God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Religious settlement was just as problematic outside Whitehall and Westminster. As parliamentary business and the treaty negotiation with the Covenanters meandered along, religious debate in England began to range well beyond the attack on Laudianism, and as it did it became more divisive. This was a very public debate, which had immediate relevance to every churchgoer in the land. In the parish of All Hallows, Barking, for example, a week before the triumphal return of the Laudian martyrs local enthusiasts sawed wooden angels off the altar rails and took them to the House of Commons as evidence of popish innovation, without the approval of the vestry. There were clearly divisions in this parish, however: in August 1638 the vestry had agreed to the creation of an altar. There was such an outcry from other parishioners that the bishop’s chancellor had to intervene in January 1640.33 It is highly likely that these decisions were taken, and perceived, against the background of the Scottish crisis, of course; in any case they bear testimony both to the divisiveness and the immediate local significance of these arguments about the future of the true religion.

  Parish radicalism underpinned the mobilization of London’s Root and Branch petition, presented on 10 December. The petition de nounced ecclesiastical hierarchy in comprehensive terms and became a focus for subsequent discussion of religious reform in Parliament. Its tone was inflammatory: ‘the government of archbishops and lord bishops, deans and archdeacons, etc, with their courts and ministrations in them, have proved prejudicial and very dangerous both to the church and commonwealth’. Such government was ‘found by woeful experience to be a main cause and occasion of many foul evils, pressures and grievances of a very high nature unto his Majesty’s subjects in their own consciences, liberties and estates’. The particular offences of this church government were miscellaneous and grave: it had allowed the decay of preaching or was actively hostile to it; discountenanced the magistracy; failed to identify the Pope as Antichrist and therefore fostered a continued resemblance between practices in England and Rome, particularly in ‘vestures, postures, ceremonies and administrations’; abused its legal power; failed to enforce observance of the Sabbath; and allowed pluralism – ministers holding more than one appointment in the church. In suppressing godly and painful preaching, the bishops had fostered:

  The great increase of idle, lewd and dissolute, ignorant and erroneous men in the ministry, which swarm like the locusts of Egypt over the whole kingdom, and will they but wear a canonical cap, a surplice, a hood, bow at the name of Jesus and be zealous of superstitious ceremonies, they may live as they list, confront whom they please, preach and vent what errors they will, and neglect preaching at their pleasures without control.

  The net result was that ‘only papists, Jesuits, priests and such others as propagate Popery or Arminianism’ had prospered, with three particular consequences: the encouragement of popery and papistical party; the forced migration of godly men, particularly to Holland, resulting in the decay of trade; and the likelihood that the ‘wars and commotions’ between the King and his subjects in Scotland would be perpetuated, making all his kingdoms ‘prey to the common enemy’.34 Hostility to Laud’s policies had been radically elaborated here, and the final implication that the Scots were not the real enemy was pretty incendiary -something close to treason on one reading of the King’s proclamation of the previous August.35

  Printed copies of the petition had circulated for some time, and between 10,000 and 20,000 signatures were eventually gathered, all of them, or so it was claimed, from citizens. On the day of its presentation the petition was accompanied by a large crowd, of around 1,500 people, that gathered in Westminster Yard. Although most observers agreed that this was a socially respectable and well-behaved assembly, it was nonetheless politically unsettling. The menace of such forceful demonstrations threatened political propriety.36

  New Palace Yard and Westminster Hall in 1647

  Metropolitan mobilization soon produced provincial imitations. During January, as the Commons prepared to discuss the petition, similar petitions were produced in thirteen counties. One more was delivered in January, from Devon; another two, from Lancashire and Nottinghamshire, followed in April; Lincolnshire petitioned on 27 May and Oxfordshire on 27 July. Somerset brought up the tail in December.37 The Kentish petition was presented by Sir Edward Dering, with some reluctance and in response to pressure from some of his constituents. He had disliked the tone of the London petition and in subsequent debates expressed a willingness to see reformed episcopacy survive.38 In this case, as in many others, it is clear that the petition was not simply got up by MPs, although it is also clear that we should not see it as the consensual voice of the county either.39 Instead petitions represent successful efforts at mobilizing wider opinion – making use of networks of officeholders, gentlemen and ministers, appealing to issues recognizable to larger constituencies. Whatever the opinions being represented, however, the increasing sophistication of the petitioning process was in itself a remarkable political development. These petitions seem to have been timed to maintain the momentum of a parliamentary debate: the Commons held significant debates on Root and Branch reform on 8/9 February and 27 May, and the process approached conclusion in late July.40 Provincial petitions were almost direct contributions to specific parliamentary debates and this phenomenon of mobilizing opinion in order to influence the political process became a source of concern in itself.

