The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 17) 9781843838159, 184383815X

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Note
Introduction
1 The Restoration Regime and Historical Reconstructions of the Civil Warand Interregnum
2 Restoration War Stories
3 Representing the Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1680–5
4 Struggling over Settlements in Civil-War Histories, 1696–1714
5 John Walker and the Memory of the Restoration in Augustan England
6 Thanking God those Times are Past
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

CivilWarsafter1660_PPC 22/10/2012 16:28 Page 1

This book examines the conflicting ways in which the civil wars and Interregnum were remembered, constructed and represented in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. It argues that during the late Stuart period, public remembering of the English civil wars and Interregnum was not concerned with re-fighting the old struggle but rather with commending and justifying, or contesting and attacking, the Restoration settlements. After the return of King Charles II the political nation had to address the question of remembering and forgetting the recent conflict. The answer was to construct a polity grounded on remembering and scapegoating puritan politics and piety. The proscription of the puritan impulse enacted by the Restoration settlements was supported by a public memory of the 1640s and 1650s which was used to show that Dissenters could not, and should not, be trusted with power. Drawing upon the interdisciplinary field of social memory studies, this book offers a new perspective on the historical and political cultures of early modern England, and will be of significant interest to social, cultural and political historians as well as scholars working in memory studies.

Frontispiece, Thomas May. Arbitrary Government Displayed (1683) © The Trustees of the British Museum (BM Satires 1127)

THE CIVIL WARS AFTER 1660 MATTHEW

The Civil Wars after 1660 PUBLIC REMEMBERING IN L AT E S T UA RT E N G L A N D

NEUFELD

MATTHEW NEUFELD is Lecturer in early modern British history at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

Matthew Neufeld

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Volume 17

THE CIVIL WARS AFTER 1660

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476–9107 Series editors Tim Harris – Brown University Stephen Taylor – Durham University Andy Wood – University of East Anglia

Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

THE CIVIL WARS AFTER 1660 PUBLIC REMEMBERING IN LATE STUART ENGLAND

Matthew Neufeld

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Matthew Neufeld 2013 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Matthew Neufeld to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2013 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978-1-84383-815-9

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Papers used by Boydell & Brewer Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests

Typesetting by User design, UK. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents Illustrations

vi

Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Abbreviations

xiii

Note

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Introduction 1 The Restoration Regime and Historical Reconstructions

1 17

of the Civil War and Interregnum 2 Restoration War Stories

55

3 Representing the Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1680–5

87

4 Struggling over Settlements in Civil-War Historical Writing,

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1696–1714 5 John Walker and the Memory of the Restoration

169

in Augustan England 6 Thanking God those Times are Past

203

Conclusion

243

Select Bibliography

251

Index

271

Illustrations Figures 1 Charles I’s flight from Oxford, his trial and his death [Nathaniel Crouch], Wars in England (1681), p. 139. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB 72410 2 Images of Enslavement, Thomas May, Arbitrary Government (1682), p. 24. ©The British Library Board (RB.23.a.9563) 3 Images of Liberation, Thomas May, Arbitrary Government (1682), p. 200. ©The British Library Board (RB.23.a.9563) 4 Frontispiece, Thomas May, Arbitrary Government (1683). ©The British Library Board (RB.23.a.9563) 5 Frontispiece, Thomas May, Arbitrary Government (1683). ©The Trustees of the British Museum (BM Satires 1127)

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126 127 128 129

Images 1 and 4 produced by ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online. Inquiries may be made to: ProQuest, 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 USA. Telephone: 734.761.4700. Email: info@ proquest.com. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.

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This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Arnie Neufeld (1944–2012)

Erinnere mich; laß uns miteinander rechten. Jesaja 43.26a

Preface On a rainy Bank Holiday in the spring of 2011 I went on a guided tour of Winchester Cathedral. Our guide led us very ably around the building’s beautiful exalted interior, at one point pausing with his back toward the very large stained glass west window. He told us that we were looking at a reconstruction, since the window’s medieval glass had been destroyed by parliamentarians at the time of the civil war. As an aside, he then noted that during the civil war Hampshire had been predominantly ‘Roundhead, or “Labour”’. I remember this moment vividly because it was the first time in nearly four years of having lived in England, and in almost seven years of thinking about early modern historical culture, that I had witnessed an unsolicited (and unguarded) reference to the civil wars. Moreover, it seemed to me that here was an obvious example of the wars’ presence within popular memory. In our guide’s mind, the political, social and religious divisions of mid-seventeenth-century England paralleled the partisanship of (post-) modern British political life. It is probably not a view shared by the Cathedral’s Dean and Chapter, at least not publicly. Interestingly, visitors to the historical section of Winchester Cathedral’s website in the spring of 2011 will have found no reference to Roundheads or parliamentarian iconoclasts.1 This book’s examination of one pre-modern nation’s attempt to make peace with its violent past and with itself contributes to our understanding of the use and misuse of the past in contemporary life. Public remembering of past conflict that seeks to keep the focus on a blameworthy ‘other’ does not do justice or bring peace. Rather, such memories create exclusive communities whose collective life is thereby diminished; often this kind of remembering lays the foundation for more conflict and even violence. This book began from an interest in the power of the past in seventeenth-century England. It ended up exploring public memories of England’s civil wars over the two generations after the Restoration of the monarchy. Today there is a great deal of interest in how individuals and groups URL: http://winchester-cathedral.org.uk/history-treasures/our-history/ [accessed 18 August 2011].

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deal with past experiences of violent conflict. While much is being written about the aftermath of war in modern societies, not much has been done for the era before 1789. This book is an effort at redressing that imbalance. Essentially, it argues that public remembering of the English civil wars and Interregnum after 1660 was not caught up in re-fighting the old struggle, but commending and justifying, or contesting and attacking, the Restoration settlements. In particular, what was at issue was the way the political nation had attempted to address the issue of remembering and forgetting past conflict. The answer was to construct a polity grounded on remembering and scapegoating puritan politics and piety. The proscription enacted by the Restoration settlements endured for nearly two centuries, supported by a memory of the 1640s and 1650s that was used to show that puritans, also known as Dissenters, could not be trusted with power. These days, past conflict is very often invoked publicly by people in authority or with power for a variety of reasons. While it is fashionable to think that the past is a kind of free-floating signifier, capable of being and meaning many things to very different sorts of people, the past misused can be very dangerous. The history of conflict can easily become a reason to do harm in the present. The fact that it is debatable and belongs to no one is all the more reason to remember it, and argue about it, with honesty, humility and charity.

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Acknowledgements I am delighted to remember and thank the institutions and individuals that assisted me during the course of writing this book. I owe a large debt of gratitude to the University of Alberta and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding several years of research. Preliminary research in the UK was undertaken with a travel award from the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Edmonton. Neither can I forget the warm welcome I received as a visiting academic at Royal Holloway College, the University of York and the University of Warwick, nor the supportive guidance provided at those institutions by Professors Blair Worden, Bill Sheils, David Wootton and Mark Knights. More recently, the faculty and staff of the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of History have made me feel at home in their midst. This book could not have been written without the assistance of the staffs at the Bodleian Library, Balliol College Library, St John’s College Library, the British Library, Durham University Library Special Collections, Brotherton Library Special Collections, the Borthwick Institute for Archives, York Minster Library, and the inter-library loan departments of the Universities of Alberta, York, Warwick and Saskatchewan. The help provided by the employees of the UK National Archives, the Derbyshire Record Office, the Devon Record Office, the Hampshire Record Office, the Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office, the Cheshire and Chester Record Office, the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield, the North Yorkshire Record Office and Doctor Williams Library was also much appreciated. Aspects of Chapter 6 were originally published by Cambridge University Press as ‘The Politics of Anglican Martyrdom: Letters to John Walker, 1704–1705’, in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Volume 62 (2011), pp. 491–514 and are reprinted here with permission. Images reproduced in this book have the permission of their respective repositories as noted in the list of Illustrations. Figures 1 and 4 are produced by ProQuest of Ann Arbor, MI, as part of Early English Books Online; Figures 2 and 3 are produced with the permission of the British Library Board; Figure 5 is produced with the permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. xi

acknowledgements

For reading individual chapters and offering constructive criticism I would like to thank Christopher Baxfield, Jacqueline Rose, Matthew Jenkinson, Nadine Lewycky, Koji Yamamoto, Warren Johnston, Roger Richardson, Stephen R. Roberts, J.R. Jones, Stephen Taylor, David Wootton, Blair Worden and the late Kevin Sharpe. I appreciated the opportunity provided me by Jason Peacey and John Miller to present the book’s key arguments at the Institute for Historical Research’s ‘Britain in the 17th Century’ seminar. I must offer hearty thanks to Katharina Megli, who spent hours helping me to improve the initial draft of this study. Andrew Gow, Sylvia Brown, Lesley Cormack, David Gay and Mark Knights deserve extra special thanks for reading an early complete version of this book. Also, I wish to acknowledge particularly the help and friendship of Gary Rivett, who graciously allowed me to test some of my arguments with him, while generously sharing the fruits of his own important work on history and memory during the English Revolution. Two other scholars played crucial roles in bringing forth this book. I am deeply honoured to thank Daniel Woolf for critical readings of several drafts and numerous suggestions that improved my thinking about Restoration historical culture. I am also profoundly grateful to Andy Wood for his amazing encouragement and support over the final stages of this book’s completion. Very special thanks go to the select cohort that composes my spiritual base of support – my family. Christine, Kent, Liam and Brontë Rygiel have provided food, shelter and joyful welcome on numerous visits to my spiritual home of Winnipeg; Michael Neufeld’s friendship and encouragement have helped me through many difficult patches of writing. My parents, Arnie and Trudi Neufeld, were with me at the very beginning of this academic pilgrimage, and their love and prayers have sustained me throughout the journey beyond all my hope and imagining. I am sorry that my father, the first and best historian I knew, was not able to see this book in print. Arnie has left us, but he will not be forgotten. Saskatoon, Pentecost 2012

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Abbreviations Bodl. Lib. Bodleian Library, Oxford CRO Chester and Cheshire Record Office DBRO Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock DRO Devon Record Office, Exeter EHR English Historical Review HJ Historical Journal HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly HRO Hampshire Record Office, Winchester JBS Journal of British Studies JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History MSS Manuscripts NYAS North Yorkshire Archive Service, Northallerton ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition P&P Past & Present QS Quarter Session SR, v Great Britain, The Statutes of the Realm, Volume V WSRO Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office, Chippenham WYAS West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield

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Note All dates are rendered according to the Julian calendar, except that the numbered year is taken to have started on 1 January. Original spelling has for the most part been retained in quotations from manuscript materials. Within the notes, the place of publication for all printed works is London, unless otherwise stated. For the sake of clarity, English Short Title Catalogue (Wing) numbers for works published before 1700 are provided in the notes rather than the Select Bibliography.

