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In January 1645 a significant battle was won when Parliament passed the ordinance replacing the Prayer Book with the Directory of Worship – defence of the doctrine but not the discipline of the Church of England – but the controversy persisted. There was already a polemical link between Independency and anarchy, both social and religious, and a link between these things and the soldiery, encouraged not least by Bruno Ryves in his Mercurius Rusticus. It was also now clear that the New Modelling, and the vigorous prosecution of the war, was associated with Independency: with Cromwell’s politics rather than Manchester’s. It is easy to see why, therefore, the New Model was quickly reputed to be an instrument of the sectaries and a threat to religious and social order.

This was the third significant transformation of the parliamentary war effort: after the escalations of 1643 and the military alliance with the Covenanters. Each had changed the parliamentary cause, and how it was regarded. The royalists had also paid a price for escalation – particularly for the Cessation and for the behaviour of some commanders – but in the face of the ramifying threat of a parliamentary victory, that does not seem to have had such an impact on royalist solidarity in 1644 and 1645. What emerged from the Self-Denying and New Model ordinances was thought by many contemporaries to be a new social formation: an institution with massive political influence which was recruited more or less independently of social status. Modern scholarship has revealed that these perceptions were exaggerated, but the perception was very important. Moreover, although the New Model delivered military victory in the Midlands and the West Country during 1645, victories which more or less ended the war, it did so before any agreement had emerged on the parliamentary side about what an acceptable peace would look like. Escalation of warfare was not accompanied by any greater clarity as to what, precisely, the fighting was for.

12

A Man Not Famous But Notorious

Death and Its Meanings

Two prominent deaths more or less framed 1644 – those of John Pym and William Laud. Pym died at about 7 p.m. on 8 December 1643 and the details and meaning of his death were immediately contested. Mercurius Aulicus, the scurrilous royalist newsbook which had opened up earlier in the year, was in no doubt about its significance: ‘This I cannot say famous, but notorious man, loaded with other diseases, died this very day, chiefly of the Herodian visitation, so as he was certainly a most loathsome and foul carcase’. The ‘Herodian disease’ was ‘Phthiriasis or other loathsome skin disease’, recalling the death of Herod Agrippa in Acts xii, 23, a tyrant struck down by a hideous death. Clearly this had significance – a preacher in Warwick was reported to have prayed that Pym should not die of this disease ‘lest the Cavaliers should cry it up as God’s judgement’. This Aulicus did, with a devastatingly light touch. The judgement on Pym was part of a larger picture, now becoming clear. He was the ‘most eminent’ of the five members ‘so justly’ accused of treason in January 1642 and experience had vindicated the King: ‘the fruits whereof have been and are yet so visible to this distressed kingdom’. Noting that it was remarkable how Pym had died, he also observed that Hampden had died at Chalgrove ‘where he first appeared in arms to exercise that unjust and mischievous Ordinance of the Militia’; that Lord Brooke, ‘who loved not our Church, was slain [by a shot from the roof of] one’; and how ‘strange, if not wonderful’ that the two Hothams, ‘seeds’ of the present troubles, and Nathaniel Fiennes, ‘active and fruitful to this faction’, were now all ‘at their own bar… attending the sentence upon their lives [for treason]’.1

That Pym’s death was a divine punishment was a politically significant charge. The analogy between the health of the individual body and of the body politic was a popular one, and Pym himself had used the image in 1641,