God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [126]
It was in these months that Prayer Book petitioning was widespread. These campaigns were clearly partisan, related to local mobilizations against parliamentary radicalism.68 The best known was that in Kent. At the assizes on 25 March, Sir Edward Dering, the disgraced MP, successfully engineered a confrontation with a rival Puritan and parliamentary faction, associated with Sir Anthony Weldon and Sir Michael Livesey. As chairman of the Grand Jury, Dering managed to steer through the assizes, after three drafts, a petition in defence of the existing liturgy and church government, and against sectarianism. The Grand Jury had been empanelled by Justice Malet rather than the sheriff, and was clearly managed, but even so nine members of the jury disowned it. One of the grounds for speaking against it was that it contradicted petitions previously sent up – clearly a tactical argument but one that arose from the increasingly partisan use of institutions previously understood to serve as the ‘voice of the county’. These struggles were revisited at quarter sessions in Maidstone in April, and at the summer assizes in July. The Commons sent a committee to sit on the bench at the summer assizes, but this was resented by those on the bench legally, and there was even some jostling as they tried to take their seats and their colleagues failed to make room for them. At another point rival groups ‘hummed’ each other as they tried to speak. Henry Oxinden complained that ‘I have heard foul language and desperate quarrellings even between old and entire friends’. This partisan struggle was very public too: it was said that 2,000 people witnessed the reading of the petition on 25 March.69
In these partisan battles standard metaphors – such as providence or natural wonders – were deployed with precise partisan purposes, and some of the staple elements of local life – the history of Protestant sufferings or the Prayer Book – became invested with partisan meaning. Newsbooks inhabited this same world of polemic and were often produced by men with a record of contentious pamphleteering and a line in other kinds of writing: Richard Harper was soon to launch an apparently very successful line in prophecy pamphlets, having published ‘pleasant histories’ during the 1630s. John Thomas and Bernard Alsop, both associated with newsbooks and publication of parliamentary news, had also been up before Parliament for publishing scandalous pamphlets.70 Unsurprisingly, therefore, news stories were often explicitly intended as moral or religious exempla. Nathaniel Butter, better known to posterity as a newspaper pioneer, published a number of wonder pamphlets, including the story of a giant toad fish caught at Woolwich and displayed at Glove Alley in London in 1642. Its appearance was attested by many witnesses, among them gentlemen, and that it meant something was attested by classical sources including Pliny and Josephus as well as more contemporary examples: large fish coming ashore had meant, throughout history, trouble for reigning monarchs. ‘These unnatural accidents though dumb, do notwithstanding speak the supernatural intentions and purposes of the Divine powers, chiefly when they meet just at that time when distractions, jars, and distempers are afoot in a Common-weale or Kingdom’. ‘It is further observed by those that profess skill in prognostication, that of how much the monster is of feature or fashion, hateful and odious, so much it portends danger the more dreadful and universal’. Appended to the story is news of a more conventional kind – a skirmish outside Hull.71 News was partisan and reports of human and natural events were of equal value in coming to terms with the times.
But this literature too was open to satire. In January 1642 a marine monster was reported to have appeared to six sailors near the mouth of the Thames. The monster ‘was very terrible; having broad