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Introduction Emerging from a period of civil violence and political upheaval, the English in 1660 faced a critical question: what from the troubled past should be retained in memory and what ought to be consigned to oblivion? It is a question that many nations today with painful and tragic histories still struggle to answer.1 At the turn of the millennium, Canadian journalist Erna Paris travelled to seven of them – Germany, France, Japan, the USA, Chile, Argentina and South Africa – determined to understand how their citizens remembered or did not remember past conflicts, and the impact that remembering and forgetting had on the people who were excluded from official national narratives. She discovered that while the desire to shape what was remembered was universal, the number of ways it could be shaped was ‘surprisingly limited’. The responses ranged from outright lies and blanket denials, through to judicious myth-making, on to benign or deliberate neglect, and finally, to efforts to confront and possibly redeem past wrongs. Paris’s conclusion was that the ‘long shadows’ cast by conflict in the past were best managed – never overcome – with remembrance, accountability and justice.2 The legal, ethical, academic and popular struggles over remembering and forgetting the great catastrophes of the modern era have generated a large body of literature.3 Yet there are far fewer studies of how pre-modern

Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, MA, 1998). 2 Erna Paris, Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History (Toronto, 2000), p. 449. 3 T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper, ‘The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics’, The Politics of Memory: Commemorating War, eds Timothy G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper (New Brunswick, NJ, 2000), pp. 3–86; Richard Ned Lebow, ‘The Memory of Politics in Postwar Europe’, The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, eds Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fugo (2006), pp. 1–39; Jeffery K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York, 2007); Alon Confino, ‘History and Memory’, The Oxford History of Historical Writing. Volume V: Historical Writing Since 1945, eds Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf (Oxford, 2011), pp. 36–51. 1

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polities addressed the problem of a difficult, if not traumatic, past.4 Part of the reason for this is because contemporary debates over, for example, the legacy of the Second World War or the Holocaust clearly have more popular resonance and political relevance than the Anglo-Dutch wars or the War of the Austrian Succession.5 Another more prosaic reason is the relative abundance of sources on modern approaches to past conflicts in comparison with those that exist for the period before 1800. Finally, the advantage of attending to the way past societies addressed the question of remembering and forgetting conflict may not be evident to all historians.6 In this book I argue that the ways in which seventeenth-century England forgot and remembered the civil wars and Interregnum explains the country’s lengthy attachment to the politically and religiously exclusive Restoration settlements, and its deep mistrust of puritan piety and religion well into the eighteenth century. Immediately after the English civil wars and Interregnum, the majority of the political nation chose the option of deliberately neglecting the recent past, most famously in the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. However, this was swiftly replaced by a form of partial public remembering that provided historical justification for the proscription of the puritan impulse from an exclusively Anglican polity. Public remembering of the English civil wars and Interregnum after 1660 was not ultimately concerned with re-fighting the old struggle, but rather commending and justifying, or contesting and attacking, the Restoration settlements that underlay the Anglican confessional state. In particular, at issue was the way the Restoration settlements attempted to solve the problem of the presence of the recent past by excluding from power and authority adherents of the puritan impulse. Much public remembering of the civil wars down through the late Stuart period occurred within a framework created by the legislation intended to guarantee peace and security. The fact that this was attempted through foisting the burden of war-guilt A prospectus for work on seventeenth-century England was set out in Mark Stoyle, ‘Remembering the English Civil War’, The Memory of Catastrophe, eds Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (Manchester, 2004), pp. 19–30. The bias towards the modern is evident even in a recent forum in the JBS ‘on remembering the past’: James McConnel, ‘Remembering the 1605 Gunpowder Plot in Ireland, 1605–1920’, JBS 50 (2011), 865–91; Edmund Roger, ‘1688 and 1888: Victorian Society and the Bicentenary of the Glorious Revolution’, JBS 50 (2011), 892–916. 5 John R. Ellis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, 1994); Dominck LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, 1998); Eelco Runia, ‘Burying the Dead, Creating the Past’, History and Theory 46 (2007), 313–25. 6 Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory 41 (2002), 179–97. 4

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upon a recognisable religious minority is not surprising, nor is it unexpected that in turn it resulted in fresh tensions and splits in England’s political and religious cultures. It is remarkable, however, that the proscription enacted by the settlements endured for nearly two centuries, as did their historical basis – a public memory of what happened during the 1640s and 1650s showing that puritans, also known as Dissenters, could not be trusted with political power. Certainly after 1689 in England, and after 1707 in Britain, Protestant subjects could unite to carry out programmes of Christianisation at home and to wage war against Jacobites and Catholic France abroad.7 It could be quite another story, however, when external and internal forces appeared to combine menacingly against the Church and king, as English Dissenters learned again in the 1790s. While a vigorous (and prolific) minority embraced the civil wars and then the Commonwealth regime as opportunities to reform and reinvigorate the nation, during the 1640s and 1650s most of the English longed first for peace and then for the return of the antebellum established order.8 Civil war cost the lives of tens of thousands of men and women, and caused enormous damage to property.9 At the same time as Englishmen were killing each other on the field of battle, the religious landscape of the kingdom was undergoing the biggest overhaul in eighty years, as reformminded clergy and laymen set about reforming what had been achieved by the Elizabethan Reformation.10 Before the end of the 1640s, Charles I had been executed by his English subjects for treason, England declared a republic, and Ireland subjected to a harsh and bloody invasion by the new political entity. Subsequently, the republic’s leading military officer assumed for himself supreme executive power, styling himself Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. However, less than a year after Cromwell’s demise, the republic was reinstated through an army-led coup, only to fall itself to Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 2003). Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York, 1975). Modern scholarship on the English civil wars continues to grow rapidly. Recent major works include J.S.A. Adamson, ed., The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–49 (Basingstoke, 2009); Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (2008); Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (2007). 9 Gentles, English Revolution, pp. 433–9; Barbara Donagan, War in England, 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2007); John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999). 10 That is, the magisterial framework in which the Church in England became the Church of England ‘by law established’; John Morrill, ‘The Puritan Revolution’, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 67–88. 7 8

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the same force around six months later. By December of 1659 many people were unsure who was really running the country. The serial regime changes were (finally) stopped by the arrival in London of General George Monck’s troops, and the reconstitution – with the support of London’s mainstream puritans – of a parliament willing to negotiate with the late king’s son, Charles Stuart. As it turned out, in the month of May 1660, Charles II returned from his European exile to rule his kingdoms without any terms and conditions attached. He was greeted with much rejoicing.11 Given the undeniable misery and hardship wrought by the war-induced loss of life and property, not to mention the social and religious divisions the conflict had stirred, along with the unpopularity of Charles I’s execution, it is no wonder that the impulse of the political nation immediately before and after the restoration of Charles II was to blot out or destroy reminders of the recent past.12 Public displays of the republic’s seal were taken down; embarrassing or compromising records were altered – such as the journal of the House of Commons for the months around the late king’s trial.13 Most dramatically and famously, the Convention Parliament embraced the king’s stated claim to overlook the troubled past for the sake of social peace by enacting an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. Forgetting the so-called ‘late troubled times’, particularly the abusive labels the combatants had hurled at each other, was now the law of the land.14 People did not, of course, forget what had occurred to them and to their country despite what the Act of Oblivion enacted. For example, Paul Seaward argues that in Restoration England politicians’ minds were so occupied with the events of the recent past that they tended to equate even the tiniest indication of disagreement in parliament with the cataclysmic breach of 1641. Similarly, John Miller contends that during the political furore over the succession of the Catholic Duke of York in the early 1680s, people’s views of current affairs were ‘coloured’ by memories of the civil wars. More recently, George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell have suggested that after 1660 personal knowledge of what had happened during the 1640s Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658–1667 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 47–77; Gary S. De Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659– 1683 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 20–65. 12 Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his kingdoms, 1660–1685 (2005), p. 46. 13 For example, the records of several resolutions from 12 December 1648 were ‘obliterated’ by an order of 2 March 1660, which meant they were scribbled over with loops; House of Lords Record Office, HL/CL/JO/1/33, p. 440. 14 12 Car. II, C. 11, ‘An Act of Free and General Pardon Indemnity and Oblivion’, SR, v, pp. 226–35. 11

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and 1650s – the English Revolution – transformed the context in which longstanding political and religious concerns were debated.15 Nevertheless, I am less concerned with what individuals remembered or forgot about the recent past as with the political nation’s answer to the question of remembering and forgetting the conflict. Jonathan Scott has argued that both personal and public memories of the violence and upheavals of the recent past determined (indeed, almost overdetermined) the responses of the political nation to events after 1660.16 Restoration England was, in Scott’s estimation, a ‘prisoner’ of its memory of the late civil discords.17 My contention is rather the reverse: the public memory of civil wars after 1660 functioned as a prison. That is to say, the public memory of the conflicted past undergirded a legal cordon sanitaire around the puritan impulse, separating it from mainstream political and religious life for the sake of what today would be deemed national security. Very soon after the restoration of the monarchy, the political nation began to encourage and disseminate a memory of the civil wars and Interregnum that vindicated an exclusively Anglican confessional polity. In particular, the nation was exhorted to remember accounts of the recent conflict that legitimated the settlements’ proscription of the puritan impulse from civil and spiritual affairs. Adherents of the puritan impulse were legally locked out from places of power in the Church and the state. This was represented as crucially important for the kingdom’s peace, security and the survival of English Protestantism. Scholarship on the processes by which groups and communities remember and represent the past, and the outcomes of those processes – memories – has grown rapidly since the early 1990s. The process of developing and upholding an awareness of the past that is useful for sustaining a sense of common identity is known as social memory.18 By contrast, collective Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661– 1667 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 325; John Miller, After the Civil Wars: English Politics and Government in the Reign of Charles II (Harlow, 2000), p. 254; see also N.H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford, 2002), p. 208; George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture (Basingstoke, 2010), p. 19. 16 Jonathan Scott, ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, eds Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 108–31; idem, ‘England’s Troubles, 1603–1702’, The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 20–38; idem, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000) , pp. 20–39. 17 Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 26; 162–6. 18 James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992); Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester, 2007), p. 17. 15

