God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Little more than two months after news of the Irish rising reached London any pretence of normal parliamentary government had collapsed. At the point when news of the rising reached London, parliamentary commissioners were in Edinburgh with the King. They were sent Additional Instructions about the necessary armed response to the Irish rebellion which could hardly have been more inflammatory. The seventh instruction attributed the great ‘miseries, burdens and distempers’ in the King’s dominions over recent years to the ‘cunning, false and malicious practices’ of men close to the King’s counsels. This party had been ‘favourers of Popery, superstition and innovation, subverters of religion, honour and justice’ and ‘factors for promoting the designs’ of hostile foreign powers. Not only this, but they had also sought to disrupt the relationship between the King and his parliament. Money granted by Parliament had been spent unprofitably, or on schemes which were positively detrimental to the state, and while Parliament had laboured to purge ‘corruptions’ and restore ‘decays’ in church and state this same party had laboured to suppress the liberty of Parliament. In response to the power of this group, and the threat that it posed to Parliament and religion, Parliament had to attach strings to any money granted to deal with the Irish rising. The eighth instruction, accordingly, called for the King to change his counsels, listening to such men ‘as shall be approved by his Parliament… that so his people may with courage and confidence undergo the charge and hazard of this war’. This was a crucial escalation from the Ten Propositions of June, which had asked the King to remove counsellors unsound on ‘religion, liberty, [and] good government’, and to replace them with men ‘his people and parliament may have just cause to confide in’. The new demand, for active approval by Parliament of the advisers, was accompanied by a threat that made an important distinction, by citing the ‘trust which we owe to the state and to those whom we represent’. That could, potentially, justify their finding another way of ‘securing ourselves from such mischievous counsels and designs’ and giving control of money for Ireland to ‘such persons of honour and fidelity as we have cause to confide in’.25

  On the same day, 8 November, Pym tabled what has become known as the Grand Remonstrance. A committee on the state of the kingdom had been at work on ‘a remonstrance of all the present evils and grievances of the kingdom, to present to the King’ as early as January. While Pym sought to maintain a sense of impending crisis in Westminster, it was clear by early August that it was not shared in the provinces, and the original committee of twenty-four was replaced by a committee of eight, which evidently made rapid progress. In the autumn one more meeting sufficed to add thirty-four clauses relating to the second army plot and the Irish rising. In the subsequent debates eight more clauses were added, and six were enlarged, but the Grand Remonstrance as we have it was largely the view of the world that Pym’s circle had held in August.26 The Irish rising confirmed them in their views, reinforcing the message of the plague sore about the real problem that confronted the English state.

  The Grand Remonstrance elaborated on the themes of a popish plot to subvert religion and liberty, detailing specific instances from the date of Charles’s accession onwards, and citing resistance to the wholesome reforms promoted during the previous year. This was done at very great length – a total of 204 individual points were made for the King’s consideration. The preamble went further than the Additional Instructions by naming the actors in this plot. They were not only the ‘Jesuited Papists’ but also the bishops and ‘corrupt part of the clergy, who cherish formality and superstition’ as the best means of sustaining their own ‘ecclesiastical tyranny and usurpation’. These two were joined by counsellors and courtiers who for private reasons had found it helpful to pursue the interests of hostile foreign powers. The aim of this plot was to cause differences between the King and his people over the prerogative, to suppress the purity and power of religion, to unify those most friendly to these aims and to sow division in the ranks of those most likely to oppose it, and to disaffect the King from his parliament. It was a complex phenomenon, of course, but there was a clear essence: ‘As in all compounded bodies the operations are qualified according to the predominant element, so in this mixed party, the Jesuited counsels, being most active and prevailing, may easily be discovered to have had the greatest sway’.27

