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The Religious Context of the English Civil War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
Extract
LENGTHY reports survive of speeches by several members of the Long Parliament for 9 November 1640, at the end of the first week of the session. The future royalist militant, George Lord Digby is reported to have begun his address by saying that:
you have received now a solemn account from most of the shires of England of the several Grievances and Oppressions they sustain, and nothing as yet from Dorsetshire: Sir I would not have you think that I serve for a Land of Goshen, and that we live there in sunshine, whilst darkness and plagues overspread the rest of the land
The future royalist moderate Sir John Culpepper is reported to have begun: I stand not up with a Petition in my hand, I have it in my mouth, and he enumerated the grievances of his shire beginning with the great increase of papists and the obtruding and countenancing of divers new ceremonies in matters of religion. The future Parliamentarian moderate, Harbottle Grimston, said that these petitions which have been read, they are all remonstrances of the general and universal grievances and distempers that are now in the state and Government of the Church and Commonwealth. The future Parliamentarian radical Sir John Wray said:
All in this renowned senate, I am confident, is fully fixed upon the true Reformation of all Disorders and Innovations in Church or Religion, and upon the well uniting and close rejoining of the poor dislocated Great Britain. For, let me tell you Mr Speaker, that God be thanked, it is but out of joint and may be well set by the skilful chyrurgeons of this Honourable House.
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References
1 Rushworth, J., Historical Collections (7 vols., 1659 1701), iv. 30Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., iv. 33.
3 Ibid., iv. 34.
4 Ibid., iv. 40.
5 S. Lambert, The Opening of the Long Parliament, Hist. Jnl. (forthcoming).
6 Existing impressions of the Short Parliament will be transformed by the availability of the very full parliamentary diary of Sir Thomas Aston. I am grateful to Judith Maltby for allowing me to see her full transcript of this very important diary which she is preparing for publication. It is the property of Mr Howard Talbot.
7 E.g. Manning, B.S., The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I, in Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, ed. Manning, B.S. (Manchester 1973), 3782Google Scholar; Roberts, C., The Earl of Bedford and the Coming of the English Revolution, Jnl. Mod. Hist., 49 (1977)Google Scholar; Christianson, P., The Peers, the People and Parliamentary Management in the First Six Months of the Long Parliament, Jnl. Mod. Hist., 49 (1977)Google Scholar; Lambert, Opening of Long Parliament.
8 The recent critique by Clive Holmes, The County Community in Stuart Historiography, Jnl. Brit. Studs., 19 (1980) 5473 lists the main corpus of recent work. What follows is based on that corpus, bearing Holmes' strictures in mindGoogle Scholar.
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15 Lambert, Opening of the Long Parliament (forthcoming). Her account of the slowness of the Houses to take up legislative redress of grievance is very telling. But I cannot agree with her that this is evidence of a house deeply divided over the need for such redress from the outset.
16 This is based principally upon a reading of the following: Rushworth, iv. passim; Nalson, J., An Impartial Collection of the great affairs of State from the beginning of the Scotch Rebellion in the year 1639 (2 vols, 1682 1683) passim and the parliamentary journal of Sir Simonds d'Ewes (BL, Harl. MS 1635, for which the period up to March 1641 and for the period November 1641 to March 1642 have been published in three separate volumes)Google Scholar.
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20 A committee was set up to investigate complaints against Lords Lieutenant and their deputies, but it appears never to have reported (Rushworth, iv. 989).
21 This paragraph and the succeeding ones are a synthesis of much reading in primary and secondary sources. The most influential of the latter include Professor Collinson's, P.The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), Godly People (1983)Google Scholar, especially chapters 4, 6, 20, and his Birkbeck lectures in Cambridge of Lent 1981 (as yet unpublished).
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24 Sharpe, K., Archbishop Laud, History Today, 33 (1983)Google Scholar is correct to see Laud as consciously a traditionalist; but by all evaluations, except Laud's own, he was stressing and imposing (often neglected) aspects of the Elizabethan church at the expense of other traditions and much established practice.
25 This view owes much to the ideas of Patrick Collinson in his Birkbeck lectures.
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29 For a full discussion of this, see J.S. Morrill, The Attack on the Church of England in the Long Parliament (forthcoming, in a Festschrift).
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42 Calamy, E., England's Looking Glass (22 08 1641), 48Google Scholar; Marshall, S., A Sermon Before the House of Commons (17 11 1640), 40Google Scholar. It should be said that the Fast Sermons as a whole displayed an indifference amounting to contempt for secular injustices, and focused with increasing clarity on the prospects for building a New Jerusalem. I am grateful to Mr S. Baskerville for his comments on this question.
43 Abbott, W. M., The Issue of Episcopacy in the Long Parliament, Univ. of Oxford D.Phil, thesis (1981), chapter 2Google Scholar.
