If relics were not destroyed, they could be kept as souvenirs of this, the best of times. Nehemiah Wallington did this, saving bits of stained glass from the London iconoclasm of 1641 ‘to keep for a remembrance to show to the generations to come what God hath done for us, to give us such a reformation that our forefathers never saw the like’. Nehemiah’s stained glass was a relic of attacks on relics; something sacred transformed into a curio, a memento, and thus robbed of its power.
Such things were also signs of the end, thought Richard Baxter: ‘if you had seen the general dissolution of the world, and all the pomp and glory of it consumed to ashes, if you saw all on a fire about you, sumptuous buildings, cities, kingdoms, land, water, earth, heaven, all flaming about your ears, if you had seen all that men laboured for, and sold their souls for, gone … what would such a sight as this persuade you to do?’ The world would end in a comparable fire that would burn away the false, a conflagration that only the righteous could survive. That made it vital to get rid of any idols that might incur God’s wrath. It was not only Christ and the Virgin that were to be sent to the fires.
Maypoles were a target not only for the godly, but for God. Nehemiah Wallington punctiliously recorded God’s acts against them. The more afraid people became, the more they attacked what they saw as objects of divine wrath. It was a way of making sure you were on God’s side, and hoping that he was therefore on yours.
For some, images offered a chance to vent feelings that could not be poured out against the real person or power. As Charles’s reign descended into violence, so his own image was no longer immune from assault. Hatred of religious icons overflowed into loathing for other kinds of icons. Statues and portraits of the king, once covered in flowers, were pulled down and destroyed.
In Oxford, during the brief Parliamentarian occupation, an alabaster and gilt image of the king at New College was destroyed by a Parliamentarian soldier; in the same year a picture of Charles in the house of Richard Mynshull in Buckinghamshire was destroyed, the soldiers ominously running it through with their swords. Of course, they may have had no idea who it was, though it seems unlikely that they picked that one painting for destruction and spared the rest by chance. If they did know who it was it is a sign that they had begun to see Charles himself as the enemy incarnate. In a more horrifying incident, a band of Parliamentary soldiers happened to capture one of their number who had gone over to the Royalists; they insisted on hanging him on the signboard of the King’s Head tavern in Thame. The dying man’s face was violently turned to face the king’s portrait, and one of his murderers coolly said, ‘Nay, sir, you must speak one word with the King before you go, you are blindfold, and he cannot see, and by and by you shall both come down together.’ Iconoclasm, and the war itself, produced class beliefs that may not have existed before. Tombs could come under attack – though this was controversial – on the grounds that the rich were for the king. All rich men, said Wharton, were Royalists, and hence fair game – in part because it was thus obvious that they were not saved. It was acceptable in this mood to destroy every stick of furniture in the house of John Penruddock, a Catholic living in Ealing, leaving him not so much as a chair to sit on, and to rip up his small orchard.
At Winchester in 1642, the king’s statue was attacked, and especially the crown, orb and sword, but this was in part because it adorned the hated roodscreen, and thus symbolized the king’s sponsorship of the icons of Laud’s regime. Fatally for the king, his own image was becoming entangled in the war against images, just as his regime was being called into question by dislike of Laud’s innovations in religion and his perceived failure to protect the nation against Catholics. The destruction of the king’s images suggests that religious rebellion was spilling over into political thinking and providing a model for it, and not just for a few ardent MPs, but for common soldiers.
Towns that were taken after a siege often suffered most. In Winchester, for example, it was the area around the castle which sustained most damage; as the Royalists retreated into it, they set fire to houses close by. During the sack of Winchester, unruly soldiers looted all the houses, and then ‘found a great store of Popish books, pictures and crucifixes’, which they carried through the streets to the marketplace, apparently in a drunken rage with all things iconic. Local legend has it that Parliamentarians rode into the cathedral on horseback, the better to reach its stained glass which they mainly destroyed. The town ultimately benefited from the destruction, as did Ludlow and Lichfield; brick and tile replaced flammable wood. But this was scarcely obvious at the time, and it is clear that the finding of popish books inspired the destruction of domestic property. Like the category of papist, the category of icons could expand to include anything, anyone. Which meant no one – no matter how elevated – was truly safe.
X The Death of Dreams
So 1643 began with the sound of breaking glass and cracking stone, as people thought they were destroying the last traces of an old and haunted world in which saints stared from alcoves and windows.