  This was a remarkably provocative document intended to firm up support for further reform, and support for the King in resisting the threat of religious and political disorder. It followed on from anti-Catholic measures taken on 1 November but escalated the claims of anti-popery.28 In effect, the Grand Remonstrance presented the King to himself as the stooge of a conspiracy dominated by Jesuitical aims, supported by corrupt churchmen and counsellors pursuing private interests. Of course, such a government could not be trusted with the prosecution of the war in Ireland and this latter point was spelt out for good measure in the accompanying petition. The malignant party, in addition to all the aims already enumerated, had sought ‘the insurrection of the Papists in your kingdom of Ireland, and bloody massacre of your people’.29 To support the war without first changing the counsels of the King would be to give money and arms to those responsible for the rebellion in the first place. Thus, although it had moderated certain key demands – in particular dropping Root and Branch reform – it did not find the middle ground.30

  Even for those who believed all this, in every detail, it was difficult to believe that you could talk to a king this way, or at least do so with any hope of success. Looking back on it later, Clarendon remarked more on the divisiveness of this means of proceeding than on the rights and wrongs of the particular grievances:

  It contained a very bitter representation of all the illegal things which had been done from the first hour of the King’s coming to the crown to that minute, with all those sharp reflections which could be made upon the King himself, the Queen, and Council; and published all the unreasonable jealousies of the present government, of the introducing Popery, and all other particulars which might disturb the minds of the people, which were enough discomposed.31

  To many contemporaries this was simply wrong in principle, but even if it was not, it was impolitic to proceed in this way since it gave the King no real option but to reject the analysis.

  After a twelve-hour debate on 22 November the remonstrance was passed by the Commons by the narrowest of margins: 159-148. It was even more impolitic, and an even greater breach of decorum, to make this case and the associated demands publicly, but this too was done after an even more controversial debate. By a vote of 124-101 it was agreed that the remonstrance could be ‘published’ but not ‘printed’: that it could be circulated in manuscript copies, in other words. In the course of the debate Geoffrey Palmer had threatened to enter a protestation against the decision to publish, an intervention which nearly caused a fight and was later considered to have been intended to. The inhibition about printing lasted until 15 December, when the Commons voted by 135-83 to allow the printing of the remonstrance. These divisions reflected the growing difficulty of sustaining consensus in Parliament and the growth of open division. In going ahead without the Lords, the Commons were also, perhaps, making a point. There were significant misgivings though. As Dering put it: ‘I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell tales to the people, and talk of the king as a third person’. Increasingly obvious partisanship in Parliament represented a significant political change.32

  Clearly, what gave strength to those pushing these measures forward was a belief in the imminent danger of the popish plot. Over the winter of 1641-2 politics in England was conducted against the backdrop of terrible stories from Ireland, and the fear of popery in the provinces was all too evident. Security measures taken in Parliament helped fuel rumours in Norwich, Guildford and London that papists were going to fire the town. A troop of forty armed Catholics was reported in London, and a few days later it was said another troop had arrived from Lancashire. A recusant in Bucking
hamshire caused panic when he was stopped with letters that he had carried through Lancashire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire, and which he destroyed when captured. Searches of recusants” stores of arms took place in many parts of the country and mysterious movements or assemblies caused panics in Bedfordshire and Berkshire. Portsmouth was gripped with a fear that the governor was going to take the fortress, in preparation for a French or Irish invasion, and in Staffordshire, it was reported, people were so frightened by rumours of popish plots to attack them while they were defenceless in church that ‘they durst not go to Church unarmed’. Rumours spread through the West Midlands in late November, from Lichfield to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and from Kidderminster to Bridgenorth. Ludlow, Bewdley and Brampton Bryan spent the night of 19-20 November ‘in very great fear’. A similar panic spread in West Riding towns early in 1642. Civic authorities in Newcastle, Hull and Berwick all appealed to Parliament for protection in late 1641, Berwick on two occasions. Panics also seized Liverpool, Conway and Beaumaris, and Lancashire towns ordered the arrest of strangers, Catholics or men riding at night. In January 1642 a skirmish took place resulting in the death of Catholics and Protestants. This was the third of five such peaks of anti-Catholic panics between 1640 and 1642, all of them related to particular political crises. It was over by the early summer, but revived again in August.33

