God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [121]
In the paper war between Parliament and the King secular issues were at the cutting edge of the conflict. But the motor behind the radical constitutional position, and the grounds on which Parliament’s cause often seemed to rest, was the defence of the true religion.40 This was certainly prominent on both sides of the conflict in the larger pamphlet campaign. Anti-popery, of course, played well for those who had remained in Parliament. In the light of what were seen as recurrent attempts to use force to overawe the guardians of the true religion – the two army plots, the Incident and the attempt on the Five Members – popery could now be seen as an active military threat. This was not new, but was newly urgent, and gained a further impetus from the Irish rebellion. Anti-popery as a polemical argument for further reformation was fused with this more restricted and dangerous form of anti-popery attached to a specific Catholic threat. It served to mobilize opinion in support of radical constitutional as well as religious positions.
Ireland was a dominant presence in print: in October 15 per cent of the tracts collected by Thomason were concerned with Ireland, rising to 22 and 28 per cent in the following two months. Between January and June 1642 nearly 23 per cent of the collection concerns Ireland, with peaks of one third or more of the total in February and April. In this massive print output stories of Catholic atrocities were clearly exaggerated, and the authors and publishers of those accounts were men with an agenda close to that championed by Pym. An important strand of writing related these atrocities directly to a strong tradition in English Protestantism celebrating the sufferings of true believers, and some passages apparently describing contemporary atrocities seem to have been lifted almost directly from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.41
They had detractors in the presses, willing to denounce the ‘many fabulous pamphlets that are set out concerning the rebels in Ireland of their outrages and bloody proceedings’, and which identified this episode with a history of the evils of rebellion rather than of Protestant sufferings. But these brave voices were shouting into a strong wind. By late 1641 fears of an Irish invasion were alive in England and Wales, along with the (groundless) fear that recusants would join forces with them.42 In January, John Thomas, likely associate of Pym and inventor of the newsbook, published ‘a true relation’ of a bloody popish plot in Derbyshire, an attempt to blow up the parish church of Bingley, which must have been intended for this audience.43 The title page is larded with promises of details: names, dates and places, as well as a full inventory of a store of arms seized from a Catholic recusant. This plain factual reporting countered the charge of exaggeration, but the pamphlet had a clear and partisan political implication. Thomas Needham, a prominent local recusant of substantial means, employed John Simonds to place thirty-four barrels of gunpowder, faggots, old iron and stones in the vault of the church, with the intention of blowing it up during divine service, ‘when the church was filled with a full number of parishioners’. God’s providence averted the catastrophe, however, when Jacob Francklin, the sexton, arrived at the church to toll the ‘passing bell’ for a parishioner who was gravely ill. Hearing noises in the vault he investigated and disaster was averted. Following investigations by the local magistrates a search of Needham’s house revealed a stock of arms, enough to set out at least one hundred men for war.44 The pamphlet is written with a little style – the narrative is dramatically recounted – but there are some