God’s FURY, England’s FIRE

by Braddick, Michael

  13. Frank, Levellers, p. 55.

  14. Frank, Levellers, pp. 57–60; See also Andrew Sharp, ‘John Liburne and the Long Parliament’s Book of Declarations: A Radical’s Exploitation of the Words of Authorities’, History of Political Thought, 9 (1988), 19–44; Andrew Sharp, ‘John Lilburne’s Discourse of Law’, Political Science, 40:1 (1988), 18–33. For the Exact collection see above, pp. 272–3.

  15. Frank, a believer in the usefulness of the term ‘movement’, thinks that the birth of the Leveller party was still two years away at this point: Levellers, p. 52.

  16. Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), esp. pp. 22–49; P. R. S. Baker, ‘Edwards, Thomas (c. 1599–1648)’, ODNB, 17, pp. 965–8. See above, pp. 337–40.

  17. Hughes, Gangraena, pp. 42–9, 131–7; Baker, ‘Edwards’.

  18. Hughes, Gangraena, esp. pp. 223–41, 333–67; Baker, ‘Edwards’. For London politics and the remonstrance see Ian Gentles, ‘The Struggle for London in the Second Civil War’, HJ, 26 (1983), 277–305, esp. p. 280.

  19. Hughes, Gangraena, pp. 151–69, 241–76, 305–8, 432–5.

  20. Ibid., pp. 2–4; Baker, ‘Edwards’. For the exchanges between Edwards and Walwyn, and Edwards’s portrayal of Walwyn, Overton and Lilburne, see Frank, Levellers, pp. 69–76; Brailsford, Levellers, pp. 36–42.

  21. The classic study is Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1972): ‘Now that the Protestant ethic itself, the greatest achievement of European bourgeois society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is at last being questioned after a rule of three or four centuries, we can study with a new sympathy the Diggers, the Ranters, and the many other daring thinkers who in the seventeenth century refused to bow down and worship it’, p. 15.

  22. For these arguments See also Michael J. Braddick, ‘The English Revolution and Its Legacies’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c. 1590–1720 (forthcoming, Manchester). In addition to the works cited there, they are particularly informed by the approach of Hughes, Gangraena; Ann Hughes, ‘The Meanings of Religious Polemic’, in Francis J. Bremer (ed.), Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith (Boston, Mass., 1993), pp. 201–29; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994).

  23. A point made by Glenn Burgess, ‘The Impact on Political Thought: Rhetorics for Troubled Times’, in John Morrill (ed.), The Impact of the English Civil War (London, 1991), pp. 67–83, esp. pp. 67–8. For rhetorical creativity in radical religious writing see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989); more generally, Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, Conn., 1994); Elizabeth Skerpan, The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution, 1642–1660 (Columbia, Mo., 1992).

  24. See above, pp. 197–9, 207.

  25. The manuscript copy, dated June 1646, is in HEH, HM 30303; for the published version see Josiah Ricraft, A survey of England’s Champions and Truth’s Faithful patriots (1647). The judgement on Newbury appears at p. 20 in both versions. The account of Marston Moor credits Manchester and Fairfax: Ricraft, A survey, p. 98.

  26. For Ryves and Mercurius Rusticus, see above, pp. 282–4; [George Wharton], Englands Iliads in a nut-shell (London, 1645), Thomason date 24 July 1645; [Bruno Ryves], Micro-chronicon (London, 1647). Ryves’s text is much fuller, but shares the basic outline and principal landmarks with Wharton’s.

  27. For an example of the genre see Anon., The Apprentices VVarning-piece (London, 1641); for examples of its political re-invention see, among many others, Thomas Morton, Englands warning-piece (London, 5 August 1642); [James Cranford], The teares of Ireland… As a warning piece to her Sister Nations (London, 1642); Anon., A warning-piece To all His maiesties subjects of England (reprinted in London, 1643), Thomason date 20 February 1643; Anon., An Alarme to England: or A Warning-Piece (London, 1647), Thomason date 8 April 1647; Alexander Mingzeis, Englands Caveat: or Warning-piece (London, 1647).

