They were explosive in other ways, too. They fired guns through tents, including the king’s tent. They were mutinous. They were beggarly. They were more fit for Bedlam (London’s asylum) or Bridewell Prison than the king’s service. They murdered a pregnant woman in Essex and beat up Oxford undergraduates. And some were vehement iconoclasts, which illustrated the incongruity of the war itself. In Rickmansworth, a quiet Sunday morning service was disrupted when Captain Edmund Ayle and his troop smashed the altar and rails. It was a taste of things to come; so too were the complaints from families whose larders were eaten bare by the hordes of soldiers, families who found themselves playing host to drunken soldiers.
When the hungry, ill-disciplined English clashed with the Scots at Newburn, on 28 August 1640, the Scots easily drove them back, securing their first victory over the English since Bannockburn. To the Scots, it was proof of their divine election. Bishops, thought one Covenanter, were ‘the panders of the Whore of Babylon, and the instruments of the devil’.
So when Charles had to call Parliament again, on 3 November 1640, John Pym had his chance, and he also had experience, allies, and knowledge of the system.
V Pym against the Papists
One of the first things done by the Parliament that opened on 3 November 1640 was to release William Prynne and Henry Burton from prison (John Bastwick came home to London a week later, to similar acclaim). All three had been imprisoned – Prynne first in Caernarvon, which the government hoped would be remote enough to allow the whole matter to be forgotten, then in Jersey when this hope proved vain – because of their vigorous objections to the Laudian Church and their agitation for godly reform. Prynne had first been gaoled for attacking the wickedness of stage plays, with a sly hostile glance at the queen, and from prison had written an angry denunciation of bishops; loathing of the episcopate was Bastwick’s and Burton’s crime too. All of them had become symbols of the sufferings of true Protestants under the regime of Charles and Laud.
Their release was therefore the beginning of a campaign against the personal rule of Charles, launched with a graphic political message. The release of the three was a sign that England was once more a nation fit for the godly, and that the Commons would keep it so. Prynne, Burton and Bastwick had all been sentenced during Charles’s personal rule to be mutilated by having their ears cropped, and then fined, and imprisoned for life for their writings in 1637. Each man, free but forever disfigured, was a walking advertisement for Parliament’s clemency and the king’s tyrannical cruelty.
They arrived in London on 28 November 1640, after a momentous journey. Their way was strewn with rosemary and bay, and they were greeted by bonfires and bells. It was an unusually warm day for November, tempting immense crowds out into its golden light. They stopped for dinner in the little town of Brentford, which was to be the scene of fierce fighting later in the war.
So thick was the throng that their progress slowed to one mile an hour. It was, thought some observers, almost like a royal procession. The living martyrs were home at last. In London itself, some three thousand coaches, and four thousand horsemen, and ‘a world of foot’ awaited them, everyone carrying a rosemary branch. Everyone noticed that the bishops were far from overjoyed. They had every reason for apprehension. Prynne’s warning to Laud that his own career was not immune from ruin was about to be as spectacularly fulfilled as the crudest tragedy.
And Prynne, like many a prophet, was himself one of the main causes of what he had cleverly foretold. On 18 December 1640, Laud was charged with high treason, and when he was removed to the Tower in the spring of 1641, Prynne gained access to his private papers, which he promptly published, carefully providing glosses. For Prynne – as for the young, clever John Milton – the bishops were nothing more nor less than ‘ravenous wolves’. It is fair to say that in bringing Laud to book, Prynne too was an iconoclast, and Laud an icon whose smash would prove his falsity. Just as early reformers had eagerly exposed Christ’s ‘blood’ of Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire to be a fake, so Prynne sought to open Laud to public inspection, to provoke healing ridicule and laughter. But there was always the risk that Prynne and Pym would come to resemble the men who, they felt, had persecuted them.
One of the new pamphlet plays, entitled Canterbury His Change of Diet, was composed to mark the occasion of the condign punishment meted out to the three. ‘Privately acted near the Palace-yard at West-minster’, said the title page. ‘The Bishop of Canterbury having variety of dainties, is not satisfied till he be fed with the tippets of men’s ears.’ Laud’s love of luxury, his links with the court, are turned into a kind of monstrous cannibalism.
