Monthly Archives: September 2023

by Joel | 7 September 2023 · 10:38 am

Parliament Challenges Charles I

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 131-132:

Charles’s military preparations stopped. If he had been planning a coup against Parliament, then it had been outflanked. With his chief adviser under guard, the king was drastically weakened.

Now that [Thomas Wentworth, Earl of] Strafford was out of the way, and on the 25th had been moved to the Tower through a jeering crowd, Parliament could turn to business. Top of the agenda was the staging of huge public rehabilitations for those who had suffered during the king’s Personal Rule.

On the 16th, Bishop John Williams was released from the Tower by the Lords. Even before that, after an emotional speech by a rather scruffy East Anglian MP called Oliver Cromwell, orders had been made for the release of Alexander Leighton and a spirited young polemicist named John Lilburne – imprisoned in 1638 for importing ‘scandalous’ books from the Netherlands. The biggest celebration, though, came on the 28th, when – on a crisp sunny Saturday – Henry Burton and William Prynne returned from imprisonment to the capital. Church bells chimed amid a chorus of cheers as the men processed slowly through town. There were so many followers, throwing flowers and herbs from their gardens, that it took the procession a reported three hours to pass Charing Cross.

Now, as winter approached, the work of unpicking Charles’s government could begin. ‘[T]here was never, I dare say, so busy a time in England,’ wrote one correspondent. Soon, though, Londoners staged a stunning intervention which threatened to disturb the whole project. On 11 December, braving the icy cold, a delegation of some 1,500 citizens crowded into Westminster Hall bringing with them a printed petition, signed by 10,000. It blamed the bishops for everything from problems in the cloth industry, to ‘whoredoms and adulteries’, to the ‘swarming of lascivious, idle and unprofitable books’. It asked not just for reform of religious abuses, but that the episcopacy itself be abolished, ‘with all its dependencies, roots and branches’. Here was the potential for a complete radicalisation of the reform agenda. More to the point, the sight of so many ordinary Londoners, petitioning publicly for the uprooting of the ecclesiastical order was staggering.

For now, Parliament carried on, confining itself to attacking the worst excesses of Archbishop Laud. Just five days after the London petition, the Canons of 1640 were declared illegal; Laud himself was impeached two days after that, and detained. The most far-reaching proposal in Parliament, though, was not a religious one. It came in the last week of December when, on Christmas Eve, the Devonian MP William Strode introduced a bill mandating annual Parliaments: if passed, it would ensure Parliament’s permanent sitting. The gauntlet had been thrown.

How Charles I Alienated Scotland

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 109-110:

By 1637 the outcry over the Book of Sports had calmed. In fact, that year had started with a victory for Charles. In February he had written to his 12 judges of the Common Law to shore up the legal case behind Ship Money. He asked two questions, clearly expecting a positive answer. The first question was whether, when the ‘good and safety of the kingdom’ required it, could he demand ships from his people. The second was whether it was he, as king, who was to decide what constituted a threat to that ‘good and safety’. Two of the judges were uncertain, but eventually all 12 fell behind the king and gave him the answer he wanted.

But then, in spring, the government committed a needless and damaging blunder. It was decided to make an example of three of the most clamorous Puritan writers. One was William Prynne, whose confinement in the Tower had done nothing to stall his literary career. The other two were the physician John Bastwick and Henry Burton, former clerk of the closet to Princes Henry and Charles, now a radical and thoroughly disgruntled Puritan. In early 1637, they were tried before Star Chamber for seditious libel and sentenced to pillorying, whipping and having their ears – in Prynne’s case the remaining parts of his ears – cut off. The three were then to be detained in far-flung corners of the realm: Jersey (Prynne), the Isles of Scilly (Bastwick) and Lancaster (Burton). The punishments were harsh, and their infliction on members of the social elite particularly offensive. More to the point, the men behaved like martyrs. Three times, shocked crowds watched as the blood poured down from the pillory, and the victims were cheered and garlanded as they progressed to their places of imprisonment. Far from instilling fear and respect, the government had managed to make themselves look like vicious tyrants.

What brought the king’s peace to a juddering halt, though, was not the prosecution of Prynne, Burton and Bastwick, but events in Scotland. Charles was born a Scot, but he’d left as a toddler and was seen there as thoroughly Anglicised. He didn’t help his reputation much in 1625 when he pushed a radical plan, known as the ‘Revocation’, to reclaim all lands granted by the Scottish crown since 1540, plus any properties owned by the pre-Reformation Kirk. It was a serious threat to the Scottish nobility, who had been the main beneficiaries of the land transfers, although the following year it was announced that they’d at least be adequately compensated. Charles had then waited nearly eight years before coming to Scotland to be crowned as their king, and when he did so – in 1633 – it had been a disaster. The Scottish Kirk maintained a much stronger Presbyterian tradition than the Church of England. In 1618, James had pushed back against this, bolstering the power of the Scottish bishops and trying to enforce such traditional practices as kneeling at communion and the celebration of Christmas and Easter. Charles wanted to go further. He wanted to draw Scotland closer to conformity with England and its now increasingly ceremonialist Church. It was a project that quickly provoked serious disquiet.

Forcing English Church Decorum, 1630s

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 103-104:

[T]he most significant of [King] Charles [I]’s campaigns to bring order to his English realm was in the field of religion. Charles was personally devout, but religion was also intertwined with his wider project for social order. Charles wanted ‘peace and quiet’ in his Church just as he did in society as a whole. He wanted a ministry that was ‘peaceable, orderly, and conformable’, and subjects who would ‘demean themselves with all Christian reverence and devout obedience’. He didn’t want debate. Predestination, in particular, shouldn’t be ‘meddled withal’, since it was ‘too high for the people’s understanding’. His own preference was for a rich liturgy, with strong emphasis on the ‘beauty of holiness’ so beloved of the ceremonialists. Critically, these were not to be days of latitude. Direction from the top, from the king, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the rest of the episcopacy, were to be followed. The Book of Common Prayer and the canons of 1604 were to be enforced in full. Parishioners would stand for the Creed and the Gloria Patri, kneel at the sacrament and bow at the name of Jesus. Those who, like Londoner and aspiring poet John Milton, preferred a ‘homely and yeomanly religion’ without a ‘deluge of ceremonies’, were deeply worried.

Charles promoted ceremonialists and Arminians. By the middle of the 1630s, Charles had created what was effectively an anti-Calvinist church establishment, particularly among his bishops, and not least when Richard Neile became Archbishop of York in 1631 and William Laud, finally, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 on the death of Abbot. The losers were men like John Williams, the Calvinist Bishop of Lincoln and sometime Lord Keeper. He fell out with Laud, was pursued in the courts and found himself fined by Star Chamber and imprisoned in the Tower.

The Church itself was suffering under long-standing economic problems, partly caused by inflation. Most visible were its crumbling buildings: indeed, much of Charles’s campaign for the beauty of holiness was really about stamping out the ugliness of neglect. The great London cathedral of St Paul’s was a case in point. Its spire had fallen down after a fire in 1561, and it was so overgrown with stalls and hawkers that it resembled a marketplace as much as a house of God. So unlike a church was it that one old Warwickshire farmer who was visiting London accidentally (‘in a beastly manner’) defiled St Paul’s ‘with his excrements’. He claimed that he did this ‘merely through ignorance & necessity being not able to go any further through his weakness & age’, and he found his explanation was accepted and was let off with a fine.

Charles and Laud’s aim was to bring back order and dignity to the Church. It was a programme that had real rationale, though some ministers took it to extremes, such as an Essex vicar who refused communion to menstruating women or those who had had sex the previous night, all in the name of decorum.