  The first of the Root and Branch debates, on 8 February, lasted eight hours and involved sixty speakers. The question was whether to commit the petition to the consideration of a committee. It was renewed the following day, when the exchanges were even more divisive.41 There was an issue of substance here, about whether the faults of Laudian bishops justified such radical measures. But there was also a debate about the means being used, about the threat of street politics. As Lord George Digby put it: there was ‘no man of judgement, that will think it fit for a parliament, under a monarchy, to give countenance to irregular, and tumultuous assemblies of people, be it for never so good an end’. On the other hand, Nathaniel Fiennes was willing to defend mass petitioning, arguing that the crowds proved that the thousands of signatures were genuine, and that the weight of numbers was a reason for Parliament to take the petition seriously. Others supported this view and emphasized the respectability of the crowd.42 Not only did Fiennes make this case, but it was published to an audience outside the House: both he and Digby saw their speeches in print.43 Parliament was clearly a permeable institution, and that was a political issue in itself. Some members were willing to exploit or respond to audiences beyond the chamber, others feared the implications of that for the authority and dignity of government, but it did not necessarily stop them going into print too.

  On 9 February a compromise emerged: the petition was referred to a committee, but the issue of episcopacy was reserved for the House. Chastened by the divided response to radical reform, the ‘rooters’ in Parliament proceeded cautiously over the spring, aiming, as their Covenanting friend Baillie put it, ‘to take down the roof first to come to the walls’. Committee meetings over the following month received presentations from citizens and ministers, and came to concentrate on the secular powers of bishops. A well-prepared measure to remove their legislative and judicial powers was approved by the Commons on 10 March and, on the following day, so was their exclusion from the Sessions of the Peace and Star Chamber. This paved the way for a bill to exclude bishops from secular employments and from the House of Lords, which passed the Commons and was sent to the Lords on 1 May. There it had a rough ride, and relations between the two Houses were made worse by proceedings which were also, by that time, under way against the Earl of Strafford. Bringing the tussle to a head, a Root and Branch bill was presented, rather half-heartedly, by Dering on 27 May (coinciding with the Lincolnshire petition). Dering made clear that he had not abandoned all hope of reviving ‘the primitive, lawful and just episcopacy’, and it may have been that the presentation of this bill was tactical –
intended to pressure the Lords into accepting the exclusion of bishops from their House. They did not accept it, and that meant that a Root and Branch bill would not get through the Lords either. A contentious committee stage for the legislation between 27 May and 11 June was followed by nearly two months of wearisome debate. The last discussion took place on 3 August, and thereafter the bill was lost in the tide of events.44 Neither the modified episcopacy promoted by Pym and Bedford nor more fundamental reform was a live political option.

  By the spring of 1641 little of the Pym-Bedford plan had been achieved. There was no consensus about what the post-Laudian church should look like and there was no financial settlement either. In the first two and a half months of the parliament the Lords initiated ten bills, of which two had made it to the statute book by the end of January: a bill to allow the Marquess of Winchester to sell some of his lands and a bill relating to the Queen’s jointure (the provision made for her in the event of her husband’s death). The Commons were in one way even less effective, initiating twenty-six bills, of which only one became law. But that Act was of fundamental political and constitutional importance: the Triennial Act, passed on 16 February.

