God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [35]
Meetings of Parliament might stoke all this up, particularly in London. Felton, after all, had been encouraged to murder Buckingham not just by the promptings of his conscience, but by a declaration of Parliament and by what he had read. He clearly moved in a world of easy private connections. Two of his lodging house acquaintances were later examined about the assassination. Elizabeth Josselyn, the wife of a stationer, testified that she and her mother lived in part of the same house as Felton in Fleet Lane, and that she had lent him several books. The only one he did not return was a ‘History of the Queen of Scots’. Like many others she found him a melancholy man ‘much given to reading of books, and of very few words. She never saw him merry’.49 But he had spent two hours discussing a copy of Parliament’s remonstrance with Richard Harward at the Windmill in Shoe Lane. Felton knew a scrivener – a professional writer of manuscript copies – by the name of Willoughby who had written petitions for him in the past. It was from Willoughby that Harward had got his copy of the remonstrance. After the murder of Buckingham, Willoughby was found to have copies of a verse in his desk – ‘Let Charles and George [Buckingham] do what they can / Yet George shall die like Doctor Lambe’.50 Books and declarations could be dangerous things, and they circulated easily in the taverns and lodging houses of early Stuart London. Felton’s own fate, of course, also became a public issue – in his scaffold scene, and in the circulation of opinions and verses about him. In the late 1620s Charles not only turned his back on parliaments and Puritans but on the public too, refusing to resort to print to explain himself.51
In these public controversies – over religion, foreign policy and prerogative powers – religious, legal and political concerns intersected. This was true at several levels: the fact that prominent Arminians seemed to support a generous view of the prerogative or that Puritans sought also to clip the King’s wings; an argument about how far to emphasize the King-in-Parliament as the seat of the Royal Supremacy; that foreign policy was irreligious and could not be funded because of the corruptions of the court; that harmless ceremonies should be respected as the preference of the monarch and the legal heritage of the church.
It was a matter of faith that the common law enshrined human reason, arrived at by accretion of the ages. So too the view that the Reformation had been achieved by statute, and that the law was literally omnicom-petent – able to provide solutions to all social and political questions and the ultimate safeguard of civil and religious rights. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this view had been entrenched as governments used the law to widen the scope of their powers. Paradoxically, therefore, as the governments became more ambitious they became more trammelled by the common law – the uses of the prerogative in the 1550s resembled those of the 1620s, but caused much less alarm.52 Part of this mix was a language of commonwealth which drew, ultimately, on the classical heritage that was a standard part of the education not just of Stuart gentlemen but of anyone who had been at a grammar school. This education, broadly termed humanist, informed a sense of public activism among these men as holders of public office and, more generally, as leading figures in local society.53 More theoretical questions were open too: Roman histories of ‘free states’ were widely available in early Stuart England, to the extent that they had become,