But it was also the year a new world sprang into being, the world of newspapers, a squinting look at reality through black-and-white print. It was when the British press really began, the year weekly newsbooks first appeared. The first was A Perfect Diurnall, fairly impartial. Impartiality did not last long; it was succeeded by Mercurius Aulicus, edited in Oxford, and therefore Royalist, by Mercurius Brittanicus, edited in London and therefore Parliamentarian, and by various Presbyterian papers, some Royalist and some Parliamentarian. For the first time people could rely on someone outside their families and circle of acquaintances for news. It has been suggested that the newspaper is a kind of secular substitute for religious observance, that its regularity, the fact that everyone reads it on the same day, makes it an experience not unlike some great saint’s festival. If so, the coincidence of the newspaper’s emergence from the shards of Cheapside Cross is perhaps explicable. Newspapers helped to fill other kinds of gaps, too. Along with the emerging pamphlet-plays, they filled a drama-and-entertainment void left by the closure of the theatres.
Other certainties tumbled down. A young hothead named John Milton published a series of pamphlets arguing that men should be able to divorce their wives on grounds of mutual incompatibility. But some certainties remained; Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, published in an authorized edition for the first time, reasserted faith in the face of doubt induced by science. In France, Corneille’s plays told the world of the death of proud Pompey at the hands of tasteless rebels, and a new king, Louis XIV, ascended the throne as a child-ruler. In the East, Japan had a new emperor. The Thirty Years War ground on miserably. The composer Claudio Monteverdi died, and in January, Isaac Newton was born.
1643 was also to be a year of bitter fighting, of many small and some great battles. Men of the king’s army and Parliament’s were to clash all over England, from Braddock Down in the west to Leeds in the north, and from Grantham in the east to Dorchester in the south. It was a year of many terrible deaths, and many failed plans. In Plymouth, for example, Prince Maurice’s Royalist army ended the siege in defeat on Christmas Day, and when the defenders crept out to inspect their siegeworks, they found ‘six hundred and sixty of the Cavaliers behind sick and maimed and not able to crawl out of their trenches’.
Was there a grand overall strategy, for either side? Military historians, ever eager to create order from chaos, like to think so, and they usually dub 1643 ‘the war for the centre’. Perhaps there was some such notion, though it’s difficult to make it fit with Adwalton Moor or Winceby in the north, or even the siege of Plymouth (unless Devon is somehow ‘the centre’). If so, though, just what either army thought it was doing to achieve its goal remained very dubious, and certainly unclear at local level. Rather, strategy tended to become reactive rather than proactive, with armies rushing here and there to cope with new threats or in response to sudden new ideas. Like ten-year-olds playing chess, the armies’ commanders tended to argue for a long tim
e, then suddenly do the first thing that came into their heads. The previous year had seen the failure of the king to take London and crush the rebellion quickly. Now no one was altogether sure what the military and strategic objectives should be. Foggy chains of command and lack of coordination meant armies raced in ratlike runs over ground covered before, pursuing the goal set by the commander of the moment. Rather like the Vietnam War, the English Civil War was mostly not fought in large Waterloo-like set-piece battles; many soldiers served for its entire duration without ever seeing a big engagement. Rather, it was fought in a series of skirmishes, guerrilla attacks, surprise encounters with rearguards, sudden cavalry swoops, and sieges, not only large sieges, but small ones, involving perhaps five hundred combatants. When we think of the Sealed Knot valiantly recreating Civil War battles, we think of Naseby or a big siege, as at Basing House. But if anyone really wanted to re-experience the Civil War battle in its most common form, they should walk down a long lane lined with a five-foot hedge, and suddenly come under musket fire from inside the hedge. Or they might stand drinking at a cattle trough, hear thundering hoofbeats, and be cut on the cheek with a cavalry sabre. Accounts of such fights rarely stress any military objective; once the action started, the goal was to stay alive.
