV, 53–4, suggests that this measure was intended to intimidate the Lords into passing the Vote of No Addresses, but the substantial refortifications undertaken, and the fact that Barkstead’s regiment occupied Whitehall and Rich’s regiment of horse the Mews on the day following the Lords’ agreement to the Vote (Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, no. 243 [11–18 Jan 1648], p. 806; Heads of Chiefe Passages in Parliament, no. 2 [12–19 Jan 1648], pp. 13, 16) would suggest that any such political opportunism was exploiting a broader and more long-term military strategy. 74 CJ, 17 and 31 Jan 1648. 75 CSPD 1648–9, p. 79 – cf. p. 85. Ashton comments that these regiments were both ‘long a source of disquiet’ (R. Ashton, Counter-revolution: the second civil war and its origins,

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The militarization of Westminster The second civil war, which was fought in the shape of a series of provincial uprisings against parliament in the spring and summer of 1648, inevitably drew troops away from the capital in a campaign that was shorter but a great deal more brutal than the first civil war. Attention was particularly focused on the North, where provincial uprisings were supplemented by an invasion from Scotland in support of the king. A rising in Kent in May and June was the nearest that the war came to the metropolis. Nevertheless, London and Westminster were buzzing with royalist intrigue and many were convinced that a royalist rising would occur in the capital. The Derby House Committee’s panic at seeing troops leave Westminster in the spring is understandable, given that at that very moment there were fears of a plot against parliament by royalists based in London (and the Committee had just a few days previously reflected that only the regiments at Whitehall and the Mews were available to protect it in such circumstances).76 An increasing preoccupation with the threat from resurgent royalism in the metropolis is evident throughout the period from late 1647 to late 1648. The returned Independent MPs were anxious that parliament should have a constant and substantial military guard to avert any repetition of the invasion of the previous summer. New orders in December 1647 had stipulated that the guards at the door of parliament should be supplied with twenty halberds ‘to make use of, as Occasion shall be, for the better Defence of this place’.77 Royalist unrest in the capital in early December 1647 (when it was reported in parliament that soldiers standing by the Savoy in the Strand would not let coaches pass unless their occupants drank the king’s health) heightened such fears and prompted orders that Westminster officials should allow no meetings in local taverns after 9 p.m. By January 1648 there were worries that a substantial royalist rising was imminent.78 While this rising did not materialize, the threat of royalist violence was ever present, and manifested itself at the heart of Westminster on the anniversary of the king’s coronation. It was reported that there were bonfires ‘even at Charing-place, Whitehall & Westminster it selfe’ where passers-by, ‘whether in Coaches or otherwise, were forced to drinke the Kings health’.79 A more ad hoc disturbance involving royalist apprentices in April 1648 would have heightened the government’s fears still further. The protesters, swelled to a band of 3,000 people armed with muskets and clubs, took away the trained band colours in Moorfields, cried royalist slogans and passed down to the Strand, where they 1646–1648 [1994], p. 189). 76 CSPD 1648–9, pp. 70–1, 79. 77 CJ, 16 Dec 1647. 78 LJ, 2 Dec 1647; CSPD 1648–9, p. 8; Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English affairs (1853), II, 252–5, 264, 266. For the traditionalist backlash at Christmas 1647 in St Margaret’s see The Kingdomes Weekly Post, no. 1 (29 Dec 1647–5 Jan 1648), p. 2 and Chapters 4 and 6 of this book. 79 Bodl., Clarendon MS 31, fol. 38r (cf. fol. 44r).

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Westminster 1640–60 planned to attack Barkstead’s army regiment at Whitehall. A party of horse drawn forth from the Mews at Charing Cross pre-empted their attack and cleared the streets. But the mob then rose again, attacked the lord mayor’s house, and took control in the City of London. A Council of War decided to use the two army regiments at the Mews and Whitehall to put down the riot, rather than waiting for additional reinforcements. After the riot, parliament embarked on a further demilitarization of London, voting that the City chains should be removed so as to prevent their use in any future insurrection.80 The need for the army’s continued presence in Westminster was unmistakable, but at the same time resentment of its costs rose ever higher, and the army itself became a cause for concern. The City of London’s fears of the army seemed amply vindicated when it received reports in April 1648 of loose talk among army officers at Windsor, who included the quartermaster-general, one Colonel Grosvenor. They had supposedly proposed ‘to Disarm the City both Friend and Foe… that such as were friends to the Army should come forth into the Fields, and there they should be armed: And that they should have the power of the City of London put into their hands, to keep the rest of the Citizens in awe: And … (this City being Disarmed) they would make them advance a Million of Money, or else plunder them.’81 This report emboldened the City of London to demand of parliament that its chain be restored (which was granted), and it also asked for Philip Skippon to be made major general of all forces within the lines of communication (seeking again to secure a unified command which would outnumber any opponent). The removal of forces from the Mews and Whitehall would thus appear to have been in part a deal done in the face of these City objections to the presence of the army. The withdrawal of the army meant that parliament had to rely on the London militia for its guard, and the City of London therefore asked for the right to nominate members of the Militia Committee and to resume its control of the Tower, to which parliament was forced to agree.82 Over the tense summer, Skippon’s military control of London was to prove crucial in frustrating the attempts by conservative groups in London to unite suburban militias under their authority and use them to gain the military upper hand.83 As the City of London and Skippon vied for parliamentary support and military control of the capital, the summer of 1648 was still marked by further security scares in the area, amid fears that the rebellion in Kent would spill over into Westminster. On 3 June parliament sought an immediate guard of 120 horse 80 I. Gentles, ‘The Struggle for London in the Second Civil War’, Historical Journal 26 (1983), pp. 287–9; Clarke, II, 3–4. 81 The humble petition of the City of London (1648), pp. 7–8; LJ, 27 Apr 1648; The true answer of parliament (1648). 82 Nagel, pp. 296–8; Gentles, ‘The struggle’, p. 292. 83 Nagel, pp. 300–1; Gentles, ‘The struggle’, pp. 294–9.

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The militarization of Westminster for itself. Amid further reports that the rebels’ army was at Greenwich under Lord Goring, the Derby House Committee gave a warrant to the Westminster Militia Committee to carry out a strict search of all places within its jurisdiction for all such people, horses and arms as were found to have been involved in the uprising in Kent. Five days later the Westminster militia’s allowance from parliament was nearly doubled to enable it to sustain its guard of parliament.84 Two months later there were further alarms, with reports that ‘reformadoes’ were planning to muster at Pall Mall in St James Fields with a band of apprentices to march on parliament, prompting the Derby House Committee to beg Skippon to provide strong guards for parliament and to send as many horse as possible the following day.85 Warnings of royalist insurrections in the area were still preoccupying the authorities even as the broader political crisis with the army developed. In November 1648 the Commons was anxiously raising extra funds to pay the horse guards who attended parliament, and the Derby House Committee was urging the city militias to prevent the ‘many incivilities and insolencies’ that had been committed earlier in the year with the drinking of healths at bonfires and intimidation of passers-by, which could also provide the occasion for royalist insurrection throughout the capital.86 By this stage, however, it was parliament’s own national army that was posing the greater threat. With the return of expelled Presbyterian MPs in the summer, parliament voted to reopen negotiations with the king. The army made its opposition plain, however, and a further military march on the capital was a clear danger. On 13 November the Derby House Committee was instructing Fairfax to remove his cavalry, then quartered in Middlesex (with some quartered as close as Parson’s Green and Knightsbridge).87 As in 1647, the army’s threat was palpable, but this time it was all too apparent that it would be impossible to defend the capital against it. On 2 December 1648 Fairfax’s troops returned to Westminster in force, and they were promptly quartered in the area as their general established his headquarters in Whitehall Palace. As one newsbook sardonically observed, Fairfax ‘took up his Quarter at WhiteHall, as if he meant to King it, and brought along with him 4 Regiments of Foote; part of which became Courtiers’.88 It would be eight months before there were moves to remove some of the troops from Whitehall to free up more space for civil administrators there. On 6 December troops led by Colonel Thomas Pride arrested 45 MPs and ‘secluded’ 186 others – excluded MPs were then imprisoned in the 84 CSPD 1648–9, pp. 93, 95, 99, 117. 85 Ibid., pp. 248–9. 86 CJ, 13 and 21 Nov 1648; CSPD 1648–9, p. 327. For an account of such behaviour the previous autumn see Bodl., Clarendon MS 31, fol. 38r. 87 CSPD 1648–9, p. 321; D. Underdown, Pride’s purge (Oxford, 1971), p. 128. 88 Mercurius Pragmaticus, no. 37 (5–12 Dec 1648), sig. Ccc2v.

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Westminster 1640–60 immediate vicinity, in inns around New Palace Yard.89 It was from their base in Westminster that Fairfax’s troops would, over the following days, sally forth into the City of London, seizing treasuries in livery company halls and the royalist major-general and sheriff Richard Browne, and carrying them back in triumph to their Westminster stronghold.90 The town of Westminster was again destined to play host to significant national events, from the king’s trial in Westminster Hall to his eventual execution outside the Banqueting House. The army’s second occupation of the capital thus marked a watershed in national politics. But it was also to prove a significant turning-point in the militarization of Westminster. A large-scale military presence in Westminster would now become an established feature, rather than a temporary expedient. The Westminster of the 1650s was a place where the military was unmistakable and unavoidable. The military in Westminster, 1649–60 With the end of the second civil war, a reduced military presence might have been expected in Westminster.91 After all, all the famous royalist risings of the 1650s took place elsewhere in the country. Indeed, apart from the Tower regiment, there would be no garrison based in London again until 1657–58. Certainly, too, there were signs of demilitarization in Westminster. In 1652–53 St Margaret’s was selling off posts, rails and gunpowder, and the following year St Martin’s vestry ordered that churchwardens should take down all chains and posts in the parish and cause them to be laid in the new churchyard.92 The old lines of communication had become a mere administrative descriptor, although the remaining ‘mounds’ now caused problems for St Martin’s as the parish sought to negotiate parochial boundaries at Tart Hall and Hyde Park.93 Yet, in actual fact it was in the periods of the republic and protectorate that the military presence in Westminster became a permanent feature. ‘The Exquisite court ... is now changed for the perpetual marching of troops, the ceaseless noise of drums and trumpets, and numerous companies of officers 89 Perfect Weekly Account (6–13 Dec 1648), p. 309. 90 Ibid., p. 312. 91 The military presence in 1650s Westminster has been mostly neglected in the pertinent scholarship. H.M. Reece in his general study of the whole country – ‘The Military presence in England, 1649–1660’ – does make some useful observations, but detailed case studies of the military presence in this period have tended to concentrate on other parts of the country (e.g. J.G.I. Ive, ‘The local dimension of defence: the standing army and militia in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, 1649–1660’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1986). 92 WAC, F2003, p. 44; E32 (just a year earlier St Margaret’s had been paying for the cleaning of twenty-eight muskets and for four new gunsticks: E31). 93 WAC, F2003, pp. 18, 41, 48.

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The militarization of Westminster and soldiers at their various posts.’94 These words of the Venetian ambassador might be expected to have been written during the civil wars, or in the immediate aftermath of the military occupations of London; but in fact they were written in 1656, when the protectoral court had re-established so many features of pre-war Whitehall, and just a year before Cromwell would be offered the crown. They offer a clear indication that the 1650s witnessed an intensification of the visible military presence at the heart of Westminster. This military presence was most conspicuously visible in state pageantry. As we will see in the next chapter, there was a significant military presence in state funerals.95 Ordnance had previously been dramatically deployed in the 1640s at the earl of Essex’s funeral, which was decidedly military in both sound and appearance. The funeral was attended by 9 regiments of trained bands, 95 field officers, 267 captains, and a party of cavalry. A final military salute was signalled by the tolling of the bells of St Margaret’s and the igniting of ‘a great Globe-Lanthorne’ from the tower of the Abbey, and involved a relay of cannons being fired along the entire length of the lines of communication three consecutive times, with all nine regiments of foot and horse ‘from Westminster Abbey to Essex House Gate’ firing volleys from their pistols and muskets at the end of each circuit.96 The removal of the lines of communication made it impossible to repeat this remarkable pageantry, but the state funerals of the 1650s invariably had a strong military presence, especially for military heroes such as General Blake, and ordnance played a major role. As Blake’s funeral barge passed up the Thames ‘the great Guns’ were discharged at regular intervals until it reached Westminster. The Tower of London fired all its guns, as did all the ships anchored in the Thames ‘and 60 large pieces expressly mounted opposite Whitehall, as well as all the musketry drawn up in line before the Abbey’, while at the interment itself ‘the Regiments of horse and foot which attended gave many great volleys of shot’.97 These funerals were, however, only one aspect of the military’s public ceremonial presence in Westminster. Hyde Park was the venue for massive military reviews and parades in 1649 and 1660.98 It also hosted an enormous 94 CSPVen 1655–6, p. 308. 95 This was evident not just at funerals held in the Abbey, but also at those taking place in St Margaret’s: see Chapter 3. Some thirty-two people with military rank (captain and above) were buried in St Margaret’s in the period 1642–58: Memorials of St Margaret’s Church Westminster, ed. A.M. Burke (1914), pp. 605–53. 96 The true mannor and forme of the proceeding to the funerall of the right honourable Robert earle of Essex (1646), pp. 1–13, 23. 97 CSPVen 1657–9, pp. 106–13; The Publick Intelligencer, no. 98 (31 Aug–7 Sept 1657), p. 1884; Mercurius Politicus, no. 380 (3–10 Sept 1657), pp. 1606–7. Note also the heavy military presence at the burial of Major-General Worsley in the Abbey in 1656: Clarke, III, 67. 98 Perfect Occurrences, no. 123 (4–11 May 1649), p. 1028; Mercurius Pragmaticus, no. 4 (8–15 May 1649), sig. D4r; Parliamentary Intelligencer, no. 18 (23–30 Apr 1660), p. 279; The diary of Henry Townshend, ed. J.W.W. Bund (2 vols, 1920), I, 35.

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Westminster 1640–60 muster of soldiery in October 1650, involving newly raised regiments, the City and Middlesex horse and Colonel Barkstead’s regiment, ‘in all about 8000’ men, who had marched there from London. Members of parliament and the Speaker joined them in Hyde Park, where again ordnance played a prominent role, one newsbook reporting how ‘the Trumpets and Drums made a sweet harmony, when also with their great and smal shot they made the fields rebound with their Ecchos for a long season’.99 Cromwell’s formal entries into Westminster marking his returns from Ireland and Worcester were marked with similar military ceremony in the locality. In 1650 at Hyde Park corner Cromwell was ‘saluted with great Guns and a volley of shot from Colonell Barkstea[d]s Regiment which were drawne up in the way for that purpose’.100 His reception after the battle of Worcester (on 12 September 1651) also involved notable activities at Hyde Park corner. The ‘great guns were drawn out of St Jameses, and about the time that his Excellency came to Charing-crosse they went off one after another once over which they had no sooner done, but there was a gallant volley of shot given by the souldiers that brake the air, and with a mighty shout of the people ecchoed again to the earth, with order in the manner aforesaid with great and small shot, and hallowing of the people was observed and done four severall times over’. Another pamphlet noted how ‘he was entertained all the way he passed with volleyes of shot from Jameses, and Whitehall’.101 If there were fewer military entries in the later years of the protectorate, the Venetian ambassador’s complaints of the constant round of noisy military drilling nevertheless reflected the prominent role of the military in other aspects of the state pageantry of the interregnum regimes. Soldiers were also deployed ceremonially at ambassadorial visits. Thus, at the visit of the Spanish ambassador in December 1650 two troops of horse ‘in compleat arms’ and a regiment of soldiers made a guard for the ambassador ‘from the great gate of the Palace Yard to the [Westminster] Hall door’.102 Lodewijck Huygens describes how the Dutch ambassadors in 1651 had a military guard even for the short walk from Sir Abraham Williams’s house in New Palace Yard to the parliament house as they walked ‘between the soldiers (who had been stationed from our house up to the Hall of the Houses of Parliament)’.103 Cromwell’s life guard, dressed ‘a mode’, were also a prominent feature of court ceremonial. The military character of the regime tended to be played down in many 99 Mercurius Politicus, no. 20 (17–24 Oct 1650), p. 339; Perfect Diurnall, no. 47 (21–8 Oct 1650). p. 577; CJ, 18 Oct 1650; S. Kelsey, Inventing a republic. The political culture of the English commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester, 1997) (hereafter Kelsey), pp. 71–2. 100 Perfect Diurnall, no. 25 (27 May–3 June 1650), p. 280. 101 Kelsey, pp. 72–3; n. 117; Another victory in Lancashire (1651), p. 2; The Weekly Intelligencer, no. 37 (9–16 Sept 1651), p. 286. 102 CSPD 1650, pp. 480–1. 103 L. Huygens, Lodewijck Huygens: The English Journal 1651–1652 (Leiden, 1982), p. 41.

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The militarization of Westminster aspects of government and public spectacle as the protectorate developed a more civilian and conservative style.104 While at Cromwell’s first installation as protector the military overtones were evident (with ‘the Muskets ratling, and the Canons roaring’, according to one account), it was noted that at his second, formal installation in 1657 ‘it was not followed by any firing except the discharge of a few guns’.105 Nevertheless, the military foundation of the protectorate was still very evident in much of its public display and role in the locality, as we shall see. Security Why should there have been such an overt military presence in Westminster in the 1650s? It was far more than a mere reflection of the association of the republic and of Cromwell with the army. Rather, it was in part a manifestation of the authorities’ keen awareness of the vulnerable geographical situation of Whitehall Palace and of parliament. This sense of fundamental insecurity was heightened by the relative fragility of the regimes, and the constant revelations of a series of locally based plots to overthrow them and to assassinate Cromwell that punctuated the 1650s. These provoked an endless sequence of security clampdowns in the area and the constant replenishment of the regiments stationed there. An account of the security concerns of these years and the measures that they incited is necessary if we are to recapture the sheer extent of the intrusiveness of the military presence in 1650s Westminster. While the capital was partly secured by an ‘outer ring’ of troop bases in Barnet, St Albans and elsewhere, which could act as muster-points and guard approaches to London, it has been observed that the metropolis ‘possessed all the characteristics of a garrison’, and the keys to its defence were the regiments garrisoned within Westminster.106 Foot regiments were established at St James and Whitehall and a horse regiment in the Mews, and these became a fixed feature of the Westminster landscape (occasionally reinforced by additional regiments at times of political unrest and alarms over security). These garrisoned troops were also supplemented by fixed artillery assembled in the heart of Westminster. A semi-permanent standing battery and artillery train were established to defend Whitehall, as a successor to the ordnance initially installed in January 1648 (which had been removed in May of that year). In August 1650 it was ordered that the comptroller, clerk and gunner appointed to take charge of the artillery train should be paid the extremely healthy salaries of 2s 6d and 5s a day. In the febrile political atmosphere of 1659, further ‘great 104 R. Sherwood, The court of Oliver Cromwell (1977); K. Sharpe, Image wars. Promoting kings and commonwealths in England 1603–1660 (2010), part V. 105 Great Brittains Post, no. 151 (14–21 Dec 1653), p. 1243; CSPVen 1657–59, p. 82. 106 Reece, ‘Military presence’, pp. 98–9.

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Westminster 1640–60 guns’ were ordered to be placed in Whitehall, ‘two in the Great Court and two in Scotland Yard, three in St James’s, [and] two in Somerset House’.107 As has already been emphasized, the Houses of Parliament and Whitehall Palace were geographically vulnerable and difficult to secure (in contrast to the more defensible City of London, with its gates and walls), so that both the legislative and executive branches of government were always open to attack.108 Fears for the safety of parliament were still a recurrent theme in the time of the republic, especially after the execution of the king in January 1649 and the subsequent assassination of two of its official agents abroad. In May 1649 parliament was particularly fearful for its own safety, urging Major General Skippon and the militia committees to make sure that their forces were ‘in Readiness for Service, for the Preservation of the Peace and Safety of the Parliament and City’. The following month it was particularly ordered that troops should be paid an additional salary during the time that they were quartered in Westminster, while the Provost Marshal of Westminster was also directed to ‘look diligently to the Quieting of all Routs, Riots, and unlawful and disorderly Meetings of People’ there, as generous salaries for him and his officers were put on a formal footing.109 Whitehall and St James were placed under tight security: guards were ever present and the jetty at Whitehall Stairs was locked at night. The commander of the St James’s garrison was entrusted with the security of St James’s Park, and was granted the authority to shut up all doors from nearby private properties that opened onto the park if he was not confident of their safety.110 Concerns about security would also seem to have prompted the orders to Colonel Pride in March 1650 to see to the sudden removal of all inhabitants of houses in Spring Gardens, and the shutting up of all doors opening into it.111 Armed soldiers were employed to keep order in Westminster Abbey right through until April 1650.112 Security fears did not decline in the following year. The Westminster militia had been warned in November 1650 to be in readiness to deal with insurrections, and the next year saw a royalist invasion in the North, culminating in the battle of Worcester.113 As during the second civil war, this demanded the services of the troops who had hitherto been guarding parliament, and, as before, parliament became anxious for its own security. Sir Henry Mildmay was instructed by the Council of State to reassure parliament of the Council’s 107 O.F.G. Hogg, ‘The Office of Master Gunner of Whitehall’, Journal of the Royal Artillery Company 105: 2 (1978), p. 86, citing CSPD 1650, p. 293; CSPD 1659–60, p. 103. 108 See Chapter 1. 109 CJ, 11 May, 6 and 29 June 1649. 110 WAM, 42801A; CSPD 1650, p. 270; Kelsey, p. 42. 111 TNA, SP25/64, pp. 96, 98, 118, 122 (cf. p. 245). 112 WAM, 42733, 42796, 42799–800, 42802A, 42803–13. 113 S.R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate 1649-56 (4 vols, Adlestrop, 1988) (hereafter Gardiner, HCP), II, 24–48.

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The militarization of Westminster particular concern for the House’s safety while the army was absent in the North, and it was directed that the guard at Westminster should be strengthened with men whose loyalty to the regime was assured, with a fund of up to £5,000 being proposed for their ‘encouragement’.114 As a result, a body of 8,000 foot and 2,000 horse was drawn up explicitly for the safety of parliament, London and Westminster.115 Fears of royalist plots and uprisings in the capital would punctuate the entire interregnum period and always led to concomitant security fears and clampdowns in the capital. Planned rebellions might sometimes be designed to begin in provincial areas, but the seizure of the capital was always part of the plan, and indeed provincial rebellions might well be planned and coordinated in the capital. This led to a constant run of proclamations and ordinances ordering ex-royalists out of Westminster – in 1649, 1650, 1651, 1655, 1656, 1658 and 1659 – sometimes renewed for several months, and often backed up by house-to-house searches and sudden security swoops in the area.116 There were some notable peaks in intrusive security arrangements, with the civilian population being closely monitored. These arrangements often required the cooperation of parish officials and JPs, but the direct involvement of soldiers was routine. One such peak in invasive monitoring occurred in August 1651, when parliament demanded that all householders ‘within the lines of communication’ provide a written account of any arms that they held, that they provide complete lists of the names and conditions of all lodgers, that all children and servants should be kept indoors (with any absences to be reported to the militia, giving the names and ages of those concerned) and that a strict curfew be kept, and ex-royalists be disarmed.117 The survival of stray lists of householders and lodgers generated by these inquisitions indicates that these special orders, prompted by genuine security fears and backed up by military force, were taken seriously.118 Similar detailed reports on lodgers were required from all householders at regular intervals after 1651, culminating in an Act of 22 July 1659 which also required that the authorities be informed within twenty-four hours of the arrival of any new lodger.119 Fears of an invasion in March 1658 prompted a new proclamation to exclude papists and ex-royalists from the capital and a thorough search of many properties on

114 CSPD 1651, p. 114. 115 CSPD 1651, p. 325 (see also CJ, 12 Aug 1651). 116 A&O, II, 349, 503, 1304; CJ, 21 May 1649, 19 Mar 1650, 18 July 1650, 13 Feb 1651, 21 Sept and 25 Oct 1655, 3 Feb 1658, 19 Apr 1659; A proclamation commanding all persons who have been of the late Kings party ... (1655); A proclamation commanding all persons who have been in arms ... (1656); A proclamation commanding all papists, and all other persons ... (1658). 117 CJ, 12 Aug 1651. 118 E.g. WAC, F1088. 119 A&O, II, 1317–19.

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Westminster 1640–60 the night of 23 March.120 Westminster forces were augmented the following month, while in May the ill-fated Carleton-Deane royalist conspiracy prompted a further security crackdown.121 The conspirator Colonel Deane had undertaken to conduct operations about Holborn, Covent Garden and the Mews, assuring his co-conspirators that if they took the City of London then he would deal with the suburbs ‘and that if any would undertake to face the Mews with 150 horse, he would rip up the Bowels of the Soldiders [sic] quarters, from the gates of the City to the Mewes and Whitehall’.122 On the morning of 15 May (on the evening of which the rising was due to begin), guards were doubled at Whitehall and elsewhere, and around 5 p.m. all horses and foot were commanded to be in arms. For most of the day, attempts were made to apprehend armed royalists, and the trained bands of London remained in arms until 4 a.m., as did the horse and foot of the army which were located about the capital.123 Some of those seized were examined in King Street, Westminster under the care of certain gentlemen of Cromwell’s horse guard.124 The more serious royalist risings of 1655, by contrast, had relatively little resonance in Westminster, apart from the arrangements that were needed to provide for the defence of the capital while regiments were away subduing the rebellion. The rule of the major-generals that was provoked by the 1655 risings did of course also lead to a more general intensification of security arrangements and military intervention in Westminster, as elsewhere.125 Plots to assassinate Cromwell acted as particular spurs to sustained military activity, especially in Westminster. The Gerard plot against Cromwell in 1654 provoked a wave of searches and arrests across the capital in May and June, with many of those arrested being confined in Westminster and examined by Westminster JPs.126 Several plotters were still not found in the original searches, resulting in a further proclamation in May. This noted that the enemies of peace were still active and that some had lately repaired to London and Westminster, and therefore required the compiling of lists 120 As described in Mercurius Politicus, no. 408 (18–25 Mar 1658), p. 414. See also D. Underdown, Royalist conspiracy in England 1649–1660 (1971), pp. 221–2. 121 On this conspiracy see Underdown, Royalist conspiracy, pp. 227–8. 122 Mercurius Politicus, no. 416 (13–20 May 1658), p. 542; no. 420 (10–17 June 1658), p. 591. 123 Mercurius Politicus, no. 416 (13–20 May 1658), p. 532. 124 Mercurius Politicus, no. 416 (13–20 May 1658), p. 549; CSPD 1657–8, pp. 326–7. 125 On Penruddock’s rising and the limited disturbances elsewhere see Underdown, Royalist conspiracy, pp. 139–58. Note the lord mayor of London’s order of Feb 1655 to form a militia commission to protect the City while much of the army left the capital to deal with rebellion in the countryside (CSPD 1655, p. 43). On the role of the major-generals in Westminster see Chapter 4. 126 CSPD 1654, pp. 204–5. Examiners in Westminster and Covent Garden included military figures such as Whalley, Goffe and Worsley, as well as civilians such as Richard Sherwyn and Edward Martin (for Sherwyn and Martin see Chapter 4). Colonel Grosvenor and Josias Berners were involved in the examinations of suspects in Holborn.

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The militarization of Westminster of all those lodging in London and Westminster since 19 May, forbidding them to leave within ten days without special licence.127 The 1654 plot had a particularly strong Westminster element. Those arrested included one John Wiseman of Westminster, and there was a developed plan to seize the guards at Westminster, to secure Whitehall, St James and the Mews and to muster at Tothill Fields.128 This Westminster focus was reflected in the erection of a gallows at Charing Cross on which one of the conspirators was executed.129 Rumours of further plots against Cromwell in December of the same year brought new regiments of horse and foot to be quartered in Westminster, with guards doubled and further ordnance planted at Whitehall and St James. The Venetian ambassador noted that ‘ten great pieces of ordnance’ had been ‘escorted publicly and placed beside his [Cromwell’s] residence’.130 The Sindercomb plotters of 1656–57 had a whole range of assassination plans focused on Westminster. They had intended to shoot Cromwell when he was taking the air at Hyde Park (in one place they had filed off the hinges of the gate in advance so as to speed their escape, and they waited by the Park on five or six different occasions with swords and pistols charged). They also had ‘recourse many times to White hall’ to try to kill him. They planned to shoot Cromwell on the first day of the parliament ‘as he passed in his Coach’, but they also planned to shoot him as he passed the Abbey after the sermon. As part of the latter plan, after lodging in King Street, they took a house in Westminster close to the Abbey, to which they transported a large quantity of arms. From here they went into the yard of a house next to the Abbey, intending to shoot Cromwell after the sermon delivered there, but they were deterred when ‘other company came there’. They finally planned to burn down Whitehall, and got as far as putting combustible material in a hole in one of the doors into the chapel before they were apprehended.131 Again, the apprehension of the plotters led to a significant intensification of the military presence in Westminster, with Cromwell’s life guard installed in Scotland Yard and Ingoldsby’s foot regiment (now under Colonel Hill) moved from Southwark to Whitehall.132 Those inciting assassination also targeted people living in Westminster: the pamphlet Killing no Murder was ‘scattered in the Mews by Charing Cross’ in May 1657, sealed up in brown paper covers.133 The treason 127 CSPD 1654, pp. 184–5. 128 Mercurius Politicus, no. 209 (8–15 June 1654), p. 3556; no. 212 (29 June–6 July 1654), pp. 3600–2. On the Gerard plot see Gardiner, HCP, III, pp. 139–49; Underdown, Royalist conspiracy, pp. 100–3; A treasonable plot discovered (1654). 129 Mercurius Politicus, no. 213 (6–13 July 1654), pp. 3615, 3618–19. 130 Clarke, III, 16–17; CSPVen 1655–6, p. 7. 131 Mercurius Politicus, no. 345 (15–22 Jan 1657), pp. 7541–3; no. 347 (29 Jan–5 Feb 1657), pp. 7575–6; no. 348 (5–12 Feb 1657), pp. 7587–92. 132 Reece, ‘Military presence’, p. 144. 133 Mercurius Politicus, no. 362 (14–21 May 1657), p. 7796.

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Westminster 1640–60 trials that followed both plots took place in Westminster Hall, as befitted the attempted crime, yet the local knowledge needed for such plans would have been apparent to all. This procession of royalist plots – incompetently organized and sparsely supported, infiltrated by agents provocateurs and effortlessly tracked by Thurloe – has tended to be viewed by historians as being of little or no significance. But their local impact should not be underestimated (however weak their chances of success), with increased troop levels, the heightened visibility and intrusiveness of soldiers, as well as the sustaining of an atmosphere of tension and instability, and the renewal of proclamations ejecting ex-royalists from the capital. After the death of Cromwell and the unravelling of the protectorate under his son, Richard, political instability once again focused attention sharply on the control of the organs of government at Westminster, and this brought soldiers into local streets with increasing regularity. In April the regiments of Goffe and Whalley had disregarded their orders to march to Whitehall to defend the protectorate and had instead followed Fleetwood’s orders to participate in a general rendezvous at St James.134 A direct military confrontation in the streets of Westminster was thereby avoided, but the act precipitated the end of the protectorate. It also entrenched a politically active military presence among the junior officers at St James and the commanders at nearby Wallingford House. The restored Rump acted quickly to secure its own military guard. At the end of May the Commons authorized extra payments to those soldiers active in the capital who acted as guards of parliament, and soon afterwards it took control of the ex-protector’s life guard. It reconstituted it as a troop of horse consisting of 160 soldiers with officers ‘for a Guard to the Parliament ... and, in the Intervals of Parliament, to the Council of State’. The diarist Thomas Rugg, who lived in Covent Garden, was impressed by this ‘very gallant troop of horse ... called the Parliments life gard’, describing it as ‘very well mounted men, well cloathed in the mode’.135 The creation of the guard was one feature of a wave of security fears in the capital in July: newsbooks noted ‘the great Guards of Horse and Foot about the Cities of London and Westminster’, and there were again parliamentary bills for lodgers to be listed and all delinquents to be ejected from the capital. The visible presence of soldiers on the streets of Westminster soon prompted rumours in the area that there had been yet another military coup, with the doors of parliament padlocked and a guard placed to deny MPs entrance. In fact (as one newsbook hastened to reassure its readers) parliament’s guard had actually been reduced: ‘there were not 134 The memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, ed. C.H. Firth (2 vols, Oxford, 1894), II, 68–9; A. Woolrych, Britain in revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 718–21. 135 CJ, 31 May 1659; 9 July 1659; W.L. Sachse (ed.), The diurnal of Thomas Rugg, 1659–1661 (Camden Society, 3rd ser., 91, 1961) (hereafter Rugg), p. 3.

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The militarization of Westminster above eight Halberts at the most to attend the door, which is the least Guard that I have ever seen in that place’. The parliament had supposedly deliberately reduced its guard ‘to witnesse how secure they were in their own uprightness, and how far from any fear, as from any fault’.136 Ironically, the rumours that soldiers had padlocked the doors of parliament and barred MPs from entering would actually prove all too true later in the year. At the time of Booth’s rising in August 1659 there were many examinations and searches in the capital, with friends of Booth and the king secured in prison. It was reported that in London and Westminster on a Sabbath day many travellers’ horses were taken for Lord Lambert’s forces (although in each case the transaction was agreed with the owner of the horse, who was given a ticket). There were also examinations of local sword cutlers, gunsmiths and armour-makers, mostly conducted by Lord Bradshaw.137 Military interventions in Westminster would peak with the renewed marches on the capital later in 1659. Lambert, on 20 September 1659, came out of Cheshire to London with a small party of horse as his guard; a few days later the whole army came to London and (Rugg reported) ‘quartered in the City of Westmister and its suberdes, and som likewise quartered in the Citty of London’.138 The Rump and the army gathered opposing military forces in the heart of Westminster. Those troops defending parliament occupied Westminster Hall, Palace Yard and the Court of Wards; the rest of the army supporting Lambert (including parliament’s own life guard) took charge of King Street and Westminster Abbey, while ‘some Boates ... well manned with Souldiers, did row up and down the Thames about Westminster, and permitted none to land thereabouts’; and Colonel Lambert’s horse were drawn up behind the Mews in Leicester-House Fields. One newsbook described the tense stand-off at the height of the confrontation on 12 October: ‘The forces of the discontented party of the Army, and the two Regiments who adhered to the Parliament stood all the while at Westminster, and many of them within a pikes length one of another, their Muskets charged, and their Matches lighted and in a churlish silence staring at one another.’139 When the Rump parliament was restored once more in December 1659, it again required a visible military defence in the area: foot regiments that were at Portsmouth came to town and were quartered in Westminster and in Covent Garden ‘and theireabouts’.140 In January 1660, in the face of further affronts to the army, parliament ordered a doubling of its guards, and a garrison with cannon was established at Somerset House.141 General Monck’s final entry into 136 CJ, 9 and 13 July 1659; The Weekly Intelligencer, no. 10 (5 July–12 July 1659), p. 80. 137 Rugg, pp. 4–5; J. Berry and S.G. Lee, A Cromwellian major general: the career of Major James Berry (Oxford, 1938), p. 229. 138 Rugg, p. 6. 139 The Weekly Intelligencer, no. 24 (11–18 Oct 1659), pp. 189–91; Rugg, pp. 7–8. 140 Rugg, p. 24. 141 Ibid., p. 29

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Westminster 1640–60 London was preceded by a mutiny among unpaid soldiers in St James Fields which spread the following day to troops in Somerset House and in Salisbury Court, amounting to well over 2,000 soldiers in full mutiny, who stood that night by the gate of Somerset House stopping passing coaches.142 Order was restored among troops when Monck’s army finally entered the city on 3 February, but Westminster’s residents would have been especially relieved had they known that this would be the last of the military occupations that had been such a significant feature of the previous thirteen years. The military and Westminster society Thus far, our discussion has focused on the ways in which the specific political circumstances of the 1640s and 1650s affected the nature and extent of military activity in Westminster and the ever-present anxiety to maintain control of the centre of national government. The constant and ubiquitous presence of soldiers is indisputable. But what did this presence mean for Westminster’s inhabitants? In what ways were local men and women affected by such a heavy concentration of armed soldiers on their doorsteps? The existence of regiments of soldiers in the town and their deployment there had a range of consequences for townspeople. The housing of soldiers and prisoners, the behaviour of disorderly troops, the role played by soldiers in enforcing potentially unpopular policies, and their involvement in local politics would clearly be areas of significant concern for Westminster’s inhabitants.143 One potentially overlooked manifestation of the military in Westminster was the detaining and guarding of prisoners of war. Although by their very nature prisons separated their inmates from local society, the presence of prisoners of war was very apparent to local people, both because of the numbers involved and also because this necessitated the prisoners’ ad hoc confinement in more public and civilian contexts and spaces. Enemy soldiers were paraded through the streets, notable public buildings were requisitioned to house them, makeshift camps were erected and parishes were expected to bury any prisoners who died. Like garrisons elsewhere in the country, Westminster’s sometimes acted as prisons for ‘malignants’ or prisoners of war from the officer class, who were often kept at St James’s, and sometimes briefly at Whitehall and the Mews at Charing Cross.144 But increasingly in the later 1640s and early 1650s there 142 Ibid., p. 34. 143 There have been few detailed studies of civil–military relations in the 1650s, but see Reece, ‘Military presence’; A. Coleby, ‘Military–Civilian Relations on the Solent 1651–89’, Historical Journal 29 (1986), 949–61. 144 E.g. F.P. Verney and M. Verney (eds) Memoirs of the Verney Family (2 vols, 1907), II, 11–12, 13, 19, 21–2; CSPD 1650, p. 526.

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The militarization of Westminster were larger bodies of prisoners of war, whose arrival was manifested with appropriate ceremony, but who had to be contained elsewhere in Westminster. After the battle of Naseby, in June 1645 a large number of royalist prisoners were marched through London with their colours before them and on into Westminster until they reached the end of St Martin’s Lane. At this point the ‘chiefe Officers’ were taken to Lord Petre’s house, while the rest of the prisoners were taken to the Mews to be guarded by the trained bands. From there they were conveyed to Tothill Fields, where a wall and buildings had to be repaired in order to secure them. Here they were reportedly treated to sermons on the Sabbath, but physical conditions may well have been grim: St Margaret’s petitioned the authorities in November to cover the cost of shrouds and burial for thirty-two prisoners who died in Tothill Fields.145 The initial intention had been to put the prisoners some distance away in St Martin’s Fields, where the Military Yard of the Westminster Military Company was located. This arrangement had brought angry protests from the earl of Leicester, however, whose neighbouring Leicester House would be inconvenienced by guards ‘placed in his Lordship’s Garden, and some Works to be made there’, and it was noted that there would be similar inconvenience to Newport House (then in the hands of the earl of Manchester).146 Fatalities among prisoners of war were particularly severe among the Scots in the early 1650s. The substantial numbers of Scottish prisoners from the battles of Dunbar, Preston and Worcester were undoubtedly badly treated. Many were paraded through Westminster, and some were kept on board ships in the Thames before being transported to New England or the West Indies.147 Worse was in store for those Scots imprisoned in Westminster after the battle of Worcester in 1651. The Scottish prisoners from Worcester were kept in St Margaret’s parish, in the churchyard of the new and fashionable chapel of Tothill Fields (the Council of State paid £30 to repair and cleanse the church afterwards).148 There would seem to have been some local sympathy for the prisoners. While St Margaret’s itself paid only a meagre, token amount to ‘Prissoners in distresse that came out of Scotland’,149 individual ­parishioners were more active in helping them. In his funeral sermon for Jane Blackwell in 1656, Covent Garden’s minister, Thomas Manton, noted that she had frequently visited and ministered to the Scots when they were (as he bluntly asserted) ‘shut up and starved by thousands at Westminster’. She also ransomed 145 The manner how the prisoners are to be brought into London (1645), p. 6; CSPD 1645–7, p. 310; The Scotish Dove, no. 88 (20–27 June 1645), pp. 692–3; WAC, E25, fol. 37r. It was complained that the prisoners were ‘like as many buzzle-bees, which eat up the honey without doing any service’: The Exchange Intelligencer, no. 6 (18–24 June 1645), p. 44. 146 LJ, 21 June 1645. 147 CSPD 1650, pp. 421, 423; Carlton, Going to the wars, pp. 212, 336–7. 148 WAC, E31; CSPD 1651–2, p. 584. On the new chapel see Chapters 3 and 6. 149 WAC, E30.

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Westminster 1640–60 several with her own money and disposed of them into families ‘where they remain’.150 But the fate of the prisoners was grim – they died in Westminster in huge numbers over a relatively short period of time. St Margaret’s churchwardens accounts for 1652–53 record the costs of burying 1,200 Scottish prisoners from Worcester in Tothill Fields.151 Such death rates were not unparalleled: the Dutch ambassadors reported in 1653 that 400 Dutch prisoners kept in Chelsea were sick, and were dying at the rate of roughly twenty a week.152 But after the Scottish deaths, large numbers of prisoners no longer seem to have been kept so close to the centre of Westminster, although small numbers were still imprisoned in places such as St James’s Palace, where security could sometimes be lax.153 The more remote Chelsea College ultimately became the preferred location for keeping larger numbers of foreign prisoners, including Spanish ones in 1655 and 1659.154 The quartering of soldiers on private citizens was the most dreaded feature of a military presence, and here at least Westminster’s experience was mostly favourable. When parliament had first ordered a significant military presence in Westminster in January 1648 it had been emphasized that care should be taken that the soldiers quartered there ‘may be no Burden to the Inhabitants’.155 Westminster parishes did later come under pressure to look to the conditions of the soldiery: the overseers of the poor for St Clement Danes parish reported a case where local soldiers forced a householder to take in a soldier’s wife who was about to bear a child, while St Margaret’s parish officials received a peremptory command to send coals and candles to a regiment of soldiers at Goring House.156 When Fairfax’s troops were initially poised to enter the capital at the end of November 1648 the general had assured Common Council that, if sufficient money were paid, the soldiers could be quartered in ‘great and void Houses about the City’ rather than being imposed on private families. This would seem to have been achieved, with soldiers mostly being billeted in some of 150 Thomas Manton, The blessed estate of them that die in the Lord (1656), p. 33. 151 WAC, E32. The Council of State had fitfully contemplated the plight of the Scottish prisoners, considering the possibility of supplementing their meagre provisions or sending them to the Plantations or to drain the fens, but its mixed feelings are revealed in its contemporaneous discussions over whether it should take revenge on the prisoners for cruelties committed by the Scots on English prisoners: CSPD 1651, pp. 431, 449, 471; CSPD 1651–2, pp. 46, 67. The official newsbook referred to the prisoners kept in Tothill Fields as ‘these Barbarians’ (Mercurius Politicus, no. 67 [11–18 Sept 1651], p. 1071). 152 BL, Add. MSS 17677V, fol. 221v. I am grateful to Anthony Milton for this reference. 153 Mercurius Politicus, no. 294 (24–31 Jan 1655), pp. 5930–2. 154 Bodl., Rawlinson MSS C. 179, pp. 15, 55. Some prisoners had been kept here as early as 1651: CSPD 1651–2, p. 77. See also CSPD 1654, p. 9; CSPVen 1655–6, p. 280. 155 CJ, 14 Jan 1648. 156 WAC, B24/A48 (1648–9); E28.

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The militarization of Westminster the royal properties and aristocratic houses in the area.157 Whitehall became Fairfax’s headquarters and served as the base for Colonel Hewson’s regiment, while Colonel Deane’s foot occupied York House, and Colonel Pride and Colonel Ingoldsby’s regiments were quartered at St James and Goring House. Durham House was also used.158 Over the following two years other great ‘void’ Westminster town-houses were employed for the same purpose. Tart Hall and Piccadilly House were ordered to be used for quartering soldiers of Colonel Barkstead (with the stipulation that the latter house should be used for 200 soldiers paying reasonable rent and committing no spoil).159 Arundel House in the Strand was directed to be used as a garrison (with the proviso that this should be explained to the earl, who was to be reassured that the house would be preserved in as good a condition as possible),160 while Essex House was ordered to be fitted up for quartering soldiers.161 To the royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus the quartering of troops in such noble residences encapsulated the usurping of the social hierarchy by the army, with Fairfax ‘kinging it’ in Whitehall while his regiments either became courtiers there or ‘were dispersed into Yorke House and other noble Houses’.162 But in fact these were uncomfortable conditions for the soldiers and represented only temporary solutions: troops were soon moved out of the larger town-houses, some of which were converted to be used for civil administration.163 Troops would still occasionally be billeted in town-houses in the area – including Goring House – but increasingly they would tend to be concentrated at St James.164 Troops were still occasionally quartered in smaller buildings in Westminster, but this practice would seem to have followed the ordinances on billeting soldiers that forbade free quarter in private houses (as opposed to quartering in inns and taverns on credit).165 Stray surviving certificates from July 1655 for troops and horses from Waller’s regiment describe their being quartered by a victualler and an innkeeper ‘a long time’ in Covent Garden because 157 There was probably some overflow from these houses into local inns: Fairfax’s order of December 1648 ordering the seizure of the public treasuries in the livery company halls stressed that his forces in the suburbs had scrupulously avoided imposing the burden of free quarter by staying in ‘void houses, Inns and the like’ (A letter from the Lord Mayor (1648), sig. A2v. 158 Kingdomes Weekly intelligencer, no. 288 (28 Nov–5 Dec 1648), p. 1176; Mercurius Elencticus, no. 54 (29 Nov–6 Dec 1648), p. 524; Mercurius Pragmaticus, no. 36 (5–12 Dec 1648), sig. Ccc2v. 159 CSPD 1650, pp. 247, 263, 270. 160 Ibid., p. 405. 161 Ibid., p. 269. 162 Mercurius Pragmaticus, no. 36 (5–12 Dec 1648), sig. Ccc2v. 163 See Chapter 3. For the moving of soldiers from Durham House see CSPD 1650, p. 15. 164 E.g. CSPD 1651, pp. 147–8, 202; CSPD 1655–6, p. 262. 165 See A&O, II, 110–18 – reaffirmed by parliament in 1651 (Mercurius Politicus, no. 79 [11–18 Dec 1651], p. 1286).

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Westminster 1640–60 their bills had not been paid.166 Some private houses that lay very close to garrisons might be rented for soldiers by prior agreement, as happened in December 1657 when houses in Scotland Yard were rented out for lodgings for Cromwell’s life guard.167 The quartering of troops in Westminster increased significantly in the unrest of the late 1650s, but it is not apparent that this involved private houses rather than the many taverns in the area, although the presence of significant numbers of troops in residential areas may have been alarming in itself. Generally, the professional, garrisoned and well-provisioned troops of the 1650s form a stark contrast with the unruly regiments of the 1640s. Particular care was taken, for example, to ensure that fires and candles were provided for guards at Westminster.168 It is important, however, not to paint too rosy a picture. There continued to be people killed in Westminster by soldiers. St Margaret’s parish register records among its deaths one Ann Marshall, described as ‘shot’, and its churchwardens’ accounts record a bargeman’s being slain on the Thames by a soldier.169 These may have been accidental deaths. In June 1655 it was reported that a soldier in Scotland Yard ‘shooting off his musket with a bullet, by accident shot a Shoe-maker that was neer him, who lived in Holborn, into the belly’.170 Fortunately, no one was hurt the previous year when a drunken sentry at St James caused alarm during the night by firing at what he thought was ‘a tall black man’.171 For all Fairfax’s anxiety in 1649–50 to ensure that the troops newly occupying London did not harass civilians in the metropolis there were inevitably some incidents of misbehaviour. On 15 January 1649 there was a sessions order to suppress alehouses near Hyde Park where the Courts of Guard were kept, because of the manifold disorders and dangerous attempts daily committed in them.172 Some soldiers were punished ‘for taking away a womans hat from off her head’, others ‘for forsing a Gentlewoman into a Tavern, and keeping her in against her will, and took away some of her mony and apparell’. Other soldiers ‘quarrelled at Westminster, occasioned by their refusing to pay their 166 TNA, SP46/97, fol. 172. 167 CSPD 1657–8, p. 218. But note the petition of Robert Blackborne in October 1658 complaining that the previous December he had left his house so that it could be used to quarter the protector’s life guard, being thereby obliged to take the lease of a house nearby for £350 (£100 more than he received for his own): CSPD 1658–9, p. 170. 168 CSPD 1655, p. 605. See also CSPD 1655–6, p. 107; CSPD 1656–7, pp. 77, 119. 169 WAC, E29; Burke (ed.), Memorials of St Margaret’s, p. 648. The previous year St Margaret’s churchwardens had recorded a payment to ‘Coulson the waterman that was shott, when the Surreymen came down with a petition’ (E28). 170 Perfect Proceedings, no. 297 (31 May–7 June 1655), p. 4718; Certain Passages (1–8 June 1655), p. ‘11’. 171 Clarke, III, 16. 172 J.C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records vol. 3: 1625–67 (1888) (hereafter Jeaffreson), p. 105.

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The militarization of Westminster Reckoning at one Mr Carlesses house, when they were drinking’.173 Fairfax was forced to issue a proclamation in February 1649 against soldiers entering the houses of local inhabitants in London and Westminster ‘in an uncivill and disorderly manner, exacting Mony and Victuals there, to the great injury and the scandal of the Army’.174 Squabbles between soldiers and innkeepers in Covent Garden and elsewhere continued to be reported intermittently in newsbooks during the 1650s, and on occasion the numbers of soldiers involved and people wounded led the affray to be described as ‘a mutiny’.175 Larger-scale and more dangerous confrontations involved other military personnel. We have already noted the threatening behaviour of Fairfax’s disbanded life guard in 1648. Tumultuous petitioning of naval commissioners by armed seamen in October 1653 prompted an intervention by soldiers, resulting in one of the petitioners being slain and many hurt and wounded. The following day saw a full-scale confrontation at Charing Cross between larger numbers of the seamen ‘armed with Swords, and Pistols, and other weapons’ and Cromwell’s life guard, in which more men were wounded, and a subsequent proclamation was issued threatening the death penalty for any mariners who committed or abetted ‘any Mutinous or Seditious act’.176 The military authorities sought to reassure local residents by carrying out punishments against disobedient soldiers in as public a fashion as possible. Regular sentences included running the gauntlet at Charing Cross. This involved the malefactor’s being stripped to the waist and forced to run through a lane of soldiers (sometimes specified to be four companies strong) armed with cudgels, ‘every souldier having a stroake at their naked backs and breasts, arms, or where it shall light’.177 Charing Cross was a favourite venue for public military justice: it was here that another soldier was burned on the forehead for stealing clothes from a house where he had been quartered, and two soldiers had their ears nailed to the whipping post for taking bribes.178 Another regular sentence was riding the wooden horse in the Palace Yard for either half an hour or an hour, sometimes with the specification that this should be with muskets tied to each heel.179 Malefactors were also sentenced to go from 173 Perfect Occurrences, no. 104 (22–30 Dec 1648), pp. 775, 778. 174 Perfect Occurrences, no. 111 (9–16 Feb 1649), p. 841. 175 E.g. Perfect Account, no. 42 (22–29 Oct, 1651), p. ‘334’ (vere 342) on ‘a mutiny at Holborn Conduit’; Perfect Diurnall, no. 286 (28 May–4 June 1655), p. 4397, reporting a foot-soldier convicted of ‘Drunkenness, swearing and quarrelling’ at the establishment of Henry Halfpenny, ‘a Victualler in Covent Garden’. 176 Mercurius Politicus, no. 177 (27 Oct–3 Nov 1653), pp. 2828–9, 2831–3. 177 Perfect Occurrences, no. 104 (22–30 Dec 1648), pp. 775, 778; no. 141 (7–14 Sept 1649), pp. 1288; Faithfull Scout, no. 184 (16–23 June 1654), p. 1458 178 Severall Proceedings of State Affaires, no. 255 (10–17 Aug 1654), p. 4040; Faithfull Scout, no. 184 (16–23 June 1654), p. 1458. 179 Perfect Occurrences, no. 104 (22–30 Dec 1648), p. 778; no. 141 (7–14 Sept 1649), p. 1288. Cf. Mercurius Politicus, no. 23 (7–14 Nov 1650), p. 385.

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Westminster 1640–60 Whitehall through Holborn with a halter around their necks.180 Other punishments inflicted included standing on a stool with a cleft stick on the tongue and bearing a paper signifying the offence of drunkenness and swearing, near to a victualler’s in Covent Garden where the deed had been committed.181 These Westminster punishments were not only inflicted on soldiers convicted of crimes committed within the locality, but also on others from elsewhere in the country whose offences were judged by the court martial kept by the Council of War at Whitehall. Thus, a group of soldiers who were tried for stealing deer in Worcester Park and other parks in Surrey were sentenced to ride the wooden horse in Palace Yard while wearing deer skin on their backs and bearing a paper on their chests describing their offence.182 Not only were these punishments carried out in public, but they were also deliberately reported – sometimes at length – in newsbooks. Having narrated one series of punishments, the newsbook Perfect Occurrences pointed out that ‘there is no favour shewed to any Souldiers that offer wrong to people any where. The more shame for those that wrong the Souldiers ... by detaining their pay.’183 The activities of the court martial in the months following the army’s occupation of London in December 1648 were reported in detail. But if the intention was to reassure the local population, this may not always have been successful. After reporting how two soldiers were sentenced at the Council of War for having broken into an orchard and having drawn their weapons and ‘affronted’ an officer who came to eject them, A Perfect Diurnall lamented ‘no marvaile if any honest Countrey man receives affronts, but dare not complaine when an Officer of the Army meets with such insolent carriage with the Soldiers’.184 London newsbooks’ regular reporting of horror stories of military misconduct elsewhere in the country may also have raised anxieties about the very visible military presence in the capital, especially when major affrays were reported as close as Finchley.185 In the case of one Mr Denn who committed a murder in Holborn, one newsbook carefully emphasized that, while it had been reported that he was a soldier, the man was no longer serving in the army and was not under the authority of Fairfax. This correction was made because of ‘it being a thing too frequent to lay charges of the highest nature upon soldiers, when many they are not guilty of it’.186 Matters were not helped by the misdeeds of those who impersonated soldiers. In January 1649 the army’s Judge Advocate and other army officers complained to the Lord Mayor of London and Middlesex JPs that many lewd people harboured in the 180 Perfect Diurnall, no. 11 (18–25 Feb 1650), p. 93. 181 Perfect Diurnall, no. 286 (28 May–4 June 1655), p. 4397. 182 Perfect Occurrences, no. 141 (7–14 Sept 1649), pp. 1283, 1287–8. 183 Perfect Occurrences, no. 104 (22–30 Dec 1648), p. 778. 184 Perfect Diurnall, no. 319 (3–10 Sept 1649), p. ‘2513’. 185 Perfect Occurrences, no. 118 (30 Mar–6 Apr 1649), p. 933. 186 Perfect Diurnall, no. 319 (3–10 Sept 1649), pp. ‘2688’–‘2513’.

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The militarization of Westminster suburbs ‘which pretended that they were souldiers’ had recently committed several outrages and robberies in and about the City of London. The following month Fairfax was forced to publish an order appealing for information regarding people pretending to be soldiers who took free quarter using counterfeit passes and tickets.187 To some commentators, however, the army’s own behaviour was partly responsible. One newsbook blamed the regular use of soldiers to arrest men in private houses for the actions of thieves in the capital who dressed as soldiers and went into private houses, stealing money and jewels and threatening the occupants with guns.188 It was doubly important for the army to demonstrate to local people that it dealt severely with transgressors because it would not allow soldiers to be prosecuted by the civil authorities, but only by its own court martial at Whitehall. The Middlesex sessions was obliged to order its constables firmly that ‘if any person whome they soe find [breaking the Sabbath] shall alleadge himself to be a souldier, that they secure him, till he declare, where his quarter is, and who is his Officer, and thereupon that he be carried to his Officer (who is to be acquainted with his Offence) to receive punishment’.189 Such treatment could be severe. Exemplary military justice was sometimes carried out as publicly as possible: in May 1653 a soldier charged with killing a man in Holborn was sentenced ‘to be shot to death near the place where he did the fact’, with his body to remain where it lay for two hours afterwards.190 In February 1660 mutineer soldiers were executed at gibbets at Charing Cross and over against Somerset House in the Strand.191 But the requirement to surrender military malefactors for private treatment by their own kind may have bred some bad blood, perhaps reflected in a notable case in 1656 where the local jury would only convict of manslaughter several defendants who had killed a soldier when trying to escape from military detention.192 Resident troops could of course also be of benefit to the locality. A Newcastle garrison’s accounts from this period show substantial payments made to local carpenters, smiths, chandlers and saddlers, while Westminster’s garrisons would also presumably have provided a boost to the local victualling trade.193 Fines levied on soldiers might in theory be passed on to parishes: in 1646–47 fines imposed on soldiers ‘for defaults in appearance’ 187 The Armies Modest Intelligencer (19–26 Jan 1649); Perfect Diurnall, no. 291 (19–26 Feb 1649). 188 The Moderate Intelligencer, no. 209 (15–22 Mar 1649). 189 LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/91, p. 132. 190 Mercurius Politicus, no. 153 (12–19 May 1653), p. 2454; The Weekly Intelligencer, no. 119 (17–24 May 1653), p. ‘850’ (vere 852); Severall Proceedings of State Affaires, no. 190 (12–19 May 1653), p. 3008. 191 Rugg, p. 42. 192 Mercurius Politicus, no. 296 (7–14 Feb 1655), p. 5964. 193 Reece, ‘Military presence’, p. 149.

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Westminster 1640–60 were passed on to St Margaret’s overseers for the poor, but this was a one-off, and the soldiers involved were members of the Westminster trained bands, rather than garrisoned troops.194 Some senior army officers also gave significant benevolences to the overseers of the poor of Westminster parishes.195 However, when in December 1658 the vestrymen at St Martin’s, struggling to meet the costs of poor relief, instructed their overseers of the poor to go to St James to the officers of the army there ‘for theyr good will’, this seems to have been a unique attempt to solicit benevolences from officers in such a direct fashion.196 Soldiers could also provide valuable extra support to the local forces of law and order – most notably in late 1649 and early 1650, when troops were deployed to assist the authorities in dealing with a wave of crimes and robberies in the area. These included thefts from St Martin’s church (which Colonel Pride’s troops helped to investigate).197 However, they were often involved in helping to enforce more contentious and unpopular measures – from closing playhouses and enforcing restrictions on travel on the Sabbath to searching private houses and arresting suspected malignants – and this may have intensified local resentment. Moreover, soldiers based in the area were regularly accused of taking a mercenary interest in such assistance. When, in May 1649, soldiers seized a robber, they expected a reward for their efforts, and Fairfax was forced to issue an order two months later against soldiers who ‘have violently entred into mens houses, and have seized upon their persons, and by force delivered them over to Bayliffs or sergeants’.198 In 1654 soldiers were punished for taking money to release a malefactor whom they had seized, while at the same court martial another four were disciplined for demanding five shillings each for helping local officials to make an arrest.199 Two years earlier, the local sessions had indicted several soldiers for going to alehouses under the pretence of reforming disorders and taking money from alehouse-keepers.200 Under the major-generals, this military bolstering of social discipline was intensified, although, as one historian has suggested, for much of the country this represented ‘a formalisation of the army’s existing role in administration, a difference in degree rather than kind’.201 Certainly, military officers had 194 WAC, E160. 195 Major-General Whalley gave an annual benevolence to St Margaret’s between 1654 and 16555 and 1659 and 1660, usually of £5, while Major-General Goffe also gave a benevolence in 1657–58 and 1658–59 (WAC, E168–173). Whalley and Lambert also gave benevolences to St Martin’s: e.g. WAC, F383. 196 WAC, F2003, p. 178. 197 Reece, ‘Military presence’, p. 181; WAC, F6 (1649–50). 198 CJ, 10 May 1649; The Moderate Messenger, no. 14 (23–30 July 1649), p. 94. 199 Faithfull Scout, no. 184 (16–23 June 1654), p. 1458. 200 LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/111, p. 31. 201 Reece, ‘Military presence’, pp. 181–8, 202; see Chapter 5.

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The militarization of Westminster for some time been listed in the liber pacis for Westminster and Middlesex, and a number had been active in their roles as local JPs, examining suspicious people and carrying out other civilian duties. The fact that, unlike some other areas, Westminster and Middlesex had a major-general in the shape of John Barkstead who had already been playing a significant role in the area may also have made for a degree of continuity.202 Nevertheless, Barkstead’s rule as major-general does seem to have seen a more notable increase in the implementation of moral legislation in London and the suburbs than was true of other parts of the country. Some of the local civilian JPs had already shown themselves to be zealous prosecutors of ungodliness in the area, but Barkstead’s new office may have enabled him to provide them with extra support and thereby to generate an increased momentum in prosecutions.203 Other military officers sought to play a wider role in the locality after the end of their active service. In the years immediately following the army’s occupation of London in 1648 a number of officers put in bids for local properties temporarily in the hands of the state, and one officer occupying such property was Colonel Edward Grosvenor.204 Grosvenor would prove to be easily the most significant ex-officer in Westminster society. He had been a prominent associate of Cromwell and other generals in the late 1640s. He was sufficiently well known in 1648 for an informer in April to have singled out his name together with that of Colonel Okey when reporting the discussions among the officers at Windsor of a possible military occupation of the capital, and he was one of the officers who accompanied Fairfax and Cromwell when they conducted a military visitation of Oxford in May of the following 202 Barkstead may also have served initially in Westminster’s Military Company (I will be discussing the evidence for this elsewhere). Philip Skippon, the major general for London, had initially been appointed for Middlesex. Barkstead also acted as Skippon’s deputy in London (C. Durston, Cromwell’s major-generals [Manchester, 2001], pp. 22, 26, 28). 203 Durston, Major-generals, pp. 79, 156–7, 175; J. Mather, ‘The Moral Code of the English Civil War and Interregnum’, The Historian 44 (1982), 207–28. On the Middlesex sessions in the 1650s see now B. Capp, ‘Republican reformation: family, community and the state in interregnum Middlesex, 1649–60’ in H. Berry and E. Foyster (eds), The family in early modern England (Cambridge, 2007). For discussion of the Westminster sessions and JPs in this period see Chapters 5 and 6. 204 Captains involved in ‘discoveries’ of properties owned by the state in Westminster in 1649–50 who also often made bids for them included Captain Edward Strutton, Captain Gouldsmith, and Captain John Hemsdell (TNA, E317/26, nos 64, 71, 74). Captain Geeres (bidding for a house and garden in Pall Mall) also occupied Shaver’s Hall (ibid., nos 71, 73). An enclosed garden with fruit trees in the Blue Mews at Piccadilly was listed as being in the occupation of Colonel Grosvenor (ibid., no. 73). More senior military figures could of course develop their own big houses for themselves: on 31 October 1656 the Council of State discussed an account for nearly £2,000 for work done at the house in Spring Gardens where General Desborough lived, and agreed that the state would cover half the costs (CSPD 1656–7, p. 143).

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Westminster 1640–60 year, receiving an honorary MA from the university in the process.205 He also played a prominent role in the Scottish campaign of 1650–51, commanding a regiment of horse.206 With the disbanding of his regiment in 1652 Grosvenor would appear to have ended his career of active service, although he continued to serve as the army’s quartermaster general. From his house in the environs of the Mews (particularly appropriate for an ex-colonel of horse) Grosvenor would appear to have set out in the next few years to build a significant profile for himself in local society.207 As early as 1652 he was listed in the liber pacis as a Westminster JP, and he would continue to appear in JP lists for Westminster and Middlesex until 1660.208 In January 1655 he was elected to the vestry of St Martin in the Fields, where he was a notably active vestryman for the remainder of the decade, playing a more conventional role in civilian affairs in the locality.209 He was also elected as one of the two MPs for Westminster in 1656 and 1659, where he showed himself (unsurprisingly) to be an enthusiastic Cromwellian, supporting the offer of the crown in 1657 and later acting as one of the signatories to the formal proclamation of Richard’s succession to the protectorship.210 Grosvenor presumably had his supporters in the locality, and was no longer an army officer. But it is notable that parish records always give him his military title, and his first election as an MP saw the most direct confrontation between military and civilian forces in the area. These were the parliamentary elections of 1656 (which also saw Major-General Barkstead elected to serve for Middlesex). The 1654 elections in Westminster had already shown how fiercely these contests would be fought, and how hostility towards the army could find expression: in an acrimonious, day-long election fought by no fewer than six candidates, one of them – Commissary General Whalley – had been attacked by a mastiff dog.211 For the 1656 elections it would seem that Cromwell himself was determined to secure Grosvenor’s appointment as one of Westminster’s MPs. The Venetian ambassador reported in August that Cromwell had sent for the chief men of the parish of Westminster (i.e. St Margaret’s) and told them the persons he wished to have nominated for the area, but Westmin205 A. Wood, The history and antiquities of ... the University of Oxford (2 vols, Oxford, 1786–90), II, 620. 206 C.H. Firth and G. Davies, The regimental history of Cromwell’s army (2 vols, Oxford, 1940), I, pp. xxv, 124; C.H. Firth (ed.), Scotland and the Commonwealth (Scottish History Society 1st ser. 18, 1895), p. 17. 207 For his residence in the Mews see St Martin’s poor rates for 1653–59: WAC, F381–6. 208 TNA, C193/13/4 fols 63r, 128v; C192/13/5, fols 67v, 136r; C192/13/6, fol. 114r. Cf WAC, F2003, p. 38. 209 WAC, F2003 p. 57 and passim. 210 The Parliamentary History of England (2nd edn, 24 vols, 1763), XXI, pp. 10, 25; Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English affairs, IV, 336. 211 Severall Proceedings of State Affairs, no. 250 (6–13 July 1654), p. 3968. For a more detailed analysis of this election see Chapter 4.

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The militarization of Westminster ster’s inhabitants allegedly told him that they would stand by their privilege to choose whomever they desired. The ambassador noted darkly (and presciently), however, that troops would be present at all the elections.212 Another source reported that, at the subsequent election in the town, in order to carry the election ‘the souldiers were bid pull off their red-coats and put on others, and to give their Vote for him’. This accusation is made in a hostile source, perhaps seeking to explain away Grosvenor’s success with the local electorate (another writer claimed that Grosvenor had received more than 4,000 votes).213 Other, more neutral reports describe much more overt conflict, however. Thurloe was informed that in the contest between Grosvenor and a long-term Westminster resident and office-holder, one Thomas Latham, ‘the solgers came in to cry for gravenar the setisans [citizens] cried no sword men no marsonary [mercenary] men’. In response, ‘thay fell together by the eres’ and in the tumult were ‘2 men slane and many wounded’.214 It is not clear whether Grosvenor’s subsequent re-election reflected the use of more subtle tactics by the soldiery, a more cowed electorate, or Grosvenor’s increased activity in parochial government. The confrontations in 1656 presumably represent the bubbling over of more constant low-level tension between the military and the civilian population, perhaps further inflamed by Cromwell’s attempt to dictate the election result. Such strains would only have been exacerbated by the tendency of ex-officers to retain military titles (a parliamentary survey of the Three Bells in the Strand in the early 1650s reported it as being in the possession of ‘Captaine Christopher Porter a Milliner’),215 and the privileges granted to ex-soldiers. An ordinance of September 1654 which allowed ex-soldiers to exercise trades without the customary requirement of a prior apprenticeship inevitably generated tensions, and the attempts of ex-soldiers to set up as coachmen in the capital provoked conflicts with other practitioners, leading to the direct intervention of Major-General Barkstead to defend their interests.216 Former military service would often be urged in petitions for almshouse places.217 Most galling for the majority of citizens, however, may have been the petty inconveniences and disruption caused by the regular security alarms in Westminster, when horses and goods would be seized,218 properties temporarily requisitioned or searched for arms and munitions, lists of lodgers 212 CSPVen 1655–56, p. 254. On the regime’s interventions in the 1656 elections see P. Little and D.L. Smith, Parliaments and politics during the Cromwellian protectorate (Cambridge, 2007). 213 Clarke, III, 70; A narrative of the late Parliament (1657), p.11. 214 Bodl., Rawlinson MSS A.41/2, fols 642–3. 215 TNA, E317/26, no. 85. 216 A&O, II, 1006. See Chapter 4. 217 E.g. WAM, 5271. 218 E.g. CSPD 1650, pp. 274, 540, 553, 565; CSPD 1651, p. 324.