The charges against Laud had to do with profound, deepening, widening dread of popery. It was this fear that animated the man who led the Commons, sometimes from the wings but increasingly from centre-stage. The man was John Pym, and his hour had found him. It was Pym’s task not only to reflect but also to whip up anti-popery, to turn headshaking dismay at the queen’s antics into shouting alarm. Only by generating a sense of national crisis – England was in danger, about to be swept away – could Pym hope to overcome the English political system’s tendency to right itself, to seek consensus and shun division.
The ground for his campaign had already been prepared. John Pym’s anti-popery was not unique to him, nor was his use of it in Parliament historically unprecedented. The Parliament of 1621 had been preoccupied with the idea that a Jesuit conspiracy was behind the fall of the Palatinate to the forces of Rome. The Parliament of 1628/9 was anxious that Arminianism was spreading. Arminianism was the belief that men and women could be saved by their own works, and by their own goodness and repentance; the way to heaven was a slow and steady walk, lined with kindness to others. This harmless-sounding idea flew in the face of Calvinism, which held that every person was destined by God to be either saved or damned and could moreover be saved by his grace alone. As Pym’s stepbrother Francis Rous put it: ‘an Arminian is the spawn of a Papist; and if there come the warmth of favour upon him, you shall see him turn into one of those frogs that rise out of the bottomless pit. And if you mark it well, you shall see an Arminian reaching out his hand to a Papist, a Papist to a Jesuit, a Jesuit gives one hand to the Pope and the other to the King of Spain; these men having kindled a fire in our neighbour country, now they have brought over some of it hither, to set on flame this kingdom also.’ Arminianism was seen as a menace because it was believed to prevent the kind of real, passionate soul-searching, with real self-loathing and much anguish, that was needed for true repentance. As a result of heightened anxieties of this kind, becoming an MP came to involve a declaration of religious allegiance. When Richard Grosvenor made a speech in support of candidates in Cheshire in 1624, he roundly announced that they were staunch Protestants, ‘untainted in their religion’. The 1624 elections were especially dominated by anxieties about popery in the wake of the Spanish Match and its failure.
This dread of sneaking popery centred on the court, because it was the queen’s influence that was feared most. Sir William Bulstrode was horrified by the spectacle of people trooping off to Mass with the queen: ‘so that it grows ordinary with the out-facing Jesuits, and common in discourse, Will you go to Mass, or have you been at Mass at Somerset-house? There coming five hundred a time from mass.’ In this atmosphere, Pym scarcely had to work hard to rouse fears that were ever-present.
The fear was renewed by Protestant England’s consciousness of its own history. John Foxe’s book Acts and Monuments, known as the Book of Martyrs, which graphically described the burning of Protestants during the reign of Mary Tudor eighty years earlier, was widely read and highly influential. The godly iconoclast William Dowsing owned three copies of it for his own personal use. So eager was Ipswich for the book that a satirist invented a maiden who shaped her sweetmeats into figures from Foxe. More recent events also haunted the Protestant imagination. Dread was fanned every year in the fires of the fifth of November. The Gunpowder Plot made papists and
Jesuits seem especially the enemies of the Houses of Parliament. The godly Samuel Ward always warned his congregations on 5 November of the terrible danger in which they stood. Every year the celebration of Bonfire Night, in which often the pope and not Guy Fawkes was burned in effigy, reminded everyone that Catholic conspirators might be in their midst, but that God had delivered them. In the 1630s, only Puritans celebrated, but by 1644 the whole nation adopted the festival; even Royalists tried to invoke it by claiming that it was Parliament that resembled the gunpowder plotters. November was, besides, a Royalist month; it embraced Princess Mary’s birthday on the fourth, and Henrietta Maria’s on the sixteenth, and the king’s on the nineteenth. Despite all this, spectacular fireworks displays marked the day in November 1647, celebrating Parliament’s victories. The celebrations were themselves a kind of elaborate allegory of popery, and included ‘fire-balls burning in the water, and rising out of the water burning, showing the papists’ conjuration and consultation with infernal spirits, for the destruction of England’s king and Parliament’. They also rang the church bells all over England every 5 November. They grew louder and louder as the 1630s went on, and somehow, in some places, the bells rung for the king’s coronation day become softer, less sustained. Catholic courtiers, Catholic nobles, and above all the queen: men and women began to wonder if they were poised to act, to use the king as their tool.