The situation was far more confused even than the American Civil War, for no Mason-Dixon line divided Parliamentarian from Royalist. True, a line drawn down the middle of the country would show that the territory to its west was predominantly Royalist, the terrain to its east predominantly Parliamentarian. But there were exceptions: in the west Plymouth, Exeter, Gloucester and Bristol were all staunchly Parliamentarian, and a key Royalist war aim became the consolidation of their territory by the capture of these islands in the stream. Had they succeeded, the situation would have been more obviously and territorially two-sided. The division was also unbalanced by London, which had no equivalent and which was the very centre of Parliamentarianism. It should have been obvious that the Royalists’ only hope was to capture it, but somehow it wasn’t, and the rebuff at Brentford was allowed to harden into a southern limit on the king’s activities. This effectively preserved Kent and the counties of the so-called Eastern Association from conflict.
Inside this ring-fence, Parliament set itself up as the true instrument of rule, and its members became used to the feeling of rule without, so to speak, a veto. Perhaps this sense of possibility was the most important outcome of Charles’s failure to take London. Parliament was no longer a paranoid interloper; instead, like any new government, it produced too many ideas and too much legislation too quickly. Yet its rule was not yet accepted or inevitable. Committees multiplied examining Church and state with fresh and anxious eyes, and creating new ways to finance the increasingly expensive war. Of course, what this meant in practice was a rise in taxes. At a local level, something similar happened as the groups that controlled cities like Bristol, Exeter and Gloucester contended with the extraordinary circumstance of being besieged by their own countrymen. The burden of the war had now settled on men and women’s shoulders. They tried to bear it gamely. But it grew heavier as the year went on, as taxes rose and supplies ran out.
Yet this was also the year in which peace negotiations faltered and petered out, despite the fact that both sides still hardly believed the enormity of what they were doing could go on. As the ground soaked up more and more blood on both sides, resolve hardened rather than weakened.
It was also to be a year when the relationship between England and Scotland was shifted by a new alliance. Yet all this hopeful expansion was checked when the leader of the Commons faltered, his own end marking the end of the war’s first phase. Both sides were to lose key leaders who represented, too, the last best hope of compromise: a godly Royalist, and a moral member.
And it was a year that foreshadowed the uncompromising end of the war in the arraignment and trial of a man who had originally been one side’s principal target.
The problem with Laud’s acts is clear. But the man, too, was a problem, and something of an enigma. Archbishop William Laud had once been a man of many dreams. Of humble origins, son of a clothier and product of Reading Grammar School, he had winched himself irritably up by his own bootstraps to the highest archbishopric. Like many ambitious men, he exaggerated his father’s status, claiming he had held all the offices in the corporation government, when in fact he had served briefly as a constable.
Laud was peppery, and he was detested. He minded – he was thin-skinned. And the minding came out in an inability to listen tolerantly to criticism, and also in disturbed nights, in which he was haunted by the desires he could not express or relieve in life.
Laud’s dreams became public property in a curious manner, when his diary was exposed to the avid gaze of his enemies by his angry old foe William Prynne, and the juiciest bits published. When his dreams lay before the public, his whole heart seemed to lie exposed, as Hugh Green’s had been physically, and almost as painfully. Laud’s dreams were mostly unpleasant, but the pleasant ones concerned his mother: ‘I dreamed that my mother, long since dead stood by my bed and looked pleasantly upon me, and that I was glad to see her with so merry an aspect’, he wrote in January 1627. This is actually remarkably close to the format of a benign apparition story. By contrast, Laud’s reflections on death were usually grim: ‘I dreamed of the burial of I know not whom, and that I stood by the grave. I awakened sad.’ He often dreamed of the deaths of others; he dreamed that Lady Buckingham had had a miscarriage, that Sackville Crow, a gentleman of the bedchamber, had died of plague having been recently with the king. He also dreamed of his teeth falling out through scurvy; tooth loss, Freud tells us, is a castration dream. But there were everyday reasons why Laud might dream of illness and death; he himself nearly died as a child, and again while President of St John’s College, Oxford, while in 1630 he suffered a fever so severe it nearly killed him. He managed to injure himself, too, by energetically swinging two hefty tomes over his head in his study to keep fit. In middle and old age, his pulled leg muscle hurt him.
