The Cessation was (to put it no more strongly) unlikely to be well-received in England and Scotland, particularly since its purpose was to allow troops to be brought back and used against the English parliament. It brought an end to Sir Edward Dering’s flirtation with royalism, for example. Returning from Oxford he was examined at Westminster, and said ‘that since the cessation in Ireland, and seeing so many papists and Irish rebels in the king’s army and the anti-parliament set up at Oxford, and the King’s counsels wholly governed by the popish party, his conscience would not permit him to stay longer with them’. He was allowed to compound for his delinquency, his treatment to be a model ‘for all others that would come in after him who was the first’.5 Perhaps more damagingly, the Cessation made Charles’s hopes of getting Scottish support seem even more remote. The truce left Monro with a choice: to enjoy the benefits of the Cessation or to face the Confederate army without support from Ormond. Ormond’s diplomacy therefore also aimed at preventing Monro fighting for Parliament, if possible. By early November the arrival of Irish troops had been negotiated and on 15 September a cessation was agreed, to last twelve months.6
While backing the plan for the Cessation in Ireland, Charles had also sought support in Scotland, hoping to exploit cracks in the Covenanting coalition, but these were more or less contradictory policies. He did not seem concerned that his Irish policy would upset others among his allies, or that Sir Edward Hyde (supporter of the policy of winning the war by subverting London through such means as the Waller plot) was not aware of these plans for Ireland. Hyde had been knighted as recently as February, joining the Privy Council and being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer shortly afterwards-he was apparently a rising man in Charles’s counsels, but he was in the dark about the Irish policy. Hamilton, the leading Scot at the English court and long-suffering adviser to Charles, who currently enjoyed Charles’s confidence, thought that by normal means of aristocratic intrigue he would be able to generate support for the King in Scotland. In particular, the leading role played by the Earl of Argyll in the Covenanting movement was generating hostility in Scotland, particularly among his rivals, and this might form the basis for a royalist party without the necessity of making war in Scotland. The price of such a deal was likely to be a secure Presbyterian settlement, but making such guarantees appear convincing would be even harder than before as a result of his Irish policy.7 Charles clearly saw his government in a ‘three kingdoms’ perspective, and was alert to the implications of dissent in one kingdom for the good order of the other two. It is hard to credit, therefore, how relaxed he was about the obvious difficulties of promoting a royalist alliance in three kingdoms, or at least one that was not obnoxious to many of his subjects.
An alternative vision for Scotland was the more militant one proposed by the Earl of Montrose. He was keen to create a royalist force in Scotland, and met Henrietta Maria soon after her landing in Bridlington, hoping to get the King’s support for a rising in Scotland. Later in the year he met Charles in person outside Gloucester during the siege, to discuss this plan, which was less palatable than more moderate advice but probably more realistic. As early as 1640, when the Covenanters had been divided about the wisdom of crossing into England, Montrose had been able to gain support for an anti-Argyll covenant and hostility to Argyll remained significant. Another potential ally was the Earl of Antrim, anxious to regain his lands in Ulster from occupation by Monro, and also hostile to Argyll’s domination of the west coast of Scotland. In the late summer of 1641 the Earl of Antrim had received orders from Charles I to raise troops in Ireland for deployment in Scotland. Now Montrose backed a plan (the ‘Antrim plot’) to use 2,000 Irish Catholic troops under Antrim to invade Argyll’s estates in western Scotland, while Antrim was also commissioned to send 10,000 men to England to fight for the royalists.8