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memories connect aspects of the past to the present while denying the ideological implications of the connections.19 According to Jan Assmann, social memory tends to emerge in two phases.20 First of all, people who experienced an event later orally recall it in what Assman calls ‘communicative memory’. The life span of communicative memories can be about three generations or eighty years, although in modern societies it might last up to a century or more. In late Stuart England, it is conceivable that communicative memories of the civil wars and Interregnum circulated among families, kin networks, parishes, and many other kinds of spiritual and trade affiliations, well into the eighteenth century. For example, in early 1702, Richard Kelke of Aston, Yorkshire was well enough to recall his having served in Charles I’s army for eighteen months as part of a successful petition for a pension. A clergyman from the same county, Nathaniel Denton, who had been ejected for nonconformity in 1662, lived until 1720.21 The bulk of the memories of the civil wars that survive today are found within cultural products, such as memorials, poems, plays, sermons, memoirs, images, letters and historical writing. These cultural memories, Assman argues, convey knowledge about the past that very often forms the basis of a group’s sense of belonging to each other, and its awareness of its distinctiveness from other groups. From these factors arise the ‘formative and normative impulses’ that enable a group to exist over time.22 The objects from the past on which cultural memories focus tend to remain the same over long spans of time, especially in foundational moments or periods of conflict. Therefore, both collective and social memories are framed by and incarnated within cultural artefacts that attend to what are deemed to have been crucial events and individuals from the past. My argument about the public remembering of the civil wars and Interregnum after 1660 is based largely on late Stuart cultural memories concerned with representing the conflicted past, particularly histories and memoirs. Up until now, this literature has been analysed by literary Olink, Politics of Regret, p. 86; Claudio Fugo and Wulf Kansteiner, ‘The Politics of Memory and the Poetics of History’, eds Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fugo, The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (2006), pp. 284–310. 20 Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique 65 (1995), 125–33, and idem, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, 2006), pp. 3, 8, 24–5. A similar two-track approach to social memory is found in Avashi Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 51–67. 21 WYAS, QS 1/40/3; John Spurr, ‘Later Stuart Puritanism’, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim (Cambridge, 2008), p. 89. 22 Assmann, ‘Collective Memory’, p. 128; see also Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, pp. 38–41; 49–50. 19

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scholars and historians mostly interested in the story of English historiography, or else the history of political thought.23 In this book, historical writing, along with published sermons, petitions, images and letters, are analysed as memories aimed at answering for the public the question of remembering and forgetting the past conflict. Historical writing in particular was the most important product of cultural remembering in late Stuart England. For much of the period, the ruling regime sought to ensure that only certain kinds of historical works about the recent past were released. The stories about that past conveyed in historical writing give us glimpses into a set of emotionally charged and intellectually complex debates that revolved around the question of distributing power and authority across the state and Church in a way that would secure, now and in the future, public peace and stability. Until the latter part of the seventeenth century the word ‘public’ was most commonly used as an adjective that referred to the sphere of human activity that concerned everyone. Relatedly, it connoted the offices responsible to tend to the welfare of all people.24 Public speech meant that which was open, available (if not affordable) and common, which particularly concerned the affairs of the polity.25 Generally throughout this book, public is used as an adjective, most crucially in connection to remembering and memories. Nations and other large human collectives obviously do not remember the past in exactly the same way as individuals do – just as groups generally do not feel or think as particular people do.26 Nevertheless, nations do, and did, foster and broadcast certain representations of their shared past openly to be recalled and discussed and applied to their present predicaments. Similarly, other aspects of their history were (and are) discouraged or even suppressed from public discourse. Public remembering, therefore, refers to those representations of the past that were put abroad Daniel Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and ‘The light of truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto, 1990); idem, ‘Narrative Historical Writing in Restoration England: A Preliminary Survey’, The Restoration Mind, ed. W. Gerald Marshall (Newark, NJ, 1997), pp. 207–51; idem, ‘Speaking of History: Conversations about the Past in Restoration England’, The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1700, eds Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (Manchester, 2000), pp. 119–37. 24 Geoff Baldwin, ‘The “public” as a Rhetorical Community in Early Modern England’, Communities in Early Modern England, eds Alexandra Walsham and Phil Withington (Manchester, 2000), pp. 199–215. 25 Phil Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England’, American Historical Review 112 (2007), 1016–38. By ‘polity’ I mean the ruling regime, the state and people legitimately able to exercise political power. 26 Fugo and Kansteiner, ‘The Politics of Memory’, p. 288. 23

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for common and open consumption, discussion and debate. Particularly during moments of political tension or crisis, memories of the past conflict were articulated for the purpose of orienting the polity towards a certain policy. It was only at the end of the century that ‘public’ became used as a noun to mean the whole people, increasingly called upon to adjudicate major questions about the nation’s future direction.27 While public memory does not require a bourgeois public sphere to exist and operate, it does by its very nature assume the existence, if not at present then in the future, of a public who will take on and make its narrations of the past part of their own personal stories, and, once thus incorporated, make them a basis for action.28 Significantly, the popular adoption and predominance of national over local history appears to have occurred at the same time as the public was increasingly invoked as umpire over political and religious debates.29 This book’s object of study is a particular sphere of cultural memory, what I call public remembering. Public remembering refers to the process of constructing and disseminating representations of public events, usually in the form of a story.30 Some of these stories were complex and complete. In particular, historical writing, by definition that form of discourse concerned to narrate public events, derived its authority in part from its ability to encompass what had happened within comprehensible explanatory narratives.31 Other kinds of stories, especially those closer in form to oral testimony, including letters and petitions from wounded veterans, were more partial, fractured and incomplete. Published materials make up the bulk of this book’s evidentiary base, partly because of their accessibility, and partly because much printed matter in this period was produced in order to influence the direction of public affairs. Printed public discourse was, as has been argued in relation to public memory during the 1640s, a form of Edward Phillips, The new world of words: or, A universal English dictionary (1696), sig. Hhhh3; Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2004), p. 29. 28 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002), pp. 66–90; Michael Braddick, ‘Mobilization, Anxiety and Creativity in England during the 1640s’, Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900, Essays in Honour of Colin Davis, eds John Morrow and Jonathan Scott, (Exeter, 2008), pp. 176–82. 29 Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 300–51. 30 Jörn Rüsen, History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation (Oxford, 2005), pp. 24–5; David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, 1986), passim. 31 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Modes of Political and Historical Time in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, in Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 91–102. 27

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political participation.32 It is well accepted that before, during and after the civil wars, print was a crucial agent for mobilising formerly (or periodically) passive people into dynamic political actors.33 Such was the power accorded to print after 1660 that new laws were made, and new offices created, to police and control better the domain of published discourse.34 Moreover, the attempted clamp-down on publication by the Restoration regime was directly connected to the question of forgetting and remembering the civil wars. It was also, after 1660, about securing the established framework of politics and religion from the dangerous traces of the past conflict. Restoration was both an event and a process after 1660.35 Charles II returned from exile to rule simply upon his hereditary right, but the question remained: how and on what basis would he govern? Moreover, it was not clear to what degree, if at all, the political and social consequences of the civil wars and Interregnum would be retained within the king’s dominions. The answers were, as one would expect, complex and contingent. Complex not the least because in England they were addressed by two very different sets of legislators: the Convention and then Cavalier Parliaments; contingent because their settlements in part were crafted in response to contemporary events. However, agreements were reached and a polity constructed upon which governance and religion would henceforth proceed. Nonetheless it needs to be acknowledged that historians generally speak of settlements in the plural, both first and second or else the political and the religious.36 It will be helpful briefly to describe them. The first settlement was aimed at healing the body politic’s wounds and moving forward from the broken past. The settlement worked out by the Convention Parliament meshed well with the king and his Lord Chancellor’s desire to blot out the recent past as much as possible, and to ensure

Gary Rivett, ‘“Make Use Both of Things Present and Past”: Thomas May’s Histories of Parliament, Printed Public Discourse and the Politics of the Recent Past, 1640–1650’, Unpublished PhD Thesis (Sheffield, 2010), pp. 2–14. 33 Alastair Bellany, ‘The Murder of John Lambe: Crowd Violence, Court Scandal and Popular Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, P&P 200 (2008), 37–76 at 73; Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004); Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007); Harris, Restoration, pp. 142–6, 212–19. 34 See below Chapter 1, pp. 20–23. 35 Jonathan Sawday, ‘Re-Writing a Revolution: History, Symbol and Text in the Restoration’, The Seventeenth Century 7 (1992), 171–99 at 174; Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 393–5. 36 Hutton, Restoration, pp. 147, 157; Southcombe and Tapsell, Restoration Culture, pp. 8–9. 32

