God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [255]
It seems that 1645 was an important year for the development of these disputes, as a campaign to abolish the committees built up a head of steam, creating common cause among partisans with quite different views on what the national settlement should look like.51 It is again striking how the new conditions of the 1640s also offered opportunities for new kinds of mobilization – in print, for example. Humphrey Willis, the clubman leader of whom we know most, published a pamphlet denouncing the Somerset county committee in 1647, and many of these county disputes were retailed for a national audience. As with the exemplary stories of providential judgements, local political battles were retold to a national audience through the London presses. Local battles in the parliamentary administration were pursued at Westminster, and used there as emblematic of the larger issues in the conflict.52 The basis of local order was experienced as a local issue, but was of national significance, and had significance for the national political battle.
Times Whirligig, by a former clubman leader, satirized Somerset’s new low-born governors
In Warwickshire, however, these disputes had an ideological dimension – they resembled a local version of the national debate about what costs were acceptable to secure a victory. The county committee was dominated by militants and their defence of their powers against the Earl of Denbigh’s association early in the war was in their eyes a defence of the county’s capacity to fight the royalists. Similarly, their defence of themselves against the sub-committee of accounts, which was dominated by Denbigh’s supporters, was a defence of their capacity to fight the war. Taking accounts in that context was a more loaded political statement, and both moderates and militants could identify their local cause as part of the larger national argument. As John Bryan argued in a sermon in 1646, people should not resent or murmur at the impositions of Parliament, ‘seeing we enjoy our lives, liberties, privileges, estates and religion (all which were at stake and almost lost)’. The great difference between these taxes and ‘those which formerly our taskmasters laid upon us’ was that ‘Those were in design to ruin and enslave us to arbitrary power, these are to preserve us from it’.53 Willingness to pay could be a test of commitment: as two Lancashire constables complained to the Justices, they had collected a rate and paid it to the benefit of the ‘public’, but could not collect it in full because some refused and also ‘withdrew others (honestly affected) from co-operation’.54 During the war, both nationally and locally, a desire to take accounts was often closely linked with a criticism of policy – it was how the money was being spent which was at stake.55
These disputes were not necessarily localist in the sense of inhabiting a narrowly bounded political world, oblivious to the larger battles being fought out in London and Oxford and on the battlefields. They might also reflect a habit of seeing the big issues in terms of local arrangements. This was a habit of thought familiar to all those who had heard a local sermon or read any seventeenth-century legal writing – small transgressions threatened the gravest sins or contraventions of the most fundamental principles. As with any other political argument in the 1640s, the attack on committeemen might be a vehicle for a number of purposes.
These local movements to defend or attack the powers of individuals or institutions were not a retreat into an apolitical bucolic idyll, but a resort to forms of solidarity and authority common before the war. A community, however,