God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  A number of overlapping concerns were at the heart of these provincial and parliamentary complaints: resentment of some of the religious and secular policies of the 1630s; of those who promoted them, and towards the influence of Catholicism at court; and of the powers that had allowed these counsellors to implement their policies. On secular matters these were calls for redress, rather than a positive programme for a new settlement – the removal of specific counsellors and the abolition of particular powers. The same was true in religious matters – there was a widespread grievance, but no agreed programme for a new settlement.

  One of the first measures taken by Parliament was to release Burton and Bastwick, two of the Puritan martyrs pilloried and whipped in 1637, in response to petitions from their wives presented to the Commons by Pym. The case for the third, William Prynne, was made by one of his servants and presented by Rous.15 On 28 November, Prynne and Burton, released from prison and heading for London, were met at Brentford, where an escort was established. They proceeded to London accompanied by more than one hundred coaches and by thousands of men and women. Those escorting them carried rosemary for remembrance and laurel in token of joy and triumph. What could this triumph possibly be but the defeat of Laudianism? Crowds gathered in the city, ‘the common people strewing flowers and herbs in the ways as they passed, making great noise and expressions of joy for their deliverance and return’. According to one observer they were received almost with ‘adoration, as if they had been let down from heaven’.16 Bastwick was similarly greeted at Blackheath a few days later. Although Charles, incensed by the reception afforded to Burton and Prynne, had issued instructions that no more than 800 horse should accompany Bastwick into town, he was not obeyed. Twenty-seven coaches and 1,000 horse formed a convoy into London, where Bastwick was greeted with jubilant crowds and the sounding of trumpets.17

  Demonstrations added to political pressure, but also fed fears about the breakdown of normal politics. Sir Edward Hyde, MP and later the Earl of Clarendon, became a prominent loyalist. In November 1640, however, he shared many of these grievances about Laudianism and other policies of the 1630s but he could not distinguish between this obviously peaceful demonstration celebrating the return of Burton and Prynne and an ‘insurrection (for it was no better) and frenzy of the people’. Nothing provided clearer illustration than these scenes of ‘the unruly and mutinous spirit of the city of London, which was the sink of all the ill humour of the kingdom’.18 These tensions were plain over the next two years – sympathy with the pressure for further reformation was in tension with its implications for authority, and the threat that it might proceed in an unlicensed way, on the streets.

  Moreover, these demonstrations combined opposition to Laud, anti-popery and hostility to bishops. These were different issues, of course, and not everyone who was happy to see the Puritan martyrs returned had the same view of what their return signified, and some were not happy at all that they had been returned. For example, Nehemiah Wallington, the pious London wood turner, rejoiced at the liberation of ‘those worthy and dear servants of God’. Robert Woodford, steward of the Earl of Northampton and another godly man, was also there, and his zeal also rings down the years: ‘oh, blessed be the Lord for this day! This day those holy living martyrs Mr Burton and Mr Prynne came to town… My heart rejoiceth in the Lord for this day; it’s even like the return of the captivity from Babylon’. But Peter Heylyn thought their release reflected the machinations of the Puritan faction in London and Southwark. Behind this suggestion lay the view that being anti-Laudian was something rather less radical than was intended by the men mobilizing these crowds: one observer noted that cries against the bishops had mingled with the acclamations of the crowds. Others saw these demonstrations primarily as an affront to the courts that had condemned these men, rather than as a religious deliverance. It was in the words of Thomas May the ‘greatest affront that was ever given to the Courts of Justice in England’, and contributed to the eventual abolition of the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission.19 All the signs are that in November 1640 England was in the grip of a powerful anti-Laudian reaction, but this was a rather disparate coalition. A profound hostility to aspects of Laudian ceremonial was shared for example by Colepeper, the future royalist, and Pym, the future champion of Parliament’s cause.

  Despite these divisions all this was, for Charles, unpromising. He had called a parliament to meet the costs of an army of occupation, but faced calls for the redress of the grievances of his English subjects while also seeking to negotiate terms for the withdrawal of the Covenanters” army. He could not dissolve Parliament, because of the costs of the Treaty of Ripon, and in order to get the money he was clearly going to have to listen to a lot of rather inchoate bellyaching, including pressure for a significant change in his ecclesiastical policies. Concessions were inevitable, but painful for a monarch for whom his public front was a crucial political matter. Charles set about minimizing the impact on his regality, and on the frame of well-ordered monarchy and religion. Here he had two pre-eminent advantages: the very general commitment to the principles of monarchy (even among those with concerns about this particular king) and the lack of unity among his critics about what positive measures should be taken beyond the redress of particular grievances.

