God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  Invited by people within the royal camp to state its terms for settlement, Parliament produced the Nineteen Propositions on 1 June. Here the claims of Parliament to an executive role were unmistakable and prompted a further round of escalation in the constitutional argument. Accepted as a whole they would have made Parliament the sovereign power. Parliament would have had the power to approve who the King chose as councillors, officials and judges. Following the implementation of the Militia Ordinance, the disbandment of the King’s personal forces, and the placing of fortresses in the hands of men approved by Parliament, parliamentary control of military resources would have been complete. Parliament demanded that the church be reformed and governed according to Parliament’s wishes and that no peers created subsequently would have been allowed to sit without the consent of both Houses. It also sought to dictate the King’s foreign policy. These were demands which would have permanently shifted the constitutional position of Parliament. There were also other demands relating to the education of the King’s children and the arrangement of their marriages, the enforcement of the recusancy laws, and the punishment of delinquents.28 Distrust of this particular king had led Parliament into proposing a constitutional revolution; this radicalism and the public insult to the King could hardly be plainer.

  The King’s Answer to the XIX Propositions stated the royalist position in terms of established and respectable political theory. It was drafted by Falkland and Colepeper, who took their stand on the law. Parliament’s propositions, they said, were an attempt to remove a ‘troublesome rub’ from their path – that is, the law of the land, which was the birthright of every Englishman. To accept the propositions would have overthrown not just personal monarchy but also a mixed monarchy, in which the authority of the crown and Parliament were combined. Authority lay with the King-in-Parliament – the King was a part of Parliament, and could not simply be dictated to by the other constituent parts. They also gave a commitment to remove illegal innovations that had crept into the church – a commitment to the preservation of the Reformation within the law which implied again the importance of the law in the regulation of political and religious life. The argument about the estates of the realm had a very respectable lineage, but there was room for disagreement here. Hyde held to the view that the three estates of the realm were the Commons, the Lords spiritual (the bishops) and the Lords temporal (the peers). He felt that Colepeper and Falkland had conceded too much in taking the (equally venerable) line that the King was one of the three estates – making him an equal partner, rather than the King over the three estates. In effect, however, they had mounted a defence of a limited monarch, something that had been taken for granted in 1640.29 Indeed, Colepeper had been a vociferous petitioner in the opening days of the Long Parliament, in defence of the lawful government of the country, and now found himself the spokesman for moderate royalism on the eve of a civil war.

  In response to the Answer, Henry Parker, something of a veteran pamphleteer and controversialist, published his Observations on some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses. This broke new ground in a number of ways. Unperturbed by the royalists” claim to be the defenders of the constitution, he pushed ahead, spelling out very clearly the implications of the recent declarations and demands. In an emergency which threatened the state the King was obliged to follow Parliament’s advice. Parliament was the state itself, with a sovereign power of its own, capable of addressing dangers by legislative, executive or judicial means. Its advice was crucial to supplying the defects of monarchy and if the King did not follow it then the ultimate moving force of all human laws – individual self-preservation and the good of the people (salus populi) justified the Lords and Commons in acting without him.30 Even more daringly, he argued that the King’s Negative Voice rendered all Englishmen slaves. It was based on an argument about freedom which can be traced before 1642 in parliamentary speeches and elsewhere, not least in the controversy over the Petition of Right. To be free, it was said, it was necessary not only to be able to exercise all your rights and freedoms in practice; you also needed to be free, in principle, from any possible constraint. This was because fear of censure or hope of reward would act as a bridle or a spur, distorting your actions as a free man and rendering you, in effect, the creature of another. This was used as an argument in favour of the Bishops Exclusion Bill in January – they should not sit in the House of Lords since their position depended on the King, and they were not, therefore, free to exercise their rights and liberties as free men. Parker now yoked it to the controversy about the Negative Voice, the existence of which rendered all Englishmen ‘slaves’, since it was a continual potential limit on the exercise of their rights and liberties.31

  But was Parker speaking for anyone but himself? It is significant here that Parker was probably also involved in drafting two declarations of May which had flirted with these ideas and his argument about slavery. Parker was secretary to the Committee of Safety established in the summer of 1642, and clearly had a role in drafting many of its papers and letters. From July onwards the committee also had a primary role in drafting declarations and, although Pym was the most prominent member of the committee, it is unlikely that an experienced polemicist like Parker was there only to take dictation.32 Parker’s argument about slavery was taken up in other pamphlets later in the summer – among them a pamphlet called Reasons why this Kingdom ought to adhere to the Parliament. This has plausibly been shown to have been published by presses run by George Bishop and Robert White, who evidently had a line in radical parliamentary publications. Even more intriguingly, they seem to have had connections with Pym and with William Walwyn, the later Leveller. Pym may have been complicit in floating these arguments but, at the point where a very significant line was crossed, the views were expressed as private opinion, not as the official parliamentary line. Instead they appeared as the private opinion of polemicists like Parker or anonymously, as in the case of Reasons (which bore the name of neither author nor publisher).33

