God’s FURY, England’s FIRE Read online

  God’s Fury, England’s Fire

  MICHAEL BRADDICK

  God’s Fury, England’s Fire

  A New History of the English Civil Wars

  ALLEN LANE

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ALLEN LANE

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2008

  1

  Copyright © Michael Braddick, 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior

  written permission of both the copyright owner and

  the above publisher of this book

  978-0-14-044757-6

  For Karen, Cora and Melissa

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Preface

  The Crisis of the Three Kingdoms, 1637–1642

  1 From the Bowels of the Whore of Babel

  The Scottish Prayer Book Rebellion and the Politics of Reformation

  2 Self-Government at the King’s Command

  Politics and Society in Caroline England

  3 Drawing Swords in the King’s Service

  The English and the Bishops” Wars

  4 We Dream Now of a Golden Age

  The Long Parliament and the Public Sphere

  5 Barbarous Catholics and Puritan Populists

  The Irish Rising and the Politics of Fear

  6 Paper Combats

  The Battle for the Provinces

  7 Raising Forces

  The Slide into War

  War, 1642–1646

  8 Armed Negotiation

  The Battle of Edgehill and Its Aftermath

  9 Military Escalation, Loyalty and Honour

  The English War Efforts in 1643

  10 The War of the Three Kingdoms

  The Irish Cessation and the Solemn League and Covenant, 1643

  11 Marston Moor

  The Victory of the Covenant?

  12 A Man Not Famous But Notorious

  Death and Its Meanings

  13 Naseby and the End of the War

  The Triumph of the New Model Army

  14 Winners and Losers

  The Costs and Benefits of Civil War

  15 Remaking the Local Community

  The Politics of Parishes at War

  Revolution, 1646–1649

  16 Post-War Politics

  Print, Polemic and Mobilization

  17 Military Defeat and Political Survival

  Attempts at Settlement from Newcastle to Newmarket

  18 The Army, the People and the Scots

  Putney, the Engagement and the Vote of No Addresses

  19 To Preserve That Which God Hath Manifestly Declared Against

  Charles, the Scots and the Second Civil War

  20 The Occasioner, Author, and Continuer of the Said Unnatural, Cruel and Bloody Wars

  The Trial and Execution of Charles I

  21 Epilogue

  England’s Freedom

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Credits

  Abbreviations

  Note on Authorship and Dating of Pamphlets

  Note on Dates and Quotations

  Notes and References

  Bibliography of Secondary Works

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1. Charles I leaving Oxford in disguise, April 1646. (Engraving, anon., 1648)

  2. English soldiers reported to be embracing their Scottish adversaries rather than fighting them, in 1640. (Engraving, anon., 1648)

  3 and 4. Portraits of Charles I from the 1630s. (Oils, Sir Anthony Van Dyke, 1635, 1636)

  5. The Prayer Book disturbances in Edinburgh in 1637. (Engraving, anon., 1648)

  6. The Royal Exchange in 1644: a centre of trade, gossip and news. (Engraving, Wenceslaus Hollar)

  7. William Laud and Sir Thomas Wentworth (soon to become the Earl of Strafford). (Engraving, William Faithorne, after Sir Anthony Van Dyke, early 1640s)

  8. The House of Commons in the Short Parliament. (Engraving, English school, seventeenth century)

  9. The attack on Lambeth Palace, May 1640. (Engraving, anon., 1648)

  10. English soldiers purging churches on their way north in 1640. (Engraving, anon., 1648)

  11. Panoramic view of London in 1647. (Engraving, Wenceslaus Hollar)

  12. New Palace Yard and Westminster Hall in 1647. (Engraving, Wenceslaus Hollar)

  13. The execution of the Earl of Strafford in 1641. (Engraving, Wenceslaus Hollar, c. 1641)

  14. Cheapside Cross, a focal point of civic life. (Engraving, anon., 1809: copy of earlier engravings depicting the visit of Marie de Medici in 1638)

  15. The dangers of sectarian excess: the Adamites. (Woodcut, anon., 1641)

  16. The dressing from a plague sore delivered to John Pym on the floor of the House of Commons. (Engraving, anon., 1642)

  17. Wildly exaggerated reports of atrocities against Protestants in Ireland. (Engraving, anon., 1647)

  18 and 19. John Pym portrayed in the forefront of the battle against Popish conspiracies. (Woodcuts, anon., 1641)

  20. The triumphant return of Parliament men following the King’s departure from London in January 1642. (Engraving, anon., 1642)

  21. The ‘paper war’ in the summer of 1642: fundamental constitutional issues argued out before a print audience. (Title page, anon., 1642)

  22. A ‘gunpowder plot’ in Derbyshire in 1641, which was probably fictitious, despite the assurances on the title page. (Title page, anon., 1641)