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that what had happened would not become the basis of future conflict.37 For example, Charles II’s reign was dated from 30 January 1649, implying that there had in fact been no Interregnum. However, in constitutional terms the kingdom of England was brought back to 1641, the year subsequently identified with the emergence of an irreparable breach between Charles I and the Long Parliament. Starting the clock from 1641 meant that the legislation enacted by the Long Parliament in response to the excesses of Charles I’s so-called personal rule was upheld. Also, lands that royalists had ‘voluntarily’ sold to pay fines to the Long Parliament or the Republic were not expropriated. Most significantly, the Convention passed an Act of Free and General Pardon Indemnity and Oblivion. The statute explicitly avoided the issue of culpability for the conflict, its rhetoric suggesting that the nation had tripped over itself into civil war.38 The first settlement suggested that peace would be achieved by forgiving and forgetting. The second settlement, by contrast, was grounded on remembering and punishing those deemed responsible for causing the broken past. The Cavalier Parliament pointed an accusatory finger at the puritan impulse. In the spring of 1661 it ordered a copy of the Solemn League and Covenant, the military and ecclesiological treaty signed by the Long Parliament and Covenanter Scots in 1643, burned by the common hangman.39 While not overturning the first political settlement, the Cavalier Parliament rejected its reconciliationist impulse, and set about to purge the state and the Church of the sorts of men it identified as having led the nation into war. Admittedly, in this it was only partly successful.40 The Cavalier Parliament’s achievement had profound and long-lasting consequences for English and later on British public life. For example, the Corporation Act was intended to cleanse borough governments from those connected to the politics of the Solemn League and Covenant: corporators were to renounce the Covenant and take communion at a parish church or Paulina Kewes, ‘Acts of Remembrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law and National Memory in Early Restoration England’, Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Institutions of Repetition in Euro-American Cultures, ed. Lorna Clymer (Toronto, 2006), pp. 109–28. 38 Keeble, The Restoration, pp. 70–7. 39 House of Commons Journal Volume 8: 21 May 1661, Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 8: 1660–1667 (1802), pp. 256–7. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report. aspx?compid=26348; House of Lords Journal Volume 11: 20 May 1661, Journal of the House of Lords: Volume 11: 1660–1666 (1767–1830), pp. 259–61. URL: http://www.british-history. ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=14107. 40 John Patrick Montaño, Courting the Moderates: Ideology, Propaganda, and the Emergence of Party, 1660–1678 (2002), pp. 43–4; Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 196–213. 37

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else lose their places.41 The following year, the religious settlement, put in effect by a new Act of Uniformity, compelled ministers to assent to everything within the Book of Common Prayer, including all ceremonies and sacraments. It also demanded episcopal ordination, and required clergymen to renounce the Covenant, thereby forswearing any future attempt to alter the government of the state and the Church.42 Hundreds of clergymen lost their positions when the law came into effect on ‘Black Bartholomew’s Day’, August 1662. Effectively, the Cavalier Anglican settlements excluded those subsequently labelled Dissenters from full participation in civil and religious life.43 Subsequent legislation – the Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670, the Five Mile Act of 1665, the Test Act of 1673 – further constrained Dissenters from positions of authority, and penalised the ongoing refusal of some of the more disenchanted of their number to conform to the established Church.44 Essentially, the Cavalier Parliament’s exclusive political and religious settlements proscribed the puritan impulse from the public domain. This settlement sought to make peace by excluding puritans from power forever. Throughout this book the phrase ‘puritan impulse’ is employed when referring to that which the Restoration settlements sought to exclude from civil and spiritual affairs. The noun and its adjective both demand clarification. In part, I use the word impulse because the settlements did not target particular individuals (save the regicides) but rather a strand of piety and politics with roots in England’s Reformation. Furthermore, the laws did not succeed in removing all old puritans, re-branded as Dissenters, from public life. Neither did they completely expunge puritan-minded clergymen from the Church of England.45 As a descriptor, the term puritan impulse reflects both the consistent and evolving realities of puritan piety and political action from the accession of Elizabeth I to the return of Charles II, and Paul Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in English Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 92–117. 42 John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991), pp. 38–42. 43 David J. Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration NonConformity (Manchester, 2007); Spurr, ‘Later Stuart Puritanism’, p. 90. 44 Gary S. De Krey, Restoration and Revolution in Britain: A Political History of the Era of Charles II and the Glorious Revolution (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 44–5. 45 Douglas R. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661–1689: A Study in the Perpetuation and Tempering of Parliamentarianism (New Brunswick, NJ, 1969); Kenneth Fincham, ‘Material Evidence: The Religious Legacy of the Interregnum at St George Tombland, Norwich’, Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke, eds Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 224–40. 41

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the intent of the exclusive Restoration settlements, which was to remove a political and ecclesiological agenda that was judged culpable for blowing up the Tudor regime and the Elizabethan Reformation settlement.46 For the sake of clarity, the puritan impulse was represented by and embodied in women and men seeking fervently to evangelise and catechise the whole people under the inspiration of the best Reformed Churches.47 This ambition was behind the puritan attempt to reform the English Reformation from 1640 to 1646. As part of making peace with the past, especially what were deemed to have been the catastrophic consequences of the second Reformation, the Restoration settlements renounced the reforming ambition and attempted to blast it from political culture. Within the cultural memory of the civil wars and Interregnum, this legislative catharsis was represented as crucially necessary for the future health and safety of the bodies politic and ecclesiastic. The book’s chapters unpack the argument through a series of case studies, delimited for the most part by generic and chronological boundaries. Chapter 1 examines a sample of published historical writing from the early Restoration period, roughly 1660 to 1673. During these dozen years the Restoration regime was most concerned to oversee the domain of public remembering. At this time the foundational explanatory narrative of a longstanding puritan conspiracy against the Church and state, and the notion of the civil conflict as a war of religion, emerged as part of the ideological case for the exclusive settlements.48 I do not mean to suggest that the regime and its supporters in parliament were completely united in their approach to public remembering during the early Restoration era and after. What is clear from historical writing concerned with the recent past, however, is that public remembering of the civil wars and Interregnum were not narrative re-enactments of the conflict, but rather were interventions in an intermittent but often heated debate over the necessity of retaining Michael Winship, ‘Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c. 1570–1606’, EHR 124 (2009), 1050–74; Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The Puritan Paradigm of English Politics, 1558–1642’, HJ 53 (2010), 527–50. 47 This definition arises from De Krey, Restoration and Revolution, p. 43; and Paul C.H. Lim, ‘Puritanism and the Church of England: Historiography and Ecclesiology’, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 223–40 at 228. 48 Jason Peacey, ‘The Paranoid Prelate: Archbishop Laud and the Puritan Plot’, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution, eds Barry Coward and Julian Swann (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 113–34; Glenn Burgess, ‘England’s Wars of Religion and Royalist Political Thought’, England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited, eds Charles W.A. Pryor and Glenn Burgess (Aldershot, 2011), pp. 169–92. 46

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an exclusively Anglican polity in order to safeguard right religion and the constitution. Drawing on a blend of published and manuscript sources, in particular the petitions of wounded ex-servicemen, I show in Chapter 2 how public recollections of military service in war stories were implicated in the politics of remembering delimited by the Restoration settlements. After 1660, petitioners for state pensions and military memoirists recalled their experiences of service in ways that linked their present sense of self with the political triumph of royalism. I also argue that Restoration war stories represent a unique development in English war culture. In England after 1660, thousands of veterans publicly narrated an experience of defeat as a demonstrable vindication of their personal sacrifices and suffering, and as a legitimation of the political and religious order for which they had taken up arms. In the following two chapters, 3 and 4, my analysis returns to historical writing during two very different moments in English political affairs. Chapter 3 examines the final five years of Charles II’s reign, 1680 to 1685. These years are noteworthy because of the marked rise in the volume of printed public discourse, comparable to what had occurred in the early 1640s. At the centre of those debates was King Charles I’s commitment to the Reformation settlement. During the early 1680s, by contrast, the concern was over the future viability of the Restoration settlements should the Duke of York, a Roman Catholic, accede to the throne. Furthermore, the domain of public remembering underwent both a structural and substantive transformation during this period. Structurally, the temporary suspension of pre-publication censorship resulted in an explosive growth of available printed matter, eventually including publications emanating from the regime that were aimed at influencing the reading public. Relatedly, the arena of public remembering was substantively transformed during these years thanks to the unprecedented rise in the amount of evocations of the civil wars and Interregnum. From an examination of historical writing and a selection of historical images, I argue in Chapter 3 that narrations of the civil wars point towards a major development within this form of public remembering: the advent of partisan historical parallelism. The troubled times were repeatedly rescreened, I argue, as part of whiggish or tory reimaginings of their meaning for the polity’s future. Chapter 4 analyses historical writing about the civil wars from the mid-1690s, when pre-publication censorship ended for good, to the accession of the first Hanoverian king. These years witnessed another modulation within the cultural memory of the wars and Interregnum, as historical writings represented the recent conflict to vindicate the political 13

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and religious settlements attending the returns of either Charles II or William of Orange. At the core of the debate over which of the two settlements – Restoration or Revolution – was the best prescription for the security of Protestantism and the stability of the polity, remained the question of the continuing necessity of the proscription of the puritan impulse. The more supportive a historical writing was of the achievement of the Glorious Revolution, the more likely it was to suggest that it was safe to remove the civil disabilities under which Dissenters still lived. The penultimate chapter, Chapter 5, focuses on the creation of one major late Stuart historical work, which concerned the experiences of Anglican clergymen and their families during the 1640s and 1650s. John Walker’s The Suffering of the Clergy (1714) was to a large extent based on recovered communicative memories of clergy families or parish-based informants. The accounts that Walker received in Exeter from across the nation arose from an ecclesiological and political sensibility deeply rooted in communicative and cultural memories of vulnerability and victimisation. In this chapter I argue that Walker’s project represented a significant effort on the part of High Anglicans to vindicate historically the Restoration settlement’s proscription of the puritan impulse. The Walker papers thus shed light on the powerful communicative memories that underlay a particular religious constituency’s strong attachment to the necessarily exclusive nature of Restoration settlements in the early eighteenth century. The final chapter, Chapter 6, examines a crucial genre in late Stuart public discourse: preaching. The political relevance of sermons in postReformation England was particularly heightened when they were delivered on public days of fasting, thanksgiving and remembrance.49 From a chronological survey of published sermons dedicated to expounding the case for giving thanks to God for the restoration of Charles Stuart and the Church of England, I argue that over the late Stuart period, annual 29 May thanksgiving sermons defended, commended and eventually contested the Restoration religious settlement. In particular, the myth of the Restoration as an instance of divine liberation was re-articulated to demonstrate God’s support of the Stuart monarchy and the Elizabethan Reformation, understood to have been rightly recapitulated by the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Thus, the cultural memory of the Restoration moment became tied up with working out the legacy of England’s long Reformation.

Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2003), passim.

