God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  41. Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 98–9.

  42. Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 17–18, quotation at p. 17. Such debates had a prehistory in early Stuart unease about ‘popularity’, and the ambivalent attitude towards the ‘public sphere’. See above, pp. 48–53, 56 and the works cited there.

  43. George Digby, The third speech of the Lord George Digby (London, 1641); Nathaniel Fiennes, A speech of the honorable Nathanael Fiennes, (second son to the right honourable the Lord Say) in answere to the third speech of the Lord George Digby (London, 1641).

  44. Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 99–107, quotations at pp. 99, 100.

  45. Russell, Fall, pp. 223–4; for the text of the Act see Gardiner, CD, pp. 144–55, quotation at p. 144.

  46. Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 22–3.

  47. Michael J. Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England: Local Administration and Response (Woodbridge, 1994), ch. 2; for Henry Best see pp. 74–5.

  48. Russell, Fall, pp. 234, 242.

  49. Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation, pp. 81–3.

  50. As a result of the financial difficulties of the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, this vision of the crown finances was increasingly unrealistic, but it remained widely held.

  51. Braddick, Nerves of State, pp. 49–55, and, for the praetermitted custom, ibid., p. 133.

  52. Ibid., pp. 52–3.

  53. Russell, Fall, pp. 256–8, 346–50, 357–64, 436–7, and, for the 1641 Book of Rates, ibid., p. 256.

  54. Ibid., p. 258.

  55. Michael J. Braddick, ‘Administrative Performance: The Representation of Political Authority in Early Modern England’, in Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 166–87; Thomas Cogswell, Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State and Provincial Conflict (Manchester, 1998); see above, pp. 65–7.

  56. See above, p. 96. For a convincing reading of this crucial speech see Russell, Fall, pp. 125–9. For the impeachment see ibid., p. 211; Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 3–4.

  57. Russell, Fall, pp. 274–94;See also his important essays on ‘The Theory of Treason in the Trial of Strafford’ and ‘The First Army Plot of 1641’, reprinted in Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (London, 1990), pp. 89–109 and 281–302; Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 7–14, quotation at p. 14; Manning, English People, pp. 20–23. The account given here should be read in the light of John Adamson’s important revision: Adamson, Noble Revolt, chs. 8–9.

  58. Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 21–2; HEH, EL 66707, John Blackburne to John Braddill, 4 May 1641; Manning, English People, pp. 23–5; Andrew Sharp, ‘Lilburne, John (1615”–1657)’, ODNB, 33, pp. 773–83.

  59. Lindley, Popular Politics, p. 23; Manning, English People, p. 26; Tai Liu, ‘Burges, Cornelius (d. 1665)’, ODNB, 8, pp. 751–5.

  60. Lindley, Popular Politics, p. 24; Manning, English People, pp. 26–8.

  61. Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 26–35; Pearl, London and the Outbreak, pp. 228–36.

  62. Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 25–6; Manning, English People, pp. 30–31; Terence Kilburn and Anthony Milton, ‘The Public Context of the Trial and Execution of Strafford’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 230–51, esp. pp. 242–51.

  63. Lindley, Popular Politics, p. 26.

  64. Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 27–8; Russell, Fall, pp. 333, 340 (gelding); See also Manning, English People, p. 27; Cressy, England on Edge, p. 43.

  65. There is a clear summary in Russell, ‘Fall’, pp. 248–9.

  66. Smith, Stuart Parliaments, p. 124.

  67. Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 167.

  68. Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation, pp. 234–5. See also Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 49–50.

  69. For the negotiations see Russell, Fall, pp. 346–50, 357–64, 436–7. For the text see Gardiner, CD, pp. 159–62, quotations at pp. 160, 162.

  70. For this calculation see Braddick, Nerves of State, pp. 9–12, and fig. 1.3.

  71. David Stevenson, ‘Graham, James, First Marquess of Montrose (1612–1650)’, ODNB, 23, pp. 189–95.

  72. For the text see Gardiner, CD, pp. 163–6. For the politics of this period see Fletcher, Outbreak, ch. 2; Russell, Fall, ch. 9.

  73. Gardiner, CD, pp. 155–6. For a concise discussion of the introduction and contents of the Protestation see Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 14–16; David Cressy, ‘The Protestation Protested, 1641 and 1642’, HJ, 45 (2002), 251–79, at pp. 253–6.

  74. Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 113; for Baillie see Russell, Fall, pp. 294–5.

  75. Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 15–16; Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism and the Political Nation, 1553–1682 (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 52–3; David Martin Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Wood-bridge, 1999), esp. pp. 116–19, 273–4.

  76. Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 77–9; Russell, Fall, pp. 294–5.

  77. Cressy, ‘Protestation’, p. 254.

  78. Ibid., pp. 257–9.

  79. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 292–4; Cressy, ‘Protestation’, pp. 267–8; Russell, Fall, p. 295.