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Westminster 1640–60 demanded, curfews imposed and ex-royalists and other suspects ejected for months at a time. Clearly, soldiers sometimes charged illegal tolls for entry to the area,219 and in September 1651 the Council of State was obliged to intervene after complaints that guards in the Avenue, under cover of examining suspicious persons, greatly troubled and molested everyone who was passing through, demanding money to let people go.220 The proclamation and arrests following the Gerard plot generated particular hostility: the Venetian agent reported that placards had been fixed to walls in the capital claiming that the plot was a mere invention of the government.221 Executions by firing squad in the fashionable streets of Holborn; the gun emplacements and new, high walls manned by soldiers in the heart of Westminster; the armed searches of properties; prisoners of war dying in their hundreds a short distance from the palace of Westminster; deadly confrontations with soldiers at parliamentary elections – this all seems a far cry from the fashionable society of Inigo Jones, Covent Garden and the New Exchange. From Lithgow’s ‘lamentable sight’ of the ‘noveltie of novelties’ of guards around Whitehall, to the Venetian ambassador’s complaints of the ceaseless noise and sight of constant military drilling and marching, the military presence at the heart of Westminster throughout the civil war and interregnum immediately struck visitors. Yet, the same visitors would observe that Westminster’s world of genteel sociability continued to gather only a stone’s throw from these military operations. It is the stark juxtaposition of these two worlds that is one of the most distinctive features of interregnum Westminster.222

219 The Weekly Intelligencer, no. 119 (17–24 May 1653), p. ‘850’ (vere 852); Severall Proceedings of State Affaires, no. 190 (12–19 May 1653), p. 3008. 220 CSPD 1651, p. 425. 221 CSPVen 1653–4, p. 222. 222 See Chapter 5.

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Chapter 3

.

Westminster and the state: sites and rites, 1642–60

W

estminster was traditionally viewed as a royal city, in contrast to the City of London. It was above all the location of the royal court and household, the privy council and of the royal law courts (and only rarely played host to the infrequent meetings of parliament). The flight of the king from Westminster in January 1642 was therefore a considerable shock to the locality. This would have been compounded when, following his failed attempt to take London in late 1642, Charles I moved his royal capital to Oxford and eventually summoned a parliament to meet there. The king also issued proclamations declaring that the courts of King’s Bench and exchequer should be moved from Westminster to Oxford, since ‘Our Cities of London and Westminster have been, and yet are, the chiefe Causers, and Maintainers of this present Rebellion against us’.1 When Charles finally returned to Westminster in 1648 it was for his trial and execution, and the abolition of the kingly office which had been so central to Westminster’s identity. Clearly, all these traumatic changes were crucially important to a locality that had traditionally defined itself in terms of its special relationship with royal authority. Its status as the seat of national government was under threat, and it is therefore hardly surprising that local inhabitants anxiously sought to reassure parliament of their loyalty when MPs returned to Westminster in January 1642.2 In 1653 Westminster’s inhabitants would be equally apprehensive when this same parliament was finally dissolved, anxiously seeking assurance from the Council of State that its successor would also meet in Westminster.3 In an era of unending constitutional experiments it was an 1 SRP, II, 992–5. See also ibid., II, 834–7, 883–6, 899–901, 951–2, 957–8, 987–9. 2 See Chapter 1. 3 The Council replied ‘That it is not for this Councell to appoint the place of sitting for the supreame power which is to meet, it being a matter to be determined by themselves when they shall be convened’, but offered the reassurance that it did not know ‘any thing to the Contrary, but that the place of their sitting may be in the House at W ­ estminster

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Figure 4  Portion of Newcourt and Faithorne’s 1658 map, showing the Strand and aristocratic houses on either side, from Durham House in the west to Essex House in the east

Westminster and the state, 1642–60 understandable source of anxiety for Westminster’s residents that the seat of government might move from their town. Yet Westminster not only continued to be the seat of government in these years; it also became more than ever the centre of state power and display for the series of regimes – parliament, republic and protectorate. Not only did successive governments – seeking legitimacy for their de facto authority – try to exploit the spatial and institutional continuities of Westminster, but the state also came to play an ever more decisive role in the locality. It took into its hands royal palaces, crown lands and royalist properties in the area, as well as requisitioning for its own purposes a swathe of famous noble town-houses. As Westminster became the site for an expanded bureaucracy, so also its churches increasingly came under direct government control, not least Westminster Abbey itself. And in the hectic weeks of October 1659, when the country’s government seemed to be in abeyance, it was in the very streets of Westminster that rivals for power confronted each other. Given that the distinctiveness of Westminster largely related to the institutions in its midst, one of the most fruitful ways of exploring these changes in the state’s role in the locality is by examining the fortunes and changing use of its chief buildings. This also enables us to chart the changing meanings attached to buildings, and the symbolic importance of such shifts. The wide-scale appropriation of space and buildings in Westminster during the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s would generate significant changes in the political geography of the town. Spectacle and display: ecclesiastical buildings Westminster had always played an important role in state pageantry, most notably at coronations and the state openings of parliament. But there had been a dearth of royal entries (and parliaments) in the 1630s.4 It was in the 1640s and 1650s that Westminster was far more regularly the venue of official public display – such as major state processions, funerals, assemblies, investitures, thanksgivings and fast days. It has been suggested that the parliamentarian and republican regimes showed little grasp of the importance of, or any aptitude for, public display, but, as will be demonstrated, the opposite would appear to be the case.5 Moreover, parliament embraced the ceremocommonly called the Parliament House’ (TNA, SP25/69, p. 141). There were reports in June that the assembly would be housed in the Banqueting House (A. Woolrych, Commonwealth to protectorate [Oxford, 1986], p. 144). In fact, the assembly – known to history as Barebone’s Parliament – met in the parliament house, as did the protectoral parliaments that followed it. 4 R.M. Smuts, ‘Public ceremony and royal charisma: the English royal entry in London, 1485–1642’ in A.L. Beier, D. Cannadine and J.M. Rosenheim (eds), The first modern society (Cambridge, 1989). 5 K. Sharpe, Image wars. Promoting kings and commonwealths in England 1603–1660 (2010),

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Westminster 1640–60 nial trappings of government far earlier than is usually suggested, indeed well before victory over the king in the civil war. John Pym was buried with pomp in Westminster Abbey as early as 1643, while William Dugdale noted in January 1645 that the House of Commons was hung with part of the arras hangings out of the king’s Wardrobe, ‘and the rest with the hanging that were at the end of the quire where the altar stood in Westminster Abbey’.6 Parliament did not merely appropriate materials from traditional places for its own benefit, though: the republican regimes appropriated the places themselves. Westminster’s major buildings were central here. Westminster Abbey We should begin with a famous building that has been surprisingly neglected by historians of the period, but which contemporaries most certainly did not ignore – Westminster Abbey. For contemporaries, the Abbey was famously the ‘house of kings’. For the Tudor and early Stuart period it was not only the site of royal coronations, the burial place of most monarchs (and increasingly of other members of the royal family), but also the showcase of the elaborate high churchmanship of which the early Stuart monarchs were patrons.7 But how would it fare in the 1640s and 1650s, under parliament and the commonwealth? Certainly, this was a time when cathedrals were the targets of both iconoclastic violence and neglect, with their sale proposed in parliament. St Paul’s Cathedral was famously used for quartering troops and as stabling for horses at various points in the 1650s, and the collapse of the south transept vault in 1654 left part of the cathedral open to the elements. The sight moved John Evelyn to exclaim: ‘how lothsome a Golgotha is this Pauls! ... England is the sole spot in the world, where, amongst Christians, their Churches are made jakes, and stables, markets and Tipling-houses’.8 The official modern history of Westminster Abbey passes over this period hastily, but under the telling subheading ‘the abomination of desolation’.9 Certain events have parts III–V; K. Sharpe, ‘“An image doting rabble”: the failure of republican culture in seventeenth-century England’ in K. Sharpe and S.N. Zwicker (eds), Refiguring revolutions (Berkeley, 1998). 6 The life, diary and correspondence of Sir William Dugdale, ed. W. Hamper (1827), p. 77. This was also noted by Lady Eleanor Davies: ‘The excommunication out of Paradise’ (1647) in Prophetic writings of Lady Eleanor Davies, ed. E.S. Cope (Oxford, 1995), p. 231. 7 Merritt, pp. 325–6; J.F. Merritt, ‘The Cradle of Laudianism? Westminster Abbey 1558–1630’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52 (2001), 623–46. 8 John Evelyn, A Character of England (3rd edn, 1659), pp. 11–12. See also Mercurius Politicus, no. 196 (9–16 Mar 1654), p. 3332; CSPD 1654, p. 89; CSPD 1657–8, p. 280; Calendar of Wynn of Gwydir Papers 1515–1690 (Aberyswyth, 1926), p. 334; 9 D. Carpenter (ed.), A house of kings (1972), p. 168 (Matt. 24: 15–26; Mark 13:14). It does, however, note the care taken to repair the fabric and preserve the institution’s finances in these years (p. 172).

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 dominated historians’ perspective on the Abbey in this period: there are the reported desecrations by soldiers in the summer of 1643; the breaking open of doors to seize and remove the royal regalia; and Sir Robert Harley’s notorious ‘cleansing’ of the Abbey of superstitious objects in 1644. Much damage was undoubtedly done in these attacks, but these vivid snapshots can easily give us a distorted view of the Abbey’s fate in the 1640s and 1650s. Images and painted glass were removed in profusion in the 1640s, it is true, especially in the chapel of Henry VII, where the high altar was destroyed and some 2,000 feet of stained glass were removed. But this activity took place over the course of two years, and this was not an iconoclastic fury, but a cool and clinical dismantling of decoration by craftsmen and Abbey officials, many of whom had served during the Laudian period. They included Adam Browne, who had been appointed surveyor at the Abbey in 1639, and remained in post until his death in 1655.10 The valuable bronze of funeral effigies and the grille of Henry VII’s tomb were not melted down in the way that the crown jewels were.11 The amount spent on restoring the fabric after the Restoration was significantly less than Dean Williams had spent in the 1620s.12 In recent years, scholars have noted the ways in which the early republic and Cromwell’s protectorate still used Whitehall and other royal spaces and forms to project their power and legitimize their government.13 These studies make little or no allusion to Westminster Abbey.14 In fact, however, Westminster Abbey was actually one of the most important buildings of the non-monarchical governments of the civil war and interregnum period. It was eagerly appropriated for their purposes by a series of regimes – from parliamentarians of the 1640s, and republicans of the early 1650s, to the protectorate itself. It was as a venue for funerals that Westminster Abbey played a particularly significant role in this period. From early on in the civil war, the Abbey was used for politically important funerals and burials that were of national importance. The most striking early manifestation of this phenomenon was the funeral of the parliamentarian leader John Pym. Pym died of cancer in December 1643. There was no obvious reason for him to be buried in the Abbey. Given the increasing use of St Margaret’s by the House of Commons, and Pym’s use of Derby House in the parish as his centre of operations, it ­ argaret’s might have seemed appropriate for him to have been buried in St M 10 BL, Add. MSS 70005; J. Spraggon, Puritan iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003) (hereafter Spraggon), pp. 88–93. 11 T. Cocke, 900 years. The restorations of Westminster Abbey (1995), pp. 33–4. 12 But note the calculation in 1646 that ‘A thousand pound is not sufficient for the repair of the Church at this present time’ (WAM, 6355). 13 See especially Kelsey; R. Sherwood, The court of Oliver Cromwell (1977). 14 The Abbey does not even have an index entry in either Sean Kelsey’s Inventing a republic or Kevin Sharpe’s Image wars. Promoting kings and commonwealths in England 1603–1660 (2010).

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Westminster 1640–60 church. The choice of the Abbey would appear to have been a deliberate decision to memorialize, indeed apotheosize, a hero of parliament at a particularly difficult time in parliament’s fortunes. His body lay in state beforehand (Stephen Marshall claimed in his funeral sermon – published by order of the Commons with an engraved portrait of Pym – that ‘well neer a thousand people’ came to view Pym’s body).15 Meanwhile, the Commons ordered that a monument should be prepared for Pym ‘at the Charge of the Commonwealth’, and that Pym’s body be interred in the Abbey ‘without any Charge for breaking open the Ground there’, and that the Speaker and the whole house should accompany his body to the interment. The funeral itself was reportedly conducted ‘with much state and magnificence’.16 The parliamentarian regime seems to have deliberately treated its most faithful servant as a hero whom it had a right to bury and memorialize where kings lay. The Venetian ambassador cannot have been alone in suggesting that parliament’s decision to erect ‘a sumptuous monument’ to Pym ‘in the chapel of the kings at Westminster’ showed ‘what their ends are to the reflecting eye’.17 Pym’s funeral is rarely discussed by historians, but it marks the beginning of the systematic use by parliament of the Abbey as a burial place for the heroes of state and commonwealth.18 Nearly two years later, the Commons directed that the MP William Strode should be buried in the Abbey ‘without Charge, near the Place where Mr. Pym was buried, and in such a Manner as may be fitting for a Person of his Quality and Deserts’. In addition, it was resolved that ‘Mr. Speaker, and the Members of this House, do attend his Corps at the Burial’.19 While Strode was hardly a major figure like Pym, nevertheless this special dignity was presumably accorded him because of his symbolic importance as one of the Five Members whom the king had famously sought to arrest in 1642.20 Another state funeral was arranged when the prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly, William Twisse, was buried on 24 July 1646, 15 Stephen Marshall, Threnodia. The churches lamentation for the good man his losse (1643), p. 31. 16 CJ, 11 Dec 1643; Perfect Diurnall, no. 21 (11–18 Dec 1643), p. 165; BL, Add. MSS 17677R, fols 165v–166r. 17 CSPVen 1643–47, p. 58. See also Robert Baillie, Letters and journals 1637–62, ed. D. Laing (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1841–42) (hereafter Baillie), II, 118. 18 This may be contrasted with the earl of Bedford’s funeral on 14 May 1641. Many MPs and Lords in reportedly over 300 coaches travelled to Bedford House, the corpse was placed in a chariot covered with black velvet and the elaborate procession of fifty coaches was accompanied by banners and heralds, yet the final burial took place at Chenies Manor House in Buckinghamshire: Jansson, IV, 384–5. For an example of the downplaying of Pym’s funeral (vis-à-vis Essex’s) see S. Lambert, ‘The opening of the Long Parliament’, Historical Journal 27 (1984), p. 285–6. 19 CJ, 10 Sept 1645. 20 Contemporaries certainly thought of Strode in these terms: see The Journal of Thomas Juxon 1644–1647, ed. K. Lindley and D. Scott (Camden Society 5th ser. 13, 1999), p. 85.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 attended by both houses (and again, Twisse was a commoner, with no obvious links to the locality).21 The most famously lavish exequies, of course, were those provided for the parliamentarian earl of Essex in 1646, as John Adamson and others have noted. Existing scholarship has tended to discuss the unique nature of this event, focusing on the use of regal motifs. But while not denying Essex’s particular political importance and the unparalleled lavishness of his exequies, there is a case to be made for viewing the event as a particularly splendid example of a tradition of parliamentarian funerals that was already well established. Essex’s aristocratic status – as well as his importance as Lord General of parliament’s forces for two years – undoubtedly explains the unparalleled splendour of the event. But this arguably represents more than an assertion of Essex’s noble rank. It also harnessed his stature to promote parliament’s own public image and its capacity to rival the ceremonial pretensions of the royalists. The splendour and magnitude of the event are undeniable. Parliament voted the colossal sum of £5,000 for the funeral, which was modelled on that of Prince Henry, with the route from Essex House to the Abbey lined with five regiments of trained bands, and the procession itself included four regiments (including one of the Westminster regiments) and over 1,000 people. The Abbey was full, despite the Lords’ order to the Westminster JPs ‘to keepe out the multitude, and all women of any quality whatsoever’, and parliament ordered that the funeral hearse should remain in the chancel indefinitely for those paying their last respects.22 It should also be stressed that the advent of the republic, if anything, intensified the use of the Abbey for state ceremonial. From early on, it was the burial place of choice for the state’s servants. Especially significant in starting this trend was the treatment of the republic’s first martyr – its ambassador to the Netherlands, Isaac Dorislaus, assassinated by royalist refugees in May 1649.23 Significantly, Dorislaus had recently played a key role in the trial of Charles I. Dorislaus’ body lay in state at Worcester House (a royalist property confiscated by the state) ‘hung with black baize and escutcheons’. The body was conducted to its interment in the Henry VII chapel in the Abbey ‘in stately pomp’ by the lord chief justices, the general officers of the army, the Commons and the Council of State, ‘in regard that he had beene a publick Agent for the State’ (as one newsletter observed), and was interred at the state’s expense.24 21 ODNB, s.n. William Twisse. 22 V.F. Snow, Essex the rebel (Lincoln, 1970), pp. 489–93; J. Adamson, ‘Chivalry and political culture in Caroline England’ in K. Sharpe and P. Lake (eds), Culture and politics in early Stuart England (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 191–3; Sharpe, Image wars, p. 376; The true mannor and forme of the proceeding of the funeral of the Right Honourable Robert Earle of Essex (1646), pp. 1–12, 20. 23 Dorislaus’s funeral is, surprisingly, neglected by Kelsey. 24 The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, no. 316 (12–19 June 1649), p. 1397; CSPD 1649–50, pp. 135, 164, 165, 183; CJ, 11 June 1649.

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Westminster 1640–60 They were attended by three troops of horse and two regiments of foot ‘in their military posture’.25 Volleys of shot were fired by these soldiers, and also from the Tower of London.26 The spectacle clearly inspired Thomas May’s friends to arrange a similar state funeral and Abbey burial for the republic’s first historian, making it a major republican event, albeit also prompting the derisory poem by Andrew Marvell.27 Other state servants buried in the Abbey with a fair degree of pomp and circumstance included the councillor Colonel Humphrey Mackworth (1654), Major-General Worsley (1656) and the regicides Sir William Constable (in 1655, despite his request in his will that he be buried ‘without ostentation’) and John Bradshaw, the judge who presided over the trial of Charles I, whose burial in 1659 was reported by an observer to have been marked with ‘very noble and great atendence with much of haroldy’.28 One notable trend in the 1650s was for the staging of elaborate state funerals in the Abbey for major military figures, especially those dying in battle for the commonwealth. This trend began with General Popham’s state funeral in 1651.29 The regicide General Deane’s funeral in 1653 was more impressive. In spite of his expressed wish to avoid the pomp and expense of Henry Ireton’s 1652 Abbey funeral, Deane’s funeral cost a substantial £800.30 He was brought in state from Greenwich, ‘in a very rich and stately manner’, the State’s Arms were carried before the hearse, and the general was buried in ‘the burial place of all the kings and queens of England’, while ‘guns were fired throughout the ceremony and the streets were lined by all the cavalry and infantry’ then quartered in the city.31 Marginally less expensive but no less impressive were the exequies of Admiral Robert Blake in 1657. As one observer described it, Blake’s body was taken from Greenwich Castle in a draped barge ‘followed by 25 Mercurius Pragmaticus, no. 9, pt 2 (12–19 June 1649); The Moderate, no. 49 (12–19 June 1649); The Moderate Mercury, no. 1 (14–21 June 1649), p. 3; Perfect Diurnall, no. 307 (11–18 June 1649). See also Joachimi’s account in BL, Add. MSS 17677T, fol. 396r–v. 26 CSPD 1649–50, p. 544. 27 D. Norbrook, Writing the English republic: poetry, rhetoric and politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 235 (Norbrook describes Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner as being behind this initiative – both were members of the Abbey Governors). 28 Mackworth, a member of the Council of State, was interred in the Henry VII chapel, attended by the Council, the Speaker, most MPs ‘and many other persons of honor, with a great train of coaches and attendants’ (Mercurius Politicus, no. 237 [21–8 Dec 1654], p. 5018). For Worsley’s burial in the same chapel see Mercurius Politicus, no. 314 (12–19 June 1656), p. 7038. For Constable’s funeral see Mercurius Politicus, no. 262 (14–21 June 1655), pp. 5418, 5420; no. 263 (21–28 June 1655), p. 5435. For Bradshaw: Rugg, p. 17. 29 Mercurius Politicus, no. 68 (18–25 Sept 1651), p. 1092; A Perfect Account, no. 38 (24 Sept–1 Oct 1651), p. 298; Severall Proceedings of State Affaires, no. 104 (18–25 Sept 1651), p. 1612; CJ 16 Sept 1651. 30 CSPD 1652–3, pp. xiv, 410, 425, 479, 491. 31 CSPVen 1653–54, p. 96; Mercurius Pragmaticus, no. 6 (22–30 June 1653), p. 48; The Moderate Intelligencer, no. 8 (20–27 June 1653), p. 64; The Moderate Publisher, no. 139 (24 June–1 July 1653); A Perfect Account, no. 129 (22–29 June 1653), p. 1027.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 so many boats of every sort that the whole river seemed covered in mourning, to Westminster Abbey, where it was buried in a tomb erected for the purpose, in the chapel of Henry VII’. This costly commemoration and the burial in Henry VII’s chapel were expressly ordered by the admiralty commissioners, despite their straitened finances. Again, military elements were prominent. It was reported that ‘during the transit the Tower of London fired all its guns and so did all the ships anchored in the Thames ... and sixty large pieces expressly mounted opposite Whitehall, as well as all the musketry drawn up in line before the Abbey’.32 Most striking of all were the funerals of those who combined military and political honours. Henry Ireton’s magnificent state funeral at Westminster Abbey in 1652 became notorious for its lavish expense. The corpse was accompanied by parliament, the Council of State and all officers of the army then resident in the capital, with London’s lord mayor, aldermen, common councilmen and ‘divers regiments of souldiers horse and foote’.33 Most splendid of all, of course, was the Abbey funeral of Oliver Cromwell, whose obsequies were modelled on those of James I, and whose effigy, after lying in state at Somerset House, was ultimately laid to rest ‘in a most magnificent structure, built in the same form as one before had been on the like occasion for King James, but much more stately and expensive’. The streets, from Somerset House to Westminster Abbey, were guarded by ‘soldiers, placed without a railing, and clad in new red coats, with black buttons, with their ensigns wrapped in cypress’. Near the head of the procession were the traditional accompaniment of ‘poor men of Westminster, two and two, in mourning gowns and hoods’, nominated by local ministers and churchwardens.34 It is worth noting among the many elegies published to commemorate the event, the poem by Samuel Slater, which concentrated on Cromwell’s burial in the Abbey. Slater comments that, despite the fact that ‘the name of Abbeys is to Cromwell’s Foe’, it was just that he should lie in Henry VII’s chapel by ‘Divine Eliza’s, and Sixth Edward’s Dust’.35 Historians have, understandably, chosen to focus on how, at his funeral, Cromwell’s effigy finally wore the crown that he had refused in life, and on the manner in which his obsequies consciously followed monarchical models (albeit in a more lavish manner than in other seventeenth-century royal 32 CSPVen 1657–59, pp. 106–13; CSPD 1657–8, pp. 60, 87, 179. 33 Faithfull Scout, no. 56 (6–13 Feb 1652), p. 433; CSPD 1652–3, p. 425; E.S. De Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn (6 vols, Oxford, 1955) (hereafter Evelyn), III, 57–8; CSPVen 1647–52, pp. 215–19; John Owen, The labouring saints dismission to rest (1652); CSPD 1654, pp. 5, 27. 34 T. Rutt (ed.) Diary of Thomas Burton, esq. ... 1656–59 (1828), II, appendix; CSPD 1658–9, pp. 143, 171, 187, 222, J. Woodward, The theatre of death: the ritual management of royal funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625 (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 199–200; Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell, pp. 127–30. 35 Samuel Slater, A rhetorical rapture (1658).

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Westminster 1640–60 funerals). It has been suggested that this lavish and stately funeral – aimed perhaps at trumping and finally erasing the Stuarts, and securing the dynastic succession – may have helped to prompt the republican backlash that toppled Cromwell’s son and the protectorate.36 But this more exclusive concentration on Cromwell’s funeral neglects the wider context of the 1640s and 1650s, which had witnessed a series of grand state funerals occurring roughly at the rate of one a year from 1643 onwards. If the monarchical features of the funeral and its sheer scale were indeed unique, it is nevertheless also possible to see it as the culmination and apogee of established commonwealth display. Grand state funerals were not merely magnificent theatrical events, however, but they also generated memorials and monuments that enshrined the parliamentarian and republican presence in the Abbey. Parliament ordered that Essex’s funeral hearse should remain in the chancel indefinitely for those paying their last respects. The catafalque (based on Prince Henry’s) was, however, mutilated soon afterwards, and the effigy was ordered to be re-clothed and placed in a glass case near to the earl of Lennox’s in the Henry VII chapel, where it remained for the next fifteen years. With notable symbolism, Essex’s effigy wore the buff coat that he had worn at the battle of Edgehill.37 Historians have, understandably, wanted to stress the regal overtones of Essex’s funeral, but they have missed crucial details of this subsequent memorialization. As one historian has commented, ‘The revolutionary government turned Westminster Abbey into a Puritan shrine’.38 The new monuments were now added to the familiar tourist route through the Abbey. The satirical royalist newsletter The Man in the Moone had imagined in 1649 how the current ‘shower of the Monuments’ would now guide tourists around, identifying the tombs and monuments of the traitors Dorislaus, Pym, Strode and Essex.39 This was intended as scoffing satire, of course, but in fact an Abbey visitor 36 L.L. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 139–46; Sharpe, Image wars, p. 522. Critical remarks about the funeral’s monarchical elements were made by royalist observers and in a later commentary by Ludlow, but the most explicit contemporary criticisms were, as with Essex’s funeral, directed at the use of an effigy, which drew complaints for the apparent idolatry involved: see E.B., A testimony against a great idolatry committed (1658). 37 John Phillips, Sportive wit (1656) contains very lengthy verses of one showing people around Abbey monuments: in Henry VII’s chapel these include Ireton, and the earl of Essex ‘stands there with his Buff coat’ (p. 96) – this was the buff coat that he had worn at Edgehill: A perfect relation of the memorable Funerall of the ... earl of Essex (1646), sig. A2v. Snow remarks that the effigy was assaulted by ‘an embittered cavalier’ (Essex, p. 494), but the Lords’ examination of the culprit points instead to a conscious act of iconoclasm by an impressionable religious zealot (LJ, 8 Jan 1647). 38 Snow, Essex, p. 493. 39 The Man in the Moone, no. 16 (13–20 June 1649), pp. 83–5. Note also the satirical account in Richard Brandon, The last will and testament of Richard Brandon (1649) p. 3, which also alludes to Dorislaus’ burial in the Abbey.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 two and a half years later describes how Dorislaus and Essex were indeed picked out for his attention by the man who displayed the monuments.40 And the parade of commonwealth heroes in the Henry VII chapel would be augmented in the 1650s by Ireton, Deane, Blake and also Colonel Mackworth, who had famously refused to surrender Shrewsbury to Charles II in 1651.41 In a sense, then, every stage of the struggle against the Stuart monarchs and the triumph of the commonwealth was represented among the exhibits in the Abbey. The dynastic use of the Abbey by the Cromwells, notably in the burials of Cromwell’s mother and favourite daughter in Henry VII’s chapel, is of course significant, but these were still private funerals and should not distract us from the larger commonwealth appropriation of the building.42 The Abbey also became a venue for other great national occasions. Chief among these was on 3 September 1652 when the formal commemoration of and thanksgiving for the victories at Dunbar and Worcester took place.43 The Abbey also hosted the processions and sermons prior to the openings of the various 1650s parliaments. The opening of the 1654 parliament had already marked a significant increase in pomp, as Cromwell rode in his coach to the Abbey ‘in very stately equipage, the Gentlemen of his Highnes going bare before, richly habited, and next before the Coach, the Pages and Lacqueys’. After the various councillors, guards and army officers processed into the Abbey, carrying maces and the sword of state, Cromwell entered and listened to the sermon ‘seated over against the Pulpit’.44 Westminster Abbey was not of course just a national secular space to rival Westminster Hall. It was increasingly the church of the state as well. It played 40 Lodewijck Huygens recounts being shown Essex’s effigy ‘dressed in a leather jerkin and red breeches with trimming’ (L. Huygens, Lodewijck Huygens: the English journal 1651–1652 [Leiden, 1982], p. 46). He and his party were also shown the grave of Dorislaus ‘with his coat of arms on top’ (ibid., pp. 45–6) although this may have been picked out for them specially because they were Dutch. 41 Mercurius Politicus, no. 237 (21–28 Dec 1654), p. 5018. 42 Mercurius Politicus’ account of the night burial of Cromwell’s daughter Lady Elizabeth on 10 August 1658 stresses the many barges filled with persons of honour and quality which accompanied the corpse from Hampton Court, but notes that ‘the whole Ceremony ... [was] managed without Funeral pomp’ (Mercurius Politicus, no. 428 [5–12 Aug 1658], p. 752). 43 This public celebration of the new regime at the Abbey echoed how nearly a hundred years before the Abbey had been the venue for the festivities commemorating the restoration of Catholicism under Queen Mary: Merritt, p. 55. Under the protectorate, however, while these were days of public thanksgiving, Cromwell generally observed them with his Council and senior army officers at Hampton Court or Whitehall, with sermons and a feast, rather than by attending a public event (e.g. Mercurius Politicus, no. 380 [3–10 Sept 1657], p. 1606). 44 Mercurius Politicus, no. 221 (31 Aug–7 Sept 1654), p. 3743. For the 1656 parliament see the account in Mercurius Politicus, no. 327 (11–16 Sept 1656), p. 7254; John Owen, God’s work in founding Zion (1656).

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Westminster 1640–60 host to the Westminster Assembly for the nine years, in which that body met to oversee the reformation of the English church (and its prolocutor, William Twisse, as we have noted, was given a burial in the Abbey). It was also the venue for some significant sermons. The House of Lords kept every one of the monthly fast days (and other thanksgiving days) in the Abbey until April 1648, and at least forty-one of these Abbey fast sermons were printed. Not only did peers and judges have separate pews kept for them, but the wives of peers clearly attended these events in the Abbey as well, having seats reserved for them in what was referred to as ‘the Honourable Pew’.45 One hitherto neglected phenomenon is the rota of daily sermons that was set up in the Abbey in the 1640s. The team of lecturers appointed by parliament included some of the most politically important clergymen of the period, including Stephen Marshall, Philip Nye and Charles Herle.46 While historians have become familiar with the famous set-piece fast sermons delivered to parliament, it is important to grasp the possible impact of these shorter sermons, delivered at the Abbey every single morning at 7.30 a.m. (or sometimes earlier).47 Here, as one of the preachers noted, they ‘preach to Builders of Church and State’ (MPs, and presumably members of the Westminster Assembly).48 Indeed, the Commons gave direct instructions regarding the beginning time and length of these half-hour services – clearly because they ran the risk of making attending MPs late for the House.49 While the monthly fast sermons might address issues of current concern, here was a means by which preachers could respond to daily events, and MPs could be advised or exhorted with an eye to the day’s forthcoming business, just minutes before they crossed the short distance from the Abbey and entered the chamber, where prayers would usually be led by the same minister who had just preached to them. By September 1656, when fast sermons were rare events, Parliament was still trying to direct the timing of these daily morning 45 LJ, 25 Apr 1645. We can trace this continuing usage for these days in the amounts listed as collected at the Abbey and sent to St Margaret’s in the poor-rate returns: see WAC, E157–66. For details of payments for sermons given in the Abbey in 1643 see WAM, 42417–21. 46 Those appointed when the exercise was set up in February 1644 were Stephen Marshall, Charles Herle, Edmund Staunton, Herbert Palmer, Philip Nye, Jeremiah Whitaker and Thomas Hill. By 1648 Palmer was dead and William Strong had taken his place. 47 Thomas Case may have been referring to an additional development when, in a formal sermon on 9 Apr 1644, he alluded to the lecture at Westminster ‘every morning at six of the Clock’ (The root of apostasy [1644], p. 33 – cited in J.F. Wilson, Pulpit in parliament: Puritanism during the English civil wars, 1640–1648 [Princeton, 1969], p. 16), unless this actually reflects when the lecturers were choosing to begin their services in order to finish by the specified time of 8 a.m. 48 Thomas Hill, The strength of the saints (1648) notes ‘the numerous and almost uniforme frequency of the Auditours in Winter as well as Summer’ (sig. A4r). 49 CJ, 28 Feb 1644.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 lectures.50 These lectures were clearly attended by local people as well: in July 1645 ‘divers Gentlemen of the City of Westminster’ presented parliament in the name of ‘many Hundreds of the best-affected of the said City’ with a ‘Petition of Thankfulness, for the great Benefit they have received to their Souls by the constant Morning Exercise daily held in the Abbey Church of Westminster; and for the Continuance thereof’.51 The lecturers themselves were not mere visitors to the Abbey, but were familiar local residents: it is clear that in 1645 Herle, Nye and Staunton were living in prebendal houses on site, and Marshall and Nye took on additional preaching duties in the Abbey.52 Thomas Hill noted ‘the numerous and almost uniforme frequency of the Auditours in Winter as well as Summer’ at the lectures.53 Some of these morning lectures were published, including Stephen Marshall’s controversial A sermon of the baptizing of infants (1644). In the preface to the printed edition of the sermon Marshall explains how the preachers at this Abbey morning exercise agreed to focus on godly doctrine, working through a programme focusing on the articles of the faith, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and (in Marshall’s case) the doctrine of the sacraments. It was among his exercises dealing with baptism that Marshall delivered his sermon in defence of infant baptism: in trying to cover all the germane issues in a single sermon, he admitted that he was ‘compelled to borrow a little more time then is usually allotted to that Exercise’.54 This was no anodyne catechetical exercise, though, given the controversies over the emergent Baptists at that time. This was not, of course, the religious life that had typified the Abbey earlier in the century, but the transition from centre of avant-garde ceremonialism to power-house of public preaching was clearly a matter of adjusted priorities rather than sacrilegious neglect.55 As has already been noted, the removal of images from the Abbey was a long drawn-out affair conducted by experienced craftsmen. Harley’s Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry, created in April 1643, was clearly principally intended to 50 E.g. CJ, 16 Sept 1656. Also note the copy of a parliament order of September 1654 that morning lecturers should attend to pray in the House (WAM, 9360). The seven morning lecturers clearly continued to serve in the 1650s (WAM, 9394, a Governors’ order dated 24 August 1653, gives them liberty to use rooms in the dean’s house). 51 CJ, 7 July 1645. (This could, though, also have reflected a concern that they might find themselves obliged to fund this service, as the Abbey’s government was being reviewed). 52 WAM, 43160. In August 1645 the parliamentary committee for the College of Westminster appointed Nye to preach the Sunday morning sermon at the Abbey church and also the Term Lecture there (WAM, 9364). Marshall was appointed lecturer in the Abbey in Apr 1648 (WAM, 9361). 53 Hill, Strength of saints, sig. A4v. 54 Stephen Marshall, A sermon of the baptizing of infants (1644), sig. A2r. For the £10 quarterly payments for the ‘catechizing lectures’ see e.g. WAM, 9371, 9384 (and for Nye’s resignation from the post see WAM, 9397). 55 For the Abbey’s earlier link to avant-garde ceremonial see my ‘Cradle of Laudianism?’.

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Westminster 1640–60 reform the interior of the Abbey, but this was surely prompted by the fact that the Abbey was now intended to be in regular use by the political elite. Windows were reglazed and new galleries were built.56 John Vicars noted with approval ‘the most rare and strange alteration of the face of things in the Cathedral Church of Westminster’.57 Dedicating one of the morning sermons in 1648 to the Committee established to administer the Abbey, the preacher Thomas Hill exclaimed O how many people doe blesse God for the sweet change they finde in their Morning Exercises; now they have rather the meanes of a heart and life Religion amongst them. Not Pompous Altars only to humour the Eyes, and ta[l]king Musick to please their Eares. All such tedious Chauntings with Musick and multiplied repetitions did little Edifie the mind of Hearers, had little saving influence upon their Hearts, which many will tell you to the Praise of God in these Morning Exercises they have found.58

It is striking that it was the Abbey that was chosen as the venue in February 1657 where the supporters of the Quaker James Naylor were taken to hear corrective sermons from the Abbey preacher John Rowe, ‘whose spirituall Doctrine so farr wrought upon them’ (one newsbook optimistically reported) ‘that they intend to hear him again; which gives hope that they may be rectified in their Judgment’.59 But the Abbey was more than ever before the church of the state. Parliament treated the Abbey lecturers as state employees, and often expected to exercise very direct control over events in the Abbey. Both Commons and Lords regularly gave detailed instructions about the running of the Abbey in the 1640s, authorizing burials, arranging pews, directing the ringing of bells and requiring Abbey officials to act promptly to prevent people walking and talking there, and children playing, during divine service. In 1644 the Commons had no hesitation in ordering Abbey preachers ‘to keep an Exercise for half an hour every Morning’ (that would suit the hours of the House) ‘in the Place of the service read every Day in the Abbey of Westminster’: it could not be more plain whom the Abbey’s services were understood to be for.60 Throughout the 1650s, the roster of Abbey preachers continued to be a barometer of the regime’s religious complexion, with Independents such as Rowe, Nye and Caryl dominant, but supplemented by the irenical Presbyterian Thomas Manton.61 56 For details of work on new pews and glass and the construction of a new gallery in 1645–6 see WAM, 24850, 24852, 24855, 42268, 42506–7; BL, Add. MSS 70005. 57 Carpenter, House of kings, p. 172. 58 Hill, Strength of saints, sig. A2v. 59 Mercurius Politicus, no. 350 (19–26 Feb 1657), p. 7624. 60 E.g. WAM, 42488A, 42488B; CJ, 28 Feb 1644, 25 Mar 1648; LJ, 15 Mar and 26 Dec 1644, 25 Apr 1645, 7 Dec 1646, 7 Feb 1648. 61 Shaw, II, 590–1.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 It is worth stressing that there had been nothing quite like this state church, under the control of parliament, before. Moreover, in the past, it was St Paul’s and Paul’s Cross that had partly served as the national religio-political venues. Paul’s Cross, however, had been removed in the 1630s and its former pulpit was not rebuilt, while the cathedral suffered serious neglect and was repeatedly occupied by quartered soldiers and horses.62 The sermons themselves did continue in a chapel in the cathedral, and indeed gained an increasing profile in print in the 1650s, although they were now more tightly under the control of the City, and were no longer attended by members of the government as in the past.63 With the partial eclipse and reorienting of the Paul’s cross sermons, it was now the Abbey (aided by its daughter church of St Margaret’s, a mere stone’s throw away) which served as the religious heart of the regime. The appropriation of the Abbey by the state can partly be explained by the fact that parliament had indeed gained direct control over the Abbey (in contrast to St Paul’s). Parliament had taken effective control of the Abbey from the absent dean and chapter by January 1644, when it entrusted its management to a parliamentary committee.64 This Committee for Westminster College played an active role. It was established by ordinance in November 1645 with eleven members of the Lords and twenty-two of the Commons, and its powers and membership were regularly enhanced thereafter, until this power was devolved and more formally established in September 1649 in a new body with the misleadingly anodyne title of the ‘Governors of the School and Almshouses’. Despite its mundane title, this was actually a very powerful body – with control of the Abbey and its lands and revenues, preachers and lecturers, and with a very substantial annual income (its annual commitments were listed in the ordinance setting it up as a little over £1,900 p.a., but the deputy receiver’s accounts in the mid-1650s suggest an annual income of over £2,900).65 The strong bonds that linked the Abbey and its Governors to the new republican regime were made still more explicit in the new seal that was created for the Governors, designed by Thomas Simon, maker of the new Great Seal of the commonwealth in 1649. The seal features the Great Porch of

62 D.J. Crankshaw, ‘Community, city and nation, 1540–1714’ in D. Keene, A. Burns and A. Saint (eds), St Paul’s. The cathedral church of London 604–2004 (2004), pp. 63–4. 63 M. Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross sermons 1558–1642 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 223–7. The church of Christ Church, Newgate was the venue for some significant public celebrations of the alliance between parliament and the City in the 1640s, but these were only rare events – notably on 18 Jan 1644, 19 June 1645 and 2 Apr 1646 (see below). See also A. Hughes, ‘Religious diversity in revolutionary England’ in N. Tyacke (ed.), The English revolution c.1590–1720 (Manchester, 2007), pp. 117, 119. 64 CJ, 13 Jan 1644. 65 WAM, 33422. These accounts for 1654–56 indicate an income of over £5,800 (including £642 arrears) – i.e. c. £2900 p.a..

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Westminster 1640–60 the Abbey on one side, and an image of parliament in session on the other.66 There could hardly be a more explicit statement of the sense of the co-identity of the two institutions – this was an Abbey that was now self-consciously ‘a house of parliament’ rather than a ‘house of kings’. It must have seemed only appropriate when, in 1656, the Council of State proposed that parliament’s records should be kept in the chapter house of the Abbey. In the past, the Abbey had preserved the royal regalia; now it was envisaged as the custodian of the goods of the parliament.67 The importance of the Governors as a body is reflected in the list of names appointed to serve in the initial ordinance.68 These include Bulstrode Whitelocke, James Harrington, Lord Lisle and the earls of Pembroke and Salisbury, along with Algernon Sidney, Henry Vane and Isaac Pennington. Clearly it partly served as a roll-call of prominent members of the Rump, many of whom would play little active role in the affairs of the Abbey (or indeed of the locality), but there were also some long-established residents of the area and some active local JPs.69 Most strikingly for the erstwhile ‘house of kings’, the list of Governors includes no fewer than fifteen regicides.70 Most symbolic of all among these regicidal Governors was the name of John Bradshaw. Bradshaw occupied the increasingly well-appointed dean’s house throughout the 1650s and enjoyed surroundings of some luxury.71 Bradshaw also regularly attended services in the Abbey: his name, along with those of other members of the Governors such as Colonel Fielder and Sir John Trevor, appears in a

66 WAM, 3922 (and see WAM, 43166); H. Farquhar, ‘New Light on Thomas Simon’, ­Numismatic Chronicle 5th ser. xvi (1936). Cf. Kelsey, p. 96, who partly misses the point in suggesting that this was to foster ‘the closeness of the ties between the Rump and the school’ (my italics). For the link with parliament, note also how one of the houses in the Abbey complex was now directed to be preserved for the Serjeant at Arms (CJ, 30 Apr 1649). 67 After a parliamentary order of 31 Oct 1656 (CJ) to remove parliament’s records from the room over the parliament house and to place them in ‘the late King’s FishHouse’, the clerks of Council were instead instructed to view rooms in the Chapter House adjoining Westminster Abbey, with a view to receiving the records (CSPD 1656–7, p. 147). 68 See A&O, II, 256–77. For the members of the earlier Westminster College see the ordinance of November 1645 (ibid., I, 803–5). Ten of the Governors had featured among the original thirty-three members of the Westminster College committee, viz. the earl of Pembroke, Sir William Masham, Sir John Trevor, Francis Rous, John Gourdon, Humphrey Salaway, Bulstrode Whitelocke, Lord Commissioner Lisle, Sir William Strickland and Sir Henry Vane the younger. 69 Prominent local figures include Sir John Trevor, Michael Oldisworth, Humphrey Edwards (who joined St Martin’s vestry) and Laurence Whitaker (a Westminster JP). 70 Sir John Danvers, Edmund Ludlow, Augustine Garland, John Carew, Henry Smith, William Cawley, John Downs, John Venn, John Bradshaw, Daniel Blagrave, Humphrey Edwards, Henry Marten, Gilbert Millington, John Moor and Thomas Challoner. 71 WAM, 42750–64. See also WAM, 43014 for work being done for Bradshaw as late as 1654.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 partial seating plan that survives from the Abbey in the 1650s.72 Bradshaw’s dominant presence, and his very active role as a member of the Governors, were a very public reflection of how the most prominent and publicly recognizable regicides had taken over the house of kings. In the cloisters and Dean’s Yard, other regicides mixed incongruously with older royalist residents such as Sir Robert Filmer and Dean John Williams’s old schoolmaster, Lambert Osbaldeston, branded in one pamphlet of 1647 as ‘the Malignant Earewig to the Nobles, who playes fast and loose ... [and] is an enemy to the Parl[iament]’.73 If any confirmation were needed of the Abbey’s remarkably high public profile during the 1640s and 1650s, we need only turn to events at the Restoration. One of the most notorious actions of the Restoration was the removal from the Abbey of the bodies of those associated with the interregnum regimes. While Cromwell and Ireton’s bodies were hanged, the rest – including Dorislaus, Deane, Blake, Bradshaw, Twisse and others – were buried in a pit in St Margaret’s churchyard.74 Transfixed by the grisly events and the very tangible reversal of fortunes, historians have tended to ignore what this event also demonstrated – that many of the iconic figures of the 1640s and 1650s had taken up posthumous residence in the Abbey. The ejections were not merely an act of revenge; they were also a very public purging of a building that had been systematically taken over by the republican regimes. This was a case of the monarchy re-appropriating the house of kings. Parish churches and the state While the Abbey lay at the religious and ceremonial centre of the interregnum regimes, the surrounding Westminster churches also had important supporting roles to play.75 Partly they acted as a crucial means of disseminating the government’s message in divisive times. London and Westminster churches were constantly directed to ensure the public reading and dissemination of government news and arguments, with instructions that ministers should be primed to ‘excite and stir up the People’ and exhort their congregations in a specific fashion.76 But Westminster’s churches were much more closely linked to the regimes than this. 72 WAM, 24851. 73 WAM, 33422; WAC, E163–66; Francis Cheynell, The sworne confederacy (1647), p. 3. 74 J.L. Chester, The marriage, baptismal and burial registers of the Collegiate Church and Abbey of St Peter, Westminster (Harleian Society 10, 1878), pp. 521–3; J. Dart, Westmonasterium (2 vols, 1723), II, 143–6. Essex’s effigy was removed at a later point in 1661 to make space for another monument, but the body remained unmolested (HMC, Fourth report, appendix, p. 180). Major-General Worsley’s body also remained in the Abbey, presumably only by oversight. 75 For further discussion of parish religion in Westminster see Chapter 6. 76 E.g. CJ, 4 Nov 1645.

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Westminster 1640–60 Principal of these churches was the Abbey’s daughter church of St Margaret’s, just a stone’s throw from the Abbey. More recent tradition has dubbed St Margaret’s Westminster as ‘the church of the House of Commons’, supposedly reflecting its long-standing and natural link to the lower house of parliament.77 But this was not a significant feature of the church in the pre-civil war period. It is true that St Margaret’s had served as the Commons’ venue for parliamentary fasts and communions in the early Stuart period, most notably in the 1620s.78 But it was its close links of interdependence with the Abbey (which exercised sole right of visitation over the parish) that were of overwhelming significance in shaping the character of St Margaret’s in the pre-war period, not least in encouraging a notably conservative approach to religious worship. The only arm of government that enjoyed significant links with the parish would appear to have been the exchequer.79 Parliaments were too brief and infrequent in their sittings to have had any major impact. By contrast, it was in the 1640s and 1650s – during the unparalleled continuous sitting of the Long Parliament – that St Margaret’s can for the first time be said to have served as the church of the House of Commons. Never before had parliament met there so regularly, nor had MPs been so constantly resident in the area. Moreover, the unending series of fast days and days of humiliation, not least the monthly fast sermons that ran from February 1642 to February 1649 (which MPs were obliged to attend, or face a ten-shilling fine)80 meant that St Margaret’s hosted many of the most important religio-political events of the period. More than 250 parliamentary sermons (commemorating fasts, days of thanksgiving and anniversaries) were preached at St Margaret’s in the period 1640–53, and of the fast sermons alone more than 150 were printed. St Margaret’s sermons could also be enhanced by the latest political news, given straight from the pulpit. It was reported how the parliamentary ‘victory’ at Edgehill was reported directly in St Margaret’s when Lord Wharton and William Strode marched into the church ‘and gave in the Sermon a paper to the preaching Mr Case to give G[od] Thanks for the Victory [at Edgehill], being 3000 slain on the K[ing]s side and 300 on theirs. He did it an houre together, throwing such abominable dirt on private men, & making such expressions to alm[ighty] G[od] that I tremble to think on them.’81 Other sermons delivered in St Margaret’s included many of the great set-piece sermons of the period – Stephen Marshall’s famous call to arms and reformation in Meroz Cursed in February 1642; Thomas Coleman’s inflammatory appeal for an 77 E.g. H.F. Westlake, St Margaret’s Westminster. The church of the House of Commons (1914). See also the home page of St Margaret’s website. 78 Merritt, pp. 340–1. 79 Ibid., p. 125. 80 CJ, 24 Apr 1644. 81 BL, Harleian MSS 3783, fol. 62r.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 erastian church ­settlement in Hopes deferred and dashed in July 1645; and Peter Sterry’s celebration of the Independent triumph in England’s deliverance from the northern presbytery in November 1651. St Margaret’s continued to be the site of parliamentary fast days and days of thanksgiving throughout the 1650s, including days of thanksgiving for military successes against the Dutch and others, and for the defeat of the Sindercomb plot against Cromwell in 1657, while the 1654 parliament began with a day of humiliation kept at St Margaret’s.82 On very rare occasions, sermons were preached before members of parliament in Lincoln’s Inn chapel83 or when they gathered with City of London dignitaries at Christ Church/St Sepulchre Newgate.84 St Margaret’s church was also chosen to play host to another great religiopolitical event: the public taking of the Solemn League and Covenant by members of the House of Commons, the Westminster Assembly and the Scots Commissioners on 25 September 1643. This Covenant, ‘never to be forgotten by us nor our posterity’, made in the names of three kingdoms, was declared at the ceremony to be ‘such an Oath as for matter, persons, and other circumstances, [as] the like hath not been in any age or Oath we read of in sacred or humane Stories’. After those attending had assembled in the church, a psalm was sung, and solemn prayer was made by John White, followed by an exhortation by Philip Nye and a further prayer by William Gouge, and a speech by the Scottish commissioner Alexander Henderson. At this point the Covenant itself was read out, ‘notice being first given to the Assembly, that after the hearing of it, each person should immediately by swearing, worship the great Name of God, and testifie so much outwardly by lifting up their hands: which was all done very solemnly and with so much joy seen in their countenances, and manifested by clapping of their hands, as was sutable to the gravity of such a worke, and sadnesse of the present times’. With the Covenant having been sworn, the Speaker and MPs proceeded to the chancel of the church, where they subscribed their names ‘in a Roll of Parchment provided for that purpose, 82 For the day of thanksgiving against the Dutch in 1653, with the service at St Margaret’s, see Mercurius Politicus, no. 165 (4–11 Aug 1653), p. 2641; no. 166 (11–18 Aug 1653), pp. 2647–9. Parliament met at St Margaret’s on 5 Nov 1653 to commemorate Gunpowder Plot (Mercurius Politicus, no. 178 [3–10 Nov 1653], p. 2853). For the 1654 parliament’s beginning with a day of humiliation kept at St Margaret’s, see Mercurius Politicus, no. 222 [7–14 Sept 1654], p. 3764). Note also the day of humiliation on 24 Sept 1656 (Mercurius Politicus, no. 328 [18–25 Sept 1656], p. 7255), the day of thanksgiving for the Fleet’s success on 8 Oct 1656 (Mercurius Politicus, no. 330 [2–9 Oct 1656], pp. 7294–5, 7302), the fast sermon on 30 Oct 1656 (Mercurius Politicus, no. 334 [29 Oct–6 Nov 1656] p. 7354), the thanksgiving on 5 Nov 1656 (Mercurius Politicus, no. 334 [29 Oct–6 Nov 1656] p. 7366), and the thanksgiving for the defeat of the Sindercomb plot on 2 Feb 1657 (Mercurius Politicus no. 347 [29 Jan–4 Feb 1657], p. 7575). 83 CJ, 19 Dec 1644. 84 CJ, 20 Jan 1644, 16 June 1645, 23 Mar 1646; Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English affairs (1853), I, 234; Baillie, II, 133.

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Westminster 1640–60 in which the Covenant was fairly written’ in front of the clerk of parliament ‘sitting at the Communion Table’. After this the Prolocutor and divines of the Westminster Assembly, along with the Commissioners from Scotland, signed their names on another parchment roll, ‘which being finished, the Name of God was again solemnly invocated, and praises returned for vouchsafing this Church and Kingdome so happy and joyfull a day; a Psalme was sung, and then the Assembly dismissed’.85 A similar event was held at St Margaret’s four days later, when 445 ‘divers Lords, Knights, and Gentlemen, and divers Colonels, Officers, Soldiers, and others, now resideing in the Cities of London and Westminster, and within the Line[s] of Communication’ signed the Covenant on a parchment roll, accompanied by a sermon from a preacher specifically appointed by the Commons. Clearly it was considered important to replicate both the venue and the format of this event: the Commons directed another favoured preacher to deliver a sermon at St Margaret’s the following week, when once again the Covenant would be taken ‘by such Officers, Gentlemen, and others, as are willing to take it, in the like manner as it was on Friday last’.86 It seems likely that St Margaret’s was sometimes preferred over the Abbey as a venue for such major parliamentary gatherings because of its configuration, and particularly its width. The church had been expanded in the late fifteenth century in a manner that unified nave, chancel and additional aisles in a style that reflected a desire to facilitate more effective preaching. At the same time, by contrast, the neighbouring medieval Abbey was completing its nave in an older, more narrow style.87 It was not surprising, then, when in July 1644 the Commons successfully petitioned the Lords that a planned day of thanksgiving attended by both houses should take place not in the Abbey, but in St Margaret’s, ‘because the Abby Church is too streight’.88 Given the constant parliamentary use of St Margaret’s, it was inevitable that parliament would start to take over some of the running and provisioning of the church. The MPs Sir Robert Pye and John Hampden were prominently involved in the forced election of Stephen Marshall to the parish lectureship by the ‘parishioners’ in February 1642, Marshall being ‘recomended’ to them by the House of Commons.89 The Commons itself directed that the gallery 85 The Covenant: with a narrative of the proceedings and solemn manner of taking it by the Honourable House of Commons, and Reverent Assembly of Divines the 25th day of September, at Saint Margarets in Westminster (1643), pp. 10–11, 12; BL, Add. MSS 31116, fols 79v–80r; Henry Hall, Digitus testium (1651), p. 13; F.P. Verney and M. Verney (eds), Memoirs of the Verney family (2 vols, 1907) (hereafter Verney), I, 298–9. 86 CJ, 27 and 30 Sept 1643. 87 G. Rosser, Medieval Westminster 1200–1540 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 265–6. 88 LJ, 10 July 1644; CJ, 10 July 1644. 89 J.E. Smith, A catalogue of Westminster records (1900), p. 66, citing a memorandum in parish records dated 27 Feb 1641/2, the original of which appears not to survive. It is noted that the election was made in the presence of Dr Wimberley, ‘the present lecturer

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 of the church (which had been erected in the 1630s) should be reserved for MPs, and gallery-keepers were paid by parliament.90 In the early 1650s, parliament directed church repairs in St Margaret’s, to include the painting of a new state coat of arms, and granted £200 for the work. The parish spent much of the money on repairing masonry and woodwork, making new windows and whitewashing all the interior of the church, ‘colloring the pillars, [and] adorning of Monumentes’.91 St Margaret’s also had its share of significant and military-style funerals: the report of the burial there in August 1657 of Lieutenant-Colonel Parsons described the funeral as being conducted ‘after the Military manner, all the Officers of the Regiment, and the whole Regiment being present at the celebration of his Funeral’.92 The church’s parliamentary links were reflected in other funerals, such as that of the former clerk of parliament Henry Elsing, who was buried in the church in 1656 (his successor in office, the Congregationalist Henry Scobell, continued to sign St Margaret’s vestry orders through the 1650s).93 It is notable too that St Margaret’s chapel of ease – the so-called ‘Broadway chapel’ in Tothill Fields – was also closely identified with parliament. It was the House of Commons that directed in December 1642 that the recently erected chapel, which had probably been completed at least a year earlier, should be opened ‘to the End that People may resort thither to hear Prayers read, and Sermons preached, as to other Churches they may’. These instructions were given to the MP Sir Robert Pye, chairman of the Committee of the College of Westminster, who had been a trustee of the original bequest for the chapel. Pye became the dominant influence in the chapel thereafter, organizing local collections, having a gallery and pews built for his tenants there and giving houses in trust to maintain the minister in exchange for the permanent right of nomination to the living.94 After the inaugural sermon had been

90 91

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of the said parish who voluntarily resigned his place and consented to the choice of Mr Marshall’, and the memorandum is signed by Sir Robert Pye, Emery Hill and John Hampden, with the signatures of thirty-nine others. This election supposedly occurred after a petition to the Commons by St Margaret’s parishioners. CJ, 4 Nov 1644, 16 Dec 1645, 6 Jan 1647, 10 June 1652. See also LJ, 24 Sept 1647; WAC, E30. Ultimately, however, the parish only received £110 because this was not a direct payment, but rather was payable out of a compounding fine that was then transferred and made payable out of dean and chapter lands: WAC, E30. Mercurius Politicus, no. 375 (6–13 Aug 1657), p. ‘7278’ (vere 7978). Parsons had been murdered by a highwayman. Note also the trained bands’ attendance at a funeral in 1652–53: WAC, E32. Memorials of St Margaret’s Church Westminster, ed. A.M. Burke (1914), p. 645; WAC, E2413, fols 49r, 50v, 52r, 52v, 53r, 55r, 69v, 70r, 76v, 79v. P. Guillery, ‘The Broadway Chapel: A Forgotten Exemplar’, London Topographical Record XXVI (1990) (hereafter Guillery). Pye was also named to a Commons committee to consider a 1642 Bill to erect an independent parish of Christ Church Tothill Fields,

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Westminster 1640–60 ­ elivered in the chapel by William Gouge (who had given a fast sermon before d the Commons a few months previously), it was Pye’s Westminster College Committee that appointed the first minister, the Presbyterian divine and member of the Westminster Assembly Herbert Palmer (who also preached a fast sermon before the Commons in June 1643). Another Commons’ favourite, Charles Herle, the future prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly, was in February 1643 appointed by the Commons to the Thursday afternoon lectureship in the Tothill Fields chapel (and also to a lectureship at the Abbey), just three months after delivering a monthly fast sermon to the Commons.95 The new church’s sense of its connection with parliament is evident in December 1644, when Palmer described to a friend how he had been earnestly importuned by divers persons of quality in Westminster to keep a fast ‘at my church [the Tothill Fields chapel] ... that We may ioyne in Spirit with the Parliament, though we may not in presence’.96 However close the links that both St Margaret’s and her chapel of ease in Tothill Fields enjoyed with parliament, it nevertheless remained true that St Margaret’s was never the private chapel (even less the ‘parish church’) of the House of Commons. It was a public parochial church, whose parishioners (as we will see in a later chapter) were no mere ciphers following the changing shape of state-approved religion. It is notable that in the 1650s, as regimes felt more vulnerable to popular criticism, so there appears to have been an increasing trend for the Commons to prefer to keep days of humiliation – involving the service of up to four preachers – in their own House rather than in St Margaret’s.97 The thinking behind this move is partly revealed in a parliamentary speech made by Sir Arthur Hesilrige in January 1659. Urging that the Commons should observe their fast in the parliament house rather than St Margaret’s, Hesilrige claimed that The minister cannot speak so freely in public, to tell of faults and duties, for a reflection upon the Parliament there, is a reflection upon the nation. People come there with ill ears, to reproach if they can. There is a mixture of hearers. Though there be less room here, and crowding, and want of air; yet I would expose myself to any inconvenience within these walls, to hear our faults and our duties.98 separate from St Margaret’s (PJ, I, 141). Intriguingly, Pye did not sign the ninety-seven-signature petition to the Abbey appealing for maintenance of the minister of the new chapel (WAM, 9381). Was this because he was hoping to make a bid for the advowson? 95 ODNB s.n. Charles Herle; Charles Herle, A payre of compasses for church and state (1642). 96 Guillery, p. 114, William Gouge, The saints support (1642); Herbert Palmer, The necessity and encouragement of utmost venturing (1643); Sheffield University Library, Hartlib MSS 59/5/1A (Herbert Palmer to Hartlib, 14 Dec 1644). 97 The Commons observed fasts in St Margaret’s on 9 June 1652, 23 Aug 1653, 13 Sept 1654 and 30 Oct 1656 (see CJ). But fasts were held in the House on many occasions; e.g. 23 Sept 1651, 3 Mar 1653, 11 Oct 1654, 9 Jan and 26 Feb 1657, 27 Jan 1658 and 4 Feb 1659 (CJ). 98 Burton, III, 12.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 It is particularly striking, however, that the Commons continued to celebrate days of thanksgiving in St Margaret’s (where faults and duties were less likely to be insisted upon in sermons and prayers).99 St Martin in the Fields, the parish adjacent to St Margaret’s, may not have enjoyed such close parliamentary ties, but it was traditionally a more fashionable church, whose parishioners included many prominent parliamentarians, and it often attracted the attention of parliament in these years. After the flight of its minister, Laud’s chaplain William Bray, the parish had effectively been temporarily taken over by parliament in early 1643. A group of local MPs – Sir John Hippisley, John Glynne, Michael Oldisworth and Sir John Trenchard – sequestered all the rents, and (like sequestrators elsewhere in the country) they were given the power during the time of the sequestration to appoint the curate, clerks and other officers of the parish whom the absent vicar had appointed in the past. They were also given the power to choose the preacher of the church of St Paul Covent Garden (still at this time part of St Martin’s parish), with the notable qualification that this should be done with the consent of MPs who were resident in Covent Garden.100 Here was a striking indication of how parliament sought at this time effectively to requisition the pulpits of the ring of Westminster churches that encircled it. Similarly, it is notable that when the Rump parliament ordered potentially controversial celebrations for the Dunbar victory in October 1650 it appointed specific preachers not only at St Margaret’s (to preach before MPs) but also at St Martin’s.101 Speaker Lenthall also had a prominent pew in St Martin’s church, and he undertook to deal personally with a recalcitrant parish clerk when the latter’s conduct was raised in the Commons.102 Parliamentarian peers were also resident in the parish, and in 1645 they would seek (as we will see in a later chapter) to intervene very directly in parish affairs.103 In 1648 the Lords switched to holding its fast day services in St Martin’s rather than the Abbey (presumably because it could make use of the Lords’ gallery there, and also because services could be more easily regulated than in the sprawling Abbey).104 It was in keeping with the semi-national status of St 99 E.g. 3 June 1657 for the victory at Santa Cruz (CJ, 28 May and 4 June 1657). Commons Gunpowder Plot sermons continued to be delivered at St Margaret’s (CJ, 6 Nov 1651, 1 Nov 1653, 1 Nov 1654, 7 Nov 1656). The service of thanksgiving for the defeat of Booth’s rising was initially intended to be held at St Margaret’s, although in the event it was conducted at Christ Church, Newgate (CJ, 24 Sept and 6 Oct 1659). 100 CJ, 12 Jan 1643 (cf. 25 July 1643); LJ, 14 Jan 1643. Note that none of the sequestrators had been active on the parish vestry at this time, and only Hippisley played any role on the vestry thereafter (first appearing in the minutes as a vestryman on 4 Dec 1644: WAC, F2002, fol. 139). 101 CJ, 10 Sept 1650. 102 Bodl., Clarendon MSS 31, fol. 7r; Jansson, II, 518. 103 See Chapter 6. 104 LJ, 7 Feb, 3 Apr and 31 May 1648.

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Westminster 1640–60 Martin’s church that a pew within it was directed by the Commons in 1644 to be reserved for the Scots Commissioners.105 Other Westminster parish churches periodically assumed wider public roles, beyond the limits of parish or neighbourhood.106 The new and fashionable church of St Paul Covent Garden was clearly seen as a significant and effective preaching place: the Lords appointed it for a parliamentary fast in December 1644 (although this had to be changed ‘in regard they are building of galleries in Covent Garden Church’ – in itself evidence of the popularity of its services).107 St Clement Danes assumed particular prominence in the 1640s, when the parish’s most important resident – the earl of Essex – attended divine service there when at the height of his power. When the earl was in the capital, Essex House itself acted as the headquarters of parliament’s army. The earl was probably instrumental in ensuring the Presbyterian Richard Vines’ appointment to St Clement’s.108 Close by St Clement’s was the Savoy church, which could also serve as a mouthpiece for government policy after the departure of its royalist minister, Thomas Fuller, in 1643. It was here that the Scots envoy Robert Baillie preached between 1643 and 1647, while he was resident in Worcester House nearby.109 Spectacle and display: secular buildings and  spaces Thus far our discussion has focused on the close links between the state and ecclesiastical buildings in Westminster. The political events of the 1640s and 1650s also led to the commandeering of other prominent buildings and public spaces in the locality for reasons that were undoubtedly practical, but which also held deep symbolic resonance. The civil war and subsequent abolition of the monarchy led to the confiscation of many royal properties in the area, as well as the sequestration of houses from royalist aristocrats. This enabled new regimes to redeploy these spaces not only to serve the needs of a state bureaucracy that had expanded in the wake of the civil wars, but also to assert their power and legitimacy. In the following paragraphs, key examples of these trends will be explored, beginning with spaces that had more explicitly royal associations and then moving on to discuss the appropriation of other prominent buildings in Westminster, particularly its aristocratic town-houses, a phenomenon with significant social, cultural and political ramifications. 105 CJ, 14 Feb 1644. 106 For discussion of the religious complexion of the Westminster parishes see Chapter 6. 107 CJ, 13 and 14 Dec 1644. A separate parish of St Paul Covent Garden was carved out of St Martin’s in 1645 – see Chapter 6. 108 Snow, Essex, pp. 412–13. 109 Baillie, III, 265–6.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 One of the most important buildings – or rather complex of buildings – to be re-appropriated by the interregnum regimes was Whitehall Palace. In the early years of the civil war the palace had been neglected.110 Harley’s committee had purged the chapel there of ‘superstitious Pictures and Monuments’ in 1644. As one royalist newsbook glossed Harley’s activities, after purging the Abbey so as to make it unfit for God’s service, Harley then ‘betooke himself to the Reforming of His Majesties palace of White-hall and made it as unfit for the use of the King’.111 But while some goods were taken to decorate the parliament house,112 and others to furnish rooms needed for state purposes such as the entertainment of foreign ambassadors, parliament’s Committee for Whitehall mostly sought to mothball the palace, trying to ensure ‘that none of the King’s Goods should be meddled with’.113 After the regicide it initially appeared that royal residences would be dispensed with, along with the monarchy itself. In the event, as Sean Kelsey’s study of the republic has noted, there was a partial revival of the palace in the early 1650s, as several thousand pounds was spent on repair work to Whitehall, as well as the Parliament House, the Mews and Somerset House. Rooms and gardens were repaired and reappointed, and a considerable proportion of the crown’s moveable goods – carpets, hangings, tapestries, statues, furniture, books – that had been earmarked for sale were actually retained by the state and redeployed to furnish rooms in Whitehall and elsewhere.114 There was a further significant revival of Whitehall Palace under the protectorate, as more of the ritual of court life was restored and a protectoral household was established. Spending on Whitehall (and Hampton Court) was at least as high as under Charles I, and visitors were suitably impressed.115 Visiting it in 1656, John Evelyn found Whitehall ‘very glorious & well furnish’d as far as I could safely go’.116 While concerns over security may have curbed some of the familiar courtly ritual, even here there were minor elements of ­ceremonial 110 Merritt, p. 178; J.B., A deep sigh breath’d through the lodgings at White-Hall (1642); P. Sillitoe, ‘“Majesty Had Wont to Sit Inthron’d within those Glorious Walls”: Whitehall, Monarchical Absence and Royalist Nostalgia’, The Seventeenth Century 25 (2010). 111 Spraggon, pp. 95–7; CJ, 5 Feb 1644; Mercurius Aulicus, no. 25 (16–22 June 1644), p. 1040. 112 See above. 113 CJ, 15 Aug 1643. During the civil war there were also directions for a review of the lodgers in Whitehall and for ‘purging it from Alehouse-keepers, Cookshops, Taverns and other such-like scandalous and in-famous Houses, Trades, and Persons’ (CJ, 28 Feb 1644). See also CJ, 16 Sept 1643; LJ, 7 Feb 1644. 114 A&O, II, 188; Kelsey, pp. 30–1, 33–4; S. Thurley, Whitehall Palace: an architectural history of the royal apartments, 1240–1698 (New Haven, 1999), p. 98. For the military role of Whitehall in the 1640s and 1650s see Chapter 2; CSPD 1656–7, p. x. 115 CSPD 1656–7, p. 247; P.M. Hunneyball, ‘Cromwellian style: the architectural trappings of the Protectorate regime’ in P. Little (ed.), The Cromwellian protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007). 116 Evelyn, III, 166.

