God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [96]
In both secular and religious matters the debate during 1640-41 was moving from particularities to general principles: from the policies of the 1630s to the constitution; from attacks on Laudianism to the problem of reformation. In November 1640 the Covenanters had been useful to a broad coalition of English people – not simply admirers of Scottish Presbyterianism but also those who wanted reformation of a different kind, as well as those with the more modest hope of rolling back Laudianism or those who wanted to force Charles to summon, and listen to, a parliament. Everyone in November 1640 was a monarchist, but almost everyone was also opposed to at least one of the following: Laudianism; financial devices based on the prerogative; court Catholicism; some of the leading royal counsellors. In its first year the Long Parliament produced no clear programme of redress and no definitive text on which such a thing could be built. Instead debate escalated without resolution, and the political process became increasingly public, as demands relating to political principle were made by crowds and petitioners and were debated in print.
As Parliament went into recess for the harvest after a year of parliamentary activity, the King was in Scotland finalizing a settlement there, and substantial measures of reform had been achieved in England with (grudging) royal assent. Although some did not trust this particular king, no-one seems to have advocated a political settlement that was not monarchical. In the autumn of 1641 everyone was still a monarchist and more or less everyone believed in the necessity of a national church. Laudianism and the unpopular financial policies of the 1630s were dead, and the counsellors of the 1630s were out of power. But new dangers seemed to have arisen in their place. Differences were emerging between those afraid of the King’s role in relation to the true religion and those afraid of the corrosive effects on church and monarchy of a populist Puritan campaign for further reformation. The latter was a principled position and one which underpinned the commitment of some of Charles’s supporters when war broke out. It was not simply, or necessarily, a reactionary position since it sought a balance, not a retreat to the 1630s; and it was not simply aristocratic – it too found support on the streets and in the provinces, just as influential peers were pushing policies of radical reform. Petitions and pamphlets sought to mobilize opinion among wider publics. Their appeal was overlapping, not mutually exclusive, and therein lay the problem. What the English lacked in 1640, by comparison with the much more successful campaign of the Covenanters in Scotland, was a rallying point for a settlement – a text like the National Covenant, around which a coalition could mobilize and on the basis of which specific measures could have been agreed. What they had instead, by the summer of 1641, was the Protestation, seen by some as a shibboleth, intended to sort the sheep from the goats. Against that stood the Prayer Book, seen by some as a threat to the true religion. Many were able to support both. As they were urged as alternatives, however, the possibility of a deep divide had emerged, and one that might run through not just the heart of government but also through the towns and villages of England.
5
Barbarous Catholics and Puritan Populists
The Irish Rising and the Politics of Fear
Parliament reassembled on 20 October 1641 and soon after it was presented with a utopian tract called A description of the famous kingdome