  A remarkable feature of the first six months of the Long Parliament was that it produced very little by way of legislation. In part this was due to the double fact that grievances were at once so loudly expressed and so very miscellaneous. Much business was passed on to committees: five Grand Committees were established to consider matters relating to general areas of concern and select committees proliferated to discuss particular issues. The first of a number of attempts to reduce the number of these committees took place in January 1641, resulting in a list of sixteen committees alongside the five Grand Committees. But the tendency was to sclerosis. The Houses usually sat for three hours each day, from 9 a.m. to noon, occasionally starting earlier, and afternoon sessions were relatively rare. In November and December 1640 only a little more than one in twenty sittings were in the afternoon. Even in November of the following year, a month of intense crisis, only one quarter of sittings were in the afternoon. In the absence of effective management, business tended to drift. Parliaments were not designed as executive bodies, but as occasions where the ills of the kingdom were resolved through a union of monarch and people. As a result, grievances and disputes were brought before the Houses in an apparently random manner and important discussion was hived off to the committees. The intention was that committees would produce legislation that would be passed effectively, but in these months the impression is more of drift than of efficiency.20

  On top of this flood of petitions came numerous private legal suits to the House of Lords. During the 1620s the House of Lords revived its judicial function, responding to massive demand from the increasingly litigious population. The lower courts were overcrowded, plagued with complex and overlapping jurisdictions, procedural irregularities and peculiarities, and appeal from some of the busiest courts was not possible. Measures of reform in Parliament had been considered, but not produced, and so the Lords became an attractive alternative forum. This development was at first slow – there was a rising trend through the 1620s, but only about 200 petitions in all during that decade. The first three months of the 1640 session brought 200 more. In addition to the kinds of suit brought in the 1620s, the Lords was now inundated with petitions from people who claimed to have fallen foul of what they said was the abuse of the legal system by crown officials during the 1630s. The Lords was flooded with petitions relating to the imposition of Laudian policies and the enforcement of unpopular fiscal expedients, and, from the summer of 1641, another round of litigation was opened up when Parliament abolished some of the courts that had enforced these measures. Officials of those courts were forced to seek protection from prosecution for their actions while the courts had been in existence, and those who would have used those courts i
n the past were forced to go to the Lords instead. By the middle of 1641 the Lords had received some 500 petitions and by the end of the year the figure had reached 650.21

  Another reason for slow progress was the close relationship between the fate of reform and redress in England and the negotiations for a Scottish treaty. The Covenanters had agreed eight negotiating points, each of which was to be settled in turn. Nothing was to be formally agreed until all eight had been dealt with, and then the whole package was to be ratified by the English parliament once everything had been agreed. In the later stages of the negotiation this raised the stakes, since earlier agreements could come unstuck in the light of later discussions, and each party was responding throughout to external circumstances in the hope of securing more of their aims. The eighth negotiating point included the demand that the religious practices of the two kingdoms would be harmonized around a single confession of faith, something which was in practical terms essential to the security of the Scottish settlement. The first seven points were agreed by February, leading to fears among English parliamentarians that they might be abandoned by their Covenanting friends. Fortunately, and perhaps not entirely to the regret of the Covenanters and their English friends, discussion of the vague eighth point dragged on until June. Business in the Long Parliament was tied to these negotiations formally but also because it was Parliament which paid the costs of the Scottish army and which would have to finance their eventual disbandment. There was also more or less obvious co-operation over particular demands, for example the removal of Laud and Strafford.22

  Anglo-Scottish affairs were intertwined in less formal ways too. One of the first acts of the parliament was to institute fast days on which sermons would be heard by the members. The first two preachers were Stephen Marshall and Cornelius Burges, both famous Puritans. They both preached on the theme of the Reformation in danger and Burges went further, dwelling on the story of Israel’s delivery from Babylon by an army from the north.23 On their arrival in London the Covenanters” commissioners were greeted by cheering crowds (‘this libertine populace’, according to the Venetian ambassador) and it is clear that there were close connections between the commissioners and their friends in Parliament. However, at the heart of this friendship lay the emotive, but potentially problematic, issue of the ecclesiastical settlement.24 As we have seen this was not the only grievance brought to Parliament by the county petitions, and to the extent that it was a prominent concern in England, there was room for doubt that the Covenanters represented a more viable position in England than the Laudians.

  Parliament met, then, with a variety of secular grievances to settle and a strong reaction against Laudianism in progress. But it was not clear what measures, precisely, would satisfy the country in secular and religious matters; and in the religious sphere the attempt to turn an anti-Laudian moment into a positive programme of further reformation, or to ‘Scottify’ the church, was not going to have an easy passage. These English issues were further complicated by the formal and informal connections with the Scottish settlement and the danger that reformation, even if it was desirable in itself, was proceeding without proper licence. Parliament was a deliberative body, with procedures designed to facilitate the airing of grievances and the generation of consensus. It was not an executive body, and there was no very developed machinery of management – certainly there were no party organization, no whips, no front bench, no Prime Minister.