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Westminster 1640–60 display. Cromwell’s extremely well-paid life guard, whose numbers were increased to counteract various plots against him, wore grey uniforms – presumably at the behest of their captain, Walter Strickland, who had served as ambassador to the Dutch but had no military experience at all – that were mocked for their Dutch ­influence.117 Nevertheless, Whitehall Palace itself tended to be used more for accommodation – of government under the Rump, and of the protectoral household under Cromwell – than for public state pageantry.118 Under the Rump, ambassadors were received in the parliament house itself: they were conducted from Sir Abraham Williams’s house accompanied by coaches and troops to the Court of Wards (or to the House of Lords, for those below ambassadorial rank),119 whence they were conducted to the floor of the House itself, where they presented their credentials to the Speaker.120 With the coming of the protectorate, however, it was the Banqueting House that now served as the venue for the reception of ambassadors by the lord protector. When the Dutch ambassadors were received there in March 1654 Mercurius Politicus noted how the room was sumptuously adorned with hangings and a rich Chair of State, while when the Spanish ambassador had an audience with Cromwell there the following year it was noted that there was ‘the greatest assembly of English nobility and gentry present that have been these many years’.121 It was the Banqueting House that was chosen as the proposed setting for a remarkable visual monument to the rebellion, to include a huge mural depicting battles and sieges of the civil wars ‘for the satisfaction of the present time, as also for posterity, and for an encouragement to all such as are in authority and command’, along with a large painting representing the assembly of parliament, and portraits of the members of the Council of State.122 While this would have constituted a remarkable secular counterpart to the mausoleum of the

117 CSPD 1655–6, p. ix; A. Barclay, ‘The lord protector and his court’ in P. Little (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: new perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 204; Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell, pp. 77–9. 118 See below. 119 The House of Lords was decorated with the set of tapestries depicting the defeat of the Spanish Armada, which had hung there since 1644 and now projected an unambiguous message of England’s naval might to foreign dignitaries (Kelsey, pp. 39, 62). 120 Kelsey, pp. 61–4. 121 Mercurius Politicus, no. 195 (2–9 Mar 1654), p. 3325; Perfect Proceedings, no. 293 (3–10 May 1655). Cf. also the receptions of the Genoese ambassador in January 1655 (Mercurius Politicus, no. 239 [4–11 Jan 1655], p. 5046) and of the Portuguese ambassador in September 1657 (Mercurius Politicus, no. 379 [27 Aug–3 Sept 1657], p. 1598). MPs had dined in the Banqueting House under the Rump (e.g. CJ, 6 Sept 1651). 122 BL, Stowe MSS 184, fol. 283; M. Jansson, ‘Remembering Marston Moor: the politics of culture’ in S.D. Amussen and M.A. Kishlansky (eds), Political culture and cultural politics in early modern England (Manchester, 1995), pp. 255–62; Kelsey, pp. 56–7.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 republic’s heroes in nearby Westminster Abbey, it was never implemented.123 Nevertheless, the Banqueting House continued to be exploited as a venue for state pageantry. It often served as the setting for formal exchanges between the lord protector and parliament. It was here that parliament waited on Cromwell with petitions, and where MPs gathered to congratulate him on the failure of the Sindercomb plot and received from the lord protector ‘a most Princely Entertainment’ (although on this occasion the gallery and stairs collapsed).124 Westminster Hall had for centuries been the most prominent of what had become a complex of royal buildings in Westminster. While it continued in the interregnum to be used as a site for the central law courts, it also still served as the location for major government events. Among its uses in the past had been as a venue for treason trials, and in 1641 for the dramatic trial of the king’s chief minister, the earl of Strafford. This would be superseded in importance, of course, by the trial of Charles I in 1649. But it should be noted that Westminster Hall continued throughout the 1650s to be used for trials of the regimes’ opponents by a series of high courts of justice, from the trials of Holland and Hamilton in 1649, through the Gerard plotters of 1654, to the Sindercomb plot of 1657 and the 1658 trials of the conspirators John Mordaunt, Sir Henry Slingsby and Dr Hewett.125 It was not used just for trials, though. Other notable events included both of Cromwell’s investitures as lord protector (in 1653 and 1657), despite the fact that in 1654 parliament had decided that future lord protectors should take their oath in parliament.126 A more permanent display of victory over opponents was continually visible in the Hall, in the shape of the Scottish colours seized at Dunbar, and later at Worcester. These were on display in the Hall throughout the 1650s and were frequently commented on by contemporaries.127 John Strype could still 123 It is also notable that the Banqueting House was envisaged in 1649 as a temporary replacement venue for services normally conducted in the chapel at Whitehall Palace while the latter would be undergoing repairs (Thurley, Whitehall Palace, p. 98). 124 CSPD 1656–7, pp. x, 324; Mercurius Politicus, no. 350 (19–26 Feb 1657), p. 7615; Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell, p. 138. 125 For the repeated establishments of a High Court of Justice in the first half of the 1650s see A&O, II, 364–7, 419, 780–2, 917–18. For the establishment of the court in 1658 and the trials conducted at Westminster Hall see Mercurius Politicus, no. 411 (8–15 Apr 1658), p. 462; no. 413 (22–9 Apr 1658), pp. 493–4; no. 415 (6–13 May 1658), pp. 515–17; no. 416 (13–20 May 1658), p. 542; no. 423 (1–8 July 1658), pp. 657–63. In 1658 Hewett, like the other conspirators, was executed at Tower Hill, but the earlier 1654 conspirator, Vowell, was executed on a scaffold that was specially erected at Charing Cross: Mercurius Politicus, no. 213 (6–13 July 1654), pp. 3615, 3618–19. 126 Mercurius Politicus, no. 184 (16–22 Dec 1653), pp. 3053–4; no. 237 (21–28 Dec 1654), p. ‘4409’ (vere 5008); no. 369 (25 June–2 July 1657), pp. 7881–4; Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell, pp. 160–4. 127 Mercurius Politicus, no. 16 (19–26 Sept 1650), p. 271; CJ, 10 Sept 1651; William Prynne, Sad and serious politicall considerations (1650).

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Westminster 1640–60 remember in 1720 having seen the colours as a boy (one of the very rare references to the 1650s in his voluminous Survey of London), while it was alleged at the time that Charles II during his supposed incognito visit to London went to Westminster Hall, where he saw the State’s Arms and the Scots’ colours.128 Was the Hall becoming as important as St Paul’s had once been for news? Henry Parker’s The cheif affairs of Ireland (1652) remarks in its title that it is intended as a reproof ‘to all such as walk Westminster Hall, only to spread false wonders’, and it is a moot point whether the various encumbrances introduced into the body of St Paul’s church in these years inhibited the traditional perambulation of the famous ‘Paul’s walkers’ and thereby enhanced the relative importance of Westminster Hall as a centre for the circulation of news.129 The booksellers in the Hall also helped to circulate printed news and opinion directly among the political elite. Certainly, the Hall was notorious in the 1640s as a place where radical religious books were ‘openly dispersed’. As the anti-Independent polemicist Thomas Edwards complained, ‘abominable errours are printed, the Books sold up and down in Westminster-Hall ... [and] given into the hands of Parliament men in Westminster-Hall’. Westminster Hall was also the place where radical sectaries would linger to talk to MPs, and the stage on which opposing authors might meet in direct confrontation: it was here that Edwards was confronted by one of the targets of his polemic, the Independent preacher Hugh Peter, who complained ‘that I had abused him in Print’.130 Other traditional Westminster venues for the manifestation of government power were vigorously maintained by the various interregnum regimes. In the 1630s, New Palace Yard had witnessed the pillorying of the puritan ‘martyrs’ Burton, Bastwick and Prynne.131 Thereafter, it continued throughout this period to be a significant venue for public events at which the government declared its aims and punished its opponents. Opposing books were ceremonially burned, proclamations were read out, and opponents of the regime were punished. Particularly dramatic were the 1649 executions of the royalists the marquis of Hamilton, the earl of Holland and Lord Capel. A printed account of the event describes how the condemned men were carried in sedans to Sir Thomas Cotton’s house in Westminster for two hours of conferences with 128 John Strype, A survey of the cities of London and Westminster (2 vols, 1720), II, bk. 6, ch. 3, p. 49; Mercurius Politicus, no. 73 (23–30 Oct 1651), p. 1170. 129 For examples of Samuel Pepys going to Westminster Hall to hear news see R.C. Latham and W. Matthews (eds), The diary of Samuel Pepys (11 vols, 1970–83), I, 4, 13, 47, 50, 56, 58, 65; III, 5, 49, 139; IV, 25, 170. On the ‘Paul’s walkers’ see T. Cogswell, The blessed revolution (Cambridge, 1989). Of course, St Paul’s churchyard was still populated by booksellers – it was this which partly made St Paul’s a news venue in the first place. 130 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (Ilkley, 1977), i, 81, 119, 149; ii, 149, 155; iii, 127; A. Hughes, Gangraena and the struggle for the English revolution (Oxford, 2004), pp. 63, 130, 168. 131 Merritt, p. 343.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 ministers before their executions. When attention shifts to the scaffold in New Palace Yard, the pamphlet is at pains to emphasize the involvement of the under-sheriff of Westminster and his men, especially in supplying the guard that met and accompanied each man to the scaffold (presumably seeking to downplay the role of the army at this sensitive time).132 Other receiving public punishment included parliament’s bête noire the Quaker James Naylor, who was set in the pillory there for two hours, before being whipped by the hangman through the streets of Westminster to the Old Exchange.133 There were also regular burnings of heretical and anti-government books in New Palace Yard.134 This does not exhaust the forms of public display and spectacle on view in interregnum Westminster – there was a constant round of processions, troop musters and state entries by ambassadors and by armies, sometimes with prisoners in tow.135 Westminster now served as the daily ceremonial heart of government (both secular and religious) as never before. Moreover, just as the churches of Westminster were appropriated for distinctively puritan styles of preaching and worship, so Westminster’s secular forms of display and ceremony did not simply represent a revival and imitation of past regal styles and forms. In the burial of commoners in the Henry VII chapel, the bearing of the State’s Arms before the regular series of state funerals, the prominence of regicides in Abbey government, the constant use of dramatic military display in processions, funerals and musters, these were very public manifestations of the distinctive republican and military character of the interregnum regimes. State accommodation Westminster did not serve just as the ceremonial and propaganda heart of the parliamentary and interregnum regimes. It also hosted government – its personnel, departments and committees. The work of successive governments involved the redeployment of the royal properties in Westminster, as some scholars have already noted.136 Remarkably unstudied, however, has been the extent to which the aristocratic houses of Westminster were also commandeered by the state. Both phenomena reflected not only changes in regime, but 132 Several speeches of .... their exhortations and conferences with Drs Sibbald, Bates and Hodges. Published by special authority (1649). 133 Mercurius Politicus, no. 340 (11–18 Dec 1656), p. 7454; no. 341 (18–24 Dec 1656), p. 7460. For other examples of people put in the pillory there for forging warrants and bills of exchange, or for perjury, see CJ, 1 Apr 1650, 25 June 1651. 134 E.g. CJ, 2 Jan 1643, 12 July 1645, 30 Nov 1646, 24 July 1647, 1 Feb 1650, 22 Feb 1651; Mercurius Politicus, no. 236 (14–21 Dec 1654), p. 5001; no. 241 (18–25 Jan 1655), p. 5078. 135 See Chapter 2. 136 See Kelsey; and Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell; although Kelsey covers only the period 1649–53, while Sherwood focuses on the protectoral palaces.

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Westminster 1640–60 also the growth and reorganization of government bureaucracy. Previously the presence of parliament in Westminster had been only an intermittent feature of local life, while even the royal court would sometimes transfer to other royal palaces, according to the movements of the monarch. For much of our period 1640–60, however, parliament was in permanent session, while the various manifestations of the executive Council of State remained firmly rooted in central Westminster. Accordingly, the ever-present central state increasingly stamped its identity upon its surroundings. It rapidly became evident that ruling elements would need to be based in Westminster, close to the sovereign parliament, while the prominent role of the parliamentarian peerage in the executive made its siting close to their West End town-houses likely. In the 1640s the most important of these bodies was the succession of proto-councils of state. The effective collapse of the privy council and removal of its staff to Oxford had created a vacuum that was initially occupied in part by the Committee of Safety, whose members included prominent noblemen based in the area such as Salisbury and Holland, while its most regular noble attender was the earl of Pembroke.137 When this Committee was effectively superseded by the Committee of Both Kingdoms in February 1644, the new committee (resolved to sit ‘in or about the City of Westminster’) initially met daily in a series of different Westminster residences – including York House, Arundel House and Worcester House – before settling in Derby House.138 With the departure of the Scots and the end of the war, a new Committee for Irish Affairs was created in October 1646, consisting of the older Committee’s active members with some additions, and which increasingly assumed most of the executive powers of the earlier Committee, as well as meeting in the same Westminster venue. It increasingly became known as the Derby House Committee. This Committee was dissolved and replaced by the Council of State, established in February 1649, which was even more consciously modelled on the privy council, and (after initial sessions in Derby House) it met in the same quarters as the older body in Whitehall. Its original members included the local peers Pembroke and Salisbury (both previous members of the series of earlier executive committees and of the Caroline privy council).139 As the executive council re-established itself in its traditional home of Whitehall Palace, so its members also acquired lodgings there. For much of the 1640s, with parliament in permanent session and the executive body meeting 137 L. Glow, ‘The Committee of Safety’, English Historical Review 80 (1965); J. Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy: the management of war and the Committee of Both Kingdoms, 1644–1645’ in C. Kyle and J. Peacey (eds), Parliament at work (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 102–4. 138 CSPD 1644, pp. 18, 21, 22, 24–5. On the Committee see Adamson, ‘Triumph of oligarchy’. 139 S. Kelsey, ‘The foundation of the Council of State’ in C. Kyle and J. Peacey (eds), Parliament at work (Woodbridge, 2002), p. 131.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 in noble town-houses, Whitehall Palace had been neglected as a possible location for government departments and committees. With the revival of the palace under the republic it became a centre of administration once more. Not only did the Council of State now meet at Whitehall, but councillors themselves resided there: under the Rump a significant number of councillors were allocated well-furnished lodgings at Whitehall as well as at Somerset House, a former royal property. Apartments were decorated and furnished for many councillors and other members of government. Other important committees were also increasingly lodged in Whitehall, where they began to acquire their own resident officials, as the commonwealth bureaucracy began to develop ‘quasi-household’ structures.140 This tendency was of course greatly intensified under the protectorate, as Whitehall became once again the residence of the court. The need to house the protectoral household became pre-eminent, and when Cromwell moved to Whitehall in 1654 state administrators were sometimes forced out: the committee for approbation of public preachers and the admiralty commissioners were both required to vacate their rooms in Whitehall, and both moved to Derby House.141 The restoration of the court under the protectorate made Whitehall seem as central to government as it had been under the Stuart kings, with the difference that this was now a court that did not go on progress, but was permanently in residence in Westminster (although Cromwell did spend his weekends at Hampton Court). One strikingly new aspect of the state’s appropriation of space in Westminster concerned the accommodation of members of parliament. The habitation of MPs had inevitably become more concentrated on Westminster than ever before during the 1640s. Previously, MPs had usually been forced to shift for themselves during parliament time, and many took short-term leases in the City of London, as well as in Westminster. But as the Long Parliament continued to sit and increasingly assumed executive powers, so members in larger numbers sought to secure more settled and convenient residence in Westminster itself. As it became apparent in 1641 that parliament would sit for longer, Sir Thomas Barrington and his wife moved from their Fleet Street lodgings to take the lease on a new house in Queen Street, where their neighbours included prominent parliamentarian peers and ambassadors. They also bought a new coach, and Barrington added his coat of arms to his pew in the parish of St Giles in the Fields.142 With the advent of the commonwealth, members of the Council of State and major parliamentary committees were increasingly given rooms around Whitehall, and the fact of rotating Council membership also meant that there was considerable overlap between membership of parliament and actual and 140 Huygens, p. 42; Thurley, Whitehall Palace, p. 98; Kelsey, pp. 35, 37, 43, 46. 141 Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell, p. 20. 142 A. Searle, ‘Sir Thomas Barrington in London, 1640–1644’, Essex Journal 2, 1 and 2 (1967).

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Westminster 1640–60 ­ otential membership of the Council.143 As a result, increasing numbers of p MPs were being housed by the authorities in the area. A committee initially appointed by the Rump in January 1651 ‘to consider of Accommodations of Lodgings for Members of the Parliament, in Whitehall’ (and to eject soldiers from the palace to accommodate this) was authorized to provide MPs with lodgings furnished at the state’s expense in Whitehall, the Mews and at Somerset House.144 In the early 1650s the idea that all MPs should live in Westminster, perhaps indeed in Whitehall itself, began to gain greater currency. In his 1652–53 poem ‘The Perpetual Parliament’, George Wither had envisaged ‘twelve structures’ in Whitehall ‘In each of which .../ The Senators, who moneth by moneth were chose/ Had their distinct abodes; each one of those/ In lodgings, by himself; yet, altogether/ In one pile .../ That, for conveniency they might be neer/ On all occasions; and, that ev’ry Shire/ Might thereby find the easier addresses,/ And, quick dispatches in their businesses’.145 Wither’s vision of a constitution where a perpetual parliament had one-twelfth of its elected membership rotated every month would not be realized. But his aspiration that the country’s elected representatives might be housed together in close proximity around Whitehall, rather than dispersed around the capital (or even Westminster), would at least partly be achieved. In the same year that Wither’s poem was published, the calling of Barebone’s Parliament led to a systematic attempt to provide housing for all of the chosen representatives in the environs of Whitehall. The Council of State established a committee in June 1653, consisting of Colonel Grosvenor (later a Westminster MP and St Martin’s vestryman) and two lieutenant-colonels, to take a view of lodgings in Whitehall, Somerset House, the Mews and Westminster ‘to consider how the persons called to supreme power may be conveniently lodged’ there.146 At the same time a new Committee for Whitehall oversaw the ejection of former MPs and other people from Whitehall, the Mews and Somerset House.147 Clearly, this attempt to secure state-owned lodgings for all MPs was not entirely successful: a Commons order of 23 August 1653 required a committee ‘to consider of all such Houses as belong to the Commonwealth in and about London and Westminster; and see how the same are disposed of ... And to assign convenient Lodgings therein, to all the Members of the House; and take care the same be speedily done.’148 143 G. Aylmer, The State’s servants: the civil service of the English Republic, 1649–1660 (1973) (hereafter Aylmer), p. 21; Kelsey, ‘Foundation of the Council of State’, pp. 143–4. 144 CJ, 14 Feb and 9 May 1651. 145 George Wither, The dark lantern ... whereunto is annexed, a poem, concerning a perpetuall parliament (1653), p. 68. 146 CSPD 1652–3, p. 415; cf. p. 421. 147 CSPD 1652–3, pp. 336, 339, 376, 377. In the meantime, new members of the Council of State were being newly housed at Whitehall (e.g. p. 452). 148 CJ, 23 Aug 1653.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 Nevertheless, the assumption that it was the state’s duty to procure stateowned lodgings in the vicinity of parliament for MPs represented a remarkable innovation. As a result, changing regimes witnessed a regular game of musical chairs as lodgings were redistributed among MPs and officials.149 When the Rump was revived in 1659, despite the political crisis that confronted it, the new Council of State devoted an extraordinary amount of time and attention to the redistribution of lodgings around Whitehall. Official lodgings were given to fifty-four MPs, and most leaders simply resumed their former suites of rooms.150 It was not all about competition for lodgings at court and around Westminster, and occupancy of sequestered buildings, of course. Prominent members of the Cromwellian regime could choose to build their own accommodation. In 1650 the later lord chamberlain and high steward of Westminster, Sir Gilbert Pickering, actually leased a prime site near the Tiltyard in Whitehall to erect his own residence, Pickering House.151 The practical needs of parliamentary and interregnum regimes also resulted in the state exploiting another more distinctive category of buildings within Westminster. These were the substantial houses belonging to members of the aristocracy. The appropriation of Westminster’s town-houses commenced in the early stages of the civil war and provided tangible symbols of national political upheaval, while at the same time holding particular significance for local society. The town-houses of the Strand, in particular, had become a defining image of the West End by the early seventeenth century, when so many were refurbished or completely rebuilt, taking their place on maps of the period and frequently referred to in contemporary plays. Hollar’s famous engravings of Arundel House around 1640 seemed to capture a confidently aristocratic way of life. Yet the civil war and interregnum were to see some of the greatest changes to these iconic town-houses since the Reformation, when many had passed from the hands of bishops into those of the crown and of its closest supporters. The state also commandeered many houses of more recent construction, situated in Westminster’s more spacious and leafy outskirts. The attractions and use to which these properties would be put varied, but the large-scale appropriation of aristocratic houses by the state and their redeployment was a revolutionary event. The sheer number of major noble houses in Westminster that came under state control in these years is extraordinary. They included Derby House (in Canon Row, confiscated from the earl of Derby), Drury House and Stafford House, while a number of the great Strand mansions were also seized and 149 E.g. CSPD 1653–4, pp. 1, 3, 4, 5, 14–15, 23, 33, 61, 66, 71, 73, 88, 98, 147; CSPD 1654, p. 70. 150 R.E. Mayers, 1659: the crisis of the commonwealth (2004), p. 30n. 151 ODNB, s.n. Gilbert Pickering; Survey of London (London County Council, 1900–63; Greater London Council, 1966–83; Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, 1985–) (hereafter SL), XVI, 31–2.

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Westminster 1640–60 deployed for state affairs, including York House (sequestered from the duchess of Buckingham’s second husband, the earl of Antrim), Arundel House, Worcester House and Duchy House. Newer great houses in St Martin in the Fields that came into the state’s hands for periods of time included Berkshire House (opposite St James’s Palace), Newport House (near the later Leicester Square) and substantial new properties built more towards the western boundaries of Westminster, such as Goring House and Tart Hall. In addition, Somerset House, a Strand-side town-house built by lord protector Somerset in the sixteenth century, which had subsequently been used as a royal residence, was also a major resource for successive regimes. Other major town-houses, even if they were not sequestered from royalist owners, occasionally found themselves commandeered for state purposes.152 These great houses were put to varying uses. As might be expected, some were simply placed in the hands of other parliamentarian peers for a time, especially those whose properties elsewhere in the country had been plundered. Thus, after the earl of Newport was declared delinquent, the desirable Newport House, ‘with the orchards, Gardens and other conveniences belonging thereto’, was temporarily leased to Lord Wharton in October 1643.153 Thereafter, the house came into the hands of the parliamentarian earl of Manchester, who lived there from at least 1645 and during the period when he was Speaker of the House of Lords (between January 1647 and March 1648).154 During the first civil war, Westminster’s Sequestrations Committee was regularly instructed to provide sequestered houses as accommodation for notable aristocratic and military figures.155 Even after the civil war, parliament sometimes made over properties to loyal peers, as in the case of Lord Howard of Escrick, who was allowed in 1645 to lease Wallingford House (previously the property of the royal favourite, Buckingham) at a price notoriously below its market value. After Howard’s conviction for bribery, however, it was stipulated that the house ‘shall be and remain, for ever, to the Use of the Commonwealth, to be disposed as the Parliament shall order and appoint’.156 It was not only the peerage who might be given privileged access to noble properties. It was ordered that the Speaker of the Commons, William Lenthall, should be housed in a series of noble town-houses during the 1640s, including Wallingford House and Goring House ‘with all Furniture and Houshold-stuff t­herein’.157 152 See below for details. In the seventeenth century Somerset House had been occupied by both Anne of Denmark and Henrietta Maria, and parliament and the Council of State tended to assign it in tandem with arrangements made for other former royal properties, such as St James’s Palace. 153 TNA, SP20/1, p. 101. 154 SL, XXXIV, p. 362. 155 E.g. TNA, SP20/1, pp. 163, 192, 210 and passim. 156 CJ, 25 June and 10 July 1651; ODNB, s.n. Edward Howard, Baron of Escrick. 157 E.g. CalCC, II, 255; CJ, 23 July 1646.

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 Wallingford House would eventually come into the hands of Colonel Fleetwood in 1655, and served as a base for his politico-military faction in the later 1650s. Indeed, the building would become as much of a shorthand for a political faction as Derby House had been in 1647.158 The majority of town-houses used by the state were those belonging to sequestered royalists, and their very availability in the 1640s coincided with the pressing need for large-scale properties that could accommodate soldiers.159 The juxtaposition of aristocratic use and military use was often stark. When the countess of Arundel had removed her exquisite collection of Chinese porcelain from the luxurious Tart Hall, this was followed by an order to fit as many troops as possible into what had been a fashionable meeting place.160 The larger town-houses were often seized to provide temporary quartering for soldiers on the periodic occasions when there was a sudden increase in the military presence in Westminster. This was most notable after late 1648, when (as we have seen) Fairfax’s troops occupied a series of major Westminster town-houses, including Tart Hall, Arundel House, Essex House, York House and Durham House.161 This type of use continued intermittently into the 1650s: Piccadilly House was assigned to quarter 200 troops in November 1650, this time under Colonel Barkstead, while Goring House was regularly used in this way until as late as 1656.162 Although the pressures to use these mansions to quarter troops were most intense in the late 1640s, a strong military presence in Westminster continued throughout the following decade, as the previous chapter has demonstrated, with intermittent surges in troop numbers prompted by security scares.163 Accordingly, there must always have been a temptation to quarter soldiers in larger houses on the outskirts of built-up areas in order to keep them away from civilian populations, and also because of the easy access that such houses gave to roads leading west out of the metropolis. Other pressures relating to war also led the state to employ great houses in the West End. Near the Savoy, for example, Northampton House temporarily served to receive maimed soldiers wounded in parliament’s service. More famously, Ely House (in St Andrew Holborn) became a hospital for wounded soldiers throughout the 1650s (having earlier been 158 Clarke, III, 52. 159 See Chapter 2. 160 J. Claxton, ‘The Countess of Arundel’s Dutch Pranketing Room’, Journal of the History of Collecting 22, 2 (2010). 161 Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, no. 288 (28 Nov–5 Dec 1648), p. 1176; Mercurius Elencticus, no. 54 (29 Nov–6 Dec 1648), p. 524; Mercurius Pragmaticus, no. 36 (5–12 Dec 1648), sig. Ccc2v; CSPD 1650, pp. 247, 263, 269, 270, 405. See also Chapter 2. 162 CSPD 1650, pp. 263, 449; CSPD 1651–2, pp. 315, 592; CSPD 1656, p. 262. For the dispute over the ownership of Goring House see C.T. Gatting, Mary Davies and the manor of Ebury (2 vols, 1921), I, 100–08. 163 See Chapter 2.

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Westminster 1640–60 used as a prison). The house was also a major administrative centre, since the treasurers who managed the relevant funds for wounded soldiers were located there.164 The use of aristocratic properties to house government committees was, in fact, one of their more important long-term uses during the entire period 1640–60. A few parliamentarian peers had already played an important role in housing political meetings and committees in their own town-houses, such as the earl of Warwick, who used Warwick House, near Gray’s Inn, in this manner in 1641. Others, such as the earl of Northumberland, seem to have hosted important sub-committees at the sequestered York House. Essex House, where the earl of Essex maintained a large staff of servants, also sometimes served as the effective headquarters of parliament’s army while the earl was in the capital during the period 1643–44.165 Nevertheless, a more striking phenomenon was the official use of aristocratic houses by government committees, many of which were created as a result of war or in connection with regime change. As we have seen, in the 1640s the most important of these bodies were the forerunners of the Council of State, which were based at Derby House, and it was as the preferred locations for the plethora of major government committees active in this period that the larger Westminster town-houses were most regularly deployed.166 Drury House, for example, was made available ‘with the hangings and furniture’ to act as the headquarters of the committee of trustees for sale of estates forfeited for treason,167 while several national accounts committees vied for the occupancy of the desirable Worcester House. These included the Accounts Committee, the crown land-sale Trustees and the Trustees for the sale of fee-farm rents, although attempted agreements to occupy rooms on alternate days failed to work. By 1653, the decision of the Accounts and Public Debts Commissioners of Barebone’s Parliament to meet here heralded yet another acrimonious dispute.168 Duchy House in the Strand had been the official residence of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a crown appointee who presided over the Duchy Court. However, the house came into the hands of parliament by 1644, 164 CJ, 8 Nov 1644, 1 May 1648. Southwark town-houses used as prisons included London House and Winchester House (see CalCC, I, 7). 165 See J. Adamson, The noble revolt (2007), pp. 147, 149, 324–5; Adamson, ‘Triumph of oligarchy’, p. 113, 117; J. Adamson, ‘The Baronial Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 30 (1990), pp. 106–8; Snow, Essex, pp. 412–13. 166 E.g. CSPD 1645–47, p. 559; CSPD 1649–50, p. 5. 167 CalCC, I, 467; P. Croot, ‘Before and after Drury House: Development of a Suburban Town House 1250–1800’, London Topographical record XXVIII (2001), p. 43. 168 Aylmer, pp. 105–6; CSPD 1651, p. 41. Ultimately, though, Worcester House was returned to the countess of Worcester, although only two months before the king returned to London (Burton, IV, 14 Apr 1659).

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 and the property was an early meeting place of the Committee of Accounts and as well as for the Committee for the Eastern Counties.169 On a local level, Westminster’s militia committee sampled a series of noble residences for its base, including Worcester House and Stafford House, before settling in the Savoy, while the Westminster Sequestrations Committee itself was housed for a time at Stafford House and elsewhere.170 In the end, a single aristocratic house often experienced a variety of uses over the 1640s and 1650s. Berkshire House, sequestered from the earl of Berkshire, was commandeered by the parliamentary army for quartering soldiers in 1649 ‘by reason of the quartering soldiers so close together’ elsewhere, although Fairfax had to accept that ‘though the officers have shown some care, yet much prejudice is done to the house’. In later years the house was clearly restored to a better state, as in 1654 it was occupied by the Portuguese ambassador, although four years later it was once more considered as a venue for quartering soldiers.171 At one level, this extensive redeployment of aristocratic houses by the state was a practical matter, reflecting the need to house state servants, a plethora of committees and the soldiers who required quartering in large numbers in the town. Yet the impact of this deployment is worth considering more carefully. In symbolic terms, the great houses of Westminster acted as a sort of political barometer. As the houses used were those at the disposal of the state (largely sequestered properties), they were tangible symbols of political power and change. Houses now filled with soldiers or with government offices and committees, for example, were no longer sites of aristocratic patronage, nor did they display the luxurious lifestyle and exclusive sociability associated with the nobility. Although we can trace a chronology of the types of demands made upon these houses (for soldiers, for bureaucrats or as rewards for the state’s servants), it would have been the sheer pervasiveness and intrusion of the state into the locality that would have been most striking to observers during the 1640s and 1650s. Large buildings under the control of the state now ranged across the length and breadth of Westminster; relatively few remained in private hands. It should also be remembered that securing a venue for government committees was not simply a matter of appropriating a sufficiently large physical space. Locating these new committees in buildings of high status was undoubtedly important in lending an air of authority to their activities. But an emphasis on 169 R. Sommerville, The Savoy (1960), pp. 63–4; CJ, 23 Dec 1644, 8 Apr 1645; CSPD 1625–49, p. 675; CSPD 1650, p. 254; CSPD 1658–9, p. 211. 170 CJ, 18 Nov 1643, 5 Feb 1644. The Westminster Militia Committee also sometimes sat in Star Chamber: e.g. LJ, 29 Jan 1648. 171 CalCC, III, 1968; T. Birch (ed.), A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe (7 vols, 1742) (hereafter Thurloe), II, 247; Clarke, III, 171.

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Westminster 1640–60 the impression that such buildings gave of the state’s pervasive influence in the area perhaps needs to be balanced by another consideration. Local inhabitants may well have been struck by the fact that these enormous residences were seriously under-occupied. When Fairfax’s soldiers were quartered in various of these mansions in December 1648, the general emphasized that these were ‘void’ houses. Even for those houses that were not left empty, the succession of government committees and temporary residents that used them could hardly have compared with the large households and liveried servants of their former noble residents. The much-desired Worcester House had some sixty rooms great and small, and most of these must have been left unused.172 Conclusion For all the temporary anxieties of its inhabitants, Westminster thus continued to be at the centre of national events. But more than this, through a range of different regimes, the locality had actually become much more central to government and national life than ever before. This was not a matter of simple continuity in the use of royal space. It is true that in the 1650s Westminster was still sometimes talked of as ‘the Seat, and Sepulchre of our Kings’.173 It is true, too, that the protectoral court could appear very much like a royal one, and that funerals for state worthies made systematic use of the Abbey and the Henry VII chapel. These continuities were of course very significant and quite deliberate. But it is also important to note that the display and pageantry was not just imitative of regal styles and forms, evoking the past. Royal pageantry offered a useful compendium of ceremonial ideas, but in the burial of commoners in the Henry VII chapel, the bearing of the State’s Arms before the regular series of state funerals, the prominence of regicides in Abbey government, and the constant use of dramatic military display in processions, funerals and musters, these were very public manifestations of the distinctive republican and military character of the interregnum regimes. We are so familiar with the notion of Westminster as ‘national space’, with its churches and buildings closely associated with state government, that it is easy to neglect the fact that exclusive state appropriation of the area was very much a creation of the 1640s and 1650s. It was in these years that the Abbey and parish churches, as well as the large private buildings of Westminster, were systematically appropriated by the state to serve its own ends to a degree that had never been known before. And this was an executive that was ­permanently resident in the locality – at each switch of regime the same 172 CalCC, I, 119. 173 E.g. Samuel Clarke, A geographicall description of all the countries in the known world (1657), p. 93. In similarly anachronistic vein, Clarke describes Westminster’s ‘many stately buildings for the Nobles, and great men of the Land’, and includes Somerset House in this category (pp. 93–4).

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Westminster and the state, 1642–60 rooms and buildings were occupied by the nation’s new governors. Moreover, as each regime rushed to occupy the central rooms and spaces of Westminster and to eject its predecessors, so the transfer of power increasingly took the form of direct confrontations in the streets of Westminster itself. Richard Cromwell’s protectorate fell when the regiments summoned to defend Whitehall chose to meet instead a short distance away at St James and Wallingford House. And when a military coup in October 1659 dissolved the restored Rump parliament, the two competing parties assembled only streets apart.174 In 1659, even more than in 1642, control of the streets of central Westminster was the key to who controlled national government. Nevertheless, the convulsions of 1659 did cause momentary panic when the poverty of the restored Rump led it to order the sale of virtually all former royal palaces (in an echo of its earlier temporary plan in 1649 to sell them off). It was ordered in May that ‘Whitehall, with all and every Appurtenances, be forthwith exposed to sale’ to meet army arrears. The following month a royalist satire concocted a ‘petition’ from the Palace of Whitehall to parliament. Fearing stories that ‘I must be sold to Ferdinand the Jew’, Whitehall pleads that other palaces such as Somerset House should be sold first. Lamenting that after the fall of the protectorate ‘I was constrain’d by force/ To quarter Souldiers and Troops of Horse’, Whitehall begs, ‘Preserve me pray you for my ancient luster,/ Although your Souldiers do but only Muster,/ And quarter in my sad decaying Rooms .../ But gladder should I be if it would be my fate,/ To be preserved for the Council of our State’.175 In fact, Whitehall’s fears were groundless, and it was indeed reserved for the Council’s use (even if a Council minute of 8 July forbade state funding for the repair of apartments assigned to MPs or councillors).176 Moreover, despite the short-term financial crisis, there would appear never to have been any suggestion that government might move out of Westminster. Even when the Commons was briefly contemplating the sale of Whitehall, it specifically ordered that ‘Westminster Buildings and Houses, with their Appurtenances, belonging to the Commonwealth, be reserved, ordered, and disposed, for the Convenience and Accommodation of the Parliament and Council, from time to time, during their Attendance and Service; and also for other publick Judicatures’.177 174 See Chapter 2. 175 CJ, 16 May 1659; White-Halls petition to the Parliament that he may enjoy his former privileges (1659). 176 Somerset House continued to be advertised for sale into July, when it was reported to have been sold to a Fleet Street goldsmith ‘who it is said will demolish it, and raise a now [new] Structure’, although a later parliamentary order shows that this sale was never completed. CJ, 16 May, 8 and 18 June, 8 July and 4 Oct 1659; The Publick Intelligencer, no. 182 (20–27 June), p. 524; no. 183 (27 June–4 July), p. 557; The Weekly Intelligencer, no. 10 (5–12 July) p. 78; Mayers, 1659, p. 42. 177 CJ, 16 May 1659.

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Westminster 1640–60 In the event, Westminster and its chief buildings remained firmly in the hands of the restored Rump parliament, as they had in the hands of every regime since the civil war had begun. But while the state had succeeded in appropriating so many of Westminster’s prominent buildings and spaces for its purposes, the actual day-to-day government of the locality itself, and control over the behaviour and political sentiments of its inhabitants, were to prove a great deal more problematic. While the monarchy was decisively swept away, some of the traditions and attitudes of the erstwhile ‘royal city’ were less easily dismantled.

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Chapter 4

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60

A

s we have seen, the 1640s and 1650s saw the state’s appropriation of the physical and symbolic spaces and buildings of Westminster. But Westminster was more than an agglomeration of nationally important edifices. It was one of the most populous towns in the country, but also one of the most idiosyncratic in its institutions and structures of government, with no lord mayor or institutions with overall executive authority or law-making powers. Various institutions played a role in the government of the town, such as Westminster Abbey, the Court of Burgesses and, in particular, the town’s enormously powerful parish vestries. In the pre-1640 period, though, it was the crown, working through the privy council and prerogative courts, which often played a crucial executive role, especially in times of crisis. Yet the events of the 1640s quickly saw the departure of the king and the privy council and the dissolution of some prerogative courts, while the dean and chapter of Westminster were ultimately abolished, the members having left several years before. In a time of swift political change, then, local government was thrown wide open. This not only opened up the possibility that new men from outside traditional governing ranks might intrude into new positions of power in the town, but also that broader structural change might occur, and that the anomalies of Westminster’s government might finally be resolved. As we will see, the 1640s and 1650s were a time of major changes in the government of Westminster, when basic questions over the power and authority of local institutions were raised, and when there were sustained attempts to secure the longed-for separate incorporation of the town. Ironically, as we will see, it was the exponents of radical political change on the national level who in the end sought to exercise control through more traditional organs of power in the locality, whereas it was the more politically conservative forces in the town who pushed for a more radical change in its government. Just as important as the structures of government were the loyalties and 133

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Westminster 1640–60 behaviour of local inhabitants. After all, many were linked either directly or at one remove to the royal court, so how would they respond to the series of non-monarchical regimes in the area? Contemporaries always assumed that Westminster was a royal city whose inhabitants were instinctive courtiers. In his History of the rebellion, the earl of Clarendon wrote that ‘the Inhabitants of Westminster, St Martin’s and Covent-Garden ... always underwent the Imputation of being well affected to the King’.1 So widespread was this assumption that even Westminster units fighting for parliament were suspected of royalist sympathies. After the lamentable showing of the Westminster Red Trained Band on the Basing House campaign in November 1643, some reports had it that the soldiers ‘would not go on for fear of hurting his Majestie, whom they expected to come shortly and be their Neighbour again’.2 William Waller was himself convinced that among the Westminster troops who refused to march under him were ‘Malignants that putt themselves upon this service only to overthrow itt’.3 As late as May 1643 it was reported by the visiting Scotsman William Lithgow that the Westminster trained bands ‘are not betrusted with neither Parliament nor Citie; so that the quotidian guard of the Parliament come daily out of London’.4 Such reports were in many cases unfair. When the Westminster troops made a better showing two weeks later, the same parliamentarian newsbook that had criticized their earlier performance retracted its former remarks with the reflection that ‘the Westminster Forces ... did bravely, fighting with great courage and resolution’ and that their earlier poor showing was due to ‘rather the indiscretion of some, then the cowardise of any part’.5 Moreover, Westminster’s troops were not alone in sometimes manifesting a lack of enthusiasm for military action: other City regiments displayed a similar tendency to resist deployment and desert their colours. And in reality the Westminster trained bands were not excluded from parliamentary guard duties but merely shared them with City units.6 Nevertheless, Lithgow was presumably repeating what his informants had assumed to be the case, and the newsbook’s readiness to assume that Westminster residents were concerned principally with trade and welcoming the return of the king doubtless reflected a popular prejudice. 1 Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, The history of the rebellion and civil wars in England, ed. W.D. Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), II, 83. 2 The Parliament Scout, no. 21 (10–17 Nov 1643), p. 184. 3 Nagel, pp. 144–5. 4 William Lithgow, The present surveigh of London and Englands state (1643), sig. A4r. 5 The Parliament Scout, no. 25 (8–15 December 1643), p. 218. The newsbook insists that the more creditable exploits of the Westminster troops ‘must be graven in letters of brass, & set up in Westminster’. Similarly, A Narration of the Great Victory (1643) commented that the Westminster regiments’ ‘behaviour and valour in this service is never to be forgotten’ (p. 3). 6 Nagel, pp. 102–3.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 This chapter will investigate the extent and nature of royalist commitment in Westminster in the 1640s and 1650s before then moving on to explore the increasingly direct micro-management of the area by parliament and to consider the extent to which shifting political developments led to corresponding purges of local institutions, including Westminster Abbey and its successor institution, the misleadingly titled ‘Governors of the School and Almshouses of Westminster’. First, however, we need to study one remarkable document that can provide us with one means of understanding how Westminster’s inhabitants responded to the political changes of these years: Westminster’s peace petition to the House of Lords of December 1642. The peace petitions The assumption that Westminster’s inhabitants were concerned principally with trade and wished to welcome the return of the king may well have reflected the impact on popular memories of the Westminster peace petitions. Dating from the crucial month of December 1642, after the stalemate at Edgehill had made it clear that the war was likely to be a long and bloody one, the Westminster petition to the House of Lords is one of many of that time that urged the two sides to come together. The king’s proclamation to London and Westminster on 27 October 1642 had offered a free pardon to ‘all the Cittyzens and Inhabitants’ of London and Westminster and professed himself ready to receive a deputation of ‘such a number of grave and substantiall Cittyzens … who may propose such things to Us on their behalf as shall be desired’.7 Some of London and Westminster’s inhabitants were keen to take up the invitation.8 The Westminster peace petition of 17 December 1642 is of especial historical interest because it is one of the largest petitions from this period to have survived with its original signatures – amounting to nearly 3,000. It has been surprisingly ignored by historians of the civil war metropolis, but it can provide us with particularly illuminating insights into questions of political conviction and allegiance in Westminster not only at the outbreak of war but also in the years that followed.9 7 By the King. His Majesties gratious proclamation to the cittyes of London and Westminster (1642). 8 Lindley, pp. 337–48; I. Gentles, ‘Parliamentary politics and the politics of the street: the London peace campaigns of 1642–3’, Parliamentary History 26 (2007), pp. 141–50. 9 HLRO, Main Papers, 20 Dec 1642. The final text of the petition is reproduced in LJ, 20 Dec 1642. It was also printed, with the answer of the House of Lords, very rapidly (Thomason received his copy on 24 December): The petition of the inhabitants of the City of Westminster (1642) (Thomason E83 [16]). It appears to be the same as TNA, SP16/514/124, wrongly dated by the editors of the calendar as ‘1646?’ (CSPD 1645–7, p. 503). The petition is not mentioned by Pearl, and while Lindley notes its text, he does not consult the surviving petition itself or note any of its signatories: Lindley, p. 340.

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Westminster 1640–60 The text of the petition was carefully worded so as to avoid any apparent insult to either side. The petition dwells on the miseries of the war, of which the petitioners claim some direct experience, ‘in their own Particulars having already tasted of some Part of those Miseries, by the Death of some of their nearest and dearest Friends, and great Losses in their Callings’. The petition appeals for ‘a speedy, seasonable, and happy Accommodation between His Gracious Majesty and both Houses of Parliament’. It is clear from the original parchment that there was an attempt after the petition had initially been drafted to alter the wording so as to assure parliament that no criticism was intended, adding to the words ‘in their humble petitions to this honourable Assembly’ the assurance ‘(Whose desires and indeavors for Peace (heretofore expressed) They doe acknowledge with al humble thankfulness)’. More intervention in the text is evident in the part of the petition in which the religious character of the proposed settlement is discussed. In the final printed petition the appeal is for a settlement which would ‘settle the true Protestant Religion against all Papists, Sectaries, and Schismatics, that shall go about to oppose it; to restrain all Prophaneness of the Lord’s-day, and establish the orderly Worship of God in His House’. This balanced invoking of positives and negatives clearly reflected careful editing. In the manuscript there is a lengthy scored-out passage between the words ‘settle the true protestant religion’ and ‘against all Papists’. Was this removed because it made too direct an allusion to the form of ‘true protestant religion’ that should be preserved, and could have been construed as being critical of the Parliament’s religious reforms? One topic conspicuously absent in the final version is any allusion to the controversial issue of church government. Petitions both for and against episcopacy, and claiming to be subscribed by the inhabitants of London and Westminster, had emerged during 1641 and 1642: it was presumably calculated that the issue was best avoided in the peace petition, in order both to maximize the number of possible signatories and to avoid offending parliament.10 A further peace petition addressed to the king in the name of Westminster’s inhabitants was drawn up at the same time as the 17 December petition, and may have been circulated simultaneously. While the first petition had Ten copies of the Westminster petition that survive without signatures are in TNA, E407/8/169, nos 4, 7. 10 As the pro- and anti-episcopacy petitions survive only in printed form it is impossible to assess who signed which, or where the religious or political views of the majority of Westminster’s inhabitants resided. The pro-episcopacy petition (which described itself as being from the Cities of London and Westminster) was specifically drawn up to counter the petition ‘subscribed by many (who pretend to be Inhabitants of those Citties)’ against bishops, and claimed to include ‘many, and those of the better sort of the Inhabitants of these Citties’ among its signatories. It ends with the modest claim to be ‘the humble suit of Ten thousand thousand’: J. Maltby, ‘Petitions for episcopacy and the book of common prayer on the eve of the civil war 1641–1642’ in S. Taylor (ed.), From Cranmer to Davidson: a miscellany (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 153–5.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 dwelt upon the miseries of war, the second petition to the king focused on the specific problems caused to the locality by ‘the long and lamented absence of Your royall person, and your Court from this City’. Westminster, they complained, was becoming utterly impoverished by the decay of trade and commerce resulting from the king’s absence: we of your City of Westminster, and the adjoining parishes of Saint Martins and Saint Clements, having our greatest entercourse of trade with your royall Court, by reason of our vicinitie to the same, and with the Families of such of the Nobility and gentry as inhabited the Strand, and the adjacent places: who having most of their dependence on your Majesty, and Your regall Court, have by reason of Your long absence from thence absented themselves. Divers others also, by reason of these domestick tumults, being removed from their wonted habitations, into the Countrey.11

It is difficult to be precise about who was behind the peace petition to the Lords. The names that appear directly under the petition text may be indicative. These include many prominent local officials, and fourteen out of the twenty-four members of Westminster’s quasi-local government, the Court of Burgesses.12 Perhaps the most significant names, though, are those of Edward Wardour and John Castle and, on a later membrane, of the clergymen Thomas Fuller and Richard Dukeson. These four men, along with John Chichley (of Covent Garden) and Laurance Lisle were all involved in taking the peace petition to the king in the name of Westminster two and a half weeks later. The peace petition to the Lords was presented by six people, of whom Wardour was one, and it would seem likely that the other five figures involved were the same as acted in the later petition to the king. Dukeson and Fuller certainly seem to have been involved in promoting the petition. It is notable that both of their parishes – St Clement Danes and St Mary le Strand – provided funds towards the costs of coach hire and expenses of ministers going to Oxford with the petition for the king.13 Fuller also intervened very publicly in support of the petitioning movement. He had been a popular choice to be minister of the Savoy chapel, a petition from ‘the greater part of the parishioners of the Savoy’ in June 1642 having overturned the Commons’ recommendation for the post.14 On 28 December (eight days after 11 A Petition of the Citie of Westminster and the parishes of St Clement Danes and St Martin in the Fields (1643), pp. 4–5. 12 For an explanation of the nature of the Court of Burgesses see p. 9. 13 WAC, B11 1642–43; WAC, vol. 22, fol. 388v. For Dukeson’s royalist credentials see Chapter 1. 14 PJ, III, 80. A petition of ‘fourteen or fifteen’ parishioners for Thomas Gibbs to be appointed lecturer was presented to the Commons by Sir Robert Harley on 30 May, and Gibbs was therefore recommended for the lectureship by parliament (ibid., II, 595), but on 15 June a petition of ‘near upon sixscore’ of parishioners in favour of Fuller was received, and this seems to have been granted. Fuller proved to be a popular preacher. According to his contemporary biographer, Fuller had ‘two Audiences, one without the

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Westminster 1640–60 the peace petition had been presented to the Lords, and when that addressed to the king may still have been circulating among Westminster’s citizens) Fuller delivered a fast sermon at the Savoy on the text ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’.15 In his sermon Fuller told his hearers that private people must try to obtain civil peace by prayer, but also specifically by petitioning both king and parliament (as his congregation had been doing). Fuller tried to strike a conciliatory and non-partisan note, observing that both king and parliament professed the same objectives: preserving the Protestant religion, the lawful prerogatives of the king, the rights and privileges of parliament and the rights and property of the subjects. The petition need not be seen as purely the inspiration of these six people, however. ‘A great Number of People’ (‘many hundreds’ of Westminster residents, according to another report) attended in the Painted Chamber when there was an initial attempt by Westminster’s inhabitants to present the petition to the Lords on 17 December, and it was at the Lords’ request that only a small deputation presented it on the 20th, ‘the rest of the company staying at Whitehall, where they drank both wine and ale ... then sold there’.16 All of the Westminster parishes had clearly been involved in the petition. The absence of the ministers of St Martin’s and St Margaret’s from among those formally presenting the petition reflected the fact that the occupancy of both livings was in doubt, and did not prevent many vestrymen and other parish officers from both parishes from signing it.17 Parish constables seem to have been involved in collecting signatures. One Battersby reported to the Commons that he was sent for by a beadle to a constable, Mr Carre, ‘who desired him to set his Hand to a Petition framed here in Westminster’. When Battersby answered that he had already signed the petition Carre allegedly replied, ‘You must not set your Hand only, but your Heart; and you must stand up for it.’18 Battersby was clearly not the only person to be asked to sign the petition more than once; a number of people signed the petition twice.19 This may perhaps reflect confusion caused by the

15 16 17

18 19

pale, the other within; the windows of that little Church, and the Sextonry so crowded, as if Bees had swarmed to his mellifluous discourse’ ([John Fell], The Life of … Dr Thomas Fuller [1661], p. 15). Thomas Fuller, A Fast Sermon Preached on Innocents Day (1642). LJ, 17 Dec 1642; State papers collected by Edward, earl of Clarendon, ed. R. Scrope and T. Monkhouse (3 vols, Oxford, 1767–86), II, appendix, p. xxxvi. Wimberley of St Margaret’s was hanging on under fear of sequestration, which would come in 1643. Bray of St Martin’s had already left but the sequestration of his living to his successor (Dr Wincopp) had passed the Commons only on 1 December 1642 and was not confirmed until 12 January 1643, well after both peace petitions had been presented (CJ, 1 Dec 1642, 12 Jan 1643). CJ, 17 Dec 1642. Battersby’s signature is on mem. 18. See for example Charles Spence (mems. 9 and 24) and Michael Barkstead (mems. 9 and 27).

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 two peace petitions’ circulating simultaneously, but it also hints at the multiplicity of occasions and the intensity with which signatures were solicited. The large parchment roll contains almost 3,000 signatures. The names are drawn from an apparently wide social spectrum, with at least 300 people signing only with their mark. Not surprisingly, those connected with the royal court are well represented. The office of the King’s Works is particularly evident, with eminent members such as Thomas Bagley, John Webb, Nicholas Stone and John Thorpe, along with Henry Wicks (Paymaster of the Works), as well as associates such as the architect Isaac de Caux and the painter Thomas de Critz. But there were also many more minor court and household figures, from William Raylton (formerly agent to the earl of Strafford, and clerk of the privy council) to Peter Le Huc (who worked on the scenery for court masques)20 and the musicians Ambrose Lupo and Henry Lawes. There were surprisingly few local gentry among the signatories, and no members of the aristocracy. This was overwhelmingly a mustering of local tradespeople and craftsmen, particularly those who also held parish or other minor local offices. As we have seen, more than half the members of the Court of Burgesses signed the petition. Churchwardens, vestrymen and overseers of the poor of all of Westminster’s parishes are also represented. St Margaret’s current pair of churchwardens and their immediate predecessors signed, as did vestrymen such as James Chapman, Thomas Style, John Fennell and William Heaward. St Martin’s officials included George Blenerhassett, Thomas Darling, Robert Dixon and Scipio le Squire. Some of this mustering of Westminster’s parochial officers seems to have been organized quite systematically, especially in the parishes of St Clement Danes and St Mary le Strand. Membrane 14 is particularly notable in this regard. It is signed at the top by the ministers of the two parishes – Richard Dukeson and Thomas Fuller – and the names that follow include almost all the current vestrymen, churchwardens and overseers of the two parishes, along with those who had held the offices in recent years or would do in the near future. Indeed, one striking aspect of the petition is the degree to which it is signed not just by much of the current parochial leadership, but also by the future leadership as well. Many of those who would become churchwardens, overseers or vestrymen over the next two decades also signed the petition.21 Some of these local officials were also members of the Westminster Military Company, while officers of the trained bands such as Michael Barkstead also signed.22 20 TNA, SO3/11 Apr 1637. On the long-established prominence of the King’s Works in Westminster see Merritt, pp. 115–17. 21 Perhaps surprisingly, only Leonard Braford (St Margaret’s) specifically identifies himself by his office of churchwarden (mem. 8). 22 E.g. Ambrose Coplestone, William Portington, Bryan Barniby, Edmond Waters, Thomas Darling, Charles Kynaston and Henry Strygnell (Queen’s College Oxford, MS 77).

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Westminster 1640–60 How should the signing of the petition be interpreted? There certainly were crypto-royalists among the signatories of the peace petition, and this is hardly surprising (the royalist William Chillingworth was identified by Thomason as the author of London’s 14 December peace petition).23 One prominent signatory, William Catherens, wrote in January 1642 deploring how ‘moderate men are suspected, violent men are thought saintes with whome too greate a streame runnes, fears and Jelousies daylie increase; distemper in Church and State dayly worse’. He had warned prophetically and self-referentially ‘his Majesties servants and such as have relation to his service will (if tymes timely mend not) suffer moste’.24 By June of the following year he would be with the king in Oxford.25 Other prominent names on the petition would also make their way to Oxford in 1643, including Thomas Fuller and Edward Wardour. Some of the attitudes of the more royalist signatories were probably encapsulated in the pamphlet A Complaint to the House of Commons and resolution taken up by the free Protestant subjects of the cities of London and Westminster, copies of which were actually found in their coach when Wardour, Dukeson and the others were stopped when heading to Oxford.26 The pamphlet, for which searches were ordered in ‘the shops in and about Westminster’, expounds a much more inflammatory and obviously royalist stance. The ambiguous phrases embedded in the petition are shrugged aside, and the pamphlet insists that the king must be ‘restored to all’ and parliament dissolved, threatening that ‘our Resolution is to re-assume the power we put into you’. While condemning emphatically the policies of the Personal Rule, the Complaint deplores the corruption, hypocrisy and illegality of parliament’s proceedings. A particular target of complaint is the ordinance of 29 November 1642, whereby inhabitants of the capital who had not contributed to parliament’s forces would be obliged to pay a twentieth part of their estates: the Complaint comments ‘that they might by the like new law take the other nineteenth [sic] part of our estates’.27 These precise points made in the pamphlet were clearly also deployed by some of those involved in collecting signatures for the peace petition. Thus, when the constable Carre was urging Battersby to sign the petition, after Battersby enquired ‘Must I fight for it?’ the constable allegedly answered Yes, Sir, or else it will come to this: The House of Commons hath already set forth an Order, or Ordinance, for the Assessing and Taking of the Twentieth Part of every Man’s Estate; and by the same Law, they may take the other Nineteen: And they that 23 Lindley, pp. 342–3. 24 BL, Add. MSS 29974, fol. 346r. 25 Ibid., fol. 388r. 26 The petitioners were stopped, although they were travelling with a warrant from the House of Lords: CJ, 2 Jan and 5 Jan 1643; A Continuation (2–6 Jan 1643), p. 6; A Perfect Diurnall, no. 30, sig. Ff3r–v (2–9 Jan 1643). 27 A Complaint to the House of Commons and resolution taken up by the free Protestant subjects of the cities of London and Westminster (1642) (Wing C5620; Madan 1150), pp. 17, 23.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 shall refuse to pay, must be banished from their Wives and Children: And how like you this? Is it not now Time to stand up for it?28

Other signatories may have felt prompted by the practical inconveniences of the war, but may not have shared the same partisan perspective. The petition itself had clearly been deliberately framed to enable parliamentarians to sign it, and it would seem that a fair number did so. Nearly 100 of the signatories had already signed the politically moderate 11 January pro-parliament petition.29 A number had also served as collectors for parliament in August of the same year, namely James Chapman, Bryan Barniby, Thomas Style, William Hawkins, John Fennell and Thomas Kirke.30 Style and Fennell had also acted as collectors of the March 1642 contributions for Ireland.31 Analysis of the surviving lists of those parishioners of St Clement Danes who paid in response to parliament’s June 1642 ordinance for raising a loan of £100,000 to pay for troops, and of those who refused, reveals that both payers and refusers signed the peace petition.32 In fact, the petition may usefully be compared with Lindley’s analysis of the smaller number of signatures on London’s 22 December peace petition. Lindley found much the same range of vestrymen, clergymen and militia officers among the more senior signatories. And while there were unquestionably some obvious royalists who would subsequently resist the war effort, undergo distraints or leave London to join the king, there were others who would later serve on local excise and militia committees.33 Westminster’s petition included many more people signing with a mark than did the London petition, and the relative numbers involved would clearly suggest that Westminster managed to attract a broader swathe of signatories from across the social range than was the case in London itself, but the same mix of crypto-royalists and more compliant local officials is evident. The involvement of so many apparently ‘honest men’ in the petition was explained away by its opponents by their having been seduced by the call for peace, or having acted under threats or compulsion as servants or employees of the petition’s supporters.34 A pro-parliament version of the Complaint to the House of Commons complained that ‘a few Papists and factious people amongst us’ had seduced others to set their hands to their petition. Signatures had also been forged, and in this way ‘these few rebellious elves belched forth their 28 CJ, 17 Dec 1642. 29 See Chapter 1. 30 HLRO, Main Papers, 29 Aug 1642 (compare with the listing in TNA, SP16/491/47). 31 TNA, SP28/293, fols 264, 266v, 272v, 281r. 32 E.g. Anthony Bickerstaffe refused to pay the loan (TNA, SP16/492, fol. 118r; peace petition, mem. 16), while Edward Mesinger and Tristram Stockwell paid it (TNA, SP16/492, fol. 115v; peace petition, mems. 9, 16). 33 Lindley, pp. 341–4. 34 Ibid., p. 344.

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Westminster 1640–60 poison’ against parliament ‘in the name of all London and Westminster’.35 It might be most helpful, however, to see the Westminster peace petition in its own terms, as an attempt, spearheaded by local notables, to secure a peace which could only redound to the benefit of the town itself, the seat of government and of the court. That aim would undoubtedly appeal to dedicated royalists as well, but it need not be viewed as a consciously partisan document. It does not seem to be stretching the evidence too far to suggest that the peace petitions of December 1642 represent a final attempt by those ‘middle men’ of Westminster who had not already yoked themselves irretrievably to the parliamentarian cause, to promote the peaceful settlement that would have most advanced the interests of the town of Westminster as a whole. The fact that so many of the newly prominent members of Westminster society did not sign the petition reflects the intensity of the political division between king and parliament, and the clear dangers that Westminster society could find itself divided. What does seem clear, however, is that for some of Westminster’s inhabitants the petition was indeed a partisan document which they would prefer not to sign. Lindley notes that the London petition was not signed by ‘one parish zealot or subsequent lay trier or elder’.36 While Lindley’s definition of ‘parish zealot’ is sufficiently capacious to embrace some of the Westminster signatories, it is nevertheless true that none of those who would be proposed in 1645 to be members of Westminster’s abortive eleventh classis of the Presbyterian London Provincial Assembly signed the petition.37 Clutches of existing local officials who did not sign the petition would be playing a significant role in local administration shortly thereafter; indeed most of those minor officials who were in prominent roles in local government in the 1640s and 1650s were non-signatories. One example of an official whose absence from the peace petition was anything but an oversight is the St Margaret’s burgess John Brigham, who signed an order at a vestry meeting that was held on 20 December 1642 – the very day on which the petition was presented to the House of Lords – along with his fellow vestrymen Heaward, Fennell, Chapman and Style (all of whom were peace petition signatories). Brigham would go on to serve on the Westminster Sequestrations Committee and be nominated as a lay trier for the Westminster classis, as well as serving on numerous committees for levying money for parliament throughout the 1640s.38 The distinction between signatories and non-signatories will provide us with an important criterion when analysing Westminster’s elites in the following decades. 35 36 37 38

A Complaint to the House of Commons (1642) (Wing C5623; Madan 1148), sig. B2v. Lindley, p. 342. On the eleventh classis see Chapter 6. WAC, E2413, fol. 20; A&O, I, 114, 232, 383, 536, 637, 796, 873, 970, 1087, 1191, 1246; II, 39, 303.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 This would not be the end of peace petitioning in the area. Petitioning activity continued into the new year, with a further petition ‘of the apprentices and other young men of the City of London’ being drawn up, and its supporters assembling in Covent Garden piazza before marching to parliament on 2 January.39 But the December peace petitions would represent the last occasion on which Westminster’s own inhabitants would be mustered on such a scale. Peace was still publicly invoked: Thomas Fuller gave a sermon in the Abbey on 27 March 1643 urging peace and emphasizing the reforms that the king had agreed. But the sermon generated fierce attacks, and while Fuller was still urging a peaceful settlement in a sermon delivered in July at the Savoy, he left Westminster for Oxford soon afterwards.40 Malignants and delinquents The peace petition may have helped to fix the notion in many people’s minds that Westminster’s inhabitants had no stomach for war with the king. As we have seen, there was undoubtedly some royalist involvement in the peace petitions. But the failure of the petition – perhaps summed up in Lord Saye’s scornful remark to Wardour ‘that they were all fools and asses that came with the petition’ and should return home, as well as by the arrest of the petitioners travelling to Oxford – must have speeded up the movement of royalists to join the court at Oxford in 1643.41 Nevertheless, the potential presence of royalists at the centre of national government, where royal authority had previously been dominant, continued to be a source of concern for the authorities. In this section we will study fears of royalist activity in the 1640s and 1650s, forms of low-level royalist opposition, increasing clampdowns on suspected royalists and the continuing nature and extent of royalist activity and sentiment in the area. As the most prominent royalists left Westminster to join the king’s court, parliament’s worries often came to focus on the actions of their dependents who were still in the area. Thus, in January 1643 the Commons authorized the examination of the servants of the royalist ministers Secretary Nicholas and Lord Falkland ‘and all other suspected Persons that frequent Westminster Hall’, but also extended these investigations to cover the apprehension of the 39 Lindley, pp. 253, 344–5. 40 Thomas Fuller, A sermon preached at the collegiat Church of St Peter (1643); idem, A Sermon of reformation (1643); ODNB, s.n. Thomas Fuller. 41 State papers collected by Edward, earl of Clarendon, II, appendix, p. xxxvi. The Lords gave an emollient answer ‘That this House approves of this their Petition; and to let them know, that their Lordships Desires and Endeavours have always been, to secure the Peace and Happiness of this Kingdom; and their Lordships are offering such Propositions of Peace to His Majesty, as they hope will settle the Peace of the Kingdom; and that they will take their Petition into Consideration.’ (LJ, 20 Dec 42).

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Westminster 1640–60 agent or servant of anyone in arms against parliament who should ‘come to the Parliament House, or Westminster’.42 Fears of spies active around Westminster law courts continued, and a further clampdown was directed at the wives of royalists and recusants.43 Concerns that Westminster’s previous royal government still held sway in the area were doubtless heightened by the fact that royal writs and proclamations issued from the rival royalist stronghold at Oxford were still penetrating the heart of parliamentarian government in Westminster. In March 1643 the Commons was still having to order London and Middlesex sheriffs not to allow the publication of a royal proclamation within their jurisdiction, and to assure them that parliamentary authority would protect them for what would hitherto have been an illegal act. However, the following month the Commons had to direct the local MPs Glynne and Wheeler ‘to take down the Proclamation, set up in St. Peter’s Street [near the Abbey], prohibiting the Collection of the weekly Assessments; and inquire, by the best Means they can, who set it up’. The culprit was finally identified as a singing man from the Abbey.44 The following year, concerns that writs and proclamations from Oxford were being delivered to judges or their clerks or servants in the Westminster courts prompted a Commons order that anyone involved in such activity ‘shall be proceeded against by the Law Martial, as Spies’.45 Resistance to parliamentary levies was notable in the Westminster area. There was a major clampdown on refusers in April 1643, with the collectors being backed up by military force,46 but the Commons rapidly became concerned that too many were being imprisoned and urged the need to release them as soon as they agreed to pay.47 There were real dangers for those who refused to pay the assessment of a twentieth part of their estates. Hugh Audley of the Inner Temple had his whole enormous estate sequestered for non-payment of the assessment, although once he paid the £3,000 required, the sequestration was lifted.48 Royalists in Oxford were anxious to portray these refusals to pay as evidence of royalist sympathies,49 and some parliamentarians were also keen to portray them as one strand of the Waller plot, aiming to overcome the army ‘if not by force, yet for want of supply and maintenance’.50 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

CJ, 16 Jan 1643. CJ, 15 May 1644. CJ, 7 Mar, 1 and 29 Apr 1643. CJ, 22 Jan 1644. CJ, 20, 24 and 25 Feb, 6, 11 and 14 Apr 1643. CJ, 17 and 18 Apr 1643 (cf. 12 May 1643). TNA, SP20/1, p. 242. Arguments over the payment of the £3,000 still dragged on for some years (CalCAM, I, 162–3; III, 1319). 49 Mercurius Aulicus, no. 15 (9–15 Apr 1643), p. 181. 50 A discovery of the great plot for the utter ruin of the City of London and the parliament (1643), sig. A2r.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 The rationale of sequestrations was that non-payment counted as delinquency, but this was more a matter of raising the stakes involved so as to force payment. Certainly, though, sequestration for non-payment involved plenty of people with parliamentarian sympathies too.51 Moreover, at least initially, attendance on the king at Oxford was not in itself grounds for sequestration. In the case of one Richard Greene, gentleman sewer to the king, who was attending Charles ‘by reason of his place and without any other Contribucon of Aid or Assistance against the parliament beinge reputed to be an honest man and well affected’, the Westminster Sequestrations Committee was instructed in December 1643 to discharge its sequestration order against him (although Greene would ultimately compound under the Oxford articles of surrender).52 There were some forms of less ambiguous low-level royalist activity apparent in the area, from outspoken verbal attacks on parliamentary leaders reported at the sessions to organized petitions. One peace petition in which some Westminster inhabitants would seem to have been involved was that presented by 5,000 or 6,000 white-ribboned women on 8 and 9 August 1643, which led to bloody confrontations between the women and the parliamentary guards and some troopers along the Strand.53 While some named men and many Southwark women were involved, one significant ringleader would appear to have been Lady Brouncker, a Westminster resident, whose husband, William (a gentleman of the privy chamber and vice-chamberlain to the Prince of Wales), was fighting in the royalist army in 1643–44.54 Of more concern to the authorities were two significant royalist plots in 1643 – those of Edmund Waller (May 1643) and of Sir Basil Brooke (December 1643–January 1644) – and these prompted a greater desire on the part of the authorities to smoke out those of royalist sympathies in the metropolis by means of an oath. The new ‘Oath and Covenant’ (also dubbed the ‘Vow and Covenant’) was ordered on 24 June 1643 to be tendered the following day ‘to every Man within the Cities of London and Westminster, and Liberties thereof’ in the parish churches after the afternoon sermon. Soon afterwards it was stipulated that any parishioners who failed to take the Vow and Covenant 51 E.g. Anthony Wither (M.A.E. Green (ed.), Calendar of the Committee for Compounding [5 vols, 1889–92], III, 2208) (hereafter CalCC). Similarly, local subsidy defaulters in 1645 included William Lenthall and Sir Anthony Irby: TNA, E179/143/322. 52 CalCC, II, 1490; TNA, SP20/1, p. 149. Note also Lord Saye’s intervention in the case of the earl of Southampton (ibid., pp. 92–3). 53 The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, no. 30 (8–15 August 1643), pp. 227–31; Mercurius Civicus, no. 11 (3–11 August 1643), pp. 86–8; Lindley, pp. 351–3. 54 It was reported that some of the women said that they had received the white ribbons which they wore ‘at the Lady Brunckhards house in Westminster’ and others ‘at other Ladies houses in other parts of the Suburbs’. They had also supposedly been directed ‘at such a Lords house’ (The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, no. 30 [8–15 August 1643], p. 230). On the Brounckers see also M.A.E. Green (ed.), Calendar of the Committee for the Advance of Money (3 vols, 1888) (hereafter CalCAM), I, 188, III, 1406; CalCC, II, 1543.