Everyone had noticed how many Catholics eagerly joined the king’s army against the Scots. All through the 1630s there were stories of plotting papists: a mole-catcher called Henry Sawyer was examined by the council for saying that when the king went to Scotland to be crowned, the Catholics would rise up and attack the Protestants. It was widely whispered that such campaigns would be led by Catholic gentry, but some suspected involvement at higher levels. The Earl of Bridgewater, the young John Milton’s patron, reported worriedly to Secretary Coke that there had been a violent incident; an elderly woman had begged alms of a young gallant on horseback, who had responded by offering her a shilling if she would kneel to the cross on the shilling itself. She refused, and the young man killed her. Terror was increased when the winter of 1638/9 saw freak storms, which contemporaries read as signs. Dennis Bond of Dorset reported in his diary that ‘this year the 15 December was seen throughout the whole kingdom the opening of the sky for half a quarter of an hour’. Henry Hastings reported that a vision of men with pikes and muskets had been seen in the sky. Brilliana Harley thought that in 1639 the anti-christ must begin to fall, while the armies themselves quailed at the spectacle of lightning and thunder. ‘Many fears we have of dangerous plots by French and papists’, recorded Robert Woodforde, while the alarm was such in Northamptonshire that some town marshals in Kettering set up a round-the-clock guard. On further rumours that papists were making ready to set fire to the town, the watch was strengthened. It was becoming clear that Charles couldn’t altogether control the situation. People began to wonder if he could guarantee the safety of the English Church and its members from the dreadful dangers besetting them within and without the kingdom. And Charles himself might be a danger.
The man who rose to greatness by exploiting those fears also believed in them; indeed, he was their creation. John Pym came from Somerset, from an estate which had been in the family for three hundred years. His father died when he was only a baby, and his mother married again. Later, Pym’s mother believed she was damned, a tragedy which often afflicted Calvinists. Her new husband was a godly gentleman of Cornwall, Anthony Rous, and Pym grew up in the area around Plymouth. In Armada year, he was five years old when Drake set sail, and perhaps he never forgot the fear, the beacons lit from end to end of the land, sending their smoke high up into the sky. Anthony Rous was not the man to let him forget; he was one of Drake’s executors, and was himself a red-hot Puritan, running a kind of house of refuge for godly ministers. However, his brand of austere Calvinism had not yet become a source of disaffection; indeed, it was the glue that kept godly left and Anglican middle together in the years of Pym’s childhood.
Nevertheless, Pym lived a comfortable gentleman’s life – Oxford, and then the Middle Temple. But his time there was disrupted by what might have seemed like a frightening recapitulation of his worst childhood fears; while he was in residence, in 1605, the Gunpowder Plot was discovered, proof that plotting Catholics were here, in England. The gentleman’s life resumed, but there was much evidence that it seemed fragile. He never really made headway in Somerset society; his circle of friends was solid but limited, and when drawn to the attention of the Commons, he was styled ‘one Pym, a receiver’, which meant he was deputed to collect the king’s rents, a process that got him involved in supplying timber for the repair of the coastal forts and thus discovering their parlous state for himself, something that horrified the man who had known the menace of the Armada as a boy. His job also involved disafforestation, an operation which meant that ordinary people lost the right to gather firewood in the forest and to pasture animals in it. This was felt as ruthless and unjust by its victims, whose livelihoods were thus destroyed, and though Pym did his best to defend his tenants on at least one occasion he was also the landlord’s man, not the tenants’ representative. What he wanted was plenty of money in the royal exchequer so that the darkness of popery could be repelled by shot and shell.
As an MP he was serious. He was unresponsive to the House’s mood, unwilling to joke and play, and poor at improvisation. He had his own ideas, and he had no wish to modify them. Yet this carried its own conviction in uncertain times. What helped to give credence to his vehement religious opinions and fears was his mastery of facts and figures in the labyrinthine areas of Crown finances. He was also exceptionally dedicated; he wanted his way more than most of the others, who preferred to adjourn and go off to a good ordinary. But he soon became a brilliant manipulator of the House’s amour-propre. Only the potential power of the Commons offered the frightened little boy that Pym had been safety from the popery he hated and dreaded. So in 1621 he was noticeably anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic, but had also begun to ruminate on Parliament’s role in safeguarding England against popery. ‘The high court of Parliament is the great eye of the kingdom, to find out offences and punish them’, he said. Already he saw the king as an obstacle to this safeguarding: ‘we are not secure enough at home in respect of the enemy at home which grows by the suspen[ding] of the laws at home’. He said papists broke the ‘independency upon others’ which loyal subjects owed, and that the king, by mistaken lenity towards them, was hazarding the state. His position had hardened further by 1624, when he urged a search for recusants who gave away their secret beliefs by their acts; this is anxious, even paranoid, and his subsequent job of hunting down popish schoolmasters increased his anxiety and reinforced his convictions. By 1628 he was in the thick of the campaign for the Petition of Right, and was the chief opponent of Arminianism, which for Pym was a way for the Devil to persuade people that they need not repent.