Hamilton’s hope was that a moderate royalist cause could be built in Scotland without resort to war, but the Irish policy certainly made this uphill work. Montrose’s militancy, while not necessarily the best thing for Scotland, was the better pair for the policy of Cessation in Ireland. However, further to Hamilton’s policy a convention of estates was summoned in April 1643, but when it eventually met in June 1643 it was solidly pro-parliamentarian. This was perhaps predictable given that the English parliament had been seen as the guarantee of the Covenanting revolution in 1641, and the prospects of a cessation can only really have reinforced this view. Revelation of the Antrim plot was certainly the nail in the coffin of the moderate alliance. Its effect in London was also dramatic: according to Simonds D’Ewes, ‘The discovery of this plot did more work on most men than anything that had happened during these miserable calamities and civil wars of England, because it seemed now that there was a fixed resolution in the Popish party utterly to extirpate the true Protestant religion in England, Scotland, and Ireland’.9
Charles’s strategy, of pursuing all options at once-peace in Ireland, armed intervention in Scotland using Catholic troops, the capture of London from within and negotiated support in Scotland-was under- standable, but untenable.10 The Scottish convention of estates was dominated by Argyll and his supporters. Argyll was a supporter of the parliamentary cause and on good terms with Pym, and after the Antrim plot the game was up for moderate royalism in Scotland. Antrim, whose capture had led to revelation of the plot, was imprisoned in Carrick-fergus, from where a dramatic escape allowed him to join the Confederates in Waterford. Meanwhile commissioners were sent from England to Scotland to negotiate a civil league and a religious covenant, arriving in August: what had seemed to be the likely outcome was indeed the eventual result-that Parliament would secure the help of the Covenanters. This produced a substantial army the following spring.11 Charles, by negotiating a truce in Ireland, would be able to deploy the Dublin government’s troops in England.
The Covenanters wanted the same thing from Parliament that they wanted from the King-security for a Presbyterian settlement. Here was one group who could certainly tell everyone what the war was about. But although there was much common ground about the preaching of the Word and purification of the church and liturgy, it was not clear that Parliament had been fighting to establish Presbyterian church government in England. The Westminster Assembly had been convened in order to discuss the form of a church settlement in England and so, in a fundamental sense, the divines were debating war aims. These discussions were therefore crucial to the military alliance with the Covenanters, and might offer the means to make common ground ideologically. Certainly its composition pointed that way-no Episcopalians sat, for obvious reasons-and it is also clear that the temper of the assembly owed something to Scottish influence. The task in front of it was both very difficult and of fundamental importance, and the assembly showed every sign of wanting to move at a pace appropriate to that task. From its first meeting, on 1 July, it proceeded slowly over issues of procedure and the rules for debate. From mid-July onwards a painstaking discussion of the Articles began. But it was undertaking that task in conditions of civil war, and with the urgent need to foster unity not only within England but also between the parliamentarians and Covenanters.12
When parliamentary commissioners had arrived in Scotland on 7 August, their priority was to secure troops. The Covenanters, however, were more concerned with securing closer union of the churches, or were at least more concerned with extracting that as the price of military support. A precondition of the military alliance became, for the Covenanters, a joint band or covenant to pursue shared religious objectives. In other words, where the parliamentarians were seeking a civil alliance, the Covenanters wanted a covenant; and for reasons internal to England that meant that the English commissioners had to try to restrain the influence of strict adherence to Presbyterian discipline on the shape of the covenant.13 The weakness of Parliament’s military position in England did not allow for robust negotiation.