  Henceforth, it said, Parliament should meet at least every three years, and each sitting should last at least fifty days. This right to sit was, or so the preamble claimed, already established in laws and statutes which, as experience had shown, should be ‘duly kept and observed’. It was in part a measure necessary to secure public credit: in order to pay off the Scots the King needed to borrow and his personal credit was low. Over the previous two generations the crown had been increasingly reliant on intermediaries for its credit, since the word of a king was of no value to a businessman. Behind the intermediary stood the assets of the crown – its lands, its rights to raise revenue and its powers to grant monopolies and licences. Now, however, these things were increasingly under pressure, and parliamentary revenue was the best security for loans. Regular meetings of Parliament would offer a reasonable security for lenders. Although these suggestions may have persuaded the King, the Act meant much more than this: if ship money had arguably affected the constitutional balance then the Triennial Act certainly did.45

  Progress on crown income had also been limited. Ship money collection had collapsed over the summer of 1640 but there had been no permanent parliamentary grant to replace it. In the meantime the costs of the two armies continued to mount. A grant of four subsidies, first proposed in November 1640, was not finally made until 16 February 1641. Two more were proposed on 20 February, but 129 members spoke against them, and it took until May to get them onto the statute book.46 If this reflected a lack of financial realism in Parliament it was reflected in the provinces too. The subsidy imposed a fixed rate of taxation on the wealth of the population, assessed in either lands or goods. But the assessment of the wealth on which that rate was levied was in the hands of local men – the sort of people who served as constables or Justices. This was one of those tasks in which they did not impose the letter of the law. Beyond straightforward under-assessment, there were more elaborate evasions, such as the use of bearers, described by Henry Best in 1641. According to that scheme a small number of inhabitants were returned on the tax assessment, with others agreeing to bear the burden with them. This, and similar scams, had led to a catastrophic decline in the overall value of subsidies from the 1560s onwards, which was offset but not overcome by the habit of granting more and more of them at once.47 Pym had been aware of the need to reform the subsidies early on, and had proposed an obvious solution – that Parliament should grant a lump sum, sufficient for the intended purpose, that could then be divided up as a specific sum due from every county and borough, and eventually every village and ward.48 But this was an uphill battle, quickly abandoned in the autumn of 1640. In Norfolk and Cheshire yields of the subsidies of 1640/41 were no higher than they had been in the late 1620s, and in Norfolk that meant that an individual subsidy was worth about 30 per cent as much as it had been in 1589.49

  Customs revenues were in general more important to overall crown finances since they provided a large part of the ordinary revenue, for the normal costs of government, whereas parliamentary subsidies were occasional additions intended to meet extraordinary costs.50 The customs consisted of several elements: the ancient customs which belonged to the crown by prerogative right; tonnage and poundage, which rested on statute, but which had from the fifteenth century been routinely granted to a monarch for life in the first year of his reign; and impositions, more recent additions raised without parliamentary sanction. The rates at which these duties were raised was determined by the Books of Rates, which laid out the schedule of liable goods. This was negotiated between the crown and merchant bodies. Impositions were raised by prerogative power either openly, as a means to regulate trade, or through the manipulation of the Books of Rates. Like ship money, they looked like taxes imposed without consent; but as in the case of ship money there was a defensible legal case that they were a reasonable use of a long-established legal power. By 1640 the impositions and the ‘pretermitted custom’ (another duty raised by prerogative power) brought in £250,000 per annum.51 Overall, therefore, the customs, and their yield, were largely outside parliamentary control.

  Both tonnage and poundage and the impositions were grievances in 1640 and, true to form, Parliament was keener to abolish than to replace them. Particular duties among the impositions had been the subject of legal challenge, and although (or because) the crown won, they remained a grievance. In 1625 Charles had not been granted tonnage and poundage for life by his first parliament, as the grant was held up as part of a negotiation about the unpopular impositions. It seems clear that the intention had been to make the grant for the monarch’s life once the negotiations were concluded, and a one-year grant was made to tide the King over. Events overtook these negotiations, with the result that the grant was not renewed. Charles continued to collect the duties. In 1626 it was declared illegal, but a bill was prepared to indemnify the King from prosecution. The issue was not resolved in the next parliament either, and so Charles collected the duties without parliamentary sanction throughout the 1630s.52 Now, the grant of tonnage and poundage was deliberately used as a negotiating counter: successive short-term grants were made in order to lever concessions from the King, on the promise of a long-term settlement. Moreover, when a new tonnage and poundage bill was proposed, in March 1641, it contained a Book of Rates set by Parliament rather than the crown – both measures reflect a determination to secure greater parliamentary control over the grant, and yield, of the customs.53 Neither bore immediate fruit, partly because of parliamentary resentment at the King’s determination to resist pressure to institute thoroughgoing persecution of Catholics.54 By the summer of 1641 there was no financial settlement either.

