God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [356]
I have in general followed the attribution of authorship in EEBO and ESTC.
Note on Dates and Quotations
Dates are given old style but with the New Year beginning on 1 January. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized where that aids comprehension.
Notes and References
Preface
1. For the Reformation and the problem of reliable knowledge see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, rev. edn (Oxford, 2003), esp. ch. 1. Benbrigge was a Sussex minister of no great fame or distinction. He may have been a relative of Joseph Benbrigge, the Puritan mayor of Rye in 1629: Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600-1660 (London, 1975), p.239. Sussex, too, had an unexceptional experience of warfare – neither spared nor ravaged. The pamphlet was dedicated to Captain Thomas Collines, another obscure figure, a relatively unknown member of Parliament’s county committee. Benbrigge’s pamphlet has attracted little, if any, attention from modern historians, although he is discussed by J. Sears McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 1620–1670 (Yale, 1976), esp. p. 22n. Benbrigge’s parliamentary sympathies are clear: he thought those labelled Puritan or Roundhead were ‘the flower of [god’s] people’, ‘howsoever the world despises them’. See also J. Sears McGee, ‘Conversion and the Imitation of Christ in Anglican and Puritan Writing’, JBS, 15:2 (1976), 21–39, at p. 25. Benbrigge had an unspectacular publishing career, which seems to have lasted less than a year. In October 1645 he had published a sermon, Christ above all exalted, as in justification so in sanctification. Wherein severall passages in Dr Crisps sermons are answered, a response to Tobias Crispe, Christ alone exalted (London, 1643, and subsequent editions). In September 1646 Benbrigge published a pamphlet about the regulation of usury, his third and final publication.
2. Speaking in Parliament in 1625: quoted in Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), pp. xi–xii.
1. From the Bowels of the Whore of Babel
1. HEH, EL 7852, Castle to Bridgewater, 22 August 1640.
2. Quoted in Edward J. Cowan, Montrose: For Covenant and King (London, 1977), p. 41.
3. Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 6–7.
4. For an overview of the government of the Borders, and further references, see Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), esp. pp. 344–6, 371–8.
5. David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), p. 94.
6. HEH, EL 7852, Castle to Bridgewater, 22 August 1640.
7. Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 68–70. It is likely that this letter refers to papers prepared following the decision, taken on 3 August, to cross the Tweed: David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–44: The Triumph of the Covenanters (Edinburgh, 2003), p. 206. The Covenanters had directed arguments to English audiences over the previous two years: Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–41 (Cambridge, 1990), esp. pp. 85–6, 128–32, 161, 178–9, 186–93, 223–5, 228–30; Russell, Fall, esp. pp. 61–2, 122–3. For the Covenanters” use of the press from 1637 onwards see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 172–87, esp. pp. 177–81; Joseph Black, ‘“Pikes and Protestations”: Scottish Texts in England, 1639–40’, Publishing History, 42 (1997), 5–19; Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 72, 286–7, 388–90.
8. The Venetian ambassador’s reports back home suggest that the picture at the English court was pretty