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The nation’s troubled past was not forgotten or ignored after 1660.50 This book is a focused attempt to highlight how much and in what ways the experience of civil violence and religious upheaval was narrated to orient a polity desperately seeking to move on. It does not aspire to be the last word on the subject of the wars’ place in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury public memory. For example, questions of reception and diffusion of printed memories do not receive sustained analysis. Obviously, readers will have made choices about what exactly from a historical writer’s narrative they would poach and what they would put aside.51 The response of readers to civil war historical writing is not dealt with here simply because such a study warrants its own book.52 There must have been a good deal of ‘back talk’ going on when people engaged with historical narrations in books, pamphlets and sermons. To give just one example, one of the readers of Thomas Gumble’s biography of General George Monck disputed in the margin Gumble’s claim that Monck had been tempted to assume supreme power for himself.53 Within the domain of public remembering that was a Quarter Session court, the clearest gauge of audience response to a maimed veteran’s war story was the denial or conferral of a pension. Yet, as will be discussed below, being granted a pension may not always have been connected to the force and credibility of an ex-serviceman’s narrative of service and injury.54 The kinds of ‘publics’ that were generated in response to and reaction against the dominant narratives put abroad in cultural memory deserve much more study. If my examination of part of the public conversation about the recent past after 1660 prompts such work, then this book will have fulfilled a key part of its purpose. The relationship between the political nation’s answer to the question of forgetting and remembering the conflicted past is crucial for understanding the character of its political culture after 1660. Not the wars only, but the ways they were remembered and forgotten divided England’s seventeenth century into ‘before’ and ‘after’ the late troubled times. People who publicly remembered the civil wars and Interregnum were not necessarily engaging in the same debates and issues that had brought them, or their immediate Eviatar Zerubavel, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (Oxford, 2006). 51 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), Chapter 12. 52 Daniel Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002). 53 Copy of Thomas Gumble, The Life of General Monck, Duke of Albermarle (1671) in York Minster Library, XXXC.K.24, p. 270. The reader noted that according to ‘Mr Locke’s acc[ount]’ Monck’s ambition was in fact arrested by Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper. 54 See below, pp. 62–63. 50

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forbears, to violent discord. Very often they were narrating the past within and in response to a framework erected after 1660 to ensure political and religious stability and concord. That framework itself represented a way of working through the legacy of the civil wars through expunging the politics and piety of those deemed most culpable, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that many puritans, especially in London, did so much to help bring about the restoration of Charles II.55 Thus, while the content of cultural memories of the wars evolved as the political and religious landscape of late Stuart England changed, their focus – their aim – remained centred on the question of whether or not it was safe for the polity to stop placing the blame and the shame primarily on the puritans. In other words, was it finally time to forget about the Restoration settlement?

De Krey, London and the Restoration, pp. 20–65.

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1 The Restoration Regime and Historical Reconstructions of the Civil War and Interregnum

In the years immediately following the restoration of the monarchy, the English had a paradoxical relationship to their nation’s recent history. On the one hand, they were supposed to forget about it. The Convention Parliament had passed an Act of Oblivion within a few months of the king’s return. This legislation commanded people not to remember publicly the civil wars. On the other hand, personal memories of what were referred to as the ‘late broken times’ were lodged firmly within most people’s minds. This was recognised openly, as in the preface to a short book called History of the Commons Warre, published in 1662. Joshua Coniers noted gloomily that the recent past lingered in the present ‘like a Skeleton’. He went on to assert that ‘the felicity of memory consists not in the bare reminding us of miseries past, but as it points and directs our sense to a greater complacency and content in the happiness we repossess’.1 Civil war history was meaningful unless it reminded readers to be happy about the Restoration. The paradoxical and complex nature of the early Restoration period makes it a fruitful area for examining the relationship between historical writing and the politics of remembering and forgetting the conflicted past. Publishing histories about the civil wars and Interregnum certainly did not advance an agenda of forgetting, but the regime and the political nation neither desired nor attempted to prohibit all acts of remembering the conflicted past. Indeed, remembering the civil war and Interregnum past was a critical part of working through the nation’s most important political and religious debates after 1660. In this chapter I investigate the uses of a particular strand of remembering the wars from the return of Charles II in Joshua Coniers, ‘The Stationer to the Reader’, W.C., History of the Commons Warre of England. Throughout These Three Nations: begun from 1640 and continued till this present Year (1662), Wing C4275aA, sig. A4.

1

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1660 to the passing of the Test Act in 1673: published historical writing. It highlights the attempt of the early Restoration regime and its supporters in Parliament to shape a useable public memory of the recent past.2 Political action to secure the present and the future could be prescribed once the experience of the previous decades, a violent rupturing of the body politic and body ecclesiastic, was organised within historical writing into narratives with beginnings, middles and ends, driven by pernicious principles, peopled with wicked plotters and triumphant martyrs, and overseen by Providence.3 The aim of this chapter is to analyse the works sanctioned by the regime to create a useable past that vindicated the proscription of the puritan impulse under the Restoration settlement.4 These works were the polemical counterparts of the attempts of civic and national politicians, and certain Churchmen, to re-create a stable, unified and peaceful realm by expelling their opponents from political or religious office.5 Historical writing about the recent past debated and defended the political and religious settlements that their advocates argued were essential for peace, and that their opponents threatened to undermine. The chief concern of histories published in the early Restoration era was not to recapitulate intellectually the civil wars but to uphold the framework erected to guarantee political, religious and social peace. Sanctioned histories increased the divisive power of antipuritanism within public discourse by connecting puritan piety and James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), pp. 200–2. Earlier employments of the term include Henry S. Commenger, The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography (New York, 1967), and Warren I. Susman, ‘History and the American Intellectual: Uses of a Usable Past’, American Quarterly 16 (1964), 243–63 at 256. By regime I mean the officers who wielded executive power within and over the state; in other words, the king’s government. 3 Donald R. Kelley, ‘The Theory of History’, Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge, 1988), p. 749; Daniel Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and ‘The light of truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto, 1990), pp. 9–16; Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice’, Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke, eds Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 80–97 at 89. 4 Earlier studies of some of these works include J.P. Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance, 2nd edn (1993); Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (Basingstoke, 1996); Daniel Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002); Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, pp. 200–2. 5 Paul Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in English Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998). 2

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politics with the greatest wounding of the nation and the national church. While this clearly conflicted with the principle of forgetting and forgiveness outlined in the preamble to the Act of Oblivion, most of the political nation was determined to scapegoat puritan piety as a way of justifying an exclusive confessional polity. This memory was not designed primarily to encourage national reconciliation, but rather to secure religious peace and political stability for the future. Early Restoration historians and their writings have not been neglected.6 Pioneering studies by literary scholars and historians of political thought have been complemented by historians of historical thought and cultural historians.7 Relatively little has been done, however, to situate published histories of the civil wars within the politics of public remembering.8 While this is partly a consequence of the relatively recent interest in social memory, it is also a function of the nature of the period itself. The early Restoration is on the one hand easy to characterise because the resumption of monarchical government marked an immediately recognisable transformation of the political landscape and turning point in the nation’s story. On the other hand, it is difficult to characterise the period because politics was very dynamic, particularly while the political and religious settlements were under construction. Nonetheless, both during and after the construction of the settlements, the regime worked to control and to shape the public memory of the civil wars in order to demonstrate that the proscription of the puritan impulse in government and religion was justified. Published historical writing promoted a story about the civil war and Interregnum that undergirded the necessity of the settlements into the foreseeable future. The regime and its supporters were aware that the stability of the Restoration polity would be strengthened by the circulation of public discourse about the recent past that underlined, historically and morally, the reconstructed monarchical state and episcopal Church. Royce MacGillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague, 1974); R.C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited, 3rd edn (Manchester, 1998); David Cressy, ‘Remembrances of the Revolution: Histories and Historiographies of the 1640s’, HLQ 68 (2005), 257–68. 7 David Norbrook, ‘The English Revolution and English Historiography’, The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N.H. Keeble (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 233–50; J.A.I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 26–51. 8 Paulina Kewes, ‘Acts of Remembrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law and National Memory in Early Restoration England’, Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Institutions of Repetition in Euro-American Cultures, ed. Lorna Clymer (Toronto, 2006), pp. 103–31; Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1979). 6

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As is well known, histories during the seventeenth century were written and read for their moral arguments. They offered concrete examples of how to apply true and right principles to the conduct of public affairs. Historical writing was an important medium for mobilising a public committed to the regime’s notion of what had really happened during the 1640s and 1650s, its explanation of why it had occurred, who chiefly was to blame, and why the settlements constructed after the king’s return were necessary to prevent any more bloodshed or religious reformations. In the rest of the chapter I will examine how the Restoration regime attempted to shape public remembering of the civil war and Interregnum. It begins by surveying the regime’s determination to police the bounds of print culture. The largest section explores both direct and indirect attempts to shape memories of the past conflict through historical writing. First, the regime gave particular historical works its seal of approval. Secondly, the regime tended to allow histories to be published that were hostile to puritan politics.9 Thirdly, it generally condoned the publication of loyalist martyrologies. Fourthly, it allowed the vilification of Protector Oliver Cromwell to flourish throughout the period. Moulding memories of the civil war In 1660 and afterwards, governments and the political nation recognised that it was important to police what could and could not be said publicly about the conflicted past. The Act of Oblivion set limits on public remembering of individuals’ allegiance during the civil wars, by forbidding people for three years from making any reflections in speech or in print on a person’s conduct during ‘the late troubled times’.10 Subsequently, the Cavalier Parliament passed legislation intended to help the regime better manage public discourse, particularly in light of what were deemed the tragic consequences of a free press in the early 1640s. For example, the Act of Security of 1661, which expanded the definition of treason to include words against the king appearing in print or manuscript, justified this policy with the contention in the preamble that ‘the growth and increase of the late troubles and disorders did in a very great measure proceed from a For an account of this impulse across the seventeenth century, see Mark Goldie, The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, Volume I. Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 149–92. 10 12 Car. II, C. 11,’An Act of Free and General Pardon Indemnity and Oblivion’, SR, v, pp. 226–35 at 230, clauses xxiii and xxiv. 9