Like many godly men, Pym was also involved in New World colonization projects, often attempts to build beyond the seas the godly nation which was failing to materialize in the British Isles. Pym was on the Providence Company board, whose very name proclaimed its godliness. This also yielded valuable political contacts. Through it Pym kept in constant touch with his patron the Earl of Bedford, Lord Saye and Sele, and the Earl of Warwick. They met often at Saye’s London house. Pym was treasurer, and helped John Hampden prepare his case against Ship Money in 1638.
It was the opening debate of the Short Parliament that made Pym a national hero. It was not his first attempt to energize the nation by articulating its dread of papists, but the Laudian reforms and the Scottish wars meant that the nation had now moved into step with Pym’s own terrors. He summarized every grievance against the king, but the focus was on religion. Later, Oliver St John said that Pym and his friends had been determined to ensure that the Short Parliament failed.
When the Short Parliament dissolved, Pym began to ne
gotiate with the Scots, bypassing the king, while during the election campaign for the Long Parliament Pym ‘rode about the country to promote the election of the puritanical brethren to serve in Parliament’. Once Parliament met on 3 November 1640, he moved at once to attack Strafford, and called him ‘the greatest enemy to the liberties of his country, and the greatest promoter of tyranny, that any age had produced’. In this he was acting for an alliance of English dissidents and the Scots, who knew Strafford had argued for the Anglicization of Scotland as a province of England, and that he had wanted to go on fighting the war after the Scottish victory at Newburn. The Irish, too, loathed Strafford, and in beginning impeachment proceedings, Pym was acting on behalf of interests in all three kingdoms.
During the next few months, Pym created the laws and institutions that were to govern the early Parliamentarian regime: the Militia Ordinance, the Nineteen Propositions, and above all the Committee of Safety. Its very name points to what had been important to Pym all along. He was not a radical; he believed that the Elizabethan constitution was being undermined by a popish conspiracy. In the Church, too, all he wanted was the Elizabethan black-and-white simplicity of his childhood and youth; he did not want anything truly radical. His own paranoia about papists within was widely shared, but partly because he made it so by voicing his fears eloquently and publicly. It was he more than anyone else who persuaded the men of the House of Commons that a popish conspiracy had entangled the king and his chief ministers, and posed an immediate threat. On 7 November 1640, Pym made a speech two hours long, claiming there was a design of papists to alter law and religion. Sir Francis Seymour voiced the ideas central to Pym: ‘one may see what dangers we are in for religion Jesuits and Priests openly to walk abroad and particularly what encouragement this is to our Papists. No laws in execution. For papists often to go to mass.’ Pym moved that a committee be appointed ‘to see that the papists depart out of town’. The committee was duly created on 9 November 1640, and was empowered to supervise and report on any dispensations granted to recusants. The king was regarded as ineffective because so many papists, it was said, were living round about and were protected by Letters of Grace, royal pardons-in-advance. So the committee began drawing up plans to constrain papists more tightly. Why shouldn’t the anti-recusancy laws apply not just to known recusants, but also to the secret and crypto-papists infesting the Church and the state? Why shouldn’t the laws be extended? Pym even suggested that Catholics should be forced to wear distinctive and recognizable dress, as if they were prisoners. He and the Commons then proposed that the queen should be deprived of all her Catholic servants. ‘We ought to obey God rather than man, and that if we do not prefer God before man, he will refuse us’, said Pym. This statement shows how radical thinking in religion could come to sound like – and to be – political radicalism. What was odd about Pym was shared by a lot of his contemporaries. They could act and talk radically while their reflexes remained conservative, even reactionary. They backed awkwardly into a revolution they did not intend.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 13