  28. Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, 1994); Hughes, ‘Meanings of Religious Polemic’, pp. 228–9.

  29. Quoted in Paul Christianson, ‘From Expectation to Militance: Reformers and Babylon in the First Two Years of the Long Parliament’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 34 (1973), 225–44, at p. 243. It was not published until 1644. For the European Reformation context see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, rev. edn (Oxford, 2003), ch. 1.

  30. William Prynne, A vindication of psalme 105.15 (London, 1642).

  31. John Milton, Paradise Lost, book ii, lines 559–61, quoted from Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (eds.), John Milton (Oxford, 1991), pp. 355–618, at p. 389.

  32. See, among many examples, John Taylor, A Cluster of coxcombes (London, 13 July 1642); Anon., The Divisions Of the Church of England (London, 1642); Anon., A Discovery of 29. Sects (London, 1641); [Alexander Ross], Religions Lotterie or the Churches Amazement (London, 1642). The second is attributed to Taylor by Wing and EEBO, but Bernard Capp discounts Taylor’s authorship in his authoritative list of Taylor’s publications: The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet 1578–1653 (Oxford, 1994), p. 203.

  33. Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography (London, 1645). See, for comparison, the subtitle of Thomas Edwards, The First and Second Part of Gangraena: A Catologue and Discovery of many of the Errors, Heresies and Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time (London, 1646).

  34. For Benbrigge see above, pp. xxii-xxiii.

  35. Clifford Geertz, ‘Common Sense as a Cultural System’, in Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 2000 edn), pp. 73–93, at p. 75.

  36. Angela McShane Jones, ‘“Rime and Reason”: The Political World of the English Broadside Ballad, 1640–1689’, unpublished Ph. D. thesis, Warwick (2004), esp. intr., ch. 4.

  37. Josiah Ricraft, The peculier characters Of the orientall languages (London, [1645]). On programmes of language reform both as a means of reducing public discussion to order and, more positively, to increase knowledge see Sharon Achinstein, ‘The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution’, reprinted in James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (London, 1992), pp. 14–44.

  38. For Macaria, see above, pp. 156–8, and Of Education, pp. 341–3 above.

  39. The best introduction to his career is Charles Webster, ‘Introduction’, in Charles Webster (ed.), Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning (Cambridge, 1970), which also reprints a number of crucial texts. For the wider intellectual context the standard work is Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2002); See also Charles Webster, Utopian Planning and the Puritan Revolution: Gabriel Plattes, Samuel Hartlib and ‘Macaria’ (Oxford, 1979); 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 (London, 1947); Mark Greengrass, ‘Samuel Hartlib and International Calvinism’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, 25 (1993), 464–75; Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge, 1994).

  40. For the Society of Astrologers see Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Princeton, 1989), pp. 40–44; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, 1991 edn), quotation at p. 340.

  41. In addition to Webster, Advancement, and Webster, Great Instauration, see, for the woollen tank, Timothy Raylor, ‘Providence and Technology in the English Civil War: Edmund Felton and his Engine’, Renaissance Studies, 7:4 (1993), 398–413, and for the saltpetre project Thomas Leng, Benjamin Worsley (1618–1677): Commerce,
Colonisation and the Fate of Universal Reform (Woodbridge, forthcoming). The torpedo was tested in 1655: John T. Young, Faith, Medical Alchemy, and Natural Philosophy: Johann Moriaen, Reformed Intelligencer and the Hartlib Circle (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 55–7. I am grateful to Tom Leng for this reference. For the failure of policies of agricultural improvement in this period see Joan Thirsk, ‘Agrarian Problems and the English Revolution’, in R. C. Richardson (ed.), Town and Countryside in the English Revolution (Manchester, 1992), pp. 169–97.

  42. [Samuel Hartlib], The Parliaments Reformation (London, 1646), Thomason date 6 August 1646, quotations at pp. 1, 6. The pamphlet is reprinted in Webster, Advancement, pp. 111–18.