  80. Walter, Understanding, pp. 292–3; Cressy, ‘Protestation’, pp. 259–62.

  81. Walter, Understanding, pp. 295–6.

  82. John Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974), pp. 36–7.

  83. John Walter, ‘“Affronts & insolencies”: The Voices of Radwinter and Popular Opposition to Laudianism’, EHR, 122 (2007), 35–60, esp. p. 37; for other examples see Cressy, England on Edge, ch. 9.

  84. Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 138–40, 221, 231.

  85. CJ, ii, p. 72. Sir Edward Dering was among the members added to this committee; Russell, Fall, pp. 367–72.

  86. David Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2000), pp. 234–43; for the longer history of the cross see Nicola Smith, The Royal Image and the English People (Aldershot, 2001), ch. 2.

  87. See above, pp. 262–4, for its eventual fate.

  88. LJ, iv, p. 134.

  89. Hirst, ‘Defection of Sir Edward Dering’. There were others too: Smith, Stuart Parliaments, p. 126; See also David L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 4. Aston’s attachment to religious decency thus defined had deep roots: Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions’, pp. 259–89.

  90. See especially Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, vol 1: Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988); Margaret Aston, ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560–1660’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 92–121; Margaret Aston, ‘Iconoclasm in England: Official and Clandestine’, reprinted in Peter Marshall (ed.), The Impact of the English Reformation 1500–1640 (London, 1997), pp. 167–92.

  91. Anon., A Discovery of 29 Sects here in London (1641); Anon., A Nest of Serpents Discovered (1641); Fortescue dates.

  92. Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, ch. 15, esp. pp. 259–61.

  93. Nest of Serpents, p. 6.

  94. Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, p. 271.

  95. Keith Lindley, Popular Politics, pp. 79–91; for the history of the sects in London see Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge, 1977); and the works by Como and Lake cited above at n. 3.

  96. Russell, Fall, pp. 368–70. See also Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 180–82.

  97. Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 284; Walter, ‘Confessional Politics’, p. 699, quoting Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), appendix 1, pp. 238
–47.

  98. Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 284–9. For Aston’s published collection see Sir Thomas Aston, A collection of sundry petitions (1642).

  99. Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 290.

  100. Ibid., pp. 289–91.

  101. Walter, ‘Confessional Politics’.

  102. Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions’.

  103. Calculated from G. K. Fortescue (ed.), Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers, and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, the Commonwealth and the Restoration, Collected by George Thomason, 1640–1661, 2 vols. (London, 1908). This assumes, of course, that these patterns reflect the market, rather than Thomason’s collecting. For discussions of the explosion of print in these years see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), chs. 5–6; Cressy, England on Edge, ch. 12. Estimates of press output based on searches of the ESTC or EEBO include collections other than Thomason’s (although his is the largest component) but do not allow for monthly (or weekly) calculations. There are difficulties with dating the Thomason Tracts, however (see above, pp. 600–601, note on dating).

  104. Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 287.

  5. Barbarous Catholics and Puritan Populists

  1. [Gabriel Plattes], A description of the famous kingdome of Macaria (London, 1641), quotations at sig. A2r, pp. 2, 3. For background see Charles Webster, Utopian Planning and the Puritan Revolution: Gabriel Plattes, Samuel Hartlib and ‘Macaria’ (Oxford, 1979); Charles Webster, ‘The Authorship and Significance of Macaria’, PP, 56 (1972), 34–48; J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal State: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700 (Cambridge, 1981).

  2. 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; G. H. Turnbull, Samuel Hartlib: A Sketch of His Life and His Relations to J. A. Comenius (London, 1920); G. H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius: Gleanings from Hartlib’s Papers (Liverpool, 1947); Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2002); Mark Greengrass, ‘Samuel Hartlib and International Calvinism’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, 25 (1993), 464–75.

  3. See in general Webster, Great Instauration; the essays collected in Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and the Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge, 1994), esp. Anthony Milton, ‘“The unchanged peacemaker”?: John Dury and the Politics of Irenicism in England, 1628–1643’, pp. 95–117. For the Hartlib circle see above, pp. 453–8.

  4. Webster, ‘Authorship and Significance of Macaria’, p. 38.

  5. Ibid., p. 39.

  6. David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–44: The Triumph of the Covenanters (Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 233–4.

  7. For a good brief account, see Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 182–3, 189–92.

  8. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, pp. 238–9; John J. Scally, ‘Hamilton, James, First Duke of Hamilton (1606–1649)’, ODNB, 24, pp. 839–46.

  9. A damnable treason by a Contagious Plaster of a plague sore ([London], 1641), quotations at sig A2r. See Paul Slack, The Impact of the Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1985), p. 293; William G. Naphy, ‘Plague-Spreading and Magisterially Controlled Fear’, in William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts (eds.), Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester, 1997), pp. 28–43. The pamphlet is discussed further above, pp. 174–5. For the plague in these months See also David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 60–67; John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007), pp. 406–7.