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Westminster 1640–60 should be visited in their homes by churchwardens to give them personal notice of another appointed day, and that subsequently certificates should be made and submitted to parliament listing all inhabitants who did not take the Vow. Where Westminster parochial sources survive, they indicate that this very intrusive inquisition was indeed carried out.55 The wording of the Vow generated some problems for convinced royalists, as, unlike earlier oaths, it involved no allusion to defending the king but required subscribers to swear that the parliament’s forces were raised for the just defence of true religion and the subjects’ liberties ‘against the Forces raised by the King’. Later in the same year, subscription to the more famous Solemn League and Covenant was launched in St Margaret’s Westminster, as we have seen, and was again in theory to be imposed on all inhabitants of London and Westminster (some two months before it was ordered to be imposed on the rest of the country).56 Again, Westminster parishes seem to have followed directions to make lists of those who did not subscribe the covenant and send them to parliament.57 The combination of a strong sequestrations drive in June and early July in the wake of the Waller plot, and the enforcement of the problematic Vow and Covenant, may lie behind a notable increase in the number of Westminster residents departing for Oxford this year. In the case of John Evelyn, the pressure of the Vow was enough to send him to the Continent. Thomas Fuller had initially taken the Vow in the vestry of the Savoy church with qualifications, but he departed for Oxford when he was again required to take the Vow.58 Matthew Plowman of Covent Garden managed to make a more dramatic exit. As a parliamentarian lieutenant of horse he received ‘some hundreds of pounds’ for his troop and then fled to the king, carrying the horse and arms with him.59 It is not clear that non-subscribers were systematically pursued. Certainly, parliament felt it necessary to initiate further moves in 1644 to target 55 CJ, 24 and 27 June 1643. St Mary le Strand records the purchase of a paper book to enter names of parishioners and residents ‘who were to take a new oath and covenant, by order of Parliament’, with further sums to supply bread, beer and wine in the vestry on the day appointed (the context makes it clear this is not the National Covenant) (WAC, vol. 22, fol. 399v). The ‘twoo paper books used for the Covenantt’ by St Clement’s (WAC, B11, 1643–44) also seem from the chronology not to refer to the Solemn League and Covenant. On the Vow and Covenant, see E. Vallance, ‘Protestation, Vow, Covenant and Engagement: Swearing Allegiance in the English Civil War’, Historical Research 75 (2002), pp. 415–17; LJ, 9 June 1643. Whitaker claimed of the taking of the Vow in parliament that only 15 out of 200 MPs did not take it, and they asked only for time to consider it (BL, Add. MSS 31116, fol. 55v). 56 CJ, 30 Nov 1643. On the taking of the Covenant see Vallance, ‘Protestation’, pp. 417–22. 57 E.g. WAC, vol. 22, fol. 400r. 58 Evelyn, II, 81–2; ODNB, s.n. Thomas Fuller. 59 CalCC, II, 1630–31. Plowman’s house was given to the minister of Covent Garden, Obadiah Sedgwick

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 Westminster institutions and individuals associated with royal government. In February 1644 the Commons urged that order be taken ‘that the Covenant may be tendered at Saint James’s and Whitehall, to all the King’s Servants, and Servants attending upon the King’s Children’.60 Westminster Abbey was next: two months later the Commons ordered ‘That all Persons whatsoever, belonging unto, or that have any Dependence upon, the Collegiate Church of Westminster, do take the National Covenant in the said Church, upon Saturday next, at Four of the Clock in the Afternoon’.61 We have noted elsewhere the Abbey’s takeover by parliamentary regimes, but it was still a source of conservative and indeed royalist opinion for much of the 1640s. The dean and chapter had contributed to collections for the relief of Irish Protestants in March 1642, but once hostilities began the prebendaries mostly fled to Oxford (their last chapter meeting was held in May 1642), although around 1645 it was said of two of them that he ‘sculkes up and downe’, presumably in the immediate neighbourhood. A survey of Abbey staff at this time noted that seven of the singing men had taken the Covenant and only two had not. Of the remainder, four were dead, three were at Oxford, one ‘in armes against the parliament’, one in prison (Mr White – the singing man arrested earlier for putting up royal proclamations in Westminster) and one ‘with the Bishopp’. More notable may have been the fact that none of the three schoolmasters was reported as having taken the Covenant, with Richard Busby described as being ‘sickly’ (presumably a diplomatic illness on the day that the Covenant was meant to be subscribed).62 Busby would later become notorious for his royalist sympathies.63 Another Abbey resident, the ex-teacher and prebendary Lambert Osbaldeston, was certainly a friend of parliament earlier on, but as early as 1644 one of his tenants was not paying rent to him ‘upon some pretence of Delinquency or cause of sequestration’, and his conservative sympathies were also well known in later years.64 Not taking the Covenant was not necessarily 60 A special oath was created for the servants of the king’s children to ensure their loyalty (for the full text see CJ, 3 June 1644). The Commons later urged the Lords to remember this (10 July 1644). 61 CJ, 22 Apr 1644. It was directed that ‘Dr. Smyth, or Mr. Gibson’ should administer the covenant. 62 TNA, SP28/193, fol. 276v; WAM, 43160. 63 Busby’s royalism is well known, but most descriptions of this are post-Restoration (e.g. Roger L’Estrange, Truth and loyalty vindicated [1662]). An intriguing and hitherto unnoticed letter from 1647 reveals his sympathies. While he expresses concerns about the army and the Independents, Busby’s greatest hostility is towards Presbyterians. It is they, he insists, who have destroyed king and church, and who are most likely to force unlawful oaths and covenants upon people: Durham University Library (hereafter DUL), Busby to Basire, Cosin Letter Book 1A, no. 45. I owe this reference to Anthony Milton. 64 TNA, SP20/1, p. 404. By 1647 Osbaldeston was notorious for his royalist sympathies: see Francis Cheynell, The sworne conspiracy (1647), p. 3. But he also had plenty of friends,

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Westminster 1640–60 the sign of a die-hard royalist, however; some parliamentarian MPs took their time, including Laurence Whitaker and Bulstrode Whitelocke.65 Any attempts to assess actual numbers of royalists in Westminster during the first civil war are fraught with difficulties. When Edmund Waller was later cross-examined over how strong the plotters’ party was in the city, he answered, ‘in the Citty three for one against them but in the outparts Five for one for them’. Waller himself came from the ‘outparts’ (his own house was at the lower end of Holborn, near Hatton House), but if his assessment of sentiment in the suburbs was true it is remarkable that so few people from outside the City of London were involved directly in the plot, beyond the earl of Clare and earl of Portland (both resident in St Clement Danes).66 This might imply a healthy degree of royalist sentiment in Westminster, but little taste for direct action. The Brooke plot was similarly dominated by people from London, with little direct Westminster input.67 Looking at individuals who were sequestered for their activity in the first civil war, the differing numbers would seem roughly proportionate to the differences in overall population: Lindley notes that about a quarter of the approximately 350 Londoners sequestered for delinquency came from Westminster. The disproportionate concentration of social elites in Westminster, however, is reflected in Lindley’s calculation that about half of the roughly 100 Londoners described in the relevant records as gentlemen or esquires and who were sequestered for delinquency came from Westminster and the western suburbs or extramural parishes.68 There are significant problems with these statistics, though. The Calendars of the Compounding Committee and the Committee for the Advance of Money do not provide comprehensive lists of people who were sequestered for delinquency: other sources refer to cases which do not appear in these records, and the surviving records of the Westminster Sequestrations Committee are frustratingly patchy.69 Moreover, as we have seen, household servants attending the king were not necessarily sequestered. In addition, the sequestration records are especially among ex-pupils like Hesilrige, and therefore continued to be protected. After the regicide, parliament allowed him a healthy annual income from his prebend: CJ, 18 Sept 1649; The diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke 1605–1675, ed. R. Spalding (Oxford, 1990), p. 246. 65 CJ, 30 Sept 1643. 66 BL, Harleian MSS 164, fol. 397r; A discovery of the great plot, sig. B1r; WAC, B24/A48, 1643–44); BL, Add. MSS 31116, fol. 55r. The plotters had also ‘nominated’ other local peers in the shape of Pembroke, Holland and Salisbury ‘but they had no Assurance of them’ (ibid., fol. 55r–v). One Dr Dunne, suspected of involvement in the plot, was apprehended at his house in Covent Garden: Mercurius Civicus, no. 6 (8–16 Jan 1643), pp. 46–7. On the plot see also Lindley, pp. 246–7, 348–50). 67 Lindley, pp. 353–4. 68 Ibid., pp. 248–54. 69 TNA, SP28/212. One of many examples of delinquents missing from the sequestration lists is Mr Mansfield, bailiff of the sanctuary (see WAM, 9678).

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 inevitably weighted towards more prosperous delinquents. Those with estates worth below £200 had their sequestrations discharged, as happened in the cases of Christopher Hills (a shoemaker in the Strand) and William Jessat (a joiner in St Martin’s) and was clearly the case with the Abbey singing men (and presumably with many of the more humble court servants).70 Calculations of the numbers of sequestered royalists from Westminster among the upper ranks of society may also be confused because of their multiple residences: a majority of the 360 ‘Westminster’ elite delinquents listed in a report of 1648 never appear in the local poor rate records.71 All that can be safely concluded is that contemporaries clearly sensed that there were disproportionate numbers of royalists based in Westminster, and that some tallies would seem partly to back up this impression. Direct royalist activity in the area may have been limited, but a more inchoate, background royalist sentiment may have been widespread. The people involved in the Waller plot had allegedly made a general survey of affection and position in the wards and parishes of the City and outskirts using three different categories: ‘Right men’, ‘Averse men’ and ‘Moderate men or Neuters’.72 It is possible that Waller’s remarks about the strength of royalist sentiment in the suburbs reflect these calculations, and, if so, it may be that it was ‘Moderate men’ who were considered to be prevalent in the suburbs – perhaps not likely activists, but at least liable to be well disposed. Such men might well have included those many signatories of the peace petition who never had their goods sequestered. In some of the parochial conservatism and latent royalism of the following years we may gain some hints of the voice of this silent majority. The end of the war brought a flood of compounding royalists to Westminster from the surrendered Oxford, and the authorities soon became nervous about the number of ex-royalists who were congregating in the area.73 There were continued ordinances to eject malignants and delinquents from the metropolis in 1647–48, and anxious exhortations from the Commons that these should be properly executed.74 The return of royal servants and officers must have created tensions when they now lived in close proximity to those who had taken over their positions: one can only guess at the atmosphere in Scotland Yard, where Inigo Jones and John Webb were living side by side with those who had usurped their positions.75 The return of royalists may also help at least in part to explain the newly 70 CalCC, II, 1131; III, 1844. On the limitations of this source see also Lindley, p. 248 and K. Lindley, ‘The part played by the Catholics’ in B. Manning (ed), Politics, religion and the English civil war (1973), pp. 132–4. 71 CalCC, I, 91–4. 72 A brief narrative of the late treacherous and horrid design (1643), p. 2. 73 CJ, 28 Oct and 26 Dec 1645; 31 Mar, 1 Apr, 6 May, 2 July, 7 and 10 Dec 1646. 74 CJ, 9 Sept, 16 Dec 1647; 14 and 17 Jan 1648; A&O, I, 986–7, 1140–1, 1166–8. 75 The History of the King’s Works, ed. H.M. Colvin (6 vols, 1963–82), IV, 158.

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Westminster 1640–60 overt forms of conservative sentiment evident in the Westminster parishes in the later 1640s, from the Christmas Day services in parish churches in 1647 to the forcing of passers-by in Westminster streets to drink healths to the king on his accession day in March 1648.76 Still more pointed was the ringing of church bells to mark the king’s birthday on 19 November 1648, which took place in St Clements, St Martin’s and St Margaret’s churches.77 Just as studied was the decision of St Margaret’s churchwardens to give five shillings in September 1648 ‘to Edward Moore a poore lame man to Redeeme his Angell of Gold which he received when he was touched for the kings evill, it being at pawne’.78 In the aftermath of the regicide, Westminster continued to be inhabited by significant numbers of ex-royalists throughout the 1650s. A list of local royalists drawn up for the major-generals in 1655 provides a valuable glimpse of those whom the authorities identified as such. In total, 278 royalists are listed in the Westminster parishes, of whom more than half are resident in St Martin’s and St Paul’s Covent Garden.79 While St Martin’s housed the highest number (110), the next greatest was St Clement Danes with 64, while only 43 dwelt in St Margaret’s. These royalists were not drawn exclusively from social elites – the lists include two labourers and a bricklayer, although their very presence highlights the relative paucity of such social categories among the rest. Of the 278, more than a third (102) were either titled or gentlemen or esquires, but the substantial majority were tradesmen whose trades were characteristic of the area. Thus, around thirty were connected with the food and drink trade, and there were also significant numbers of cooks, barbers and tailors. Other tradesmen included six goldsmiths, two stationers and a bodice-maker. There were some notable clusters of particular occupations, such as the twelve royalist hackney coachmen in St Martin’s parish. Such a concentration can help to explain the regularly voiced complaint that the trade was dominated by royalists.80 Another trade that caused understandable concern was that of the gunsmiths. There were four royalist gunsmiths in Westminster, and these included Harman Barnes, a St Clement’s gunsmith who was the regular target of government anxieties. Barnes had been required in 1650 to go twenty miles beyond the lines of communication and remain there till further order, and was placed under similar restrictions later in the 1650s.81 The eighteen royalists listed with a military title may also have caused the authorities concern, and this undoubtedly underestimates the number of 76 For these see p. 67 and pp. 228–30. 77 WAC, E28, F4, B11, 1648–49. 78 WAC, E28. 79 BL, Add. MSS 34016, fols 1–7. 80 For which see TNA, SP18/123, fol. 22r; 18/129, fol. 87; CSPD 1655–6, pp. 94–5; CSPD 1656–7, pp. 26–7, 74–6; Mercurius Politicus, no. 339 (4–11 Dec 1656), pp. 7428–9. 81 TNA, SP25/120, fol. 19; CSPD 1650, p. 514; Bodl., Rawlinson MSS C. 179, p. 19.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 listed tradesmen who had previously fought as officers in royalist armies. For example, Walter Bredall of St Martin’s is listed simply as ‘goldsmith’, yet he had been a lieutenant colonel in the duke of York’s regiment, and was involved in both the earl of Holland’s royalist uprising and Booth’s rising in 1659, for both of which he furnished himself with a horse and arms.82 Some of the listed royalists had been prosecuted only a few years earlier: John Clerke (a physician resident in St Martin’s) was required in 1650 to give a bond to leave the realm within five days.83 Nor were the listed royalists merely passive ones. On the contrary, they included diehard royalists whose proximity to plotters continued to arouse concern. John Chase, the apothecary to the Prince of Wales, had first been arrested as a malignant back in 1643, and had been allowed to visit the king’s children at various times. But in the 1650s his house was regularly identified as a place where royalist plotters congregated, and letters to him were intercepted by the authorities.84 Even when resident royalists were not directly involved in plots themselves, Westminster often played host to royalist plotting. The 1654 plotters under examination reported meetings ‘walking … in Covent-garden walks’ and St James’s Park. The public houses of Covent Garden, in particular, were regularly the preferred destination for surreptitious royalist meetings.85 Westminster might seem the natural place for royalist plots: not only because of the proximity of the hated usurpers, but because its spaces still carried resonances of the regicide. The site of the royal martyrdom was a place of portents in the 1650s that were eagerly circulated among royalists, with ‘the rayneing of blood at St James’ Parke’ in 1654 and ‘fire breaking out of the ground where the Kings scaffold stood’ in 1655.86 For royalists dwelling in Westminster, life was often lived under the shadow of active surveillance, even if those who were permanent residents were exempted from the proclamations that occasionally expelled ex-royalists from the metropolis.87 Certainly they could expect to have their mail regularly 82 TNA, SP29/5, fol. 72r. 83 CSPD 1650, p. 120. 84 CJ, 2 May 1643, 19 Aug 1648. Lady Gennings reported in 1653 that royalist plotters sent letters to Chase in Covent Garden (T. Birch (ed.), A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe [7 vols, 1742], I, 749), and in 1655 there were reports that he was entertaining agents of King Charles and that his house was a rendezvous for royalist plotters (ibid., III, 343, 350). For intercepted letters to Chase see e.g. ibid., V, 651. 85 Ibid., II, 331, 332, 341, 350, 351, 352. 86 D. Gardiner (ed.), The Oxinden and Peyton letters 1642–1670 (1937), p. 211. 87 Thus the July 1655 proclamation ejected ex-royalists ‘unless it be their places of Habitation for themselves and Families’, or else if they ‘shall not be able to travel without imminent Danger of Life’: By the Protector. A proclamation commanding all persons, who have been of the late Kings party, or his sons, to depart out of the cities of London and Westminster, and late lines of communication on or before Thursday the twelfth day of July instant (1655). In October 1655 the July proclamation was renewed, requiring all royalists

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Westminster 1640–60 intercepted.88 Writing while in London in December 1655, the royalist Sir Henry Oxinden reported bluntly that ‘as for publique newes, men are afrayd to speake one to another, though friends’, and begged his wife ‘let none of my letters bee seene, nor report any newes against the present proceedings, times are now so as a man can hardly walke securely’.89 If they stayed, though, they could be subject to the rigours of the decimation tax, and although the figures for Westminster do not survive, there is nothing to suggest that the tax was not imposed as rigorously as elsewhere.90 Secretary Nicholas wrote in March 1656 that many gentlemen were leaving the capital, choosing rather to fall into the hands of the county Major-Generals rather than those appointed for London and Middlesex.91 It is evident that not one of the Westminster royalists listed in the 1650s report played any significant role in parish affairs in these years.92 It is therefore tempting to treat them as a discrete minority, surgically removed from the local community. But this would be unwise. The sessions also heard regular accounts of royalist sentiments being expressed by local people whose names do not appear in the listing, such as Edward Ordway of St Clement Danes, gunmaker, ‘for speaking seditious words against the Parliament’ and James Afflack, a gentleman of St Martin’s, for spreading false rumours regarding the army’s lack of success in Scotland ‘and sayd that none of the newes was to beseene in the bookes’.93 Pro-royalist and anti-Cromwell sentiments continued to be indicted at the Westminster sessions throughout the 1650s.94 There were also clearly some important and dedicated royalists resident in temporarily resident in London and Westminster to leave the capital within a fortnight (TNA, SP25/76A, pp. 137–8). 88 The published Thurloe State Papers contain intercepted letters sent to twelve different addresses in Westminster, seven of which are in Covent Garden: Thurloe, I, 311, 402–3; II, 317, 322–3, 340–1, 349–50, 359, 439–40, 541–2, 553, 557–8; IV, 737; V, 267, 651, 713. 89 BL, Add. MSS 28003, fol. 327v. 90 J.T. Cliffe, ‘The Cromwellian decimation tax of 1655: the assessment lists’ in Camden Miscellany XXXIII (Camden Society, 5th ser. 7, 1996). One stray example is the earl of Bedford, who was assessed by the Middlesex commissioners at £300 p.a. for an estate worth £3,000 p.a. within Middlesex and the City of Westminster (ibid., pp. 452, 490). See also the earl of Berkshire: Thurloe, IV, 764–75. 91 CSPD 1655–6, p. xii. But contrast with this the suggestion in P.H. Hardacre, The royalists during the Puritan revolution (The Hague, 1956), pp. 73–4 that sequestrators in the capital were less predatory than were the county committees. 92 One rare exception is the parish of Covent Garden, where eight of the listed royalists signed a petition against the vestry (The case of many of the inhabitants of Covent Garden [1655], pp. 2–3). In this case, the organizers of the petition were anxious to maximize the number of gentry and titled residents signing a petition against what they represented as a vestry dominated by more humble residents. Here, at least, social status trumped royalism. 93 Jeaffreson, pp. 196–7, 205. 94 E.g. LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/102, p. 5; MJ & WJ/SB/B/132, p. 26; MJ & WJ/SB/B/141, p. 24.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 Westminster who managed to remain beneath the authorities’ radar. Notable among these was John Adler, who lived in St Martin’s Lane and was later reported to have ‘layd out hinselfe and the best part of his estate to serve his Majesty frinds and was a Zoare to hide the clargey and other of his Majestys frinds’ during the time of the protectorate. The ejected bishop of Salisbury, Brian Duppa, referred to Adler in the 1650s as ‘the honest merchant of St Martin’s Lane’ and the ‘one righteous Lot’ whom he relied on to convey letters and money among fellow royalists. It was only after the king’s formal return to London that Adler’s royalist convictions were publicly revealed, when he made a bonfire before his house, with wine and fireworks which depicted the king’s arms on the side of the house, while medals with the king’s picture were thrown out of the windows for onlookers to catch.95 But apart from hidden individuals such as Adler, there seems to have been a broader constituency of royalist sympathizers in the area. They can perhaps be glimpsed in the sermon preached in 1657 at the funeral of one of the listed royalists, one George Haycock, a combmaker in the parish of St Clement Danes. The sermon was preached in St Clement’s church by the erstwhile royalist Thomas Fuller. Fuller makes it quite clear that Haycock was a royalist: he was (Fuller remarked) ‘an excellent subject; for according to that which his conscience (with many others) conceived to be loyaltie: he lost much of, and hazarded all his estate’. Fuller is candid, though, about the dangers of speaking too openly: the evil of the present times ‘is more dangerous then difficult to describe, and may with more safety be confest by the hearers, then exprest by the Preacher in his place’. He advises his congregation to steer a path between those who refuse to have any dealings with the current evil times and those who are ‘but slaves and vassals to the age they live in, prostituting their consciences to do any thing … to be a Favourite to the Times’. There is nothing to suggest that Fuller did not consider the assembled congregation to be of the same beliefs of Haycock’s (and, evidently, of Fuller himself).96 Preaching in the same year in the neighbouring parish of St Margaret’s on the text ‘if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it’, the minister John Vyner (soon to be silenced by Cromwell’s direct intervention) spoke in similar terms. Emphasizing the need to bear evils and afflictions, he urged his congregation to wait on God rather than try to rid themselves of their affliction ‘by any unlawfull meanes’. True patience should make them ‘meeke spirited even towards such men as have had any hand in our a­ ffliction’; God 95 The correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham 1650–1660, ed. G. Isham (Northamptonshire Record Society 17, 1951), pp. 83, 106, 141; Rugg, pp. 91, 100. Zoar was the city that offered refuge to Lot and was therefore spared destruction (Gen. 19: 20–23). Adler was knighted by the king for his services. 96 Thomas Fuller, A sermon preached at St Clemens Danes, at the funeral of Mr George Heycock (1657), pp. 13–15, 21.

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Westminster 1640–60 would deal with those who had committed sins. The preaching of o ­ bedience and forbearance was impeccable, but it was just as clear that Vyner and his congregation were waiting and praying for a royal restoration.97 Government by committee: the limits  of  local  government? If royalists were necessarily excluded from the government of Westminster in the 1640s and 1650s, into whose hands did local government actually fall? As we have already stressed, regardless of the presence or absence of royalists, the outbreak of the civil war posed serious problems for the government of Westminster. The area was always hampered by its lack of corporate status, which meant that there was no town corporation with executive powers. It had regularly relied on the intervention of the king and privy council, the regulations of prerogative courts and the oversight of the dean and chapter. With the king and his privy council absent, the dean and chapter fled (and ultimately dissolved), and the prerogative courts already or soon to be abolished, there was a serious vacuum in the government of the locality. This would swiftly be filled by a combination of old and new institutions, manned by a shifting range of new and old personnel, and the nature of the power being exercised would change to reflect both changing requirements and diversifying membership. The legitimacy of, and the precise authority and power being wielded by, these new institutions was, however, far from self-evident – issues of overlap and potential conflict were seldom far from the surface. Much authority, of course, fell into the hands of parliament. The Houses exercised a great deal of de facto authority in Westminster in the 1640s, as urgent problems and a lack of clarity over where authority lay, led them to conduct extraordinarily meticulous micromanagement of the area around parliament. This can be seen in their recommending lecturers, setting up committees to administer parishes in the absence of royalist clergymen and directing the reform of misbehaviour during Abbey services. It can also be observed in measures to combat the spread of plague. Not only did the Commons in September 1646 direct a specific payment of £100 to the overseers of the poor of St Margaret’s to pay the watchmen attending the doors of shut-up houses, but in September 1647 it intervened in the case of a single individual. It ordered the JPs and the vestries of St Margaret’s and St Martin’s to take care that one Hasilton whose House is visited with the Sickness, be kept in, according to the Course in the like Cases: And that he do not open his House, or his Shop Windows, or utter or 97 Christ Church Oxford, MS 451, ‘1657 May 17 Mr Vyner Rom. 8.25’ [unfoliated] – see also Chapter 6. I would like to thank Anthony Milton for drawing this source to my attention.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 make Sale of any Wares: And if he shall be refractory, and not conform to the said Course, that then they shall have Power to send him to the next Pest House, to be maintained at the Charge of Martin’s Parish; and the Governors of the next Pest House are required to receive him accordingly.98

Specific parliamentary committees were also entrusted with longer-term tasks – such as the committee for Whitehall, and especially that for Westminster College (the Abbey).99 In the case of Westminster College, but also in a range of other forms of ad hoc parliamentary involvement in Westminster’s local affairs, the understandable preference of the House was to empower those MPs who were local residents. Parliamentary authority was thus channelled through particular members, who were seen as having especial expertise and authority in the area and were more regularly invested with specific responsibility for Westminster. As a result, some MPs came to be very prominent indeed in local affairs, to a degree never before witnessed. This was of course true of Westminster’s own MPs, William Bell and, especially, John Glynne (who had a major parliamentary profile in his own right). But there was a range of other MPs, elected for other parts of the country, who were often long-term Westminster residents. It has been estimated that at least forty Long Parliament MPs ‘had lived for some time in the shadows of Whitehall’, even not counting previous MPs or those with offices in the royal administration or household.100 Chief among these were members of the exchequer (most notably Sir Robert Pye, and others with fiscal experience, such as his colleague William Wheeler). Their financial expertise meant that they played a major role in orchestrating aspects of the parliamentarian war effort (along with their close colleague the non-MP Thomas Fauconberge).101 As well as their national responsibilities, they were also often recruited to supervise the war effort specifically in the Westminster area. MPs who were regularly called upon to oversee Westminster affairs were Sir Robert Harley (a resident of St Margaret’s, and major force in the reform of Westminster’s churches and the Abbey) and the Middlesex MP and JP Sir Gilbert Gerrard. Other long-term residents who were regularly recruited to relevant committees dealing with Westminster’s affairs included Sir John Clotworthy and John Trenchard (who had a town-house in Covent Garden).102 Many prominent local MPs served on the committee for Westminster College. The initial Abbey committee included Pye, Glynne and Wheeler, 98 CJ, 10 Sept 1646, 4 Sept 1647. 99 CJ, 13 Jan 1644. 100 M.F. Keeler, The Long Parliament (Philadelphia, 1954), p. 21. 101 D. Pennington, ‘The accounts of the kingdom 1642–1649’ in F.J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the economic and social history of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 182–203. 102 Keeler, Long Parliament, p. 364.

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Westminster 1640–60 alongside Sir Walter Erle, Sir Robert Harley, Sir Gilbert Gerrard, Sir John Clotworthy and Sir William Masham. Members of the Lords also belonged to the committee, and among them we might have expected the earl of Pembroke, as the long-serving high steward of Westminster, to play a dominant role on the committee. There is, however, no evidence of this – indeed, a letter of supplication from him to the committee in 1647 makes plain his lack of influence upon it.103 Other notable local figures were fed onto the committee during the 1640s.104 Members of parliament who also served as Westminster or Middlesex JPs played a particularly significant role in implementing policy in these years. This was true of Pye, Wheeler and Glynne, but also of Laurence Whitaker (another administrator who had managed a seamless transition from royal to parliamentary service), who served on the bench up until his death in 1654.105 Sir Gilbert Gerrard and Sir John Francklyn, the Middlesex MPs and JPs, also became ubiquitous on parliamentary committees pertinent to Westminster. Humphrey Edwards, the recruiter MP and later regicide, was also a very active figure in Westminster affairs, appearing on the bench several years before his election as a recruiter MP and being a regular presence thereafter.106 Justices of the Peace who were not members of parliament did not have this distinctive combination of legislative and executive roles, but they could nevertheless also play a significant role in implementing policy in the area. Some members of the bench, such as Edward Wardour and Endymion Porter, were royalists who left to join the king, although George Long, despite his royalist sympathies, continued to serve on the bench for much of the 1640s.107 But there was a strong body of parliamentarian JPs who sat on the bench throughout the 1640s, and sometimes beyond, and who thus provided an important degree of consistency and continuity in local government. Notably active JPs in this respect were John Hooker (who had been a JP in the 1630s), Laurence Swetnam and Edward Carter.108 It is sometimes suggested by historians that JPs were effectively superseded in the 1640s by new, centrally appointed committees, but there is ample evidence in Westminster that new figures in local politics swiftly moved onto the bench of JPs.109 103 WAM, 9633. Pembroke’s name appears on virtually none of the surviving orders and minutes of the Committee preserved in the Abbey muniments. 104 E.g. CJ, 27 Mar 1645. 105 D. Pennington, ‘The making of the war, 1640–1642’ in D. Pennington and K. Thomas (eds), Puritans and revolutionaries (Oxford, 1978), p. 164; TNA, C193/13/4, fols 127r–129v. 106 Edwards appears as a JP in the late spring of 1642, signing the St Martin’s churchwardens’ accounts: WAC, F3, fol. 345. 107 See e.g. LMA, MJ/SR 965. 108 LMA, WJ/E/B/002. 109 D. Underdown, ‘Settlement in the counties, 1653–1658’ in G. Aylmer (ed.), The interregnum: the quest for settlement 1646–1660 (1974), p. 168.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 Nevertheless, much local power in the 1640s was typically exercised by local committees set up to handle specific tasks, most notably the organization of the militia, sequestrations and the raising of revenue. In many parts of the country these activities were integrated by the creation of county committees in the winter of 1642–43 by special ordinances, whereas others simply evolved from the meetings of deputy lieutenants and JPs.110 In Westminster the different committees were never formally combined, although there was inevitably a certain degree of overlap, and increasingly individuals were appointed to serve on all the committees at once.111 County committees may have often been based on established local leaders, but they could include comparatively obscure men, and in royalist areas in particular the committees might have had to go quite far down the social scale to find well-affected officials.112 Westminster had certainly lost some of its prominent figures, but there was of course a ready supply of local MPs and JPs. There had never been a formal level of local government operative beyond the parishes and the Court of Burgesses. These do not, however, seem to have provided most of the committee members. Westminster’s own Sequestrations Committee was comfortably one of the busiest. The membership of the Westminster Sequestrations Committee, established by the 27 March ordinance, was not made up of the most hard-line parliamentarians.113 The seven MPs appointed, who included local figures such as Pye, Ashton, Glynne, Trenchard, Wheeler and Bell, played little part in practice. The other members were local tradesmen. Remarkably, these included a peace petitioner – the St Martin’s vestryman George ­Blenerhassett. Other members included two members of the Court of Burgesses (John Brigham and William Barnes) and two chapelwardens of Covent Garden – Anthony Wither, and Josias Fendall – former clients of the fourth earl of Bedford who had clashed acrimoniously with their fellow parishioners.114 This, then, represented a very selective choice of existing local officials below the gentry (although it could have been argued that Pye, Glynne, Wheeler and Bell were all, theoretically, members of St Margaret’s vestry, and Ashton of St 110 Pennington, ‘Accounts’, p. 192; A.M. Everitt, The community of Kent and the great rebellion (Leicester, 1966), ch. 1; A. Hughes, Politics, society and civil war in Warwickshire 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 5. 111 E.g. the Commons order ‘That Mr. Francis Gerard be one of, and added to all the Committees of Westminster and Middlesex’ (CJ, 5 May 1645) [my italics]). Cf. Hughes, Politics, society and civil war, p. 172–3. 112 Pennington, ‘Accounts’, p. 192. 113 A&O, I, 106–117 at p. 114. Compare also the membership of the Middlesex Sequestrations Committee. 114 See J.F. Merritt, ‘“Voluntary bounty and devotion to the service of God”? Lay Patronage, Protest and the Creation of the Parish of St Paul Covent Garden, 1629–41’, English Historical Review 125 (2010).

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Westminster 1640–60 Martin’s). The Committee treasurer and parish collectors were also non-signatories of the peace petition.115 It was this Committee that was required to transgress most directly its traditional local obligations by being willing to dispossess and prosecute its royalist neighbours. It is not clear that the Committee exercised notable restraint in dealing with local inhabitants, however; it was regularly called upon to review its sequestration orders, and Wither and Fendall were charged with corruption.116 In 1644 the Commons nominated and approved a significant block of new appointees to the Committee.117 These included Edward Martin and John Biscoe, who had already served on the Court of Burgesses (although neither had signed the peace petition).118 Two particularly significant new appointees were Sir Gregory Norton and Humphrey Edwards. These men were close friends and allies (indeed, when Norton died in 1652 he settled most of his estate on Edwards, rather than on his own son)119 and both were seemingly keen to play an increasing role in local administration: Edwards had been serving as a Westminster JP and vestryman of St Martin’s, and Norton would joined the same vestry soon afterwards.120 Both Norton and Edwards had been gentlemen pensioners at the court in the 1630s (indeed, Edwards had allegedly been among those mustered in support of the king when he attempted to arrest the Five Members). But they had both become strong political Independents, both were appointed to parliament as recruiter MPs (Norton in October 1645 and Edwards in 1646) and both would later be regicides. It was perhaps oddly appropriate that in the former courtly enclave of Westminster, its most politically radical local governors were themselves erstwhile courtiers. Norton’s appointment to the Committee was not good news for Westminster’s royalists. In September 1645 he petitioned the Commons that he should receive £1,000 ‘out of such Papists and Delinquents Estates, not yet discovered, as he shall discover; and that he shall hold and enjoy the sequestred House of

115 John Jackson and George Crompton. While there are several ‘John Jacksons’ on the peace petition none of the signatures corresponds with those of John Jackson the committee treasurer. 116 There were abuses and corruption in all county committees, but that by Wither and Fendall ‘touching a Postscript set to a Certificate made by the Committee of Westminster, in the Business of Mr. Eyton’s Sequestration’ caused particular scandal. When in August 1645 the Commons set up a committee to examine abuses in sequestrations it was ordered that this case should be its first item of business: CJ, 16 Aug 1645. For charges against Wither see also TNA, SP28/212, pt. 2, fols 98–101v; SP28/237, pt. 2, fol. 201. 117 CJ, 5 Aug 1644; TNA, SP28/212 pt. 1, fol. 90r. 118 Lindley’s categorization of these two men as ‘radicals’ (Lindley, pp. 146, 220) is based on little direct evidence and ignores their roles on the Court of Burgesses. 119 ODNB, s.n. Gregory Norton, Humphrey Edwards. 120 WAC, F3, fol. 345; F2002, fols 138v, 147.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 Sir Roger Palmer, in Westminster’.121 The arrival of Norton and Edwards on the Sequestrations Committee marks a more radical swing in Westminster’s local government. One of the most controversial committees was the Westminster Militia Committee. Initially this was just a sub-committee of the London Militia Committee, established in August 1643. Unlike the Sequestrations Committee, no MPs were initially listed as even honorary members, and its early members were drawn from among the lesser ranks of Westminster’s local officials, and some of them had played no role at all in pre-1640 parochial government. Certainly they did not include any peace petitioners. That having been said, they were far from being the marginal and ‘radical’ group that some historians have suggested. The treasurer, John Honnor of St Martin’s, was a wealthy investor in the Irish adventurers, and nearly all of the others would soon be acting as JPs, including Edward Carter, Lawrence Swetnam, William Haberfield and even the future republican and Baptist Josias Berners. Carter and Swetnam were nominated in 1645 as lay triers in the abortive eleventh classis of the London Provincial Assembly, based in Westminster.122 With the increasing demands of the war, and then in the febrile political and military atmosphere of the later 1640s, Westminster’s Militia Committee became increasingly important, and this was reflected both in the swelling numbers of committee members and in their higher social status (although many of these senior members held what were effectively honorary positions). By the time of the ordinance re-establishing it in September 1647, the original committee of seven had swelled to a board of thirty-seven men that included four MPs (headed by Norton and Edwards) and John Brown, the clerk of the parliament.123 By 1659 the Committee had no fewer than ninety-nine members.124 The Committee was charged with various tasks, of which the basic one was raising troops: it was required to gather together all people ‘meet and fit for the wars’ and to train and equip them. But it was also tasked with securing the funds to pay for them. This meant that the Committee was given the power to levy rates to maintain the forces, and to use force to collect them. It is worth emphasizing just what this meant. The Committee was empowered to demand accounts from all collectors and receivers and to raise the arrears 121 CJ, 10 Sept 1645. Norton had been petitioning the Commons a week and a half before his appointment to the Sequestrations Committee: while its contents are unclear, the petition presumably reflected a desire for remuneration, as it was referred to the Committee for His Majesty’s Revenue (CJ, 20 July 1644). 122 A&O, I, 267–71, 796; Lindley, pp. 332–3. Lindley somewhat exaggerates the marginal and ‘radical’ nature of these appointees. Carter, for example, was also a member of the King’s Works, whose members had traditionally played a prominent role in St Martin’s parish government (see Merritt, pp. 115–17). 123 A&O, I, 1011–12. 124 Ibid., II, 1290. Membership had increased to fifty-six in March 1649 (ibid., II, 20–21).

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Westminster 1640–60 of former assessments (by distraining goods if necessary). It could imprison without bail any man or woman who did not appoint and pay the costs of a soldier to serve on their behalf if their age or sex prevented them from serving in person; and it could also imprison or fine anyone who did not respond to musters. By the late 1650s it even had the power to examine people on oath.125 The Militia Committee was also routinely allocated to a range of other miscellaneous duties. Thus the Commons charged it at various times with ejecting delinquents and papists, and with taking down stages and seats in playhouses in the area.126 Given this extraordinary range of intrusive, extra-legal powers, it is not surprising that it was felt necessary for parliamentary orders and ordinances to emphasize repeatedly that Committee members were carrying out their duties ‘by Authority and for the service of the Parliament’.127 The members of the Militia Committee seems to have been constantly anxious about its legal authority, and a series of additional ordinances and parliamentary orders were required to assure it of its authority to disarm recusants or punish disobedient constables.128 There would undoubtedly have been substantial local hostility to its activities, although this rarely finds overt expression in the surviving records. Mark Howsley, a musician of St Martin’s who had signed the peace petition, may have spoken for many when, in April 1645, he was fined at the Westminster sessions for ‘scandalizing the committee of the militia’. At the same sessions Walter Poolehouse of St Martin’s was even indicted for assaulting and wounding Sir Gregory Norton.129 As one of the Militia Committee’s basic jobs was to secure adequate local funds for the army, it also appointed a series of local collectors to secure the relevant funds.130 In 1642 many of these collectors had been active local vestrymen, minor officials, even assistant burgesses, and they had included some peace petitioners.131 But, as with the Militia Committee, some figures from outside parochial elites were also appointed, and increasingly the post 125 A&O, I, 271–2, 1011–12, 1063–4; II, 20–3, 1292. 126 CJ, 17 Jan, 26 July 1648. 127 E.g. A&O, I, 1012. 128 The Committee requested further authority when instructed to disarm recusants (CJ, 1 Sept 1645). In January 1648 it complained to the House of Lords that it had ‘noe power to punish Constables for any neglect’ when local constables had failed to make returns of names of Westminster inhabitants to be listed for the trained bands and auxiliaries (the chief focus of its ire was the high constable of Westminster, Robert Flood, for his failure to circulate petty constables with the warrants in time, but Flood was a local figure of some consequence) (HLRO, Main Papers, 17 Jan 1648). Flood did not serve as high constable for 1648, but his will is dated 5 June 1648 (TNA, PCC Prob 11/204) and it is illness that presumably explains both his dilatoriness and his removal from office. 129 LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/56, pp. 45, 46, 49. 130 A&O, I, 268. 131 See pp. 61, 129, 159.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 pof assessment collector was confined to those who had not signed the peace petition, and included some more obscure and radical figures.132 This wave of new committees with apparently sweeping powers inevitably raised potential questions about the authority and jurisdiction of older institutions within Westminster, especially when it came to replacing local office holders. The Sequestrations Committee often seems to have taken it upon itself to make appointments to local offices when it had no obvious authority to do so. As early as July 1643 it appointed a new parish clerk for St Martin’s. It then gave John Arnold, one of messengers to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, the vacant post of Bailiff of the Sanctuary (in the place of its previous delinquent occupant), only for Arnold to then be told that it was the Committee for the College of Westminster that had the power to appoint to the position.133 But the authority of the Committee for the College of Westminster was itself questionable. When the Committee removed the Abbey receiver, John Okeley, in 1645, a committee of the Lords and Commons was then set up to enquire why Okeley had been dismissed, ‘he having a Patent during his Life’, and to review the ordinance for the regulation of the Abbey.134 When the College Committee appointed two new city appraisers the following year, two others made themselves appraisers and maintained that the Committee did not have the power to make the other appointments.135 Extraordinarily, Westminster’s high steward, the earl of Pembroke, also had to write to the Committee in 1647, when it was proceeding to appoint a new bailiff of Westminster, to point out that it had always been his right as high steward to nominate to whom they should make the grant.136 For all this bewildering range of different committees, commissions and levels of administration, and the appointment of new committee members from outside pre-war parochial elites, a new governing elite was starting to emerge within the government and administration of the town of Westminster. Among these upper ranks of local government, perhaps the most ubiquitous group were those whose government service and work as MPs was 132 Lindley, pp. 219–20. 133 CJ, 25 July 1643; WAM, 9678. 134 CJ, 7 Nov 1645 (cf. 17 Nov 1645). 135 WAM, 42820. 136 WAM, 9633. Similarly, when parliament the following year sought to remove John Glynne from the office of steward of Westminster (having already ejected him from the Commons) it had to request Pembroke as high steward to do this (CJ, 29 Jan 1648). Pembroke would seem to have only half-complied, appointing Thomas Latham to the office of ‘deputy steward’ without formally dismissing Glynne. On 8 June 1648 the Commons resolved ‘That it be left to the Earl of Pembroke, to dispose of the Place of Steward of Westminster, as he shall think fit’ (CJ). The Commons had received a petition the previous day for Glynne to be readmitted as MP, and it had presumably decided to allow his recall, so that there was no longer a reason to seek his exclusion as steward.

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Westminster 1640–60 combined with strong links to the area, service as JPs and often an active role in local vestries. Those belonging to this virtual oligarchy were by no means new names in Westminster, but extremely familiar ones from the pre-war bureaucracy. It has been noted that a number of second-rank royal officials moved almost seamlessly from the service of the crown to that of parliament, seeing this ‘more as a change in the circumstances of their job than a reversal of its purposes’. This would seem to hold true especially for Sir Robert Pye (Auditor of the Receipt in the exchequer), as well as for William Wheeler and Thomas Fauconberge (the Receiver-General of Revenues).137 This tight-knit group of exchequer officials would prove themselves indispensable to the war effort, but they were also established Westminster residents who would continue to play an important role at many levels of local affairs (Fauconberge, for example, also served as Receiver General for Westminster Abbey in 1645–48).138 This made for a very cohesive administrative elite, even within the shifting politics of civil war. Most of them had active and family links with royalists, and their main characteristic was pragmatism rather than reforming zeal. Pye has been described as ‘an active, if only marginally parliamentarian’ and ‘a somewhat lukewarm parliamentarian’, while William Wheeler had royalist connections through his wife, who was reportedly the king’s laundress, and the baronetcy that he was rewarded with at the Restoration arguably reflected tacit support for royalism that predated the king’s return.139 The purging of Westminster? The dominance of this elite group of administrators, and the careers of all those involved in the upper levels of Westminster’s government, would be unsettled, however, by political events. For all the apparent continuity of these networks of administrators, government was often marked by significant change. All these new committees and officials were appointed and dismissed directly by parliament, and therefore they inevitably reflected the changing political situation. Already during the first civil war there had been a tendency for more hard-line parliamentarians to be appointed to those committees that governed Westminster. The rapidly escalating political crisis in the later 1640s inevitably led to regular purges and changes in the governors of the area. In the so-called ‘counter-revolution’ of the summer of 1647, Westminster’s governing MPs were split down the middle, between those who remained and those who fled to the army. Westminster’s own most prominent MP, John Glynne, was a noted supporter of the political Presbyterians and remained at 137 Pennington, ‘Making of the war’, p. 164. 138 WAM, 33422 (see also 42256). 139 Aylmer, pp. 24, 253; Keeler, Long Parliament, p. 387.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 Westminster, but among those who fled to the army were Norton, Edwards and (interestingly) Whitaker. When Fairfax’s army entered London the tables were turned, and Glynne was subsequently suspended from parliament, albeit by a very narrow vote, while a local MP, Sir Anthony Irby, replaced him on the Committee of Westminster College.140 A purge of the Militia Committee followed, while new commissioners for assessment – including the JP John Hooker – were also appointed for the conservative parishes of Clement Danes and the Savoy.141 Pride’s Purge the following year led to a further winnowing of opponents of the army. Those ejected included the recently restored Glynne (whose recall had been petitioned for by local inhabitants), but this time he was accompanied by many other MPs who had played a significant role in Westminster’s affairs, including the other Westminster MP, William Bell, and also Sir Robert Pye, William Wheeler, Sir John Clotworthy, Sir Walter Erle, Sir John Evelyn, Nathaniel Fiennes, Sir Gilbert Gerrard, Sir Robert Harley, Sir Anthony Irby and Sir Richard Wynn. The City of Westminster now had no formal representation in parliament. But some prominent, locally resident Westminster people remained in the Rump, notably Michael Oldisworth, Laurence Whitaker, Robert Scawen, Sir John Trevor, John Trenchard and Sir William Masham, as well as regicides such as Norton and Edwards. Westminster’s two most prominent noblemen – Pembroke and Salisbury – were two of only three peers sitting in the Rump Parliament.142 The purging of MPs necessarily also involved the purging of those parliamentary committees which played a role in Westminster’s government. The Committee for Westminster College was replaced the following year by the ‘Governors of the School and Almshouses of Westminster’, from which more than half of the original Abbey Committee had effectively been ejected.143 The new institution had a numerically strong body of notorious regicides – including the ubiquitous Humphrey Edwards – alongside some survivals from the earlier Committee, notably Sir John Trevor, Sir William Masham and Humphrey Salaway, who were among the more active members of both the Committee and the Governors.144 Trevor and Masham also maintained significant local profiles in the 1650s on other Westminster committees. The famous Isaac Pennington was also an assiduous member of the Governors in the 1650s: from 1653 he was rated for a house in Dean’s Yard, his shift of focus from London to Westminster being reflected in the marriage of his son in 140 CJ, 7 Sept 1647; 16 Mar 1648. 141 Post-purge members are listed in A&O, I, 1011; CJ, 23 Oct 1647. For St Clement’s conservatism, see Chapter 6. 142 CJ, 20 Dec 1648, 18 Sept 1649. 143 A&O, I, 803–5; II, 257. For some ejections and new appointments to the Committee before the creation of the Governors see CJ, 19 Apr, 27 Nov 1648; 5 Feb, 2 Apr 1649. 144 See for example WAM, 422209, 42489, 43334.

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Westminster 1640–60 St Margaret’s church in 1654.145 The most notable new member of the Abbey Governors, though, was John Bradshaw, the Lord President of the Council of State. Although Bradshaw did not fully succeed in his attempt to consolidate his position in the area by gaining the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, his kinsman Peter was nevertheless made steward of the liberty and served regularly on the Westminster commission of the peace for the rest of the 1650s.146 The board of Abbey Governors was not purged during the various alterations of national government after 1653, so that republicans remained a force in the Abbey. Thus Bradshaw, despite his dismissal from the Council of State and opposition to the protectorate, remained an active member of the Governors, and can be found signing orders in 1654 and 1657, while living in state in the former dean’s house.147 Below the MPs, spokesmen for the local inhabitants moved swiftly to petition the new regime after Pride’s Purge, assuring it of their support,148 and there were further rewards of local office for those who had supported the army (thus Silvanus Taylor became a Trustee for the securing of soldiers’ arrears).149 Of the committees that had played such a powerful role in Westminster affairs, the Sequestrations Committee was eclipsed as parliament assumed direct control of sequestered estates and composition fines. But the Militia Committee was purged and then expanded in membership and given new powers.150 It remained very active. As well as its obvious military duties151 the Committee fulfilled a diverse range of other functions: it was even ordered in July 1649 to ‘take care that timely Notice be given to the several Ministers, for the due Observation of a Day of Fasting and Humiliation’.152 The bench of local JPs was purged, but this mostly represented a removal of its upper ranks of honorary members.153 New assessment commissioners 145 WAM, 42930; WAC, E167–72; Memorials of St Margaret’s church Westminster, ed. A.M. Burke (1914), p. 366. 146 ODNB, s.n. John Bradshaw; TNA, DL 41/617; C193/13/4, fols 127r–129v; C193/13/6, fols 113r–115r; C193/13/5, fols 135r–137v. 147 WAM, 42908A, 42991–3, 43506, 43857. 148 CJ, 16 Dec 1648. While the Commons thanked the Westminster petitioners for their good affection, it is not clear what the subject of their petition was. Similarly obscure, but presumably relating to issues of taxation, are ‘the Petition of the Westminster Gentlemen’ in February 1649 (CJ, 14 Feb 1649) and ‘The humble Petition of the well-affected and much oppressed Inhabitants of the City and Liberty of Westminster’ (CJ, 26 Feb 1649). 149 CJ, 30 June 1649. 150 A&O, II, 20–23. Edward Martin and William Haberfield, who were apparently removed from the Committee in September 1647, were restored to it in March 1649 (cf. ibid., I, 1011–12). 151 E.g. CJ, 24 Mar 1649. 152 CJ, 6 July 1649. 153 CJ, 8 Feb 1649; The names of the Justices of Peace (1650), p. 72.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 added in April 1649 included the veterans of the Sequestrations Committee George Crompton and John Honnor.154 Ranks of new and obscure commissioners were appointed in April 1651, but there was a notable shift in a more inclusive direction in September, when the burgesses and former peace petitioners Thomas Darling and George Greene, along with the vestryman and future assistant burgess John Clendon (who had joined the Militia Committee in 1649), were added to the list of commissioners for Westminster. They were also chosen as commissioners for Middlesex in December, although the commissioners for Westminster at this time were not drawn from established office holders.155 Under the protectorate, despite some interruptions, in the country as a whole it has been suggested that old families of country gentry drifted back onto the JP bench and assessment committees.156 There are some very limited ways in which this was true in Westminster: Glynne was returned as an MP (though not for Westminster) to the 1654 and 1656 parliaments, and was ultimately called to the upper chamber in December 1657 (having been appointed chief justice of the upper bench in 1655).157 The exchequer official and peace petitioner Scipio le Squire, who had been purged from the commission of the peace in 1647, would appear to have been reappointed in 1656, only to apparently be removed again in 1657.158 Those local parochial officials who were passed over in the 1640s were still passed over in the following decade. In general, those who had accommodated themselves to the regimes of the 1640s often continued and consolidated their positions further in the 1650s. There were still a few political and religious radicals with a profile in local affairs: Josias Berners still served on the commission of the peace, and John Wildman ran without success in Westminster’s 1654 parliamentary election.159 Regicides continued to be present among the Governors in the Abbey, as we have seen. But their influence was limited. Even in Barebone’s Parliament, while there were no Westminster MPs, the Middlesex ones were ‘a mixed bag’, including the comparatively moderate Sir William Roberts and Augustine Wingfield.160 Even the Fifth Monarchist MP who was chosen to stand for Middlesex reflected more traditional Westminster influences: Arthur Squibb 154 CJ, 18 Apr 1649. 155 CJ, 16 Apr, 1 Sept, 19 Dec 1651. 156 Underdown, ‘Settlement in the counties’, p. 177. 157 ODNB, s.n. John Glynne. 158 LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/2, fol. 43v; MJ & WJ/SB/B/161, p. 3. In the liber pacis for 1656–57 Le Squire is listed but his name has been crossed out without explanation (TNA, C193/13/6, fol. 114v) and he does not appear in the list for the following year (TNA, C193/13/5, fols 135–7). 159 One local householder was fined ‘for Scandelous words by him spoken of Maior Wildman, when he stood for Burges in Parliament’: WAC, B25/A48, 1654–55. 160 A. Woolrych, Commonwealth to protectorate (Oxford, 1986), p. 128.

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Westminster 1640–60 junior was a member of an established and numerous family of exchequer officials.161 Some of the moderate and pragmatic administrators of the 1640s remained in significant positions. While Pye was excluded from the re-established exchequer, Fauconberge was co-Auditor of the Receipt, continued to serve as a JP and was elected to serve as MP for Westminster in a troubled parliamentary election in 1654.162 The advent of the major-generals in 1655 saw a pronounced intensification of moral regulation in the area, but the principal figures involved were very familiar ones. Major-General Barkstead had been a local figure of consequence for many years, and had been actively pursuing moral reform in Westminster parishes as a JP since 1651.163 Other particularly active JPs were also familiar: John Hooker had been on the bench since the 1630s, and William ­Haberfield was also a venerable local puritan.164 Like the regicidal ex-gentlemen pensioners Norton and Edwards, the architects and implementers of some of the iconic policies of the 1650s were not usurping, obscurely born outsiders, but long-term residents of the area who were entrenched in familiar local institutions. Rather than the gradual return of older elite families, Westminster government in the 1650s in fact witnessed the return of older institutions and patterns of rule, with the revival of the high stewardship and the increasing role played in local affairs by the Abbey. One notable example of the return to traditional networks of power and influence was the increasing local profile of Richard Sherwyn. Sherwyn had been acting as clerk to Sir Robert Pye in 1641 and worked his way through a series of Rump revenue committees until attaining the key post of Secretary to the Treasury Commissioners in the newly revived exchequer.165 But Sherwyn supplemented this position in central administration with an active profile in local government. He was an energetic local JP, but also played a major role in the administration of the Abbey (where he was resident) as deputy receiver and also sat on the vestry of St Margaret’s.166 This prominence in Westminster’s government was capped by his election as MP for Westminster in 1659. Sherwyn’s Westminster career not only imitated 161 Aylmer, pp. 216–18. 162 The names of the Justices of Peace (1650), p. 72; TNA, C193/13/3, fols 81v–82r; C193/13/4, fols 127r–129v; Aylmer, pp. 252–3. 163 WAC, B25/A48, 1650–51, 1651–52; E164; F379; G2, 1650–51, 1652–53. 164 It is difficult to gain a clear sense of the most active Westminster JPs during the time of the major-generals because no Westminster sessions rolls survive between January 1654 and April 1660. However, records of fines imposed in these years for moral offences which were then given to local parish overseers of the poor sometimes provide details of the JP involved, and figures such as Barkstead and Hooker feature prominently: see WAC, B24/A48; G2; E164–172; F378–387. Hooker had been imposing extraordinary fines for moral offences from as early as 1645–46: WAC B24/A48, 1645–46. 165 Aylmer, p. 253. 166 WAM, 33422. Sherwyn started to sign St Margaret’s vestry minutes in February 1655, at precisely the point that Pye ceased to (WAC, E2413, fol. 67r).

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 that of his patron, Pye, but was in a sense an archetypal accumulation of offices that imitated Westminster elites of the sixteenth century. His prominence across the different traditional institutions of local power and influence – central administration, the Abbey, the commission of peace and the local vestry – represents a remarkable revival of the power structures that had run pre-war Westminster. Negotiating local government It is tempting to create a picture of Westminster’s local society and government as being run by an amalgam of fair-weather and zealous parliamentarians and Cromwellians of various hues in the upper ranks of the different committees invested with most obvious power and authority. But in practice matters were not quite so straightforward. Westminster’s lack of a governing corporation meant that lower levels of parochial administration inevitably assumed greater responsibilities. The parish vestries had tasks and budgets similar to those of small towns elsewhere in the country, and had become used to filling important gaps in local government.167 Above them was Westminster’s own unique and anomalous institution, the Court of Burgesses, whose members had long nursed the ambition of making the court the basis of a full civic government and had made several attempts to secure the full incorporation of the town from the 1580s onwards, most recently in 1633.168 The years of the first civil war might seem to have witnessed the eclipse of these levels of government. In a world dominated by an obsessively interventionist parliament, and by demonically active sequestration and militia committees, this more humble level of government seems almost to disappear. There was certainly no attempt by the higher authorities in these years to work with and through the Court of Burgesses when implementing any initiatives concerning public order or moral regulation. But there is an obvious danger in assuming that courts which were being sidelined therefore disappeared. Aylmer, for example, made the assumption that the Court of the Palace of Westminster had simply ceased to function after 1642, yet its court books survive all through the 1640s, demonstrating that it remained very active, while the 959 tradesmen who signed a petition in 1654 pleading for its revival demonstrate that a prerogative court of this type could still provide an important legal service for local traders (in this case for the recovery of debts), regardless of its original association with the monarchy.169 There is no 167 Merritt, chs 4 and 8. 168 See p. 10 and Merritt, pp. 87–99, 225–56. 169 TNA, SP18/66, fol. 113ff. Aylmer (p. 33) states bluntly that the court ‘did not act during 1642–60’. But the surviving profit books stretch up to April 1647 (TNA, PALA 7/1) and the plea rolls continue up to 1650 (PALA 6/8–9, 11–12). Parliament did not vote to abolish the court until 9 July 1651 (CJ).

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Westminster 1640–60 reason to assume that the Court of Burgesses was not also very much alive in these years. Lists of its members certainly survive for this period, even if the disappearance of its court books makes it impossible to analyse its precise workload.170 It is certainly true that the republican parliament, giddy with its new executive powers, was initially tempted to disregard the Court of Burgesses. On 25 January 1650 it sought peremptorily to requisition ‘the Court House in Westminster’ to store the parliament’s records, and directed that the court and its officers should be required to hold their sessions instead in the nearby Court of Requests.171 Six months earlier, the newly appointed Abbey governors were busy reorganizing the interior of the Abbey church but neglected to ensure that the burgesses and their wives retained their traditional pews there.172 These affronts may have energized the Court into playing a more assertive political role. Already in June 1648 it was the burgesses and their assistants (accompanied by ‘divers of the Gentry and Inhabitants of the City of Westminster’) who had presented parliament with a petition calling for the reinstatement of one of the town’s MPs, John Glynne.173 In the 1650s, as we will see, they were often ready to act as political spokesmen and supplicants for Westminster, whether promoting ambitious proposals for the incorporation of the town of Westminster, or in petitioning in the defence of local office holders.174 The Court’s prestige was reflected in its success in tempting officials from the new parish of Covent Garden to join the ranks of burgesses and thereby draw the parish within its jurisdiction (much to the displeasure of its co-parishioners), and in the readiness of individual burgesses to use their title when signing petitions.175 By 1652 the burgesses and assistant burgesses 170 CUL, MS Gg/1/9 contains a contemporary list of members of the Court – burgesses, assistant burgesses, high bailiffs, stewards, high constables and other minor court officials – for every year from 1639 to 1660. This is the source for all my later comments in this chapter on membership of the Court and the timing of appointments to offices related to it. 171 CJ, 25 Jan 1650. The Court of Burgesses would appear to have been able to resist this order, as in October 1656 the Commons was debating the decayed condition of ‘the Room over the Parliament’ in which the records were kept, and the need to move the records elsewhere (CJ, 31 Oct 1656). 172 WAM, 42827. 173 CJ, 7 June 1648. 174 See pp. 171–7. 175 The Covent Garden vestry was accused, inter alia, of having ‘betrayd the Parish into the Jurisdiction of the Court House of Westminster’ ‘out of a Design to be made High Burgesses and Assistants’ (The case of many of the inhabitants of Covent Garden (1655), p. 5. This gibe was presumably aimed at Samuel Smyth (made a burgess in 1655 despite not having served as an assistant burgess before) and Humphrey Groves (appointed an assistant burgess the following year). Edward Bowers specifically signs himself as ‘burgis’ on the 1656 petition against new building in Lincoln’s Inn Fields: TNA, SP18/129, fol. 215r.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 were once more being directed to play a role in the defence of public order in Westminster, specifically in the licensing of alehouses.176 What is most striking about the Court of Burgesses is the degree to which, unlike other levels of Westminster’s government, it was still dominated by more conservative local figures (perhaps because it was regarded as being insufficiently important to need purging). The burgesses and assistant burgesses included a healthy number of peace petitioners. We have already noted that no fewer than fourteen out of twenty-four of these had signed the initial peace petition. Just as remarkable is the number of petitioners who continued to serve as burgesses right through into the 1650s.177 Arthur Cundall, Edmund Waters and William Hawkins served until 1646, and George Blenerhassett until 1650, but Thomas Style continued until 1653, James Chapman until 1654 and Thomas Darling and Emery Hill until 1656. Not only that, but throughout the 1640s a continued procession of newly appointed burgesses and assistants were themselves former peace petitioners. As a result, in 1650, for example, there were still as many peace petitioners serving on the court as there had been in December 1642, and as late as 1658 ex-petitioners were still joining the ranks of the burgesses.178 What was evident on the Court of Burgesses was still more remarkably the case in the parish vestries. Here a solid phalanx of peace petitioners – regularly replenished – was always a major force throughout the 1640s and 1650s. In St Margaret’s, throughout the 1640s at least half the signatories of parish vestry minutes were peace petitioners, and this was still true as late as March 1657. The same proportion may be observed on St Martin’s vestry, although it is interesting to note that these ranks of peace petitioners included none of the titled vestrymen, who were closer to the interregnum regimes. In St Clement Danes the preponderance was even more marked – almost all of the vestrymen in the 1650s had signed the peace petition, and while complete vestry lists are not available for the 1640s it seems highly likely that this was also true then. In St Mary le Strand this was also the case: signatures on the overseers’ accounts in the 1650s reveal that the majority of vestrymen even then were peace petitioners. The peace petition had clearly signed up most of the emerging ranks of local officers, in the form of existing and potential vestrymen and burgesses. As we have emphasized, the petition need not be seen as a crypto-royalist document. But it is also hardly surprising that we can continue to detect signs of royalist sentiment in the Westminster parishes.179 176 LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/105, p. 30. 177 See the lists of burgesses and assistants in CUL, MS Gg/1/9. 178 The petitioner joining in 1658 was William Newington; Henry Bradberry, another petitioner, had joined the Court the year before. 179 See Chapter 6.

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Westminster 1640–60 It is telling that, with very brief exceptions, not one of Westminster’s various executive committees included a single peace petitioner as a member after 1646. But this did not mean that the Court of Burgesses and the vestries were therefore deemed to be irrelevant by those local officials who were employed on the new committees. Not only did the committee officials continue to serve on the Court and in the vestry if they had done so prior to their appointments,180 but some newly significant committee figures made a point of playing a role in these local institutions. Robert Pye, Thomas Fauconberge, Arthur Squibb and Edward Powell served on the St Margaret’s vestry throughout the 1640s and early 1650s, and were followed by the prominent exchequer official Richard Sherwyn.181 The politically radical recruiter MPs and members of the Council of State Sir Gregory Norton and Humphrey Edwards were both regular attenders of St Martin’s vestry, as were the prominent MPs Sir John Hippisley and Sir Edward Hungerford. Colonel Edward Grosvenor later served on the vestry as well as on the bench of JPs before making his pitch for a parliamentary seat, suggesting that an older local style of cursus honorum was still being followed. In the case of St Clement’s, the conservative majority on the vestry would appear to have prompted the Committee for Plundered Ministers to seek to work through an alternative body of godly parishioners in 1647, but elsewhere there would seem to have been a preference for working within the existing institution.182 This also of course reflected the continuing local importance and status of the vestries themselves. This was an eminence which the vestries themselves were anxious to emphasize and enhance. St Margaret’s spent no less than £133 on ‘building the new Vestrey’ in 1651–52, and substantial further sums on chairs and cushions, a desk and platform, an oval table (with a £6 Turkey carpet to go on top of it), a black-and-white marble hearth, serge curtains and ‘three figures’ to be set up in the vestry ‘for an Ornament there’.183 St Martin’s made payments in 1655–56 to ‘Scollers that made the speeches to the Gentlemen of the Vestry after dinner’. The ‘Gentlemen of the Vestry’ was a term used with increasing frequency in St Martin’s to describe an increasingly oligarchic body, and by 1658 the term was being used in St Margaret’s for the first time.184 The vestries and Court of Burgesses were therefore witnesses to a significant degree of coexistence between conservative and more radical figures. 180 E.g. Edward Martin was elevated from assistant to high burgess in 1644 (the year that he joined the Sequestrations Committee) and continued to serve in that capacity until the Restoration. 181 Sir William Playters, ejected in Pride’s Purge, also played a prominent role in St Margaret’s vestry from 1655 onwards. 182 See Chapter 6. 183 WAC, E31; E2413, fol. 80v. 184 WAC, F12 (1655–56); see Chapter 6.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 It is thus notable that when Edward Martin – a long-term member of the sequestration and militia committees – presented in 1652 his nominations for men to be added to the feoffees for the poor of Westminster, he included no less than seven peace petitioners among the eleven names.185 It is therefore tempting to paint a picture of a sort of pragmatic symbiosis, with conservative erstwhile peace petitioners playing an active role in affairs at the level of the parish and leet court, while more radical groups or trimmers were dominant in the higher echelons of the executive committees. But matters were not resolved in quite such a neat fashion, and this partly reflected the fact that even in the pre-war period many aspects of Westminster’s government had proceeded in an ad hoc and ambiguous fashion. The administrative innovations of the war years had introduced further levels of confusion and ambiguity over the precise legitimacy and powers that different institutions wielded, while the radical political solutions that the regicide unleashed both threatened existing arrangements and also created the chance for opportunities to be seized and historic anomalies to be rectified. As a result, the 1650s were marked in Westminster by a series of confrontations over the authority and legitimacy of its institutions which, while they often focused on administrative issues, nevertheless embraced broader conflicts, and the results were anything but abstract. These clashes were played out most obviously and dramatically in Westminster’s acrimonious parliamentary elections in the 1650s, which resulted in day-long rancorous meetings involving no fewer than six rival candidates, fights, deaths and the barring of an elected MP from parliament. Political and parliamentary historians have not hitherto been able to explain what lay behind these confrontations. A more detailed understanding of local developments, culled from a wide variety of fragmentary records, can help us to gain at least some sense of what was going on. And in explicating this, some older themes in Westminster’s history emerge as being as important as ever – namely the desire for incorporation, and the contested role of the Abbey. Incorporation: a ‘city’ at last? Westminster’s attempted incorporation in these years has not previously attracted the attention of historians, and this partly reflects the fact that the interregnum has often been presented as a period of sustained metropolitical development. It is certainly true that in the war years the City of London was exercising more control than ever before over its suburbs, and this included Westminster. After all, effective co-operation and integration was vital to the success of the parliamentarian campaign – in military organization and 185 James Chapman, Thomas Style, George Plucknett, Francis Duke, Rice Hammond, Phillip Lilly and James Morgan (TNA, SP46/128, fol. 127).

