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By Root 1474 0

parliamentary coalition, not between royalists and parliamentarians. It was a war about the identity of a single church, of which all should be members, and which should be organically linked to the political order. Preaching the Word and administering the sacraments were at the core; but episcopal discipline had been broken before a replacement was in place. Church government, so divisive within the parliamentary alliance, and a non-negotiable for the King, was absent. No authoritative source of authority now existed to interpret scripture, and God’s signs in the world. John Benbrigge’s Gods Fury, in its attempt to convince by pre-war means, was a symptom as much as a cure.34

Political cultures are probably best understood as ‘common sense systems’. Certainly, early Stuart political culture was not a coherent philosophical system but ‘a relatively organised body of considered thought’ consisting of heterogeneous, unsystematic, ‘down-to-earth, colloquial wisdom’, something more than ‘mere matter-of-fact apprehension of reality’ but something less than a fully coherent, consciously articulated world view.35 The crisis during the 1640s made plain some of the contradictions in Stuart common sense: for example, between law, custom, providence, prerogative, scripture and reason as sources of authority. Events were forcing people to choose between authorities which had not previously been seen to be in tension. In these circumstances it was clearly tempting to turn to established metaphors and languages as a means of making sense of the times. The language of tyranny, derived from learned works, was deployed by low-born balla-deers to explain current affairs,36 but who was the tyrant? The literature of monstrosity spoke of the ills of the body politic; that of heresiography spoke of the plague of sectarianism. Providentialism – the belief that the active hand of God was manifest in the world, and that it could offer direction in human affairs – was another staple element of contemporary thought which now provided a means to make sense of civil and religious Babel. Anti-popery, already an elastic term, was made to embrace ever wider areas of religious practice, both Catholic and Protestant. But the collapse of spiritual authority made all other forms of authority difficult to negotiate – this was the fundamental challenge posed by the crisis of Reformation politics.

Just as political disruption was both crisis and opportunity, so too was this polemical morass. This intellectual crisis might offer new vistas onto the wilder shores of Reformation thought – the late 1640s in England seem to have been a time of creative and exhilarating religious experimentation. Others went beyond Reformation politics, seeking workable truths on other bases. For example, indeterminacy and uncertainty were the context for more fundamental reflection about language. Elsewhere in Europe, an active response to this indeterminacy of meaning was to seek a new, transparent language that did not occlude our access to key ideas. In Spinoza this was a disdain for the ‘language of men’, in Descartes an aspiration for a mathematical philosophy and in Hobbes a careful definition of terms. Many reformers were attracted to the study of Chinese and Arabic. Chinese was attractive as a pictographic language, which communicated ideas, not sounds, and which was comprehensible to those whose spoken languages were quite different. Arabic, while not pictographic, was also a written language shared by people whose spoken languages were quite different. Babel in England gave rise to an interest in universal languages. Josiah Ricraft, the partisan historian, may have shared this interest.37 There were more practically oriented responses too. William Lilly’s demotic astrology offered hope in the face of uncertainty – identifiable and verifiable things to look out for that would offer a guide as to what was going on, and where it would all end. By 1645 others saw more-bracing possibilities, to take charge of events, and sought to make the approaching parliamentary victory