God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [302]
Alliances could form around these various appeals – for arrears of pay, religious decency, toleration, opposition to the Negative Voice of the House of Lords, for recreation days or the abolition of the excise – and there were now more players. In addition to the City, Parliament and the King, the New Model became an independent actor, with a conscious political organization. Apprentices, excise rioters, Presbyterians, Covenanters, royalists and London radicals were all mobilizing in a more sophisticated political environment and appealing to different institutions. But, as in 1642, the resulting alliances did not necessarily bind very closely. The Presbyterians took control of London’s government and militia, but their appeal to the anti-excise and pro-recreation day crowds was of more measured success. And such loose alliances did not necessarily withstand the pressure to go to war – perhaps even less so in the immediate aftermath of the one just fought. When it came to the crunch, the Presbyterians could not deliver an armed and determined capital, or a northern army, with which to defeat the New Model.
In the face of all this Charles had little reason to do anything other than look on. As these divisions widened, his prospects improved by leaps and bounds: as the Heads of Proposals seemed to demonstrate. This was a contest about whom he should deal with, and none of the parties spoke for the people as a whole, or championed a settlement that would obviously satisfy all shades of opinion. These various interests were all to some extent disposable, except perhaps the King. The Covenanters could be bought off, the army disbanded and Parliament dissolved, but few thought there could be a king other than Charles and very few, if any, thought that there need be no king at all.
Spring and summer passed as Presbyterians and Independents fought for control of Parliament, the City and military force. There were no formal peace proposals after Newcastle and before the late autumn. But there is little sign that this battle resonated strongly outside London and the armies: no record of provincial mobilization for Presbyterian or Independent reaches us, except perhaps in Norwich. Elsewhere there is plenty of evidence of anti-army and anti-sectarian feeling, but it is difficult to document a powerful Presbyterian movement and, outside London and Lancashire, there is not much evidence of concerted attempts to establish a national Presbyterian church.112
In the provinces the clearest message seems to have been a desire for settlement, and demilitarization, without much sense of commitment to the precise political measures that would allow this. In September 1647 pamphlet readers were treated to another story of monstrous birth, this one from Scotland. The child was born with two heads, one female and one male, its other features described with parallels in classical mythology: Midas, Polyphemus, Satyrs and a Gorgon. At its birth ‘nature seemed to be disquieted and troubled; in so much that the heavens proclaimed its entrance into the world with a loud peal of thunder, seconded with such frequent flashes of lightning that it was credibly believed of all… that the latter now was now come upon them’. At the height of the storm the monster announced with ‘a hoarse but loud voice… I am thus deformed for the sins of my parents’.113
The lesson was a familiar one – the repentant mother admitted how she had been ‘seduced by heretical factious fellows’, and as a result had ignored the ‘laws and ancient customs of England and Scotland’ and had ‘vehemently desire[d]… to see the utter ruin and subversion of all church and state-government’. The editorial