God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [267]
Gangraena was published as a catalogue, and has some value as such, but it was also a political intervention, offering a window onto the fraught politics of the fracturing parliamentary coalition in 1646. It was a publishing sensation – part one was reprinted three times before the appearance of part two. There were at least twenty direct replies (Walwyn was prominent among the critics) and it was incidentally mentioned in many more. The author became known to contemporaries as Gangraena Edwards, or simply as Gangraena, and he was immortalized by Milton as ‘Shallow Edwards’.20
Like William Lilly, whose career had also been launched in 1644 and took off in 1646, Edwards was tapping into a large market, one characterized by anxiety. As in 1640–42, the future of a church liberated from episcopal control was easily expressed in terms of a problem of order, and discussion of that problem clearly sold well. Gangraena’s sprawling denunciation publicized the dangers, and in its very form demonstrated disorder, but it also offered some comforts. The desire to catalogue, count and categorize was an effort at rhetorical control – capturing the threat but also, by historicizing, taxonomizing and enumerating it, to make it more bounded and limited. It is a relief, in a way, to know that the festering affliction of the body that appears so worrying has a name, even if that name is gangrene.
In the polemical world inhabited by Edwards and his antagonists, an argument which had been postponed in 1641 was now in full spate. Where could the limits of decency be set once episcopacy had gone, and how could they be policed? In Scotland, when the shell of episcopal authority had cracked, there was a fully developed Presbyterian system ready to emerge – wanting only the abolition of bishops and the recognition of the authority of the General Assembly. In England nothing so complete had been growing within: what emerged was not formed and was, to Presbyterian eyes, monstrous. The world portrayed by Edwards, of dissolving limits and unpoliced religious experimentation, a world turned upside down, held appeal for the radicals of the 1960s.21 For contemporaries it was more or less inseparably connected with anxiety.
In these pamphlet debates about war aims, and peace projects, standard metaphors and images were used for partisan purposes but in ways that became controversial, incomprehensible or straightforwardly incredible.22 The 1640s saw remarkable rhetorical creativity, the innovative use of familiar arguments and languages, as much as in more formal conceptual innovation.23 For example, resistance to Charles’s policies was couched in terms of loyalty to the monarch, even when that entailed raising an army through Parliament but without the King’s consent. Opponents claimed that they were protecting Charles from his evil advisers or from himself or, eventually, protecting the office from its present incumbent. By 1646 treason had been creatively reinterpreted to embrace, effectively, advising the King wrongly (Strafford, Laud) and surrendering a city to the royal army (Nathaniel Fiennes). In 1649 it was used to kill the King himself. Political battles were fought out on the scaffolds, where these novel claims were asserted and resisted, Laud and then Charles embracing martyrdom rather than the justice of their end. ‘Strained readings’ is a polite term for the often bizarre, incomprehensible or incredible uses to which standard terms were put. Many people had taken sides reluctantly and conditionally, and a number of people lapsed from activism into inactivity, or changed sides altogether, leading to public argument about what was more honourable – following an initial commitment to a cause, or the shifting dictates of