  23. The battle for the provinces in 1642: declarations and resolutions of local bodies published for the benefit of a national audience. (Title page, anon., 1642)

  24. Royalist propaganda about the actions of the ‘Colchester plunderers’ and other parliamentarian barbarities: a later compendium of Bruno Ryves’s Mercurius Rusticus. (Engravings, anon., 1685)

  25. The battle of Edgehill, October 1642. (Engraving, anon., 1648)

  26. The destruction of Cheapside Cross, May 1643. (Engraving, anon., 1648)

  27. Henrietta Maria charged with treason and royal houses purged of popery, May 1643. (Engraving, anon., 1648)

  28. The burning of the Book of Sports at the site of Cheapside Cross, May 1643. (Engraving, anon., 1648)

  29. The revelation of the Waller plot,
June 1643. (Engraving, anon., 1643)

  30. The execution of the plotters, June 1643. (Engraving, anon., 1643)

  31. The Apologeticall Narration, which sparked fierce controversy in the parliamentary alliance. (Title page, 1644)

  32. John Milton’s Areopagitica argued against pre-publication censorship. (Title page, 1644)

  33. The executions of William Laud, Sir John Hotham and his son, and Sir Alexander Carew in January 1645. (Engraving, anon., 1648)

  34. Political astrology: George Wharton’s notoriously inaccurate military predictions in May 1645. (Title page, 1645)

  35. The battle of Naseby. (Engraving, anon., 1647)

  36. One of the twenty-eight ‘works’ around London’s civil war fortifications. (Engraving, anon., 1643)

  37. The Queen’s Sconce, part of the civil war defences of Newark. (Aerial photograph, 1962)

  38. Times Whirligig, by a former clubman leader, satirizing Somerset’s new low-born governors. (Title page, 1647)

  39. Matthew Hopkins ‘watching’ two suspects during the witch hunt in 1645. (Woodcut, anon., 1647)

  40. Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena. (Title page, 1646)

  41 and 42. Images of political monstrosity in post-war England. (Woodcuts, anon., 1647)

  43. Sir Thomas Fairfax presiding over the Council of the Army in 1647. (Woodcut, anon., 1647)

  44. Charles I in captivity at Carisbrooke Castle. (Woodcut, anon., 1648)

  45 and 46. Plans for a new Whitehall Palace approved by Charles during his captivity at Carisbrooke Castle. (Architectural drawings, John Webb)

  47. The Scottish invasion, 1648. (Engraving, anon., 1648)

  48. The siege of Colchester, 1648. (Engraving, anon., 1648?)

  49. The trial of Charles I. (Engraving, English school, seventeenth century)

  50. The execution of Charles I. (Engraving, anon., 1649)

  51. The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike portraying Charles I, the royal martyr. (Engraving, William Marshall, 1649)

  52. The equestrian statue of Charles I at Charing Cross pictured soon after it was erected. (Drawing, anon., c. 1700)

  53. The Cromwell statue in Parliament Square pictured soon after it was erected. (Photograph, York and Son, 1899/1900)

  Maps

  1. The military situation in late 1642

  2. The military situation in late 1643

  3. The military situation in late 1644

  4. The military situation in late summer 1645

  5. Principal battles in Ireland and Scotland

  Preface

  In late April 1646 Charles I, a monarch very jealous of his dignity and personal authority, slipped out of Oxford disguised as a servant. A week later, after some apparently hesitant wanderings in the company of his chaplain and one personal friend, he surrendered to a Scottish army camped at Southwell, Nottinghamshire. Eight years earlier he had set out to crush religious protests in Scotland, never quite able to see the protesters as anything but rebels. But their campaign had set off a political and religious crisis that reverberated through all three of Charles’s kingdoms – Scotland, Ireland and then England. Charles had been unable to establish military control in any of them and, following defeat in England, surrender to his original tormentors had come to seem his best option.

  Charles I leaving Oxford in disguise, April 1646

  This personal humiliation signalled the end of one of the most destructive conflicts in English history, in which a larger percentage of the population may have died than in the First World War, and huge amounts of property had been destroyed. Armies had tramped the land, bringing in their wake terrible plagues. The coming harvest was bad, the crops ruined by wet weather, and over the next four years famine threatened. To many contemporaries these were unmistakable judgements of God on a sinful land: war, disease and famine, three of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. After four years of war in England, however, there was still no agreement about which sins, specifically, were being punished.

