God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  If Charles was harsh on popularity he was also stringent on Puritans, without using either term. On 10 December he issued his own declaration on religion, which largely echoed the Lords declaration of 16 January, calling for worship according to the laws of the realm, and for severe action against those who undermined that worship: ‘the present division, separation and disorder about the worship and service of God, as it is established by the laws and statutes of this kingdom… tends to great distraction and confusion, and may endanger the subversion of the very essence and substance of true religion’.49 An attack on a conventicle in the City on 19 December shows that crowds could be mobilized against sectaries as well as against bishops.50 In a sense this was a battle for the middle ground. The Grand Remonstrance had accused papists of driving a wedge through Protestantism and here was the counter-charge – that Puritans were splintering and weakening the practice of the true religion. In the coming years it was partly on these grounds that radical Protestant sects were to be accused of popery.51

  The passage of the Grand Remonstrance was a pivotal moment in English politics in several ways. It crystallized a conflict between the popish plot and the fear of Puritan populism; those promoting concern at the machinations of Jesuits, their allies and dupes were appealing outwards, confirming fears about populism and making it increasingly difficult to secure concessions which left the dignity of the crown intact. There was a widening gap between the rhetoric of the two sides: Thomas May (writing in 1647) thought that it was at this point that ‘ordinary discourse’ became polarized.52 The constitutional implications of the remedies proposed by the Grand Remonstrance further confirmed that political demands had escalated uncomfortably. For those actively engaged in national politics, it would be difficult to get out of this not simply because the claims being made were so likely to be rejected, but because the way that political negotiation was being conducted was dangerous in itself. Many who felt Parliament had right on its side on religion, foreign policy and the prerogative might well come to feel that the greater threat to political well-being was posed by democracy or anarchy.

  Above all, this was a triumph for coalition-building on the basis of fear rather than hope. There had been a drift of opinion towards the King over the summer, and at the heart of this revival of Pym’s fortunes were fear and distrust; and in particular the impossibility of trusting the King and his advisers. Simonds D’Ewes noted in his diary during this tense autumn that ‘The logicians say that the final cause is the first in intention though it be the last in execution: and so here let us but look to the ultimate end of all those conspiracies and we shall find them to be to subvert the truth’.53 Extravagant anti-popery was combined with conscious popular appeal, and this found echoes on the streets and in the counties. Much of the appeal of the Grand Remonstrance lay in the purchase of anti-popery, which was greatly increased in the wake of the Incident and the Irish rising, and the burgeoning print market escalated the uncertainty in more than one way. It also began to justify increasingly direct attacks on the Queen’s freedom of worship.

  Pushing through the Grand Remonstrance, however, and moving against the Queen in this way, came close to over-bearing the weight that could be sustained by anti-popery and the King was not in an isolated political position in taking a strong line against it. If conspiracy theorists could see in the demands of the Irish leaders the machinations of the popish plot, others could see in the Additional Instructions and the Grand Remonstrance the clear imprint of Puritan populism. The polarized opinion manifest at the heart of government was manifest too in the counties, where the Prayer Book petitioning campaigns were taking off. With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to see that this was good news for the King: there had been no such polarization when Parliament had assembled in November 1640.

  Politics in London were also becoming more polarized. The triumphant entry of the King had rejuvenated street politics, and in late November and December it was calls for further reform that dominated. In Common Council elections in late November the balance of power shifted towards those promoting reformation, and this was associated with constitutional change in the City and in many vestries.54 A second Root and Branch petition was presented on 11 December to mark the anniversary of the first one. In the final days of December crowds thronged around Westminster demanding a response, and seeking the exclusion of the bishops and popish lords from the House of Lords while the future of episcopacy was being discussed. They were also confronted by Colonel Lunsford, a clash which revealed the currency of two stereotypes of enormous significance for the future. Lunsford’s men were referred to as ‘Cavaliers’ while the apprentices were derided as ‘Roundheads’: party affiliations were becoming visible among the populace at large. Demands for Lunsford’s removal from command of the Tower of London became another rallying point, and one of constitutional significance.55 Violence was barely constrained and increasingly partisan, and there can be little doubt that these disturbances affected parliamentary business.

  Charles now embarked on a high-risk strategy, against this background of increasingly unruly politics in London, and fear that his wife (who was increasingly openly attacked as the heart of Catholic influence at court) was becoming the target of the kind of campaign that had killed Strafford. On 4 January 1642 he entered Parliament with a body of armed men in search of five members of the Commons and one of the Lords whom he had identified as the principal architects of his troubles.56 He had intended to try them for treason on seven counts: attempting the subversion of the laws of the kingdom and depriving the King of his regal power; attempting to alienate the people from their King; attempting to draw the army from its obedience to the King; inviting and encouraging a foreign power (Scotland) to invade; attempting to subvert the right ‘and the very being of Parliaments’; in order to do this, attempting ‘by force and terror to compel the Parliament to join with them in their traitorous designs, and to that end have actually raised and countenanced tumults against the King and Parliament’; and conspiring to levy, and actually levying, war against the King.57 This was not perhaps as unprovoked as is sometimes implied: it followed immediately after an accusation of treason against twelve bishops. Nehemiah Wallington certainly seemed to appreciate the significance of the juxtaposition, giving the running heads to these pages of his notebook ‘xii bishops charged with treason justly’ and ‘Six worthy members of the house charged with treason unjustly’.58

