• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1063 0

to those who did not come up to the rails. One hundred of his parishioners had been excluded from communion at Easter 1640, and this had led to a direct confrontation with the godly. The godly had their moment later in the summer, however, when fifty men who had assembled at Saffron Walden passed through the village on their way to war. On a fast day in early July they pulled down the altar rails and some images erected by Drake. The images were tied to a tree and scourged, before being taken back to Saffron Walden, where they were used as fuel to roast the soldiers” meat. En route they were taunted: ‘if ye be Gods deliver yourselves’.72 Clearly, in this case as presumably in many others, it makes little sense to separate the violence of the soldiers from a broader culture of anti-popery, and from a local history of conflict over ceremonial forms.

Certainly Essex was alive with this popular anti-popery. On 26 May, Colchester had erupted in panic when two young girls reported having seen two men, both strangers, acting suspiciously the previous night. According to one of the girls, who had been playing in the street, one of the men had been pushing rags through the window of a house into which he was peering. The mayor, informed of this, put the town in a state of defence, on suspicion that the men were trying to fire it. Seventeenth-century towns were built largely of flammable materials and full of open fires: fire was a constant threat and, in an age before insurance, a total disaster. Reports of attempts to fire a town touched on real sensitivities. The following morning, the danger became widely associated with another great fear of Stuart England – plotting Catholics. It was rumoured that a large number of papists had gathered at Berechurch (the house of a prominent recusant, Lady Audley), planning to bring the Queen Mother, William Laud and the Bishop of Ely there. The details were disputed – which bishop and whether it was to Berechurch or Monkwick. The following afternoon a drum was beaten through the town summoning apprentices to go to Berechurch and Monkwick ‘to see what company was there’.73 In a locality where men would try to beat a drum to the house of local recusants on information as flimsy as this, it is easy to understand why following the drum to the Scottish borders was regarded with a critical eye.

To the extent that Charles’s problems arose from an attempt to connect and harmonize practices in his three churches we can presume that this opposition to Laudianism, popery and the influence of French papists was also, potentially, connected. This all impinged on the royal family: in late September the Queen Mother’s carriage was pelted with carrots by women while passing through Kingston, Surrey. Abuse was also thrown, and one ‘rude fellow’ struck one of her guards.74 Among the soldiers heading north, it seems, were armed men likely to sympathize with their enemy rather than their king. Not only were these soldiers not hurrying to fight the Covenanters, they were taking the opportunity to make their own protests against royal ecclesiastical policy.

The point is not that Charles was facing two armies, of course, since a large English force was successfully mustered near the border. At the Green Dragon, in Bishopsgate Street in London, two clothiers from Dedham, in the same godly corner of Essex, fell into conversation with two officers about to go to fight the Covenanters. When they revealed their hostility to the enterprise the officers called them Puritans, to which they responded, in the style of Francis Rous, by asking what a Puritan was. This so enraged one of the officers that he threw his meal at the clothier and hit him on the head with the flat of his sword. Other soldiers had to be restrained from attacking Lord Loudon on no other grounds than that he was Scottish. This is evidence of division in an integrated and informed political society, rather than fickleness among ‘soldiers’.75 Charles’s English army was not opposed to him, but the evidence suggests that the English mobilization was hesitant