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multitude of seditious Sermons Pamphlets and Speeches dayly preached printed and published’. The Restoration regime simply could not safely ignore the printed sphere. In a speech to the Commons in May 1662, Secretary William Morrice reported that the king regarded legislation for regulating the press to be essential for political and religious stability, since the ‘exorbitant Liberty of the Press [had] been a great Occasion of the late Rebellion in the Kingdom, and the Schisms in the Church’.11 The means by which the king’s government attempted to limit what could and could not be said about the civil wars and Interregnum was prepublication censorship. As Jason McElligott has shown, the mid-seventeenth-century English state had the coercive power and often the will to censor the printed sphere. The effectiveness of censorship at this time was not necessarily undermined from a lack of adequate tools, but rather through contingent considerations, such as a regime’s sense of its security or the willingness of officials to enforce its regulations.12 The Restoration regime evidently was not completely secure, even in 1662. That year, parliament passed an ‘Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses’, otherwise known as the Licensing Act. The law required that historical books entering the market had to be sanctioned prior to publication by one of the two Secretaries of State. Originally intended to be effective for two years, the Licensing Act was renewed in 1665 and remained in force until 1679.13 Relatedly, by the spring of 1663 the king had ensured a place for the former royalist printer, Richard Royston, in the Company of Stationers, largely to keep watch on its meetings and the printing of material that might have undermined the establishment.14 Soon afterwards, the government employed Sir Roger L’Estrange as

13 Car. II, cap. 1, An Act for Safety and Preservation of His Majesties Person and Government, SR, v, p. 304; 14 Car. II, cap. 33, An Act for Preventing the Frequent Abuses in Printing Seditious Treasonable and Unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses, SR, v, pp. 428–35; House of Commons Journal, Volume 8: 10 May 1662, Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 8: 1660–1667 (1802), p. 425. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=26516. 12 Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 211–15. 13 17 Car. II, cap. 4, SR, v, 577; Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 160. 14 H.R. Tedder, ‘Royston, Richard (1601–1686)’, rev. William Proctor Williams, ODNB. 11

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the Surveyor of the Press to keep seditious pamphlets out of the published sphere.15 Licensing and L’Estrange did not succeed in stopping the dissemination of all literature hostile towards or critical of the established civil and spiritual powers. The farewell sermons of notable ministers ejected for refusing to conform to the Act of Uniformity, some of which contained strong rebukes of the new religious settlement in their biblical allusions, were printed.16 Furthermore, a vigorous culture of manuscript publication allowed people to read, for example, Andrew Marvell’s Last Instructions to a painter, written in 1667. The piece poetically evoked the ghost of Charles I (and French king Henry IV) to remind the present king of his father’s violent end as a consequence of relying on bad advisors.17 Dissenters, those loyal to the ejected ministers or to the puritan impulse within English Protestantism, produced a lively literary culture of critique and resistance directed at the established Church.18 At times of national emergency, or when the government was considering significant changes to the religious settlement, Dissenters had an easier time getting their works into print. For example, Slingsby Bethel’s modest celebration of religion and political economy under the Commonwealth regime, The World’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell, was published in 1668 when those Dissenters who were seeking religious toleration could make their case for liberty of conscience more freely.19 However, almost no work of prose historical writing written or compiled by a former parliamentarian, in sympathy with the Long Parliament’s cause or the Protectorate, was published in England during the early Restoration period. The only exception occurred sometime in the early 1670s when None of the essays in Anne Dunan-Page and Beth Lynch, eds, Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Aldershot, 2008), examines closely his work as Surveyor. Geoff Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, ed. Jason McElligott (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 67–90, and Peter Hinds, The Horrid Popish Plot: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London (Oxford, 2009), both focus on L’Estrange’s later career. 16 David J. Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration non-Conformity (Manchester, 2007), pp. 218–22. 17 See the discussion of the poem in George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 149–50. 18 NH. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Non-Conformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester, 1987). 19 [Slingsby Bethel], The World’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell (1668), Wing B2070; Derek Hirst, ‘Samuel Parker, Andrew Marvell, and Political Culture, 1667–73’, Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England, eds Derek Hirst and Richard Steier (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 145–64. 15

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the first part of John Rushworth’s Historical Collections, originally dedicated to Protector Richard Cromwell, was published. However, the release of this book is considered ‘surreptitious’ because there are no surviving copies noted in the standard modern bibliographical catalogue for the period. 20 Thus, the regime was rather successful in managing the contribution of historical writing to public remembering of the civil wars and Interregnum. Yet the government was not satisfied simply to stop the release of seditious histories. More positively, it sought to mould and inform the contours and contents of the public memory of the conflicted past. The regime provided content for civil-war cultural memories by patronising particular authors or works. Similarly, it gave others its imprimatur. Additionally, the regime indirectly shaped cultural memory by permitting certain kinds of narratives to circulate freely within the published domain. Thus, through its sanctioned stories the regime offered an explanation of the recent past that showed how and why the exclusive Restoration settlements were necessary for public safety and true religion. These writings, which meshed with the conservative royalist legalism animating most members of parliament after 1661, portrayed the principles and people connected to the puritan impulse as the greatest threat to order, peace and Protestant Christianity in Britain.21 Additionally, the attention devoted in these histories to Providence underlined the conviction that God was the ultimate vindicator of the Stuart monarchy and the re-established Elizabethan framework of the Church. This metanarrative of puritan perfidy and providential oversight created a useable past for a settlement that barred those who chose to identify strongly with Reformed Protestantism from places of power and authority. The regime tended not to discourage recapitulations of this narrative in other sorts of published historical literature, with two important exceptions: Peter Heylyn’s history of British Presbyterianism and Thomas Hobbes’s Behemoth. Moreover, the government did not discourage the release of works that highlighted the sufferings of loyalist clergy, royalist politicians and royalist soldiers at the hands of the puritan Long Parliament, again with the exception of one of Heylyn’s works: his biography of Archbishop William Laud. It is hardly surprising that James Heath’s vituperative biographies of Oliver Cromwell – the arch villain – went through multiple editions between 1661 and 1673.

Robert Clavell, A Catalogue of Books Printed in England since … 1666 to … 1672 (1673), Wing C4598, p. 30; Joad Raymond, ‘Rushworth, John (c.1612–1690)’, ODNB; the work is not listed in the English Short Title Catalogue. 21 Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 46–7. 20

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Sanctioned histories and lessons The earliest historical writings sanctioned by the regime emerged as products of royal favour. In 1661 the regime bestowed upon James Howell the title of ‘Historiographer Royal’. In his letter of application for the post, probably written soon after the king’s return, Howell argued that all the ‘best policed nations’ had an official tasked with recording the great transactions of state, and vindicating the government from ‘erroneous relations, traducements and falsities’.22 Despite securing the appointment, Howell only managed to publish just one civil-war history. The Twelve Several Treatises of the Later Revolutions was in fact a series of previously released pamphlets. While Howell’s contribution to the cultural memory of the recent past was neither substantial nor original, his account of the wars did align with the regime’s desire to extricate puritan politics from public affairs.23 The next work released with royal approval, published in 1662, was Richard Royston’s Basilika: the Works of Charles I. The book included a biography of Charles I written by a London rector, Richard Perrinchief, along with the late king’s self-justifying reflections on the 1640s, Eikon Basilike.24 Royston’s book particularly supported the government’s desire, shared by many Churchmen, to reaffirm the connection between the return of the monarchy and episcopal Protestantism, thought to be a miraculous deliverance, with Charles I’s sacrificial death on 30 January 1649.25 The biography deliberately connected sacral kingship and the ancient constitution with the providential vindication of the Elizabethan frame of the English Church. After the passing of the Licensing Act, official approval was given to historical writing through the imprimatur of one of the Secretaries of State. The works accorded this grant included the second and much expanded edition of James Health’s Chronicle of the late Intestine Wars, published in 1663, Edward Phillips’s continuation of Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle of James Howell, ‘Application for the Post of Historiographer General’, Epistolae Hoelianae: The Familiar Letters of James Howell, Historiographer Royal to Charles II, ed. Joseph Jacobs (1892), pp. 687–8; Paul Seaward, ‘A Restoration Publicist: James Howell and the earl of Clarendon, 1661–6’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 6 (1988), 123–31; Daniel Woolf, ‘Conscience, Constancy, and Ambition in the Career and Writings of James Howell’, Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer, eds John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (Oxford, 1993), pp. 243–78. 23 James Howell, Twelve Several Treatises of the Later Revolutions (1661), Wing H3123. 24 William Fullman and Richard Perrinchief, eds, Basilika (1662), Wing C2075. 25 Andrew Lacey, ‘“Charles the First, and Christ the Second”: The Creation of a Political Martyr’, Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700, eds Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas Mayer (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 203–20. 22

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the Kings of England, published in 1665, and David Lloyd’s Statesmen and Favourites, released the same year.26 Both Phillips’s and Lloyd’s works were republished in 1670, although the latter without any significant changes. Another history, the Scottish edition of John Davies’s The Civil Warres of Great Britain and Ireland, was published in 1664 ‘cum privilego’.27 It is possible that Davies’s history was granted a Scottish licence on account of its apparent British scope. It likewise was grounded on a strident condemnation of puritan religions and politics. For this reason, the identical English edition of 1661 will be considered among the histories sanctioned, albeit in this case retrospectively, by the Restoration regime. Sanctioned historical writings demonstrate the extent to which public remembering was important to Restoration political culture. Histories that were licensed or officially patronised were cultural reminders meant to foster a public favourably disposed to the Restoration regime’s exclusive political and religious settlements. This reading public would learn the lessons these writings offered, and embrace the principles they exemplified. Having recognised the truth about the recent past, this public would also act upon that memory in the future.28 Along this line, Edward Phillips recognised that his Chronicle of the wars and Interregnum contained ‘deplorable and unhappy passages’ some might wish to forget, yet he argued that ‘it is necessary that all Occurrences should be equally known and transmitted to Posterity’.29 Sanctioned civil-war histories, such as Phillips’s, taught that puritan-inspired resistance to the established temporal and spiritual authorities, in tandem with recourse to popular politics, led to calamitous violence, religious chaos, social disorder and tyranny. Since the civil and spiritual impulses animating puritans had caused the wars and subsequent

