God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  70. John Walter, ‘“Abolishing superstition with sedition”?: The Politics of Popular Iconoclasm in England, 1640–1642’, PP, 183 (2004), 79–123; John Walter, ‘Popular Iconoclasm and the Politics of the Parish in Eastern England, 1640–1642’, HJ, 47 (2004), 261–90.

  71. Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 90–91.

  72. John Walter, ‘“Affronts & insolencies”: The Voices of Radwinter and Popular Opposition to Laudianism’, EHR, 122 (2007), 35–60.

  73. John Walter, ‘Anti-Popery and the Stour Valley Riots of 1642’, in David Chadd (ed.), History of Religious Dissent in East Anglia, III (Norwich, 1996), pp. 121–40, at pp. 121–2. For the fear of fire see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, 1991 edn), pp. 17–20.

  74. HEH, EL 7860, Castle to Bridgewater, 24 September 1640. See also EL 7863, Castle to Bridgewater, 29 September 1640; Hibbard, Popish Plot, pp. 166–7.

  75. The examples are from Russell, Fall, pp. 139, 142. Russell’s judgement that ‘It would seem that soldiers were capable of turning against anyone they could blame for their predicament’ (p. 142) seems no more true of ‘soldiers’ than of, say, ‘the aristocracy’.

  76. HEH, EL 7847, Castle to Bridgewater, 8 August 1640.

  77. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp. 192–202.

  78. Ibid., pp. 205–7; Russell, Fall, pp. 143–4; Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 93–4.

  79. For the Covenanters” difficulties see Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp. 208–10. Russell emphasizes the fact that the English took the wrong ground: Russell, Fall, pp. 144–5. The battle is described in Fissel, Bishops” Wars, pp. 53–9..

  80. Russell, Fall, pp. 149–64; Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp. 210–12.

  81. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007). Adamson’s important study was published as this book went to press, and I have been unable to take full account of its findings. For the peerage See also Brian Manning, ‘The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I’, in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973), pp. 37–80.

  82. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, pp. 98–9; for London see above, pp. 116–17.

  83. ‘Russell, Fall, pp. 157–64.

  84. Holmes, Lincolnshire, p. 137.

  85. Pauline Croft, ‘Trading with the Enemy, 1585–1604’, HJ, 32 (1989), 281–302; Michael J. Braddick, ‘“Upon this instant extraordinarie occasion”: Military Mobilisation in Yorkshire in the Armada Year and Thereafter’, HLQ, 61 (2000 for 1998), 429–55.

  86. The exchange is reported in Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, 1978), p. 189.

  87. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp. 133–7.

  88. Russell, Fall, p. 86; CSPD, 1638–9, p. 167; 1639–40, p. 585.

  89. See also David Smith: ‘In many ways it makes sense to see the Short Parliament as a continuation, indeed a finale, of the Parliaments of the 1620s’: The Stuart Parliaments 1603–1689 (London, 1999), p. 120.

  90. For the following see David Como, ‘Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, PP, 196 (forthcoming).

  91. Ibid. See Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001).

  92. Lindley, Popular Politics, p. 33.

  93. BL, Add MS 21,935, fos. 12r-12v. This does not seem to have been reproduced in Webb (ed.), Historical Notices. For Wallington see Paul Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in 17th Century London (London, 1985).

  94. HEH, EL 7859, A letter from a gentleman of Newcastle to a friend in London, 8 September 1640. This letter circulated in manuscript copy: see below, n. 98. For the power of prophecy see Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, ch. 13, esp. pp. 469–93. For influential studies see Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, NJ, 1990); Sharon Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII (Woodbridge, 1991); Ethan Howard Shagan, ‘Rumours and Popular Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 30–66; Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (eds.), Prophecy: The Power of Inspired Language in History 1300–2000 (Stroud, 1997). Prophecy is placed in the broader context of the radical potential within popular politics by Krista J. Kesselring, ‘Deference and Dissent in Tudor England: Reflections on Sixteenth-Century Protest’, History Compass, 3:1 (2005).

  95. HEH, EL 7831, Castle to Bridgewater, 11 April 1640; EL 7832, Castle to Bridgewater, 11 May 1640; EL 7842, Castle to Bridgewater, 6 July 1640; EL 7838, Castle to Bridgewater, 23 June 1640. For other examples see Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 30–36.

  96. Fissel, Bishops” Wars, pp. 25–6. According to Robert Woodford’s diary, the eclipse was observed in Northamptonshire between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, ibid., n. 82.

  97. The phrase ‘oligarchic centralism’ is from Allan I. Macinnes, ‘The Scottish Constitution, 1638–1651: The Rise and Fall of Oligarchic Centralism’, in Morrill (ed.), Scottish National Covenant, pp. 106–33.

