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for the future, and there was very obviously much more at stake in this public contestation than a failure to deal adequately with a ‘Scottish invasion’. But English opinion was on the whole expressed in conventional terms, and seems to have been more divided and irresolute than it was revolutionary. John Castle, for example, drew a ready but not particularly helpful analogy between natural events and the political crisis. Strafford’s crossing from Ireland in 1640 had been rough, and there were fears that the ship might be lost. The ride, and the fear it induced, brought on his gout and he finished his journey to London on a litter. His condition had ruled out the possibility of serving as Lord High Steward of Parliament. A month later, following the failure of the Short Parliament, Castle reached for the obvious analogy: ‘God I trust will guide the rudder of this ship, and give you a healthful body to support the concussions and tossings of these stormy times’. Reporting assaults on their officers by troops in Essex, later in the summer, he concluded equally piously, ‘God amend all, and defend this great ship from breaking upon these rocks’. In June he wrote:

there is at this time reigning here at Westminster a disease… wherein they that labour of it, complain of a stifling at heart and distemper in the head; and there is cause to fear that almost generally through the kingdom, the common people are sick of those parts; they labour of a suffocation of their hearts in the duty and obedience they owe to his Majesty’s service and commands, and they are stricken in the head that they rave and utter they know not what against his Majesty’s government and proceedings in the present action in hand.95

Looking for signs or portents in the natural world was commonplace. For example, English troops in the Borders had been intimidated by an eclipse on 22 May 1639, two days after a skirmish at Wark that marked the first action of the first Bishops” War. Troops summoned suddenly to Newcastle were overtaken by the eclipse, and feared for the worst. John Aston started his journey late in the afternoon, just at the time of eclipse. ‘[I]t was not superstition stayed me, though rumours being then uncertain, and our departure sudden, there wanted not those who construed this eclipse as an ominous presage of the bad success of the king’s affairs’.96 This habit of thought helped to make sense of an insecure natural and political world, but it was not a very effective guide to action.

The Covenanting movement drew on deep wells of support in Scotland and appealed to English opinion through declarations that circulated in manuscript and were printed by presses in Edinburgh and London. Mobilization in England was supported from the pulpits and demanded action from village officers. Political engagement, in other words, was invited at relatively low levels of society in both countries. In Scotland control was exerted by an oligarchic group, whose authority resided in the Presbyterian church and in the Tables. ‘Oligarchic centralism’ allowed for a degree of co-ordination and ideological control that underpinned a dramatic political success and also set limits to the radicalism of the movement: the whole campaign, in fact, was framed by a document which reflected, and respected, informed Protestant opinion about the limits of legitimate resistance.97 In England, over the next two years, similar tensions were not controlled, and armed conflict was not restrained: as proponents of reformation pushed for more fundamental changes, and accompanying shifts in constitutional arrangements, others pulled back, wary of what this radicalism meant for political order. Greater hesitancy and a lack of clarity about the aims of the opposition to the crown paradoxically led to a much more bloody conflict and, eventually, much greater radicalism on both the royalist and parliamentary sides.

Armed petitioning was a well-established form of politics. Leslie’s army, processing in the form of a funeral march for the Bible, had been led by ministers and the greybeards