James Heath, A Chronicle of the late Intestine War in the three Kingdoms, 2nd edn (1663), Wing H1319; idem, A Brief Chronicle of All the Chief Action so Fatally Falling Out in These Three Kingdoms (1662), Wing H1318A; Edward Phillips, ed., Sir Richard Baker, A Chronicle of the Kings of England (1665), Wing B505; idem, A Chronicle of the Kings of England (1670), Wing B506; David Lloyd, The States-Men and Favourites of England since the Reformation (1665), Wing L2648; idem, State-Worthies, or, The States-Men and Favourites of England (1670), Wing L2646. 27 John Davies, The Civil Warres of Great Britain and Ireland (1661), Wing D393; idem, The Civil Warres of Great Britain and Ireland (Glasgow, 1664), Wing D394. 28 Rüsen, History, p. 12. 29 Phillips, Chronicle, p. 458; see also Davies, Civil Wars, ‘Dedication’; Heath, Intestine War, sig. A4. 26

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illegitimate regimes, it was right and good that the settlements purged them from the arenas of political and religious authority.30 Sanctioned historical writings reminded readers that the motives, language and loyalty of puritans and Presbyterians during the 1640s and 1650s were false and untrustworthy. Heath placed all the blame for the kingdom’s miseries on the men who had promoted ‘the Cavils, Discontents, and disputes’ about the Church of England’s liturgy.31 The actions of this faction proved that they posed a constant threat to public safety and Protestant Christianity. The histories underlined that those people who had claimed to desire religious reform were (and always are) really only after power. Phillips, for example, declared that the Covenanting Scots had revolted against Charles I in 1637–8 and invaded England in 1640 and 1644 for sake of a so-called ‘reformation of religion’. Without the ability of London’s puritan preachers to ‘persuade the people religiously out of their money’, Parliament could not have paid for its war against the king.32 The puritans’ ambition to dominate was cloaked by their piety. One of the clearest indications of the danger Presbyterians posed to the state was their recourse to popular politics. Davies asserted that the ‘high pretence [of] Reformation of Religion, or indeed the very preservation of it’, as preached by London ministers, allowed them to draw a portion of the multitude to Parliament’s cause with disastrous results.33 This tendency was operative even before the Long Parliament met. According to Davies, the puritan ‘Faction’ used the controversy over Ship Money to draw down popular odium on the king by claiming that it was ‘a breach of civil rights and tyrannical to raise money’ without Parliament’s consent. Similarly, Phillips stated that Charles I’s consent to Strafford’s execution ‘was in a manner Extorted’ by around 5,000 citizens of the city ‘most armed with Swords, Cudgels and Staves’, who had thronged to Westminster ‘crying out for Justice’. The Presbyterians’ malicious recourse to crowd pressure also explained some of the king’s political blunders. Heath blamed ‘popular importunities’, and Phillips the ‘tumultuous concourse of the London Apprentices’, for forcing the king to assent to the exclusion of the bishops from the House of Lords.34 Thus, sanctioned Gary S. De Krey uses the term ‘Reformed Protestants’ in reference to those who wanted to reconfigure the nation’s civil and spiritual realms along Calvinist lines; Restoration and Revolution in Britain: A Political History of the Era of Charles II and the Glorious Revolution (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 45. 31 Heath, Intestine Wars, p. 2; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 535. 32 Phillips, Chronicle, p. 573; Davies, Civil Wars, p. 73. 33 Davies, Civil Wars, sig. A5 and p. 73; p. 8. 34 Davies, Civil Wars, pp. 6–7; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 532; Heath, Brief Chronicle, sigs 6–7; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 547. 30

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histories represented puritan politics as little better than rabble rousing, undertaken by incendiaries posing as sober and pious men, who managed to force their way to supreme power by drawing the common people into political affairs. Official histories also supported the exclusionary outcome of the Restoration settlements by showing the disastrous consequences of puritan political thought. The events of the 1640s and 1650s proved that zealous reform leads to resistance, which generates all manner of wickedness. The histories demonstrated, by contrast, that there could never be legitimate grounds for resisting civil or spiritual authorities. Relatedly, the puritan impulse to renovate the ‘best reformed’ Church had led to a flourishing of separating congregations and radical sects; a struggle to protect the subject’s liberties produced an oligarchic republic and then Cromwell’s tyranny. Heath and Phillips pretended to be bemused by how easily ‘what was pretended to be fought for’, namely questions of church governance and doctrine, were lost when the fighting was over; indeed, even as early as when things first ‘came into Blood’.35 In Basilika, Perrinchief criticised the Long Parliament for permitting ‘all Sects and Heresies’ freedom to preach and teach, which had generated the schisms and misunderstandings that Oliver Cromwell would later use to maintain his power.36 The histories approved by the regime underlined God’s approbation of the Stuart monarchy, the restored episcopal Church, and the settlements that secured them. These historical works used providential reasoning to explain both royalist defeats and loyalist suffering, and the ultimate triumph of the monarchy and the episcopal Church. For example, Perrinchief interpreted the disaster at Naseby as God’s sign that he was preparing for the king for translation ‘into another Kingdom’.37 The story of Charles II’s miraculous preservation in 1651 proved that God had not abandoned the dynasty; Charles II’s wonderful deliverance was ‘a providence indeed not paralleled in History’.38 The events of 1660 which combined to produce the king’s ‘restitution’ were to Davies a ‘chain and series’ of providences against the former usurpations, marvellously borne out by the fact that God directed the people’s deliverer, General Monck, from the same ‘place which started the miseries – Scotland’.39 Importantly, an emphasis on God’s good and timely work in bringing the king back peacefully downplayed the Heath, Brief Chronicle, sig. A3v; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 770. Perrinchief, Basilika, pp. 18, 29, 32, 62. 37 Perrinchief, Basilika, p. 46; cf. Phillips, Chronicle, p. 588. 38 Heath, Intestine War, p. 30; Davies, Civil Wars, p. 323; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 669. 39 Heath, Intestine War, p. 444; Davies, Civil Wars, sig. A3. 35 36

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role of London’s Presbyterians in driving the political agenda in late 1659 and 1660. Thus, the fact that the Restoration political and religious settlements attempted to expunge puritan politics and piety from public life was not truly a betrayal of the Presbyterians’ support for the monarchy or the Stuarts. Instead, it was simply an acknowledgement of God’s will. The Almighty had vindicated the Stuart cause by the marvellous turn of events of 1660, as earlier He had demonstrated his fidelity to Charles II by saving him from capture. Sanctioned histories thus underlined the doctrine that God does indeed work things out for the good of those people who are truly His own.40 Sanctioned stories Civil war histories justified the necessity of the exclusive political and religious settlements by explanatory devices and mode of apportioning blame, their choice of momentous beginnings, turning points and conclusions, the counterfactuals they employed, and characterisation of their protagonists and antagonists. Sanctioned histories traced the civil wars back to a seditious and longstanding conspiracy. This was a mode of explanation already well established within English political culture. Since the mid-Tudor era, various politicians and religious leaders perceived the establishment under threat from a cadre of plotters. For example, the polemical rhetoric of antipopery reflected and fostered fears of a ‘popish plot’ to blow up England’s Protestant Church and monarchy. Similarly, the rhetoric of antipuritanism revealed and informed fears of a puritan–populist plan to overthrow the religious and social order.41 Fears of conspiracies legitimated calls for the exclusion or repression of popish or puritan principles and people, portrayed as disloyal to the status quo. Naturally, those calling for the purgation of the ‘disloyal’ argued that they and their principles were the very embodiment of true loyalty. Relatedly, as relations between Charles I and parliament had worsened in late 1641 and early 1642, both the king and his critics saw the other as the victims of a conspiracy with religious roots. The Court saw itself under Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999); Blair Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, P&P 109 (1985), 55–99; Geoffrey C. Browell ‘The Politics of Providentialism in England, 1640–1660’, Unpublished PhD Thesis (Canterbury, 2000). 41 Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, Conflict in Early Stuart England, eds R. Cust and A. Hughes (1989), pp. 72–106; Scott Sowerby, ‘Opposition to Anti-Popery in Restoration England’, JBS 51 (2012), pp. 26–49. 40

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attack from puritan–populists who had hijacked parliament, while many parliamentarians were convinced that the king was unwittingly surrounded by maniacal popish advisors.42 Conspiracy was the preferred explanation in sanctioned histories for several reasons. First, it made the descent into violent conflict readily understandable as the consequence of human intention. Secondly, the conspiratorial mode complemented the desire to assign blame for the calamity wholly on one side of the struggle. Thirdly, and more particularly, this mode of explanation connected post-Restoration puritans, increasingly identified with Dissenters from the established Church, with a long-term and international movement dedicated to overturning the constitution and the English Reformation. Finally, conspiracy-theory explanations of the wars re-emphasised the innocence (if not the intelligence) of Charles I and the wickedness of the puritan–Presbyterians whose principles had legitimated resistance against him. The puritans’ supposed animus towards the establishment, and their culpability for the wars’ outbreak and the regicide, proved that they deserved to be excluded from the mainstream of civil and religious affairs after 1660. The sanctioned histories blamed the wars on a cadre of plotters, usually identified as ‘the Faction’. For example, Howell’s Several Treatises linked the process by which the king and the Long Parliament became irreconcilable to a puritan plot to remould the English constitution and Church according to the civil theology of Calvin’s Scottish disciples. Presbyterian misuse of the pulpit and the press had turned a large section of the people against the best of kings.43 The malignancy of a few ‘unquiet persons’, according to Richard Perrinchief, had perverted parliament, and misled the masses. It was clear to the world, Davies argued, that only ‘some particular Factious persons’ within the parliament started the wars. They had used the institution to overthrow the constitution and erect their own tyranny. Phillips claimed that the conspirators behind the ruin of Charles I had planned his demise for a long time, and had seized the opportunity provided by the Long Parliament to set their schemes in motion.44 While sanctioned histories presented the cause of civil war to be premeditated puritan politics, writers acknowledged that it was not entirely Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 112–13 and 152–3; David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 35; David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 217, 261. 43 Howell, Several Treatises, sig. B4; sigs E1, E3v, B6; sigs Cc1–Cc5v. 44 Davies, Civil Wars, sig. A1v and 378; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 625. 42

