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By Root 1319 0

told the sorry tale of their sin and punishment, which they accepted as just, in the hope that their sad experience would serve to discourage others from taking the same path. These warning pieces were now made partisan – recounting, for example, the punishments consequent on disobeying a royal order to lay down arms, or divine judgements against popish plotters.27 The language of providence, and of monstrosity and wonders, was ubiquitous, but if God’s judgements were plain, the identity of the culprit and the nature of the sin were far less so. In reporting the signs of God’s will in this world there was a double problem: to establish the truth of the phenomenon and then to come to an uncontested interpretation of its meaning. An effect of public discussion of these issues was to make the reading public arbiters of these fundamental questions.28

Perhaps the most profound element of this crisis of authority was the collapse of spiritual authority. As early as October 1642 Thomas Case had attributed conflict to this question of truth: ‘And what is this quarrel all this while, is it not religion, and the truth of God? The truth of Doctrine?, the truth of discipline, the truth of worship?’29 Criticism of tradition and learned divinity made scripture ever more clearly the bedrock of religious knowledge, but scriptural texts were often opaque, ambiguous or apparently contradictory. These were in fact the reasons why unguided access to scripture was regarded as dangerous. Appeals to scripture were made for quite contrary purposes. The injunction in Psalm 105.15, for example, ‘Touch not mine anointed and do my prophets no harm’, became unstable in its meaning. The royalists claimed, on the basis of long practice, that the King was God’s anointed, and that this clearly ruled out the possibility of legitimate resistance. Prynne argued that the anointed were all God’s chosen ones, and that the injunction was directed at kings – more than a counter-blast since it in fact indicted Charles of already having breached the injunction.30 A veritable Babel of conflicting interpretations emerged, and was intimately connected to the debate about church government, since religious sects claimed spiritual warrant for their practices either from scripture or from personal revelation, liberated (to varying degrees) from tradition and learned divinity.

On the other hand, religious pluralism was denounced in terms of well-established idioms – as a disease or a rupture in the divine order – but exactly which forms of belief were pathogens, or threatened the organic moral order? There seemed to be no agreement as to how to answer this question. Those who took on these questions seemed to John Milton, and presumably to others, to be ‘in wandering mazes lost’. Many polemicists, rather than reasoning high ‘Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, / Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute’,31 simply cut to the chase: the boundaries of acceptable belief could surely be established on the basis of the behavioural consequences of a prophet’s teaching, rather than on the basis of scripture or authority. If there was a definitive text here it was Matthew vii, 20: ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’. False prophets led the flock to sin. Another response to the sectarian scare was taxonomical, and these taxonomies were also, frequently, historical in content, equating current errors with others in Christian history.32 This process of numbering and taxonomizing both captured the escalating threat and promised, by labelling and counting, to contain it. Ephraim Pagitt’s Heresiography of 1645 promised a description of the Heretickes and Sectaries of these latter times: numbering and historicizing at the same time.33

This was not a war of religion in the sense that the two sides were members of a different church. Neither anti-popery nor anti-sectarianism marked the boundary between royalist and parliamentarian: people on all sides deployed both for polemical purposes. In fact the most vituperative exchanges about the church settlement were within the