  The attempt on the Five Members was a bold move, which would certainly have broken the deadlock, but it is difficult to see it as anything other than politically foolish, although the charges were no more extravagant than those laid at Charles’s door by the Grand Remonstrance. There is evidence of co-ordination between Pym’s circle and the Scots prior to the invasion of 1640, and of Pym’s connection with the incitement and countenancing of tumults.59 Of course, the worst outcome was to suffer the outrage without bagging the targets. Famously, when Charles arrived the birds had flown, forewarned that something was up. This ensured that the coup was a failure, and left the Commons free to express its unrestrained outrage at this invasion of its privileges. The declaration ‘touching a late breach of their privileges’ made no bones that the King had come to Parliament with ‘many soldiers, Papists and others, to the number of about five hundred’.60

  On the following day Charles went into the City to demand that the members be handed over but this visit revealed the extent to which he had lost control of his capital. Common Council men elected in November had taken their seats early, and the City was already in the hands of men with whom Charles was unlikely to want to deal. The meeting became disorderly, as cries of ‘Parliament, privileges of Parliament!’ mingled with cries of ‘God bless the King!’ Charles withdrew, but as he did so the outer hall rang with the cries of assembled citizens, ‘Privileges of Parliament!’ Such was the hostility on the streets of London that, on 10 January, Charles left his capital.61 As has often been noted, Charles was not to return until h
e himself was tried for treason in 1649.

  The triumphant return of Parliament men following the King’s departure from London

  Parliament had adjourned its sitting on the grounds that it was not safe at Westminster. On 11 January its sitting was resumed. Having left town the previous day Charles was spared the sight of a triumphant return of the Parliament men, the accused members among them. It was an orchestrated demonstration of support for Parliament, marked by banners and streamers, celebratory volleys and a flotilla on the Thames. Shouts against bishops and popish lords were heard and, along with copies of Parliament’s condemnation of the breach of its privileges, copies of the Protestation were prominent – fixed to the tops of pikes and sticks or on muskets, worn in hats, pinned to coats or attached to banners. A copy of the Protestation had also been thrown into the King’s coach on his retreat from the Guildhall. The message was clear: Parliament was the guardian of the Protestant faith: its privileges and the true religion stood together.62

  If the English response to the Covenanters? invasion in 1640 had disappointed the King, the response to the Irish rising must have come as a blow to the solar plexus. The question of whether the King could be trusted with an army to put down the rising was immediately at the forefront of English politics. Even if this doubt was groundless, of course, it did not make it any more likely that the King would seek to conciliate it. Both sides played on commonly held fears, rhetorical exchanges heated up and an increasingly polarized political argument spilled out onto the streets, into the presses and out into the counties. The high hopes expressed in A description of the famous kingdome of Macaria had not held the centre of political debate; fear was triumphing over hope. Indeed, 1641 had become the year of plots – fears of popish plots in rural England fed on the revelation of actual plots in London. Two army plots, the attempt on the Five Members and the Incident, the revelation of Strafford’s plans for the Irish army – all this created a political atmosphere in which trust was at a premium. But it was not all on one side – on 5 January 1642 an associate of one of the constables of the Tower had claimed that Pym and the others accused of treason ‘did carry two faces under one hood’ and that Puritans, not papists, were at the root of the current trouble.63 The vastly increased output of pamphlets and then newspapers did little to lower the temperature either. If titles are a guide to what publishers thought would sell, it is clear that they saw a large market in this uncertainty.

  These panicky politics had led to political escalation. Parliament was no longer acting as a consensual body, but was increasingly partisan. Members were actively courting public opinion and were certainly not trying particularly hard to put an end to street politics. Executive powers were being claimed too: in the fevered last weeks of December, Parliament had called out military forces on its own authority, and the Common Council of the City of London had formed a Committee of Safety with similarly questionable powers. Most importantly of all, the King had removed himself from London. In that sense, and many others, parliamentary politics in England had collapsed; the nation’s ills were no longer being addressed by the King-in-Parliament.

  6

  Paper Combats

  The Battle for the Provinces

  Parliament had failed as a forum in which to express and reconcile political differences and could not hope to enjoy that function again until the King returned, along with those members who now defected.1 A recurring theme of subsequent negotiations was to find terms on which the King could return to London, a necessary preliminary to the resumption of this role. In the spring of 1642, however, parliamentary politics as they were normally understood had broken down, but there was no alternative way forward. As a consequence emerging royalist and parliamentarian parties battled for control of the language of constitutional moderation and of provincial institutions, appealing to wider publics and mobilizing support for their favoured projects and platforms.

