God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [52]
We cannot say that these questions were the talk of every alehouse, and it seems unlikely, but it is practically possible that they might have been. Political awareness was available to the villagers of Stuart England, and their participation was essential to the functioning of government. Practice and precept made them self-activating for the public good, defined in terms common with the magisterial class. Local misgivings about particular policies could be expressed through foot-dragging and legal challenge and, to some extent, through the normal channels of government leading up to the court. During the 1630s, however, they could not be expressed in Parliament and so local grievances accumulated. The problems of the 1620s had not gone away, although the absence of war, and of a talking shop, clearly helped to reduce the temperature. But the apocalypse continued to threaten and militia reform proceeded: fighting a war against fellow Protestants in the light of all this was unlikely to meet uncritical obedience.
3
Drawing Swords in the King’s Service
The English and the Bishops” Wars
As far we can possibly tell, Alexander Powell, of Holt, Cheshire, was not a natural rebel or traitor. His background and personal history, though, to the extent that we can reconstruct them, did make him likely to oppose the war against the Covenanters. In 1638 he had been accused of attending church to hear preaching by a minister who had been suspended for his advanced Protestant views. These meetings, labelled conventicles by the ecclesiastical authorities, had been winked at by the churchwardens, reflecting perhaps the extent to which ‘Puritan’ sympathies were entrenched among village worthies in that part of the country. Puritan preaching had certainly enjoyed some success in fostering hotter forms of Protestantism in the county. It was quite possible for ‘Puritans’ such as Powell to be active in their local communities, pursuing charitable work or fostering an alliance between magistrate and minister aimed at the eradication of sin. But in 1638 Powell turned a beggar away from his house, saying, ‘No sirrah, you shall have no alms here for shortly you will be pressed to war, and then you will fight against us’. Soldiers were about to be pressed in the north-west to fight against the Covenanters, and when the press was used it was exactly such men who were vulnerable: it was not unlikely that this man may have been on the verge of being pressed for service against the Covenanters. Powell seems then to have been asserting the importance of a religious affiliation with the Covenanters over obligations to his ungodly but vulnerable neighbours.1 The pressure of events was making plain potential contradictions in the world view of Charles’s subjects.
We do not know how many people there were like Powell, but we do know that military mobilization by prerogative power in order to enforce Laudian ceremonialism would have plenty of opponents. A Buckinghamshire gentleman came to the attention of the authorities for saying that ‘he cared not [for Laud], for he has been the occasion of this strife between the Scots and us, and I care not if he heard me’. Libels in Ware (Herts.) proposed delivering Laud to the Scots rather than being eaten up with superstition and idolatry, and claimed that the conflict with the Covenanters arose from their resistance to idolatry and the Mass. Others were willing to blame the King, who, according to a man in Pembrokeshire, wanted ‘a good headpiece’, unlike his wise and learned father. A vicar in Northamptonshire who preached obedience was interrupted by a parishioner who said the King should