  10. Politicians, Pym included, were not above fostering Catholic panics for political purposes: Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, PP, 52 (1971), 23–55, at pp. 39–40. There is, though, independent evidence that this incident actually occurred. D’Ewes records the incident: W. H. Coates (ed.), The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes from the First Recess of the Long Parliament (New Haven, Conn., 1942), p. 37. Nehemiah Wallington recorded that it was verified – even he was at least a little suspicious of this particular example of popish plotting: ‘There was a letter brought to Mr Pym with an odious plaster taken from a plague sore, saying if this will not doe, then a dagger shall and as I did hear very credibly one standing by him looking over his shoulder upon it took a conceit [look] at it and sickened and died presently’, BL, Add MS 21,935, fo. 188v. George Mordant was examined the next day on suspicion of having delivered the letter but dismissed: CJ, ii, p. 295.

  11. CJ, ii, p. 300.

  12. The key recent work is Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001). For a summary and further references see Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1500–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 379–97.

  13. Aidan Clarke, ‘Selling Royal Favours, 1624–32’, in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne (eds.), A New History of Ireland, vol. 3: Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 233–42; Canny, Making Ireland British, esp. pp. 258–75.

  14. Aidan Clarke with R. Dudley Edwards, ‘Pacification, plantation and the Catholic Question’, in Moody, Martin and Byrne, New History of Ireland, vol. 3, pp. 187–232; Clarke, ‘Selling Royal Favours’; Canny, Making Ireland British, pp. 265–9; Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 380–82; John Reeve, ‘Secret Alliances and Protestant Agitation in Two Kingdoms: The Early Caroline Background to the Irish Rebellion’, in Ian Gentles, John Morrill and Blair Worden (eds.), Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 19–35.

  15. For an overview of Wentworth’s policies in Ireland see Canny, Making Ireland British, pp. 275–98. See also Aidan Clarke, ‘The Government of Wentworth, 1632–40’, in Moody, Martin and Byrne (eds.), New History of Ireland, vol. 3, pp. 243–69.

  16. Canny, Making Ireland British, pp. 275–98; Clarke, ‘Government of Wentworth’.

  17. Russell, Fall, pp. 382–8; for a concise discussion of the constitutional question see David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 30.

  18. Russell, Fall, pp. 388–92; Aidan Clarke, ‘The Breakdown of Authority, 1640–41’, in Moody, Martin and Byrne (eds.), New History of Ireland, vol. 3, pp. 270–88.

  19. Patrick J. Corish, ‘The Rising of 1641 and the Catholic Confederacy, 1641–5’, in Moody, Martin and Byrne (eds.), New History of Ireland, vol. 3, pp. 289–316, esp. pp. 289–93; Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Dublin, 1994); Canny, Making Ireland British, ch. 8, emphasizes the extent to which this high political approach to the rebellion conceals the roots of the rebellion in Irish society at large; See also Micheàl Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 1999), esp. pp. 23–4. Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘Introduction: A Failed Revolution?’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1–23, places the rebellion in a comparative perspective. For aristocratic rebellions in Tudor England see Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 5th edn (Harlow, 2004), esp. pp. 122–7; Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), esp. chs. 8, 9.

  20. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 194–6. For the offer to try to call it off see Russell, Fall, pp. 396–8.

  21. Canny, Making Ireland British, ch. 8.

  22. Ibid. See also Nicholas Canny, ‘What Really Happened in Ireland in 1641?’, in Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, pp. 24–42. For the rapid formation of the Catholic Confederacy see Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland.

  23. Thomas Partington, VVorse and worse nevves from Ireland (London, 1641), printed for Nathaniel Butter. Quoted from Keith Lindley, The English Civil War and Revo
lution: A Source Book (London, 1998), pp. 81–3. For an overview of this literature and its impact see Keith Lindley, ‘The Impact of the 1641 Rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641–5’, Irish Historical Studies, 18 (1972), 143–76. The most convincing reconstruction of events on the ground is Canny, Making Ireland British, ch. 8.

  24. Reprinted in Lindley, English Civil War and Revolution, pp. 80–81.

  25. Gardiner, CD, pp. 199–201, quotations at pp. 199, 200, 201; for the Ten Propositions see ibid., pp. 163–6, quotation at p. 164.

  26. J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1966), p. 216; Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981), pp. 81–8.

  27. Gardiner, CD, pp. 202–32, quotations at pp. 206–8.

  28. See, for example, measures against English Catholics in Ireland, to control movement, discussion with the Lords about the Capuchins, and close scrutiny of household priests of Henrietta Maria and ambassadors: CJ, ii, 300–301.

  29. Gardiner, CD, p. 204.

  30. For a reading of the remonstrance as an attempt to find consensus see Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 145–6.

  31. Quoted from Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649 (Oxford, 1996), p. 121.

  32. Russell, Fall, pp. 424–9, 433; Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 94–5; Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 86; CJ, p. 344. Dering quoted from Russell, Fall, p. 427. For partisanship see Fletcher, Outbreak, ch. 4.

  33. Clifton, ‘Popular Fear of Catholics’, pp. 30–31, 49; for the chronology of such panics see Robin Clifton, ‘Fear of Popery’, in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (Basingstoke, 1973), pp. 144–67 at pp. 158–61; Fletcher, Outbreak, pp. 203–6; for an example see John Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974), p. 37.