God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [69]
London crowds mobilized in response to libels, pasquils and papers may also have been consuming the output of underground presses.92 Nehemiah Wallington, a London wood turner and avid reader of the press, was often among the crowds in London in these years. He was an unusually pious man, who paid painstaking attention to his own spiritual well-being and the health of the community in which he lived. He has left hundreds of pages of notes on his own affairs, and on public issues, all seeking to come closer to an understanding of God’s purposes in the world. Among his notes on the canons of 1640 is a paper outlining orthodox resistance theory and relating it directly to the situation of the Covenanters.
It was in the form of an answer to the concern that for subjects to bear arms against their king ‘upon any pretence whatsoever’ was to resist ‘the powers ordained of God’. It was acknowledged that private individuals could not resist. However, if the King maintained a faction which oppressed the whole kingdom and the ‘people in their law and liberties and most of all in the true religion’, ruling not by law, but seeking to ‘make all his subjects slaves by bringing their souls, bodies, estates under a miserable bondage’; and if the breach could not be healed, and there was no alternative, then it was acceptable for the whole people ‘to stand up as one man to defend themselves and their country’. He noted that ‘this point trencheth upon the Scots at this time’, who were standing to the defence of their laws, liberties and religion:
when a whole Nation thus universal and unanimously stands up in such a quarrel it cannot but be ascribed to the overruling and righteous hand that thereby thou might both defend the people’s rights and preserve the State of the Kingdom to the King himself and his posterity, which otherwise by oppression and Tyranny would be brought to confusion…
The royal office was a sacred one, but numerous biblical sources justified the view that kings were bound by the law, covenants and conditions agreed between them and their people. Those that ‘persuade Kings, that they are no way bound, but have liberty to rule as they list, by an independent prerogative these are they that are traitors both to God and to the King, and to the Realm and to the peace and prosperity thereof’.93
Whether informed directly from the presses or not, the politics of crowds in London and of some of the troops conscripted for service against the Covenanters indicate that English politics were entering some of the more dangerous waters in post-Reformation Europe. Tensions between religious and political duties such as those being experienced in Scotland and England were not unusual in Reformation Europe, and had tremendous radical potential. The classical heritage was rich in resources for those who would oppose tyranny, champion virtue or promote freedom. These may have been some of the books that encouraged Felton to think that ‘it was lawful to kill an enemy to the republic’, or that those who were not free to exercise their own judgement free of interference were in bondage or slavery: an argument that became prominent in 1642. England was not full of revolutionaries in 1640, but its cultural heritage – biblical and classical – furnished materials with which to think radically about political crises when they erupted. And it was true of the popular culture too. Scottish troops on the march through Flodden in 1640 were encouraged by an ancient prophecy of Merlin, circulating in both Latin and ‘Scottish verse’, which could be read as predicting success in their venture. Such prophecies were widely thought to be potential solvents of political order, lending a kind of supernatural authority to resistance, upheaval and changes of regime.94
It is tempting to dwell on this radicalism because of its implications