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By Root 1331 0

fiery eyes, hair black and curled, his breast armed with shining scales, so that by the reflection of the sun they became so blind and dazzled, that he might have taken or slain every man of them, he having a musket in one hand, and a large paper in the other hand, which seemed to them a petition’. Able to travel at miraculous speeds he left the sailors to observe the French fleet on its way to Catalonia, returning within minutes with news of it. In discussion with the amazed sailors the monster emphasized to them the dangers faced by the kingdom, a clear warning about the consequences of divisions. Appended was a report of a minor victory in Ireland, a providence of God and an encouragement to the Protestants. The six sailors were named, and the story was said to have been taken down by a gentleman – a contemporary code for the reliability of the testimony. The names of the witnesses, however, suggest a satirical intent.72 Perhaps the point was to make fun of the influence of rumour on menacing petitioners. In January fear of the crowd was certainly vying with fear of armed Catholic conspiracy. In any case, this subverted more than just the use of monsters to tell political tales, since a plain, factual style was in itself a persuasive technique. The bloody plot in Derbyshire was reported with the full apparatus of sober reporting, for a clearly identifiable political purpose but in the hope that it would be inoculated against the charges of fantasy and exaggeration being levelled against some of the pamphlets about the Irish rebellion. There does not seem to have been a parish called Bingley, though, and there is no independent evidence of the existence of this plot. This was not uncommon: in such publications ‘moral verisimilitude’ was as important as ‘circumstantial accuracy’.73 But at this juncture such ambiguities made it even more difficult to know not only what to believe, but also whom to believe.

A substantial number of pamphlets sought to expound the fundamental issues using the common metaphors of political life, but in these increasingly polarized political conditions their meaning was elusive. For example, an important metaphor for contemporaries in understanding political relationships, and dysfunctions within them, was that of the body politic. Over the summer of 1640 the court had been afflicted by disease, as had the Earl of Strafford. In August, after this summer of disease, uncertainty and discontent, John Castle prayed for his patron’s ‘safety and health in these valetudinous times, when all is sick and ill at ease’.74 Where did the sickness lie? In Parliament, following the revelation of the Irish rising and the suspicion that it was prompted from above, Pym had said ‘diseases which proceed from the inward parts, as the liver, the heart or the brains, the more noble parts, it is a hard thing to apply cure to such diseases’.75 In December, William Montagu wrote to his father that ‘sects in the body and factions in the head are dangerous diseases and do desperately threaten the dissolution of a well governed estate’.76 A shared language did not enable the resolution of the conflict, but it might be a means to express it. Thomas Knyvett wrote to his wife on 31 May 1642 about the paper war, expressing his frustration that both sides claimed to be seeking the maintenance of the laws: ‘the question is not so much how to be governed by them, as who shall be master and judge of them’. ‘A lamentable condition’, he continued:

to consume the wealth and treasure of such a kingdom, perhaps the blood too, upon a few nice wilful quibbles. Out of these prints you may feel how the pulse of the King and kingdom beats, both highly distempered, and if God doth not please to raise up skilful physicians that may apply lenatives and cooling Julips, phlebotomy [blood letting] will be a desperate cure to abate this heat.77

Provincial opinion was not leading events, but it is certainly clear that the issues being thrashed out in Parliament and at court resonated powerfully in the localities. Local conflicts were interpreted