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The fact that the Commons was pushing for reform in these directions lent legitimacy to local initiatives. In the light of this parliamentary pressure, for example, Cheapside Cross, in London, came to stand for, even personify, the dangers of popery and superstition. It had been erected in the late thirteenth century, one of a series of Eleanor Crosses built around the country to commemorate Edward I’s wife. An elaborately carved and very public monument, decorated with images of angels, the cross was a very familiar landmark. It had been the target of hostility in Elizabeth’s time, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and now, once again, came under scrutiny. Henry Burton, preaching in Parliament in June 1641, had called on Parliament to cast down idols, beginning with the Cheapside Cross, and a flutter of pamphlets followed. On the whole, however, these pamphlets were satirical, sending up the radicals who made such a fuss about so little, likening the cross, for example, to Dagon, the filthy God of the Philistines.86 The cross survived again, in 1641, but remained a focus for religious controversy.87

The attack on Laudianism was readily expressed as an assault on popery (spiritual bondage), but that language might lead in the direction of more radical reform, undertaken without magisterial direction. As this line of polemic about popery and reformation developed so did a counterpoint: attacks on episcopacy opened the way for religious licence and sectarianism (spiritual anarchy). There was a long tradition of anti-Puritan polemic, stretching back to the 1560s, in which hot Protestants were denounced as hypocrites and sectarians, and this provided a means to understand the threat now being posed by the challenge to ecclesiastical hierarchy. Such fears seem to have exercised a powerful effect in the Lords. Most notably, having been informed about the activities of sectarians in Southwark on 15 January, the Lords ordered

Cheapside Cross, a focal point of civic life

That the divine service be performed as it is appointed by the Acts of Parliament of this realm; and that all such as shall disturb that wholesome order shall be severely punished, according to law; and that the parsons, vicars, and curates, in several parishes, shall forbear to introduce any rites or ceremonies that may give offence, otherwise than those which are established by the laws of the land.88

The order was to be read publicly in all the parish churches of London, Westminster, Southwark and their surrounding liberties and suburbs. This fear about spiritual anarchy gained strength from stories of iconoclasm in the provinces. As radicals in Parliament pressed for the abolition of episcopacy, iconoclasts in the country attacked the outworks of popery in their own church. For hesitant reformers such as Dering, these stories of provincial iconoclasm only added to their hesitancy about the abolition of episcopacy. In June, at the time of the Protestation controversy, and the exchanges over Cheapside Cross, Dering seems to have had a change of heart. He abandoned attacks on episcopacy and the cause of Root and Branch reform, informed once again by concerns in his home county about religious order. Others, like Sir John Colepeper and Sir Thomas Aston, also seem to have been driven towards royalism by attacks on episcopacy and the Prayer Book.89

From late 1640 through 1641 there were intermittent attempts at local reformation, as activists took up the call to arms. These local initiatives stood in uneasy relation to the parliamentary debates on religion, which gave out an intermittent and often contradictory message. As the events of the previous summer had shown, local activists did not need explicit parliamentary prompting: attacks on altar rails, surplices and images were reported in the summer of 1640, all associated with hostility towards Laudianism, but without explicit parliamentary sanction. When Parliament did begin to discuss Root and Branch reform there was a well-grounded fear that