This was the context in which the Solemn League and Covenant was produced. It was the document
that the Covenanters wanted, not a straightforward statement of the parliamentary cause as seen by its English adherents. It was intended that the covenant would be sworn by all the inhabitants of the three kingdoms and would commit them to the promotion of a common religious practice. Significantly that entailed the preservation of the kirk, but the reform of the English and Irish churches. This reform was to be undertaken according to the example of the best reformed churches, and since no reform was proposed of the kirk, it is pretty clear which churches the drafters had in mind. Henry Vane, the chief parliamentary negotiator, is credited with securing a little wriggle room for those uncomfortable with Scottish presbytery: a clause was changed in Westminster so that reform should be pursued ‘according to the word of God’ rather than by the ‘same holy word’ that governed the kirk. It was not simply a religious covenant, since subscribers were also bound to preserve both Houses of Parliament and the King’s person and authority, and to seek the punishment of malignants as well as opponents of religion. In fact only two of the six clauses were purely religious.14 Nonetheless, the religious bond was close to the heart of the military alliance, and like all religious commitments it posed potentially very serious problems of conscience.15
There can be little doubt that this religious programme was closer to the mainstream of Scottish opinion than of English, or even the centre ground of the parliamentary coalition. For the Covenanters the best security for the gains they had made in 1640 and 1641 lay in the export of their church settlement, and that was in hand here, but many of those who fought for Parliament in England had not taken up arms for that. Moreover, the covenant pledged to extirpate heresy and schism. Sectarians could hope for little sympathy here, and respectable Congregationalists might look askance too. The pay-off for the English parliament was priceless, however: alongside this mutual covenant to pursue reformation the Covenanters demanded £30,000 per month from the English parliament in return for sending 21,000 men to bolster Parliament’s ailing cause.16
The Scottish Convention adjourned on 26 August, the day that the draft of the Solemn League reached Westminster, where it was forwarded to the Assembly of Divines. Amendments were added in early September but negotiations were taking place with Gloucester under siege and Parliament’s military fortunes far from thriving: nice distinctions over the precise form of the most desirable form of Protestant worship were allowed to slip notice, in the interests of political and military expediency. Scots commissioners arrived on 7 September and the covenant was finally sworn to by the Commons and the Assembly of Divines on 25 September.17
By October the assembly had returned to the business of a confession of faith for the English church, but again these careful deliberations were overtaken by the more pressing concern with the unity of the parliamentarian-Covenanter alliance. On 12 October the assembly was busy on the sixteenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles, especially ‘upon that clause of it which mentions departing from Grace’.18 At that point the Houses ordered the assembly, with some urgency, to consider the discipline and liturgy of the church instead. Although opinion on the issue of church government was poised between Presbyterians, Independents and Erastians, its deliberations took place in the light of the clear military and political significance of an alliance with the Presbyterian Scots. In this new work on discipline and liturgy, the hand of the Scottish commissioners can clearly be seen. The five Scottish commissioners had originally been chosen by the Scottish General Assembly, ‘to treat with the English parliament or Assembly for the union of England and Scotland in one form of kirk government, one confession of faith, one catechism and one directory for worship’.19 The Houses empowered the Westminster Assembly to elect a committee to treat with the Covenanters, and this standing committee came to exercise a considerable influence over the deliberations of the assembly as a whole. Initially it was a means of agreeing the Solemn League and Covenant, but on 17 October, as a result of Scottish pressure, another standing committee was formed to discuss the union of the churches – what had initially been a means of securing a political and military alliance had mutated into the instrument for the achievement of a union of the churches. 20 Robert Baillie, the leading Scottish Presbyterian minister, who was one of the commissioners, claimed that the influence of this committee was pervasive, and the records of the assembly seem to bear out that view. From the autumn onwards debate in the Westminster Assembly took a distinctly Presbyterian direction, one which was to cause significant problems within the parliamentary alliance.
Parliament was now co-ordinating a military campaign built around the call for further reformation defined ever more closely not simply in anti-episcopal but also in actively Presbyterian terms. The anti-Laudian alliance which had sustained opposition to the crown at the opening of the Long Parliament was far easier to mobilize than one in favour of this particular brand of reformation, but for the time being it was not in anyone’s interest to dwell on the potential difficulties.
There was much common ground, of course. The Solemn League and Covenant committed its signatories to the extirpation of ‘Popery, prelacy (that is, Church government by Archbishops, Bishops, their Chancellors and Commissaries, Deans, Deans and Chapters, Archdeacons, and all other ecclesiastical officers depending on that hierarchy), superstition, heresy, schism, profaneness, and whatsoever shall be found to be contrary to sound doctrine and the power of godliness’.21 Much of this was dear to the hearts of English parliamentarians: popery, superstition and profaneness certainly; prelacy almost certainly; and heresy, subject to negotiation over definitions. Schism, however, was a much more controversial term, bearing on the nature of church government to follow from the abolition of prelacy.