  98. HEH, EL 7859, A letter from a gentleman of Newcastle to a friend in London, 8 September 1640. Howell notes four existing manuscript copies of this letter: Roger Howell, ‘Newcastle and the Nation: The Seventeenth-Century Experience’, in R. C. Richardson (ed.), The English Civil Wars: Local Aspects (Stroud, 1997), pp. 309–29, p. 326n. For sympathy with the Covenanters in Newcastle prior to their occupation, and diminishing sympathy thereafter, see Roger Howell, Newcastle upon Tyne and the Puritan Revolution: A Study of Civil War in North England (Oxford, 1967), esp. pp. 122–41. Following defeat, anxious measures were taken for defence against the Scots, particularly in the north: Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 39, 96. For the economic dislocation arising from the disruption of the coal trade and for the unpopularity of the royal army see ibid., pp. 57–9, 97–103; for the latter point See also Ronan Bennett, ‘War and Disorder: Policing the Soldiery in Civil War Yorkshire’, in Mark Charles Fissel (ed.), War and Government in Britain, 1598–1650 (Manchester, 1991), pp. 248–73, at pp. 251–3.

  4. We Dream Now of a Golden Age

  1. I am using the term loosely to embrace not just the City of London, but Westminster and suburbs too. There is a huge literature on early modern London. For an overview and bibliography see Jeremy Boulton, ‘London 1540–1700’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 2: 1540–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 315–46; and the important essays collected in A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (eds.), London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis (London, 1986), and Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester, 2000). For its overseas trade See also Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge, 1993), and Ben Coates, The Impact of the English Civil War on the Economy of London, 1642–50 (Aldershot, 2004). For the increase in litigation see Christopher W. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The ‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986); Christopher Brooks, ‘Interpersonal Conflict and Social Tension: Civil Litigation in England, 1640–1870’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 357–99. For Westminster see J. F. Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community, 1525–1640 (Manchester, 2005). For the national growth of consumption see Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2005).

  2. For an overview and further reference see C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change. England 1500–1700, 2 vols. 1: People, Land and Towns (Cambridge, 1984), esp. pp. 187–91; E. A. Wrigley, ‘A Simple Model of London’s Importance in
Changing English Society and Economy, 1650–1750’, reprinted in E. A. Wrigley, People, Cities and Wealth: The Transformation of Traditional Society (Oxford, 1987), pp. 133–56.

  3. Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics 1625–1643 (Oxford, 1961), chs. 1–2; for the earlier period see Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991); for the religious diversity and the ‘Puritan underground’ see Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001); David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, 2004); David R. Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London’, HJ, 46 (2003), 263–94; David R. Como and Peter Lake, ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London: The Strange Case of Peter Shaw and its Contexts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 50 (1999), 684–715; Peter Lake and David R. Como, ‘“Orthodoxy” and Its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of “Consensus” in the London (Puritan) “Underground”’, JBS, 39 (2000), 34–70.

  4. Roger Finlay and Beatrice Shearer, ‘Population Growth and Suburban Expansion’, in Beier and Finlay (eds.), London, pp. 37–59; Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987).

  5. For important overviews see Ian Archer, ‘Popular Politics in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, in Griffiths and Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis, pp. 26–46; and Keith Lindley, ‘Riot Prevention and Control in Early Stuart London’, TRHS, 5th ser., 33 (1983), 109–26. For the Protestant calendar see David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London, 1989); for 1623 see Thomas Cogswell, ‘England and the Spanish Match’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (London, 1989), pp. 107–33.

  6. Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), p. 6. For evocations of talk on the streets of revolutionary London see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), ch. 3; Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (London, 2005), pp. 135–6.

  7. Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 8–9; See also David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 114–16.

  8. Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 10, 33; Pearl, London and the Outbreak, pp. 174–5.

  9. Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981), pp. 1–2; David Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973), p. 25; Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 40–41.

  10. Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Three Foreigners: The Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution’, reprinted in Hugh Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, and Other Essays (London, 1984), pp. 237–93; J. H. Elliott, ‘The Year of the Three Ambassadors’, in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (eds.), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981), pp. 165–81.

  11. Following the summary in Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 157–8. For the debate about the extent of popular participation in parliamentary elections prior to 1640 see Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People: Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975); Mark A. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986); Richard Cust, ‘Politics and the Electorate in the 1620s’, in Cust and Hughes, Conflict in Early Stuart England, pp. 134–67. For some examples see Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660 (London, 1975), pp. 248–51; Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 119–30; A. R. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Gloucestershire 1640–1672 (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 26–8. Counties further from London may have had fewer ideological contests: Anthony Fletcher, ‘National and Local Awareness in the County Communities’, in Howard Tomlinson (ed.), Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government (London, 1983), pp. 151–74, at p. 173. For the petitions See also Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. xxv–xxvii.

