God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [125]
Religious contention in Northamptonshire was not restricted to pamphlet wars. On 28 June a party of volunteers raised for Parliament entered the village of Isham and destroyed its cross. This led to a charge of riot, prosecuted by Thomas Jenison, a neighbouring Justice. But the two men most likely to judge the case at a special sessions called to consider the matter were also likely to sympathize with the iconoclasm, and the commander of the troop was himself a JPs. On 6 July, Jenison went to Wellingborough and found Puritan JPs at lunch in the Hind, after the regular lecture, discussing the incident. Their conclusion was that it was not a riot and that he was interfering unnecessarily. A heated argument ensued but the matter was eventually brought before a special sessions on 11 July. There the men were found guilty, but not without problems. The foreman of the jury had apparently disheartened the jury, and as they withdrew to consider their verdict one of the presiding magistrates, Mr Sawyer, lectured them about the superstitious nature of crosses, citing the Commons order of 8 September 1641 as justification for the action of the volunteers. This led to an argument between Jenison and Sawyer in which Jenison accused him of seeking to pervert the jury. The Commons order had mentioned crucifixes not crosses, but Isham Cross was not the last victim of this zeal.62
Defence of the liturgy in pamphlets like those describing the torments of Stichberry and the Wilmores supported a programme of order based around the dignity of the clergy, learned divinity, and a nuanced approach to the authority of scripture and tradition in liturgical matters. The zeal of the humble, Puritan scriptural preciseness and public contestation were in this view not means to promote reformation, but a threat to the faith. Again, this seems to represent a modulation and radicalization of longer-standing polemics. Since the reign of Elizabeth at least there had been anti-Puritan polemic, which had often focused on the hypocrisy and self-love of Puritans. Starting with the line of anti-sectarian writing in the autumn of 1641, however, anti-Puritanism seemed to concentrate almost exclusively on the question of order, the dangers of schism and the folly of unlearned preachers.63
This anti-Puritanism was not necessarily the same as support for Laudianism, but it was certainly beginning to play better for the royalists than for Parliament. It was reflected, for example, in Ludlow, on 1 May, where a maypole was adorned with the head of a Roundhead and pelted with stones. Puritan excess in suppressing communal festivities was harnessed to attacks on Parliament’s partisans. Wallington noted, alongside ‘God’s judgements on them that set up the cursed maypole’, judgements on ‘mockers especially that new reproachful name… Round heads’.64 At Croft images were shot at ‘in derision of roundheads’ and a ‘Roundhead sermon’ in Hereford Cathedral was silenced. It was a term now juxtaposed to loyalty and constitutional royalism and it began to erode deference to the godly elite. Lady Brilliana Harvey wrote to her husband in June 1642 that:
They are grown exceeding rude in these parts. Every Thursday some of Ludlow, as they go through the town, wish all the puritans of Brampton [the home of the Harleys] hanged, and as I was walking one day in the garden… they looked upon me and wished all the puritans and Roundheads at Brampton hanged.65
Another sign of irreverence is in the spread of the nickname King Pym. It apparently arose from the publication of an order of the House of Commons in a form resembling that of a royal publication, appearing over the name of John Pym.66 It became a means of ridiculing the presumption of the parliamentary leadership. On 15 March 1642 the Commons sent for Mr Shawbery, who was reported by two witnesses as having said in the Spread Eagle in Gracechurch Street ‘That he would cut [Pym’s] throat,