God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [99]
This had certainly been reflected in his actions in Scotland. In October he had tried to carry out a coup against his chief Scottish opponents, the ‘Incident’. How far the King was involved in the attempt to seize Argyll, Hamilton and Lanark is not clear; nor what was to be done with them once they were taken, although assassination was a possible intention. Hamilton’s misfortune here was considerable: a member of the English parliament working for settlement, he had established links with many of Charles’s leading critics; in Scotland he had good relations with Argyll. Rather than putting him in a strong position, as a close adviser of the King, this laid him open to a hostile whispering campaign at court. The man who as Charles’s representative had had to kick his way out of the Glasgow assembly, and whose own mother had threatened to shoot him if he landed in Scotland, may now have been the target of a royalist assassination plot in which the King himself had a hand. Amidst rumours of royalist plotting, Charles attended Parliament to explain himself, but unfortunately agreed to be accompanied by several hundred armed men. Hamilton and the others fled, although Charles strenuously denied that they had anything to fear, and claimed in fact that the plot was invented solely to discredit him. Amazingly, Hamilton seems to have believed him: he returned with the King to England in November.8 For others the Incident made Charles difficult to trust and it continued to be possible to claim that this pattern of behaviour reflected the machinations of international popery. Despite the revelation of the Incident, however, opinion in England was probably drifting in his favour in the autumn of 1641.
It was in that sense convenient, perhaps, that on the same day that Macaria was presented to parliament, 25 October, fresh evidence of papistical perfidy also became available to the English parliament. John Pym received a letter on the floor of the House which purported to contain the dressing from a plague sore. Plague had been prevalent the previous summer but in England, unlike some other areas of Europe, the accusation of deliberate plague spreading was not usual. In fact, there do not appear to have been any other accusations like this in England during the period of the plague’s greatest incidence. Nonetheless it was a disease with political resonances, associated with disorder and divine wrath. Here, though, the problem in the body politic was not internal distemper, but foreign infection. ‘How bold was this attempt of inhumanity… But see the subtlety of the damnable project compiled without all Christianity’. Could papists possibly stoop lower? They would have to, of course, because God’s providential defence of Protestantism forced them to it: ‘God beholdeth all your mischief and saves the righteous from the cruelty’.9
The dressing from a plague sore delivered to John Pym on the floor of the House of Commons
Pym’s apparent brush with death was politically useful, perhaps suspiciously so.10 The fear of popery was a potent tool in fostering support for reform, and offered a powerful means of distracting attention from the perceived corrosion of religious and political decencies over the previous two years. English history, as generations of people had now been taught, gave manifest evidence of the desire of Catholics to defeat English Protestantism and to reintroduce popery: the effort to purify the church by eradicating popery existed alongside a vividly expressed fear of plotting by actual Catholics. In November, Pym was to take respectable anti-popery and use it to support a more or less direct attack on the King. With many secular grievances settled, peace in Scotland and fears about religious anarchy calling forth a Prayer Book petitioning campaign to rival that for Root and Branch