God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [3]
Thomason eventually bought around 20,000 tracts between 1640 and 1660, a collection which reveals another dimension of the crisis: the very wide publicity given to these fundamental political disagreements. From the very beginning of the Scottish crisis partisans had distributed tracts, mobilized petitions, organized demonstrations and, eventually, raised armies. Benbrigge was by no means the most obscure figure to be given a public voice as a result – leathersellers preached, women spoke of their visions to senior army commanders, men of pre-eminent obscurity purged churches of scandalous ministers and offensive images. Here was a challenge to the cultural authority not just of scripture and reason, but also of kings, bishops and gentlemen, of courts and institutions of government, of learning and universities. Contemporaries had no shortage of languages in which to describe the resulting chaos or to express anxiety: Thomason’s collection is full of discussions of portents and wonders, and of the principles which, if agreed, might bring an end to fighting. But there were no such terms. As long as people like Benbrigge offered different versions of the nature of the problem, to a wide public and without finding new grounds on which to convince people, there remained a chaos of highly principled and competing certainties.
In one sense this was a crisis in Reformation politics – over the nature of the true religion, how to decide what that was, and of the proper relationship between religious and secular authority. In Scotland a religious party, the Covenanters, took control of the discontents, mobilizing pretty much the whole kingdom around a manifesto for a new settlement. They created a radical movement but one that had clear goals and, therefore, clear limits. The combination of a unified Scottish church and a revolutionary constitution gave control to identifiable political leaders: it was a revolution defined in theory and practice by Reformation politics. In Ireland, Catholic elites excluded from power on the basis of their religion took advantage of the crisis, seeking to recover their position by appealing to their king, in opposition to his English parliament and the Protestant political establishment. In the process they unleashed a popular revolt against Protestant settlement. Armies from Scotland and England were sent to defend the Protestant interest and Ireland eventually suffered the greatest devastation: a bloody, sectional conflict whose memory and relevance live on.
England’s experience of this crisis was more hesitant, anxious and divided than Scotland’s; but also more radical in its outcomes. And unlike Ireland the conflict was for most people an argument within a single church and state, about its true identity, past and future; it never quite became a war between rival confessions. Almost everyone was against popery (although they could not necessarily agree what it was) and the bitterest public recriminations about religious belief were often within the parliamentary coalition. England, the metropolitan kingdom, was the cockpit of the British crisis, its armies and battles the largest, its presses by far the most active, its public discussion completely open-ended and almost without social restriction.
This conflict over religion had profound political implications: Sir John Eliot, for example, thought ‘religion it is that keeps the subject in obedience… [it is] the common obligation among men; the tie of all friendship and society; the bond of all office and relation; writing every duty into the conscience, the strictest of all laws’.2 Confronted by the demands of the Covenanters, Charles had said that to concede would reduce him to the condition of the ‘Duke of Venice’: refusing to concede, it subsequently turned out, had reduced him much further. Criticisms of his rule implicitly raised fundamental