• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1042 0

of Scottish society: the soldiers came last. But the soldiers were there, and if the King would not listen to the leaders of the community, then they would have to defend their corner by force of arms. The difficulty was that force, or the threat of it, might be a cure that was worse than the disease – indeed, one that was fatal to the patient. ‘God grant this viperous brood so freely received into the body of the Kingdom, do not eat through the belly of their fosterers; for I assure you where they shall govern we shall find them proud lords’, wrote one correspondent from Newcastle a little more than a week after its occupation by Leslie’s army. A week of Scottish occupation had been an education for the author: ‘For my part, I assure you had I known what I now find, I should have preferred by much to have suffered as a martyr for my religion, than to run the hazard of being a traitor to mine own country’. Manuscript copies seem to have circulated widely.98 The costs of the Treaty of Ripon, and the realities of occupation, created a political opportunity for those anxious for change in England. But the Covenanters” occupation also, potentially, changed the balance of priorities for many English people between the maintenance of normal civil government and the defence of the true religion or redress of secular grievances. England’s tragedy in the coming years was to be that so many continued to feel that they had to make this choice. When they did, the ideals and experience of active citizenship, and of informed Protestant faith, were available to guide them.

4

We Dream Now of a Golden Age

The Long Parliament and the Public Sphere

Failure in the Bishops” Wars forced Charles to call a parliament which he could not dissolve until the Covenanters were paid and a treaty ratified. From an English point of view this meant that there was now ample opportunity to air eleven years” worth of grievances. When Parliament met in November 1640, therefore, there was plenty to talk about, but that talking was structured by a number of concerns which were already becoming clear. Aside from, or behind, the immediate problems of undoing the religious innovations and abuses of the prerogative during the 1630s there lay an influential body of opinion in favour of further reformation. There were potential tensions in this coalition, however. Over the previous summer pressure for reformation had seemed to threaten political and social decency: a willingness to collude with the Covenanters was by no means the same thing as a desire to import their reformation, or an even more radical one; still less did it imply approval of unofficial iconoclasm. The previous summer had seen politics in the hands, to some extent, of Scottish soldiers inspired by Merlin and led by ministers and English soldiers eager to make a statement of their own about the future of the church. The potential for political debate to spill out of the usual channels was becoming plain: this was true out in the counties but it is revealed most clearly in London, which now replaced Edinburgh as the theatre of events.

Looking at Wenceslaus Hollar’s 1647 engraving, drawn from an imaginary spot high above Bankside, we see the two sides of the heart of the English kingdom. On the right, below the only bridge, ships are massed on the river, carrying goods into and out of the greatest port in the country. London’s trade was increasingly reaching not only into the Baltic and Mediterranean, but also across the Atlantic and even into the Indian Ocean. London was also an important manufacturing centre, with more diverse trades and industries than any other city in England. With a population of 400,000 it dwarfed its nearest provincial rivals, which mustered only 20,000 inhabitants, and it was second only to Paris in the whole of Europe. It dominated the economy more completely than the capital cities of other major kingdoms and its position was more akin to that of a city republic like Amsterdam or Venice, but with a larger hinterland. On the left, centred on the great medieval buildings