  Three days after the surrender of the King a London bookseller called George Thomason bought a tract, Gods Fury, Englands Fire, which promised the answer. Thomason, an avid (perhaps obsessive) collector of pamphlets, had acquired around thirty tracts published during or dealing with the events of that week. They were dominated by two issues: the surrender of the King and the chaos of religious opinion that many now saw in England. With the King defeated, God’s judgement on the battle of arms now clear, it did not take much imagination to identify religion as the issue which should now be addressed. John Benbrigge, the author of Gods Fury, took as his text Isaiah xlii, 24-5:

  Who gave Jacob for a spoil and Israel to the robbers? Did not the Lord? He against whom we have sinned? For they would not walk in his ways, neither were they obedient to his Law. Therefore he hath poured on him the fury of his anger, and the strength of battle, and it hath set him on fire round about; yet he knew not; and it burned him, and he laid it not to heart.

  The general relevance was clear, but what was it that English sinners should lay to heart? Benbrigge promised to identify ‘those spiritual incendiaries which have set church and state on fire’ and exhorted ‘all persons to join together in seeking to quench it’. He also promised to explain how to ‘prevent the fire from being unquenchable in our ruin’. Like many others he set out his partisan view in a laboured and formalistic argument, based on scriptural authorities. His difficulty though was that reasoning of this kind, and scriptural authority, could not convince doubters. In the lush world of civil war print there were too many competing voices of reason, and divergent readings of scripture, to clinch an argument this way. Other partisans could make a competing case in the same style, from similar authorities, while some renounced scholarship and scripture altogether for these purposes. Benbrigge had nothing to say on this deeper problem, and is now forgotten.1

  Thomason eventually bought around 20,000 tracts between 1640 and 1660, a collection which reveals another dimension of the crisis: the very wide publicity given to these fundamental political disagreements. From the very beginning of the Scottish crisis partisans had distributed tracts, mobilized petitions, organized demonstrations and, eventually, raised armies. Benbrigge was by no means the most obscure figure to be given a public voice as a result – leathersellers preached, women spoke of their visions to senior army commanders, men of pre-eminent obscurity purged churches of scandalous ministers and offensive images. Here was a challenge to the cultural authority not just of scripture and reason, but also of kings, bishops and gentlemen, of courts and institutions of government, of learning and universities. Contemporaries had no shortage of languages in which to describe the resulting chaos or to express anxiety: Thomason’s collection is full of discussions of portents and wonders, and of the principles which, if agreed, might bring an end to fighting. But there were no such terms. As long as people like Benbrigge offered different versions of the nature of the problem, to a wide public and without finding new grounds on which to convince people, there remained a chaos of highly principled and competing certainties.

  In one sense this was a crisis in Reformation politics – over the nature of the true religion, how to decide what that was, and of the proper relationship between religious and secular authority. In Scotland a religious party, the Covenanters, took control of the discontents, mobilizing pretty much the whole kingdom around a manifesto for a new settlement. They created a radical movement but one that had clear goals and, therefore, clear limits. The combination of a unified Scottish church and a revolutionary constitution gave control to identifiable political leaders: it was a revolution defined in theory and practice by Reformation politics. In Ireland, Catholic elites excluded from power on the basis of their religion took advantage of the crisis, seeking to recover their position by appealing to their king, in opposition to his English parliament and the Protestant political establishment. In the process they unleashed a popular revolt against Protestant settlement. Armies from Scotland and England were sent to defend
the Protestant interest and Ireland eventually suffered the greatest devastation: a bloody, sectional conflict whose memory and relevance live on.

  England’s experience of this crisis was more hesitant, anxious and divided than Scotland’s; but also more radical in its outcomes. And unlike Ireland the conflict was for most people an argument within a single church and state, about its true identity, past and future; it never quite became a war between rival confessions. Almost everyone was against popery (although they could not necessarily agree what it was) and the bitterest public recriminations about religious belief were often within the parliamentary coalition. England, the metropolitan kingdom, was the cockpit of the British crisis, its armies and battles the largest, its presses by far the most active, its public discussion completely open-ended and almost without social restriction.

  This conflict over religion had profound political implications: Sir John Eliot, for example, thought ‘religion it is that keeps the subject in obedience… [it is] the common obligation among men; the tie of all friendship and society; the bond of all office and relation; writing every duty into the conscience, the strictest of all laws’.2 Confronted by the demands of the Covenanters, Charles had said that to concede would reduce him to the condition of the ‘Duke of Venice’: refusing to concede, it subsequently turned out, had reduced him much further. Criticisms of his rule implicitly raised fundamental questions not only about him, but about kingship, the normal form of government in seventeenth-century Europe (aside from city republics such as Venice that made do with a Doge). Over the coming decade the effort to make Charles see a different sense failed, and it became increasingly difficult to avoid asking what to do with a king who was unfit to rule, or to deal with. Fundamentally, that was a question about monarchy: a king governed by his subjects, or chosen by them, was a peculiar kind of king, perhaps no king at all; but a king who stubbornly led his people into religious error and civil war could hardly be said to be doing God’s work, which was surely the purpose of kings.