  43. Ibid., p. 5. For the grant see Webster, Advancement, p. 49. The pamphlet is sub-titled Or a Worke for Presbyters, Elders, and Deacons, to Engage themselves, for the Education of all poore Children, and imployment of all sorts of poore, that no poore body young nor old may be enforced to beg within their Classes in City nor Country. See also Samuel Hartlib, Londons Charitie Stilling The Poore Orphans Cry (London, 1649); Hartlib, Londons Charity inlarged (London, 1650). This later scheme is discussed in Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), pp. 85–7.

  44. Webster, Advancement, p. 49; Turnbull, Hartlib, pp. 48–51; for the Navigation Act and Down survey see Leng, Worsley.

  45. Webster, Advancement, pp. 25–6. For Culpeper’s politics see Culpeper Letters, pp. 105–402.

  46. For Puritanism and science see Webster, Great Instauration, pp. xxi-xl, and the many works cited there. For Richard Wiseman see Severall Chirurgicall Treatises (London, 1676 edn); for dissection see Lisa Jardine, On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren (London, 2002), pp. 55–7; for problems in the supply of corpses during the seventeenth century see Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London, 1996 edn), pp. 54–9; for Hobbes see Timothy Raylor, ‘Thomas Hobbes and “The Mathematical Demonstration of the Sword”’ Seventeenth Century, 15 (2000), 175–98; for developments in nursing see Eric Gruber von Arni, Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare for the Sick and Wounded Soldiers and Their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642–1660 (Aldershot, 2001).

  47. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge, 1993), esp. chs. 8–13; for the Council of Trade and the Navigation Act see Leng, Worsley. This is discussed above, pp. 587–8.

  48. For a brief introduction see Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679)’, ODNB, 27, pp. 385–95; Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), ch. 1.

  49. For the censorship ordinance see above, pp. 294–5; Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (Philadelphia, 2006), addresses the whole question of censorship in terms of civility rather than the nature of the views expressed; See also David Cressy, ‘Book Burning in Tudor and Stuart England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 36 (2005), 359–74. For secrecy at the lower levels of government see Paul Griffiths, ‘Secrecy and Authority in Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century London’, HJ, 40 (1997), 925–51; See also the Swallowfield articles, reprinted in Steve Hindle, ‘Hierarchy and Community in the Elizabethan Parish: The Swallowfield Articles of 1596’, HJ, 42 (1999), 835–51, at p. 851 (article 26). For the ritual of burning see above, pp. 278–9.

  50. For Dering see above, pp. 195–6, 278; for the Book of Sports see above, pp. 277–81; for Williams see above, p. 341; for the catechism see above, p. 373; for the Scots’ declarations see above, p. 471. For fuller discussion see Ariel Hessayon, ‘Incendiary Texts: Radicalism and Book Burning in England, c. 1640-c. 1660’, unpublished paper. I am grateful to Ariel Hessayon for allowing me to see this paper, and to Brian Cummings and Jason Peacey for discussing this issue with me.

  51. Compare the texts of the R. Ram, The souldiers catechisme, 7th edn (1645) and R. Ram, The soldiers catechisme, 8th edition (1645); the title pages are otherwise indistinguishable. For the order for the burning of the soldiers’ catechism published in Oxford ‘counterfeiting that at London’, see The Kingdomes VVeekly Intelligencer, no. 111, 29 July-6 August 1645, p. 887. It is also reported in The Weekly Account, 31 July-6 August 1645, pp. [5–6].

  52. John Milton, Areopagitica (London, 1644), see above, pp. 341–3.

  53. Ann Hughes, ‘Parliamentary Tyranny? Indemnity Proceedings and the Impact of the Civil War: A Case Study from Warwickshire’, Midland History, 11 (1986), 49–78.

  54. TNA SP24/76 petition of Anne Smith. We might perhaps detect in the latter argument the hand of a lawyer or advocate.

  55. TNA SP24/38 petition of William Caswall; SP24/57 petition of Thomas Johnson; SP24/57 petition of Thomas Jones. See also Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 203–8, 289–90; David Underdown, ‘“Honest” Radicals in the Counties, 1642–1649’, in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds.), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978), pp. 186–205; David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 217–20; Michael J. Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England: Local Administration and Response (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 152–6; David Scott, ‘Politics and Government in York 1640–1662’, in Richardson (ed.), Town and Countryside, pp. 46–68, esp. pp. 56–7; for the self-conscious adoption of this identity among those active for Parliament see William Cliftlands, ‘The “Well-Affected” and the “Country”: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Society, c. 1640–1654’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Essex (1987).