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Westminster 1640–60 revenue raising – and this was best accomplished by a unified metropolitical administration. This is most evident in the activities of London’s Militia Committee, which had authority over all the suburban areas, mediated from September 1643 by a series of militia sub-committees. Also, the lines of communication created a visible and therefore tangible metropolitical unit. There was therefore a continual incentive in the 1650s for the lord mayor and the Court of Aldermen to exercise a degree of metropolitical authority over the politically vulnerable suburbs. However, it must be emphasized that Westminster consistently resisted these encroachments by the City. The City of London, eager to maximize its military resources, especially in the face of the increasing threat from the army in the later 1640s, constantly sought to keep the Westminster Militia Committee and other forces under the direct control of the London Militia Committee. During the war, the City consistently agitated for its control over the suburban militia to be made one of the conditions for a permanent settlement with the king, and in the years following the end of the war the Londoners kept up constant pressure on parliament to grant this.186 A petition to the Lords of the three military sub-committees of Westminster, Tower Hamlets and Southwark in February 1646 spelled out their concerns with particular clarity. They protested that the City Militia Committee was attempting ‘to bring your Petitioners under their Command for Perpetuity’. After mustering the obvious objection that the London officials ‘cannot be sensible of the Condition of these Parts, for that no Common-council-men are to be chosen out of the Liberties of the City’, they added a particular concern that the Common-council-men ‘are under an Oath of Secrecy; so that we, not knowing what is there in Agitation, though never so extreme against us, cannot either by Reason prevent, or by Petition qualify that Extremity’. An additional concern spoke to a more general worry shared by the suburbs, that ‘they [the Londoners] have sworn to maintain their Charters and Privileges, which will not always suit with the Condition of these Parts’. There were undoubtedly other political, military and factional issues at stake in these confrontations, but the firm resistance to the City’s encroachments also reflected much more long-established issues of concern in the locality.187 It must also be emphasized that the lines of communication themselves existed for a very short space of time – scarcely more than four years. And while the term remained a convenient shorthand to describe the metropolitical area in statutes and proclamations, this did not necessarily entail a common metropolitical identity in jurisdictional terms. In fact, extensions of the lord mayor’s 186 Nagel, pp. 241–2. They petitioned successfully for it in July 1648 (CJ, 5 July 1648), prompting a furious Westminster petition against it (ibid., 17 July 1648), but this was to be only a temporary victory. 187 LJ, 16 Feb 1646. On the political and ideological issues involved see Nagel, pp. 90, 241–312.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 authority into Westminster were vigorously resisted. One example of this is the controversy surrounding the regulation of hackney coachmen – an increasingly prominent and troublesome feature of Westminster’s f­ ashionable society. An ordinance of 1654 had directed that the Court of Aldermen of London should ‘have power to make and ordain Rules, Directions, and Bye-laws’ concerning the hackney coachmen, including rates and places of standing.188 Among other things, the Court’s bye-laws had stipulated that the coaches were to have the arms of the City of London on them. However, not only did these bye-laws extend to cover Westminster, but Westminster locations had much greater coach traffic (reflected in the larger numbers of coaches which were specifically permitted to stand in Westminster locations), and hence jurisdictional issues inevitably arose.189 It was doubtless after protests from Westminster officials that the Council of State subsequently ordered that execution of this ordinance should be suspended in Westminster until further order, and that it was Westminster JPs who should see to the regulation of coaches there ‘because the lord mayor & aldermen have by law nothing to do with Westminster’.190 The clearest evidence of Westminster’s resistance to metropolitical jurisdiction, however, can be observed in the renewed campaign for its separate incorporation. As we have noted, attempts to create a separately incorporated city of Westminster may be traced back to 1585, and were regularly renewed thereafter, leading to the creation of a draft statute in the early Jacobean period. As recently as 1633 Westminster’s inhabitants had petitioned for incorporation, with the support of the high steward, the earl of Pembroke. Earlier incorporation bids had foundered on the opposition of the Abbey to any diminution of its power in the locality (although the 1633 bid would seem to have been superseded by the creation of the short-lived New Incorporation of the Suburbs).191 It seems likely that the effective dissolution of the Abbey and of the Committee for it, and the potential reallocation of its revenues, prompted some local inhabitants to seize the opportunity to push for incorporation once more. Questions of what was to happen with the secular powers and revenues of the Abbey had already been raised in the early months of the republic, and, in the years that followed, a Committee for Corporations was established to consider bids for new and revised corporations.192 On 4 December 1649 Southwark had presented a petition for incorporation within or outside the City of London, noting that its inhabitants were often taxed for both London and Surrey, and yet the poor suffered in falling between the two jurisdictions.193 188 A&O, II, 922–4. 189 CSPD 1655, pp. 16–17. 190 CSPD 1656–7, p. 74. See also WAC, F2003, p. 149. 191 For a fuller discussion see Merritt, pp. 87–101. 192 B.L.K. Henderson, ‘The Commonwealth Charters’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 3rd ser., 6 (1912). 193 N. Brett-James, ‘A 17th Century “L.C.C.”’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex

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Westminster 1640–60 What may well have triggered more immediate action was the death of the high steward, the earl of Pembroke, on 23 January 1650, as there was now no king or dean of Westminster available to appoint a new high steward, and no sitting high steward available to authorize the actions of local officials. The attempted seizure of the burgesses’ court house by parliament on 25 January – thereby ejecting the Court of Burgesses (the last remaining de jure local authority) – may have given an added urgency to incorporation plans. Six days after Pembroke’s death, a ‘Petition of the City of Westminster’ is recorded in the Commons Journal as being ordered to be read as the first item of business on 2 February (and then on that day referred to the following Tuesday). On 5 February ‘divers of the Inhabitants of the City of Westminster’ appeared at the door of the Commons. They were called in, and presented ‘a Petition of the Inhabitants of the City of Westminster, that such a Government may be settled amongst them, as may conduce to the well-governing and regulating the Inhabitants in Westminster’. The petition was referred to the Committee for Corporations.194 Who was behind the petition? It is impossible to say. One prominent figure would appear to have been Samuel Smyth, who made ‘a short Preamble’ before the petition was delivered to parliament.195 Smyth was a parish official in Covent Garden and had impeccable loyalist credentials, having served for some years on the Militia Committee, and having retained his position on the Committee after the regicide.196 The petition does not survive. But it evidently focused the House’s attention upon the fact that, with Pembroke’s demise, the status of City office holders was unclear. Therefore the Commons issued specific orders that the bailiff for the City of Westminster, Gabriel Clinkard, and Thomas Latham, the deputy steward, were authorized to execute their offices ‘until this House take further Order’.197 That a full incorporation was intended by the petition is made clearer by the responses of other institutions. The Court of Common Council had a copy of the petition read to it ‘as also the draft of the Modelle annexed, whereby Archaeological Society n.s., 5, pt. IV (1928), pp. 408–9. Parliament was sympathetic, but the Court of Common Council ensured that a counter-petition was presented to parliament and referred to the Committee for Corporations. Nothing seems to have ultimately come of Southwark’s proposal. 194 On the Committee for Corporations see Henderson, ‘Commonwealth Charters’. This article discusses the various corporations, but makes no reference to Westminster’s bid. 195 CJ, 5 Feb 1650. 196 Smyth is listed as serving on the Militia Committee from 1647 onwards (A&O, I, 1011–12; II, 20–23, 1290–93). He was acting as a churchwarden in St Paul’s Covent Garden in the early 1650s: see WAC, E31, E32. 197 Latham had been appointed deputy steward in 1648 (succeeding Eubulus Thelwall) while Glynne was still theoretically listed as steward, but Latham is listed as replacing Glynne in 1650 in the post of steward, with no reference to anyone holding the post of deputy steward until Carey in 1657 (for which see below).

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 they desire to be incorporated according to the same’, and it was arranged that the Court’s objections to the ‘Westminster Model’ would be presented by the Committees of the Common Council to the Committee of Corporations.198 Similarly, it was reported at the Middlesex sessions on 22 April 1650 that the Court had learned ‘that the Citty of Westminster hath petitioned the Parliament of England to incorporate and make themselves a Citty distinct from the Citty of London and the County aforesaid, and to take parte of the County to annex the same to the Citty of Westminster which they conceive wilbee very prejudiciall to the County in divers respects’. Accordingly, it was ordered that Richard Graves, the Middlesex clerk of the peace, should attend the relevant parliamentary committee and ‘offer such reasons against it as shalbee prepared for that purpose, And that hee likewise retayne such Councell for the prosecution thereof as he shall thinke fitt’.199 If the Middlesex authorities were concerned, then the City of London was clearly even more worried. Just two days after the Commons had referred the original petition to the Committee for Corporations, the Court of Aldermen ordered the City Remembrancer to ensure that the City’s MPs attended the meeting of the Committee for Corporations that very afternoon ‘in favour of this Citty against the petition presented for th’incorporation of Westmonaster’. On 11 April the Remembrancer was again ordered to attend the business before the Committee, and the City records were directed to be made ready to be produced before the Committee whenever this was necessary.200 The Committee for Corporations fixed upon the date of 25 June 1650 to make a full report on the matter, and the Court of Aldermen therefore directed the Recorder of London to attend the Committee on that day on the City’s behalf, along with the members of a sub-committee that it had established to deal with the issue.201 The result for the time being would appear to have been a stalemate, but it is clear that the Westminster petitioners kept up the pressure for implementation. On 16 December 1651 the Commons resolved that ‘the Report touching the Government of Westminster’ should be dealt with as urgent business. In the meantime, the advantages of collective action by the different Westminster parishes were being explored at the meeting of the separate Westminster sessions in January 1652, where it was agreed that JPs representing each one of the Westminster parishes would explore the possibility of raising a joint stock for the poor (and to petition parliament if they did not already have the legal authority to do this).202 198 LMA, Journals of the Court of Common Council 41, fols 20, 23. 199 LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/87/25. 200 LMA, Repertories of the Court of Aldermen 60, fols 58v, 107r–v. 201 LMA, Repertories of the Court of Aldermen 60, fol. 160r. 202 LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/105, pp. 30–1. The JPs were to be Hooker (Clement’s), Scobell (Margaret’s), Nelson (Martin’s), Bradshaw (Mary Savoy) and Carter (Covent Garden).

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Westminster 1640–60 A further allusion to incorporation plans on 30 March 1652 is more intriguing, as the Commons directed that ‘the Amendments to the Act for settling the Government of Westminster’ should be reported the following week. That an ‘Act for settling the Government of Westminster’ had reached the amendment stage would seem to imply that the case for incorporation had been accepted in some form. The scheduled report does not seem to have been made, however, yet the Westminster petitioners soon made a further direct appeal. On 8 June 1652, on receiving a petition of ‘the inhabitants of the City of Westminster and Liberties thereof’, the Commons ordered that a report from the Committee of Corporations ‘of the Model of Government of the City of Westminster’ should be made on the 18th. This report does not appear to have been submitted on that date, and it seems that no further headway was made under the Rump. However, it is notable that the appeal for incorporation was clearly revived once more in 1654. In March of that year the Council of State summoned both London’s lord mayor, recorder and town clerk and Westminster’s steward, bailiff and burgesses, ‘when several Matters were propounded to them in relation to the good government of the cities’.203 This may well have inspired Westminster’s officials to reintroduce their bid for incorporation. Just twelve days later the burgesses and assistant burgesses presented a petition and proposals to the same Council of State. It is almost certain that this was the ‘Westminster petition for Incorporation’ that the Court of Aldermen referred to in June as having been committed to the Council committee. One again, the Court of Aldermen felt it necessary to assemble the City’s solicitor and recorder to appear on the City’s behalf before the committee.204 The involvement of the burgesses and assistant burgesses in the 1654 campaign is particularly striking. Several of them had held parochial office at the time of the 1633 incorporation bid: in particular, the burgess James Chapman had been a churchwarden of St Margaret’s at the time, and had entered in his account the expenses relating to the failed attempt to obtain ‘a Corporacon for this Citie and liberties’.205 The failure of these incorporation attempts should not blind us to the fact that the schemes had clearly made significant headway, and their absence from the standard accounts of incorporation policy in the 1650s represents a serious gap in the relevant scholarship.206 The fact that neither the ‘Model of Government’ nor the draft ‘Act for 203 CJ, 30 Mar [my italics], 8 June 1652; CSPD 1654, p. 1. 204 LMA, Repertories of the Court of Aldermen 63, fol. 117r; CSPD 1654, p. 28. A later petition from the inhabitants of Jersey regarding its government was referred to the same committee to which the Westminster petition was committed (ibid., p. 65), which implies that the Westminster petition concerned the same issues. 205 WAC, E18. 206 The various Westminster schemes are not mentioned in the standard account of incorporations in the interregnum period: see Henderson, ‘Commonwealth charters’.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 settling the Government of Westminster’ have survived makes it difficult to infer the precise nature of the incorporation that was proposed. Nevertheless, the involvement of the burgesses in the 1654 campaign would suggest that what was being proposed at least on this occasion was a variant of the pre-war incorporation bids, with executive power being invested in an upgraded Court of Burgesses with all the trappings of a town corporation.207 As an institution that still in 1654 had substantial numbers of older parochial officials and peace petitioners in its ranks, this bid to boost the powers of the burgess court may well have been intended not just to secure public order, but to redirect local power into the hands of Westminster’s traditional parochial elites. They certainly had good reason to be concerned with the power being wielded by other institutions at this time, as we will see. Politics and the Abbey The fact that the long-running campaign for the full incorporation of Westminster should have been revived, and should indeed have come so close to success at this time, also undoubtedly reflected the unprecedented upheavals taking place in the institutions of Westminster government in this period. Such disruption may have seemed to create a legislative opportunity, but it may also have generated significant concerns about the conduct of local government by Westminster’s new de facto governors. A new incorporation may have been regarded by local inhabitants as one means of safeguarding local customs and autonomy, and of counteracting the influence of these new ruling figures. One of the critical issues here was the overhauling of the government of the Abbey in the early months of the republic. The Abbey’s secular jurisdiction had long been a thorn in the side of Westminster’s inhabitants. With the assault on cathedrals and the dissolution of deans and chapters, one might have assumed that this anomalous bastion of clerical power would be removed. In fact, however, the Abbey’s role in the area had, if anything, been bolstered and intensified in the ensuing years. Revisions to the government of the Abbey in 1649 raised the issue of what would happen to its secular powers and revenues. Some in Westminster hoped to appropriate the Abbey’s secular powers by absorbing them within a new incorporation. Others were concerned that, if whatever body that took over the Abbey ended up with the landed revenue and rights of appointing to local office, they would simply keep the money for themselves and farm out the local offices to the highest bidder. From February 1649 there were attempts by Westminster’s inhabitants to persuade parliament that it should ensure that the town was governed in a manner that would ensure its well-being and that all fines raised would be 207 Compare the schemes discussed in Merritt, pp. 91–8.

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Westminster 1640–60 used for the benefit of the poor.208 Attention focused on the royalty of Westminster and its profits, which had been earmarked for sale by the Trustees and Contractors for Sale of the Lands of the late Deans and Chapters. Westminster’s inhabitants presented a petition to parliament on 19 March 1650 to prevent the sale of the Royalty of Westminster.209 A parliamentary order of 12 October 1652 directed that all the rents and profits arising from the royalties of Westminster should be used for stock for setting the poor of St Margaret’s to work, but also spelled out the specific power of the Governors of the School and Almshouses to appoint ‘all and every the Officers belonging to the said Royalties, in such sort, as the late Dean and Chapter, or their Steward, might do’.210 A petition to the Governors made the plea that they would not farm out these offices, but would appoint and give a fitting salary to people who had faithfully served the commonwealth interest.211 One individual who was particularly anxious not to lose out in this respect was one Robert White. Petitioning the Governors directly, White claimed to have been involved throughout in the campaigns to retain the royalty – both the petition to parliament in 1650 and further petitions for which he had ‘spent a great part of his estate with the losse of a considerable Trade’ thereafter when the royalty was not being used to support the poor.212 With the support of an additional petition on his behalf from local residents, White appealed to be appointed to the vacant position of clerk of the town courts of Westminster.213 It was the appointment of the clerk of the Court of Burgesses that became the initial focus of what would become a significant struggle for power and authority in the area. Central to this conflict was Westminster’s steward, Thomas Latham. As we have seen, Latham had been appointed to the office of deputy steward while Pembroke was still alive, and the Commons had authorized him to continue in office during the interregnum in ­Westminster’s 208 WAM, 24989. 209 CJ, 19 Mar 1650. A preamble to the petition was made by ‘Mr Martyn’ – presumably Edward Martin, the burgess and vestryman of St Margaret’s. The 1650 Act for the Sale of the Manors of Rectories, and Glebe Lands, late belonging to Archbishops, Bishops, Deans, Deans and Chapters, read for third time in the Commons on 15 Oct 1650 (CJ), includes a tendered proviso read for the first time and agreed ‘That this Act, or any thing therein contained, shall not extend, nor be taken or construed to extend, to the Sale of the Royalties of or belonging to the City of Westminster, and Liberties thereof; or of any Office or Offices thereunto appertaining; or any the Issues or Profits thereof’. 210 CJ, 12 Oct 1652. Note the copy in WAM, 6568. 211 WAM, 9352. 212 WAM, 24989. This undated petition presumably dates from some time shortly after 12 October 1652, as it refers to parliament’s having recently invested the royalty ‘in this honourable Court’. 213 Ibid. The undated petition on White’s behalf is WAM, 24947. The petitioners, who are mostly obscure figures, assert that the College Committee has the appointing and disposing of all officers in the city and liberties.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 government after Pembroke’s demise. As an appointee of the last high steward (and at least temporarily confirmed in post by parliament), as well as a local JP, Latham represented a rare element of continuity with previous structures of authority in the area. With no dean or high steward of Westminster, he was also the de facto manager of the Court of Burgesses (indeed, the court was referred to at this time as ‘the Stewards court of Westminster’). Latham soon found himself clashing with the new Abbey Governors when they sought to intervene in the running of the burgess court. The conflict developed in 1653 when the clerk of the court, William Gawen, was sequestered for delinquency. The Governors appointed one William Jones in Gawen’s place in February, but Latham ignored their order, refused to admit Jones and continued Gawen in post. In response, the Governors sought to eject Latham from his position as steward and to appoint one John Corbet in his place. The conflict now escalated. Latham secured a petition to the Governors in his favour signed by the bailiff, all the existing burgesses and nearly all the assistant burgesses.214 The petitioners praised Latham’s ‘fidelity and abillity’ in the post and emphasized his ‘integrity to this Commonwealth’. Through his ‘great paines’ he had ‘preserved many persons from ruyne and brought such a conformity of the inhabitants to the Court by him and us held, as hath not beene donne in any of our memoryes, by any of his predecessors’. Yet, the petition continued, none of Latham’s predecessors in post had ever received less encouragement. Warning of the ‘great detriment’ that Westminster’s inhabitants had in the past experienced by the change of stewards, they urged the Governors to continue Latham in his post with appropriate encouragement and to grant him ‘such freedome in the electing of a Clarke as his former predecessors have enioyed’.215 The Governors were clearly not swayed, and the tussle over their attempt to replace Latham as steward ultimately reached the Council of State, which in June 1653 appointed a committee to examine the competing claims of Latham and Corbet to the place of steward.216 Corbet’s name appears as steward in the list of members of the Court of Burgesses for 1653, but by 1654 Latham’s name has returned, so Latham would seem to have won this round of the struggle (although the compromise would seem to have been that Gawen was 214 The only assistants who did not sign the petition were minor figures, and it is not apparent that this represented any disagreement with the petition’s contents. 215 WAM, 9888 (for Jones’s own petition see WAM, 9889). Robert White seems to have been trying in vain to exploit the situation for his own advantage. He claimed in his petition to the Governors (WAM, 24989) that Latham had been happy to give the position of clerk to him, but that he (White) had scrupulously forborne to exercise it, given the differences between Latham and the Governors, and he therefore asked the Governors directly to grant an order for the clerk’s place for him. This account of Latham’s actions seems highly unlikely. 216 CSPD 1652–3, pp. 397, 410.

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Westminster 1640–60 ejected as clerk, but not replaced by Jones).217 In the meantime, members of the Court of Burgesses seem to have been happy to mount their own challenge to the authority of the Governors. When the Governors appointed Clement Bradshawe as the keeper of Tothill Fields in 1654, the appointee was indicted by the high burgess William Brewer at the Westminster sessions. People were commanded not to recognize Bradshawe’s title, with Brewer reportedly declaring before the bench ‘that he had nothing to say against [Bradshawe] but against the power that putt him in that place’. It was claimed that, after the sessions, Brewer had continued to declare that the Governors ‘hath nothing to doe with those fields and that he will try a Title with ... [them] concerning it’.218 It is probable that the Court of Burgesses had also been involved in a challenge to the power of the Westminster College Committee to appoint appraisers for the City and Liberty of Westminster five years previously.219 Latham’s struggles with the Abbey Governors may also help to explain what has hitherto baffled political historians of the period – and that is the apparent barring of Latham from the 1654 parliament. Westminster’s parliamentary election in 1654 was evidently highly acrimonious. It was contested by no less than six candidates – the Commissary General Whalley, Thomas Latham, Thomas Fauconberge, ‘Mr Hooker’ (presumably the JP John Hooker), Edward Carey and the Leveller John Wildman – and the whole day was spent in trying to take the poll. While voters initially assembled in Westminster Hall, ‘the multitudes increasing, they adjourned into Tuttle-fields, but by reason of the wet, were necessitated to return back again’. A newsbook was unable to report the result because, while the poll had been finally taken, the papers were sealed up and the result was not to be announced until the next day, ‘but all agreed that Mr Latham was one [of the two] chosen’. Latham was indeed elected, but he never took up his seat in parliament.220 Peter Gaunt has stressed how few elected MPs were barred from the parliament, making Latham’s absence inexplicable. It may well be, however, that it was his role as a focus of local opposition to the forces of army and government sympathizers among the 217 Gawen’s replacement was George Plucknett, son of a venerable St Margaret’s vestryman and peace petitioner. 218 WAM, 25198. Brewer was possibly attempting to defend the claims to this office of George Andrewes (WAM, 43032), who would join him on the Court of Burgesses in 1657. 219 The Committee for the Revenues of the College of Westminster had in February 1646 appointed two appraisers for the City and Liberty of Westminster to replace those who had died, but it was complained in April 1649 that two other inhabitants had made themselves appraisers and had declared that the Committee ‘did they knew not what’ and did not have the power to grant the offices (WAM, 72820). It seems quite likely that it was the Court of Burgesses that had ‘made them appraisers’. 220 Severall Proceedings of State Affaires, no. 250 (6–13 July 1654), pp. 3968, 3983; Mercurius Politicus, no. 214 (13–20 Jul 1654), p. 3632.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 Abbey Governors that caused his exclusion.221 The elections for the 1656 parliament – when Latham again contested the seat – would seem to confirm this picture of the government’s determination to intervene so as to block the activities of Latham and others in opposing the Abbey Governors. As we have recounted elsewhere, Cromwell sought to direct Westminster’s chief inhabitants in their voting in advance, presumably in favour of Colonel Edward Grosvenor. Intervention by soldiers on the day of the election in order to sway the voting resulted in an affray in which two people were killed and many injured. At least one account of events describes the clash as being between soldiers supporting Grosvenor and ‘setisans’ supporting Latham.222 Those finally deemed to have been elected were Colonel Grosvenor (whose standing had presumably prompted the military’s support) and one Edward Carey. Carey was close to the government, working as a Compounding commissioner and being offered the post of Baron of the Irish exchequer, as well as serving on Westminster assessment commissions and as a local JP.223 He was clearly more to the authorities’ taste than was Latham, as subsequent events would demonstrate. A further intervention after the election confirmed the authorities’ victories over Latham and his supporters, and this involved the use of an additional arm of local authority in the shape of the high stewardship. This post, as we have seen, had been suspended with the death of the earl of Pembroke. However, in 1655 Cromwell’s favourite, Sir Gilbert Pickering, had succeeded the earl of Pembroke in the restored post of lord chamberlain and it would seem that Pembroke’s other post as high steward of Westminster was perceived as being tied to the lord chamberlain’s office. Whatever the truth of the matter, it was as high steward of Westminster that Pickering attended the Court of Burgesses on 12 August 1656 and ‘presented’ Edward Carey – the new MP – as his deputy steward in place of Latham (who had held the post since 1650).224 This was not necessarily a victory for the Abbey, however, as Pickering was also active in seeking to expand his power vis-à-vis the Governors, as became clear shortly afterwards when they clashed over who had the authority to appoint the high bailiff of the City and Liberty of Westminster.225 221 P. Gaunt, ‘Cromwell’s Purge? Exclusions and the First Protectorate Parliament’, Parliamentary History 6 (1987), 1–22. 222 See Chapter 2. 223 A&O, II, 283, 619, 669, 830, 839, 1074; TNA, C193/13/4, fols 127r–129v; C193/13/6, fols 113r–115r; LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/163/1. For his public appointments see Aylmer, pp. 219–20 (although Aylmer fails to understand the local political context of Carey’s promotion as Westminster’s deputy steward). 224 CUL, MS Gg/1/9, fol. 79r. 225 Nicholas Jenkins had held this position since 1652, but the post came up for renewal in December 1657 (WAM, 9634–6, 9638, 9674–6). The question was who, in this ever-changing map of Westminster’s local government, had the power to appoint to

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Westminster 1640–60 If Latham was indeed the champion of local interests against the Abbey, then the supporters of those interests would appear to have accepted their defeat. It is notable that no fewer than seven members of the Court of Burgesses ceased to serve after 1656, including Thomas Darling and Emery Hill, who had both served on the Court since the early 1640s (Hill would resume his position in 1659). It is not clear whether they were forced out or resigned in protest. Under the terms of the creation of the Court of Burgesses, it was presided over by the high steward (or his deputy) and the dean, and it was they who held the right to appoint new burgesses. The Court had just been given a very clear lesson in where power lay, which was presumably repeated in the years that followed. Carey died soon after his appointment, but was succeeded as deputy steward by Peter Elliston in 1658, and in 1659 by another JP, Robert Wallop.226 These were not token appointments, however. Indeed, Wallop was inducted to his position with some ceremony. Rugg reports how, when Wallop was made ‘Steward of the Corte House att Westminster’, ‘that an[c]ient costome used which formerly [was] one the like occations, as all the towne or citty officers, burgesse, high constable, petty constables’ of Westminster attended ‘from the house where hee was in the Palase yard … [to] the corte house through Westmister Hall’, where after a short time ‘they all returned to a feast that was provided by the burgesses for the honor of the new Steward’.227 Such ceremonial is surprising; I have not unearthed any previous records of such rituals for a post that was usually a mere sinecure, and it is quite possible that it was a recent invention of the burgesses themselves, as a means of seeking to tie the new appointee symbolically to the community in general, and to the burgesses in particular. this position. St Martin’s vestry was puzzling over this matter in September 1656 when, hoping to secure tolls from the local market to help its parish poor, it decided to investigate ‘from whom the Bayliffe of Westminster hath his power and to whom hee pays that sum which hee pays for the execution of his office’ (WAC, F2003, fol. 106). That the answer to these questions was not straightforward soon became clear when one Thomas Hoare applied to the Governors and acquired a patent for the post in January 1657, only to find that Jenkins had in the meantime secured a patent to remain in office from Pickering as high steward. Hoare would appear ultimately to have been granted the post after the matter was heard at the sessions (WAM, 9639, 9640, 9790; LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/173A, pp. 157–8). 226 TNA, PCC/Prob 11/267. Elliston was acting as a JP in 1657–58, when he took fines from people attending a play at the Military House: see WAC, F385 (1657–58). 227 Rugg, p. 2. See also the advertisement in The Publick Intelligencer, no. 183 (27 June–4 July 1659), p. 556 that ‘Richard Wallop of the Middle Temple, Esquire, was on the Thirtieth of June, chosen Steward of Westminster by the Governors of the Colledge of Westminster’. This was not the Robert Wallop who was a Long Parliament MP and member of the Council of State. Wallop’s Northamptonshire links make it likely that it was Pickering’s support that was decisive, even if the formality of appointment was made by the Abbey Governors.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 With the return of the king, the burgesses were swift to disown the incumbency of Pickering as high steward. In a petition to Charles II, they claimed that ‘the government of this Citty and Liberty is in a great part managed under your Majestie by the high Steward thereof’ and the custos rotulorum, but that the inhabitants were ‘much preiudiced’ because of ‘there being noe person legally in the execution of the said Offices since the death of the late Earle of Pembroke’.228 For all the dominance first of new institutions such as the committees, and then later of the Abbey and high steward, there had been remarkable continuity, datable back to the late 1630s and early 1640s, in the personnel of Westminster’s parochial government, where signatories of the peace petition had sustained a high profile. Below the power struggles taking place within the upper echelons of local government, this remarkable continuity can easily be missed. But it can be noted in two phenomena at the end of the 1650s. The continuing role of those who had been peace petitioners is evident in the development of the Westminster Feast. These special dinners, held in the capital for societies of those born in particular counties or towns of England, were a popular phenomenon in London in the later 1650s.229 These festive occasions particularly seem to highlight the presence of provincials in the teeming metropolis. It may therefore come as a surprise that a similar society was created for ‘natives’ of Westminster. Its emergence in the 1650s is likely to have held special resonance, after years of political upheaval and, particularly, the shifting character, personnel and novel layers of local government. A formal invitation to the feast printed in 1658 begins with the declaration ‘Friendly society [is] a means under God to preserve unity’, while another in 1660 insists that the feast is ‘to preserve unity and beget amity’. Those attending would meet to hear morning sermon in St Margaret’s church and from thence proceed to a dinner in Westminster Hall. It is particularly striking to observe which Westminster inhabitants were involved in organizing the feasts. In 1658 five of the six organizers had been peace petitioners sixteen years earlier, and four of them had subsequently served on the Court of Burgesses.230 This was effectively a gathering of Westminster’s unofficial local governors, in a form that could emphasize both their unity and their distinctive identity as Westminster’s authentic local leaders. But one of the most intriguing documents to survive, suggesting some 228 TNA, SP29/1/158, fol. 247r. 229 E.g. Mercurius Politicus, no. 420 (10–17 June 1658), p. 599. 230 The peace petitioners were Thomas Darling, Emery Hill, Rice Hammond, Richard Price and William Williams. Darling, Hill, Hammond and the other organizer, Edward Bowers, had served on the Court of Burgesses: Sheffield City Archives, Elmhirst Pye MS 1287 (c). It may be significant that Bowers, the only organizer not to have signed the peace petition, was also the only one of these six organizers still serving on the Court of Burgesses after Pickering’s coup in 1656 (when Darling and Hill had ceased to attend).

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Westminster 1640–60 form of collective Westminster identity, is the so-called ‘Concurrent Declaration of the Inhabitants of the City and Liberty of Westminster’, which was drawn up in support of the City of London’s petition for a free parliament, dated 20 December 1659. Signed by 399 names, it is essentially a collective statement of all those local people involved in the government of Westminster. Past and present members of the Court of Burgesses, and all members of the vestries, churchwardens and overseers of the poor of all the Westminster parishes, were for once united. At least ten surviving signatories of the 1642 peace petition can still be found.231 In its appeal for unity and stability, the ‘Concurrent Declaration’ forms an intriguing and more inclusive counterpart of the peace petition of 1642. Conclusion The series of altercations between the Abbey Governors, the army and the Court of Burgesses are striking illustrations of the tensions in structures of power and authority within Westminster. It would be misleading, however, to imply that the Court of Burgesses spoke for a single, unified body of local inhabitants excluded from power. After all, the Court of Burgesses did not itself enjoy unquestioned authority among Westminster’s parishioners, as we have seen, while individual parishes sometimes clashed over issues of taxation and jurisdiction. Parish vestries were themselves sometimes resented by the rest of the parishioners.232 The conflict between traditional local governors and institutions, on the one hand, and more recently established governing bodies and their members, on the other, is very evident. But potentially smoothing over some of these confrontations were a number of locally based career bureaucrats, often linked with the exchequer, who managed to move seamlessly from royal to parliamentarian, and later to protectoral, service. The chaotic nature of the parliamentary elections in 1640, 1654 and 1656 – each with six candidates competing for the two seats – bears eloquent testimony to the fragmentation caused by the absence of unquestioned authorities 231 A concurrent declaration of the inhabitants of the City and Liberty of Westminster, with the declaration of the people of England for a free parliament (1659). Surviving peace petitioners whose names appear include Rice Hammond, Henry Lidgould, William Brewer, James Morgan, Emery Hill and Philip Lilly. 232 For the charge by parishioners that Covent Garden vestry had ‘betrayd the Parish into the Jurisdiction of the Court House of Westminster’ see n. 175. St Mary le Strand’s parish­­ioners clashed with St Clement Danes’ burgesses and assistants over fines and joint responsibilities, especially regarding the repair of Strand Bridge (TNA, DL 41/617). When Robert White and his colleagues were struggling to boost the local resources for the poor they were involved in legal action, not just against the Abbey but also against St Margaret’s vestry (WAC, E28). For opposition to the power of the parish vestry see the example of St Martin’s in Chapter 6.

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Allegiance and government, 1643–60 in the town. The ultimate irony, though, is that the new regimes ultimately established their control over 1650s Westminster by the revival of traditional offices and institutions. Despite the revived pressure for a new incorporation, and the experience of years of political upheaval and of novel forms of political organization, by the end of the 1650s the town of Westminster was securely under the control of the Abbey and high steward, just as it had been in the pre-war period. Despite Westminster’s traditional identity as a ‘royal city’, the struggles over local government did not manifest any overtly royalist sentiment. It is clear, though, that while Westminster did not furnish many royalist plotters, there was a broader constituency of royalist sympathizers in the area, and these may have included many of the signatories of the peace petition of December 1642. The continued presence of peace petitioners at the lower levels of local government in Westminster would have ensured a basic degree of continuity of administration in the parishes and the Court of Burgesses. Notable regicides may have dominated the upper echelons of Westminster’s government, but a broader range of political sentiment was evident in the day-to-day administration of the town, and Westminster’s local governors would therefore prove able to navigate the return of their royal master in 1660 with a certain degree of ease.

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Chapter 5

.

Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’

I

f Westminster had been famously a ‘royal city’, it was also renowned, as James Howell noted, as the residence of ‘most of the Nobility and Gentry’, and increasingly as a focus for a fashionable ‘season’ that embraced many more elite visitors. Historians have traditionally seen the 1640s and 1650s as a time when, with the royal court abandoned and the neighbourhood subjected to the years of wartime disruption, followed by those of puritan regulation, the gentry season and fashionable society of the West End largely disappeared, only to re-emerge in 1660. Given that the rise of an aristocratic West End is one of the key cultural developments of urban society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, its apparent demise requires further exploration. Some features of this gloomy picture have been undermined by specialist studies examining the broad cultural tastes of prominent puritans and parliamentarians, while aspects of luxury consumption have also been documented for the capital in this period.1 In fact, as this chapter will make clear, many traits of fashionable society are visible in the Westminster of these decades. But an exclusive emphasis on such features risks being as distorting as an account that focuses solely on restrictions and a puritan glumness that was only dispelled by the Restoration. There was no uncomplicated return of earlier fashionable society and the period saw considerable fluctuation. As other chapters have already demonstrated, the area around Westminster could prove a potentially antipathetic environment for fashionable living, not least with the strong military presence and the regular security clampdowns in a locality where royalist sentiments were justly suspected to linger.

1 E.g. T. Mowl and B. Earnshaw, Architecture without kings (Manchester, 1995); L. Peck, Consuming splendour (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 1; T. Raylor, ‘Faire Englands joy is fled’? Visual and performance arts in the 1650s’, overview article in ODNB.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ This chapter is therefore less concerned to examine whether fashionable society was going ‘up’ or ‘down’, but rather, to explore the contours and shifting character of such a society. A study of some of the ways in which fashionable society – which was so indelibly associated with this specific locality – adapted and responded to these unique conditions can therefore offer us further important insights into the impact of the changing regimes on social and cultural relations, and the continuing destabilizing role of royalism in the area. The 1640s: wartime disruption On the eve of the civil war, the town of Westminster was the legal and administrative centre of the nation and home to the royal court. It had also during the course of the early seventeenth century gradually emerged as the centre of a fashionable and aristocratic West End. Members of the gentry developed the habit of coming to the capital, where they not only vied for court patronage, pursued lawsuits and looked for suitable marriage partners, but also participated in an increasingly rich cultural life which extended beyond the precincts of Whitehall. Visits from the country now frequently involved family parties and, more generally, sociable activities, luxury consumption and conspicuous display became the focal points of the newly emerging ‘season’. Members of the landed elite also mingled with others of similar status from around the country, sharing news, developing new connections and taking fashions back to the countryside. The parishes of Westminster, in particular, increasingly began to cater for the commercial needs and tastes of this wealthy and discerning clientele. The market for housing sky-rocketed and a taste for newer, more sophisticated urban town-houses was answered by the 1630s development of Covent Garden. The newly popular hackney coaches congregated in their hundreds at points in the area, conveying their occupants to the shopping precinct that was the New Exchange, to the royal court or to the theatre. In addition, Westminster’s location on the western fringes of the metropolis meant that residents had access to the green spaces of Hyde Park and St James’s Park. The Caroline period saw the further development of fashionable areas for recreation, such as the leafy walks, bowling greens and dainty comestibles available at Shaver’s Hall and Spring Gardens, to the north and west of Charing Cross.2 In the early months of the Long Parliament the pleasures of town life were still eagerly pursued, and many MPs were enthusiastic participants. Simonds D’Ewes reported how the Commons was urged on 21 May 1641 ‘that all men would be pleased to sit and not the greater part of us to depart to Hyde Park plays and bowling greens and then to leave the burden of all business upon 2 Merritt, ch. 5.

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Westminster 1640–60 some four score of us’, which prevented the Commons from dispatching important business.3 With the outbreak of civil war, however, fashionable society in Westminster inevitably suffered. The royal court departed, as did many courtiers, and (as we have seen) Whitehall remained unoccupied for some years. Many prominent members of the gentry and nobility left, to join the army, to flee to royalist Oxford or to return to their country estates.4 Nobles on both sides of the political divide had reason to leave the capital while armies moved across the countryside. The departure of so many members of the royalist aristocracy undoubtedly altered the political complexion of elite society in Westminster during the civil war. But war brought other pressures and upheavals that disrupted the normal structures and rhythms of Westminster’s fashionable society. Even pro-parliamentary county gentry were tied up with warfare and its costs in their own counties, and were thus less likely to keep the season. Fewer cases were heard in the law courts at Westminster, and prerogative courts such as Star Chamber and High Commission were abolished. In Easter Term 1644, the Lincoln’s Inn barrister John Greene reported that there was little business, reflecting smaller numbers travelling to the capital to pursue legal cases. Given that the business of the law courts had been a mainstay of the Westminster economy since the medieval period, such disruption would undoubtedly have had a significant impact. The Inns of Court similarly suffered a shortfall in recruitment, which resulted in a loss of student spending power that has been estimated at £10,000 a year. Beyond this financial loss, the cultural life of the West End would also have missed the contribution of the large numbers of young gentlemen who traditionally attended the Inns as a sort of finishing school (often combining legal studies with dancing and fencing lessons).5 More broadly, the economic dislocation caused by the war had an especially severe impact on the luxury trades, as can be seen with the specialist shopkeepers of the fashionable New Exchange, who fell into debt with the departure of many of their usual elite clientele.6 The burden of the war also affected shopkeepers in other ways, and those with shops in Westminster Hall, for example, were assessed for the 3 Jansson, IV, 506. 4 E.g. WAC, H433 for residents labelled ‘gone’. Cf. the 1644 inventory of Leicester House when the earl returned to Penshurst: BL, Add. MSS 32683, fols 16–36; SL, XXXIV, 443. 5 E.M. Symonds, ‘The Diary of John Greene (1635–57)’ English Historical Review, 43/171 (1928), p. 392; S. Porter, ‘The economic and social impact of the civil war upon London’, in S. Porter (ed.), London and the civil war (1996) p. 188; G. Rosser, Medieval Westminster (Oxford, 1985), pp. 36–7; W.R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts 1590–1640 (1972), p. 30. Of all the Westminster parishes, St Clement Danes attracted the largest number of legal residents, given its proximity to the various Inns of Court. 6 L. Stone, Family and fortune (Oxford, 1973), p. 150; Peck, Consuming splendour, pp. 58–9.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ army rates, (although they normally escaped other assessments). Similarly, the Vintners Company estimated in 1643 that, due to the excise, the demand for wine had fallen to less than a quarter of what it had been before the war, a phenomenon that would have had a major impact in Westminster, given that the town was a particularly popular location for taverns.7 Covent Garden also seems to have struggled: evidence from rate-books suggest that a number of houses in the fashionable Piazza were vacant in 1644, while most of the tenants reportedly managed to force their desperate landlords to halve their rents. Despite this, rent arrears continued to rise and many houses could not be rented out, and were left empty.8 Similarly, some high-quality housing developed by the earl of Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane stood empty, with the flight of royalist tenants such as the earl of Annandale.9 Those who did stay in the capital struggled under a number of pressures, including periodic shortages and punishing taxation, the latter linked to the high share of the tax burden placed on London and Middlesex by the parliamentary regime. The years 1646–48 also saw the return of plague, while the Westminster parishes recorded the impact of fuel shortages on the poor and refugees from the war (particularly from Ireland), who were pouring into the capital.10 All was not entirely black for Westminster traders and the service sector during this period, though. Some Westminster tradesmen did very well out of supplying the army. Surviving contracts for the supply of the New Model Army in 1645 show that beneficiaries included Thomas Tayler of Covent Garden (supplying 1,000 pairs of shoes) and Richard Blissett of the Strand (supplying 450 horse harnesses). Gunsmiths in St Martin in the Fields did particularly well: Andrew Tyer and John Pope (both of St Martin’s) were contracted to supply ‘200 payre of snaphaunce pistols and holsters’, George Drewe 500 pair, and the partnership of Robert Murdon, Miles Knight and William Judge was to supply a further 550 pairs.11 Another significant boost to the local economy must have been the continued sitting of the Long Parliament: a figure of £175,000 p.a. has been suggested for the collective expenditure of MPs in the area.12 Indeed no fewer than forty MPs sitting in the Long Parliament lived in the relatively small 7 B. Coates, The impact of the English civil war on the economy of London, 1642–50 (2004), pp. 29 n. 27, 34–8. Coates argues that, unlike brewers, vintners found it difficult to get their customers to accept price increases. For vintners in Westminster in 1641, see TNA, E179/254/22. 8 SL, XXXVI, 7; Porter, ‘The economic and social impact’, pp. 190–1. 9 Stone, Family and fortune, p. 150; Porter, ‘The economic and social impact’, p. 190. 10 Porter, ‘The economic and social impact’, pp. 182–7, 193–4; WAC, E23; E24, fol. 3v; E28. 11 G. Mungeam, ‘Contracts for the Supply of Equipment to the “New Model” Army in 1645’, Journal of Arms and Armour Society 6/3 (Sept 1968), pp. 89, 92, 96–8, 103, 111, 113–15. 12 Porter, ‘The economic and social impact’, p. 177.

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Westminster 1640–60 area of the Piazza and nearby streets in Covent Garden, while poor rate-books record their shifting presence in the other parishes of Westminster. By 1647 nine prominent parliamentarians were listed as rate-payers in the Piazza alone, including Denzil Holles and Sir Henry Vane the elder.13 More generally, government bureaucracy was commandeered by the parliamentary regime and therefore the state continued to provide a source of employment for those who were willing to stay, and there was substantial continuity in some departments, such as the exchequer.14 Even the attentions of the Committee for Sequestrations had a mixed effect on the locality. Some gentlemen’s private houses in the 1640s were initially sequestered and used to house sick soldiers,15 and as we have seen, many noble town-houses were retained for the state’s use to house committees. But many sequestered properties in Westminster returned swiftly to private usage. Some of the larger town-houses were redistributed among the peerage.16 The Westminster Sequestrations Committee received a constant stream of orders to make sequestered houses available to destitute parliamentarians, ranging from army colonels to the earl of Stamford.17 Thus Sir Edward Herbert’s house in the Strand was offered to the destitute Sir Thomas Middleton and his family, with instructions that it should be furnished with goods and furniture available through the sequestration.18 Inventoried furnishings were often left in sequestered houses in this way, with an eye not just to the comfort of destitute parliamentarians but also to the future rental value of the property. When the duke of Buckingham’s York House was seized and passed into the hands of the earl of Northumberland, it was initially decided not to sell off the pictures as they were ‘not like to yield soe great a value as they are worth but may serve to increase the rent of the said House wherein they are’.19 It was only later that parliament stepped in and required a number of the paintings to be burned.20 A sequestration order need not therefore have denuded the fashionable properties of the area. Some indulgence was also granted to those who suffered the sequestration of a portion of their goods. In the case of the countess of Clare it was felt appropriate that she should be given three weeks to raise the money to buy back her sequestered goods before they were removed or sold ‘and that shee should be respected in her fift parte with such goods as 13 SL, XXXVI, 7, 151–72. Sir Henry Vane the younger is listed as a rate-payer in 1645–47 in nearby King Street. 14 D. Pennington, ‘The making of the war 1640–1642’ in D. Pennington and K. Thomas (eds), Puritans and revolutionaries (Oxford, 1978), pp. 164–5. 15 E.g. TNA, SP20/1, p. 67. 16 See Chapter 3. 17 E.g. TNA, SP20/1, pp. 153, 164, 192, 210. 18 TNA, SP20/1, p. 163. 19 TNA, SP20/1, pp. 113–14. 20 CJ, 16 Jan 1643, 27 June and 20 Aug 1645.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ are most desired by her’.21 There might also be less official means of avoiding the full rigours of the sequestration process: two of the Middlesex collectors were accused of ‘takeinge money and rewards to favour Delinquents’.22 Overall, the 1640s saw considerable economic and social dislocation in Westminster. The abandonment and decay of Whitehall over the course of the decade removed the royal court as a place of patronage and rendezvous. The period also witnessed other striking challenges to the cultural life associated with the emerging West End, not all of which were linked to the military defence of the capital. As we will discuss below, the closing down of theatres, stricter enforcement of Sabbath restrictions and the shutting of pleasure gardens such as Spring Gardens and Hyde Park in these years would necessarily have affected forms of public, elite sociability.23 The moral regulation of fashionable living would also be a problematic feature of Westminster society well after the war was over, as we will see. Fashionable society under the republic and  protectorate Ultimately, the end of the war saw Westminster begin slowly to recover some its role as a centre for aristocratic living, with some of Westminster’s residents returning, albeit potentially saddled with sequestrations. There were still temporary alarms when times of tension created a more intrusive military presence in the area. Thus, after Fairfax’s troops entered Westminster in 1648 it was reported that ‘the Army where they are quartered, demeane themselves very civilly, howsoever being seene so numerous in the Strand and places adjacent, many Gentlemen who intended to reside there all this winter, are now preparing to goe downe to keepe their new yeare with their tenants’.24 Over the following years the sight of soldiers in the Strand may have become more familiar and less alarming, but periodic political crises, which usually flooded central Westminster with soldiers, must have caused many a temporary change of plans for the ‘season’. Minor harassment by soldiers was also not uncommon, as we have seen. In addition, a number of ordinances temporarily expelled from the capital those who had ‘recently borne arms for the king’.25 Gentlemen might possibly feel vulnerable at times of acute political unrest. Thomas Rugg (who lived in Covent Garden) commented in November 21 TNA, SP20/1, p. 132. 22 TNA, SP20/1, p. 97. Lord Howard of Escrick’s was only the most notorious case of bribes being taken to reduce fines on delinquents. 23 For further discussion see below, and pp. 213–14, 237–40. 24 The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, no. 288 (28 Nov–5 Dec 1648), p. 1176. Christopher Guise reported that at the troops’ approach his family ‘pawned our plate, buried our money and so removed’: D. Underdown, Pride’s purge (Oxford, 1971), p. 131. 25 See Chapter 4.

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Westminster 1640–60 1659 that after the army’s dismissal of the Rump, ‘gentlemen did not care to goe into the Citty to buy theire commodities’, and John Evelyn commented around the same time on the ill-treatment that gentlemen in coaches seemed to receive from the London populace, but there is little evidence to suggest that this was a persistent problem in more settled times.26 In fact, the end of civil war and the return of relative political and social stability brought a series of developments that helped to revive forms of elite sociability. These included the revival of the law courts, the return of the ‘season’, economic recovery, the renewed use of Whitehall Palace and (as the 1650s progressed) the creation of the protectoral court. In particular, litigation brought the gentry to the capital. One lawyer in April 1653 observed that Westminster Hall was ‘full, as it usually is in the beginning of a terme’, even if he also noted that ‘the army flocketh to this town’.27 Even if there may have been some hesitation about coming to the capital purely for pleasure, litigation drew the gentry to Westminster, and the need to attend the law courts seems to have been recognized as a ground for licensed exemption from the proclamations that periodically restricted former ‘adherents’ of the king from coming to the metropolis.28 By 1658, it seemed natural for Sir Ralph Verney to preface a letter to his cousin by apologizing ‘I would not interrupt your London pleasures’ (which, it should be said, were heavily focused on the West End and the family’s favoured location of Covent Garden).29 The signs of a renewed fashionable society are readily apparent, not just in the revival of the law courts and ‘London pleasures’, but also in particular in the resurgence of substantial building developments in the area. New building One of most distinctive features of the emergence of a fashionable West End in the early seventeenth century had been the creation of a new style of urban housing in locations such as St Martin’s Lane, and most notably in the earl of Bedford’s planned development in Covent Garden in the 1630s. This had also been supplemented by new aristocratic mansions such as Leicester House, Newport House, Goring House and Tart Hall. In the same spirit, the ­Restoration period in Westminster would be marked by the development of 26 Rugg, p. 13; John Evelyn, A Character of England (1659), pp. 7–9. 27 E.M. Thompson (ed.), Correspondence of the Family of Hatton (Camden Society, n.s. 22, 1878), p. 8. 28 Porter, ‘The economic and social impact’, p. 188; CJ, 2 Nov 1649; CSPD 1656–7, p. 91. By June 1648, an ordinance was published that complained that a recent order allowing exemptions from a ban on delinquents within the lines of communication (in relation to those who had compounded) had resulted in officers neglecting their duty for fear of arresting those who had made their peace with the regime. A&O, I, 1166–68. 29 Verney, II, 143.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ aristocratic squares, new town-houses and further elite housing development in the western and northern fringes of Westminster and beyond. There has therefore been a tendency to see the years between 1640 and the Restoration as a time of stagnation, when the taste for major urban developments faltered, only to be relieved by the return of the king and the royal court in 1660. This is a historical reading that has tended to predispose scholars to regard the interregnum years as a time when fashionable society in Westminster was in retreat. In fact, however, not only were there significant new building developments in these years which accompanied a broader revival of fashionable society in the area, but these were also projects which very clearly had their roots in the pre-war West End. Newer building reflected a large degree of continuity with earlier developments, with many of the same aristocratic families continuing building programmes that had been projected or already in progress in 1640. The confidence that the same type of ‘quality’ housing would prove viable in a very different political climate is notable. Nevertheless, it must be said that the 1650s, unsurprisingly, did not see the building of substantial aristocratic mansions, although Sir Gilbert Pickering, the cultured new lord chamberlain and high steward of Westminster, did build a handsome house at the end of the Old Tiltyard in Whitehall on a ninety-nine-year lease.30 Efforts to resume building started as early as 1648.31 Leicester Square had been initially laid out by the earl of Leicester in 1630, but it was further expanded in 1648, when the earl of Northumberland conveyed three acres of land (Swan Close) to the earl of Leicester.32 It is also clear that developers sought to reproduce features that had been so popular with a range of wealthy tenants in Covent Garden during the 1630s. The earl of Salisbury, for example, acquired older, out-of-repair houses in Newport Street in 1651, just north of his fashionable houses in St Martin’s Lane. These were leased to the prominent carpenter, Richard Ryder, who had worked on Covent Garden, and according to the terms of the lease the houses were either rebuilt in brick, with similar-sized street frontages, or substantially improved.33 Other notable ‘quality’ building nearby included development in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, an area which had been set out for ‘faire and goodlye walkes’ under James I. Despite attempts to maintain this green space for pleasant recreation, the pressure to build fashionable houses soon mounted and an impressive row of classically inspired houses (Arched Row) had appeared on the west side by the later 1630s. This took place under 30 CSPD 1656–7, p. 143. The puritan Pickering’s sophisticated cultural tastes are discussed in Mowl and Earnshaw, Architecture, pp. 121–2. The houses of other new local notables also had considerable sums spent on them, such as the £2,000 spent on the house in Spring Gardens where General Desborough lived (ibid.). 31 For the earl of Clare’s building in St Clement Danes, see below. 32 SL, XXXIV, 416. 33 Stone, Family and fortune, p. 112; SL, XXXIV, 344.

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Westminster 1640–60 the auspices of William Newton, a speculator from Bedfordshire, who obtained a licence in 1638 and was also responsible for building in nearby fields. The civil war, the death of Newton in 1643 and objections to further building in the locality put a halt to further development. However, by 1657 Newton’s interest had passed to others and, in agreement with Lincoln’s Inn, the decision was made to build houses that would ‘beare equall proportions in front, height, breadth, strength and beauty, with the sayd Row called Portugall Row, or in a more firme or beautifull manner’. The considerable efforts needed to smooth the path for this development, including an exemption from the 1657 Building Act, once again point to the popularity and demand for this type of housing, with Arched Row and Portugal Row still described by Strype in 1720 as being ‘for the generality taken up by the Nobility and Gentry’.34 The post-war period also witnessed the start of other large-scale planned developments in Westminster and its adjacent West End parishes. The second earl of Clare’s development around Clare Market makes an interesting case study. The first earl of Clare, a prominent courtier, had already developed a considerable urban estate in St Clement Danes in the early Stuart period. He bought up property piecemeal and obtained licences for his tenants to convert or rebuild properties, on the grounds that they would be suitable for persons of quality who would not ‘pester’ the parish in the way associated with the poor occupants of older tenements. The first earl died in 1636, but his son not only continued in his father’s footsteps, but acquired sufficient land to envisage a larger-scale development.35 A patent was granted for further development in August 1641, and in the 1640s Clare and his tenants started to build over most of Clement’s Inn Field, and also erected a market house.36 This was generally a popular development, and there was local support for the market to be established on a more official basis, with petitions from the inhabitants of Westminster and other adjoining parishes and Middlesex JPs. This resulted in the preparation of a parliamentary Act to allow a market to meet there three times a week, although this was not completed when the Rump was precipitately dissolved in 1653. The market continued to meet in the meantime without official sanction.37 In 1657, James Howell’s Londinopolis noted how 34 The Lincoln’s Inn Fields development was situated on the boundary of two parishes, St Clement Danes and St Giles in the Fields: SL, III, pt. 1, pp. 3–22; Mowl and Earnshaw, Architecture, p. 136; F. Sheppard, London: a history (Oxford, 1998), p. 179. For residents in these new houses (Sir Peter Temple, Henry Carey, earl of Monmouth and the earl of Cardigan) see SL, III, pt. 1.The subject of anti-development sentiment and activity in the 1640s and 1650s is one that I plan to pursue further elsewhere. 35 Merritt, p. 146; P. Croot, ‘Before and after Drury House: Development of a Suburban Town House 1250–1800’, London Topographical Record 18 (2001), pp. 40–41. 36 Croot, ‘Drury House’, p. 40. See Clare’s Middlesex accounts 1647–49 for building houses in Clement Field, Holles Street, Stanhope Street and the Market House: Nottingham University Library, Ne A 518–60. 37 A petition was published in October 1654, in favour of the market, from the inhabitants

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ Clare lived in St Clement’s ‘in a princely manner, having a house, a street, and a market both for flesh and fish, all bearing his name’.38 However, this initiative attracted mixed comment. When an exemption from the penalties of the 1657 Building Act was debated in the Commons, one speaker ‘took occasion to reflect highly upon my Lord Clare’. He complained that Clare had erected a market but no church – a ‘house for the flesh’ rather than ‘a house for the spirit’.39 The charge was a valid one: the original 1641 patent had included a commitment to building a chapel of ease for St Clement Danes – an obvious mirroring of Bedford’s Covent Garden – but this Clare clearly had not done.40 The provisions of the original patent suggest good-quality housing, but it is not entirely clear how far Clare ultimately sought to create a truly fashionable development, and he may have struggled with a relatively constricted site. It should be stressed, though, that in the less built-up areas north of St Clement Danes and St Martin’s, the taste for planned networks of streets with fashionable town-houses was more straightforwardly imitated. Developments in Hatton Garden and the Bloomsbury development of the earl of Southampton were both obviously inspired by Covent Garden and began to take shape in the later 1650s. Hatton Garden was carved up out of gardens belonging to Hatton House, built by the Elizabethan favourite Sir Christopher Hatton. By the 1650s, his impoverished descendant, the royalist and former Comptroller of the Household to Charles I, Christopher Hatton, sold off leases for building plots. In 1659, John Evelyn went to view ‘the foundations now laying for a long Streete, and buildings in Hatton Garden, design’d for a little Towne: lately an ample Garden’. Tellingly, the principal street was sixty feet wide, the equivalent of the main streets leading off the Piazza in Covent Garden.41 Similarly, in 1657 the earl of Southampton (whose family had earlier benefited from the pre-1640 value of its Bloomsbury estate) began to repair war damage to his

38

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40 41

of the Westminster parishes (along with those of St Giles in the Fields and adjoining parishes) which noted previous petitions from them and from Middlesex JPs for a market in Clement’s Inn Fields ‘where Buildings usefull are erected for that purpose’: The humble petition of the inhabitants of the severall parishes of Clement Danes, Savoy, Covent-garden. James Howell, Londinopolis (1657), p. 344. Further information on Clare’s development can be found in Nottingham University Library, receiver’s accounts and rentals (Ne A 561–72). For making a sewer in St Clement’s in 1653–6, see Ne L 366–82. T. Rutt (ed.), Diary of Thomas Burton, esq. ... 1656–59 (1828) (hereafter Burton), II, 9 June 1657. In response to this criticism of ‘Mr Pedley’, the Speaker and Bulstrode Whitelocke ‘took him down, and said, such scurrilous language did not become this place, and that if we would not do this person, who was an honourable person and well deserving, a favour upon his petition, we ought not to do him a displeasure by such reflections’. Another suggestion was that rather than granting Clare an abatement on his houses, he should have ‘the new market confirmed to him’. CJ, 5 June 1657 reproduces the original patent of 10 Aug 1641. Evelyn, III, 231. P. Hunting, ‘The Survey of Hatton Garden in 1694 by Abraham Arlidge’, London Topographical Record, 25 (1985), pp. 86–7.

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Westminster 1640–60 properties, as well as erecting a new mansion to replace one damaged by fortifications built during the civil war. At the Restoration, Southampton then laid out the land in front of it as a square, which was subsequently surrounded on three sides with ranges of terraced houses. This elegant development can claim to be the first open space in London to be called a square, and became a model for later aristocratic squares in the capital.42 While this series of planned aristocratic developments provides important evidence for the continuity of pre-war fashionable building in the western suburbs, and helps to form a bridge between the interregnum and later Restoration building schemes, it must, however, be emphasized that this provides us with only one aspect of the exponential increase in building activity experienced in Westminster during the 1640s and 1650s. As in the pre-1640 period, much of the building was actually of poor quality and the sudden appearance of ramshackle houses and sheds throughout the town still concerned parish authorities, JPs and parliament, with some examples even dating from the war years.43 Changes in property ownership and the absence of royal authority also affected such expansion. For example, over 200 houses were built in St James’s Field sometime between 1651 and 1660. St James’s Field was held together with the keepership of St James’s Palace, and the houses in question were all built by Hugh Woodward, deputy to the keeper of the palace, Sir John Danvers. In 1651 Woodward bought the field from the trustees for the sale of the late king’s goods and subsequently began building.44 Under the protectorate there were extended attempts by the government to buy back St James’s Field from Woodward,45 and the establishment of the protectorate (and fears of assassination) evidently intensified official sensitivity to building near Whitehall Palace and St James. In 1654 it was ordered that royal parks and residences were to be repurchased and cleared for the use of the protector – especially Whitehall, St James’s Field and the Mews.46 For our purposes, though, Woodward’s 1650s houses – the quality of which is not clear – attest to the demand for housing among those whose livelihoods were likely to have been bound up with the local economy and Westminster’s role as an ­administrative centre and site of the protectoral court. 42 Sheppard, London, pp. 179–80. Although these areas were adjacent to Westminster and increasingly attracted socially elevated residents, they were technically outside the bounds of Westminster. 43 E.g. LJ, 21 Apr 1642: ‘a building being erected by one Henry Roseby and his Workmen, upon the King’s Ground, near His Majesty’s House, where the Records of Parliament are kept, contrary to express Orders of this House, which Building hath gone on in Contempt of the said Orders, and the Commands of the Lords in Parliament therein expressed’. See also LJ, 6 Jan 1644; SL, XXIX, 26. 44 SL, XXIX, 2, 23. Sir John Danvers – a regicide and a Governor of the College and Almshouses – held the position jointly with his brother. 45 CSPD 1654, pp. 39, 311. 46 CSPD 1653–4, p. 397; See also R. Sherwood, The court of Oliver Cromwell (1977), pp. 16, 21–22.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ The revival in poor-quality speculative housing is of course in itself an index of the revival of the economy of the western suburbs, which built on and was reflected in the resurgence of elite society. The Westminster parishes urgently petitioned the authorities, complaining about the plague of new building and urging the revival of earlier royal proclamations against new building in the area.47 When the government at length decided in 1657 to promote an Act ‘for the preventing the multiplicity of Buildings in and about the Suburbs of London, and within ten miles of the same’, this indicated its recognition of the sheer extent of feverish new building in the capital.48 Part of the renewed enthusiasm of the authorities for these measures can undoubtedly be explained by the government’s financial crisis in 1657–58. The allocation of fines to be levied by the Buildings Commission (and estimated at c. £400,000) was specifically ear-marked for a range of urgent needs, including the repayment of a £17,000 loan to pay for forces serving in Jamaica.49 Clearly, the market in new building was seen as sufficiently extensive to provide a rapid and substantial revenue stream. The Act exempted the more prestigious new aristocratic developments in the western suburbs (although only after substantial and somewhat acrimonious debate)50 but more generally the legislation is a barometer of the revival of building activity since the war’s end. The provisions were potentially quite strict, but politics dictated that those who had bought sequestered properties from parliament, potentially in violation of the Act, were exempt.51 The 1657 Building Act, as we have seen, applied to London, not just Westminster. The losing struggle to implement it in Westminster, however, is suggested by an open advertisement that appeared in the official government newsbook Mercu 47 WAC, F2003, fol. 37; CSPD 1655, p. 315; CSPD 1656–7, pp. 70–1; TNA, SP18/129, fol. 214. 48 ‘An Act for the preventing the multiplicity of Buildings in and about the Suburbs of London, and within ten miles of the same’, A&O, II, 1223–4. The Act is known as 1656, cap. 24, but was passed in June 1657. It imposed fines of a year’s rent on every new building erected since 1620 within ten miles of London, and not having four acres of land, and also restricted future building. The scope of the Act seems to have come closer to Elizabethan legislation: N.G. Brett-James, The growth of Stuart London (1935), p. 121. 49 CJ, 13 Feb 1657; CSPD 1657–8, p. xiv; CSPD 1658–9, pp. 95, 128. 50 The Bill was subject to many amendments which prompted constant and extended debates: see Mercurius Politicus, no. 353 (12–19 Mar 1657), p. 7663; no. 361 (7–14 May 1657), p. 7790; no. 364 (28 May–4 June 1657), p. 7828; no. 365 (4–11 June 1657), p. 7836; no. 367 (11–18 June 1657), p. 7850; no. 368 (18–25 June 1657), pp. 7867, 7874–5. Burton’s diary records Thomas Clarges reporting from the Committee on its response to the petitions of the earls of Bedford, Clare and ‘the Petition of the City of Westminster’, but the contents of this latter petition are unclear: Burton, II, 5 June 1657. Exemptions also included a parcel of ground in Stanhope Street in St Clement Danes parish where a group of lessees had contracted to build ‘substantial and strong Brick-houses’. 51 Properties built since 1620 (the starting date for building said to be illegal) on lands sold to individuals by parliament and formerly in the possession of the crown, delinquents or ecclesiastical bodies were exempt.

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Westminster 1640–60 rius Politicus in 1658, inviting that ‘if any persons have a minde to imploy their Money in Building, they may have Four Acres of Ground, and a convenient place to build on in Hide-park’.52 Residence and the season The surge in new aristocratic housing reflected the revival of the West End season, and the return of large numbers of noble residents to the area, albeit potentially saddled with sequestrations. Rents in desirable areas such as Covent Garden, and the social status of its inhabitants, would also seem to have revived, and by the end of 1652 it was reported that the price of lodgings in the area had grown dearer.53 Some of the traditional pageantry that accompanied the visits of noblemen to the area would seem to have been revived. The earl of Pembroke’s accounts for 1649–50 record money given to Colonel Hewson’s drummers, Colonel Pride’s drummers, General Cromwell’s drummers and Colonel Rich’s trumpeters – payments which echo the exchanges enacted in the past when noblemen such as the earl of Cumberland were greeted on their arrival in Westminster by the king’s and prince’s trumpeters, who were given similar amounts.54 Men and women of rank generally continued to be treated with deference and their behaviour and entitlement as a group were regularly recognized by local officials in Westminster. In 1653 demand for seats in the ‘lords’ gallery’ of St Martin’s led to fierce competition. In 1656, after the death of Sir Henry Vane senior, his pew in what was still described as the ‘lords’ gallery’ was swiftly taken on by Lady Dorothy Stanhope and her family. Parish officials in St Martin’s also took care to acknowledge the claims of rank where possible, and in 1657 they personally attended the countess of Peterborough to offer her a pew in the church, if she were interested, while the following year glass sun-dials were provided for the lords’ gallery in St Martin’s church at the request of some ‘persons of quality’.55 Equally, throughout the 1650s St Martin’s vestry was keen to levy rates for the repair of highways on those whom it identified as lords, ladies and gentlemen who kept coaches and horses.56 Pamphlets also drew attention to the many ‘Persons of Honor’ and ladies and gentlemen of the peerage still active in the social season, and although this was 52 Mercurius Politicus, no. 416 (13–20 May 1658), p. 535. Those interested were told to gain further directions ‘at Mr Talmans House a scrivener, in King-street, Westminster, or else by Thomas Shell, or Francis Proctor, near Hide-Park Gate’. 53 Verney, I, 490. 54 Hatfield House, earl of Pembroke’s accounts, 127/9, January 1648/9; Merritt, p. 149. 55 WAC, F2003, fols 23, 25, 28–9, 93, 123; F15, 1658–9. 56 WAC, F2003 p. 19. St Martin’s vestry in May 1654 also resolved to make a rate for highways, with every lord, lady and gentleman inhabiting in the parish who kept a coach and horses to be charged.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ sometimes intended to highlight their supposedly lascivious behaviour, such literature also confirms a certain social prominence in West End society. Newes from the New Exchange describes a fashionable milieu involving women such as the countess of Kent, the countess of Exeter, Lady Carlisle, Lady Peterborough, Lady Devonshire, Lady Pratt, Lady Hungerford, Lady Kinsmell and Lady Rutland.57 It has been suggested that aristocratic women in the Restoration period seem to have enjoyed freer social lives in town than in the country. Yet it is clear that significant number of aristocratic women in the 1640s and 1650s came to the capital and dealt with their husband’s financial affairs and sequestrations. Given that some royalist couples were also effectively separated, with one of them living on the Continent and the other in England, it appears that such circumstances contributed yet further to what seems to have been an increasing acceptance of elite women gathering in public places.58 Assessing the number of members of the gentry and aristocracy who resided in the Westminster parishes in the 1640s and 1650s is not any easy exercise. Impressionistic evidence, coupled with parish records, such as the poor rate, suggests that after an initial surge in 1640–41, associated with the calling of parliament, the war years discouraged residence except among those who had a specific need to be in the capital, or those fleeing the war in other parts of the country. By the 1650s, however, numbers seem to have slowly improved, as is partly suggested by the poor-rate assessments.59 It must be emphasized, though, that these do not provide a reliable guide to temporary gentry and noble residents. For all the efforts of overseers of the poor, temporary residents were not always caught on the poor-rate books.60 For example, many of the temporary visitors listed in the major-generals’ register book for 1655–56 as lodging in Westminster do not appear in the parochial poor rates for that year, and these include at least fourteen titled residents.61 Similarly, the Westminster Sessions books for 1657, which record Catholics who had not taken the Oath of Abjuration, reveal the presence of titled residents and their servants in the locality whose names do not appear in the poor-rate records. 57 Edward Phillips, The mysteries of love & eloquence ... as they are manag’d in the Spring Garden, Hide Park; the New Exchange, and other eminent places (1658), preface; Newes from the New Exchange or the Commonwealth of Ladies (1650), p. 6. 58 S. Whyman, Sociability and power in late Stuart England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 93–5. 59 The combined poor-rate records for St Martin’s, St Margaret’s, St Clement Danes and St Paul Covent Garden typically list between 105 and 120 titled residents each year during the 1650s. 60 The material for individual years is difficult to compare. The first surviving poor-rate for St Paul Covent Garden is 1647–48 (WAC, H433), when there may have been some confusion about its separate status from St Martin’s and some residents are listed as ‘gone’ when the list was made. In 1652–53, fourteen titled residents were rated (H434), while in 1656–57 numbers had risen to twenty-four (H438). Obviously, such measurement excludes untitled members of the gentry. 61 See below, n. 63.

