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All this is blunt, and bracing. But Henderson was less clear on the more fundamental question: who was to judge when the chief magistrate was out of line? This was really the nub, and a king who accepted the argument about an errant chief magistrate was unlikely to accept that a self-appointed group like the Covenanters should be judges of when it had happened. At least the Covenanters had produced authoritative texts against which the judgement could be made – the Negative Confession of 1581 and subsequent declarations. England, as events over the next two years showed, lacked such texts. Although it seems to avoid the most pressing question – who should be the judge – this tract was persuasive enough to be reprinted in 1642 for the guidance of English readers facing a similar dilemma. The dangers inherent in opening up these lines of argument, and the reasons for imposing limits on the right to resist, were exemplified, however, by the words of Roger Moore, in Middleton (Westmorland) in 1640: he was accused of saying that if the king commanded him to turn papist, or do anything against his conscience, then he would rise up against him and kill him.88 An unlimited licence to follow conscience rather than to obey the powers that be might quickly lead to chaos if individuals could claim the right to kill a king.

In the Short Parliament, of course, these questions had not been asked, and the debates were in the main revisiting the grievances of the 1620s.89 But as we have seen, on the streets of London and among the troops going north there were signs that a new and more radical kind of politics was emerging: not just anti-Laudian but in favour of pushing the Reformation further, perhaps openly anti-episcopal. At some point in the summer of 1640 an underground press kicked into life in London, publishing Covenanter texts almost simultaneously with the presses in Edinburgh.90 This could even have been construed as treasonous after the royal proclamation of August 1640 that all those who ‘shall not with all their might oppose and fight against’ the Covenanters would be deemed rebels and traitors. But there was worse. The same press published two tracts arguing that the Church of England was anti-Christian – so corrupt that true believers should withdraw. Instead Christians should separate themselves completely from the established church, forming independent congregations, gathered voluntarily. These arguments had a hinterland in discussions within radical Protestant circles during the 1630s, but now they were breaking cover and they were to be of profound significance to the politics of the 1640s. Even more disturbingly, Samuel How’s pamphlet, The Sufficiencie of the Spirits Teaching, argued that human learning about the scriptures might not be merely wrong but positively dangerous. This cut the ground from under the entire ministry, not just bishops, justifying lay preaching and even suggesting that the minds of the poor and unlearned, whose thinking was unadulterated by human learning, were more receptive to the teaching of the Spirit. These too were radical claims, again with an established heritage in Reformation thought, that were to be of profound significance to the politics of the following decade.

Perhaps the most inflammatory of the pamphlets produced from this press was Englands Complaint to Jesus Christ Against the Bishops canons. This argued that there was a popish plot which had infected government right up to the King himself, who was personally implicated because he had fallen for the Devil’s snares. To allow such a faction to flourish threatened the people’s laws and liberties, and the good of their souls. This, it was claimed, breached a covenant between the King and the people in existence since the Norman conquest. An argument in this form hinted, to put it no more strongly, at a positive right to resist. These were by no means standard, or normal, responses to the Covenanter crisis, and in arguing for congregational