  The most coherent proposals for settlement were promoted by the ‘Junto’, a group associated with John Pym in the Commons and the Earl of Bedford in the Lords. They had no formal position: their authority rested not on office, but on the extent to which they were able to guide business in the direction of their preferred settlement by domination of committees, effective speech-making and the creative use of the power of the purse to secure redress of grievances.25 Members of the Commons were also apparently willing to co-ordinate their efforts with pressure from outside Parliament – the presentation of petitions and the assembling of crowds. If this was happening, however, it did not always favour the Junto’s programme – here and elsewhere they could hope to guide or harness the larger forces at work but they could not control them. There is no reason, beyond hindsight, to think that Charles ought to have seen a deal with the Junto as the centre of his political concerns. They were not an elected party and had no formal role: their authority was informal, and negotiated, and their command of business in the two Houses was imperfect.26

  Pym had been a relatively prominent figure in the parliaments of the 1620s, and was in the Short Parliament one of the two most experienced members. He had achieved prominence in that parliament also by his electrifying speech on 17 April, which had fused religious and secular grievances around the need to protect the liberties of Parliament: Parliament was the guarantor of both.27 He established himself in the new parliament with a similarly powerful speech made on 7 November. The burden of his two-hour speech was similar, but introduced a new element. Once again he suggested that law and religion were so necessarily joined that ‘with the one, the other falls’, but he now identified a single and compelling threat: a plot by the papists to alter both. This case had been made by Rous in the Short Parliament but was now taken up with vigour by Pym. The agents of this plot were evil counsellors, corrupt clergy that ‘finds a better doctrine in papists to serve their turns better than that of our church’, and those who were not particularly concerned about popery and, through their inaction, allowed it to flourish. Part of his appeal was his ability to meld the miscellaneous grievances being expressed into a single problem, with a clear diagnosis and a suggested remedy: he consistently argued, and at times convinced many other members, that the problems of popery and arbitrary government were bound together by a single popish plot.28

  For much of the first session of the Long Parliament, however, Pym was a significant but not quite dominant figure, and was not the manager of business that his later reputation as ‘King Pym’ suggests. His views were compelling, but not universally held. Colepeper’s speech, for example, bears many similarities with Pym’s: they could more or less agree on all the symptoms that were in need of attention, but their diagnosis of the cause was different. Pym saw a fundamental corruption, caused by a malign and identifiable agent, whereas Colepeper saw examples of misgovernment. As the symptoms were alleviated over the coming months it became clearer that men like Colepeper were working to a different, and less demanding, agenda from men like Pym. In the early months of the parliament, in fact, much of Pym’s energy was engaged in liaising between the two Houses, seeking to establish a coalition in difficult circumstances.29

  Hindsight leads historians to emphasize the role of the Commons, but in Tudor and Stuart parliaments the Lords often took the lead. They did not initiate supply bills (taxation), but networks of patronage and connection often meant that business in Parliament was dominated by peers. Clarendon thought that it was Pym’s patron in the Lords, the 4th Earl of Bedford, who really could have brokered this settlement. A Calvinist who favoured bishops and disliked sects, someone who distrusted this king but did not like the stronger arguments for restraint on the monarchy, Bedford represented a kind of par position that might have been the basis for settlement. He was undoubtedly a respected figure in both Houses: when he died, in early May 1641, the Commons adjourned all committees in order to allow members to attend his funeral – no-one else was honoured in this way by the early Stuart parliaments. But his views were not shared by the majority in the Lords, many of whom were more wary than Bedford about the direction of secular and religious redress.30

  The Privy Council showed some interest in achieving a settlement through a change of counsel, by bringing in prominent men from among the twelve peers who had petitioned for a parliament the previous August. Bedford was a key figure here, and there is evidence that the plan for settlement favoured by him and Pym made some headway between January and March 1641. Their settlement required the removal of St
rafford, Laud and others associated with the policies of the 1630s. They also sought a number of ‘bridge appointments’ intended to surround the monarch with more reliable advisers. Naturally enough, Bedford and Pym were in the frame here, as Treasurer and Chancellor of the Exchequer respectively. They wanted permanent, parliamentary additions to the revenue in order to compensate the crown for the loss of ship money and other prerogative revenues. That had constitutional implications, of course, in shifting the balance of royal revenue towards sources granted by Parliament. Beyond that they do not seem to have wanted to go: their own authority as counsellors, of course, depended on the preservation of a reasonable freedom of action for the monarch. A third important element of the projected settlement was the regulation of episcopacy, along lines proposed by James Ussher, the Calvinist archbishop of the Church of Ireland, a scheme in which bishops were to act in consultation with the clergy and to be bound by law; the analogy was with the regulation of the divinely ordained powers of the monarchy by the laws of the community.31

  It seems that Charles was reluctant to abandon his counsellors, willing to accept augmentation of his revenue, but not at all willing to allow reformation to reach to the abolition of bishops. On the other hand, the inducement of a sufficient financial settlement, based on parliamentary grants, was attractive to the King but less so to many Members of Parliament, who favoured the abolition of ship money more than they did the creation of new sources of revenue. Meanwhile, the Scots were seeking the abolition of episcopacy in England in order to secure their own church settlement; any settlement in England short of that was unacceptable to them. This was a tricky negotiation, which foundered for a mixture of reasons, including the failure of the money to arrive in return for attacks on prerogative revenues. But what really did for it was the failure to reach an agreement over church government. Bedford and Pym were closely tied to the Covenanters, who made it clear that the abolition of episcopacy was an unshakeable demand.32 The failure of this proposed settlement would not have mattered if there had been a ready alternative, but there was not.