The committee on recusants reported to the House on 1 December 1640. Sixty-four priests and Jesuits had been discharged from prison, on Secretary of State Windebank’s authority. Windebank had also written repeatedly to local authorities asking them to halt their proceedings against papists. The House ordered Windebank to appear, to explain himself, and Pym and the future Royalist general Ralph Hopton moved that ‘some course might be taken to suppress the growth of popery’. Then two days later the House ordered all JPs in Westminster, London and Middlesex to tell churchwardens to compile a list of known recusants ‘so that they may be proceeded against with effect, according to law, at the next session, notwithstanding any inhibition or restraint’.
For Pym, the papists were not only a problem in matters of religion; they had become a political menace as well, because they were organizing a conspiracy ‘to alter the kingdom in religion and government’. The country was awash with rumours of papists amassing arms; the House was told of a stabbing carried out by a popish priest because the magistrate in question was about to act against papists in Westminster. They worried that the army commanders were untrustworthy, and agreed to create another committee to look into ‘the state of the king’s army, and what commanders, or other inferior officers, are Papists’. Sir John Clotworthy, the tirelessly godly Ulsterman and Pym’s relation by marriage, reported that eight thousand of Ireland’s ten thousand soldiers were papists, ‘ready to march where I know not. The old Protestant army have not their pay, but the Papists are paid.’
The Commons began to take action to protect the realm. It purged itself of papists by deciding that all members must take communion and that the House should also make a confession of faith renouncing the pope. Meanwhile petitions complained that the government was too lenient towards papists. From the counties came stories of planned Catholic risings. John Clotworthy reported that there was a Catholic Irish invasion at hand. Pym told Parliament that divers persons about the queen were plotting a French invasion. In the Grand Remonstrance, too, plots were prominent, among Jesuits, bishops, prelates and popish courtiers. In reply, some hardy souls pointed out that nothing very much had happened yet, but this did not stop Pym or his followers from disseminating their fears. They may never have become majority beliefs, but they did become very widespread. The Declaration of Fears and Jealousies was especially fearful about Henrietta Maria, ‘a dangerous and ill-affected person who hath been admitted to intermeddle with the great affairs of state, with the disposing of places and preferments, even of highest concernment in the kingdom’.
So widespread was the fear, that ‘popery’ was coming to mean something close to ‘anything in religion or politics that I don’t approve of or like’, that though it extended itself from actual card-carrying Catholics to those in the Church of England suspected of an overfondness for ceremony, it remained firmly grounded in a clear if misinformed apprehension of Romish practices. In particular, popery was foreign, and especially it was Spanish, and hence cruel, or French, and hence silly and nonsensical. Or, to put it another way, the English – and for that matter, the Scots – increasingly developed their ideas of national identity in response to the perceived menace of popery. To be truly, properly English or Scottish was to stand against Rome, an idea that was promulgated by writers from Edmund Spenser to every grubbing pamphleteer. This was to cast a long shadow for Charles Stuart, for it was thus that he could come to seem a traitor to his own people. The flavour of foreignness was to be intensified by the stories from Ireland later in 1641.
In just the first few months of the Long Parliament, no fewer than five popish plots were reported and discussed. A papist army was thought to lurk in South Wales. In early May 1641, every member of the House pledged to ‘maintain and defend the true reformed Protestant religion … against all Popery and Popish innovations’. Pym himself was menaced personally, or so one newsbook thought. It reported on ‘a damnable treason by a contagious plaster of a plague-sore, wrapped up in a letter and sent to Mr. Pym; wherein is discovered a devilish plot against the parliament, Oct. 25 1641’. Two terrifying menaces to security combined: plague and popery.
Or was it the printer who deserves credit for ingenuity? There was a raging bull market for popish plots in 1641. There was A bloody plot, practised by some papists in Darbyshire, and lately discovered by one Jacob Francklin. There was Matters of note made known to all true Protestants: 1st, the plot against the city of London [&c.]. A most damnable and hellish plot exprest in three letters, against all Protestants in Ireland and England, sent out of Rome to the chief actors of the rebellion in Ireland. There was The truest relation of the discoverie of a damnable plot in Scotland. And A discovery to the prayse of God, and joy of all true hearted Protestants of a late intended plot by the papists to subdue the Protestants. And A discovery of the great plot for the … mine of the city of London and the parliament, a pamphlet sometimes attributed to Pym himself. There were dozens of pamphlets like these doing the rounds. One was Gods Late Mercy to England, in discovering of three damnable plots by the treacherous Papists, printed in 1641. It told a compelling story. On 15 November, a poor man named Thomas Beale lodged in a ditch near a post-house, and while thus concealed, he heard two men planning to surprise and take London for the papists, and to murder key MPs. They and their co-conspirators had been promised ten pounds and the chance to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist if they did so. Beale rushed to the Commons with his story, and the malefactors were arrested, but the author decided that ‘we have … as just cause to fear the papists in England as they did in Ireland’. The House agreed, and responded with ever-tougher anti-papist legislation. Another pamphlet, A True Relation of a Plot, told of Catholics in Derbyshire, amassing supplies of gunpowder – itself virtually a logo for Catholics after 1605 – and also old iron; they had planned to blow up the local church with the worshippers inside.