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56 I recognise that this is highly contestable view. Might not the prospective leaders of the parliamentary cause have deliberately played down their radicalism for tactical reasons, for fear of alienating moderate opinion and losing the initiative? This is the very influential view of Hexter, J.H., The Reign of King Pym (New Haven, 1940), 130Google Scholar and passim. I prefer the view expressed here because (i)they displayed no such reticence on religious matters despite the fact that it cost them moderate support (ii)their private thoughts appear to reflect their public statements (iii)their rhetorical reticence led to a reticence of action which threatened the success of the military operations.
57 E.g. Schwoerer, L., The Fittest Subject for a King's Quarrel: an essay on the Militia Controversy, Jnl. Brit. Studs., ii (1971)Google Scholar;Tuck, R., 'The Ancient Law of Freedom: John Selden and the Civil War, in Reactions to the English Civil War, ed. Morrill, J.S. (1982), 13764Google Scholar.
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61 M. Mendle, Politics and Political Thought, 16401642, inOrigins of the English Civil War, ed. Russell, C. (1973), 21946Google Scholar; idem, Mixed Government, the Estates, and the Bishops, Washington Univ., St Louis, Ph.D. thesis (1977), 396432Google Scholar; Fortescue, G.K., Catalogue of the Thomason Tracts (2 vols, 1908), 1116Google Scholar.
62 The best discussion is probably in The Prose Works of John Milton (8 vols, 1953 1982), vol. i, ed. Wolfe, D.M., 48151Google Scholar; Fletcher, , Outbreak, 91124Google Scholarand passim.
63 Fortescue, , Thomason, i. 5773Google Scholar; similarly in March 1642 there was more discussion of the prayer book than of the militia (ibid., 8697).
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66 I owe this point to conversations with Conrad Russell and to ideas contained in his unpublished paper The Causes of the English Civil War. The notion that the king had been poisoned is a common one, but more specific was the declaration of the Houses that they proceeded as though the king was suffering from nonage, natural disability or captivity (BL, Thomason Tract E 241(1), pp. 2078). Dr Ian Roy tells me that Sir Ralph Verney's (hitherto undeciphered) notes on the debate of 28 February 1642 show MPs considered the king in the position of a suicidal maniac, from whom the power of the sword must be removed. Verney Papers: Notes of Proceedings in the Long Parliament by Sir Ralph Verney (Camden 1st series, 31, 1845), 184. I am very grateful to Dr Roy for this reference.
68 See n. 66; also Stevenson, D., Alasdair MacColla and the Highland Problem of the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 1981), chapter 1Google Scholar; Elliott, J.H., The year of the Three Ambassadors, in History and Imagination, eds, Pearl, V., Worden, A.B. (1981)Google Scholar.
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73 There was a generalised anxiety about the growth of popery in and around the Court from the beginning of Charles' reign, but few saw it as the principal hazard until the events of 1641. For John Pym's precociousness in this respect, see Russell, C., The Parliamentary career of John Pym, 16211629, in The English Commonwealth, eds Clark, P., Smith, A.G.R., Tyacke, N.R.N. (Leicester, 1979)Google Scholar.
74 Rushworth, iv. 287.
75 Ibid., iv. 2401.
76 LJ. iv. 5403.
77 LJ, iv. 512.
78 Rushworth, iv. 398421 (Since the paggination is awry at this point, 385415 being used twice, this reference is to 398415 and then 385421), 51650, 565-01, 691739. A good starting point is the Declaration of Causes and Remedies' (CJ, ii. 4436, reprinted in Private Journals, eds Coates etal., 54350).
79 Lamont, , Baxter, 8898Google Scholar.
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81 LJ, v. 25760.
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83 Parker, H., The Contra-Replicant His Complaint to kis Majestie (1642)Google Scholar. See also his comments on the absolute and unlimitable power of the king's sword and sceptre controlled by the Queen who is in turn controlled by the Romish vice-god (Ibid., 1015). Parker's thought was dramatically affected by the Irish Rebellion. My reading of Parker has been enormously helped by discussions with Howard Moss, and by supervising his admirable B.A. dissertation.
84 Fletcher, Outbreak, passim; Morrill, , Revolt, 4650Google Scholar; Morrill, , Church in England, 89114Google Scholar; See also the forthcoming Cambridge Ph.D. thesis by Judith Maltby. For the growing articulation of the case for episcopacy within the Commons, see the debates on the Grand Remonstrance (the most heated exchanges before the final vote all concerned the church) in if Ewes, ed. Coates, , 117, 14952, 1656Google Scholar.
85 Innumerable works could be cited here. See, for example, Fletcher, , Outbreak, 22882Google Scholar; Gardiner, , History, x. 152219Google Scholar; Hexter, , King Pym, 130Google Scholar; Rushworth, iv. 7545; Whitelocke, B., Memorials of the English Affairs (4 vols, Oxford, 1853), i. 14890;Google ScholarSpalding, R., The Improbable Puritan (1979), 7897Google Scholar.
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87 Ibid., 191227, 369407. See how well this account fits the sequence of petitions in Kent, as discussed in Woods, A.S.P., Prelude to Civil War (Salisbury, 1981), 3062, 95119, 1414, 1537Google Scholar.
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93 LJ, v. 34850.
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