God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [80]
It seems that Charles was reluctant to abandon his counsellors, willing to accept augmentation of his revenue, but not at all willing to allow reformation to reach to the abolition of bishops. On the other hand, the inducement of a sufficient financial settlement, based on parliamentary grants, was attractive to the King but less so to many Members of Parliament, who favoured the abolition of ship money more than they did the creation of new sources of revenue. Meanwhile, the Scots were seeking the abolition of episcopacy in England in order to secure their own church settlement; any settlement in England short of that was unacceptable to them. This was a tricky negotiation, which foundered for a mixture of reasons, including the failure of the money to arrive in return for attacks on prerogative revenues. But what really did for it was the failure to reach an agreement over church government. Bedford and Pym were closely tied to the Covenanters, who made it clear that the abolition of episcopacy was an unshakeable demand.32 The failure of this proposed settlement would not have mattered if there had been a ready alternative, but there was not.
Religious settlement was just as problematic outside Whitehall and Westminster. As parliamentary business and the treaty negotiation with the Covenanters meandered along, religious debate in England began to range well beyond the attack on Laudianism, and as it did it became more divisive. This was a very public debate, which had immediate relevance to every churchgoer in the land. In the parish of All Hallows, Barking, for example, a week before the triumphal return of the Laudian martyrs local enthusiasts sawed wooden angels off the altar rails and took them to the House of Commons as evidence of popish innovation, without the approval of the vestry. There were clearly divisions in this parish, however: in August 1638 the vestry had agreed to the creation of an altar. There was such an outcry from other parishioners that the bishop’s chancellor had to intervene in January 1640.33 It is highly likely that these decisions were taken, and perceived, against the background of the Scottish crisis, of course; in any case they bear testimony both to the divisiveness and the immediate local significance of these arguments about the future of the true religion.
Parish radicalism underpinned the mobilization of London’s Root and Branch petition, presented on 10 December. The petition de nounced ecclesiastical hierarchy in comprehensive terms and became a focus for subsequent discussion of religious reform in Parliament. Its tone was inflammatory: ‘the government of archbishops and lord bishops, deans and archdeacons, etc, with their courts and ministrations in them, have proved prejudicial and very dangerous both to the church and commonwealth’. Such government was ‘found by woeful experience to be a main cause and occasion of many foul evils, pressures and grievances of a very high nature unto his Majesty’s subjects in their own consciences, liberties and estates’. The particular offences of this church government were miscellaneous and grave: it had allowed the decay of preaching or was actively hostile to it; discountenanced the magistracy; failed to identify the Pope as Antichrist and therefore fostered a continued resemblance between practices in England and Rome, particularly in ‘vestures, postures, ceremonies and administrations’; abused its legal power; failed to enforce observance of the Sabbath; and allowed pluralism – ministers holding more than one appointment in the church. In suppressing godly and painful preaching, the bishops had fostered:
The great increase of idle, lewd and dissolute, ignorant and erroneous men in the ministry, which swarm like the locusts of Egypt over the whole kingdom, and will they but wear a canonical cap, a surplice, a hood, bow at the name of Jesus