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cannot be understood outside that British context, this is a book about the distinctive English experience of that shared crisis. England was the last of Charles’s kingdoms to rebel, and the one with the most spontaneous royalist party, but also the one with the most radical and creative politics. Part of the resolution of that apparent paradox is to study the conditions which made this extraordinary creativity possible. Crucial among them was the appeal to ordinary people, often those without a vote, to support particular platforms, and the creative dialogue between activists, opportunists and their wider publics. In this fluid and confused political world public support was courted, opinions were mobilized and, in the name of the people, a revolution was carried out. My aim here is to understand that political process in England, to capture the anxiety and trauma of civil war, the plurality of responses and the creative confusion to which it gave rise. To say that God’s fury had caused England’s fire was in these circumstances to start an argument rather than end one. Therein lay the crisis of Reformation politics.

The Crisis of the Three Kingdoms, 1637–1642

1

From the Bowels of the Whore of Babel

The Scottish Prayer Book Rebellion and the Politics of Reformation

It was more like a procession than an invasion. When a large Scottish army passed through Flodden in 1640, their progress was ‘very solemn and sad much after the heavy form showed in funerals’. Trumpeters decked with mourning ribbons led the way, followed by one hundred ministers and, in their midst, the Bible ‘covered with a mourning cover’. Behind the ministers came old men with petitions in their hands along with the military commanders, also wearing black ribbons or ‘some sign of mourning’. Finally came the soldiers, trailing pikes tied with black ribbons, accompanied by drummers ‘beating a sad march such as they say is used in the funerals of officers of war’.1

This was a forceful demonstration about the death of the Bible, a complaint about the fate of the true, scriptural religion in Scotland. The origin of their protest was revulsion at a new Prayer Book, introduced in 1637 and described by the Earl of Montrose as ‘brood of the bowels of the whore of Babel’. ‘[T]he life of the gospel [had been] stolen away by enforcing on the kirk a dead service book’, he said.2 Here was its funeral. In fact the army was not, strictly speaking, the army of the Scots but of the Covenanters, men who had entered a mutual bond before God to defend the true religion. Even at this stage there were Scots who were not Covenanters, and that distinction was to become extremely significant in the coming years – Montrose, for one, was later to abandon this version of the cause and become the champion of armed royalism in Scotland.

This was not the first time that a Scottish army had taken this road, inland from the fortified town of Berwick and crossing the river Tweed, which marks the border between England and Scotland at its eastern end, just south of Coldstream. The last time, in 1513, it had ended in disaster: perhaps 5,000 Scots died, among them the Scottish king, eleven earls, fifteen lords, three bishops and much of the rest of Scotland’s governing class.3 Fear of the arrival of armed Scots in the north had caused centuries of concern in England. Indeed tenants in the Borders had enjoyed unusual freedoms in return for an obligation to offer armed resistance to Scottish incursions, and the prevalence of cross-border cattle raiding had given rise to something like clan society. When James VI of Scotland ascended to the English throne in 1603, the Borders had, in his vision, become middle shires, and the problems had receded somewhat. Nonetheless, armed Scots were not regarded with equanimity in northern England.4

This time, however, they were barely opposed and the march past Flodden was the prelude to a successful occupation of northern England, achieved more or less without a fight. Alexander Leslie’s Covenanting army were faced by 10,000 English troops with