  This panic about popery fed, and probably fed upon, the output of the presses.34 During the third week of November letters reporting events in Ireland had flooded into London and this gave rise to a publishing innovation: the newsbook. On 29 November, the Heads of Severall Proceedings appeared, published by John Thomas. The appetite for news was well-established, and had been satisfied in previous years by manuscript newsletters or ‘separates’. There had been hostility to publishing Parliament’s proceedings in print, and Dering had got into quite serious trouble for doing it. In fact during the Short Parliament note-taking had been banned, and, in the Long Parliament, John Rushworth was regarded with some suspicion because of his proficiency in shorthand, leading to a formal investigation.35

  At the same time that inhibitions in Parliament were lifting, the apparatus of control was dissolving. News-related pamphleteering was peaking: Thomason had collected around sixty titles per month since the trial of Strafford, and that total now reached ninety. The publication of the Grand Remonstrance both recognized and encouraged the growth of this political world of print, by addressing ‘the people’ as competent judges of history and politics. At the same time, country petitions were being printed – their appeal thereby directed not just to the named recipient but to a wider political world of potential fellow travellers. The brakes were now completely off and January 1642 was the biggest month in Thomason’s whole collection – 200 titles, dropping back to ninety by May. This was the spring of the ‘paper war’, in which fundamental political questions were canvassed before a print audience.36

  This is the context of John Thomas’s decision to publish his newsletter of parliamentary business. He had connections with Pym, who had proved himself an eager publicist over previous months, and was a prime mover behind the publication of the Grand Remonstrance. Earlier in the week Thomas had published a pamphlet reporting the Incident. What was particularly important about the Heads of Severall Proceedings, however, was that it was a serial. He published another the following week, and soon had numerous competitors. The boom lasted until March 1643, when Parliament successfully enforced licensing.37 By that time a series of long-term newsbook titles accounted for half of Thomason’s collection – clearly the newsbook eroded the market for the one-off political pamphlet.38

  An immediate implication of this was an increase in the supply of news. During the 1630s the services of professional letter writers seem to have cost around £20 p.a. The Earl of Bridgewater seems to have paid something like this to John Castle in return for perhaps three letters every two weeks.39 A little over a year later 1d bought 5,000 words of news each week; for his £20 Bridgewater could have had 4,800 titles (more than ninety each week). More important than the potential banquet that this provided for Bridgewater was that readers who could not possibly have enjoyed the services of a newsletter writer could, for less than one ninetieth of the price, have a weekly newsletter which was fuller, and not necessarily less well-informed, than that of a professional letter writer of the 1630s. Increasing the supply of information is not, of course, a guaranteed way to foster clear understanding, and many readers may have felt that they enjoyed fewer certainties as a result of this news revolution. John Castle had been scrupulous about identifying and weighing sources, advertising particular reports as ‘likely to be true’, distinguishing between rumour, report and news in complex ways. Nonetheless, Bridgewater was unsure what to believe: ‘the various reports of the news of this time be such that no great credit be to be given to the rumours spread abroad’.40 Newsbook writers were evidently aware of this difficulty and quickly came to proclaim their bona fides on their title pages: The kingdomes weekly intelligencer: sent abroad to prevent misinformation; Mercurius Civicus; Londons Intelligencer as truth impartially related from thence to the Kingdome to prevent misinformation; The moderate: impartially communicating Martial affaires to the Kingdom; or the Mercurius anti-mercurius, which claimed to be ‘Communicating all humours, conditions, forgeries and lies of mydas eared newsmongers’

  There are some suggestive connections here. The pamphlet about the plague sore had been printed for ‘W.B.’, possibly the bookseller William Bowden, who was active in these months. Bowden is known to have published a number of tracts recounting stories of Catholic plotting and in December he published a number of pamphlets retailing the atrocities of the Irish rebels. John Thomas’s pamphlet about the Incident used the same woodcut as W.B.’s pamphlet about the plague sore. Like Bowden, Thomas was also active in publishing pamphlets about the atrocities carried out by Irish Catholics. It may be that this reflects a network of printers and booksellers working hard to promote awareness of the popish plot and the image of Pym as the main bulwark against its success.41 It is clear that the plague sore and the Irish rising were useful to Pym and he may actually have used them.