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Westminster 1640–60 Not only were temporary titled residents not listed in the poor rate, but they may also have been lodging in non-aristocratic properties. Thus, while the Sessions books list Sir Thomas Shirley and his wife as living in Covent Garden, they also describe the Catholic countess of Banbury and her women as lodging with a St Clement’s tailor.62 Likewise, the major-generals’ register book records titled visitors staying in a range of properties, including taverns, and the houses of a tailor, an apothecary, a stone-cutter and an innkeeper, in locations such as Covent Garden, Drury Lane and Axe Yard in St Margaret’s.63 The risk of underestimating the number of aristocratic visitors to Westminster is also exacerbated by the growing trend for some of them to reside just outside the bounds of Westminster in westward areas such as Chelsea, from where they would then travel in to enjoy the delights of the metropolis or to conduct business. For former royalists, this had the advantage of putting them beyond the obvious observation of various metropolitan authorities, although it must be said that this leafy enclave, conveniently located by the Thames, also attracted various supporters of the commonwealth and protectoral regimes, such as the regicide Sir John Danvers and Bulstrode Whitelocke.64 Lady Jane Cheyne, writing in 1656 from Chelsea, where she and her husband had rented a house, claimed to prefer solitary walks there, rather than ‘the crowd and dust’ of Hyde Park, and remarked ‘I have not as yet been there, for which I am much wondered at, by those that affect such pleasures’. Chelsea itself could attract sociable company: she added two months later: ‘I have company with me not only every day but all day, Chelsea being as pleasant a place for inviting of company as any I know, and being not far from Hyde Park, we can not miss of seeing often our friends and acquaintance’.65 Some gentry 62 LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/172, pp. 12, 14, 19. 63 BL, Add. MSS 34014: Sir Walter Pye (lodging in Russell Street and Tothill Fields: fol. 1v); Sir William Hicks (Bedford Street: fol. 3v); Sir Edward Widdrington (King Street: fol. 4r); Sir William Courtney (York Street Covent Garden and Drury Lane: fols 8v, 16v); Sir Walter Vavasour and Sir Thomas Strickland (Russell Street: fols 19v–20r, 25r); Sir Richard Willis (Russell Street: fol. 28v); Sir Christopher Wray (Covent Garden: fols 33v, 34v); Sir Edward Griffin (Henrietta Street: fols 44, 53r); Sir Thomas Fleetwood (Charles Street: fol. 57r); Sir Thomas Gower (King Street: fol. 63r); the earl of Shrewsbury (the Duchy House: fol. 65); Sir Fulke Huncks (Drury Lane: fol. 79); and Lord Poulett (the Strand: fols 46, 79). 64 Lodewijck Huygens: the English journal 1651–1652 (Leiden, 1982) (hereafter Huygens), p. 92. Huygens heard the organist Christopher Gibbons (son of the more famous Orlando) play at the house of Danvers. Despite being a regicide, Danvers seems to have later helped distressed cavaliers, according to Aubrey, and Thomas Fuller preached frequently before him at Chelsea, ODNB, s.n. Sir John Danvers: R. Spalding, The improbable puritan, a life of Bulstrode Whitelocke (1975), pp. 121, 204. 65 Nottingham University Library, Portland MSS PWI/86, 89 (Lady Jane Cheyne to Charles Cavendish, Viscount Mansfield, 27 Mar, 7 May 1656 (quoted in Peck, Consuming splendour, pp. 289–90).

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ gathered still further west, at Petersham: Sir Justinian Isham sometimes stayed here with his friend the ejected bishop of Chichester Brian Duppa (although Isham’s principal lodgings when visiting the metropolis were at Charing Cross), and the bishop expected to receive other visitors from the capital. He briefly welcomed Lady Carlisle as a neighbour in 1653, although he soon discovered that her professed love for country walks was limited and that she ‘cam only till she could preapare [sic] lodgings in the Piazza [Covent Garden]’.66 The correspondence of the royalist dowager countess of Devonshire, who stayed in Roehampton, similarly describes a broader genteel social scene, moving between Westminster, the western fringes of the capital and sometimes ranging as far afield as Newmarket for the races, where ‘Our Lords are all bent’. The countess herself clearly expected to travel into Westminster, and commented on the latest fashions and entertainments there.67 The appeal of a more rural setting (sometimes combined with its distance from prying eyes) meant that even Westminster’s own residents sometimes chose to spend part of the year in Chelsea: Sir Henry Herbert moved with his family from his house in James Street in Covent Garden to Chelsea for the summer.68 What is significant here, however, is that the social milieu of fashionable Westminster was also bolstered by men and women living outside of the metropolis, yet participating in its cultural life. Evidence for the gradually reviving social scene comes not only from the swelling numbers of well-to-do titled residents either listed in the Westminster poor-rate records or whose residence is mentioned in other sources, but also from the activities of those who depended on their patronage. Dr William Denton, formerly a court physician to Charles I, not only continued to enjoy a flourishing practice from his house in the Piazza, but also recorded dining regularly with members of the nobility in 1652, such as Lady Suffolk, Lord Musgrave and the countess of Barrymore, while Lady Heale and her friends were said to invite themselves to Mrs Denton’s at night.69 Another physician, Dr Walter Charleton, a correspondent of Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, also established a fashionable practice in Bow Street, Covent Garden around 1651.70 The 1650s also saw properties in the area occupied by those who purveyed specialist luxury goods, such as Francis Clein, the noted German painter and tapestry designer, located in Henrietta Street, while it was complained in 1652 that a ‘Mr Hodnow’, a painter of religious paintings for 66 The correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham 1650–1660, ed. G. Isham (Northamptonshire Record Society 17, 1951), pp. 30n, 71n. 67 HMC, Ailesbury, pp. 158–61. 68 BL, Add. MSS 34014, fol. 83. 69 Verney, I, 568. 70 SL, XXXVI, 96; L. Semler, ‘The magnetic attraction of Margaret Cavendish and Walter Charlton’ in J. Wallwork and P. Salzman (eds), Early modern women testing ideas (2011), pp. 57–8.

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Westminster 1640–60 Roman Catholics, plied his trade from a property in Covent Garden.71 A survey of Covent Garden properties by the commissioners for new buildings in 1657 valued the development at over £10,000, and as we have seen, its evident popularity clearly inspired other building projects in the 1650s.72 Conspicuous expenditure by its residents is also easily demonstrated. Humphrey Weld spent a fortune on his town-house just off Drury Lane in the 1640s and 1650s and, despite having suffered sequestrations in the 1640s, he bought many paintings for his property and even built a chapel there. He also bought royalist lands in 1651 and 1652, acting as a trustee for his father-in-law, Lord Arundel, and others until they could recover them.73 Evidence of the revival of elite consumerism in Westminster can also be detected in the changing fortunes of the shopkeepers in the New Exchange, whose rents increased, after their fall in the 1640s, and whose owners would seem to have amassed considerable wealth.74 By the later 1650s, references to the New Exchange as a meeting place for fashionable society had once again become commonplace and visits to ‘this Paradise of Toys’ were considered de rigueur as part of a round of genteel social activities.75 It has also been suggested that a taste for new luxuries was brought back by royalists who had experienced periods of exile on the Continent, a phenomenon already making itself felt in the 1650s.76 It was not simply the old, established gentry and nobility who participated in this revival of conspicuous display. The regimes of the 1640s and 1650s generated their own elites, and in the later years of the protectorate Cromwell even began to bestow life peerages on his supporters.77 Some of these prominent members of the new regimes were happy to embrace the lifestyle of the fashionable gentry and aristocracy for which the West End was famous. Major-General John Lambert, for example, was a cultured individual who famously adopted the sophisticated way of life that his new position afforded. Both Lambert and his wife dressed sumptuously and à la mode, with the Major-General’s tailor specifically instructed on one occasion to ensure that Lambert’s new riding suit, ‘trimmed with civil ribbons and round silver cord, [be] as fashionable as he thinks will please him’.78 The republican Sir 71 SL, XXXVI, 97; ODNB, s.n. Francis Clein; M. Sparke, A second beacon fired by Scintilla (1652), p. 7. 72 LMA, E/BER/CG/E/07/01/004. 73 SL, V, 93–7; L. Peck, ‘Luxury and War: Reconsidering Luxury Consumption in Seventeenth Century England, Albion 34, (2002). 74 Peck, ‘Luxury and War’, pp. 6–7. 75 Phillips, Mysteries of love & eloquence, preface, p. 43. 76 Peck, ‘Luxury and War’, pp. 9, 13. 77 Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell, p. 164. 78 Alexander Griffith, Strena Vavasorensis (1654), pp. 18–19, criticized the swordsmen whose godliness was now undermined by their ‘Parks, and new houses, and gallant

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ Arthur Hesilrige, a leading figure under the commonwealth, cut a similarly splendid figure, with the latest style of coach, accompanied by a page in cloth trunks ‘garded with velvet, silver sword, and silver buckles on his shoes, and silk stockings’. Cromwell’s lord chamberlain, Sir Gilbert Pickering, although a choleric and godly individual, nonetheless was described as ‘finical, spruce, and like an old courtier’.79 Cromwell’s protectoral court provides numerous examples of the richness and display that were felt necessary to dignify the regime. There were some significant limitations on the degree to which the protectoral court gave a lead in the fashionable society of the 1650s, as we shall see. Nevertheless, on occasions the new court did seem to embrace the personnel and practices of fashionable society, especially in the special entertainments that were particularly arranged for foreign ambassadors, and which were conducted with great ceremony and normally accompanied by the musical performances that were a favourite of Cromwell’s. It was important on these occasions to parade aristocrats and other persons of ‘quality’ as a means of emphasizing the regime’s legitimacy. In 1655 the Spanish ambassador was received by the protector at the Banqueting House at Whitehall, where a spectator reported ‘the greatest assembly of English nobility and gentry present that have been these many years’. Increasingly, attempts were also made by the regime to gain support among the nobility. This was partly manifested in lavish weddings, perhaps the most famous of which was the wedding between Cromwell’s daughter Frances and the grandson of the earl of Warwick. This was attended by some notable royalists such as the earl of Newport, who danced with the bride, and the dowager countess of Devonshire. ‘The discourse of this town’, it was said, ‘has been much filled up with the great marriage at Whitehall, which was solemnized there three or four days last week, with music, dancing and great feasting, and now it begins for two or three days at the Earl of Warwick’s’.80 More generally, while there may have been fewer titled nobility and gentry resident in Westminster in the 1650s than there had been before the war, the taste for luxury consumption, fashionable activities and aspects of the gentry and noble lifestyle among those who could afford them certainly did not disappear.81 Officers appointed by parliament as heralds complained that while in Wives.’ In 1652, when Lambert came to London, he made great preparations, ‘laying out five thousand pounds for his own particular equipage’, Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of ... Colonel Hutchinson, ed. J. Hutchinson (1863), p. 360; B. Capp, England’s culture wars (Oxford, 2012), pp. 174–5. 79 Verney, I, 490; Mowl and Earnshaw, Architecture, p. 121. 80 HMC, Fifth report, appendix, pp. 177, 183; R. Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell, pp. 135–44. Huygens (pp. 37, 40–1) also describes the magnificent reception given to the Dutch embassy by the commonwealth regime on its arrival in December 1651. 81 Mowl and Earnshaw, Architecture, pp. 2–7, 93, 120–2, 129. Peck, ‘Luxury and War’ provides some helpful examples, taken from various parts of the country.

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Westminster 1640–60 the past it had been the custom to grant solemn funerals and hatchments only to persons of eminence, now hatchments and coats of arms were made privately and put up for people of small worth, while, as we have seen, the taste for elegant and comfortable town-houses in the West End continued.82 Royalists and fashionable society For all the enthusiasm with which General Lambert and his ilk embraced the luxurious lifestyle of the West End, there was, however, no disguising the presence of those with strong royalist associations. It was the presence of royalism that helped to problematize both the organization and the political and cultural resonances of fashionable society in Westminster. Ironically, the very fact that royalist members of the aristocracy were sub­­ jected to prosecution actually sometimes resulted in their return to Westminster. As we have observed already, the need to compound – which could be a lengthy process – or to negotiate the details of sequestrations were powerful forces in drawing the gentry (and often aristocratic women) into the capital. Sir Justinian Isham, for example, compounded initially in September 1646, but he regularly stayed in lodgings near Charing Cross over the next few years while he negotiated (albeit unsuccessfully) to reduce his fine. Granted that a visit in such circumstances might not have had the same sunny tenor of recreational visits in the pre-war years, nevertheless forms of sociability flourished, especially in a rapidly changing political environment in which rumour could be vital to the fortunes of gentry society. Lady Verney, in the capital to deal with the sequestration of Sir Ralph, described her attempts in March of 1647 to gain the support of the parliamentarian earl of Warwick, through his wife. The difficulty, however, was that ‘one can neavor find her alone, for her house is always like a court’.83 When Lady Ann Fanshawe waited uneasily for news of her husband around the time of the battle of Worcester, her pregnancy kept her to her town lodgings, yet she described how she was ‘seldom without the best company’ and she ultimately only heard that Sir Richard had survived the battle after reading his name among a list of prisoners printed in the latest London newsbook.84 Of course some royalist nobility did not come back to Westminster, despite the actions of local parishes anxiously seeking their return. Thus the earl of Berkshire, whose parish fees in St Martin’s were in arrears from 1644, was consistently warned by St Martin’s vestry that he would lose his pew as a consequence, until it was finally resolved in June 1652 that the arrears would 82 CSPD 1655, pp. 156–7. 83 Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa, pp. 30n, 71n; Verney, I, 353–4. 84 Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa, pp. xli, 1–3, 101; B. Marshall (ed.), Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe (1905), p. 105.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ be discharged because of Berkshire’s absence from his house, and his pew taken from him. But when the pew was given by the vestry to another, this was with the proviso that if Berkshire returned to live in St Martin’s and paid what was due, his pew would be restored to him.85 Prosperous noble families could be an important source of charitable gifts to the poor, and parishes such as St Martin’s therefore did their best to keep them as residents. However, some prominent royalists always managed to retain a presence in the capital. The marquis of Hertford, for example, thanks to his wife, Frances Devereux (sister to the earl of Essex), had leased parts of Essex House in the Strand for a token rent in 1639. But after the death of Essex the Hertfords remained in possession of the house, even as the property was conveyed to trustees to secure the debts of Lady Hertford and her son, as heirs to Essex House.86 Other aristocrats with more complicated political allegiances also managed to remain in Westminster. The regular reissuing of proclamations that required ex-royalists to depart from the area raised potential problems, especially for temporary visitors. But licences could still be granted and exceptions made. William Paget, sixth baron Paget, resided in Old Palace Yard in St Margaret’s Westminster for much of the 1650s and even obtained a licence to reside within the exclusion zone around London under the major-generals, despite a career which had seen him switch sides and marry the daughter of the earl of Holland.87 Even as unequivocal a royalist as Sir John Winter, formerly private secretary to Henrietta Maria, managed to obtain a licence to live in the capital in 1653, and was listed in 1657 as living in Hartshorn Lane, in St Martin’s, despite having refused to take the Oath of Abjuration.88 Licences could also be procured for former royalists to remain in Westminster if they were ill or had suits at law: thus the prominent ex-royalist Lord Scudamore was given leave to remain in Westminster in 1658 because the doctor familiar with his constitution lived in Petty France. Sir Justinian Isham obtained licences to settle his financial affairs and was also able to obtain a licence for his family to pass through the capital in 1650, despite not having taken the Engagement.89 Nevertheless, royalist gentry visiting the capital could still find themselves in trouble. Miles Woodshaw in 1651 made the mistake of saluting royalist friends in the street, and promptly became caught up with their arrest and subsequent imprisonment at Murray House in St Martin’s Lane, not because of any suspicious act on his part, but because the 85 WAC, F2003, Nov 1653. 86 VCH Middlesex XIII, p. 58; HMC, Bath, IV, 222–6; Hertford was confined briefly to his country seat in 1650 and in 1656–57 reputedly fled to the Continent to escape creditors, with Lady Hertford assuming the management of his affairs and supporting royalist clergy: ODNB, s.n. William Seymour, earl of Hertford. 87 ODNB, s.n. William Paget, sixth baron Paget. 88 ODNB, s.n. John Winter; LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/172, p. 25. 89 CSPD 1656–7, p. 91; CSPD 1657–8, p. 315; Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa, p. 101.

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Westminster 1640–60 c­ onstables had been told to arrest all of the company.90 In 1656, the young royalist Richard Lane (son of Sir Richard Lane) wrote to friends in the country from his lodgings in the Strand, weighing up the risks of remaining in the capital. After recounting the recent arrests of Lord Tufton and a son of the earl of Bedford and a recent proclamation banishing ‘poor cavilers’ from ‘towne for six months’, he nevertheless concluded, ‘I had once thought of comminge into the country, but these thinges have diverted mee: for a London jayle with friends and drinke, etc I am for that, much before your country shackle’.91 Ultimately, the social worlds of royalists and parliamentarians could and did overlap in Westminster. This phenomenon is perhaps most vividly recaptured in the journal of Lodewijck Huygens, the son of the statesman Sir Constantine Huygens. During his visit between December 1651 and July 1652, the young Huygens travelled in the entourage of a special mission of Dutch diplomats. The ambassadors were housed in a residence formerly occupied by Fairfax in Queen Street, Covent Garden, before later moving to Chelsea. Huygens’s account is particularly valuable for the light which it sheds on the cultural and political milieu of Westminster. As part of the embassy from the Dutch republic, he visited leading members of the commonwealth regime, while he also frequented individuals known to his father, large numbers of whom were former royalists. Although Huygens carefully noted the decay of ecclesiastical and royal properties, overall his account describes a complex and vibrant social scene, encompassing royalists and supporters of the commonwealth alike, who occupied many of the same public spaces. Thus, while dining at the house of Sir Walter Strickland, a member of the Council of State, whose wife was of Dutch extraction, Huygens encountered two of Lady Strickland’s Morgan relatives, both of whom were said to be ‘ardent’ royalists, who had been forced to redeem their properties twice over. Huygens was a frequent visitor to the Stricklands, who lived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, near Covent Garden, which also housed other high-ranking parliamentarians, as well as regicides such as Sir Gregory Norton and Humphrey Edwards. But the larger impression conveyed by the diary is of the presence of numerous royalists in Westminster in early 1652, including the countess of Derby and her daughters, the antiquarian Sir Thomas Stafford and his wife, and Lady Inchiquin (who had secretly crossed the Channel into England), among many others. Many of these played host to other royalist friends and kinsmen. At the house of the countess of Cork, for example, Huygens met Sir Gervase Clifton, a Clifford relative by marriage, as

90 TNA, SP18/16, fol. 10 (3 July 1651). Sir Barnaby Scudamore, Mr Glasworke and Dr Donne were involved. The ‘Mr Glasworke’ in this tale was presumably the delinquent Glascock in CalCAM, II, 995. On Dr Dunne’s royalist credentials see Mercurius Civicus, no. 6 (8–16 June 1643), pp. 46–7. 91 Thompson (ed.), Correspondence of the family of Hatton, p. 14.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ well as Peter du Moulin, the notable royalist clergyman.92 Such encounters with royalists and parliamentarians alike were seldom solemn affairs, with suppers, card games, music, coach rides, trips on the river and shopping all on the agenda and easily available.93 But while these forms of elite sociability may have served to salve political divisions, they were themselves potentially as controversial, as we will see. For those of royalist connection who did come to the capital in the 1650s, the rounds of recreation and socializing must still have been tempered by the knowledge that friends and family might suddenly face imprisonment triggered by the latest royalist plot or rumoured uprising, or be expelled from the area because of the calling of a parliament. A cloud of uncertainty thus still hung over many of the denizens of fashionable society and their activities. Elite sociability, public spaces and the limits of  fashionable society Some of the most tangible ways in which fashionable society manifested itself were in forms of public elite sociability and display. Key here were the distinctive and changing fashions in modes of dress, address, speech and behaviour by which ‘persons of quality’ sought to identify each other. Just as important were the established spaces in which such fashions could be displayed, and the range of social activities and entertainments that would accompany them. Elite people needed to have the spaces and activities in which they could interact and establish themselves. Places with a reputation for genteel association were tightly concentrated in Westminster, so that their place-name would become a shorthand to describe the fashionable society that disported itself there. Nevertheless, as we will see, it was these public, collective forms of elite behaviour which could also be subject to intrusive intervention by the authorities. The revival of fashionable society in Westminster can be partly glimpsed by the increasing popularity in Westminster of coach travel, which had become an important accompaniment to gentry visits to the pre-war capital. But the ubiquity of coaches in the 1650s could also have particular cultural and political overtones. The coach – particularly the private coach – had traditionally been a symbol of elite status, and indeed special forms of etiquette came to surround coach travel and social visits conducted by coach. The luxurious fittings and elaborate decoration of coaches clearly followed fashion in the 1650s, as did the development of different types of vehicles.94 The opportunity for display was not limited to the crowded streets of the capital, however, and the parade of coaches in Hyde Park was a firm feature on the social calendar and one that 92 Huygens, pp. 63, 62, 54, 81, 74. 93 See below. 94 Merritt, pp. 169–73; Verney, I, 490.

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Westminster 1640–60 was followed alike by royalists and supporters of the interregnum regimes. The use of hackney coaches, already problematic in terms of the traffic generated, now demanded even greater attention from authorities in both London and Westminster. A petition of 1647–48 from shopkeepers of the New Exchange and the inhabitants of the Strand asked for a ban on coaches standing in the street and complained that their ‘pestering’ of the streets annoyed locals.95 In 1652 an account of the number of hackney coaches across the capital revealed a disproportionate number located in Westminster,96 and there were several attempts thereafter to regulate their numbers and behaviour, including an order in 1654 that fixed the number of hackney coachmen in London and Westminster at 200 (and the number of coaches at 300).97 Although coach travel held elite associations in any case, coachmen as a group came to be seen as part of a trade dominated by royalists, as we have seen.98 In part this may have been linked to the large numbers who had depended on employment from transient gentry and aristocracy in the pre-war years. During the civil war and throughout the 1650s, the control of horses in the capital also came to be a very sensitive issue, and whenever there were rumours of royalist plots, surveys of privately owned horses took place in the capital. In addition, many people tried to make a living from the lucrative hackney-coach trade, as an ordinance allowed ex-parliamentary soldiers into this occupation. Competition became fierce, which doubtless explains some complaints, but the authorities also included hackney coachmen on lists of suspected royalists in Westminster in 1655, and clearly kept close scrutiny on them.99 If the types of coaches and their furnishings followed fashion in the 1650s, those travelling in them found much to appreciate in the shopping available along the Strand. The pressure to keep up with changing fashions continued even during times of government austerity and political instability. Friends and relatives traded advice on how to remain à la mode, and it was said that ‘Easter terme is fittest time to buy ... cloathes, for then all fashions alter’.100 Lord Windsor, a heroic royalist figure at the battle of Naseby, after deciding to attend the funeral of Oliver Cromwell, expressed concern that when he came up from the country ‘I may not looke more lyke a bumking’, and he asked a friend to buy him a suitably fashionable little riding sword and belt of the kind that other 95 HMC, Seventh report, p. 6. See also LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/67, p. 55; MJ/SR/1001/4. 96 CSPD 1656–7, p. 180. 97 Mercurius Politicus, no. 211 (22–29 June 1654), pp. 3581–2; no. 225 (28 Sept–5 Oct 1654), pp. 3813–14; no. 238 (28 Dec 1654–4 Jan 1655), pp. 5028–32. See also Chapter 4. 98 See Chapter 4. 99 CSPD 1654, p. 109; CSPD 1655–6, pp. 94–5; CSPD 1656–7, pp. 26–7, 74–6. See Chapter  4. 100 Verney, II, 57.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ friends had purchased near the Temple.101 Even the printed pamphlets of the period routinely depicted the shame associated with out-moded fashions. One imaginary scenario located at a ribbon stall in the New Exchange portrayed a flirtatious gentleman asking for comment on his dress from a fashionable young woman, who replies ‘Sir, For your cloathes, were your Breeches a little too long they were Jeer-proof against all the Ladies either in Hide Park or Spring-Garden’.102 In the battle to keep up with the fashion, the shops of the West End thus performed a vital role. There is ample evidence that shopping was still one of the main features of a fashionable visit to the capital. Letters from country correspondents to their friends based in the capital regularly contained shopping lists, echoing similar requests from the pre-war period. Young Tom Verney, down in the country in 1658, explained how it would be possible to purchase a new periwig by consulting a Frenchman based at the Three Periwigs & Three Crowns ‘in the Strand by Suffolk House’, who knew the size of his head and the borders he usually wore, and would be able to complete the order within a week for ten shillings.103 Pre-eminent here was the New Exchange (also known as Britain’s Burse). As we have seen, the shopkeepers of the New Exchange struggled in the 1640s, but their fortunes improved considerably by the 1650s, when many of their wills reveal them to have been men of considerable wealth. Even in early 1652 a Dutchman such as Huygens, acquainted with Amsterdam, was impressed by the shopping complex the more he delved into it, discovering ‘on a floor even higher than the second row of shops, all the kinds of niceties one usually buys in French haberdashery shops’.104 But shopping was not just a matter of the acquisition of fashionable objects. It was an important social activity in its own right, and here the New Exchange enjoyed a special and distinctive cachet. Although its exclusive tenor was established from the start, it is notable that in the 1650s the very name ‘New Exchange’ became more firmly established in the writing of the period as a kind of cultural shorthand for the sorts of pleasures enjoyed by carefree ladies and gallants.105 The pleasant and refined shopping environment, away from the street, encouraged customers to linger, and it was notoriously seen as a place for romantic assignations. In the pre-war period the New Exchange shopkeepers had occasionally been concerned about beggars or small boys playing ball games,106 but the 1650s began to see more examples of unruly, boorish and sometimes violent 101 Thompson (ed.), Correspondence of the family of Hatton, p. 15. 102 Phillips, Mysteries of love & eloquence, p. 43. 103 Verney, I, 552. 104 Peck, Consuming splendour, p. 59; Huygens, p. 56. 105 See Henry Neville, Newes from the New Exchange, or the commonvvealth of ladies, drawn to the life, in their severall characters and concernments (1650); New news from the Old Exchange (1650); Phillips, Mysteries of love & eloquence. 106 Merritt, pp. 157–9; Peck, Consuming splendour, p. 57.

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Westminster 1640–60 behaviour on the part of nobles and gentlemen. As early as 1648 the inhabitants of the New Exchange petitioned parliament, complaining of how ‘divers and sundry debauched Gentry and others have of late several Times riotously committed many Violences and Batteries upon your Petitioners Persons and Servants, in their Shops, to the Danger of their Lives and Estates’. In particular, the earl of Anglesey and his company, ‘being unanswered by a modest Maid to their uncivil and lascivious Questions’ were accused of having forced the young woman to flee, ultimately killing a neighbour, wounding another ‘and, at their Departure, marched with their Swords drawn, and Pistol ready, swearing, “Damme, they would kill all that should offer to resist them”’.107 Such squabbles paled, though, before the notorious case in November 1653 involving the brother of the Portuguese ambassador, who, with members of his entourage, was involved in an attack in the New Exchange, resulting in a trial for murder and subsequent execution.108 This led to an order by the Council of State, directing that no one ‘of what quality soever, do presume, at the said Exchange, or any other like publick place, to Occasion [or] Encourage ... any tumultuous Meetings ... by Drawing there, … or any other such place, any Sword or other Weapon, Discharging, Presenting or Bearing any Gun’.109 Nevertheless, it was more usual in the 1650s for the New Exchange to be bracketed with venues such as Hyde Park and Spring Gardens, which (one commentator observed) ‘are esteemed the fittest Schools of Ceremony and Complement; where the most select, as also the newest Fashions are alwayes in request’.110 Ready access to the open spaces which served as these ‘Schools of Ceremony and Complement’ had long been one of the attractions of the area around Westminster (alongside its proximity to the royal court). These open spaces in the western fringes of the area were used for sport, healthful recreation and fashionable entertainments. The development of these into the capital’s first pleasure gardens had been one of the more significant features of the seventeenth-century metropolis. Pleasure gardens and the range of activities available at Spring Gardens, St James’s Park and Hyde Park had been integral to the process whereby fashionable society had been able to congregate in areas which were distant from the restrictions of the royal court itself but which still maintained a socially exclusive tone.111 These exclusive, ­fashionable 107 LJ, 3 Feb 1648; HMC, Seventh report, p. 7. Complaints were also made that local officials were turning a blind eye to behaviour by unruly gentlemen. 108 A narration of the late accident in the New-Exchange, on the 21. and 22. of November, 1653 (1653); CSPD 1654, pp. 151, 250; Mercurius Politicus, no. 213 (6–13 July 1654) pp. ‘3702’ (vere 3612), 3619–20. 109 By the Council of State. The Council of State taking notice of the tumultuous and barbarous actings at the New Exchange (1653). 110 Phillips, Mysteries of love & eloquence, sig. a3v. 111 Merritt, pp. 163–7.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ c­onnotations persisted during the 1640s and 1650s, and all three of these venues continued to function (albeit sometimes sporadically) as places of elite sociability. Political instability meant that they were sometimes subject to closure for security reasons, while the religious tenor of the times resulted in periodic clampdowns on venues that either violated the Sabbath or encouraged men and women in dissolute, luxurious practices. Spring Gardens, where ladies and gentlemen could stroll, play at bowls and eat and drink in a landscaped setting near the court, experienced varying fortunes in this period. The barrister John Greene was able to go walking there in May 1644, but in 1646 the House of Lords complained of ‘the great Disorder in suffering Company to walk and resort to The Spring Garden on the Lord’s-day and Fast-days’, and directed the earl of Pembroke to ensure that it was closed on such days. Access was again restricted amid the security scares of the early years of the republic, when in 1650 Colonel Pride ordered the fastening up of all doors leading to the Spring Gardens.112 In April 1652, Huygens records having visited the Gardens and considered them ‘reasonably attractive but rather wild. There is a house in the centre where the ladies go and eat cheesecake and syllabub in the summer.’ By May 1654, however, John Evelyn was reporting that ‘Cromwell and his partisans’ had ‘shut up and seiz’d on Spring Garden, which ’til now, had been the usual rendezvous for the Ladys and Gallants at this season’.113 Nevertheless, by 1658 Evelyn himself was able to enjoy a fashionable ‘collation’ there, while the same year one pamphleteer claimed to have had his musings in a bower there interrupted by a distressed, lovesick gallant who had been scorned by the beauties who frequented the place.114 Some places of popular resort now had a far more restricted usage than they had had in times past. The walks of St James’s Park, adjacent to St James’s Palace, had been another fashionable haunt before the war. In 1648 an order had banned the usual St James’s fair, normally held nearby, on the grounds that ‘under Pretence of repairing thither, there may be a Meeting of many that may prove dangerous to the Parliament’.115 In addition, the palace was frequently used to house high-ranking prisoners of the regime. When Huygens went to visit it in December 1651, he described how ‘we could scarcely get in because this place was garrisoned and many Scottish prisoners were there’. He also commented that ‘the park is scarcely planted and, so far as I could see, not particularly pleasant’, perhaps a reflection of its use by soldiers, as well as of its more important function as a deer park.116 Nevertheless, it was still used for 112 113 114 115 116

Symonds, ‘Diary of John Greene’, p. 599; Huygens, p. 106; CSPD 1650, pp. 529, 531. Huygens, p. 108; Evelyn, III, 97. SL, XX, 58–65; Phillips, Mysteries of love & eloquence, epistle dedicatory. CJ, 22 July 1648. Huygens, p. 43.

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Westminster 1640–60 walks, and Bulstrode Whitelocke records conversing with Cromwell there in late 1652.117 Perhaps the outdoor venue that was most emblematic of fashionable society in the 1650s was Hyde Park. What is striking about Hyde Park in this decade is not only that it continued to act as a pre-eminent focal point for elite social display and interaction, but also that it attracted constant hostility and suspicion, which nonetheless did not result in its closure. It was first established by Henry VIII as a royal park near to his new palace of Whitehall, and Oliver Cromwell was keen to preserve it as a hunting venue and the Council of State offered its hunting to prestigious visitors, such as the Danish ambassadors. Parts of the park seem to have first undergone significant development as pleasure gardens as late as the 1630s, but, despite some small signs of neglect, the park and its social activities, as seen by Huygens in early 1652, were flourishing, and the Dutchman frequently met friends there during his visit.118 The park was used for many different activities. To those in the country, Hyde Park was a major attraction of trips to the capital during this period. The young Betty Verney, begging to be allowed a visit in 1658, sighed that ‘Hid Parck and the cheries ther is very pleasant to me’.119 Even in the early 1650s, ladies were said to come there ‘in hundreds of coaches’ and were offered refreshments at a house in the park. Certain features, such as the assembly of coaches and foot-races in the park, were already famous before the war. When he observed them in the early 1650s, Huygens reported how the ‘coaches mostly drive in a circle with the gentlemen [riding] next to them, unless they have a race, which usually happens twoe or three times every afternoon’. The special etiquette to be observed there was in itself the object of study and satire, with gentlemen on horseback being instructed that lengthy conversation with the ladies in their coaches was not to be expected, given the motion of wheels and horses, and that it is ‘as great a Solecism, as to talk at Church’. Instead, a gentleman was supposed to restrict himself to ‘That is my Lord such a ones coach, That’s my Lady such a one, That’s Squire such a one’.120 John Evelyn (adopting the persona of a mocking Frenchman) also described the assembly of coaches, although his account noted disapprovingly how visitors had to pay to enter the Park, which was manned ‘with Porters and long Staves’. His sardonic eye mocked ‘such an assembly of wretched jades, and Hackney Coaches’, comparing it to ‘a Regiment of Carre-men’. Evelyn also noted that the park acted as a point of entry into Spring Gardens, where ‘the forbidden fruites are certain trifling Tartes, Neats-tongues, Salacious meates, and bad Rhenish’, all available for purchase for an exorbitant sum. Like other 117 Spalding, Life of Bulstrode Whitelocke, p. 133. 118 CSPD 1651–2, p. 349; Merritt, p. 166; Huygens, p. 57. 119 Huygens, p.106; Verney, II, 138. 120 Phillips, Mysteries of love & eloquence, pp. 2–3.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ commentators, Evelyn also suggested that ‘it is usuall here, to find some of the young company till midnight; and the Thickets of the Garden seem contrived to all advantages of Gallantry’.121 The social life of Westminster’s world of elite sociability was memorialized and satirized in a series of publications, most notably from the pen of Edward Phillips, whose Mysteries of Love includes a series of mock conversations and pieces of advice, pointedly located in sites such as Hyde Park, Spring Gardens and the New Exchange. As evoked by Phillips, here was an enclosed society of vanity, luxury, excess and immorality that seemed to inhabit a different world to that of the Westminster garrisons, which were located only a short distance away. But, while Phillips’ works seemed to offer affectionate mockery, other contemporary authors were more censorious and socially specific. Although it is clear that Hyde Park attracted visitors from across the political spectrum, nevertheless, in these moralizing works it was taken to encapsulate the religious and moral failings still rampant among the well-born, although the author of The Trial of the Ladies Hide Park May Day conceded that ‘there be not half so many sinners [in noble houses] as there us’d to be in the late Kings daies’. This book, and others like it, satirized Lord Lye-a-bed, Mr Gamster, Monsieur Aulymoade de France and Mr New-come-over and their female companions such as Lady Hoyden, Mrs Looseness, Mrs Silver-stuff and Mrs Jewell, all of whom were said to be coming out to celebrate May Day in Hyde Park, their favourite rendezvous.122 This sort of writing obviously drew upon a tradition of moralizing works that condemned luxury, pride and sexual excess. Nevertheless, the specificity of topical allusions, including oblique references to cavaliers newly returned from the Continent, was clearly designed to resonate with contemporary readers. The title page of The Yellow Book or a Serious Letter to the Lady Consideration is even couched in terms of a fashionable invitation, in which the lady is ‘desired to communicate in Hide-Park to the Gallants of the Times a little after Sunset’. The taste for gossip and competition is further whetted by the promise of ‘A brief Account of the names of some persons that intend to be there’.123 The image of the coach and coach racing is frequently invoked as a symbol both of luxury and of heedlessness, ‘but what a Hell will this be, to go from golden Coaches and beds of Downe, to fiery Litters and beds in Hell’. How many ‘brave Sparks and Ladyes ... are now in midst of all their gold and glory, displaying of themselves ... for the glory of the day in Hide-Park’. The women with their faces ‘so patch’d and peec’d with old taffaty patches’ are mocked alongside sparks who bring up ‘all the fashions 121 Evelyn, Character of England, pp. 54–7. 122 The trial of the ladies Hide Park May Day (1657), pp. 2, 3, 13. This work, a partner to the 1656 Yellow book, also alludes to the possible decline in numbers to the May Day festivities, ‘by reason of the late Act, and the County Generals’ (p. 1). 123 The yellow book or a serious letter to the Lady Consideration (1656).

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Westminster 1640–60 and the new oaths’.124 The Yellow Book of 1656 not only warns and condemns fashionable young people, but in a surprisingly direct manner also castigates the supposedly complacent ministers of the Westminster parishes of ‘Martins, [and] Pauls, Covent Garden’, who ‘are apt to dine with them, speak to them, and yet wink at them’.125 In the eyes of this author, the moral degeneracy of Hyde Park was thus not simply the preserve of a debauched crypto-royalist aristocracy, but had infected the whole elite culture of the West End parishes. Anxieties about the depth of elite involvement in the idle recreations of fashionable society are revealed in the extraordinarily mixed response to the alleged presence of Cromwell at May-Day events in Hyde Park in 1654. All the newsbooks save one agreed that Cromwell was present at an elaborate hurling match played by 100 Cornishmen, and describe with approval the ‘great agility of Body shown, and wrestling proper to that Nation’. All of these reports are clear that Cromwell was present at this ‘Hurling of a great Ball’, and one implies that it was performed specifically for the protector’s entertainment, commenting that the Cornishmen ‘toss’d a silver ball before him, and thousands of people were present to behold the same’ while Cromwell ‘solac’d himself in Hide-Park’.126 But Severall proceedings of state affaires strikes a very different note, and seems to have been written specifically to combat the impact of these reports. In tones of severe disapproval, it reports that the day had been ‘more observed by people going a Maying then for divers years past, and much sin committed by wicked meetings with Fidlers, drunkenness, ribaldry, and the like. Great resort came to Hide Park, many hundreds of rich Coaches and gallants in Attire, but most shameful powdred hair men, and painted and spotted women.’ Commenting laconically that ‘some men plaied with a silver Bal, and some took other Recreation’, the newsbook hastened to add: ‘But His Highness the Lord Protector went not thither, nor any of the Lords of the Council, but were busie about the great Affairs of the Commonwealth.’127 The contrasting reports, in a sense, encapsulate the schizophrenic attitudes of the authorities. It is certainly true that Cromwell’s daughters were sometimes to be found elegantly attired, riding in a coach in Hyde Park, and one report describes how ‘the coaches and horses flocked about them like some miracle’. Cromwell himself was certainly often to be seen there (even if not necessarily partaking in the fashionable sports). When he caused alarm by falling from his horse in 1654, this event took place in Hyde Park, where he was taking the air, attending a small, open-air supper.128 124 The trial, pp. 19, 24, 14. 125 The yellow book, p. 4. 126 The Weekly Intelligencer, no. 329 (25 Apr–2 May 1654), p. 240; Moderate Intelligencer, no. 176 (26 Apr–3 May 1654), p. 1385; A Perfect Account, no. 173 (26 Apr–3 May), p. 1382; The Faithfull Scout, no. 177 (28 Apr–5 May 1654), p. 1399. 127 Severall Proceedings of State Affaires, no. 240 (27 Apr–4 May 1654), p. 3811. 128 J. Ashton, Hyde Park (1896), p. 18; Thurloe, II, 652.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ An ambiguous and inconsistent official attitude can also be observed in relation to the performance of plays and other entertainments. This did not merely reflect potential hostility to the theatre, or concern over the content of performances. There is also evidence that successive regimes were aware that dances, horse races and other gatherings where royalists might congregate could mask potentially subversive political activity.129 Stage-plays were first officially suppressed in 1642. There seems to have been some revival of theatrical activity in the capital in 1647, although a further ordinance ‘utterly’ banning stage-plays and interludes was passed in 1648.130 By the 1650s, there is limited evidence that some performances took place covertly, often with members of the gentry in the audience or with the more direct involvement of members of the nobility. What has attracted little notice is the extent to which these performances took place within Westminster or its fringes. In 1652, Huygens recounted how he waited at the house of Lady Cork to be taken to a ballet, scheduled to be performed that evening at the house of Lady Newport in St Martin in the Fields. Huygens was particularly interested to observe that when he arrived there were ‘a great number of ladies and lords ... all people of quality but of the King’s party’. After a considerable wait, visitors were told that it had been impossible to obtain ‘the protection General Cromwell had promised us’, and that it would be inadvisable to continue, since on similar occasions soldiers had entered the house by force, with swords drawn, carrying away with them ‘all they could get, even hats, rapiers and ladies’ muffs’. Apparently it was agreed to postpone the performance, although two ladies sang some Italian songs for the benefit of the guests.131 This incident suggests not only that licences could indeed be procured, but also that performances were patrolled with such rigour that it was not worth the risk of proceeding without one. Other stage-pieces were also clearly performed in the 1650s. James Shirley’s Cupid and Death, although written as an entertainment for the Portuguese ambassador in 1653, was also performed in 1659 at the substantial house belonging to the Westminster Military Company in St Martin’s Field.132 Other places that appear to have served as venues for public performances of various kinds included a barn in Hyde Park, said in 1659 to have been converted into ‘a very fine play house’, and Holland House in Kensington, just over the western boundary of St Martin in the Fields.133 There are occasional allusions in court and other local records of the 1650s to prosecutions for attending stage-plays. In 1650 a barber of St Martin’s was 129 Capp, Culture wars, pp. 190–1. 130 D. Randall, Winter fruit (Lexington, 1995), p. 45, J. Milhous and R.D. Hume, ‘New Light on English Acting Companies in 1646, 1648 and 1660’, Review of English Studies 42 (1991), p. 491. 131 Huygens, pp. 58–9. 132 Randall, Winter fruit, p. 160. 133 Ibid., p. 47.

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Westminster 1640–60 even arrested for going to act in a stage-play. More intriguing is an entry in St Martin’s overseers’ accounts in 1657–58 of £6 received ‘of Justice Elliston for money that he took of them that went to see the play at the Millitary house’.134 This would suggest that the revived Military Company was complicit in mounting illegal plays even earlier than the 1659 Cupid and Death performance. One wonders whether the Military Company was acting more systematically as a patron of local cultural conservatism in these years. The new genre of opera exploited a loophole in legislation, and certainly some were performed in Westminster: there is a reference to an opera being performed at the Cockpit in Drury Lane in December 1658, although the local authorities were instructed to send for the actors and poet ‘to inform themselves of the nature of the work, and to examine by what authority the same is exposed to publick view’.135 In addition to limits on public entertainment, further restrictions on the denizens of fashionable society came in the form of Sabbath regulation. Although Sabbath enforcement could easily affect people of all social backgrounds, in Westminster, particularly during the rule of the Major-Generals, the fines imposed for breach of the Sabbath seem to reflect the fact that members of elite society were sometimes singled out for high-profile prosecutions. The fines imposed were often linked to servants carrying out tasks related the care of wearing apparel. The 1650s had seen some attempts in parliament to curb lavish dress, and indeed Major-General Harrison had famously warned MPs against showy apparel, a direction undermined the next day, Lucy Hutchinson recounts, when he appeared publicly ‘in a scarlet coat and cloak, both laden with gold and silver lace, and the coat so covered in clinquant [tinsel] that scarcely could one discern the ground’.136 In the Westminster parishes, the focus on servants carrying expensive clothing seems particularly pointed. In Covent Garden, for example, fines were paid by ‘the lord Osseryes servant for carrying a feather on Sabbath’, Lady Lucy’s boy for carrying a basket of ‘linen’, numerous tailors for carrying items of clothing and Mr Mazine’s maid for ‘carrying black patches’ (presumably the fashionable beauty spots used by women). Even John Evelyn’s relation the JP George Evelyn found his boy fined ‘for carrying a suit it being the Sabbath day’.137 An even clearer pattern of elite prosecution emerges in the case of fines meted out to titled individuals travelling in sedan chairs and coaches in breach of Sabbath legislation. Huygens was struck by the impact of legislation forbid134 Jeaffreson, p. 198; WAC, F385 (1657–58). Even on the eve of the Restoration, however, prosecutions were still a danger. In February 1660 two Westminster residents signed recognizances for a weaver from St Andrew Holborn charged with acting in a stage play at the Cockpit in Drury Lane: Jeaffreson, p. 282. 135 CSPD 1658–9, p. 225; Mercurius Politicus, no. 547 (23–30 Dec 1658), p. 118. 136 Capp, Culture wars, pp. 173–4. 137 WAC, H438; H440.

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Fashionable society in ‘these our cloudy days’ ding travel by horse or vehicle on the Sabbath. He noted how on Sunday 31 December 1651 ‘we did not see a single carriage in the street, for this is forbidden under heavy penalty, as is all buying and selling, yes, even travelling unless it is exceptionally urgent’.138 He described how on another Sunday he had been forced to walk because ‘we had not received a license to go by water on Sundays’, and on reaching a small inn in Clapham the owners ‘at first refused to give us anything primarily because it was Sunday’.139 Even travel to church on a Sunday was a potential problem: the earl of Bedford and his wife could travel to St Clement Danes church by ‘chair’ in early 1642,140 but it is not clear that they would have been allowed to do this on a Sabbath in the 1650s. Surviving certificates show that licences could still be granted: Katherine Gell of St Margaret’s and her servants received one permitting them to attend divine service in St Martin Ludgate by coach or water on 18 October 1656. Nevertheless, surviving records give the impression that sabbatarian legislation was enforced with some rigour.141 Enforcement drives in the Westminster parishes, often aided by informers, were regular events. Thus one enforcement drive in St Mary le Strand parish in 1652–53 netted a series of fines (often over £1 a piece) from gentlemen riding in coaches, or from ‘Coaches and Sedans Traveiling on the Lords day’. Lady Hungerford was not alone in having her coach impounded, and the parish paid watchmen for assisting it ‘in the Staying of Coaches on the Lords daies’.142 Conclusion In 1653 the royalist dowager countess of Devonshire described how ‘the garb in the town is ladies all in scarlet, shining and glittering as bright as an antymaske’, but she went on to concede balefully that ‘you would wonder to see such stars in these our cloudy days’.143 If historians in the past have perhaps placed too much emphasis on the ‘cloudy days’, it is equally dangerous to place excessive stress on the ‘stars’. It is the contradictions, tensions and conflicting forces that are just as striking to the historian as is any evidence of the persistence or revival of various features of pre-war fashionable society. If royalists and ex-royalists constituted an indispensable core of elite fashionable society, they nevertheless experienced it in an anxiously qualified way. The spectre of further prosecution, of temporary expulsion from the metropolis and even of imprisonment (of themselves, or at least of close 138 Huygens, pp. 24, 43–4. 139 Huygens, p. 97. 140 Woburn Abbey 5E/14, fol. 50. I would like to thank Dr Lynn Hulse for this reference. 141 Derbyshire Record Office, MS D258/13/1 (1656) (certificate signed by Richard Sherwyn). See Chapter 6, for further discussion of Sabbath regulation. 142 WAC, G2, 1652–53 (and cf. 1654–55). For St Margaret’s see WAC, E171 (1657–58). 143 HMC, Ailesbury, p. 159.

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Westminster 1640–60 relatives and friends) must have lurked in the minds of many of fashionable society’s royalists. Moreover, for contemporaries there was always a tendency to equate the excesses of fashionable society with royalism. It was relatively easy to conflate the behaviour which flouted the cultural values of the drive for moral reform with the political values that denied the legitimacy of the interregnum authorities. Nevertheless, the authorities seem to have betrayed a rather schizophrenic attitude towards the fashionable society that traditionally congregated in the Westminster parishes. As we have seen, the protectoral court might seek to parade aristocrats and other persons of ‘quality’ as a means of emphasizing the regime’s legitimacy, and lavish display was also central to the projection of power and authority, but its involvement in the world of elite sociability that gathered at Hyde Park, a short distance from parliament and Whitehall Palace, was strictly limited. When the printed literature and discourse of the time sought to evoke the contemporary world of urban gentility and fashionable society, it almost never referred to the protectoral court.144 Instead it tended to invoke the symbolic importance of the triangle of the New Exchange, Hyde Park and Spring Gardens as a code for elite sociability among ‘persons of honour’. The lack of a royal court in this period, whose attendants and officers might give direction to the fashionable society of the area, meant that this world of elite sociability could appear strangely detached from the dominant political and cultural forces of the time. In practice, however, the insistent and very specific location of fashionable society in the Westminster haunts of the New Exchange, Hyde Park and the Spring Gardens placed this world in the very tightest proximity to the heart of government, with its garrisons, its security preoccupations, and its periodic drives for moral reform.

144 For a relatively rare example see Phillips, Mysteries of love & eloquence, ‘A short advertisement’, sig. a3v.

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Chapter 6

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Religion, politics and society in revolutionary Westminster

S

ome of the most striking changes that affected Westminster in the 1640s and 1650s occurred in the area of religion. The dissolution of the dean and chapter represented the removal of a religious institution that had played a central role in the locality since pre-Reformation times. As we have seen, the Abbey itself and Westminster parish churches now often served as the venues for the most important expressions of the public face of the succession of regimes that followed. But these were also years of religious revolution, when the established church underwent substantial changes before its effective dissolution in the 1650s. Church interiors and the public liturgy were transformed, the ritual life of parishes underwent significant alteration, and puritan values were writ large in the religious life of the nation. And yet, as we have seen, Westminster was a locality with its fair share of royalists and conservatives, while being on the doorstep of government did not necessarily mean that official directives were meticulously followed. This had been true of Westminster during the Tudor reformations, and it would remain true in the mid-seventeenth century religious revolutions.1 Moreover, parishes were social as well as ecclesiastical units, and religious changes often had important implications for social relations. This chapter seeks to assess how these changes actually manifested them­­ selves in Westminster. The influx of different religious practice, new ministers, new messages and new forms of ecclesiastical organization created a dramatically changed context in which parish religion would now operate. As we will see, behind the alterations to the public face of religion, more traditional forms of religious culture persisted. But Westminster’s parishes also provide us with evidence of a richly diverse range of responses to the opportunities and challenges of the new religious settlement. While some puritan ministers sought to mobilize the resources of the parish in order to achieve a

1 Merritt, ch. 2.

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Westminster 1640–60 local religious and moral reformation, other ministers did their best to sustain crypto-royalist and religiously conservative sentiment among their parishioners. The result would be a remarkably shifting, hybridized local religious culture. Religious reforms Given the increasing encroachment of the state into Westminster and its churches, it is not surprising to find that the parishes responded reasonably swiftly to the religious reforms of the 1640s. Compliance with the reform of church interiors and services seems to have happened fairly promptly in all the Westminster parishes.2 A printed Commons order of September 1641 had already urged the removal of monuments of idolatry and the levelling of chancels, and in apparent compliance with this order the chancel steps were removed in the Savoy chapel (the parish church of St Mary le Strand), and there may have been an attempt to board over images (the accounts note the costs of colouring the ‘freeze and other bords’ that had been put up in the lower end of the church).3 St Mary’s churchwardens’ accounts are exceptionally detailed, and it is possible that some of these reforms may have been taking place simultaneously in the other Westminster parishes.4 Further momentum in the reform of church interiors developed in 1642–43, and Westminster was very much at the centre of events. Sir Robert Harley was a Westminster resident, and the committee that he chaired in April 1643 was particularly prompted by the need to reform the interior of the Abbey.5 But Harley was also personally active in reforming Westminster parish churches at the same time. The churchwardens of St Mary le Strand were summoned in March 1644 to appear before Harley himself ‘concerning the takeing downe of the picture in the church’ (possibly one that they had earlier boarded up), and in the same month pictures were recorded as having been taken down and the place whitewashed.6 The reformation of the interior of St Margaret’s (where Harley was resident) followed closely upon the setting up of the committee, with images on tombs and monuments being defaced, and the screen, organ loft and brass from the monuments being sold the following year.7 St Clement Danes removed a 2 The absence of churchwardens’ accounts for St Paul’s Covent Garden, and the laconic nature of the surviving accounts of St Clement Danes, does, however, make it difficult to trace changes in these parishes. 3 WAC, vol. 22, fols 376v, 377. 4 Spraggon, p. 144. Spraggon suggests that some iconoclasm was also carried out in St Clement’s in response to the order, but I have been unable to finds any allusion to this in the churchwardens’ accounts. 5 See Chapter 2. 6 WAC, vol. 22, fol. 400v. 7 WAC, E25, fol. 5; E2413, fol. 28; Mercurius Aulicus (30 Apr–6 May 1643), p. 228.

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Religion, politics and society steeple cross and other crosses in 1643.8 By this stage the new chapel of ease in Tothill Fields would doubtless have needed to replace an elaborate stainedglass window representing Pentecost, which had been erected as recently as 1640, and which would feature in Laud’s trial in 1644.9 An ordinance of May 1644 ‘for the further demolishing of Monuments of Idolatry and Superstition’ had in the meantime prompted a further escalation of reform. St Mary le Strand paid four shillings in October for alterations to the pulpit cloth that included ‘takeing out the Jesuites badge’ (presumably the ‘IHS’ symbol).10 The absence of churchwardens’ accounts for St Martin’s for the years 1642–45 makes it difficult to trace developments in the church, but there seems no reason to doubt that the interior was reformed in the same way as the other Westminster churches.11 Amid all this iconoclasm, Charing Cross seems to have remained until the late 1640s. It thereby managed to outlive Cheapside Cross by several years, although this may reflect the fact that the religious figures on the Cross had already been removed some time earlier.12 These changes to church interiors were only the prelude to the major revisions to parish religion in Westminster after 1645, when the new Directory of Public Worship was introduced and the prayer book was made illegal. One new target was now the parish font. The Directory required that baptism be carried out ‘in the face of the congregation where the people may most conveniently see and hear; and not in the places where fonts in the time of Popery were unfitly and superstitiously placed’. Parishes generally therefore purchased basins instead, while the existing fonts at the west end of the church were in some cases not only neglected but actually physically removed.13 A host of other parish ceremonies may also have been at least temporarily discontinued at this time. For example, the rogationtide perambulation appears to have been suspended in all Westminster parishes in 1645–46. One of the few embellishments of Westminster churches’ interiors in these years were the copies of the Covenant, which were framed and mounted in St Martin’s, St Margaret’s and the Savoy chapel.14 Not only were church interiors transformed, but the very titles of parishes and parish churches were altered. Parishes lost their title of ‘Saint’ for the first time since their foundation, and 8 Note also the reference in the April 1643 sessions to remarks ‘conceived as said in a disdainful manner’ at the taking down of a cross at St Clement’s (LMA, MJ & WJ/ SB/B/31, p. 33). 9 Guillery, p. 112. 10 WAC, vol. 22, fol. 410v. The word ‘Jesuites’ has been deleted. 11 The organ (installed in 1637) that was still in the church in 1641–42 had clearly been removed by 1644, when the vestry allowed the building of a private pew in what was now the disused organ gallery (WAC, F3, fol. 325; F2002, fol. 137). 12 Spraggon, pp. 86–7. 13 Lindley, p. 260. But see also pp. 252, 257. 14 WAC, F3, 1645–6; E25, f. 30; vol. 22, fol. 423v.

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Westminster 1640–60 this change was implemented in all official documents and in the parishes’ own records.15 Westminster’s parishes do not seem to have been noticeably more resistant to change than others in the capital – indeed in some respects they were more compliant, although unlike in some London parishes these reforms do not seem to have been pre-empted, and most followed the active intervention of Harley’s committee, as we have seen.16 The fact that Westminster’s churches were regularly attended by MPs may have meant that visible, tangible expressions of older religious practice, which violated in any way the new directives on worship, were unlikely to slip under the government’s radar. We cannot, of course, assume enthusiastic compliance, and, as we will see, there is evidence to suggest the opposite. Nevertheless, in practical terms it is important to recognize that these reforms had transformed the religious spaces in which parishioners of varying persuasions now met and worshipped. The reforms of parish churches were not, of course, intended to be negative. After the iconoclasm and removals, the religious buildings of Westminster – the Abbey, the royal chapels and the parish churches themselves – began to be smartened up again to act as ‘decent’ and edifying centres where their principal purpose could be more effectively promoted – as spaces for the preaching of God’s Word. The preaching spaces and churches were also occupied by very different clergy to those who had been in the area hitherto. Westminster was unusual in the metropolis in that nearly all its ministers were royalists, and therefore in the early 1640s there was an almost complete overturning of the clerical personnel of the area. Laud’s chaplain, William Bray of St Martin’s; Francis Hall, the minister of Covent Garden; and Richard Dukeson of St Clement Danes – all had departed by late 1642, and Thomas Fuller of St Mary le Strand left a year later.17 Gilbert Wimberley, St Margaret’s minister, who had been quietly compliant, was formally sequestered and replaced in February 1644. A series of nationally prominent Presbyterian clergymen now occupied Westminster’s livings on the recommendation of parliament: Richard Vines was installed at St Clement’s, Daniel Cawdrey at St Martin’s, Obadiah Sedgwick at Covent Garden and Herbert Palmer at St Margaret’s chapel of ease at Tothill Fields, while John Bond occupied the Savoy (which had also briefly been served by the famous John White of Dorchester). A further succession of prominent ­Presbyterians would follow them in these livings in the 1650s, including 15 A curious time-lag in this matter can be observed in parliamentary records. The preface ‘Saint’ was removed in September 1645 from the titles of parishes listed in the division of classes of the London Assembly (CJ, 26 Sept 1645), yet the Commons was nevertheless referring to St Margaret’s Westminster as late as 26 November 1646 (CJ). 16 Spraggon, ch. 5. 17 Bray’s appointee at Covent Garden, Francis Hall, was appointed in April 1640.

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Religion, politics and society Gabriel Sangar and Thomas Manton.18 Even more striking was an explosion of different lecturers in the locality. Westminster had had a relatively limited experience of lecturers in the years before 1640: the gentrified St Martin’s had introduced a lectureship in 1602, but this had been regularly interfered with by the crown.19 This situation swiftly changed after 1640. Once the Long Parliament met, there was regular preaching in St Margaret’s, with one or more new preachers every Sunday, and with the calling of the Westminster Assembly even more famous preachers were within easy reach of Westminster’s pulpits. The lectures at Westminster Abbey also added an important supplement to the preaching on offer in the locality, although the large numbers that they attracted created their own problem for local people. Abbey servants had to petition for room to hear the daily preaching in the Abbey, ‘ther beinge Roome enough for strangers and as yet None for your petitioners though Constant hearers’.20 New lectureships were also established: for example, St Martin’s arranged (on the motion of the Commons) in February 1642 for there to be an extra lecture on working days for those who could not find room in the church on the Sabbath day.21 The new lecturing posts in Westminster were soon occupied by famous preachers. Stephen Marshall, Charles Herle, Philip Nye and Thomas Hill were among those appointed lecturers at the Abbey, and several were also sought for potentially lucrative positions in the local parishes. Hill was appointed to the lectureship at St Martin’s, and there were moves to appoint Marshall to a lectureship in St Margaret’s, although ultimately he joined the Abbey roster instead (historians have continued to confuse the two, however).22 In the later 1640s still more venues for public preaching became available. As the authorities came to occupy Whitehall once more, so its own chapel and preaching place came to be used for public preaching. Other royal chapels also became available in the wake of the regicide, and these non-parochial locations often became hosts for more extreme sermons, as we will see. The Westminster preaching scene was further boosted by the fact that new 18 For other details of these changes see Chapter 3. There were some lesser clergymen appoin­­ted to Westminster positions as well, such as Samuel Gibson at St Margaret’s (see below) and John Wincopp, who may have been related to Samuel Wincopp, who was vicar of Cheshunt, near Hatfield, a living controlled by the parliamentarian earl of Salisbury. John Wincopp was appointed to serve the cure of St Martin’s in January 1643 by the Commons on its hearing that Bray had deserted parish three months previously, but Wincopp had been preferred elsewhere by November 1643 (CJ, 1 Dec 1642, 12 Jan and 8 Nov 1643, 12 Feb 1644). 19 Merritt, pp. 315–16, 338–9, 344–6. 20 WAM, 9376. 21 WAC, F2002, fol. 145. 22 CJ, 28 Feb 1644; PJ, II, 86–7. Marshall continues to be wrongly identified as lecturer at St Margaret’s in all the relevant scholarship (see most recently Webster’s account in ODNB).

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Westminster 1640–60 chapels of ease planned in the 1630s now began to operate. Ephraim Udall had urged in 1641 the need for new chapels to be built in the suburbs, given the enormous size of their congregations.23 While Covent Garden (which became a parish independent from St Martin in the Fields in 1646) had started to address this problem, another important addition came in the form of the chapel of ease for St Margaret’s parish in Tothill Fields (later known at the Broadway chapel). There were also plans from 1641 that the earl of Clare would erect a chapel of ease for St Clement’s, but this never emerged, although it was still under discussion in 1650.24 James Palmer, a minister from a wealthy Westminster family, also proposed the building of a new chapel near to the Tothill Fields chapel with his almshouses in the 1650s.25 It was initially intended that Tothill Fields chapel would serve a separate parish under the title of Christ Church, and draft legislation for carving the parish out of St Margaret’s was being read in parliament in 1642.26 This was also a time when other parochial sub-divisions were being contemplated in the Westminster area, including in nearby St Andrew Holborn.27 Apart from the creation of Covent Garden under revived legislation in 1646,28 these structural changes were abandoned, and while in the 1650s many orders for the union and division of parishes were made by the Trustees for Maintenance of Ministers, these do not seem to have included Westminster.29 It was not until later in the seventeenth century that further Westminster parishes were officially created. For a while, however, a further subdivision was on the cards, and a parliamentary committee was established for dividing St Margaret’s into three parishes (with the parish churches to be St Margaret’s itself, the Tothill Fields chapel and the Abbey) – a plan that was still being actively pursued as late as 1647.30 Even though Tothill Fields did not become a new parish in its own right, it became a high-profile chapel of ease with notable links to parliament.31 Not just routine services, but also major thanksgiving days were celebrated there,32 23 Ephraim Udall, Good workes if well handled (1641), pp. 8–9. Udall also urged that where parishioners were able to raise a sufficient maintenance for the chapel’s minister they should be able to choose one for themselves rather than having him imposed by the parson of the mother church (pp. 9–10). 24 LPL, COMM XIIa/12, p. 400: it was noted that Clare had already measured a parcel of ground for the church. 25 WAM, 25241. 26 PJ, II, 141. See also a petition for the maintenance of the minister there, with the signatures of ninety-seven potential parishioners, in WAM, 9381. 27 See Jansson, IV, 669, 674. 28 Ibid., IV, 558, 560; WAC, F3, 1645–46; A&O, I, 814–17. 29 CSPD 1657–8, p. xli. 30 WAM, 6567.The Tothill Fields church had been listed as an independent entity in the listing of members of the projected eleventh classis, A&O, I, 796. 31 See Chapter 3. 32 See the entries in WAC, E157–164, E166–173.

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Religion, politics and society and prominent puritans preached in the chapel, while its minister, Herbert Palmer, was a noted member of the Westminster Assembly. The limits of reform The impression of Westminster being overwhelmed by an irresistible tide of Presbyterian puritanism is, however, rather misleading. It was in the national public buildings of Westminster, of course, that the Presbyterian movement would meet its most decisive opposition from erastian and Independent forces: in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey, where the Westminster Assembly debated, in the Houses of Parliament, where the vision of a clerically enforced Presbyterian reformation would be watered down and in Whitehall, where a new regime would emerge, determined to install religious toleration. Yet, outside these buildings, in the streets and parish churches of Westminster, the Presbyterians had already been struggling to secure victory. Even before its political eclipse, it is clear that Presbyterianism was not the dominant force in Westminster parishes that it was in some prominent London ones. This was reflected in the fact that the eleventh classis of the London Provincial Assembly, which was intended to incorporate all of Westminster’s parishes, was never operational – in fact it was still-born, along with three other of the twelve intended classes (two others of which were also suburban).33 It is especially notable that few, if any, of the figures who were nominated to serve on the eleventh classis played a prominent role in their respective parish vestries, and that most were not even vestrymen at all.34 The failure of the eleventh classis may also have reflected in part the fact that the cloud of Presbyterian preachers in Westminster’s churches was something of a mirage. Prominent Presbyterian names might grace the lists of local parish ministers and lecturers, but they were not necessarily a constant presence shaping the religious complexion of local parishes. Often they had additional livings or lectureships elsewhere, or were deeply involved in the business of the Westminster Assembly. Richard Vines and Obadiah Sedgwick, for example, were both members of the Westminster Assembly and were popular preachers before parliament.35 When the London Provin 33 T. Liu, Puritan London: a study of religion and society in the city parishes (Newark, 1986) (hereafter Liu), pp. 85–8. Liu notes the importance of the lack of settled ministry in many of the parishes in these other unformed classes, but in the case of the eleventh classis he suggests that ‘as the center of national government and politics, the City of Westminster was an arena of political forces far too complex and powerful to be contained by the classical structure’ (p. 86). 34 Only one of St Martin’s vestrymen – Sir William Ashton – was appointed, for example. See also p. 232. 35 See ODNB, s.n. Richard Vines, Obadiah Sedgwick.