So readers could learn some simple lessons. For the pamphleteers, Catholics were people with gunpowder, people who plotted; traitors too. They had tortuous, devious minds. They were animated by hatred of the good and godly. And they were at this very moment menacing the country from within: why, any stranger at an alehouse might be a Jesuit in disguise. And from without, too: the Jesuit in the alehouse might be in touch with a vast army ready to sweep into England.
Into this dynamite came a spark. On 1 November 1641, news reached London of a major rebellion in Ulster. Many years later, one of the many Protestants terrorized by it recalled the fear. Alice Thornton was the daughter of Sir Christopher Wandesford, who succeeded his cousin Strafford as Lord Deputy of Ireland:
That horrid rebellion and massacre of the poor English protestants began to break out in the country, which was by the all-seeing providence of God prevented in the city of Dublin, where we were. We were forced upon the alarum to leave our house and fly into the castle that night with all my mother’s family and what goods she could. From thence, we were forced into the city, continuing for fourteen days and nights in great fears, frights, and hideous distractions from the alarums and outcries given in Dublin each night by the rebels. These frights, fastings, and pains about packing the goods, and wanting sleep, times of eating, or refreshment, wrought so much upon my young body, that I fell into a desperate flux, called the Irish disease, being nigh unto death, while I stayed in Dublin.
Stories of terrible atrocities committed by the insurrectionists circulated in London as well as in Dublin. This may have been the kind of thing Alice feared:
they [Irish rebels] being blood-thirsty savages … not deserving the title of humanity without any more words beat out his brains, then they laid hold on his wife being big with child, & ravished her, then ripped open her womb, and like so many Neros undauntedly viewed nature’s bed of conception, afterward took her and her Infant and sacrificed in fire their wounded bodies to appease their Immaculate Souls, which being done, they pillaged the house, taking what they thought good, and when they had done, they set the house on fire.
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This horrible story may or may not be true: as in the Indian Mutiny in the 1850s, stories like this had propaganda value far in excess of any simple truth. But to a young English girl, fifteen-year-old Alice Thornton, crouching in Dublin, stories like this might seem a direct threat to her in particular. Immediately the news press went into overdrive, and tales of atrocities began to pour forth. There were descriptions of gruesome tortures, especially stories of unborn babies ripped from their mothers’ wombs, wives raped in front of their husbands, and girls in front of their parents. The rebels allegedly hanged a woman by her hair from a door; in Tyrone, it was said, a fat Scot was killed and rendered into tallow candles, in a grisly prefiguration of the Holocaust’s soap industry. Humble people lost relatives and friends too. Among the dead was Zachariah, the brother-in-law of London woodturner Nehemiah Wallington, though the news did not reach Nehemiah himself until almost two years later, in 1643. The story was horrible: Zachariah had been cut down while his children begged, ‘Oh, do not kill my father. Oh, do not kill my father.’ Two of those children also died that winter, of cold and exposure, and Zachariah’s widow, the sister of Nehemiah’s wife, had to scramble along in a desperate plight, so desperate that she eventually took an Irish Catholic as her lover and protector. This horrified Nehemiah, but it was a move born of dire necessity. She sent one of her surviving sons to her sister and to Nehemiah, where he was trained as a woodturner. At least she had managed to get him away.
Nehemiah knew by then just how to interpret Zachariah’s last words, which he carefully transcribed into his diary: ‘as for the rebels, God will raise an army in His time to root them out, that although for a time they may prevail, yet at last God will find out men enough to destroy them. And as for the king, if it be true, as these rebels say, that they have his commission … to kill … all the Protestants … then surely the Lord will not suffer the king nor his posterity to reign, but the Lord at last will requite our blood at his hands.’ They were to be the instruments of God’s vengeance. This idea, piled on top of months of anxiety and panic, created a mentality which led people to think that the king needed to be restrained. After the war, clergyman and chronicler Richard Baxter said the rising was one of the main causes of the Civil War: ‘the terrible massacre in Ireland, and the threatenings of the rebels to invade England’; Royalist historian Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon also thought it a key factor. John Dod told the Commons Committee that ‘he saw a great number of Irish rebels whom he knew had a hand in the most barbarous actions of the rebellion, as the dashing of small infants and the ripping up of women and children and the like’. Joseph Lister, a boy of twelve at the time, never forgot his terror that he and other Protestants were about to be set upon as the Protestant Irish had been: ‘O what fears and tears, cries and prayers night and day!’ he recalled, ‘was there then in many places, and in my dear mother’s house in particular!’