  If it is true that Pym was to some degree complicit in this ideological radicalization, seeking either to fly kites or to soften up the public with a clever manipulation of the press, it bears testimony to an increasingly complicated relationship between politicians and the press.34 For example, the publication of parliamentary speeches seems to have been both commonplace and a breach of a longstanding inhibition on publicizing the deliberations of Parliament.35 Nonetheless, from very early in the Long Parliament speeches had been printed, and there were also, from very early on, publications purporting to be speeches which were clearly fictitious – because the supposed speaker had not spoken in the relevant debate or was no longer even a member of the House. Even this did not automatically cause offence, however. Many of John Pym’s printed speeches seem to have been fabrications, for example: an observation that both cuts him down to size a little, while at the same time inflating his importance as a figurehead for influential views.36 But on occasion what was said, or who said it, or the timing, clearly did cause offence and on those occasions sanctions were imposed which might have seemed to some to have been inconsistent.

  Sir Edward Dering offers an instructive case. It was he who famously objected to the printing of the Grand Remonstrance: ‘I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell tales to the people, and talk of the king as a third person’. The experience of these debates was an important moment in his ‘defection’ from the parliamentary cause. He had himself been chair of a committee dealing with ministers” grievances and charged with the licensing of books – he made an early speech complaining about the licensing of crypto-popish books. He had also seen many of his speeches in print, or circulating in manuscript copies, however. On 16 January 1642, at the height of the security scare following the attempt on the Five Members, a collection of his speeches appeared. Styled as moderate, they were highly inflammatory, and very critical of the more radical positions being taken by Parliament. But his parliamentary colleagues were
most offended by the irreverent tone, and the public display of this dirty linen (sentiments not unlike his own reaction to the publication of the Grand Remonstrance). This offended against the view that free speech depended on civility, freedom from public opprobrium and, therefore, secrecy. On 2 February the collection was condemned by the Commons and ordered to be burned by the public hangman. Dering himself was expelled from the House and sent to the Tower, where he remained until discharged on his own petition on 11 February.37 The spectacle of politicians appearing on all sides of these questions about the propriety of publication invited satire. John Taylor, one of the most prolific satirists of the period, for example, published a pamphlet (under the anagrammatic pseudonym Thorny Ailo) which promised on its title page that it was based on shorthand notes taken at a sermon.38

  Such a public breakdown of government by the King-in-Parliament was bound to resonate more widely and the snowstorm of official and semi-official declarations was part of a larger paper war. Thomason acquired more pamphlets per month in this period than during any other: an average of 165 titles each month, with peaks of 200 in January and 231 in August.39 Much of the output consisted of the official statements of the two sides, published speeches or news items, but there was clearly a much wider mobilization of opinion. This was manifest too in petitions and battles for control of local institutions, and in this mobilization there was a concerted attempt to harness existing metaphors and images to fit the current situation. The issues which seemed irreconcilable in national institutions were represented differently in local situations, but this was clearly a crisis which affected all levels of English government.

  In the paper war between Parliament and the King secular issues were at the cutting edge of the conflict. But the motor behind the radical constitutional position, and the grounds on which Parliament’s cause often seemed to rest, was the defence of the true religion.40 This was certainly prominent on both sides of the conflict in the larger pamphlet campaign. Anti-popery, of course, played well for those who had remained in Parliament. In the light of what were seen as recurrent attempts to use force to overawe the guardians of the true religion – the two army plots, the Incident and the attempt on the Five Members – popery could now be seen as an active military threat. This was not new, but was newly urgent, and gained a further impetus from the Irish rebellion. Anti-popery as a polemical argument for further reformation was fused with this more restricted and dangerous form of anti-popery attached to a specific Catholic threat. It served to mobilize opinion in support of radical constitutional as well as religious positions.

  Ireland was a dominant presence in print: in October 15 per cent of the tracts collected by Thomason were concerned with Ireland, rising to 22 and 28 per cent in the following two months. Between January and June 1642 nearly 23 per cent of the collection concerns Ireland, with peaks of one third or more of the total in February and April. In this massive print output stories of Catholic atrocities were clearly exaggerated, and the authors and publishers of those accounts were men with an agenda close to that championed by Pym. An important strand of writing related these atrocities directly to a strong tradition in English Protestantism celebrating the sufferings of true believers, and some passages apparently describing contemporary atrocities seem to have been lifted almost directly from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.41