All this sounds manic, obsessional, and faintly donnish. All his life Laud had plenty to be anxious about, and he was ultimately deserted by the king, impeached on trumped-up charges, and suffered the further indignity of having his diary rifled by Prynne. By 1642, his life’s work was being destroyed by his enemies. While a prisoner in the Tower in November 1642, he dreamed ‘that parliament was removed to Oxford, the church undone, some old courtiers came to see me and jeered. I went to St John’s and found the roof of the old college ready to fall down. God be merciful.’ This is an obvious anxiety dream. He also dreamed – terrifyingly – of conversion to Catholicism: ‘this troubled me much’. Laud was not a Catholic, disliked Catholicism and especially the little queen whose fierce piety had pushed him out of Charles’s circle, yet Rome, with its authority-figure, its rituals, appealed as much to Laud as it did to the leaders of the Oxford Movement two centuries later.
And his sensibility was certainly High Anglican. Laud had a significant dream about Buckingham: ‘That night, in my sleep, it seemed to me that the Duke of Buckingham came into bed with me; where he behaved himself with great kindness towards me, after the rest, where-with wearied persons are apt to solace themselves. Many seemed to me to enter the chamber who saw this.’
When Prynne published this dream in his Breviate of the Life of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, extracted for the most part verbatim out of his diary, in 1644, he suggested Laud was guilty of the sin of uncleanness. Laud replied angrily that ‘there was never fastened on me the least suspicion of this sin in all my life’. But in reality matters were not so simple. Laud’s diary is full of cryptic references to his ‘unfortunateness’ with T, SS, PB, Em, Ad, and EB. The pronouns show all of them were male, but none have been identified. ‘Towards the morning [4 August 1635] I dreamed that LMSt came to see me the next day, and showed me all the kindness I could ask for.’ ‘I dreamed that KB sent to me in Westminster Church tha
t he was desirous to see me.’ Laud ‘went with joy’, but ‘met another’. Like other diary references to KB, this one is enigmatic, but points to an intense and troubled relationship. He also expressed guilt and terror in a letter to Sir John Scudamore, ‘One thing there is which I have many times feared, and still do, and yet I doubt it will fall upon me. I cannot trust my letters, but if it come I will take my solemn leave of all contentment. But in that way shall ever rest your loving friend.’ This may simply be part of the consciousness of sin that endeared Laud even to his godly foes. He also had numerous dreams about his rival and political opponent Bishop Williams; having persuaded the king to banish him to Lincoln, Laud kept dreaming of Williams loosing himself from bonds, turning up at dinner and sitting above him. Perhaps this explains Laud’s decision to have Williams taken before the Star Chamber and sentenced to be heavily fined. Awake and asleep, Laud saw Williams obsessively as the cause of problems within the Church.
When Charles threw Laud to his Parliamentarian enemies after the debacle of the Scottish Prayer Book, he replaced the Laudians with Williams and his friends. Charles, described by Laud as a king who ‘knew not how to be or be made great’ fulfilled a Laudian dream of betrayal.
He had longed, perhaps, for love. Now he would be killed by the country’s burning and indignant hatred.
In London, there was a fresh casualty of war: Cheapside Cross was down, in spring 1643.
It had been the centre of commercial London, and also a place where heretical and seditious books were burnt, where their authors were punished. It was twelve yards high, three rich tiers of stone, like a wedding cake ornamented with statues of the Virgin and Child, and surmounted by a large brightly gilded cross and a dove to represent the Holy Ghost. Edmund Campion, racked savagely by Elizabeth I’s torturers for his Jesuitical beliefs, nevertheless managed to bow to it as he passed on his way to the scaffold at Tyburn. This made the cross a guilty papist by association for some. People desecrated it throughout Elizabeth’s reign; whether they were iconoclasts or simply vandals is not altogether clear. It was repaired after each attack, and ‘marvellously beautified and adorned’ for the entry of James I into London in 1603. A ballad celebrating its glory appeared in 1626, and the city turned a deaf ear to Robert Harley’s efforts to persuade the Commons to pull it down as an idol. The Venetian ambassador thought especially well of it, admiring the ‘exquisite workmanship’ of the figures; high praise from a man of Venice. By the outbreak of war, it was still there, a little darkened by the soot deposits which bedevilled Stuart London’s public spaces, but staunch as ever. People still sneaked the odd covert bow to it, though the godly were angry and accusing if they saw. The main threat to it was traffic; there were complaints that it hindered the passage of carts and carriages. But then Prynne, Burton and Bastwick came back to London, trailing clouds of sanctity, and Burton almost immediately urged London to get rid of ‘the golden idol in Cheapside’. For him and his followers, the cross was female, a popish seductress.
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 26