God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [33]
At stake too was the location of the Royal Supremacy. ‘Puritan’ opponents of crown policy looked to the King-in-Parliament as the seat of the Royal Supremacy – it was a parliament which had given Henry VIII power over the English church – and sought an active foreign policy in defence of the Reformation in Europe at large. Hooker offered an authority for this view too.38 The battle might erupt over any number of issues, and when it did the means of publicity, and handy stereotypes, lay close to hand.
Print was not the cause of this, nor its only medium, but the growth of printing in England in the later sixteenth century had been associated with the development of a pamphlet culture encouraging open debate of political issues in print. Much printed matter was in expensive formats, large bibles or learned tracts written in Latin and not intended to inspire reflection on current affairs by the vulgar. But there were also genres of cheap print which targeted wider audiences. In particular ballads were produced in huge numbers, illustrated and set to well-known tunes with the intention of amusing but also educating audiences in alehouses and elsewhere. Although literacy in England may have been as low as 30 per cent among the male population, and less than that among the female population, this form of print was not primarily textual. Ballads were sung, and pasted on the walls of village alehouses, their woodcut images offering a spur to the memory of what the text contained. In the second half of the sixteenth century there may have been 4 million of these ballads in circulation – nearly one each for the whole population.39
Many of these ballads were entertainments, dealing with chivalric stories or romances between young swains and country maids. They also had a didactic function, of course, giving their audiences examples with which to think about, for instance, moral qualities and the dangers of adolescence. Others were intended to educate the populace about the demands of a Protestant life, and, by the 1640s in any case, about tyranny and virtuous government.40 Alongside these religiously improving ballads and stories of civic virtue huge numbers of printed catechisms circulated, teaching people to read at the same time that they offered religious instruction. In the early seventeenth century there were about half a million official catechisms in circulation, as well as three quarters of a million alternatives.41 An unknown number of broadsides – large single sheets illustrated with a woodcut – were also in circulation, again often with the purpose of offering religious instruction that reached beyond the formally literate population. By the late sixteenth century more elaborate works were making their way in a more sophisticated print market – the chapbook. Costing a penny or two, and consisting of up to twenty-four small unbound pages, many of these books also took up the themes of love and chivalry, but they might also seek to edify and inform about more narrowly religious or political issues.42
In the later sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century there was also a steady growth in the publication of ‘news pamphlets’, alongside ballads and broadsides. They were not serial publications, but were one-off, topical and (at least ostensibly) factual.43 Many of these pamphlets sought to give advice or example about the active Christian life by lending a providential meaning to disasters, murders, monstrous births and unusual natural phenomena. The hand of God could be discerned in the life and