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3. Drawing Swords in the King’s Service

1. Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 127. Wood reads this incident differently. For impressment in 1639 see M. C. Fissel, The Bishops” Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns against Scotland 1638–1640 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 224–41; for Cheshire and the war effort see map 1, and pp. 12–18.

2. All examples from Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 85–7. For the circulation of Covenanter propaganda see Joseph Black, ‘“Pikes and Protestations”: Scottish Texts in England, 1639–40’, Publishing History, 42 (1997), 5–19; Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 181–7; Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 91–5.

3. Russell, Fall, pp. 85–6: they had refused to remove their hats during the reading of the royal proclamation against the Scots. Two of them claimed that they had done so initially but then put them back on because the church was cold.

4. Fissel, Bishops” Wars, pp. 18–22; Russell, Fall, pp. 84–5. For Brooke see Ann Hughes, ‘Greville, Robert, Second Baron Brooke of Beauchamps Court (1607-1643)’, ODNB, 23, pp. 792–5; Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), esp. pp. 120–26. For the Providence Island Company see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, 1993).

5. Russell, Fall, pp. 82–3, 87–8.

6. Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 81–2.

7. Ibid., p. 71; Russell, Fall, pp. 79–80.

8. Ronald G. Asch, ‘Wentworth, Thomas, First Earl of Strafford (1593–1641)’, ODNB, 58, pp. 142–57. See also J. F. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641 (Cambridge, 1996); G. C. F. Forster, ‘Faction and County Government in Early Stuart Yorkshire’, Northern History, 11 (1976 for 1975), 70–86.

9. Russell, Fall, p. 80.

10. 1639: Fissel, Bishops” Wars, p. 24 – this was roughly the same size as the army of the Covenanters; 1640: Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), p. 145; See also Fissel, Bishops” Wars, pp. 45–53.

11. Northumberland to Wentworth, 23 July 1638: William Knowler, The Earl of Strafford’s Letters and Dispatches, 2 vols. (London, 1739), II, p. 186. Russell reports similar views from Northumberland in 1640: Fall, p. 131. See also David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), p. 80.

12. Fissel, Bishops” Wars, pp. 246–9.

13. For impressment in general see Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550-1700 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 196–9 and the references therein.

14. Fissel, Bishops” Wars, p. 237. A sidesman was a minor official in the church, responsible for greeting the congregation and seating them.

15. Ibid., pp. 232–6; Victor L. Stater, ‘The Lord Lieutenancy on the Eve of the Civil Wars: The Impressment of George Plowright’, HJ, 29 (1986), 279–96. For Sibthorpe, see above, p. 48. He was vocal too about divisions later in 1639: Russell, Fall, p. 85.

16. Fissel, Bishops” Wars, pp. 226–32.

17. For financial questions see ibid., pp. 124–37; for reluctant nobles and the officer corps see ibid., pp. 18–22, 78–80, 152–62. For the problems of arms supply see ibid., pp. 90–110; Richard Winship Stewart, The English Ordnance Office 1585–1625: A Case Study in Bureaucracy (Woodbridge, 1996).

18. For the weakness of the arms market see Fissel, Bishops” Wars, pp. 98–106. Some of the difficulties in the case of the officer corps were political, however: ibid., pp. 86–7.

19. Edward M. Furgol, ‘Scotland Turned Sweden: The Scottish Covenanters and the Military Revolution’, in John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in Its British Context 1638–1651 (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 134–54. Fissel argues that the Covenanters