  12. John Rushworth, Historical Collections: The Second Part (London, 1686 edition), p. 1338. For another full transcript see Sheffield University Library, Hartlib Papers, 55/5/1a-4b. The denunciation of monopolists is quoted at greater length in Michael J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester, 1996), pp. 208–9. It is possible that Colepeper did not actually deliver the speech, merely depositing a script with Rushworth, but this seems unlikely: Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), p. 219n.

  13. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, p. 158.

  14. Russell, Fall, pp. 214–21.

  15. Ibid., pp. 221–2.

  16. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1978), p. 14; See also EL 66705, Richard Kinge to Edward Parker, 12 December 1640. For the orchestration of this ‘pageant of power’, see John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007), pp. 128–30.

  17. Lindley, Popular Politics, p. 14.

  18. Quoted in Manning, English People, p. 15; and Lindley, Popular Politics, p. 14. See also Russell, Fall, pp. 221–2.

  19. Manning, English People, pp. 14–16. For Wallington see above, p. 109.

  20. David L. Smith, The Stuart Parliaments 1603–1689 (London, 1999), pp. 71–5; Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 37–8; for the list of surviving select committees after the first purge see J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 216–17. For parliamentary procedure, and its predication on the importance of achieving consensus rather than decisions, see Mark A. Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 11–15, and on the Committee of the Whole House as a means to achieve that, Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 38–42.

  21. James S. Hart, Justice upon Petition: The House of Lords and the Reformation of Justice 1621–1675 (London, 1991), pp. 3–4.

  22. Russell, Fall, ch. 6, esp. pp. 164–205; David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution 1637–44: The Triumph of the Covenanters (Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 214–23.

  23. Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 92–4; Russell, Fall, pp. 174–5. See, in general, Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Fast Sermons of the Long Parliament’, reprinted in Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, pp. 297–344; and John Frederick Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars, 1640–8 (Princeton, NJ, 1969).

  24. Russell, Fall, esp. pp. 164–7.

  25. For their domination of the committees, and the influence that gave them over the flow and pace of business, see Adamson, Noble Revolt, esp. ch. 4.

  26. For this and the following paragraphs see Conrad Russell, ‘Pym, John (1584–1643)’, ODNB, 45, pp. 624–40; Russell, Fall, chs. 5–6. Russell’s position is challenged in Adamson, Noble Revolt, esp. ch. 5. Unfortunately this work appeared as the current book was going to press and I have been unable to take full account of its arguments.

  27. See above, p. 92.

  28. For the speech see Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. xix–xxv; Russell, Fall, pp. 216–17, quotation at p. 216.

  29. For King Pym, see Jack H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, Mass., 1941). For more measured accounts of his role see Russell, ‘Pym’; Russell, Fall; Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 164–7; John Morrill, ‘The Unweariableness of Mr Pym: Influence and Eloquence in the Long Parliament’, in Susan Dwyer Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995), pp. 19–54.

  30. Conrad Russell, ‘Russell, Franc
is, Fourth Earl of Bedford (bap. 1587, d. 1641)’, ODNB, 48, pp. 241–50.

  31. Russell, Fall, esp. pp. 238–58.

  32. Ibid., ch. 6.

  33. Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 37–8, 51. Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 158–65, takes the most alarmed contemporary comment at face value; for the hopes of the godly see ibid., ch. 8.

  34. Extracts reprinted in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 171–5.

  35. See above, pp. 5–6.

  36. Lindley, pp. Popular Politics, pp. 14–16.

  37. Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 92.

  38. Ibid., p. 96; Hirst agrees that Dering was responding to constituency pressure, but feels that despite the moderation of the language Dering was probably seen as an advocate of the abolition of episcopacy: Derek Hirst, “The Defection of Sir Edward Dering, 1640–1641”’, reprinted in Peter Gaunt (ed.), The English Civil War (Oxford, 2000), pp. 207–25, esp. pp. 216–17.

  39. For the mobilization of other petitions see Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 192–8; Anthony Fletcher, ‘Petitioning and the Outbreak of the Civil War in Derbyshire’, Derbyshire Archaeological Journal, 113 (1973), 34–8; David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, NJ, 2000), ch. 8. For detailed discussions of the local politics of petitions from the following autumn see John Walter, ‘Confessional Politics in pre-Civil War Essex: Prayer Books, Profanations, and Petitions’, HJ, 44 (2001), 677–701; Peter Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions: Local Politics in National Context, Cheshire, 1641’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 259–89.

  40. Compare the dates of delivery with the timings of important parliamentary debates: Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 92, 98–103. For the development of the debates See also A. J. Fletcher, ‘Concern for Renewal in the Root and Branch Debates of 1641’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History: Papers Read at the Fifteenth Summer Meeting and Sixteenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Studies in Church History, 14) (Oxford, 1977), pp. 279–86.