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Westminster 1640–60 cial Assembly drew up a list of parish churches and congregations suffering from absent ministers or vacant livings in 1648 it included St Clement’s, St Margaret’s, the Tothill Fields church and the Savoy.36 St Martin’s was in fact the only parish in Westminster to experience a continuous and active godly parish ministry (under Daniel Cawdrey between 1644 and 1650, and Gabriel Sangar from c.1650–51 to 1660). Yet Cawdrey himself encountered significant problems in his parish. Cawdrey had been appointed in 1644, and clashed with St Martin’s vestry the following year over the appointment of the new lecturer to replace Thomas Hill. Not the least notable aspect of this conflict was that it involved the active participation of several prominent parliamentarian noblemen.37 The local peers Pembroke and Salisbury, along with Northumberland and Lord Howard of Escrick, came into the vestry ‘as they were parishioners’ (as the minutes recorded), and desired that one Richard Leigh might be heard to preach by the vestry and be appointed to the vacant lectureship ‘if we should find noe cause to the contrary’. That the peers felt it necessary to appear personally would suggest that it was assumed that Cawdrey would be a fierce opponent (although it should also be noted that the parish had resisted an earlier attempt by the earl of Suffolk to direct their choice of lecturer, and had sought with varying success to resist royal interference in the matter as well).38 Cawdrey presented two of his own alternative candidates for the lectureship, and in the end it was found necessary to have a poll of all three candidates by ‘the inhabitants in generall’, at which Leigh reportedly received ‘the general vote of all the better sort’.39 There is a possibility that Cawdrey received some support among ‘some of the meaner sort’ who allegedly opposed the lords’ proposal; certainly, a contemporary account in the vestry minutes sought to 36 Shaw, II, 103–4. 37 My reading differs from the account provided of these events in J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The peerage in politics 1645–9’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1986), pp. 88–103. 38 Merritt, pp. 315, 344. Northumberland and Howard were relative newcomers to the parish, the former inheriting Suffolk House, near Charing Cross, from his father-in-law in 1639. Salisbury’s father and grandfather had hitherto played an important role in the parish, and the intervention of the nobility on this occasion should be seen partly as a renewed attempt by Salisbury to assert his authority in the area. Subsequently, Salisbury would be able to procure John Meriton’s appointment to the parish lectureship in 1652–53, although he again had to attend the vestry personally to ensure the success of his candidate: WAC, F2003, fol. 13. The parish’s long-running dispute with Salisbury over the repair of Ivy Bridge in the early 1650s, which required the adjudication of a judge (F2003, pp. 18–20) shows that the parish was clearly not under the earl’s control. 39 WAC, F2002, fols 144, 145. It is difficult to piece together exactly what was happening – the unusual back-dated account drawn up in the vestry minutes gives what is clearly a tendentious account that emphasizes social divisions and the unanimity of the ‘better sort’, but no other descriptions of the events survive.

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Religion, politics and society present the struggle as having been between the vestry and the ‘better sort of the knightes and gentlemen of the parish’, on the one hand, and the ‘meaner sort’, on the other.40 There is also evidence of broader tensions between an increasingly oligarchical vestry and the wider body of parishioners (which the brief intervention of the peers may have exacerbated).41 Nevertheless, Cawdrey seems to have been unable to capitalize on these divisions. He was clearly an unpopular figure: in 1647 he was still struggling with parishioners who refused to pay him tithes.42 The following year saw further clashes between Cawdrey and his parishioners, this time over the election of churchwardens. The election took place by tradition at Easter, ‘contrary to the will of Mr Cawdery ... who liked not of that superstitious time for such as worke’ (it was reported), and at the election the people cried out ‘No Roundheads, No Roundheads, No Elders, No Elders’.43 The next year (as we will see) saw a further confrontation – this time over access to communion. If there was a power struggle in the parish, though, Cawdrey would seem to have lost it. A year after a vestry order to the effect that Leigh’s election as lecturer was finally confirmed, the vestry declared itself willing to regard the appointment to be ‘by the approbacon of the Lords inhabiting in the parish and to be by the approbacon of the vestry as formerly hath bine used’.44 By 1650, Cawdrey’s own tenure as minister there was being described in remarkably similar terms.45 It is not surprising that the embattled clergyman left St Martin’s the same year. But Cawdrey and other Presbyterian ministers did not only face opposition from a godly or socially elevated laity keen to preserve their right to appoint lecturers and church officers. There is also unmistakable evidence of conservative religious sentiment in Westminster too. When the cry of ‘No Round 40 When the peers had made their extraordinary personal visit to the vestry, their request was reportedly ‘slighted and disputed’ by ‘some of the meaner sort’, although they were overruled by the ‘whole’ vestry and the ‘better sort of the knightes and gentlemen of the parish’ (WAC, F2002, fol. 145). 41 The agreement that there should be a choice of the lecturer by a general assembly of the parishioners was clearly resented by the author of the report in the vestry minutes, who commented that this was agreed ‘though before tymes never called the inhabitants in general, for further satisfaccon to all men’ (WAC, F2002, fol. 145r). In 1653 there was intensive popular lobbying over the choice of a new parish ‘Register’, with a ‘greate number’ of inhabitants assembled and others signing a petition (WAC, F10, fol. 22). The term ‘Gentlemen of the vestry’ is used with increasing frequency in the 1650s in the vestry minutes (e.g. F2003, fol. 144). 42 In October 1647 parishioners refused to pay tithes to him or to respond to summons to appear before the Committee for Plundered Ministers on the matter: BL, Add. MSS 15671, fol. 244r. 43 Bodl. Clarendon MSS 31, fol. 44v. 44 WAC, F2002, fol. 147v. 45 LPL, COMM XIIa/12, p. 384. Cawdrey is here described as being the incumbent at St Martin’s ‘by the desire and approbacon of the Maior parte of the Nobillitye Gentrye and Antient Parishioners’.

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Westminster 1640–60 heads’ was raised in St Martin’s parish, it was at a meeting called to replace a churchwarden who had been dismissed for his involvement in organizing a Christmas Day service, and the cry of ‘No Elders’ was reportedly followed by some parishioners remarking to ‘the Elders [that] they would have the booke of Common prayer the next Sunday, which was little pertinent to the Election’.46 The most striking evidence for religious conservatism, however, can be found in the parish of St Margaret Westminster. St Margaret’s is so often renowned in the histories of this period as the parish church of the House of Commons and the venue of famous, bloodchilling fast sermons, that it is remarkable to find continued conservative sentiments among the parishioners. These found expression both in services and in the decoration in the church itself. This should not be entirely surprising, however. The parish of St Margaret’s had traditionally been a haven for more conservative religion, strongly influenced by the Abbey, which carried out its own visitations of the church and helped to sustain its elaborate ceremonialism.47 The Abbey itself, for all of its co-option by the state, still had its conservative elements (as did Westminster School in its grounds, whose previous headmaster, Osbaldeston, remained in the vicinity in possession of his house with a guaranteed stipend, while his successor Richard Busby would be notorious for his royalist sympathies).48 The Abbey’s ceremonial past still lingered on through the first half of the 1640s: the accounts ending in Michaelmas 1643 still include payments for cornet and sackbuts, as well as other payments to the singing men.49 Even as it complied with the reform of its church interior, St Margaret’s was still paying an allowance to the Abbey singing men for ‘singing anthems’ in the church at Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide and ‘towards their feast at St James tide’ in 1642–43.50 One notable figure here was the composer John Hilton. Hilton (who leased a tenement in the Almonry) was the parish clerk and organist at St Margaret’s and a student of the famous William Heather, who had himself served as St Margaret’s parish clerk until 1613, after which he became a gentleman of the chapel royal, but was most famous for having established a professorship of music at Oxford.51 In May 1646 Hilton was ordered to be dismissed from his posts in the parish in regard of his ‘abusive behaviour’, to be replaced by Edward Rogers as parish clerk, while in addition money was to be made available for ‘an able man to bee imploied for setting the psalms in 46 There is no evidence to suggest that the parish had indeed elected ‘elders’, although there were cases in London at this time where a parish elected elders even if it did not form part of an active classis (see the example of St Dunstan in the West: Liu, p. 86). 47 Merritt, pp. 322–9. 48 See Chapters 3 and 4. 49 WAM, 33692. 50 WAC, E24, fol. 22v. 51 Merritt, p. 327.

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Religion, politics and society the Church on the Saboth daies’.52 However, Hilton would appear to have held on to his post as clerk despite this vestry order (he had presumably been able to challenge the authority of the vestry in the matter), and soon afterwards he played an active role in the striking events that took place at St Margaret’s at Christmas 1647, as we shall see. Christmas Day services had rapidly become a natural focus of opposition to the religious reforms. From the outset, the new monthly fast days had always run the risk of clashing with traditional church feasts (even if the fasts were not always rigorously observed: it was complained in December 1643 that some MPs had been dining in a tavern ‘most part of the Time that the House was solemnizing the Fast’).53 Thomas Fuller had alerted his congregation at the Savoy to the problem of how the new monthly fast might clash with traditional feast days when he noted in a fast sermon on the church feast day of Holy Innocents in December 1642 that ‘on this day a Fast and Feast do both jostle together’, and in 1644 the monthly fast coincided with Christmas Day. The New Directory (issued in January 1645) abandoned all holy days. That Christmas in London there were no churches open, but there was also vigilante action against shopkeepers who opened their shops.54 The abolition of Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide and other holy days was confirmed in a parliamentary ordinance of June 1647, and this set the scene the following December for a situation in which Christmas became the focus for conservative resistance throughout the country.55 There was particular concern about the metrop 52 Acts of the dean and chapter of Westminster, 1609–1642, ed. C.S. Knighton (Westminster Abbey Record Series 5, 2006), p. 98 n. 644; WAC, E2413, fol. 33. William Ireland was also dismissed from the post of parish clerk at the same time. Ireland, the collector of the Abbey rents, would later abscond in April 1649 with three years’ rents (WAM, 42821). It may be significant that Lawrence Swetnam (nominated to the eleventh classis) was appointed to the vestry at the same meeting (and Sir John Trevor had been elected the previous week: WAC, E2413 fol. 32v). Rogers was acting as sexton in 1661 (ibid., fol. 91). 53 CJ, 27 Dec 1643. 54 R. Hutton, The rise and fall of merry England: the ritual year, 1400–1700 (1994), p. 209; C. Durston, ‘“Preaching and sitting still on Sundays”: the Lord’s Day during the English revolution’, in C. Durston and J. Maltby (eds), Religion in revolutionary England ( 2006); C. Durston, ‘Lords of misrule : the Puritan war on Christmas 1642–60’, History Today 35/12 (1985); C. Durston, ‘“For the Better Humiliation of the People”: Public Days of Fasting and Thanksgiving during the English Revolution’, Seventeenth Century 7 (1992). 55 Hutton, Rise and fall, pp. 210–11; Canterbury Christmas or, a true relation of the insurrection in Canterbury on Christmas day last, with the great hurt that befell divers persons thereby (1648); A perfect relation of the horrible plot, and bloudy conspiracie, of the malignant party at Edmondbury in Suffolk, for the murdering of Mr. Lanceter and divers other eminent and well-affected persons, for opening of their shops upon Christmas-day (1648); G.S., A word in season or, A check to disobedience, and to all lying scandalous tongues, with manifest conviction of a general received slander; in vindication of the Right Honorable, John Warner, Lord-Mayor of the Honorable City of London : concerning the justness of his actions upon Christmas-day, calumniated by evil-affected men (1648), pp. 6–8.

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Westminster 1640–60 olis: on Christmas Eve a parliamentary order warned the militia committees of London, Westminster and Southwark to make sure that shopkeepers who opened their shops the following day would not be attacked, and that ­‘Malignant Ministers’ should be put out of the lines of ­communication. It was noted that ministers had the power to punish churchwardens who allowed preaching on Christmas Day, and a parliamentary order was sent to the lord mayor to stop episcopal divines who were planning to preach that day.56 Despite such last-minute precautions, there were struggles throughout London on Christmas Day 1647, but St Margaret’s saw the most significant flouting of legislation, on the very doorstep of government. Not only was a service held on Christmas Day, but the church was decorated with rosemary and bays, a sermon was prepared to be delivered by a royalist clergyman (Nicholas Bernard), and the Nunc dimittis was sung. Bernard never managed to deliver his sermon: informed of what was happening, the Committee for Plundered Ministers sent men to seize Bernard in the parish vestry and carried him away to imprisonment in the Fleet for attempting to preach without a parliamentary licence. One newsbook described the subsequent examination of St ­Margaret’s churchwardens and clerk before the Committee for Plundered Ministers.57 On being demanded why a sermon was arranged for that particular day, the churchwarden reportedly replied That some of the Parish having occasion to meete together some days before, about spending their time on Christmas day and it was the opinion of those present, that most part of the people would not worke or open their shops, and if there were preaching in the Church it might be an occasion to draw people thither, and prevent their mis-spending of time in Taverns and Ale-houses.

On being asked why they chose as preacher ‘one that had been against the parliament’, the churchwardens and clerk allegedly answered ‘that the same man preached but a little before in Chelsey, there being present some Members of the House and others of great quality; and finding that he was admitted to preach there, he knew not why he might not preach in another place’. The parish clerk, Hilton, admitted to having set Nunc dimittis to be sung, but claimed that he did this ‘at the desire of severall eminent persons then present at Church’.58 The involvement of Hilton in these events is unsurprising, although it is still remarkable that he was able to linger in the parish for some years 56 CJ, 24 Dec 1647; Mercurius Pragmaticus, no. 15 (21–8 Dec 1647); The Moderate Intelligencer, no. 145 (23–30 Dec 1647), p. 1079. 57 The churchwardens’ accounts record payments to the messengers of the serjeant at arms of the Commons, ‘when theis Accomptants were Committed for permitting Ministers to Preach upon Christmas day and for Adorning the Church’ (WAC, E26). 58 The Kingdomes Weekly Post, no. 1 (29 Dec 1647–5 Jan 1648), p. 2. For the link between Chelsea and Westminster, see Chapter 5 and also p. 246.

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Religion, politics and society ­afterwards.59  The churchwardens Robert Mawer and Rice Hammond were both peace petitioners, but clearly the event was not solely the brainchild of these three minor officials, even if they were enthusiastic promoters of it. It is difficult to clarify who precisely were the ‘severall eminent persons’ allegedly involved, or the ‘some of the parish’ who met to plan the event, but these allusions clearly indicate that prominent parishioners were happy to be involved in a service which revived more traditional forms of worship in direct contravention of government regulations. The preacher Bernard also managed to publish his intended sermon with the title The still-borne ­nativitie.60 The absence of St Margaret’s minister, Samuel Gibson, may also have been significant. His replacement, John Binns, had been appointed to officiate the cure in August 1647 in Gibson’s absence, boasting a certificate from the Westminster Assembly that he was a man of ‘able parts and unblameable conversation’. Yet it seems highly likely that he was complicit in the Christmas events, not least because it was testified a year later that he repeatedly christened children at their parents’ houses with the Book of Common Prayer and ‘signed them with the signe of the Crosse’.61 Binns would seem to have been dismissed from his post and eased out of the parish over the following year, as the parish records payments to carry him ‘our late Reader’ and his wife back to Yorkshire, where he was born.62 Just four days after St Margaret’s Christmas service the church hosted a Commons day of humiliation, with sermons by the godly luminaries Joseph Caryl and Lazarus Seaman. One assumes that the rosemary and bays had been removed by then. There could hardly have been a more stark juxtaposition of the national and parochial uses of the church. It seems clear that a Christmas service with a ‘malignant’ minister was also held at St Martin’s at the same time. By 30 December the Commons was investigating ‘the Business at Martin’s Parish in the Fields on ... Christmas Day’. Those particularly being blamed were the vestryman Scipio le Squire and the churchwarden John Harris. The latter was ordered by the House to be removed from his office of churchwarden ‘for countenancing and setting to preach Malignant Ministers’.63 We have already noted the clashes that occurred the following April over the election of churchwardens to replace Harris. Ultimately the parishioners chose ‘Bromwell an Oyleman in the Strand, a Malignant esteemed’ and retained Burgh, ‘an Upholster that was 59 See p. 248. The vestry ordered in March 1648 that Hilton should receive no fees or wages as parish clerk, and threatened sequestration if he did so (WAC, E2413, fol. 44v). 60 Nicholas Bernard, The still-borne nativitie, or, A copy of an incarnation sermon that should have been delivered at St. Margarets Westminster, on Saturday, December the five and twenty, 1647, in the afternoon (1648). 61 WAC, E2413, fol. 43v; WAM, 9366 (testimony of Elizabeth Whitney, 24 Nov 1648). Binns signed churchwardens’ accounts in May 1648 (WAC, E28). 62 WAC, E28. 63 CJ, 30 Dec 1647; The Moderate Intelligencer, no. 146 (30 Dec 1647–6 Jan 1648), p. 1089.

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Westminster 1640–60 the last yeare Churchwarden so much in their books, that they have continued him ... maugre [malgre] all that could be said by the contrary faccion’.64 Le Squire, who had clearly been suspected of orchestrating the Christmas events, seems to have escaped further investigation, and would remain on the parish vestry until his death in 1659 (by which time the ‘Maligant esteemed’ Francis Bromwell was also serving on the vestry). Events in the other major Westminster parish of St Clement’s in 1647 might initially appear to reflect ministerial neglect rather than enthusiasm for traditional religion, but further study suggests that, like its neighbours, St Clement’s had parish officials who were happy to have ‘malignant’ preachers in the parish pulpit. It was complained that their minister, the noted Presbyterian Richard Vines, preached in the parish ‘only upon theire [the parishioners’] intreatie at such tymes as his attendance on the [Westminster] Assemblie causeth him to reside in Towne’, and with the other minister (Daniel Evans) also absent it had arisen that several ‘disaffected and sequestered persons have been enterteyned to officiate’ at St Clement’s. The Committee for Plundered Ministers acted swiftly to establish a committee in the parish to act as temporary sequestrators of the rectory and to make funds available ‘for the maintenance of such able minister[s] as may officiate the cure there’. Nevertheless, it is striking that the sixteen members appointed to this committee – headed by Colonel Silvanus Taylor and Colonel James Prince (both named as lay triers for the Westminster classis) – do not include any past or current churchwardens, and involved only one of the nine officials who had signed an inventory of parish goods drawn up the year before. Moreover, not one member of the emergency committee appears in the first surviving vestry list for the parish, from 1652. Given that the committee was also urged ‘to take especiall care that noe minister that is scandalous or disaffected or that hath been sequestered doe preach or officiate in the said Church’, it seems highly likely that the committee was appointed specifically to circumvent the parish vestry, which it was feared would continue to appoint ‘disaffected’ preachers. It need hardly be added that all the parish officers excluded in this way had signed the peace petition in 1642, which their royalist minister, Richard Dukeson, had promoted.65 There would also appear to have been an abortive attempt by St Mary le Strand at this time to appoint a sequestered minister.66 The active conservatism on display in Westminster’s parishes in 1647 heightens the suspicion that when Westminster’s churches had been purged of ornaments, this may not have been as complete or irreversible a process as 64 Bodl., Clarendon MSS 31, fol. 44v. 65 BL, Add. MSS 15671, fols 144v–145r; WAC, B1055, fol. 6v; B11, 1651–2. It is not clear whether St Clement’s hosted its own Christmas sermon in 1647: certainly the parish paid for ‘scouring the brasse branches against Christmas’ (WAC, B11, 1647–48). 66 See WAC, vol. 22, fol. 431r.

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Religion, politics and society initial accounts might have suggested. ‘Superstitious’ objects may have been removed, but they were not necessarily destroyed. St Martin’s altar rails, for example, which had been brought in by the parish before the Laudian reforms, were retained and entered in inventories right up to the Restoration.67 There were especially striking developments in the Savoy chapel, used by the parish of St Mary le Strand. We have noted that pictures had been removed and their empty places whitewashed in 1644 after Sir Robert Harley’s direct intervention. Even after this, however, the pictures were clearly not destroyed, but seem to have been stored in the house of the firmly puritan John Bond, Master of the Savoy, and they were brought back into the church in 1647–48, during the conservative revival of these months, which would seem to have affected all Westminster parishes. But the pictures were removed into the vestry again the following year, where they may well have been preserved.68 Bond’s readiness to store the paintings could reflect the fact that their religious content may have been relatively innocuous, but there may have been a more general sense in the parish that its church fittings constituted parochial assets that should be retained, even if they should not play any role in public worship. The fact that the pictures were brought back into the church in 1647–48 would suggest that their retention was not a mere matter of collective inertia on the part of parish officers. Like Vines, Bond may have been mostly absent at the Westminster Assembly, and therefore less in control of events (which might suggest that parliament’s policy of placing prominent puritans in Westminster’s livings could easily backfire).69 Anti-Presbyterian voices could of course also come from the Independent and sectarian side. Westminster had its smattering of radical religious incidents. Robert Lockyer ‘of Westminster’ was bound over at the Westminster sessions in September 1644 for saying and justifying in open court that the ministers of the Church of England were antichristian ministers and that Stephen Marshall and Thomas Hill (the Abbey preachers) taught antichristian doctrines ‘or the doctrine of divells, or some such words’.70 But Lockyer would appear to have been an exception. While it may have been political Independents who had stymied Presbyterian reformation on a national level, in Westminster the responsibility essentially lay with more conservative religious forces. 67 WAC, F6 (1649–50). 68 Spraggon, pp. 169–70; WAC, vol. 22, churchwardens’ accounts 1647–48 and 1648–49 (unfoliated). 69 On the problem of absent puritan ministers at this time in the capital, see Liu, p. 132. 70 LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/51, p. 12 (cf. MJ & WJ/SB/B/56, p. 13). Two months earlier Richard Douglas had been committed at the sessions ‘for offering diverse abuses in the Abby Church, disturbing the ministers in tyme of divine service’, but it is less clear that this misbehaviour was religiously motivated (MJ & WJ/SB/B/48, p. 17).

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Westminster 1640–60 Religion and the community in 1650s Westminster Godly reform in the parishes The failure of Presbyterian reformation and the execution of the king in 1649 meant that hopes for an imposed puritan settlement were dashed. There would be no coercive, comprehensive national church, and participation in the Presbyterian system would henceforth be voluntary. On the other hand, prayer-book worship was criminalized, whereas non-parochial gathered congregations that avoided heresy were free to worship as they chose. This could imply the end for the parish community, and for the intimate relationship between religion, the minister and the locality. Nevertheless, as we will see, parishes still had an important role to play in the religious life of communities, not least because there was a public church which aspired to the national provision of a godly and well-maintained ministry. The puritan ministers who had failed to secure the Presbyterian reformation of the national church were nevertheless still determined to secure the evangelical transformation of the country by other means, whether they be preaching, catechizing or programmes of moral reform, and the parish church was often the central forum for local initiatives towards this end.71 But if parishes continued to be important as potential vehicles for evangelical reform, they were also potentially problematic custodians of traditional forms of social and religious organization. In 1650s Westminster, where the public church was still on its most visible display on national religious days of thanksgiving or humiliation in the Abbey and St Margaret’s church, the parish and the parish church continued to be the focus of competing visions of what the church, true religion and the religious community should be. In Westminster, the puritan drive for local godly reformation in the 1650s is best exemplified by the parish of St Martin in the Fields. At the heart of the parish’s evangelical programme in these years was the vicar Gabriel Sangar, who had taken over from the unpopular Cawdrey in 1651.72 Sangar would seem to have made a much better job than Cawdrey of harnessing lay enthusiasms for the work of religious reformation. The most striking and visible example of this was the lecture exercise held in 1656. The morning exercise – in which for a month a single parish played host to a team of ministers who took turns in delivering a short daily lecture followed by prayers, and with a fast at the end of the month – had been a successful and popular evangelical device developed by London Presbyterian ministers in the 1640s.73 71 See A. Hughes, ‘“The public profession of these nations”: the national church in interregnum England’ in C. Durston and J. Maltby (eds), Religion in revolutionary England (2006). 72 Sangar attended his first vestry meeting on 19 Mar 1651 (WAC, F2002, fol. 177). 73 E. Vernon, ‘A ministry of the gospel: the Presbyterians during the English Revolution’ in C. Durston and J. Maltby (eds), Religion in revolutionary England (2006), pp. 121–2.

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Religion, politics and society Presumably inspired by the exercise held in the neighbouring parish of St Giles in the Fields in May 1655,74 Sangar was able to arrange for London’s famous morning exercise to come to Westminster the following year. Over the first three months of 1656, the exercise took place in the Westminster parishes of St Clement’s, St Martin’s and Covent Garden. As Thomas Case explained to Sangar’s parishioners, his brethren in the City ‘lent you the Morning Exercise for a Moneth’. The twenty-three lecturers (plus Sangar) who were involved included many prominent City of London Presbyterian ministers such as Edmund Calamy, Walter Bridges, Zachary Crofton, Michael Herring, William Jenkyn, James Nalton, Thomas Watson, John Wells and Peter Witham. Case made the revealing comment on Sangar’s sermon summarizing the content of all sermons given, that it was ‘as if the whole number had met at Sion Colledge to consult their subject’. But if the London Presbyterian caucus was a strong presence, the roster nevertheless also included the local ministers Thomas Manton, George Masterson (minister of St Clement Danes) and Onesephorus Roode (minister at the Tothill Fields chapel), and also the parish lecturers John Meriton and Thomas Case (both of St Martin’s – although Case may have also been involved in his capacity as rector of the neighbouring St Giles in the Fields).75 It was claimed that all social groups had attended the exercises. Sangar applauded the ‘general attendance upon this Morning Service, when noble and ignoble, high and low, rich and poor, afforded their presence’, and Case similarly expressed his pleasure ‘to see the Nobillity, gentry, and all sorts of people ... from morning to morning thronging those spacious Assemblies, with such assiduity and chearfulness’.76 The exercise clearly engendered hopes in the London Presbyterian community that Westminster’s ministers might join them in a more formal capacity. While the exercise was meeting in St Martin’s in February 1656, the London Provincial Assembly ordered that a letter be sent to the Westminster ministers Manton, Sangar, Roode and John Vyner (of St Margaret’s), as well as Case, urging them ‘to associate themselves for the making up or renewing of the 11th classis, to settle the Presbyteriall government’. Nothing was achieved: Case reported two months later that ‘as yet they could not meet to doe it’, but at least one of these ministers, Vyner, was hardly likely to support such an initiative, as we will see. The ministers were also presumably well aware of how difficult it would be for them to persuade their parishioners to comply 74 Thomas Case, The morning exercise ... preached at St Giles in the Fields during the moneth of May 1655 (1655). 75 Gabriel Sangar, The word of faith (1656). For evidence of the arrangements for the exercise in parish sources, see the entry for the entertainment of ministers ‘that preached every morning this Monthe’ in WAC, F12. 76 Sangar, Word of faith, sig. A6r and unfoliated.

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Westminster 1640–60 with such a plan. Case, Sangar and Roode did appear as supposed representatives of the eleventh classis at the meeting of the Provincial Assembly in August 1657, and also at the penultimate meeting of the Assembly in 1659, but while Case implied that Presbyterian structures were active in St Giles, there is no evidence that Sangar and Roode had managed to erect them in their own parishes, and no elders appeared in the supposed classis delegation.77 Nevertheless, Sangar and some of his colleagues continued to do what they could to support parochial initiatives that would help to build a godly community, even without the formal Presbyterian structures that were desired. The 1656 exercise was not a one-off event. In the following year Sangar joined a sub-committee to implement a proposal by St Martin’s vestry to create a new weekday lectureship, in addition to Thomas Case’s lecture. This remarkable new lectureship was to be occupied not by a single clergyman, but by a series of twenty-six named lecturers (who would be required to send a replacement if they were for any reason unable to preach).78 The initial proposal had come from Colonel Edward Grosvenor, whose religious predilections, though obscure, may have included patronage of a Baptist chaplain for his regiment. This raises the possibility that this initiative was intended not only to secure a greater variety of religious voices than that offered by Case (inspired perhaps by the exercise held the previous year), but, conceivably, to include some more radical messages among them.79 For St Clement’s too, experience of the 1656 exercise would seem to have generated further initiatives.80 In July 1658 the churchwardens recorded making payments for ‘entertainment of the Ministers for the morning exercises’.81 Its neighbouring parish of St Giles in the Fields also ran a further exercise in May 1659, in which Manton and Meriton participated.82 The exercise and other sets of lectures were clearly open to all comers, regardless of their parish of residence – those attending included people from neighbouring parishes and from the City of London – but nevertheless they represented a significant mustering of parochial resources in pursuit of evangelical reform. Other forms of collective parochial activity with a godly focus would seem to have flourished during Sangar’s tenure at St Martin’s. The parish easily 77 Shaw, II, 111–16. 78 WAC, F2003, p. 144–7. 79 One William Bell (possibly the Baptist of that name) was chaplain to Grosvenor’s regiment: A. Laurence, Parliamentary army chaplains 1642–51 (1990), pp. 74, 98. The lecture at St Martin’s does seem to have been implemented in 1657–58, given the references to ministers giving morning and afternoon lectures in that year (WAC, F385), but, unfortunately, lists of ministers do not survive and it is not clear that the lectureship continued to run in the following year. 80 The 1656 exercise is recorded in entries in WAC, B12, 1655–56. 81 WAC, B12, 1658–59. 82 Thomas Case, The morning exercise methodized (1660).

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Religion, politics and society out-performed every other parish in the metropolis when collecting money for the oppressed Protestants of Piedmont, raising the extraordinary sum of £325 (which may have reflected systematic house-to-house collections).83 A collection in St Martin’s for ‘poor Protestants bannished out of Poland’ in May 1658, which did not receive the same promotion by the central authorities, nevertheless amounted to a creditable £48.84 The broader Protestant parish community was also potentially reaffirmed through the celebration of 5 November. In some parts of the country there would seem to have been some uncertainty over whether the old festivities surrounding the day were appropriate, but nevertheless St Martin’s, St Margaret’s and St Clement Danes continued to ring their church bells on the day.85 The puritan evangelical agenda was also pursued through the implementation of moral legislation. In January 1660 Sangar and Manton joined sixty-three London ministers in signing A seasonable exhortation of sundry Ministers in London to the People of their respective Congregations, warning of the dangers of popery, of religious divisions and, specifically, of the profanation of the Sabbath.86 Sabbath observance was another prominent means by which ministers might seek to promote the godly reform of their parish, and it is the heightened regulation of behaviour on the Sabbath that is one of the distinctive aspects of Westminster’s parishes in the 1650s. Commerce, travel and labour on the Sabbath had already been the targets of parliamentary ordinances in the 1640s, pressed especially by that determined advocate of the religious reform of Westminster, Sir Robert Harley.87 At the same time, the local Westminster ministers Daniel Cawdrey and Herbert Palmer (lecturer at Tothill Fields chapel) co-authored a massive two-volume work on the Sabbath which argued that ‘one Main Cause’ of God’s infliction of civil war on the land had been ‘publique Toleration of the Profanation of that Day’.88 Prosecutions of local traders in Westminster’s parishes who infringed the terms of the 1644 83 TNA, SP25/126; WAC, F2003, fol. 77. See also CSPD 1656–7, p. 223; CSPD 1655, p. xvi. Only St Mary Aldermanbury came close to St Martin’s record. Covent Garden collected a creditable £171. The other sums collected in Westminster were £102 (St Clement Danes) and £79 (St Mary le Strand). Compare the earlier petitions for distressed Protestants of Ireland in TNA, SP28/193. 84 WAC, F2003, fols 76–77 85 WAC, B11, E30–36, F8–F16; D. Cressy, Bonfires and bells (1989), pp. 164–5. St Margaret’s does not, however, record bell-ringing in 1657 and 1658. This might conceivably reflect a broader reaction against parish ritual after the ejection of the royalist minister, Vyner, earlier in 1657 (see below). 86 The fact that the ministers of St Clement’s, the Savoy and St Margaret’s did not sign the petition may not necessarily indicate their hostility to its contents, but would certainly indicate that they were less fully integrated into City Presbyterian circles than were Manton and Sangar. 87 A&O, I, 420–2. Durston, ‘Preaching and sitting still’, p. 213. 88 Sabbatum redivivum (1645), sig. a2v.

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Westminster 1640–60 ordinance can indeed be found in the 1640s.89 But that there was not a systematic, coherent policy at work in the locality is evident in St Martin’s arrangements in 1646 that there would be morning sessions in the church on weekdays at which public prayers would be held and the vicar or lecturer would expound a chapter or psalm for the better information of ‘Labourers and the poorer sort who cannot come to Church on the Lordes day, as also for the bringing downe of a greater blessing upon their laboures’.90 From 1650 onwards, a more sustained drive to regulate is evident, bolstered by the new sabbatarian Act passed in April of that year, and then by the even more rigorous Act passed in 1657. In 1655 an enhanced sabbatarian campaign was also launched by Major-General Barkstead and the Middlesex and Westminster JPs.91 The task of regulating behaviour on Sabbaths and days of humiliation fell to parish constables at the direction of JPs (often with the direct involvement of paid informers), but parishes were thoroughly aware of these activities, and indeed partly profited, as fines were often paid to overseers of the poor. The overseers’ accounts can thus give us a richly detailed picture of controls over public life in the 1650s.92 Westminster’s officials clearly did not hesitate to impose penalties on every misdemeanour mentioned in the 1650 Act. Thus, in St Clement’s, St Margaret’s and St Martin’s, tradesmen such as tailors and others were fined for taking home work on the Sabbath. People were charged with carrying suits of clothes, boots, linen and bottles, or for causing servants to break the Sabbath in this way.93 Other were fined for exercising trades: barbers for cutting hair, porters carrying burdens, butchers pulling poultry, people selling shoes, meat and rabbits, and millers for grinding corn. In the case of the miller Henry Prentice in St Margaret’s, however, his regular convictions imply that he considered such fines to be simply an occupational hazard.94 Other fines targeted those involved in transport: watermen and hackney coachmen for taking fares, but also private people riding, travelling in coaches or sedans or ‘crossing over the water’. Large numbers of gentry and titled residents were arrested and fined for travelling in coaches on the Sabbath, especially in St Martin’s and Covent Garden.95 Boys playing in the fields might also receive fines, although sometimes the penalties were imposed on their parents. Richard Robinson was fined 16d in St Margaret’s

89 E.g. WAC, B24/A48, 1645–46, 1646–47. 90 WAC, F2002, fol. 148v [italics mine]. 91 A&O, II, 383–7, 1162–70; Order by the Justices of the peace of London and Westminster (1656). 92 See also Chapter 5. 93 E.g. WAC, E165: Mr Braford junior fined 3s 4d ‘for suffering his servant to carry cloathes on the Sabbath’. 94 WAC, E166, E167, E170. 95 See pp. 216–17.

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Religion, politics and society parish in 1657–58 ‘for his children playing’.96 ‘Idleing in the feildes’ could also earn a fine in St Martin’s.97 There were sudden surges in prosecutions in particular years, although these vary between neighbouring parishes, which implies the impact of particular JPs or constables, or specific parochially based initiatives or pressures. Overall, far greater sums were raised in St Martin’s than in the other parishes, but there are some interesting fluctuations. St Clement’s seems to have been especially zealous: the parish bought multiple copies of the sabbatarian acts to distribute among its constables, overseers of the poor and ‘others, appointed to looke after that busines’.98 The financial benefits of a rigorous programme of prosecutions were considerable. In 1657–58 all three parishes experienced a sharp rise in income from fines for moral offences (presumably reflecting both the more restrictive provisions of the 1657 Act, and the fact that it empowered constables, churchwardens and overseers to demand entrance into any tavern or alehouse where they suspected the Sabbath was being profaned).99 Income from such fines in the three parishes in this year amounted to over £150, of which £91 was gathered in St Martin’s alone (more than double the amount collected the previous year). Given the major struggles that this parish was encountering in funding poor relief, it had every incentive to maximize the prosecution of moral offences, as this provided an increasingly vital income stream for the parish.100 Conversely, in St Clement’s parish there was then a dramatic falling-off in the income from fines in the late 1650s, but this coincided with the parish’s starting to charge large fines for people not serving in a range of parish offices, which brought in vastly more money than those fines that had been levied for moral offences.101 By 1659–60, income from fines for moral offences had dwindled to almost nothing in both St Margaret’s and St Clement’s, although it was still running at a healthy figure in St Martin’s, having reached a peak of £127 in the year 1658–59.102 Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that restrictions on travel on Sundays in the capital were remarkably effective. Ambassadors and visitors to London commented on the strict observance of the Sabbath, and as we have seen, the visiting Dutchman Huygens, while lodged temporarily at Whitehall, was 96 WAC, E171. 97 WAC, F386, fol. 26. 98 Seventeen copies of the Acts were purchased in 1656–57, and fifteen in the following year: WAC, B12, 1656–57, 1657–58. 99 A&O, II, 1170. 100 St Martin’s vestry agreed in 1653 to petition the JPs at the next session that fines raised by penal statutes on inhabitants committing offences in the parish might go to the profit of the poor of the parish (WAC, F2003, p. 30). 101 See WAC, B12, 1658–59 (£43 5s 2d [fining out] and £5 3s 6d [offences]; and B12, 1659–60 (£60 5s [fining out] and £1 16s 8d [offences]). 102 WAC, F386. The parish’s income from fines had been only £31 in 1650–51 (F378).

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Westminster 1640–60 particularly struck by the absence of carriages in the locality and of buying and selling on a Sunday.103 For the JPs charged with implementing the legislation, however, there was always more to be done, especially in the matter of regulating alehouses. The Westminster JPs meeting in St Margaret’s vestry complained in March 1656 that the Sabbath was ‘very much prophaned and the observation thereof very much neglected’ by tradesmen and alehouse dwellers, as well as ‘such as employ or travel with Coaches and Sedans on that day’, and launched a revived campaign by republishing their March 1649 order against ‘disorderly alehouses’.104 The moral offences that generated lucrative fines for Westminster’s parishes included that of swearing. The Blasphemy Act of 28 June 1650 had provided JPs and constables with the power to prosecute all, and some of them seem to have seized on the opportunity with alacrity. The JP John Hooker appears to have been particularly exercised by this sin, and the fines could generate substantial sums. For example, Robert and Henry Payton were required to pay £7 in 1653–54 for ‘swearing divers oathes’.105 One further means by which an evangelical agenda could be promoted in parishes was through the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. There are examples of churches within Westminster where communion was discontinued for sometimes considerable lengths of time during this period. There does seem to be evidence that communion was not offered regularly at the Abbey. Two petitions from the 1640s complained of limited administration of the sacrament there. One observed that communion had not been administered there ‘for above a whole yeare’ and that ‘divers gentlemen Members of the howse of Commons ... desire to receive it from the hands of Doctor Smith’. Another, said to be from ‘the Inhabitants neare unto the Abby & the Officers & servants thereof’, urged the Committee for the College of Westminster to ‘order and incourage Dr Smith to administer the same unto us’.106 The Abbey was not, of course, a parish (even though there had been abortive plans to make it such). The new parish of Covent Garden had reportedly had no parish communion for seven or eight years when Manton arranged for it to take place in January 1658.107 In most of Westminster’s parishes, however, communions were held 103 Durston, ‘Preaching and sitting still’, p. 217. Huygens, pp. 43–4. 104 Several orders made and agreed upon by the Iustices for the Peace of the city and liberty of Westminster upon Monday the 10. day of March 1655 (1656). See also Publick Intelligencer, no. 28 (7–14 Apr 1656), pp. 468–9. 105 WAC, B25/A48, 1653–4. Capp notes that in rural Middlesex punishment of blasphemy often took the form of binding-over orders, so that numbers punished for this offence may have been significantly underestimated (B. Capp, ‘Republican reformation: family, community and the state in interregnum Middlesex’ in H. Berry and E. Foyster (eds), The family in early modern England (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 47–8. 106 WAM, 9359, 9377. 107 Doctor Williams’s Library (hereafter DWL), Baxter Letters, V, fol. 219r.

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Religion, politics and society with reasonable frequency. Monthly communions seem to have been standard at both St Margaret’s and St Martin’s, although after 1645 neither parish followed the erstwhile practice of the staggered festive communion at Easter.108 The crucial question, though, is how exclusive these communions were. In the 1640s and 1650s parish communions could run the risk of creating division rather than unity, and this was because attendance was restricted. While in the past only notorious ‘evil-livers’ might be excluded, under the Directory and parliamentary ordinances there was a much more capacious sense of those who might be undeserving, and communicants were to be vetted, their faith scrutinized by small groups of fellow parishioners (in theory the minister and elders), who could deny them access to communion.109 This made communion arrangements in large parishes a demanding and challenging matter. The evaluation of the relative worthiness of candidates for communion could obviously be a divisive as well as a time-consuming task, and this may be one of the reasons why it was delayed for so long in Covent Garden. Thomas Manton, however, was clearly determined to change things. He had been in the living less than a year when he resolved in late 1657 that parish communion should be celebrated. His ‘assistant’, Abraham Pinchbeck, feared that there would be ‘much difficulty’, and raised his concerns on this matter with the famous puritan expert on pastoral issues, Richard Baxter. As Pinchbeck explained it, the problem was that some parishioners ‘will have admission at large’, whereas others were ‘united to some independent congregations and ... they would scarce thinke few if any holy enough to partake with’. Manton was determined that all parishioners should be examined, but, said Pinchbeck, ‘some sober ones I heare stumble at that’. Pinchbeck’s principal concern was that the communion might be too exclusive, and he feared ‘lest a division should be made from too many & we should looke too much like schismatickes or else that we must goe without that Sacrament’.110 In particular, Pinchbeck asked Baxter for the scriptural proofs that could be used to demonstrate ‘that a pastour may call his people to an account at any time’. Such proofs were needed because ‘we hop er long to have a meeting with our people & shall have need of all arguments’. After Baxter told him that he needed no proofs other than that ‘you are their Teacher & Ruler’,111 Pinchbeck replied with concerns that display a deeper awareness of an assertive and potentially quarrelsome laity. This may have reflected his particular experi108 For pre-1640 staggered Easter communion at St Martin’s see Merritt, pp. 318–20. For its use in 1645: WAC, F4518, fols 8v–9v. This frequency of communions, but lack of festive communions, contrasts with the findings in J. Morrill (ed.) The nature of the English revolution (Harlow, 1993), pp. 166–8. 109 A&O, I, 836, 852–5. 110 Calendar of the correspondence of Richard Baxter, ed. N.H. Keeble and G.F. Nuttall (2 vols, Oxford, 1991), I, 269–70. 111 Ibid., I, 273.

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Westminster 1640–60 ence of Covent Garden, where there were a disproportionately large number of socially elevated and prosperous residents who were unlikely to defer to a junior minister. Pinchbeck complained that ‘we must declare the law & shew law for all our demands & not act despotically & therefore if our people call for scripture we must give it them’. Otherwise, ‘they will say, we deny your power you are ambitious of command and rule’.112 Baxter’s blunt response – ‘I am a free man as well as they. I was not borne under an obligation to give this or that man the Sacrament’ – might have gone down more easily in Kidderminster than in Covent Garden.113 In the event, the Covent Garden communion would seem to have been held without generating significant divisions: Manton may perhaps have exercised a degree of discretion. This was not just a matter of lay–clerical tensions and competing senses of individual worthiness; there were social and economic issues at stake as well. One common problem was that those rejected from parish communion would in turn refuse to pay tithes to the minister.114 But just as worrying was the fact that poor relief would suffer too, if socially elevated residents were barred. Communions continued to serve as an important occasion when charitable donations to the poor might be collected and distributed. In 1659 St Martin’s vestry was complaining of the ‘rude and disorderly carriage of poore that are begging in and about the Church and Churchyearde on the Saboth day and especially on the Communion day’, and instructed the beadles to ‘attend on the Communion daye to keep all poore from pressing on the Churchwardens & overseers of the poore as they stand Collecting at the Church doores’.115 The connection between the parish communion and poor relief had been another point of conflict between the vestry and Daniel Cawdrey ten years earlier. The vestry had noted in November 1649 ‘the paucity of Communicantes which is caused by the restraint of divers persons of quality from the Communion which causeth a great Clamor to be made by the Poore, and the Overseers cannot Collecte moneys Enough to satisfy the Weekly Pencons’.116 The vestry resolved that a deputation would go to urge Cawdrey ‘that people of quality may freely come to the Communion as formerly (Salve Libertate) that so the Collections may arise for the preservacion of the Poore’. It was agreed, however, that the deputation would meet in the vestry first, before they went to speak to Cawdrey – they were clearly not expecting a friendly, informal conversation. It is perhaps significant that Cawdrey would seem to have decided to 112 DWL, Baxter Letters IV, fol. 47v. 113 Correspondence of Richard Baxter, I, 281. 114 Morrill, Nature of the English revolution, pp. 170–71; Vernon, ‘Ministry of the gospel’, pp. 128–9. 115 WAC, F2003, fol. 213. 116 WAC, F2002, fol. 167. Note also the reference in October 1645 to the arrangement whereby the lecturer would preach with the vicar ‘for the preparation of the Sacrament the day before in the Afternoon’ (ibid., fol. 144).

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Religion, politics and society leave the parish a few months later. There is no mention of further concerns regarding the closed communion under his successor, Sangar, who may well have exercised rather more discretion and prudence in the question of restricting the attendance of his social superiors, perhaps in a similar manner to Manton later in the decade at Covent Garden. One possible compromise was that an insistence on preparation and examination could be combined with a tacit assurance that householders would not be excluded.117 That is not to say, of course, that access was not patrolled or that it did not potentially cause disquiet and affront. Mary Verney, recently arrived in the capital in 1647, described her unease with such a system, noting that ‘everybody that receaves must be examined before the elders, whoe they all swere asketh them such questions that would make one blush to relate’.118 While some historians have attempted to calculate attendance at parish communion in this period by noting changing levels of expenditure on communion bread and wine,119 alterations and inconsistencies in the ways in which this information was entered in various Westminster parish accounts make it difficult to construct clear patterns of expenditure there, while the occasional attendance of MPs at services can risk skewing St Margaret’s figures, in particular. Nevertheless, in St Margaret’s, expenditure on bread and wine did not significantly change throughout the 1640s and 1650s, and in several years was higher than it had been in the 1630s. Poor-rate records also show that substantial benevolences continued to be collected at communions held in St Margaret’s and the Tothill Fields chapel throughout the period. In St Martin’s, amounts spent on bread and wine were generally not recorded, although in 1646–47 they were very close to those for 1644–45.120 For St Clement’s there are significant gaps in the evidence, but sums spent in the 1650s, while gradually rising, were less than half the expenditure of the late 1630s – a pattern which follows that noted in other London parishes.121 The numbers of communion days had clearly fallen as well (St Margaret’s and St Martin’s did not arrange the staggered Easter communions that they had before the war), but it may be that there was a more limited but still consider117 Vernon, ‘Ministry of the gospel’, pp. 128–30. 118 F.P. Verney and M. Verney (eds), Memoirs of the Verney family (2 vols, 1907), I, 356. It seems possible that she may be describing Covent Garden under Obediah Sedgwick, as she describes attending ‘our parrish church’ and the Verneys had a sequestered property in the Piazza. 119 Vernon, ‘Ministry of the gospel’, pp. 127–8, 132; Morrill, Nature of the English revolution, pp. 166–7. Lindley, p. 279 points to sharp reductions in 1641–45 when attendance was not being enforced, and also less frequent communions, with levels generally lower than the 1630s. 120 The parish did record receipts at monthly communions, but these vary so widely from month to month and year to year that it is difficult to use them to gain any meaningful statistical information. For St Martin’s cf. WAC, F372 and F373. 121 WAC, B11 and B12; Vernon, ‘Ministry of the gospel’, pp. 128–30.

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Westminster 1640–60 able body of parishioners who were receiving communion on a more regular basis. Overall, Westminster’s parishes may have found practical and prudent ways of dealing with the regulation of access to communion, although resentments must have festered not only among those denied access but also among those who had had to submit to the indignity of having their beliefs examined. When Manton was planning to reintroduce a parochial Lord’s Supper in Covent Garden, it was clearly intended that parishioners who belonged to separate Independent congregations in the parish would nevertheless participate in the parish communion. Historians have in recent years emphasized the working accommodations achieved on the local level between Presbyterians and Independents during this period in the pursuit of godly reform,122 and while Westminster’s beneficed ministers were not Independents there are nevertheless indications that some of them could cooperate in mutually beneficial ways with local Independents. Thomas Manton was closely involved in attempts to seek accommodation with Congregationalist clergy on a national level, and in Westminster these instincts are most visible in his attempts to build bridges with the Independent preachers at the Abbey. Not only did Manton join them in the preaching rota at the Abbey, but he was also involved in overseeing the posthumous publication of works by the pastor of the Independent church at the Abbey, William Strong (working with Strong’s successor, Rowe, on the project). Manton himself, and his predecessor at Covent Garden, Obadiah Sedgwick, were also two rare Presbyterians among the Independent-dominated Committee of Triers based in the capital, alongside Caryl, Nye, Strong and the other Abbey preachers.123 Manton’s colleagues among the Westminster ministers may have been less enthusiastic to join forces in this way, however: it may be significant that there was no attempt to involve the famous Abbey preachers in the lecture exercise taking place in the parishes a short distance away, which appear to have been exclusively Presbyterian events.124 The prominent Congregationalist and clerk of parliament, Henry Scobell, was active on St Margaret’s vestry. Although not formally admitted until February 1656, he had attended and signed parish accounts and vestry minutes for several years. He was also chosen to act as a feoffee for the use of the poor of St Margaret’s, and gave an annual personal benevolence to the parish poor.125 Such examples of congregationalists holding parish office were not uncommon in the capital in these years: a sense of civic obligation and social responsibility, and perhaps too a desire for local status and recogni122 E.g. Hughes, ‘“Public profession”’. For Manton, see ODNB. 123 William Strong, A treatise (1657); idem, XXXI sermons (1656). See also A&O, II, 855–8. 124 Sangar may also have been antipathetic, given the attempts by the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers to replace him at St Martin’s in 1653 (ODNB, s.n. Gabrial Sangar). 125 WAC, E2413, fols 49; 55r, 71; E30, E33, E163–173.

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Religion, politics and society tion, may have been operating here, although in Scobell’s case he was also ultimately able to secure the services of two Independent Abbey ministers for his parish.126 Nevertheless, the structures and traditional forms of parochial organization could also help to preserve more conservative religious practice, as we will see. Conservatism in the Westminster parishes In fact, Westminster’s parishes were not just being mobilized for puritan reform. Other voices suggest a rather different picture. Pinchbeck’s worries about the plans for communion in Covent Garden partly reflected the fact that he considered that ‘the greatest part’ of the parishioners were ‘for the old ceremonies and profanenesse’, and there is certainly evidence that such sentiments were not confined to Covent Garden.127 In his analysis of parishes in the puritan metropolis where ‘Anglicans’ might occasionally preach, the only parish outside the City of London that Tai Liu identifies is St Clement Danes, and this is based on evidence from the 1640s alone.128 Yet there is ample evidence that conservative voices could be heard in several of the Westminster parishes in the 1650s, most notably in St Margaret’s. The persistence of conservative preaching in St Margaret’s may conceivably reflect the long-established problem of the relatively humble stipend of their parish minister (revealingly named the curate), which had helped to ensure that St Margaret’s pre-war incumbents had been a long succession of mostly obscure clergymen.129 The religious reforms had done little to improve this situation. Given the sparkling team of weekday and Sunday lecturers active at St Margaret’s as late as 1649 (Philip Nye, John Bond, William Strong, Joseph Caryl and Jeremiah Whitaker),130 the authorities were presumably sufficiently happy to be surrounded by this superabundance of preachers (supplemented by those performing at the Abbey) that they were unconcerned that St Margaret’s own minister was a relatively impecunious one. The stipend of £13 6s 8d had not changed since the 1570s.131 Samuel Gibson had sought in vain to boost his income by petitions to the Committee for Westminster College, in which he deplored the fact that the size of the parish necessitated his employment of a sub-curate, yet his means were so small ‘that it will scarce maintain one man, but in a low waie’, and this despite the fact that St Margaret’s was ‘one of the most eminent parishes 126 Liu, pp. 185–6. For Scobell and the Abbey preachers see below. 127 DWL, Baxter Letters IV, fol. 45r. 128 Liu, pp. 132–3. 129 Merritt, pp. 323–4. 130 Shaw, II, 537. 131 The overall income of the curate – including tithes, fees and leases – was estimated in 1650 as being around £49 a year (LPL, COMM XIIa/12, pp. 373–4).

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Westminster 1640–60 in the Kingdome’.132 Such frustrations may lie behind Gibson’s absence from the parish in the later 1640s, during which time some of his duties appear to have been resumed by the previously sequestered curate Gilbert Wimberley. Wimberley appointed one Robert Garrett to officiate the cure for him for half of the meagre profits of the parsonage and vicarage, making a still more impoverished position, although Wimberley himself had some other sources of income.133 Wimberley was increasingly ill in his final years, and had been notably compliant and self-effacing in the religious changes of the 1640s, but his continuing presence in St Margaret’s may have helped to bolster conservative sentiment in the parish. In his will, dated 3 October 1651, he describes himself as ‘weak in body’, but refers to leases held of the dean and chapter of Westminster ‘if they come to be restored again’.134 More emphatically conservative clerical voices were to be heard in the parish after Wimberley’s death. By the mid-1650s, St Margaret’s was enjoying the services of two very surprising clergymen indeed.135 One was Thomas Warmestry, who had given an anti-Laudian speech to convocation in 1641 but subsequently showed himself to be a dedicated royalist, and who by this point was acting ‘as confessor to ex-royalists and as an almoner to distressed cavaliers’.136 In June and July 1658 he would play a very public role in attending on royalist plotters at their public executions, using prayers from the Book of Common Prayer and urging them to declare their faith that they died ‘a true Protestant of the Church of England’.137 In 1657, though, he was the lecturer at St Margaret’s, chosen by the parishioners and supported by a substantial voluntary contribution, travelling in from Chelsea, where he lodged with Lady Lawrence.138 St Margaret’s minister at this time was the equally remarkable figure of John Vyner, who had been appointed to the position in June 1653, but who had already been serving as parish lecturer since 1649.139 Surviving manuscript notes of sermons that Vyner delivered in St Margaret’s in the 1650s show unmistakable royalist sentiments, and a disapproval of the religious 132 WAM, 9401. 133 LPL, COMM XIIa/12, pp. 374–5. 134 TNA, PCC/Prob 11/241. 135 Garrett continued in the post of sub-curate throughout these years (see e.g. WAC, E2413, fol. 68v). He had been receiving payments to preach at Knightsbridge chapel from at least September 1648 (WAM, 42726, 42775). He is also recorded as acting as preacher at the Savoy in 1650 (LPL, COMM XIIa/12, p. 401). 136 ODNB, s.n. Thomas Warmestry; Thomas Warmestry, A convocation speech … against images, altars, crosses, the new canons, and the oath &c. (1641). 137 Mercurius Politicus, no. 419 (3–10 June 1658), pp. 584–6; no. 424 (8–15 July 1658), pp. 656–8. Warmestry does, however, seem to have been capable of working with more moderate puritans. In 1653 he subscribed to a statement expressing his support for Richard Baxter’s Worcestershire Association (Correspondence of Richard Baxter, I, 109). 138 Thomas Warmestry, The baptized Turk (1658), p. 19. 139 WAC, E2413, fol. 55; LPL, COMM XIIa/12, p. 376.

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Religion, politics and society status quo. He repeatedly dwells on the afflictions of God’s church and people, ‘hir sad and miserable Condition under the regall power of hir enemies’, and the need for comfort in affliction. He warns, though, of ‘over much sorrow’ and of the danger to God’s children ‘that be[cause] they Cannot do the duties of Gods service in the manner that they should[,] therefore they have not heart at all in any dutie that they doe performe’.140 Vyner had clearly not been popular in Westminster’s Independent circles. When the would-be minister Anthony Sadler was seeking (without success) the approval of the Triers, and proferred a certificate in his support signed by Vyner (as well as by Anthony Tingle, ‘Clerk of the Abbey at Westminster’), Philip Nye complained that the certificate ‘was not Subscribed by Hands they knew’ and demanded ‘Doe you know no Minister but Mr Viner?’ Sadler was later told bluntly that ‘the Hands to my Certificate were not approved of’. Unlike his neighbouring clergymen, Vyner was also a notable absentee from the 1656 lecture exercise at St Martin’s.141 The authorities would seem to have become aware of this curious state of affairs of St Margaret’s conservative serving clergymen by chance, in 1657, when parliament was in session and a preacher failed to attend to deliver the scheduled sermon during a service in the Abbey at which some MPs were present. According to Warmestry himself, who was present, he took it upon himself to supply the omission and ‘give the Congregation and the Parliament-men a Sermon in the Abby’.142 While the precise content of the sermon is not recorded, one assumes that MPs were disconcerted to discover that they were being preached to by a notorious royalist, and that subsequent enquiries revealed the equally unorthodox situation of the minister Vyner. The Commons promptly petitioned Cromwell to remove from St Margaret’s ‘the present Preacher [Vyner], being a Prisoner of the Upper Bench; and also one Warmstree, who is employed as Lecturer there, being a notorious Delinquent’.143 Vyner and Warmestry were replaced as preachers in St Margaret’s by Edward Pearce and Seth Wood (the latter of whom was already employed as a preacher at the Abbey), who had stronger Independent credentials, and there would seem to have been a notable curbing of some of the parish’s traditional ceremonial in the following months.144 It is not perhaps surprising that Vyner’s sermons in St Margaret’s before his formal exclusion on 1 October focused on the persecution of the clergy. Four days before the vestry order confirming his 140 Christ Church, Oxford, MS 451, Vyner sermons on 16 Nov, 30 Nov, 7 Dec 1656; 17 May and 21 June 1657. 141 Anthony Sadler, Inquisitio Anglicana (1654), p. 6. 142 Warmestry, Baptized Turk, pp. 138–9. Warmestry attributes his ejection from St Margaret’s specifically to this event. 143 CJ, 23 June 1657. 144 Seth Wood was an Independent minister in the Abbey, who was remembered in the codicil of Henry Scobell’s will (ODNB, s.n. Henry Scobell) while Pearse was also appointed lecturer at the Abbey on 20 May 1658 and was ejected in 1660.

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Westminster 1640–60 removal, in what was presumably his last sermon in the parish, Vyner warned his congregation to take heed of ‘wronging or despiseing any of the faithfull ministers of Christ’. When he lamented that ‘this malice of men doth so persecute the soules of the ministers, insomuch as it is made a note of an unfaithfull minister not to be so [persecuted]’, he was priming his parishioners to give a hostile reception to his manifestly unpersecuted successors.145 There is nothing to suggest that the presence of Vyner and Warmestry did not reflect the views of the majority of St Margaret’s parishioners. Vyner had been chosen by the parishioners themselves to be their lecturer in 1649, ‘and by them paid by their voluntarye Contribution’, which amounted to £100 p.a., and he had presumably been promoted to minister at the parish’s request. It seems clear that Warmestry was in turn chosen as lecturer by the parishioners and funded by a voluntary contribution of the same amount.146 Not only had they chosen to appoint and pay their lecturer’s salary, but in these years St Margaret’s parishioners also enjoyed more direct control than ever before over their parish in other ways: no clergymen seem to have attended meetings of the vestry after 1642, for example, and none even signed the churchwardens’ accounts after Wimberley’s death. It is also notable that some of the parish officers involved in the notorious 1647 Christmas service were still active in parish affairs. The two churchwardens concerned had gone on to join the vestry after completing their terms of office and remained as active vestrymen throughout the 1650s. The parish organist, Hilton, remained in post as parish clerk until his death in 1657, and he continued to promote religiously conservative and crypto-royalist ideas. Particularly striking in this respect is his 1652 publication Catch as Catch Can – a collection of musical pieces that are partly concerned with the familiar royalist themes of conviviality and good company, with Hilton’s contributions including a drinking song based in a prison. The second half of the publication is a collection of ‘sacred hymns and canons’, many in Latin, including a setting of the Gloria. Many of the texts that are set are lamentations, and Hilton’s own pieces in this section include his setting of the unambiguous lines ‘Sweet Jesu Christ thy Church keep sound, those bloudy, bloudy Edomits to confound, that cries down, down, down, down, down, down with it to the ground’.147 For at least some members of St Margaret’s vestry, Hilton may have been an unwelcome presence whom they had wanted to dismiss, but it is very significant that the parish was notably generous in marking Hilton’s death. A vestry order required his successor, 145 Christ Church, Oxford, MS 451, ‘1657. Sept. 27 Mr Vyner’. 146 LPL, COMM XIIa/12, pp. 376–7; WAC, E2413, fols 77v, 79v. It is notable that St Margaret’s vestry felt it necessary to call upon the parochial members of the Court of Burgesses to assist them in collecting this ‘free benevolence’ from parishioners to support the intruded preachers Wood and Pearce. 147 John Hilton, Catch as catch can (1652), pp. 28–9, 97, 103–5, 133.

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Religion, politics and society Hooper, to make a payment to Hilton’s widow, and also instructed the churchwardens to pay forty shillings towards Hilton’s funeral.148 St Margaret’s was not the only parish where more conservative voices could be heard. While Thomas Fuller was based in Waltham Abbey in the 1650s, he still returned to preach in Westminster. His sermon at the funeral of a royalist in St Clement Danes unequivocally describes the dead man’s loyalty to the royalist cause and is very consciously aimed at the disaffected local royalist community.149 St Clement’s minister in the 1650s, George Masterson, is a shadowy figure. He participated in the lecture exercise in 1656, which spent a month based in St Clement’s church. Yet Masterson could also attract the royalist John Evelyn to his sermons, and when he conformed at the Restoration his was not a muted and reluctant compliance: even before the king’s return he was delivering outspoken attacks on Presbyterianism and demanding revenge for the blood of Strafford and Laud.150 It is not clear whether sequestered ministers ever preached in St Clement’s, as they had done in the 1640s (the churchwardens’ accounts do record payments to ‘straungers’ preaching in the church in Masterson’s absence), but they may have been a visible presence in the parish, given that the noted royalist pulpit at Exeter House chapel was located there.151 Concerns about ‘popish’ preaching by ex-royalist ministers even found their way into the Independent-controlled Abbey. Here concerns were expressed over one Mr Bridock, who had been chaplain to the late earl of Derby and had been at a royalist garrison. He had been invited to preach at the Abbey in 1655 by one of the Governors – the Presbyterian John Gourdon – but the Abbey’s preacher, William Strong, refused ‘to sufer such a person to preach in his pulpit’. When Strong’s objections were overruled by the Governors, Bridock’s preaching of unsound doctrine reportedly gave ‘much dissatisfaction’, and St Margaret’s Independent vestryman Scobell remarked that it ‘was litell less then poopery’.152 More conservative religious forces can be observed not just in some of the preachers, but in other aspects of the organization of church and parish. In November 1656 St Margaret’s vestry even returned to using the name ‘Saint’ in the title of the parish. That this was not a religiously neutral return to earlier parochial practice is suggested by the fact that after the ejection of Vyner and 148 WAC, E2413, fol. 74v. 149 See Chapter 4. 150 R. Bosher, The making of the Restoration settlement (1951), pp. 108–9. Masterson was appointed to St Clements by the Committee for Plundered Ministers in 1649 (LPL, COMM XIIa/12, p. 396). 151 WAC, B11, 1652–53. The former sequestered minister of St Clement’s and outspoken royalist, Thomas Tuke, seems to have remained in the parish, and was buried in the new chapel of Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1657 (ODNB). 152 TNA, SP18/94, fol. 19

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Westminster 1640–60 Warmestry and the clampdown on conservative religion that seems to have followed in the parish, the title was omitted thereafter until the Restoration.153 The revival of some more traditional aspects of parish religion in the 1650s could also carry conservative overtones. One of these was the rogationtide perambulation. This parish custom had been observed more fitfully in the 1640s: no Westminster parishes document its taking place in 1645–46, when the Directory was introduced, but all parishes record it happening in 1647, when the removal of the lines of communication made the reclaiming of parish boundaries in the fields to the west an urgent necessity.154 All the Westminster parishes continued to have significant boundary problems with their neighbours, so that the practical need remained.155 The rogationtide perambulation survived in many parts of the country,156 although in Westminster there would seem to have been a conscious need felt to defend the practice and emphasize its reformed character. St Martin’s churchwardens punctiliously recorded the secular nature of the event when it was revived in 1647, noting payments for ‘whiping of boyes two pence a peece at the severall markes or bounds for the rememberance of the same where formerly wee had Epistles and Gospells’ (although the parish did not stint on the ribbons, feasting and charitable donations that traditionally formed part of the event).157 No clergy seem to have been involved in these processions. Nevertheless, even this secular emphasis did not mean that the activity was not performed with a certain amount of ceremony. In St Margaret’s itself the amounts spent on perambulation steadily increased: by 1656–57 the accounts show the parish spending more than four times the amount spent on perambulation in 1652–53, so that expenses had almost returned to pre-war levels.158 Costs presumably included substantial amounts spent on food and wine for parish dignitaries as well as the poor as they processed to Knightsbridge.159 In St Clement’s, when the feoffees and ‘ancients’ went on the perambulation in the 1650s, they still provided bread and beer for boys and the almspeople. In St Martin’s they even rang the church bells at perambulation in certain years – one of the very few occasions when 153 WAC, E2413, fols 73r, 79r, 86v. 154 In St Martin’s, perambulation is recorded in 1641, but not again until an elaborate celebration in 1647: WAC, F2002, f. 152v. Thereafter perambulation is recorded every year except 1652. 155 For St Margaret’s, see, for example, WAC, E33 and E36, and the instructions to churchwardens in 1654 that if they met any obstruction ‘that then they may forsse and make there ways to the end that the parish may Inioye there Just Wrightes as formerly they have done’: WAC, E2413, f. 61v. 156 Hutton, Rise and fall, pp. 217–18. 157 WAC, F4, pp. 21–2. 158 WAC, E36. It may be significant that in this year 30 shillings was spent at various times when inhabitants of the parish and Paddington met to ‘reconcile the differences concerning the Boundes’. 159 Merritt, p. 210.

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Religion, politics and society the bells were rung, apart from 5 November and the occasional one-off national day of thanksgiving.160 One person who was determined to see the revival of perambulation as evidence of religious conservatism was the former bishop of Gloucester, Godfrey Goodman. A member of a family which had long enjoyed close links with the Abbey, stretching back to dean Gabriel Goodman in the sixteenth century, the crypto-catholic Goodman remained stubbornly resident in St Margaret’s churchyard into the 1650s. In his The two great mysteries of 1653, optimistically dedicated to Oliver Cromwell, Goodman applauded the fact that, as he had observed, the parish had recently had a solemn perambulation, which had been omitted during the sitting of the recently dissolved Rump parliament.161 It may not be a coincidence that St Margaret’s expenditure on perambulation doubled the year after Vyner became its minister.162 Another recent development at St Margaret’s that Goodman applauded in the same breath was the restoration of the font. The parish had set up a white marble font with a font cover in 1652–53, and also paid for carving ‘two figures sett on the forepart of the pew, wherein the font stands’.163 There may have been a more widespread revival of the use of fonts rather than basins in the Westminster parishes: St Martin’s made payments for painting and gilding its font in 1650–51, and to a stonecutter for ‘new cutting and mending the font’.164 It is not clear whether the fonts had been restored to their traditional position at the west end of the church, but the absence in accounts of any expenditure on moving fonts in the 1640s or returning them at the Restoration would imply that they had been restored to use in their original place. Goodman’s enthusiasm for St Margaret’s font was reflected in a legacy in his will that was specifically ‘to Adorne the Font in this Church’.165 Several Westminster parishes also spent significant sums of money on buying new church plate. This was partly forced upon them by church robberies in both St Clement’s (in 1648) and St Martin’s (in 1649), when church plate was stolen.166 Both parishes spent around £30 on new communion plate.167 It is notable that the churchwardens’ accounts describing those who robbed St Martin’s church repeatedly uses the specific term ‘sacrilege’.168 160 WAC, F8, 1651–52; F12, 1655–56; B11, 1650–51; B12, 1655–56. 161 St Margaret’s churchwardens’ accounts do not record expenses for perambulation in 1649 and 1650, although they do record £9 14s 7 spent at perambulation in 1650–51, when divers of the inhabitants ‘went the bounds of this parish’ (WAC, E30). 162 WAC, E34: £11 9s (£5 13s was spent the previous year). 163 WAC, E32. 164 WAC, F7. 165 WAC, E26, 1656–57. 166 The vestry door and chests were broken open and plate and money stolen: WAC, B1055, fol. 6v; B11, 1648–49. 167 WAC, B11, 1652–53; F377. 168 WAC, F377.