  In the immediate aftermath of the attempt on the Five Members the political temperature was very high. The arsenal assembled for the Scottish wars was in Hull and the King made a preliminary attempt to take control of it by issuing the Earl of Newcastle with a commission as governor of the town. Parliament hastily empowered Sir John Hotham to secure the arsenal in the name of King and Parliament, and a hasty journey up the Great North Road thwarted the royal plan. On 12 January, Colonel Lunsford assembled some of his Cavaliers at Kingston, where the Surrey arsenal was kept. There they met Lord George Digby, sent over from Hampton Court, and it was assumed that the plan was to arm enough men to secure Portsmouth for the King. When the King moved from the palace at Hampton Court to the castle at Windsor, on 13 January, it was easy to believe the worst, and there were rumours of wagons of arms heading for Windsor in the days afterwards.2 On 15 January men of strong convictions in the Commons, including Oliver Cromwell, called for the creation of a committee to put the kingdom into a posture of defence and on 18 January that committee proposed that the militia should be mobilized by the authority of a parliamentary ordinance – that is, without the King’s assent. This was an issue of unmistakable constitutional significance, and one which forced many allegiances later in the summer. The previous day, prompted by Pym, a Committee of the Whole House requested the dismissal of the King’s entire Privy Council, to be replaced by men appointed with the advice of the Houses. The Attorney General was impeached for agreeing to issue the charges against the Five Members and on 20 January the Commons ordered that a printed letter be sent to the sheriffs in all counties requiring all adult males to swear the Protestation.3

  Taken together these were remarkably provocative measures. Parliament would have taken control of the militia and of whom the King should take as advisers, and was at the same time appealing directly to the people as the defenders of the Church of England. The use of ordinances (legislation passed on the authority of Parliament but without royal consent) seemed also to threaten fundamental constitutional principles. It was certainly a ticklish issue. No-one argued that Parliament could legislate alone: statutes required the royal assent. Parliament, however, could be said to be serving as a Great Council to the monarch, akin to the Privy Council. Just as the King could make proclamations in the absence of a parliament, so long as they did not make new law, so the Privy Council could issue executive orders in the King’s absence. Now, it was claimed, Parliament acting as the King’s Great Council could make such orders. While the King had been in Scotland the previous August, Parliament had passed five ordinances with this logic, and the constitutional principle does not appear to have caused outrage even though the fifth order, for disarming recusants, arguably went beyond existing law.4 On the other hand, this constitutional device coincided with more aggressive claims for Commons influence over policy, and this political issue did cause dissent – resentment against the growing pretensions of ‘King Pym’, the programme suggested by the Ten Propositions and the Commons order of 8 September for the purification of the churches.5 The proposals put forward in the fevered aftermath of the attempt on the Five Members accelerated this process. In the Lords there was considerable disquiet about these developments, and active opposition to the national imposition of the Protestation.6

  These measures were taken against a background of continuing crowd activity in London and a renewed round of county petitioning strengthened Pym’s hand: on 25 January he personally delivered four massive county petitions to the Lords, throwing the weight of the Commons behind their demands (among which were the removal of bishops and popish lords from the upper House). Some London petitions were now making a connection between the failure to reach a political settlement and the decay of trade, and between January and March eleven counties and six towns petitioned Parliament on this issue. Clothworkers in Essex, Suffolk and the West Riding were among those who made this connection, and with some justification. Fearing forced loans and debasement of the coinage in the summer of 1641 many merchants had avoided tying up their capital in stocks of cloth. This, in turn, m
eant that work in clothing districts dried up and these conditions apparently persisted through the winter. In Essex, at least, this sectional economic interest fused with anti-Catholicism and popular parliamentarianism. In London, the slump led to the intervention of ‘poor labouring men, known by the name of porters, the lowest members of the City of London’.7

  On 31 January, for the first time in this crisis, a petition was presented by women, specifically ‘many poor and distressed women in and about London’. To some extent these petitioners stayed within the bounds of the public role afforded to women by claiming that because of the slump they could not feed their families. Women had an established role in this sense, and were frequently prominent in food riots for this reason: as the family members most involved in the food market it was they who were most aware of corruption and exploitation within it. Petitioning on behalf of their families, and in these terms, avoided any challenge to the patriarchal assumptions governing political participation. But this posture could not conceal the fact that these women were making direct political interventions in a less than deferential way. Like the clothworkers and porters they attributed the slump to the political crisis, arguing that a popish plot existed to plunge England into a war, once Ireland had been overrun. This line of argument led to the extraordinary spectacle of poor women attending the Houses demanding that the kingdom be put in a posture of defence, that popish lords and bishops should be excluded from the House of Lords and that those who were hindering reformation should be identified and punished. The following day, 400 women attended the Houses for an answer and became involved in a scuffle with the Earl of Lennox. ‘Away with these women, we were best to have a parliament of women,’ he apparently said, only to have his staff broken as they tried to block his path. Philip Skippon, who was guarding the House, was told that for every woman there today there would be 500 the following day, since they might as well die there as at home, and they had also apparently threatened to bring their children to starve at the door of the Lords rather than watch them die at home. Lennox and Lord Keeper Littleton were both mobbed by a crowd of women and porters when they left that evening.8