London still retained some sense about nonsense. In January 1642, a tract entitled No pamphlet, but a detestation against all such pamphlets as are printed, concerning the Irish rebellion, denounced the ‘many fabulous pamphlets that are set out concerning the rebels in Ireland’ as forgeries. But similar accounts of the Thirty Years War made them seem likely. John Erwyn led a party of Scots soldiers to Edward Mullan’s house in Ireland on Sunday 2 February 1642. He drew his sword ‘and wounded the said Mary Mullan in her head, and forehead, and cut her fingers, at which time she cried out, “Dear John, do not kill me, for I never offended you”, repeating this to him two or three times, whereupon he thrust her under the right breast and she gave up the ghost … And after a time the said Erwyn took a mighty lump of fire and put it on the said Mary Mullan’s breast, expecting she was still living.’
Mary’s words sound like the desperate self-defences of women accused of witchcraft by violent neighbours. Particularly telling is the test to see if Mary is really dead; it sounds as if Erwyn expects Mary to be impervious to weapons. A pamphlet called Treason in Ireland told typical stories, and invited its readers to see the sponsors as traitors of the worst and cruellest kind:
Henry Orell, when they slew his wife an ancient woman, and ravished her daughter in the most barbarous manner that ever was known; and when they had done pulled her limbs asunder, and mangled her body in pieces without pity or Christianity … The woman and her maid a brewing, for it was an alehouse, where they brewed their own drink. The maid they took and ravished, and when they had abused her body at their pleasure, they threw her into the boiling cauldron.
The terror in England was almost a panic. On one public fast day at Pudsey the congregation was thrown into turmoil because of reports that the Irish rebels had invaded the West Riding and had reached Halifax and Bradford. ‘Upon which the congregation was all in confusion, some ran out, others wept, others fell to talking to friends, and the Irish massacre being but lately acted, and all circumstances put together, the people’s hearts fainted with fear.’ Fears were not allayed till it was discovered that the supposed rebels were actually refugees. Elizabeth Harding testified that her lodger had remarked, on hearing of the Irish rebellion, that ‘the worst of the plot was not yet discovered there, and that the Protestants heels would go up apace’. Devonshire petitioners were terrified when refugees told them of ‘their wolvish enemies, that the bounds of that kingdom shall not limit their malicious tyranny’. Many Londoners, like Nehemiah, believed that ‘he that will England win/ Must first with Ireland begin’. Wallington added, ‘now, all these plots in Ireland are but one plot against England, for it is England that is that fine, sweet bit which they so long for, and their cruel teeth so much water at. And therefore these blood-thirsty papists do here among us in England plot what may be for our overthrow, to bring in their damnable superstition and idolatry among us.’ Parliament thought that the English Catholics were to have risen at the same time. The counties that felt especially exposed – North Wales, Cheshire and Lancashire – began asking London for help.
People felt they were already at war, and believed that the rebels would find a fifth column of supporters poised to help them. In Parliament ‘new jealousy and sharpness was expressed against the papists’, said Clarendon, ‘as if they were privy to the insurrection in Ireland, and to perform the same exploit in this kingdom’. Considerable numbers of English Catholics were said to have gone over to Ireland to help the rebels. Jesuits were (as usual) thought to be behind it all. Pym was quickfooted as ever, and managed to make political capital from it all: ‘the papists here are acted by the same principle as those in Ireland; many of the most active of them have lately been there; which argues an intercourse and communication of counsels’. One pamphlet revealed a plan to blow up and burn the chief English cities and to land an army. When another plot was revealed in London, ‘the poor people, all the countries over, were ready either to run to arms, or hide themselves thinking that the Papists were ready to rise and cut their throats’, wrote Richard Baxter. Some counties asked for help in rounding up the local Catholics who were believed to be on the brink of helping to launch an invasion.
There is no evidence that English Catholics had any such intentions, and most of them probably shared their countrymen’s dislike and fear of the Irish; one, John Carill, of Harting in Sussex, actually sold lands to raise money for an army to suppress the rebellion, a tactful move to appease his neighbours. But it made little difference. Ardent Protestants saw events in both Ireland and England as signs of a general European Catholic conspiracy to eradicate Protestantism. The worst-case scenario envisaged the Irish landing in England, backed by Spain and France; then they could turn against the Dutch too. It was believed that the pope was behind this, for he had given plenary indulgences to all those who made war on his behalf. As fears of a Catholic invasion spread, England was seen as a tiny, gallant Protestant nation, encircled by conniving Catholic superpowers keen to blot it from the earth.
As with more recent conspiracy theories, the immediate result was loss of civil liberties. T
runks and possessions of suspected persons heading for Ireland were ordered to be searched. Letters were intercepted and read. Even foreign ambassadors’ reports came under scrutiny. Irish soldiers returning home from fighting for the kings of France or Spain were detained at the ports and questioned. A register of Irish residents in Middlesex and Westminster was drawn up, and all over England and Wales Irish Catholics and priests were arrested. English and Welsh Catholics found themselves secured and disarmed too. Catholic peers and bishops in the House of Lords came under renewed political attack. And yet another army began to be raised to put down the rebellion.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 14