God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [228]
Hopes of a quick settlement along Presbyterian lines were also dealt a blow by the capture of the King’s personal correspondence. A remarkable feature of the battle had been the discipline of the parliamentarian troops once the royalists had broken ranks and begun to flee. As the horse followed in ruthless pursuit, forbidden on pain of death to dismount for plunder, the rich pickings of the field were left to the foot. Among the prizes were arms, ammunition and more or less the entire baggage train, including the King’s own coach, which contained his correspondence. It revealed in detail the wide gap between many of his public statements and his private convictions: for parliamentarians, in other words, the depth of his untrustworthiness. The letters were read to the two Houses and then at a Common Hall in the City. Selections were published as The Kings Cabinet opened, and those anxious to verify their accuracy and genuineness were invited to examine the originals.27 Publication was justified as religious duty: ‘It were a great sin against the mercies of God, to conceal these evidences of truth, which he so graciously (and almost miraculously) by surprisal of these papers, hath put into our hands’. But it was also a means to enlighten ‘our seduced brethren… that they may see their errors, and return into the right way’. Others, of course, were wilful and beyond reason. Rather than revile them, and following the example of the Apostle St Jude, the editors merely confronted them with the truth: ‘They may see here in his private letters what affection the King bears to his people, what language and titles he bestows upon his Great Council; which we return not again, but consider with sorrow, that it comes from a Prince seduced out of his proper sphere’.28
Here, from the hand of God, was proof positive of the justice of the parliamentarian cause. Anyone ‘well affected to that cause of liberty and religion’ maintained by the English and Scottish parliaments ‘against a combination of all the Papists in Europe almost, especially the bloody tigers of Ireland, and some of the prelatical and court faction in England’ will be ‘abundantly satisfied… how the court has been Cajoled… by the Papists, and we the more believing sort of Protestants, by the Court’. ‘Cajole’ (‘To prevail upon or get one’s way with (a person) by delusive flattery, specious promises, or any false means of persuasion’) was another new word thrown up by conditions of civil war. Apparently imported from the French, it was ‘the new authentic word now amongst our Cabalistic adversaries’.29 Again it bears testimony, both in its meaning and the context of its appearance in the language, to the increasing difficulty of arriving at the truth of matters, despite the massive increase in the flow of printed information. In private spaces – the cabinet and the closet – truth resided, and could be revealed: ‘[the closet is] the most secret place in the house appropriate unto our own private studies, and wherein we repose and deliberate by deep consideration of all our weightiest affairs’. It was ‘a place where our readings of importance are shut up, a room proper and peculiar to ourselves’.30 The revelation of private letters, the breaching of closets and the opening of cabinets, was a common literary form; revelation of these private statements gave the lie to a dissembling or dextrous public front.31
The main body of the pamphlet consists of transcripts of thirty-nine letters and papers, almost all of them individually witnessed as accurate by Zouch Tate, Miles Corbett or Edmund Prideaux and one by P.W. The cumulative effect is damning, including for example a letter written to Ormond during the Uxbridge negotiations telling him to secure peace or at least a cessation in Ireland, and to offer military support against the Scottish forces and even, if necessary, the Earl of Inchiquin, a prominent