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Westminster 1640–60 In the same year that the marble font was erected, St Margaret’s had paid for gold and silver lace for pulpit cushions, for silk tassels and for cleaning the velvet pulpit cloth, and had spent £26 on whitewashing all the inside of the church and ‘colloring the pillars, adorning of Monumentes, and other worke in trimming of the said Church’. This should not be seen as a straightforward return to St Margaret’s ceremonialist past, however. In the same year, the parish purchased a two-volume version of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and two Acts of parliament concerning the observation of the Sabbath. Moreover, some of the redecoration of the church (for which parliament had granted financial assistance) enhanced the republican credentials of the church, including sums paid for painting and gilding ‘the States Armes in several places of the Church and Vestrey’, for the colouring of shields ‘that conteyne the Armes of the Comon Wealth of England’, and payments for ‘cleering of all the brasse monuments in the Church’.169 Moreover, given the hostility to believers’ baptism that most Presbyterians and Independents shared, the renewed embellishing of the traditional site of infant baptism in parish churches might also have been something that all non-Baptists could live with. In Westminster, as elsewhere, Christmas proved to be a remarkably resilient feast. There were no longer any of the actual public religious services which had caused such problems in 1647, but private ones continued to be celebrated (such as that at Exeter House chapel in 1657). Shopkeepers remained reluctant to open their shops on Christmas Day. In 1651, when Lodewijck Huygens was staying in Covent Garden, he noted that ‘little heed’ was paid to the prohibition on the observation of Christmas, ‘for we saw that all the shops were closed and there were few people in the streets and scarcely any coaches’. They also ‘found’ (or were given by a local inhabitant or saw on sale) a booklet entitled Reasons why Christmas ought to be celebrated.170 Shopkeepers who did open for business remained vulnerable to attack: a parliamentary order directed to authorities in London and Westminster and published on 24 December 1652 directed ‘that all such persons as shall open their Shops on that day, [should] be protected from Wrong or Violence, and the Offenders punished’. It was also specifically ordered that the shops in Westminster Hall should be kept open.171 Christmas and Easter also lived on in other secular forms: rents remained due at Christmas (as in St Clement’s),172 and accounting years continued to run from Easter to Easter in some parishes and were described in these terms in the accounts.173 ‘Christmas’ and ‘Easter’ sessions were still identified as such.174 For 169 WAC, E31. 170 Evelyn, III, 203–4; Huygens, p. 45. Cf. CJ, 27 Dec 1650. 171 CJ, 24 Dec 1652. 172 WAC, B11, 1647–48. 173 E.g. St Mary le Strand: WAC, vol. 22. 174 E.g. LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/109, p. 25; WJ/E/B/2.

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Religion, politics and society all Cawdrey’s efforts to prevent the practice, in St Martin’s the vestry continued the tradition of choosing church officers at Easter.175 More traditional forms of parish religion and holy days were also sustained because of their association with poor relief. Thus the tradition of gifts to the poor at Christmas time was preserved in St Clement’s and St Margaret’s parishes, and bequests and benevolences continued to stipulate that they should be distributed among the poor ‘against Christmas’. St Clement’s vestry was still giving money ‘to poor people upon their peticions against Christmas’ in the 1650s.176 In 1650 St Margaret’s was still making payments to twenty poor people on ‘Easter day’.177 St Margaret’s even managed in 1650 to claim four years’ arrears of the royal Maundy money from the Committee of the Public Revenue, and continued to receive the money thereafter on Maundy Thursday for a further two years.178 Perambulation, as we have seen, could also provide a means of supplementing charity to alms-people and miscellaneous poor people. It is also interesting to note the response in St Martin’s parish to the will of Sir William Ashton. Ashton had been a prosperous and prominent godly vestryman, a JP and was listed as a member of the still-born eleventh classis. His will would traditionally have been expected to include payment for bread to be distributed among the poor at his funeral, but while Ashton bequeathed £20 to ‘such poore people within the parish [of St Martin’s] ... as my wife shall thinke fitt’, he warned her to be careful ‘not to dispose of it to undeservinge beggars’. ‘I am perswaded’, he added coldly, ‘there are many undeservinge Beggars’ within St Martin’s parish. The parish overseers, exceptionally, felt compelled to spend seven shillings of the parish’s own money on bread for the poor at Ashton’s funeral in April 1647, writing with obvious disapproval that Ashton ‘gave £20 to the deserveinge poore housekeepers of this parish, yet nothing for bread that day’.179 The social obligations of community may thus have helped to bind West­­ minster’s conservative, Presbyterian and Independent parishioners together. Parish vestries maintained a remarkably eclectic membership. In St Margaret’s, Independents such as Thomas Gabryll and Henry Scobell sat next to crypto-royalists and traditionalists like Rice Hammond and Thomas Style. A list of St Martin’s vestrymen in December 1658 includes Scipio le Squire (who had been implicated in St Martin’s Christmas Day service in 1647), Bromwell (the reported ‘Malignant’ elected churchwarden in 1648) and a host of other peace petitioners, but also an army Independent in the shape of Colonel Edward Grosvenor. Parochial concerns could thus transcend confessional and 175 WAC, F8. 176 WAC, B11, 1650–51. 177 WAC, E29. 178 WAC, E163–165. 179 TNA, PCC/Prob 11/198; WAC, F374.

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Westminster 1640–60 ecclesiological boundaries, yet different readings of parish community were exposed periodically over issues such as communion. Beyond the parishes Ultimately, though, whatever their broader social function, in religious terms Westminster’s parishes and their churches were just one competing venue in a lively and diverse religious market-place. The range of parish churches available in itself offered an element of choice: Presbyterian-minded parishioners who did not care for the conservative religion on offer at St Margaret’s, or who were unable to secure there the prominent pew or space for a monument that they desired, might choose instead to worship, set up coats of arms and bury their relatives in the chapel of ease in Tothill Fields, as Sir Abraham Williams, Sir Robert Pye, Sir William Wheeler and others chose to do, and where they could hear the godly sermons of Onesephorus Roode.180 But Westminster’s inhabitants were not confined to parish churches. In an interregnum religious landscape where a wide variety of religious communities coexisted with various levels of explicit or tacit approval from the authorities, they had a remarkably wide range of religious sites and congregations to choose from. Congregationalists may have reserved the right to attend their parish churches occasionally, or even to sit on their vestries, but Westminster was host to one of the most famous separatist congregations in the country, in the shape of that which gathered within Westminster Abbey under William Strong, and subsequently John Rowe. This was a congregation that reportedly included many ‘Parliament men, and persons of quality residing in Westminster’.181 The congregation had first gathered in the 1640s, when a number of petitioners (including the St Margaret’s vestryman Thomas Gabryll) had requested to use the Henry VII chapel for a lecture on Sunday afternoons, requesting that the organization of the lecture should be allocated to ‘Mr Peters, Mr Legate and Mr Henry Walker, able godly orthodox and wel-affected ministers of gods word; or to Mr Scobell Clerke of the parliament’.182 While the Abbey hosted the independent congregation presided over by Strong and Rowe, it also seems to have sustained a more orthodox local congregation as well, with pews accommodating various Governors and Abbey officials.183 The Abbey also supported a notable team of lecturers, including famous Independents such as Nye and Rowe, but also more orthodox divines such as Manton. 180 WAC, E31, E34, E36, E39, E40; Guillery, p. 114; John Strype, A survey of the cities of London and Westminster (2 vols, 1720), II, bk. 6, p. 65. See also Chapter 3. 181 E. Calamy, An abridgement of Mr Baxters history (2nd edn, 2 vols, 1713), II, 41; I. Boseley, The independent church of Westminster Abbey, 1650–1826 (1907). 182 WAM, 9357. Rowe preached to parliament on various occasions, and also preached the funeral sermon for Bradshaw (ODNB). 183 Note the pew plan in WAM, 24851.

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Religion, politics and society The plethora of available public buildings meant that even more radical religious voices could be accommodated. Here the chapels royal, suitably reformed, were perfect for the task, and none more so than Somerset House. Queen Henrietta Maria’s chapel had been opened up and re-established as a public place of worship, fit for Protestant sermons. All internal fittings were removed in a substantial and costly renovation, with a black-and-white marble floor installed to cover where the altar had been removed, and a blue painted board to replace the ceiling painting. In 1649 St Clement Danes’ minister Masterson was licensed to use the chapel.184 As Somerset House came into the hands of the army, however, so the chapel become a favoured pulpit for soldiers. Certainly Huygens was told in January 1652 that ‘nowadays soldiers often preach here’.185 Soldiers were not the only lay preachers to use the chapel. A glazier preaching there in April 1653 reportedly prophesied to his congregation that ‘they should ere long see greater destruction fall on the parliament than ever befell the Cavaliers’.186 In the same year, a sardonic royalist reported news of an audacious virago (or feminine tub preacher) who last Sunday held forth for about two hours together within our late Queen’s mass chapel at Somerset House, in the Strand, and has done so there and elsewhere, divers Sabbath days of late, who clasps her Bible and thumps the pulpit cushion with almost as much confidence (I should have said imprudence) as honest Hugh Peters himself.187

It is not surprising, therefore, that even Quakers felt that they could bid to acquire the chapel. But it was in the same year of 1653 that the Somerset House chapel was finally bestowed on another breakaway congregation – that of the controversial Huguenot cleric Jean D’Espagne. D’Espagne’s flock had abandoned the main Huguenot congregation at Threadneedle Street in the City of London, and had established itself instead to cater for those French people who were resident in the western suburbs, having been based in the nearby chapel of Durham House under the patronage of the earl of Pembroke. D’Espagne’s services may have appeared to the authorities to be a safer use for the chapel than the sermons of the unruly lay preachers. Yet they also potentially catered for another religious minority: while D’Espagne had made his peace with Cromwell, he had nevertheless enjoyed long-running and intimate royalist connections, and the services at Somerset House were reportedly attended by ‘many of the Nobility, and the best of the Gentry’, who included undoubted royalists.188 184 S. Thurley, ‘The Stuart Kings, Oliver Cromwell and the Chapel Royal 1618–1685’, Architectural History 45 (2002), pp. 250–1. 185 Huygens, p. 60. 186 Gardiner, HCP, II, 248. 187 R. Barclay, The inner life of the religious societies of the commonwealth (1876), p. 157n. 188 Thurley, ‘Stuart Kings’; ODNB s.n. ‘Jean Despagne’; CSPD 1652–3, pp. 138, 343.

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Westminster 1640–60 Other ex-royal chapels remained available for controversial sermons to a more general public. The Whitehall chapel royal was specifically ordered in November 1649 to be enlarged for sermons to be preached there. Huygens observed the renovated Whitehall chapel royal, now available for public preaching, where ‘the people are mostly seated in a gallery, which runs around the upper part of the church. The pulpit is oblong but divided into two parts.’ The Dutch visitor was particularly struck by the fact that two or three men behind the minister ‘wrote down his sermon’, as did ‘more then 20 others’, who included ‘a handsome, rather bejewelled young lady’.189 The chapel was attended by members of the Council of State but was still accessible to the public, including the woman who ‘stripped herself of all her apparel’ and ran through the chapel crying ‘welcome the resurrection’ during a sermon on the Resurrection given in the chapel by Peter Sterry.190 There were even Quakers in Westminster. Quakers met from 1655 in New Palace Yard – at the very heart of government – in the house of one Stephen Hart, as well as briefly enjoying lodgings at Worcester House and a house adjacent to the Savoy Hospital, while they also reportedly made use on occasion of ‘a large room near the Abbey capable of holding a thousand persons … as a place in which to “plough and thresh” among the people of the world’.191 Some heretical groups did not meet as formally, but were certainly present in Westminster, as trials before the local sessions make clear.192 It was not just radical congregations which gathered outside parochial structures. Survivalist ‘Anglicanism’ also adopted the private extra-parochial meetings that had hitherto characterized sectarian groups. Again, Westminster was unusually important: it played host to the most famous national meeting place of underground ‘Anglicans’ in the shape of Exeter House chapel, nearly adjacent to the Savoy and Somerset House. The congregation that gathered here to attend services conducted by such famous preachers as Jeremy Taylor and Peter Gunning was popularly known as ‘the Grand Assembly’ of the Church of England.193 But this was not the only alternative to a parish church that was available to adherents of the old church. The royalist John Evelyn attended sermons at a variety of residences – not just Exeter House, but also 189 CSPD 1649–50, pp. 373, 414, 447; Huygens, p. 42. 190 M. Verney (ed.), Memoirs of the Verney family (4 vols, 1894), III, 47; Gardiner, HCP, II, 95. 191 W. Beck and T.F. Ball, The London Friends’ meetings (1869), pp. 240, 245. Samuel Fisher in his The scorned Quakers true and honest account (1656) describes how he interrupted parliament’s day of public humiliation in St Margaret’s on 24 July 1656 (pp. 13–15), when he stood behind the seat of the Speaker. 192 All the proceedings at the sessions of the peace holden at Westminster, on the 20 day of June 1651 (1651); William Birchley, The Christian Moderator (1651), p. 21; Jeaffreson, p. 200; LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/89, p. 4. See also A. Hughes, Gangraena and the struggle for the English revolution (Oxford, 2004), p. 158. 193 Bosher, Making of the Restoration settlement, p. 12.

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Religion, politics and society ‘at a Privat house in St Martines Lane’ (where he heard Peter Gunning preach) and several times at venues described simply as ‘at a privat place’ (where he heard Jeremy Taylor).194 Roman Catholics of course constituted another active alternative religious community in Westminster. Local recusants were still regularly prosecuted,195 and the familiar problem of native Catholics attending mass at ambassadors’ residences continued.196 Complaints were also made of masses being said in St Martin’s parish in 1650 and in December 1655.197 While the claim of Hugh Peter, who officiated in the area, that a whole college of Jesuits had sat weekly ‘of late years’ in counsel ‘in or neer Westminster’198 was fanciful, nevertheless priests were regularly found in St Martin’s, St Margaret’s and Covent Garden in these years, and despite the regular proclamations ejecting suspected papists along with ex-royalists from the metropolis, underground congregations would seem to have continued to meet.199 These different religious worlds coexisted, but were also highly aware of each other – and often in very close proximity. This is vividly illustrated by a succession of hugely publicized baptisms of Muslim converts in the area. The first was conducted by Peter Gunning in Exeter House chapel (with Warmestry giving the sermon, soon after his ejection from St Margaret’s) in November 1657. A mere six months later Jean D’Espagne conducted his own baptism of a Muslim convert in the chapel at Somerset House, a very short distance away. This was followed eight months later by yet another public baptism of a Muslim convert, which took place this time in ‘Mr Mantons church in CoventGarden’ (again only a short distance from Exeter House), where ‘a great Font’ was set up near the pulpit and an elaborate service conducted. This latter event took place on 30 January 1659 (surely no coincidence), and the new convert’s confession, which was read out during the service, included a strong affirmation of the importance of the office of elders in church government. The master of ceremonies on this occasion was John Durie, but Manton’s involvement was flagged on the title page of the pamphlet that described the event. All three baptisms were rapidly commemorated in print, and St Martin’s vestry 194 BL, Add. MSS 78364, fols 40r–41r, 45r–v, 46r–47v, 48r–49r, 51v–52r. 195 LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/148, pp. 47–9; Jeaffreson, p. 239; TNA, E377/49–64: recusant rolls 1641–56. 196 Mass at the Venetian ambassador’s in Charterhouse Yard attracted a number of Westminster residents: Jeaffreson, pp. 255–6; CSPD 1655–6, p. 289; Mercurius Politicus, no. 292 (9–16 Jan 1656), pp. 5897–900. 197 Jeaffreson, pp. 193–200; LMA, MJ & WJ/SB/B/100, p. 1. See also Jeaffreson, p. 257 for a mass held at Newport House. 198 William Prynne, The first and second part of a seasonable, legal and historicall vindication (1655), sigs B2v, F4r. 199 E.g. Jeaffreson, pp. 90, 197; Mercurius Politicus, no. 393 (3–10 Dec 1657), p. 152; no. 395 (17–24 Dec 1657), p. 192. For directions from the Council of State in October 1655 about the legal forms to be followed in dealing with recusants, see Jeaffreson, pp. 231–2.

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Westminster 1640–60 directed that the account of the Covent Garden proselyte should be publicly read in church and a collection made at the church doors.200 In essence, the different churches were competing for the allegiance of the same Westminster public, and this suggests a more general observation that, rather than islands of discrete religions, Westminster may instead have been occupied by a broader shifting mass of people of varying religious p ­ redispositions, who were actively sampling the various religious voices and congregations that were on offer. Thus, John Evelyn attended at various times the parish church of St Clement Danes and d’Espagne’s congregation at Somerset House, as well as the separatist Exeter House chapel and sermons in private houses.201 Conclusion Westminster’s religious life in these years offers us a picture of striking contradictions and stark juxtapositions. The public face of a centrally reformed godly commonwealth, encapsulated in the roll-call of nationally famous puritan preachers performing in Westminster’s many fashionable pulpits, disguises a messier reality of compromise and resistance in the parishes. Ministers such as Sangar and Manton may have been able to make significant strides in promoting godliness in their parishes, but this may well have been built upon judicious compromises with the sensibilities of their socially elevated parishioners, not least in the sensitive matter of access to the Lord’s Supper. The career of the divisive Daniel Cawdrey provided a stark warning of what could happen if the minister were less prudent. St Margaret’s gives us a remarkable example of the persistence of religious conservatism in Westminster, all the more striking as its church had been adopted by the House of Commons as the venue for its most important religious services. When MPs were not present, it is clear that crypto-royalist and religiously conservative messages were being disseminated from St Margaret’s pulpit, and it is equally apparent that this was happening with the approval of many of the parishioners and (presumably) a majority of the vestrymen. Beyond the parish churches, still more heterodox (and more overtly royalist) sermons and services were being performed in non-parochial and private venues. A colourful spectrum of different religious aspirations can thus be discovered living in what must have been an uneasy coexistence, where the boundaries of parish and congregation appear to have been ambiguous and permeable and the limitations of what was considered legitimate religious activity were in a process of constant testing, adjustment and implicit negotiation. 200 Warmestry, Baptized Turk; John Despagne, The joyful convert (1658); Thomas White, A true relation of the conversion (1658), pp. 19, 78; see also N. Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 144–9. 201 E.g. BL Add MSS 78364: ‘A stranger at St Martines’ (fol. 34v); Masterson at St Clement’s (fol. 52v); and D’Espagne at the chapel in Somerset House (fol. 40r).

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Conclusion

. T

he Restoration inevitably shapes our understanding of the period that preceded it. In the case of Westminster, the revival of the monarchy, the royal court and the dean and chapter in 1660 might seem to place parentheses around the previous twenty years as an aberration in the continuous history of the royal enclave. Yet this has also led historians to underestimate not only the impact of these years on Westminster, but also the role that Westminster itself played in the politics of this period. As we have seen, Westminster experienced the impact of the period’s unprecedented and repeated changes in the forms and style of national government in an unusually direct and immediate fashion. The oscilliations between parliamentary and protectoral regimes had direct practical implications for the locality – in terms of the uses of public buildings and spaces, the nature of the military presence and the personnel of government – in a way that they did for nowhere else in the country. With its lack of corporate governing structures and its immediate proximity to the organs of national government, the town of Westminster was not just swiftly exposed to changes of regime, but could also regularly be at the sharp end of switches in national policy. Policy changes could be instantly reflected in Westminster’s local society: for example, fluctuating government anxieties immediately resulted in security clampdowns, ejections of ex-royalists, and soldiers on the streets. The spaces and buildings of Westminster also lay at the heart of the ceremony and propaganda of the parliamentary and interregnum regimes. Former royal buildings and spaces were not left just to decay in dusty obscurity until the Restoration, but were actively appropriated and exploited by regimes searching for legitimacy. Not only was Whitehall Palace revived and reoccupied, but Westminster Abbey became in a sense the first ‘state church’, while its daughter church of St Margaret’s can be shown to have truly begun its special relationship with the House of Commons in these years. Westminster not only served as the daily ceremonial heart of government (both religious and secular), but also hosted the organs and personnel of government to a remarkable degree. The political events of the 1640s and 1650s led to the commandeering of other prominent buildings and public spaces in Westminster for reasons that were undoubtedly practical, but which also held deep symbolic resonance. While we are all familiar with the present-day notion of Westminster as ‘national space’, with its churches and buildings closely associated with state government, such exclusive state appropriation of the 259

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Westminster 1640–60 area would seem to have been very much a creation of the 1640s and 1650s. This was, however, very much a reciprocal process. Just as Westminster was shaped by the succession of executive governments in its midst, so distinctive aspects of the town could interact in important ways with the politics played out there. One fundamental issue here was the geographical vulnerability of Westminster, and of Whitehall Palace and parliament in particular, which informed much of the political and military history of the area in the 1640s and 1650s. It played a key role in the political tumults of 1641, and necessitated the persistent military presence in the years that followed. The very specific problems of deficient local government in Westminster made it difficult to secure order in the area and became of national significance in the so-called ‘December days’ in 1641. In addition, the immediate social, cultural and religious circumstances of Westminster could sometimes crucially inform the making of national policy. In this sense, this book has built upon recent work by parliamentary historians flagging the importance of studying parliament’s immediate physical environment in order to understand the influences exerted upon it.1 Thus, the need to reform the interior of Westminster Abbey for parliamentary use prompted national religious legislation, while it was concern over the security of the capital that drove changing policies towards ex-royalists and Roman Catholics. When particular regimes were anxious over security, or were losing control, this was often first apparent in the streets of Westminster. It is striking how the very close proximity of groups in Westminster that were believed to constitute a threat – Roman Catholics in 1640–42, royalists in the 1650s – undoubtedly affected the perceptions of those in power. And in 1641 it was Westminster’s own JPs and MPs who were among the most zealous in highlighting the Catholic threat and inflaming MPs’ fears at crucial moments. But while this book has sought to focus on the dialectic between national and local history, it has highlighted the complexity of these interactions. One important factor which complicated Westminster’s relationships with successive regimes was the past intimacy of the traditional ‘royal’ city with the monarchy. This need not have been problematic in itself: previous members of the royal administration, such as Sir Robert Pye, were able to move seamlessly from royal to parliamentarian service, while it was the ex-gentlemen pensioners Sir Gregory Norton and Humphrey Edwards who were among the most politically radical of the regicides in the locality. Nevertheless, the survival of royalist sentiment, and the broader climate of religious conservatism in the area, has emerged as an important theme of this study. The number of royalist plotters and activists fully resident in the area would appear to have been fairly low, but conservative and ex-royalist social networks and religious and cultural practices still clearly persisted. While Westminster’s 1 E.g. C. Kyle and J. Peacey (eds), Parliament at work (Woodbridge, 2002).

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Conclusion position on the doorstep of central government might in theory have left its inhabitants vulnerable to the immediate oversight of the authorities, nevertheless heterodox patterns of behaviour persisted. Conservative religious practice can easily be documented in Westminster during this period – whether in the form of forbidden Christmas services presided over by ‘malignant’ ministers a stone’s throw from parliament in 1647, or in the form of royalist sermons delivered by ‘Anglican’ ministers beneficed in the supposed ‘parish church of the House of Commons’ in 1657. The apparent persistence of fashionable society and more c­onservative forms of religious life should not, however, blind us to the remarkably different context in which these operated. Not the least important of these contextual features was the fact that Westminster in the 1650s experienced a more significant and sustained military presence than virtually anywhere else in the country. In contrast to much of the rest of England, it was actually after the civil war that a military presence became more firmly established in what contemporaries sometimes called ‘this garrison town’. The decade that followed the military occupation of Westminster in December 1648 saw permanent garrisons entrenched in the heart of the town, constituting a constant, looming and often intrusive military presence. Yet this was also a locality that had traditionally acted as a national venue for fashionable society in the emerging West End. The worlds of military government and of elite sociability and luxury now coincided uneasily and in close proximity. Here was a place where pleasure gardens still provided opportunities for leisure and exuberant social display, even though nearby fashionable houses were used to quarter troops, and soldiers intervened to stop aristocrats’ coaches travelling on the Sabbath. What emerges from the contextualized study of fashionable society and religious life in Westminster in these decades would seem to be a pattern of intermittent low-level harassment combined with implicit negotiation. Fashionable society’s operations were therefore marked by a degree of uncertainty and anxiety over whether blind eyes would be turned and licences granted. The sudden arrests of people attending plays or Christmas services may have reflected not so much an oppressive police state but, rather, misunderstandings and missed or confused signals about what would be permitted. The result is a mixed and sometimes ambiguous picture. Attention to overt royalists should not distract our attention from the potential importance of another significant body of Westminster’s inhabitants. These were the parochial officials and members of the local Court of Burgesses, who were never sequestered royalists, but who also played no role in the higher reaches of the committees and commissions that ran Westminster for much of this period. Many of them had signed Westminster’s overtly non-partisan peace petition of December 1642, which had sought to urge the 261

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Westminster 1640–60 king and parliament to come together, and they may also have been involved in a series of tussles in the 1650s concerning the rights of the ‘Governors’ of the Abbey to appoint local officials. These struggles partly reflected a rejection by local inhabitants of the authority and legitimacy of the new Governors, all appointed by the post-regicidal regimes, but they were also an ironic replaying of the struggle for power between the Abbey and the local tradesmen that had been a feature of Westminster’s post-Reformation history. It is a splendid paradox that in the end, after years of usurping intervention in the locality by a series of executive committees, the authorities’ control of Westminster would ultimately rest in the deployment of more traditional forms of local government – the Abbey and the high stewardship. These various tensions in local society were also reflected in Westminster’s extraordinary series of disputed parliamentary elections. In all the elections for which any evidence survives – the Short Parliament election of 1640, and the protectoral parliamentary elections of 1654 and 1656 – there were each time no fewer than six candidates for Westminster’s two seats, and the calling of the poll drew large crowds and was acrimonious and hotly contested. These events seem to imply not a simple division between supporters of the state government and local royalist opposition. Instead there was a diversity of interest groups in the area and the absence of any generally recognized authority which could prompt the community to unite behind a preferred candidate (although Cromwell had attempted informally to provide this direction). Perhaps one of the strongest impressions to emerge from the study of the town of Westminster in these years is of contradictions and incompatibilities in public political and cultural life. Westminster was the place where competing forces and latent conflicts were most vividly revealed. Here was a centre of republican government where nonetheless crypto-royalist messages rang from pulpits, and to which ex-royalists flocked. The residence of a government committed to the moral reform of the nation, Westminster was at the same time the mecca of a defiantly unreformed fashionable society, where luxurious display and ribald entertainment were revealed at their most excessive and exuberant. The extravagancies of Hyde Park were only a short distance from the garrisons of central Westminster, and the royalist denizens of fashionable society could be one step away from imprisonment or (at best) expulsion from the metropolis. The contradictions are even more stark in the religious situation in Westminster, with the coexistence cheek-by-jowl of Gabriel Sangar’s godly community in St Martin’s and of the barely concealed conservative royalism of St Margaret’s. Incongruous juxtapositions were evident in St Margaret’s church itself, where in December 1647 sober fast sermons before assembled MPs were delivered just four days after an illegal Christmas Day service at which the Nunc Dimittis had been sung in a church decorated with rosemary and bays. The implicit conflicts of the 1650s – between the godly 262

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Conclusion and the ungodly, the republican and the royalist, the army and civilians – were revealed in their most stark forms in the uneasy and contradictory social, political and cultural world of interregnum Westminster. The ‘royal city’ of Westminster emerged from the English Revolution with a decidedly mixed legacy. While some institutions were restored in 1660, and its recent history was symbolically obliterated by the Abbey’s purging of the corpses of those dignitaries – from Pym to Cromwell – who had been buried in it, many of the changes of the interregnum were not so easily reversed. The local religious community would never again be united under a single church. Ejected ministers such as Manton and Sangar still remained in the area, living symbols of Westminster’s alternative religious traditions. When it came to government and administration, ‘restoration’ was a deeply contested phenomenon, and involved the highly contentious reviewing and reinterpreting of the pre-war government of the area. There were reviews of and legal challenges to almost every existing or revived Westminster institution – the Court of Burgesses, the Palace Court, the Military Company and even the new parish of Covent Garden. The extent of the Abbey’s secular powers and social responsibilities also provoked intense dispute once more.2 The locality had not heard the last of talk of an incorporation of Westminster – another detailed plan would emerge after the burning down of Whitehall Palace in 1691, when the incorporation of the town was apparently proposed as a means of funding the rebuilding of the palace.3 The English Revolution was not a strange, discrete cataclysm from which Restoration Westminster could emerge unscathed as the royal city of old – even if this term had never captured the full range and complexity of the locality and its community. Some features of the town were destroyed and never returned; some social and topographical trends began in these years that would subsequently develop an unstoppable momentum. The corpses of Pym and Cromwell may have been removed from the Abbey, but the legacies of the years of revolution were not so easily eliminated.

2 I plan to discuss these issues in more detail elsewhere. 3 John Strype, A survey of the cities of London and Westminster (2 vols, 1720), VI, bk i, p. 6.

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Bibliography: selected manuscript sources

. Bodleian Library, Oxford

Bankes MSS Cherry MSS Clarendon MSS Nalson MSS Rawlinson MSS British Library

additional mss 15671 Minutes of orders of Commons relating to the Committee for Plundered Ministers 17677 Correspondence related to England ... from the Archives at the Hague 28003 Oxinden correspondence 29974 Pitt correspondence 31116 Diary of Lawrence Whitaker 32683 Sidney correspondence 34014 Returns by the Major Generals, 1655 34016 Names of persons living in Westminster ... 1655 38856 Hodgkins MSS 70005 Portland MSS 78364 Evelyn papers harleian mss 832 Collection of papers relating to the creation of St Paul Covent Garden 1831 Register book made by the burgesses and assistants of Westminster, c. 1660 Cambridge University Library

MS Gg/1/9 List of members of Westminster Court of Burgesses, high bailiffs, stewards, high constables, and other minor officials, 1639–60 Christ Church, Oxford

MS 451 Notes on sermons given at St Margaret Westminster Doctor Williams’s Library

Baxter Letters 264

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Select bibliography Durham University Library

John Cosin Letter Book House of Lords Record Office

Main Papers Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Ellesmere MSS Lambeth Palace Library

COMM XIIa/12 Interregnum valuations of clerical stipends London Metropolitan Archives

Journals of the Court of Common Council Repertories of the Court of Aldermen middlesex sessions MJ/SBR Sessions of the peace registers, 1608–1667 MJ/SR Middlesex sessions of the peace rolls MJ & WJ/SB/B Westminster sessions books WJ/SR Westminster sessions of the peace rolls, 1620–1844 Queen’s College, Oxford

MS 77 Register of the Westminster Military Company, 1622–39 Sheffield City Archives

Strafford Papers Elmhirst Pye Papers 1287 (c) Sheffield University Library

Hartlib Papers The National Archives, London

C5 C193 E179

Chancery Proceedings Libri Pacis Exchequer, King’s Remembrancer, Lay Subsidies (assessments, certificates, etc.) E317 Parliamentary Surveys PC2/41–52 Privy Council Registers (June 1631–September 1640) PCC/Prob 11 Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Will Registers SP16 State Papers Domestic, Charles I SP20 Sequestration Committee, books and papers 265

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Select bibliography SP25 SP28 SP29 SP46

Council of State, books and accounts Commonwealth Exchequer papers Secretaries of State: State Papers Domestic, Charles II State Papers Domestic, Supplementary Westminster Abbey Muniments

3922 5271 6568 9352 9357 9359, 9377 9363, 9379, 9407 9366 9381 9401 9633 9678 9888

Seal of the Governors of the School and Almshouses of Westminster Petition for a place in the almhouses, n.d. Order of parliament dated 12 October 1652 for granting the royalties of Westminster Petition to the Governors not to farm out the royalties of Westminster, n.d. Petition requesting use of Henry VII chapel for a Sunday afternoon lecture, n.d. Petitions concerning failure to provide communion in Abbey church, (later 1640s) Petitions concerning Knightsbridge chapel, 1646 and n.d. Testimony of Elizabeth Whitney concerning John Binns, November 1648 Petition for maintenance for a minister for Tothill Fields chapel, n.d. Petition of Samuel Gibson, minister of St Margaret Westminster, n.d. Letter from the earl of Pembroke to Committee for the College of Westminster, 1647 Petition of John Arnold touching appointment of bailiff of sanctuary, n.d. Petition of burgesses and assistants of Westminster to Governors of School and Almshouses on behalf of Thomas Latham, n.d.

24850, 24852, 24855, 42268, 42506–7

Payments for new pews, construction of new gallery, 1645–46 24851 Seating plan of pews in the Abbey, temp. Commonwealth 24995–6, 25005, 42827  Petitions touching pews, 1649, 1650 25109 Memorandum of the appointment of a royal commission to hold a visitation of Westminster college 33422 Deputy receiver’s accounts, 1654–56 266

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Select bibliography 42733, 42796, 42799– 800, 42802A, 42803–13 Orders for the security of Westminster Abbey, c. 1650 42750–64 Work on the dean’s house, 1650s 42827 Petition touching lack of seats for members of the Court of Burgesses and their wives, 1649 42908A, 42991–3, 43506, 43857 Orders signed by John Bradshaw as Governor of the School and Almshouses Westminster Archives Centre

st clement danes B11 Churchwardens’ accounts 1633–54 B12 Churchwardens’ accounts 1654–70 B24/A48 Accounts, overseers for the poor 1627–50 B25/A48 Accounts, overseers for the poor 1650–63 st margaret westminster E23–40 Churchwardens’ accounts 1640–60 E154–174 Accounts, overseers for the poor 1640–1661 E2413 Vestry minutes 1591/2–1661/2 st martin in the fields F3–16 Churchwardens’ accounts 1624–60 F361–387 Accounts, overseers for the poor 1635–60 F2002 Vestry minutes 1624–52 F2003 Vestry minutes 1652–65 st mary le strand Vol. 22 Churchwardens’ accounts 1586–1650 G2 Accounts, overseers of the poor and churchwardens 1625–55 st paul covent garden H433–441 Accounts, overseers for the poor 1647–1660 426/134–136 Churchwardens’ accounts 1656–1662

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Index

. Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note Abjuration, Oath of 199, 205 Adler, John 153 Afflack, James 152 ambassadors Danish 212 Dutch 118, 206 Florentine 28n.80 Portuguese 27–8, 129, 210, 215 Spanish 27, 72, 203 Venetian 27, 65, 71, 77, 90, 92, 98 Arnold, John 161 Arnold, Michael 21 Arundel, Alethia Howard, countess of 127 Arundel, Thomas Howard, 14th earl of 29 Ashton, Sir William 157–8, 253 Audley, Hugh 144 Bagley, Thomas 139 Baillie, Robert 116 Barkstead, Major-General John 89, 90, 91, 166, 238 regiment of 66, 68, 72, 83, 127 Barkstead, Michael 53n.3, 54, 139 Barnes, Harman 150 Barnes, William 157 Barniby, Bryan 46n.162, 141 Barrington, Sir Thomas 123 Basing House 61, 134 Bastwick, John 14, 120 Battersby, Mr 138, 140 Baxter, Richard 241–2 Bedford, Francis Russell, 4th earl of 17, 98n.18, 157 Bedford, William Russell, 5th earl of 58, 206, 217 Bell, William 17, 18, 21, 26, 30, 54, 155, 157, 163 Bennet, John 33 Berkshire, earl of 204–5 Bernard, Nicholas 230 Berners, Josias 76n.126, 159, 165 Binns, John 231 Biscoe, John 46n.162, 158 Blackwell, Jane 81–2 Blake, Admiral Robert 71, 100–1, 103, 109

Blenerhassett, George 139, 157, 169 Bond, John 21, 222, 233, 245 Booth, Sir George 79, 151 Bowers, Edward 168n.175, 183n.230 Bradshaw, John 79, 100, 108–9, 164 Bradshaw, Peter 164 Bradshawe, Clement 180 Bray, William 15, 30, 115, 222 Bredall, Walter 151 Brewer, William 180, 184n.231 Bridgeman, Orlando 44 Bridock, Mr 249 Brigham, John 142, 157 Brinsley, John 31 Bromwell, Francis 231–2, 253 Brooke, Sir Basil 29n.84 Brouncker, Lady Winifred 145 Brouncker, Sir William 145 Brown, John 159 Browne, Adam 97 Browne, Richard 70 Brownists 33 Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st duke of 18, 23, 126 Building Act (1657) 195, 197 Burton, Henry 14, 30, 32, 120 Busby, Richard 147, 228 Butler, Lady 5n.27 Capel, Arthur, 1st baron 120 Carey, Edward 180–2 Carlisle, Lucy Hay, countess of 199, 201 Carre, Mr 138, 140–1 Carter, Edward 156, 159 Caryl, Joseph 106, 231, 244, 245 Case, Thomas 31, 110, 235, 236 Castle, John 11, 19–20, 137 Catherens, William 37, 140 Catholic priests 27–8, 257 Catholics 24–30, 46, 58, 66, 75, 160, 199–200, 257 Caux, Isaac de 139 Cawdrey, Daniel 222, 226–7, 237, 242–3, 258 Cecil, Robert 48

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Index Chapman, James 139, 141, 142, 169, 176 Charles I, King 13, 14, 21, 39, 43–4, 54, 70, 93, 119 Charles II, King 103, 120, 153 Charleton, Dr Walter 201 Chase, John 151 Chelsea 82, 200–1, 206, 230 Cheyne, Lady Jane 200 Chichley, John 137 Christmas 228, 229–32, 252–3 Clare, Elizabeth Holles, countess of 190–1 Clare, John Holles, 1st earl of 194 Clare, John Holles, 2nd earl of 148, 194–5, 224 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st earl of 134 Clein, Francis 201 Clendon, John 165 Clerke, John 151 Clifton, Sir Gervase 206 Clinkard, Gabriel 174 Clotworthy, Sir John 155–6, 163 coaches 187, 207–8, 212, 217, 238, 240 coachmen 49, 91, 150, 173, 208, 213, 238, 240 Coleman, Thomas 110–11 Committee of Both Kingdoms 57, 59, 122, 161 Committee for Corporations 173, 174, 175, 176 Committee for Plundered Ministers 170, 230, 232 Committee of Safety 122 Commons, House of 25, 43–4, 64, 69, 96, 99, 111–12, 144, 187–8, 195, 247 orders of 27, 31, 42, 54, 58, 60, 66, 98, 104, 106, 124, 144, 147, 154–5, 176, 178, 220, 252 Speaker of 72, 98, 100n.28, 111, 118, 126, 195n.39 see also Lenthall, William Constable, Sir William 100 Constable, Thomas 53n.3 Corbet, John 179 Cork, countess of 206, 215 Council of State 74, 82n.151, 92, 93, 99, 101, 108, 118, 122–4, 125, 131, 164, 173, 176, 179, 206, 210, 214, 256 Council of War 86 court (protectoral) 71, 117, 213, 130, 192, 196, 203, 218 court (royal) 5, 6, 13, 17, 18, 28, 29, 32, 39, 45, 137, 142, 143, 158, 187 Covenant see Solemn League and Covenant Coventry, Thomas Coventry, 1st baron 14 Critz, Thomas de 139 Crompton, George 57, 158n.115, 165 Cromwell, Elizabeth (daughter) 103

Cromwell, Elizabeth (mother) 103 Cromwell, Frances 203 Cromwell, Oliver 71, 72–3, 89–91, 101–2, 103, 109, 119, 123, 153, 181, 202–3, 208, 212, 214, 215, 247, 251 life guard of 72, 77, 78, 84, 85, 118 plots to assassinate 76–8 Cromwell, Richard 78, 90, 102 Cumberland, Francis Clifford, 4th earl of 198 Cundall, Arthur 46n.162, 169 Danvers, Sir John 108n.70, 200 Darcy, Thomas 38 Darling, Thomas 38, 139, 165, 169, 182, 183n.230 Davies, Lady Eleanor 56, 96n.6 Deane, Colonel William 76 Deane, General Richard 83, 100, 103, 109 Denton, Dr William 201 Derby, countess of 206 Derby House Committee 66, 67, 69, 122, 128 Desborough, General John 89n.204 D’Espagne, Jean 255, 257, 258 Devonshire, dowager countess of 201, 203, 217 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds 47, 187 Directory of Public Worship 221, 229, 241, 250 Dixon, Robert 139 Dorislaus, Isaac 99–100, 102–3, 109 Dorset, Edward Sackville, 4th earl of 20, 37 Dugdale, William 96 Dukeson, Richard 49, 50, 137, 139, 140, 222 Du Moulin, Peter 207 Dunbar, battle of 81, 103, 115, 119 Duncon, Mr 38 Duppa, Brian, bishop of Salisbury 153, 201 Easter 227, 228, 229, 252–3 Eaton, Mr 33 Edgehill, battle of 54, 62, 102, 110, 135 Edmunds, Colonel Francis 49 Edwards, Humphrey 108n.69, 156, 158–9, 163, 166, 206, 260 Edwards, Thomas 120 Ellison, Lawrence 29 Elliston, Peter 182, 216 Elsing, Henry 113 Engagement oath 205 Erle, Sir Walter 156, 163 Essex, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of 36–7, 43, 128 effigy 102–3, 109n.74 funeral 71, 99

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Index Evelyn, John (diarist) 96, 117, 146, 192, 195, 211, 212–13, 249, 256–7 Evelyn, Sir John 163 Exchequer 93, 110, 155, 162, 165, 166, 184, 190 Fairfax, Sir Thomas 65, 66, 69, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 129 troops of 59, 65, 66, 69, 70, 82–3, 127, 130 Fanshawe, Lady Ann 204 Fauconberge, Thomas 155, 162, 166, 170, 180 Fawkes, Guy 24, 36 Fendall, Josias 157–8 Fennell, John 46n.162, 139, 141, 142 Fielder, Colonel 108 Fiennes, Nathaniel 163 Filmer, Sir Robert 109 Fleetwood, General Charles 78, 127 Fleming, Sir William 43 Flood, John 59 fonts 221, 251, 257 Francklyn, Sir John 156 Frend, Mr 38, 49 Fuller, Thomas 1, 46, 116, 137–8, 139, 140, 143, 146, 153, 222, 249 Gabryll, Thomas 253, 254 Garrett, Robert 246 Gawen, William 179 Gerrard, Sir Gilbert 19, 20, 27, 47, 155–6, 163 Gibson, Samuel 231, 245–6 Glynne, John 16, 17, 18, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28–9, 30, 37, 45, 54, 115, 144, 155–6, 157, 161n.136, 162–3, 165, 168, 174n.197 Gouge, William 111, 114 Goffe, Major-General William 76n.126, 88n.195 regiment of 78 Goodman, Godfrey, bishop of Gloucester 251 Goodman, John 28 Goring, George Lord 69 Gourdon, John 108n.68, 249 Greene, George 165 Greene, John 188, 211 Greene, Richard 145 Greenwich 69, 100 Grimston, Harbottle 35 Grosvenor, Colonel Edward 68, 76n.126, 89–91, 124, 170, 181, 236, 253 Gunning, Peter 256, 257 Gunpowder Plot 26, 44, 237 Gunsmiths 79, 150, 151, 189

Haberfield, William 159, 166 Hall, Francis 49, 222 Hamilton, James, 3rd marquis of 119, 120 Hampden, Elizabeth 17 Hampden, John 24, 35, 49, 112 Hampton Court 117, 123 Harley, Sir Robert 30, 35, 97, 117, 137n.14, 155–6, 163, 220, 233, 237 Committee 105–6, 117, 222 Harrington, Sir James 62, 108 Harris, John 231 Harrison, Major-General Thomas 216 Hasilton, Mr 154 Hatton, Sir Christopher 195 Hawkins, William 17, 22, 141, 169 Haycock, George 153 Heaward, William 139, 142 Henderson, Alexander 111 Henrietta Maria, Queen 7 chapel of 26, 255 Herbert, Edward 23 Herbert, Sir Henry 201 Herle, Charles 104, 105, 114, 223 Hertford, Frances, Lady 205 Hertford, William Seymour, 1st marquis of 205 Hesilrige, Sir Arthur 114, 202–3 Hewett, John 119 Hewson, Colonel 83 Heywood, Peter 16n.14, 19, 24–5, 26, 35, 36 Hill, Emery 113n.89, 169, 182, 183n.230, 184n.231 Hill, Thomas 104n.46, n.48, 105, 106, 223, 226, 233 Hilton, John 228–9, 230–1, 248–9 Hippisley, Sir John 115, 170 Hodnow, Mr 201 Holborne, Robert 17, 18, 21 Holland, Henry Rich, 1st earl of 42, 56, 119, 120, 122, 151 Holland House 215 Hollar, Wenceslas 125 Holles, Denzil 190 Hollingworth, Mr 32 Honnor, John 159, 165 Hooker, John 38–9, 156, 166, 180, 240 Howard of Escrick, Edward Howard, 1st Lord 126, 191n.22, 226 Howell, James 5, 9, 10, 186, 194–5 Howsley, Mark 160 Hungerford, Lady 199, 217 Hungerford, Sir Edward 170 Hutchinson, Lucy 216 Huygens, Lodewijck 72, 206–7, 209, 211, 212, 215, 216–17, 239–40, 252, 255, 256

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Index Inchiquin, Lady 206 Independents 106, 111, 158, 233, 244–5, 247, 249, 252, 253, 254 Ingoldsby, Colonel Richard 77, 83 Ingram, Sir Arthur 25, 26 Inns of Court 41, 43, 188 Irby, Sir Anthony 163 Ireton, Henry 100, 102, 109 Isham, Sir Justinian 201, 204, 205 James, John 24–5, 26, 29, 30, 36 James I, King 6 Jenkin, Lieutenant 43 Jones, Inigo 149 Jones, William 179 Jonson, Ben 6 Kensington 215 Kent 67, 68 Kequick, Thomas 61 King’s Works 139 Kirke, Thomas 46n.162, 141 Knightsbridge 8, 69, 250 Knyvett, Sir Thomas 26 Lambert, Major-General John 79, 88n.195, 202 Lambeth 19 Lambeth Palace 19–20 Landon, Humphrey 19n.28, 45n.159, 46n.161 Lane, Richard 206 Latham, Thomas 91, 161n.136, 174, 178–82 Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury 15, 19–20, 21, 23, 249 Lawes, Henry 139 Lawrence, Lady 246 Le Huc, Peter 139 Leicester, Robert Dudley, 1st earl of 58, 81, 193 Leigh, Richard 226 Lenthall, William 32n.98, 115, 126 Le Squire, Scipio 139, 165, 231–2, 253 Lincoln, Theophilus Clinton, 4th earl of 56 ‘lines of communication’ 55, 63, 70, 71, 172–3 Lisle, Laurance 137 Lisle, John, Lord Commissioner 108 Lithgow, William 56, 134 London Court of Aldermen 101, 172–3, 175, 176 Court of Common Council 82, 101, 172, 174–5 Lord Mayor 86, 101, 172–3, 176, 230 Militia Committee 61–2, 64, 172 Provincial Assembly 225–6, 235–6

Recorder 175, 176 Remembrancer 175, 176 London, parishes St Andrew Holborn 224 St Giles in the Fields 123, 235, 236 St Martin Ludgate 217 St Stephen Coleman Street 41 London, places Arched Row 193, 194 Bloomsbury 55n.10, 195 Cheapside Cross 32 Christ Church/St Sepulchre Newgate 107n.63, 111 Ely House 127–8 Grocers’ Hall 44 Guildhall 37, 43 Hatton Garden 195 Holborn 76, 86, 87 Lincoln’s Inn 194 Lincoln’s Inn chapel 111 Lincoln’s Inn Fields 27, 193–4, 206 Moorfields 67 Old Exchange 121 Paul’s Cross 107 Portugal Row 194 St Giles’s Fields (Middx.) 28 St Paul’s cathedral 96, 107, 120 Southampton House 60 Warwick House 128 Long, George 38, 156 Lords, House of 15, 22, 32, 104, 115, 116, 138, 143n.41 orders 22, 42, 211 Lowther, Richard 38 Lunsford, Thomas 39, 40 Lupo, Ambrose 139 Mackworth, Humphrey 100, 103 Major-generals 76, 88–9, 150, 152, 166, 205, 216 register book of 199 Manchester, Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of 81, 126 Manchester, Henry Montagu, 1st earl of 31 Manton, Thomas 81, 106, 223, 235, 236, 237, 241–2, 244, 254, 257, 258, 263 Marshall, Stephen 98, 104, 105, 110, 112, 223, 233 Martin, Edward 46n.162, 76n.126, 158, 170n.180, 171 Marvell, Andrew 100 Masham, Sir William 108n.68, 156, 163 Masterson, George 235, 249, 255 Matthew, Sir Tobie 25 Mawer, Robert 231 May, Thomas 100

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Index Maynard, John 16n.14 Meriton, John 235, 236 Middlesex clerk of the peace 175 justices of the peace 27, 38–9, 43, 86, 89, 194, 238 petitions 19, 47 sessions of the peace 10, 87, 175 sheriffs 42, 43, 47, 144 trained bands 19, 48, 59 Middleton, Sir Thomas 190 Mildmay, Sir Henry 74 Miller, Michael 48 Monck, General George 79–80 Moore, John 25 Mordaunt, John 119 Montagu, Lord 31 Musgrave, Lord 201 Muslim converts 257–8 Naseby, battle of 81, 208 Naylor, James 106, 121 Newport, Lady Anne 58, 215 Newport, Mountjoy Blount, 1st earl of 126 Newton, William 194 Nicholas, Sir Edward 143, 152 Northampton, James Compton 3rd earl of 57 Northumberland, Algernon Percy, 10th earl of 128, 190, 226 Norton, Sir Gregory 158–9, 160, 163, 166, 206, 260 Nye, Philip 104, 105, 106, 111, 223, 244, 245, 247, 254 O’Brien, Teighe 29 Okeley, John 161 Okey, Colonel John 89 Oldisworth, Michael 22n.48, 108n.69, 115, 163 Ordway, Edward 152 Osbaldeston, Lambert 14, 109, 147, 228 Oxford 89, 93, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149 Oxinden, James 25 Oxinden, Sir Henry 152 Paget, William Paget, 6th baron 205 Palmer, Herbert 104n.46, 114, 222, 237 Palmer, James 224 Palmer, Sir Roger 159 Parliament 1st protectorate (1654) 103 acts & ordinances 57, 64, 65, 75, 149, 159, 221, 238, 240 Barebone’s (1653) 95n.3, 124, 165



guard 35, 36, 43, 54–5, 66, 67, 68–9, 74–5, 78–9, 134 orders 49, 63, 68 the Rump (1648–53) 74–5, 108, 115, 124, 163–4, 168 the restored Rump (1659) 78, 125, 131–2 Short (1640) 18–19 Parsons, Lieutenant-Colonel 113 Pearce, Edward 247 Pembroke and Montgomery, Philip Herbert, 4th earl of 18, 22–3, 37n.118, 108, 122, 156, 161, 163, 173, 174, 198, 211, 226, 255 Pennington, Isaac 35, 108, 163 perambulation 221, 250–1, 253 Peter, Hugh 120, 254, 255, 257 Peterborough, countess of 198, 199 petitions 26, 32, 34, 35, 45–8, 50, 61, 105, 141, 142, 145, 168, 172, 174–6, 178–80, 208, 210 peace petition to King (Westminster, Dec 1641) 136–7 peace petition to Lords (Westminster, Dec 1641) 135–42 peace petitioners 137–42, 149, 157, 160, 165, 169, 171, 177, 183, 185, 231, 232 pro-parliament petition (Westminster, 11 Jan 1642) 45–7 Phillips, Edward 213 Pickering, Sir Gilbert 125, 181, 193, 203 Piedmont 237 Pinchbeck, Abraham 241–2 plague 34–5, 154–5, 189 playhouses 88, 160 pleasure gardens 187, 191, 200, 210–14, 218 Plowman. Matthew 146 Pocklington, John 30 Poolehouse, Walter 160 Popham, General Porter, Endymion 19, 45, 48, 156 Porter, George 17 Prentice, Henry 238 Preston, battle of 81 Pride, Colonel Thomas 69–70, 74, 83, 211 Pride’s Purge 69–70, 163, 164 Prince, Colonel James 62, 232 Prinne, George 46n.162 Prisoners 81–2, 211 Privy Council 10, 19, 122, 133 proclamations, protectoral 75, 151, 206 proclamations, royal 26, 29, 49, 93, 135, 144 Prynne, William 14, 17, 120 Pye, Sir Robert 17, 21, 23, 26, 55, 112, 113–14, 155–6, 157, 162, 163, 166–7, 170, 254, 260

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Index Pym, John 18, 23, 25, 37, 49, 96, 97–8, 102 Quakers 255, 256 Queen Mother, Marie de Medicis 19, 21, 42 Raylton, William 139 Rivers, Lady 58 Roberts, Sir William 165 Roode, Onesephorus 235, 236, 254 Rookwood, Robert 48 Rowe, John 106, 244, 254 royalists conspiracies Brooke 145, 148 Carleton-Deane 76 Gerard 76–7, 92, 119 Sindercomb 77, 111, 119 Waller 144, 145–6, 148–9 expulsion of 58, 75, 149, 151, 160, 191, 206 in Westminster 49, 58, 63, 66, 67–8, 140, 143–54, 185, 204–7, 208, 215, 246–7, 249 Rugg, Thomas 78–9, 182, 191–2 Ryder, Richard 193 sabbath regulations 88, 216–17, 237–40 Sadler, Anthony 247 St James’s fair 211 Salaway, Humphrey 108n.68, 163 Salisbury, William Cecil, 2nd earl of 23n.49, 48, 108, 122, 163, 193, 226 Sangar, Gabriel 223, 234–7, 243, 258, 263 Saye and Sele, William Fiennes, 1st viscount 143 Scawen, Robert 163 Scobell, Henry 113, 244–5, 249, 253, 254 Scots Commissioners 111–12, 116 Scott, Peter 48 Scudamore, Sir John 205 Seaman, Lazarus 231 Seamen 85 Sedgwick, Obadiah 222, 225, 244 sequestrations 145, 148–9, 190–1, 202, 204 see also Westminster officials, Sequestrations Committee Shepheard, Mr 38 Sherwyn, Richard 76n.126, 166–7 ship money 16–17, 18, 20 Shirley, James 51–3, 215 Shirley, Sir Thomas 200 shopping 208–10 Sidney, Algernon 108 Simon, Thomas 107 Skippon, Major-General Philip 47, 68, 69, 74, 89n.202

Slater, Samuel 101 Slingsby, Sir Henry 119 Smyth, Samuel 168n.175, 174 soldiers as local law-enforcers 88–9 ceremonial presence 71–3 punishment 84–7 quartering 58, 66, 69, 74, 77, 79, 82–4, 127, 129, 191 unruly behaviour 58–60, 82, 84–8 Solemn League and Covenant 111–12, 146, 147–8, 221 Somerset, Edward Seymour, duke of 126 Southampton, Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of 55n.10, 195–6 Southwark 173 Spiller, Sir Henry 20 Squibb, Arthur (elder) 170 Squibb, Arthur (younger) 165–6 Stafford, Lord 29 Stafford, Sir Thomas 206 stage-plays 215–16 Stamford, earl of 190 Stanhope, Lady Dorothy 198 Staunton, Edmund 104n.46, 105 Sterry, Peter 111, 256 Stone, Nicholas 139 Strafford, Sir Thomas Wentworth, earl of 20, 23, 35, 37 Strickland, Walter 118, 206 Strode, William 49, 98, 102, 110 Strong, William 104n.46, 244, 245, 249, 254 Strype, John 119–20, 194 Style, Thomas 46n.162, 139, 141, 142, 169, 253 Suburbs, New Incorporation of the 15, 173 Suffolk, Lady 201 Suffolk, Thomas Howard, 1st earl of 226 Swetnam, Lawrence 58, 156, 159, 229n.52 taxation 57, 62–3, 144, 152, 159–61, 188–9 Taylor, Jeremy 256, 257 Taylor, Silvanus 164, 232 Taylor, Thomas 49 Thorpe, John 139 Thurloe, John 78, 91 Tomkins, Thomas 26 Trenchard, Sir John 115, 155, 157, 163 Trevor, Sir John 108, 163, 229n.52 Turnham Green, battle of 54, 55 Twisse, William 98–9, 104, 109, 112 Vane, Sir Henry (elder) 190, 198 Vane, Sir Henry (younger) 108, 190n.13 Vaughan, Oliver 59

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Index Verney, Betty 212 Verney, Lady Mary 204, 243 Verney, Sir Ralph 192, 204 Verney, Tom 209 Vicars, John 106 Villiers, Sir Edward 18 Vines, Richard 116, 222, 225 ‘Vow and Covenant’ 145–6 Vyner, John 153–4, 235, 246–8, 251 Waller, Edmund 148, 149 Waller, Sir Hardress 83–4 Waller, Sir William 134 Wallop, Robert 182 Wardour, Sir Edward 16n.13, 17, 21, 137, 140, 143, 156 Warmestry, Thomas 246–8 Warwick, Robert Rich, 2nd earl of 58, 128, 203, 204 Waters, Edmund 169 Webb, John 139, 149 Weld, Humphrey 202 Westminster Auxiliary companies 59, 60–1, 62, 64 classis of (11th classis) 142, 159, 224n.30, 225, 232, 235–6, 253 Court of the Palace of 167, 263 Feast 183 ‘gentlemen of’ 61, 105 gentry residence in 187–8, 191, 192, 198–201, 203, 204–7 incorporation of, attempted 10, 15, 23, 173–7, 263 law courts 144, 188, 192 members of parliament 10, 90, 155, 163, 166, 181 MPs living in 28, 35, 155–6, 163, 189–90 Military Company 8, 20, 42, 51–3, 64, 81, 139, 215–16, 263 new building 15, 187, 192–8 parliamentary elections 171 1628 13, 18 1654 90, 165, 166, 180 1656 90, 181 1659 90–1, 166 Long Parliament 21 Short Parliament 17–18 popular tumults in 19, 20, 33, 35–43 Royalty of 178 sessions of the peace 10, 152, 160, 175, 180. 199, 233, 256 trained bands 20, 36–44, 46–8, 54–5, 59, 60–2, 64, 81, 134, 139 Westminster Abbey 3, 6, 8, 14, 19, 33, 40–1, 49, 71, 74, 77, 96–109, 112, 115, 147,

168, 177–81, 224, 228, 263 Committee for Westminster College 105n.52, 107, 113–14, 155–6, 161, 163, 173, 180, 240, 245 communion 240 Dean 13–14, 18, 22, 178–9, 182 see also Williams, John, dean of Westminster and archbishop of York funerals 71, 97–102 Governors of the School and Almshouses 107–8, 163–4, 168, 178–81, 249, 254, 262 Henry VII chapel 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 121, 254 Independent congregation in 244, 254 lecturers 104–6, 223, 244, 245, 247, 249, 254 Receiver 161, 162, 166 sermons in 77, 103, 104–6, 143, 247, 249 singing men 144, 147, 149, 228 Westminster officials appraisers 161, 180 assessment commissioners 163, 164–5, 181 bailiff 161, 174, 176, 179, 181–2 Court of Burgesses 8, 9–10, 19, 35, 46, 139, 158, 165, 167–71, 174, 176–7, 179–80, 181, 182, 183, 184, 261–2, 263 clerk of 178–80 high constable 37, 160n.128, 182 high steward 10, 18, 174, 179, 181–3, 185 justices of the peace 19, 27, 29–30, 34–5, 37, 38, 42, 43, 59, 76, 89, 154, 156, 164, 165, 166, 173, 175, 238, 240 Keeper of Tothill Fields 180 Militia Committee 58, 61, 68, 74, 129, 159–60, 163, 164, 172, 174, 230 Provost marshal 58, 74 Sequestrations Committee 126, 129, 142, 145, 148, 157–9, 161, 190 steward 161n.136, 174, 176, 178–82 under-sheriff 38, 49, 121 Westminster, parishes St Clement Danes 6–7, 10, 13, 20, 29, 62, 82, 137, 139, 141, 146n.55, 148, 150, 163, 184n.232, 195, 224, 226, 232, 245, 252 bell-ringing 237 church 33, 116, 217, 220–1 churchwardens 232 accounts 22, 236, 249 lecture exercise 235, 236, 249 minister, see Dukeson, Richard; Masterson, George; Vines, Richard



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Index

religious conservatism in 232, 249, 251, 252–3 sermons 153 vestry 169, 170, 232, 238, 253 St Margaret Westminster 8, 10, 13, 16, 32, 33, 70, 81, 82, 84, 150, 226, 257 bell-ringing 71, 237 church 60, 112, 113, 164, 183, 220, 221, 252 Christmas Day service at (1647) 228–31, 248, 262 swearing of the Covenant in 111–12, 146 use by House of Commons 26, 30, 110–15 churchwardens 101, 139, 230–1, 248 accounts 65, 82 churchyard 109, 251 communion 26, 30, 241, 243–4 lectureships 223, 245, 246, 248 minister, see Gibson, Samuel; Vyner, John; Wimberley, Gilbert parish clerk 228, 230, 248 perambulation 250–1 religious conservatism in 228–31, 245–51, 253 sermons 30–1, 32, 110–11, 115, 153–4, 223, 230, 231, 246–8 vestry 17, 54, 113, 138, 139, 142, 154, 157, 166, 169, 170, 184n.232, 228–9, 240, 244–5, 248–50, 253 St Martin in the Fields 7, 8, 10, 13, 70, 150–1, 198, 226, 237, 257 bell-ringing 22, 65, 237, 250–1 church 8, 88, 221, 257–8 Christmas Day service at (1647)   231–2, 253 parliamentary use of 115–16 pews 198, 204–5 churchwardens 231–2, 242, 250 accounts 22 communion 227, 241, 242–3 lectureships 15, 223, 226–7, 234–5, 236, 238 minister, see Bray, William; Cawdrey, Daniel; Sangar, Gabriel; Wincopp, John parish clerk 32, 161 perambulation 250–1 religious conservatism in 227–8, 231–2, 250–1, 253 trained bands 44, 47–8, 54–5 vestry 31, 70, 88, 90, 115n.100, 138, 154, 158, 169, 170, 198, 204–5, 226–7, 232, 242–3, 253, 257–8 St Mary le Strand 7, 28, 137, 139,

146n.55, 163, 184n.232, 217, 221, 226, 232, 233 church see Westminster, places, Savoy chapel churchwardens 220, 227 accounts 22, 31, 220 religious conservatism in 233 vestry 146, 169, 182n.225, 233 St Paul Covent Garden 15, 150, 152n.92, 168, 224, 235, 245, 257, 263 church 48–9, 115, 116 communion 240, 241–2, 245 minister, see Hall, Francis; Manton, Thomas; Sedgwick, Obadiah religious conservatism in 245 vestry 168n.175 Westminster, places Arundel House 7.83, 122, 125, 126, 127 Axe Yard 200 Bedford House 7 Berkshire House 126, 129 Butchers Row 6 Canon Row 125 Charing Cross 6, 8, 67, 72, 77, 85, 87, 201, 204, 221 Clare Market 6, 194–5 Clement’s Inn Field 194 Cockpit, the 216 Court of Requests 37, 40, 168 Court of Star Chamber 14, 22, 34, 129n.170, 188 Court of Wards 118 Covent Garden 7, 21, 28, 29, 45, 49, 59–60, 66, 76, 79, 83–6, 115, 146, 151, 187, 189, 192, 200, 201–2, 216 Piazza 7, 143, 189, 190, 195, 201 Dean’s Yard 109, 163 Derby House 97, 122, 123, 125, 128 Drury House 125, 128 Drury Lane 200, 216 Duchy House 126, 128–9 Durham House 7, 23, 83, 127, 255 Essex House 71, 83, 116, 127, 128, 205 Exeter House 252, 256, 257 Goring House 83, 126, 127, 192 Hyde Park 8, 55, 57, 61, 65, 70, 71–2, 77, 84, 187, 198, 200, 209, 210, 212–14, 215, 218 court of guard 56–7, 60, 84 King Street 6, 8, 9, 11, 41, 76, 77 Leicester House 8, 81, 192 Mews 8, 66, 67, 68, 73, 76, 77, 80, 81, 117, 124, 196 Military Yard 8, 81 Murray House 205 New Exchange 7–8, 187, 188, 202, 208,

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Index 209–10, 213, 218 New Palace Yard 14, 36–7, 49, 70, 85–6, 120–1, 182, 256 Newport House 8, 81, 126, 192 Northampton House 127 Old Palace Yard 36–7, 205 Pall Mall 69 Parliament House 117 Petty France 205 Piccadilly House 83, 127 Pickering House 125, 193 Queen Street 66, 123, 206 St James’s Fields 64, 69, 80, 196 St James’s Palace 8, 19, 27, 42, 74, 80, 82, 83, 131, 147, 196, 211 garrison 66, 72, 73, 74, 77, 80, 84, 88 St James’s Park 8, 74, 151, 187, 211–12 St James Street 56 St Martin’s Fields 81 St Martin’s Lane 8, 20, 46, 59, 81, 153, 189, 192, 205, 257 St Peter’s Street 144 Salisbury Court 80 Salisbury House 7 Savoy 67, 129 Savoy chapel 7, 31, 116, 138, 143, 220, 221, 233 Scotland Yard 65, 74, 77, 84 Shaver’s Hall 187 Somerset House 7, 21, 26, 27, 74, 79, 80, 87, 101, 117, 123, 124, 126, 131n.176, 255, 257 Spring Gardens 59, 74, 187, 209, 210–11, 212–13, 218 Stafford House 125, 129 Strand 6–7, 44, 59, 67, 91, 145, 149, 191, 206, 208, 209 Tart Hall 70, 83, 126, 127, 192 Temple Bar 6 Tothill Fields 8, 17, 19, 48, 56, 77, 81, 82, 180 chapel of ease in 81, 113–14, 221, 224–5, 226, 243, 254 ministers, see Palmer, Herbert; Roode, Onesephorus Wallingford House 80, 126–7, 131 Westminster Hall 24, 28, 35, 39–40, 47, 58, 70, 78, 119–20, 143, 180, 183, 188, 192, 252 Whitehall Palace 9, 39, 65, 69, 71, 74,



77, 80, 83, 117–19, 122–5, 131, 147, 192, 263 Banqueting House 65, 70, 118–19 chapel royal 117, 119n.123, 223, 256 Committee for 117, 124, 155 court of guard 39–40, 41–2, 43, 55–6 garrison 60, 65–6, 67, 68, 73, 76 Painted Chamber 29, 138 Tiltyard 65, 125 Whitehall Stairs 74 Worcester House 99, 116, 122, 126, 128, 129, 130, 256 York House 83, 122, 126, 127, 190 Westminster Assembly 104, 111–12, 225 Whalley, Major-General Edward 76n.126, 88n.195, 180 regiment of 78, 90 Wharton, Philip, 4th Lord 110, 126 Wheeler, William 21, 23, 26, 37, 55, 144, 155–6, 157, 162, 163, 254 Whitaker, Jeremiah 104n.46, 245 Whitaker, Laurence 21, 23–4, 28–9, 108n.69, 148, 156, 163 White, Robert 32, 178, 179n.215, 184n.232 Whitelocke, Bulstrode 108, 148, 200, 212 Wicks, Henry 139 Wildman, John 165, 180 Williams, John, dean of Westminster and archbishop of York 13–14, 22, 23, 32, 40, 97, 147 Wimberley, Gilbert 32, 46, 112n.89, 138n.17, 222, 246 Wincopp, John 138n.17, 223n.18 Windsor 44, 68 Windsor, Lord 208–9 Wingfield, Augustine 165 Winter, Sir John 205 Wiseman, John 77 Wiseman, Sir Richard 14–15, 22, 40–1 Wither, Anthony 17, 145n.51, 157–8 Wither, George 124 Wood, Seth 247 Woodford, Robert 22 Woodshaw, Miles 205 Woodward, Hugh 196 Worcester, battle of 72, 74, 81, 103, 119, 204 Worsley, Major-General Charles 76n.126, 100, 109n.74 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 9 Wykes, Aquila 46 Wynn, Sir Richard 163

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