  They had detractors in the presses, willing to denounce the ‘many fabulous pamphlets that are set out concerning the rebels in Ireland of their outrages and bloody proceedings’, and which identified this episode with a history of the evils of rebellion rather than of Protestant sufferings. But these brave voices were shouting into a strong wind. By late 1641 fears of an Irish invasion were alive in England and Wales, along with the (groundless) fear that recusants would join forces with them.42 In January, John Thomas, likely associate of Pym and inventor of the newsbook, published ‘a true relation’ of a bloody popish plot in Derbyshire, an attempt to blow up the parish church of Bingley, which must have been intended for this audience.43 The title page is larded with promises of details: names, dates and places, as well as a full inventory of a store of arms seized from a Catholic recusant. This plain factual reporting countered the charge of exaggeration, but the pamphlet had a clear and partisan political implication. Thomas Needham, a prominent local recusant of substantial means, employed John Simonds to place thirty-four barrels of gunpowder, faggots, old iron and stones in the vault of the church, with the intention of blowing it up during divine service, ‘when the church was filled with a full number of parishioners’. God’s providence averted the catastrophe, however, when Jacob Francklin, the sexton, arrived at the church to toll the ‘passing bell’ for a parishioner who was gravely ill. Hearing noises in the vault he investigated and disaster was averted. Following investigations by the local magistrates a search of Needham’s house revealed a stock of arms, enough to set out at least one hundred men for war.44 The pamphlet is written with a little style – the narrative is dramatically recounted – but there are some printing errors, so it may have been a rushed production. Given what else we know about Thomas’s publishing, it seems likely that revelation of this store of arms was intended to support the case for the radical security measures promoted in the Commons during January: it was on 18 January that a parliamentary committee had proposed the Militia Ordinance and, a couple of days later, that John Hampden had called for parliamentary control of strongpoints, including the Tower.45

  The pamphlet account of the gunpowder plot in Derbyshire, which was probably fictitious, despite the assurances on the title page

  This was also a story to be understood in the light of previous Catholic plots, of course: the resonances with the Gunpowder Plot are strong in general and in the details (Fawkes and his associates had used thirty-six barrels of powder, along with faggots and other materials), and placed this story in a longer history of providential deliveries from Catholic plots. It was this general lesson which was, ostensibly, the main concern of the pamphlet: ‘This kingdom hath had too frequent experience of their mischievous intentions and plots, which had the all-seeing eye of Heaven not prevented, we would long ago been brought to utter ruin and destruction’. Like the plague sore of the previous autumn, the inhumanity of the plot revealed the corruption of the beliefs from which it sprang. Providential delivery bore testimony to God’s favour, and to the persistent blindness of Catholics to His purposes. Their resilience in the face of constant frustration was thus evidence of a more fundamental error: ‘Mischief, the child of heresy, cannot want instruments to prosecute and bring it to perfection, and the devil, who is the author of all unlawful attempts is always ready at hand to further and set forward any dissensions, and damnable enterprises’.46

  Anti-popery was not necessarily about Catholics – it was a language with which to denounce the danger of all threats to the Reformation. In the past, it had been possible to distinguish between the threat of popery and the more acceptable presence of Catholic recusants and it is well attested that practical local toleration of Catholics existed alongside a keen awareness of the threat of popery in the abstract.47 In these fraught political circumstances, however, these distinctions were in danger of breaking down. Pym and others had conflated popery with Catholic conspiracy for months, but the Irish rebellion and the year of plots gave this line of argument its maximum appeal. Many parts of the country experienced Catholic scares during these months, fuelled by knowledge that violence in Ireland was extending widely in January and February.48 There is some evidence that it began to erode the practical toleration of recusants in provincial England, and in August anti-Catholic scares were to give way in Essex to attacks on the houses of Catholics.49 This atmosphere was also bad for the prospects of those Catholic priests unfortunate enough to be arrested. Seven priests were arrested and executed in the aftermath of the Irish rising. Two of them, a Benedictine called Alban Roe and an ageing secular priest, Father Thomas Greene, met their ends at Tyburn in late January, and on 22
March further executions followed. This was despite, or perhaps because of, the King’s record in securing reprieves for Catholic priests. Such deaths were gleefully reported in pamphlets, of course. Arthur Browne, a seminary priest, was condemned at Dorchester assizes on 16 August, and his public recantation was reported for the edification of a wider audience in London nine days later. Hugh Green, condemned at the same assizes, met a grotesque end, which reportedly culminated in a game of football using his severed head.50

  This heady mix of anti-papistical writing seems to have underpinned mobilizations across most of the country in support for the emerging parliamentary position. In the aftermath of the attempt on the Five Members, a number of county petitions were submitted, co-ordinating provincial concerns about the future of Protestantism with the defence of parliamentary liberties. In fact, between December 1641 and May 1642, thirty-seven of England’s forty counties petitioned Parliament, along with a number of Welsh counties and boroughs. Some counties petitioned more than once, and Westmorland added its petition to the pile in August. The contents of these petitions suggest that those promoting Pym’s position were more successful at mobilizing provincial opinion than those with alternative visions. Most concentrated on anti-popery, evil counsellors, preaching and scandalous ministers, the decay of trade and the militia. Rather than talk of confrontation they tended to set out terms for an accommodation; but of course to urge accommodation was to urge that someone shift their position, and that often entailed taking a position on the national debate.51 Many of these petitions, of course, were printed, suggesting that these ‘county’ postures were intended as contributions to the wider debate.52