  56. TNA SP24/47 petition of William Flacke.

  57. TNA SP24/76 petition of Francis Smith. Smith was being sued by a bookseller in Bury who had ordered the prayer book.

  58. TNA SP24/57 petition of William Jackson; SP24/38 petition of Richard Carr (seven to eight years and for costs); SP24/76 Thomas Smallwood and Elizabeth Kent (three years); Hughes, ‘Parliamentary Tyranny?’, pp. 58–9, 64, 68. For the persistence of these partisan conflicts See also Ian Roy, ‘The City of Oxford 1640–1660’, in Richardson (ed.), Town and Countryside, pp. 130–68, at pp. 156–60.

  59. TNA SP24/57 petition of the ‘well-affected inhabitants’ of St Ives. See also, for example, SP24/76 petition of John Smith; SP24/47 petition of the inhabitants of Farringdon Without (including Praisegod Barebon). Such cases are discussed by Robert Ashton, Counter-Revolution: The Second Civil War and Its Origins, 1646–1648 (New Haven, Conn., 1994), pp. 215–23; Hughes, ‘Parliamentary Tyranny?’, p. 62; A. R. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Gloucestershire 1640–1672 (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 89.

  60. For some of the conventions of these exchanges see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), esp. pp. 206–14.

  61. For the term bum-fodder: Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, Ga, 1981), pp. 48–9; Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 33–4. It was more usually, but not exclusively, associated with single-sheet ballads.

  17. Military Defeat and Political Survival

  1. Gardiner, III, pp. 103–4, 127. For the full text of the propositions see Gardiner, CD, pp. 290–306. There is a useful summary in David L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 128-9; and a useful narrative in Robert Ashton, Counter-Revolution: The Second Civil War and Its Origins, 1646–1648 (New Haven, Conn., 1994), pp. 7–17.

  2. Smith, Constitutional Royalism, pp. 128–9.

  3. Quoted in Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), p. 343; Gardiner, III, p. 127.

  4. For a good summary of the position see David Underdown, Pride’s
Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1971), ch. 3, esp. pp. 73–5; Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and Its Debates, 1647–8 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 5–10. For the ordinances see Gardiner, III, pp. 137–8, 145. For anti-Scottish pamphlets see Ashton, Counter-Revolution, pp. 302–3.

  5. Gardiner, III, pp. 79–80.

  6. For Charles’s views in this period see Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, 2005), pp. 423–9; Gardiner, III, pp. 131–2.

  7. Quoted in Smith, Constitutional Royalism, pp. 129–30.

  8. Gardiner, III, pp. 165–6; Cust, Charles I, pp. 426–7. For Culpeper and Presbyterian popery see Culpeper Letters, esp. pp. 144–5; for an earlier example see John Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974), p. 50. This alliance of royalism and anti-Presbyterianism was evident in other circles during 1647: the royalist judge David Jenkins struck up an unlikely friendship with John Lilburne while they were both in the Tower: Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: The Biography of John Lilburne (London, 1961), ch. 17. See above, p. 490.

  9. John Morrill, ‘The Church in England, 1642–1649’, reprinted in John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow, 1993), pp. 89–114, esp. pp. 103–8.

  10. Smith, Constitutional Royalism, pp. 129–32, quotation at p. 130; Cust, Charles I, pp. 424–6.

  11. Ibid., esp. pp. 420–22, 438–9, 469–70.

  12. For Ormond’s position in Confederate politics see Miche´l Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 1999), esp. pp. 68–83.

  13. Ibid., pp. 86–96; Gardiner, III, ch. 39; Patrick J. Corish, ‘Ormond, Rinuccini, and the Confederates, 1645–9’, 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. 317–35.

  14. Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, pp. 96–117; Gardiner, III, pp. 52–7, 151–3; Corish, ‘Ormond’, pp. 319–20.