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By Root 1404 0

produced petitions against military government and centralization. In Essex, the failure of the petition in favour of the Vote of No Addresses was followed by the adoption of a petition calling for a personal treaty with Charles, which was accepted by the Grand Jury at the Chelmsford assizes in March. It linked this call for a personal treaty with a denunciation of free quarter and high taxation, and a call for the disbandment of the army. Two thousand men came to London to present the petition. The key point in the ‘moderate’ campaign, therefore, was the call for a personal treaty, and opposition to the Vote of No Addresses: it was intended to forestall a Scottish invasion, and secure a rapid settlement by bringing Parliament back to the table. Similar petitions were produced in Sussex and Hampshire, and calls for restraint of the county committees, local control of the militia, and restraint of the military and of sectaries were heard around the country throughout the summer.10 But while that might offer a means to resolve disparate problems it was not clear that those who joined in these campaigns were royalists, or in favour of a return to the religion of bishops and the Prayer Book.

Naturally, these disparate issues also got an airing in print. During March there were attacks on sectarianism and protestations in favour of the calendar and promoting the image of a royalist London. A true and perfect picture of our present reformation was yet another catalogue of sectarian errors, arranged thematically (scripture, God, Trinity and so on). Its diagnosis was plainly stated on the title page: ‘the Christian’s Prospective to take a short view of the new lights that have brake forth since Bishops went down’, ‘Printed in the first year of King Charles His Imprisonment’. Heading the list of authors in whose works these new views could be found was Thomas Edwards, rubbing shoulders with some of the pantheon of religious enthusiasts – Roger Williams, Laurence Clarkson, Richard Overton, John Lilburne, John Milton and others. The current parliament was denounced as mother to this monstrosity in Mistris Parliament Brought to Bed of a Monstrous Childe of Reformation, while another pamphlet announced the Last will and testament of that ‘monstrous, bloody, tyrannical, cruel and abominable’ parliament, which was ‘desperately sick in every part of its ungodly members, as well committees, sequestrators, agitators, solicitors, promoters, clerks, door keepers and all her other untrue and unlawful adherents’.11

The tide was not all in one direction, of course. Along with calls for parliamentarian unity, vindications of Independents and celebrations of the conversion of Indians in the New World came a translation of the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, the leading work in favour of the right of subjects to resist their monarch in early modern Europe. The man often named as the translator, William Walker of Darnall (near Sheffield), was later credited with cutting the King’s head off, although it is more likely that his credit lay in the inspiration than in the physical act. More ambiguously, Edward Husbands republished Elizabeth I’s speech to her last parliament, made on 30 November 1601.12 Here, in miniature, lay one of the crucial weaknesses of the royalist mobilization in 1648: did attachment to this view of harmonious relations between monarch and Parliament necessarily support a second civil war? Proponents of this vision might be in favour of the Vote of No Addresses and bringing the King to see reason, for example – would a weak peace of the kind threatened by the Treaty of Newport really restore this vanished world?

It was not, however, completely unreasonable to think that these grievances might support pro-royalist risings all over England. Henry Firebrace had a plan for the King’s escape from Carisbrooke, rumours of which reached the Committee of Derby House on 7 February and of another one on 13 March. The following week came the attempt foiled by the failure of the King’s physical body to fit through the window. If he had got out,