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Creativity was manifest in the content of arguments, in the forms in which they were expressed and the means by which they were disseminated. It was a product of the fluidity of the two coalitions and doubts about what would constitute a successful peace; and of escalating war efforts which had made both things more rather than less complex, and which sought to mobilize opinion and support among wide and overlapping publics. The resulting polemical morass exposed fundamental elements of political culture to sustained critical observation; and that public debate was far less socially bounded than was considered decent before 1640.

It was not the novelty of the problems which made this crisis remarkable. The problems of, for example, the origins of religious and other truths, the nature of the Christian community, and the relationship between religious and secular authority had all generated traditions of learned argument. What was remarkable about England in the 1640s was the depth and extent of their public discussion, the urgency with which they imposed themselves, and the creativity of some responses to them. Polemical fury had created a world of competing certainties: about the personal honour of particular individuals such as Nathaniel Fiennes, the trustworthiness of the King or the impropriety of revealing his private correspondence. Rival claims and rival accounts of the same event created a problem of authority: the authority of truth-claims. Expert testimony from physicians was a means of fixing the meaning of Pym’s death; Laud’s equally contested death was discussed in terms of martyrdom and hypocrisy. Print accelerated, generalized and amplified particular causes. Pamphlet debates articulated anxieties and uncertainty even as they laid claim to the truth, and in the course of the controversies some authors responded very creatively to these opportunities. Print was a means to mobilize, and the forum in which anxiety was amplified and creativity flourished.

One response to this effect of print was, of course, repressive. The lapse of licensing in 1641 had been unintentional, and a series of press-licensing measures followed, often in periods of acute political tension. Book-burnings were in a sense more than measures of censorship: they declared particular publications anathema to civil, Christian society. Whether an act of censorship or a statement of repugnance it was not only the content of the argument that attracted repression – it was often the form of expression. The 1643 Licensing Ordinance, for example, had cited ‘seditious’ texts as a problem, but in a longer list which was primarily concerned with civility: ‘false, forged, scandalous, seditious [and] libellous’ publications. Free speech in Parliament required that people have the freedom to speak – denunciation, misrepresentation, dishonourable satire all made the free exchange of views impossible. Secrecy about public proceedings, in Parliament and village bodies, was designed not simply to exclude the vulgar, therefore, but to allow political elites to discuss freely without the danger of their divisions becoming public, or the fear of public censure preventing them from making an important argument.49

With the spectacular growth of print these questions had become much more pressing. Some burnings – for example, those of Roger Williams’s Bloudy Tenent or of the Book of Sports – reflected a deep hostility to what they contained. Others seem more particularly a response to tone and form. Dering’s collection of speeches, burned in February 1642, had been scandalous to the proceedings of the House, rather than particularly offensive in their opinions. In early 1646 a collection of declarations published by the Scots was nearly burned, at a moment of tension in the military alliance – although in the end only the preface suffered this fate, presumably on similar grounds to Dering’s.50 Another case may have been the spoof of the parliamentary Souldiers Catechisme. Both armies were provided with catechisms,