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the defence of the church from popish innovation, was it necessary to push for further reformation of its discipline? Some of the promoters of the Protestation were quite aware that it would have this function, serving as a shibboleth ‘to discover a true Israelite’, a means of identifying who was really committed to the pursuit of reformation.75 Imposing it in Westminster was a means of intimidation, although the fact that the bishops were able to take it devalued it in the eyes of Robert Baillie, the acute Covenanting observer of English affairs. Reported, debated, amended in one day, this demonstrated the power of Parliament to act when it felt the urgency. It also took the debate out into the country. On 5 May the Commons ordered that it be printed and on the following day a bill was read requiring all adult males to take the Protestation by Christmas. The Lords refused to pass it, but subscription to the printed Protestation became a national campaign, nonetheless.76 Alongside the official copies went unauthorized manuscript and print copies, not all of them accurate.77

The divisions caused by the Protestation were evident in print – Henry Burton saw it as a licence for radical reformation, others as a threat to the authority and responsibilities of the godly magistrate; the easy phrases, about the powers and privilege of Parliament and the rights of the subject, were all contestable. So too was the doctrine of the church. The text did nothing to answer doubts on these points and there was a healthy public debate.78 Copies of the Protestation eventually became talismans, worn in hats, thrown in the King’s coach and, later, affixed to muskets and ensigns, and the text was later treated as the parliamentarian’s ‘title to be in arms’.79 But it was controversial, and that controversy was deliberately exported from Westminster to the rest of the country. Across the country, at assizes and quarter sessions, the Protestation was subscribed by officeholders and the better sort. London led the way in its systematic arrangements for subscription. In Essex the following spring swearing of the Protestation was not always limited only to the men of the parish-women and youths took it too. It was done in church, following a sermon and, in some places, was accompanied by communion.80

For radicals, the Protestation gave further legitimacy to iconoclasm. There is evidence in Essex that religious protests moved beyond anti-Laudian gestures such as attacks on altar rails, on to attacks on the liturgy of the Prayer Book and the use of clerical vestments.81 In Cheshire, during the spring, painted windows and images had become targets for iconoclasts.82 At Radwinter, where there had been attacks on altar rails the previous summer, one of the churchwardens began to refuse to co-operate with the minister over matters of ceremony – locking away the vestments, refusing bread and wine at communion, and moving the communion table from its elevated position.83 Iconoclasm in London seems to have picked up pace and there were the first signs of the cleansing of chapels in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.84

It was not just the Protestation which prompted or gave legitimacy to these radical acts. The parochial energies which had prompted the Root and Branch campaign had not been dissipated, and gained some legitimacy from parliamentary debate. Following the presentation of the original petition a committee had been established to consider the decay of preaching, scandalous ministers and the increase of popery soon after the presentation of the London petition. On 31 December, Simonds D’Ewes proposed a bill to abolish idolatry, heresy, superstition and profaneness, a measure attached to the subsidy bill. A committee report led to further consideration of idolatry, and on 23 January 1641 this resulted in an order from the Commons for ‘commissions, to be sent into all countries, for the defacing, demolishing, and quite taking away of all images, altars, or tables turned altarwise, crucifixes, superstitious pictures, monuments, and relicts of