As we have seen, and perhaps not coincidentally, the campaign against popery, superstition and profaneness had been stepped up during 1643. Scottish commissioners in London during the spring and summer of 1643 were witness to a more advanced process of purification than anything that had previously been undertaken as the Harley Committee, supported by the authorities in London, had started its campaign against exactly these things. Reformation of the physical space of English churches and towns, and purification of the liturgy, could be identified as pushing forward the preaching of the Word, and the right administration of the sacraments. Completion of the military alliance with the Covenanters coincided with an escalation of this second phase of iconoclasm, a campaign which was apparently more top-down than the relatively spontaneous reactions against Laudianism in 1640-42. On 26 August, the day that the Solemn League and Covenant was received at Westminster and immediately referred to the Westminster Assembly, the Lords approved an ordinance ‘for the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all monuments of superstition or idolatry’. It had been in production since June, and the terms echoed the Commons order of 8 September 1641 and the remit of the Harley Committee. But it was also broader in scope, more detailed and conducted nationally on a legislative basis. It called for the removal of altar tables and tables of stone. Communion tables were to be moved away from the east end of the church and all rails removed; tapers, candlesticks and basins taken off the communion table and no such things to be used. Crucifixes and crosses, images and pictures of the Virgin Mary and the saints, and superstitious inscriptions were all to be removed. This was a far wider campaign than the attacks on Laudian innovations in 1640-42: Michael Herring, for example, the churchwarden of St Mary Woolchurch, London, had at that time been reprimanded for defacing superstitious inscriptions. In adding crosses, the saints and superstitious inscriptions the legislation went further than previous orders, and also embraced not just the interiors of places of worship but also churchyards and other places belonging to churches and chapels, and ‘any other open space’. The orders were not simply for removal either, but that these things should be defaced.22
It was this ordinance that set in train one of the more remarkable careers of the 1640s. Through the following spring an otherwise obscure man, William Dowsing, set about his own
work in God’s cause with great energy. A working farmer of relatively modest means, Dowsing was clearly a godly man. He collected a serious library of religious books, the earliest acquisitions illegal imports from the Low Countries dealing with separatism. In his mid-forties by the time war broke out, he served as Provost Marshal to the Eastern Association armies from August 1643 – responsible for military discipline. In December of that year, however, he surrendered his commission in favour of appointment as commissioner for removing the monuments of idolatry and superstition from the churches of the Eastern Association. This he did, with tremendous commitment, and over the next four months he visited 200 churches. On 15 April he visited three churches near his home in Suffolk, removing fifty-six superstitious pictures. This was the end of his most vigorous phase: in the coming five months he visited barely thirty more.23 Perhaps his farm absorbed his energies over the summer, and by the autumn the Earl of Manchester’s command was no longer secure. Thereafter, this kind of purification became the responsibility of churchwardens. In a relatively brief period, however, the first third or half of 1644, a yeoman farmer had cleansed most of the churches in Cambridgeshire and, with at least eight deputies, most of those in Suffolk too. There are signs of his presence in Essex and Norfolk too.24
In all this Dowsing was careful to act within the law, interpreting the ordinances empowering him very carefully: what he took into account changed as the legislation changed, and he sometimes argued the case with local authorities. The actual work of destruction was often left in the hands of churchwardens, constables or respectable local gentlemen. Here, as in the destruction of Cheapside Cross or the activities of the Harley Committee, was iconoclasm shorn of any association with sedition or lawlessness. As with those measures too, here was an opportunity for godly solidarity. Dowsing, almost certainly an Independent by inclination, was acting under orders from Manchester, a godly man who inclined towards Presbyterianism. Manchester, although conservative on church government, was very active in promoting the ejection of scandalous ministers and his father had, in the 1630s, taken a sympathetic view of the famous iconoclast Henry Sherfield. He was one of the members of the Lords who had supported the Commons order of September 1641, suggesting a long-term commitment to this issue.25 Dowsing’s books contain annotations which reveal a loss of confidence from 1645 onwards, as divisions among the godly and anxiety about the abuses of religious liberty by sectarians sapped his confidence about the authority of the cause.26 But in 1644 these concerns lay in the future – here was a high-water mark of godly activism, in which differences over church government were marginal, or not of the essence.
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