  The one area of substantial progress in redress of provincial grievances was in the removal of Charles’s counsellors, in particular Laud and Strafford. There were few defenders of either in Parliament, among the Covenanters or in Ireland, and the attacks on both resonated powerfully in the streets. Laud was impeached in mid-December, the beginning of a slow march to the scaffold which did not finally end until January 1645. In the meantime he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in March 1641, his arrival greeted by jeering crowds, and throughout his incarceration suffered neglect and indignity at the hands of the godly. Other committees were also pursuing particular people: Bridgewater and other parties to the dispute about the muster master in Shropshire were brought to book and so was the Earl of Huntingdon, brought low by his adversary Sir William Fawnt.55

  The first real victim, however, was Strafford, who was impeached on 10 November, a week after the meeting of Parliament. He was accused of trying to subvert Parliament, or to find ways of avoiding having to summon it at all. It was said that he had intended to have some of the leading figures in the Commons arrested and tried on charges of treason on the grounds that they had co-operated with the Scots, or ev
en actively encouraged the Covenanters” invasion. He may have done that, just as they may have. His strong line on the need to crush the Covenanters made him few friends in Scotland. In Ireland he had imposed an oath in Ulster, heartland of Scottish Presbyterian settlement in Ireland, disavowing support for the Covenant. This ‘Black Oath’ outraged influential Protestant opinion in Scotland and Ireland. It was also said, plausibly but almost certainly inaccurately, that immediately after the failure of the Short Parliament he had suggested using an Irish army to bring the English kingdom to heel.56

  Whatever the truth, Strafford came to personify an apparently lawless defence of the King’s interests in the face of all political difficulties; a willingness to subvert the constitution in defence of otherwise indefensible policies. But, although Strafford had few admirers, the manner of his trial and execution compounded fears that the political process was becoming dangerously corrupted. It was close to judicial murder, informed in no small part by the threat of public disorder if his neck was saved.

  On 30 January 1641, when Strafford was called to Westminster to hear his charge, he travelled by water under armed guard. In the event he suffered nothing worse than shouts and curses from the crowd and the early stages of the trial were uneventful. However, as the likelihood that he might escape with his life increased, so did the temperature on London’s streets. On 23 March Strafford’s trial opened on the rather frail-looking charge of ‘cumulative treason’. It was likely that Strafford would have beaten this particular rap, since those accusing him of this previously unknown crime were themselves motivated in part by fears about the erosion of legal protections for the subject. Tiring of this procedure, Arthur Haselrig introduced a bill of attainder of Strafford on 10 April. Here, by vote, was the possibility of simply declaring Strafford to be guilty, and the bill had passed its third reading in the Commons on 21 April. Avoiding the complexities of a trial, it had the advantage of achieving an obviously necessary political end by efficient means. ‘Stone dead hath no fellow’; as one wry observer put it. In April petitions circulated in the City calling for swift action, despite a personal request from the King to the mayor to put a stop to this activity. The petitions made a connection between the slow progress in Parliament and economic problems, and attributed the decay of trade to political uncertainty. This agitation was taken up by those anxious for the attainder to make progress. The suggestion that animals of prey (like Strafford) did not deserve the same protections as the creatures they hunted was politically convenient but worrying in principle. Even more worryingly, the names of those who had voted against the attainder (the ‘Straffordians’) were published, and those named feared for their lives in the face of angry crowds. In the Lords there was hostility to these pressures from the Commons and the trial continued.