  John Pym portrayed in the forefront of the battle against popish conspiracies

  Fear about the popish plot fed on uncertainty about events, an uncertainty that in turn fed rumour and anxiety. These issues were reaching out beyond Parliament; perceptions of local events were coloured by these larger anxieties while at the same time reports of these events fuelled the crisis of confidence that lay at the heart of the failure of the political process. Pamphlets sold by their covers – the titles are actually abstracts which sell the book from the shelves of the stalls. What publishers and authors put on the covers probably reflected their sense of the market and it may therefore be significant that in 1641 ‘plot’ and ‘conspiracy’ were unusually prominent terms.42 Excluding official publications and newsbooks, the impression is quite dramatic: in November 1641 Thomason collected eighty-eight pamphlets, of which nine had ‘plot’ in the title, two more promised discussion of ‘conspiracies’, and others discussed ‘bloody plots’ and ‘bloody attempts’.43 An increased supply of information did not in this case solve the central political difficulty of uncertainty and the problem of establishing trust, but it greatly amplified rumours. In March it was reported that 154,000 settlers had been killed (the real number may have been nearer 4,000)44 and some estimates went as high as 200,000.45 And, to reiterate, this Catholic rising was said to have enjoyed the support of the English king.

  Fear of the popish plot was driving political action beyond the bounds of decency and was reciprocally related to the growing publicity given to political discussions. This produced a polarization of political opinion, however, not simply a drift of opinion to Parliament. By the time that the Grand Remonstrance had been passed Charles was back in London. His progress southwards from Scotland was marked by conspicuous displays of loyalty, and his entry into London on 26 Novembe
r was the occasion for another lavish display. This was a deliberate political manoeuvre of course: Charles had not previously indulged in a formal entry into his capital city, a lack that has struck subsequent commentators as significant by comparison with the greeting accorded to the Puritan martyrs the previous year.46 The King was, of course, the essential element of any settlement, and this interest in public political theatre surely rested on that knowledge.

  On entering London, Charles was ‘brought in with a Hosanna at one end of Town, [but] he found a Crucifige at the other’, wrote James Howell a short time later. In the light of the controversy over the Grand Remonstrance and the warmth of his own reception in the City, Charles cannot be blamed for thinking that his opponents in England might now have gone too far and that this division of opinion could play in his favour. In any case, Charles could hardly be expected to concede to the demands of the Grand Remonstrance, given the public analysis on which those demands were apparently based. Thus, while he was feted in the City, the ‘Remonstrance framed’ in Westminster could expect ‘but cold entertainment with His Majesty’.47

  Charles, by emphasizing the threat of Puritan populism, played to a resurgent royalism based on a concern to preserve political and religious decencies. Acknowledging the petition and the ‘declaration of a very unusual kind attached thereunto’, his answer first objected to the publication of the petition and remonstrance. He would have hoped for a chance to answer but this decision robbed him of the time to consider his response. He had also hoped that their own ‘reason’ and regard to the King would have dissuaded them from proceeding in this way, or at least that his express view that they should not would have restrained them. He was, he said, ‘very sensible of the disrespect’ that it implied. Beyond these concerns about the integrity of the political process, he naturally rejected the history presented in the petition and remonstrance, and promised to consider the proposals in a ‘parliamentary way’, although his answer sounded dubious about all the principal proposals – removing the Bishops” votes in the House of Lords, alienating control of his choice of counsellors and giving undertakings about Irish lands before the war was even fought. It was significant, perhaps, that the answer said that Charles was in search of support for the ‘royal estate’, in contrast to their concern for the state and those they represented. But the key issue was that Charles could plausibly suggest that he was the safeguard of parliamentary courses, rather than these populist hotheads and, perhaps, that their views of the interests of the state were corrosive of the royal estate.48