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predictable. Bodily and environmental metaphors enabled the historians to explain the timing of the civil wars while not taking the burden of blame off puritan clergy and politicians. For example, in one of Howell’s early treatises he compared the outbreak of conflict after more than a decade of stability and prosperity to an unexpected thundershower sweeping down from Scotland.45 Additionally, depicting the Personal Rule of Charles I in glowing terms underscored the success of his kingship and reinforced the argument that puritan resistance to his rule was wholly unwarranted.46 However, too much peace and prosperity were not always healthy. For example, Heath was prepared to admit that the nation’s ‘descent’ into violence after a lengthy period of peace could be viewed as part of a normal cycle of politics. Relatedly, Davies believed that the surfeit of riches and political tranquillity enjoyed during the reigns of James I and Charles I made the political nation dangerously arrogant and complacent, so that the only cure was ‘a violent Bleeding’.47 Such interpretations came very close to calling the civil war a good thing in itself. It was difficult for writers to reconcile what they believed was the puritans’ premeditation with cyclical views of national history. In sanctioned histories, puritan politics was portrayed as creating the overarching casual framework in which other contingent factors operated. Thus, medical or environmental explanations of the wars’ particular timing did not remove the heavy burden of culpability otherwise placed on puritan ministers and politicians. According to Perrinchief, it was simple greed for ‘the richest Benefices, and a partage of the Revenues’ belonging to the bishops, which motivated London preachers to proclaim ‘War in the Name of Christ’. Heath claimed to be perplexed that religion, which in normal times was supposed to be a force for peace, was the ultimate cause for the recent ‘miserable distractions and confusions’. It was sad but certain that the ‘guilt of so much misery’ had no greater origin than differences over ‘a few Ceremonies in the Church’.48 While Phillips’s Chronicle acknowledged that before the wars a ‘great part’ of the people was unhappy with the Laudian episcopate, it was a small faction within the Long Parliament who had encouraged the ‘Nonconformists or puritans’ to preach for the abolition of episcopal government in the Church. ‘No sooner’ had this Howell, Several Treatises, sig. B4; sigs E1, E3v, B6; sigs Cc1-Cc5v. Portraits of the 1630s as quasi golden age are similar to eulogistic characterisations of Europe before August 1914; Frank R. Ankersmit, ‘The Sublime Dissociation of the Past: or How to Be(come) What One is No Longer’, History and Theory 40 (2001), 295–323. 47 Davies, Civil Wars, sig. A1; see MacGillivray, Restoration Historians, pp. 237–42, for the broader intellectual context of this explanation. 48 Perrinchief, Basilika, p. 26; Heath, Intestine War, p. 2. 45 46

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agitation from the pulpit commenced, Phillips argued, than the differences between Charles I and the Parliament became irreconcilable.49 Phillips’s suggestion in his 1665 Chronicle that the terms ‘puritans’ and ‘nonconformists’ were interchangeable helped to identify the movement responsible for the civil wars with the ministers excluded from spiritual leadership by the Restoration religious settlement. However, it also implied that pre-civil war puritanism had existed outside the framework of the Church, and consequently was an external threat to established Protestantism. This implication was removed, however, in the 1670 edition of the Chronicle, to underline the danger of comprehending moderate nonconformists within the Church. The 1670 edition of the work jettisoned the terms ‘nonconformists’ and ‘puritan’ in order to emphasise the threat that a puritan movement within the Church posed to religious peace and national security. Phillips blamed certain ‘learned and pious men’ who had hitherto conformed to the Church’s doctrine and discipline for preaching and writing things that had ‘excited the people to an unlawful and unnatural War’, purportedly for the sake of a new reformation. It had been, in other words, clergymen inside the Church who had sparked the violence that later unleashed the religious errors and schisms that ‘yet too too much obscure the beauty’ of English religious life.50 To readmit such men within the Church again, which moderate Dissenters and even some Churchmen proposed, would put the state and Church in mortal peril once again.51 Sanctioned histories also emphasised the culpability of the puritan movement by identifying them with the moment when normal political procedures stopped functioning. Over the course of two editions, Heath changed his assessment of the point at which war was inevitable so it better emphasised the guilt of Presbyterians. Heath had initially suggested that popular protests in London fatally polarised the body politic. In particular, Heath’s 1662 Brief Chronicle began with the golden peace of the 1630s, and then moved rapidly forward to examine the consequences of the impeachment of the earl of Strafford. Heath then argued that ‘the tide turned’ towards war during the popular demonstrations that had surrounded the earl’s trial and execution. Subsequently, however, he proposed that it was puritan–Presbyterian agitation in England and Scotland that made civil war Phillips, Chronicle, pp. 612–13. Phillips, Chronicle (1670), p. 590. 51 That Phillips’s animus towards Presbyterians had increased in the later 1660s is also suggested by his removing the text of the Solemn League and Covenant from the 1670 edition; Chronicle (1670), pp. 603–4. The 1665 edition interestingly inserted the Covenant as the last entry under the reign of Charles I; Phillips, Chronicle (1665), pp. 625–30. 49 50

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almost certain. Thus the 1663 edition of this history opened with an account of puritan complaints during the 1630s against, among other things, the Book of Sports and growing political role of the episcopate. The controversies stirred up by men including William Prynne, John Bastwick and Henry Burton, were the precursors of similar, although wider and more violent, disruptions over the liturgy in Scotland. These protests, in turn, were the first sparks of the combustions that soon engulfed Britain and Ireland.52 Popular protest in London simply added more wood to the fire. Additionally, the way histories described the dispute in 1642 over the control of the militia pointed to parliament as the guilty perpetrator. Consequently it was parliament, and not the king, that was to blame for the subsequent bloodshed.53 For example, Phillips’s Chronicle reminded readers that it had been uncertainty over the militia had first divided the English into ‘Royalists and Parliamentarians’. Davies placed particular blame for the outbreak of hostilities in 1642 on the parliamentarian Sir John Hotham. Hotham’s refusal to allow King Charles entry into Hull in April on Parliament’s order did ‘first indeed begin the Civil War’. Conventionally, the conclusion or summative section of a historical work highlighted the ultimate meaning and importance of the recent past.55 The way the narrative was brought to a close in sanctioned histories showed that the civil wars and Interregnum were fulfilled by and compassed within the Restoration moment – in fact, the monarchy and Church had triumphed. For example, Perrinchief’s biography of Charles I concluded with the reflection that although God had allowed a faction to kill him unjustly, the king’s son was currently sitting on the throne. The injustice of the regicide thus had been confounded by the Lord in his own time and good way. For Davies, the return of the king was almost too good for memory; Charles II’s entrance into London had provoked such joyful popular acclamations that they ‘are rather to be imagined than expressed’.56 The vindication of the Stuart cause, despite having lost the civil war, could Heath, Brief Chronicle, sig. A1; idem, Intestine War: ‘the smoke and smother in England concerning ceremonies broke out into fire in Scotland’, p. 3. 53 Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, pp. 141–51. The consistent identification of the dispute between Parliament and the king over the militia as the beginning of open war also could be read as a vindication of the Militia Act of 1662; 14 Car. II, C. 3, SR, v, pp. 358–63, and 15 Car. II, C. 4, SR, v, pp. 443–6. 54 Phillips, Chronicle, pp. 552, 558; Davies, Civil Wars, pp. 71, 77; cf. Heath, Brief Chronicle, sig. A3. 55 Evitar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago, 2003), p. 15. 56 Perrinchief, Basilika, p. 73; Davies, Civil Wars, p. 378. 52

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also be conveyed by concluding the narrative with Charles II’s magnificent coronation in 1661, especially since its pageantry and symbolism demonstrated so clearly the return of peace and proper order. Thus in his 1663 history, Heath recognised that the country’s troubles were over with the dissolution of the Long Parliament in April 1660, but nonetheless continued his story up to the coronation of Charles II one year later. The reconstituted hierarchy was displayed in the coronation processional, ‘each luminary shining in its proper orb and in its degree, king, nobles, clergy, [and] gentry. [The] whole community of English Freemen … from being the servants of servants are become their own Masters.’ Likewise, in both the 1665 and 1670 editions of Phillips’s Chronicle the writer proclaimed that ‘peace and happiness’ returned with the king’s person in May 1660, but still he carried forward the story to the coronation. The ceremony served as ‘a Convenient Haven’ with which to conclude a history of ‘Troubles and Confusions, an Unnatural and Intestine Warr succeeded by a long time of Usurpation and Misrule’.57 The Restoration was realised with the public union of the king’s political and corporeal bodies. Sanctioned histories further showed that Restoration was the real outcome of the conflicted past by ignoring the Interregnum completely or treating it perfunctorily. Within histories the 1650s represented both a kind of waiting room, when the nation stood until the monarchy and Church re-emerged, and a void that was hardly worth narrating, let alone remembering. Additionally, the decade had contributed almost nothing lasting or positive to the political or religious landscape. As an instance of a history that rushed from regicide to restoration, Heath’s 1663 Chronicle covered the events of 1653 and 1656 with two and five pages respectively, which together equalled less than a quarter of the space he devoted to the events of 1647. Similarly, over half of Davies’s Civil Wars dealt with the time from the outbreak of hostilities in 1642 to the regicide, while the Interregnum and Restoration got only a quarter of his narrative. The fact that Davies essentially ignored public affairs in 1654, except for the execution of two royalist conspirators, showed that what really mattered during the Interregnum was evidence of loyalty to the old regime. Likewise, Phillips covered the years 1650 to 1658 in 49 pages, but then used 126 pages to bring his Chronicle up to 1661.58 Part of the reason for the focus on 1659 to 1661 can be explained by the fact that Phillips had access to General George Monck’s private papers through his Secretary, Thomas Clarges. Heath, Intestine War, pp. 442, 515; Phillips, Chronicle (1665), pp. 778; 806–9; idem, Chronicle (1670), p. 771. 58 These figures are the result of counting pages in each of the works. 57

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Nonetheless, the work’s chronological emphasis on the steps leading to the Restoration clearly indicated that the national story properly resumed once General Monck prepared for the king’s return.59 However, a few of key aspects of the Interregnum period were addressed fairly consistently within sanctioned civil war histories. The military and naval triumphs of the Commonwealth were recounted because they could be celebrated within a national rather than strictly political framework. The New Model Army’s remarkably swift if brutal subjugation of Ireland and Scotland was noted by Davies and Heath. Phillips also discussed the Rump regime’s amazing success in Ireland, while characterising the storming of Drogheda as ‘cruel’.60 Charles II’s defeat at Worcester in 1651 was explained by the failings of the supporting Scottish troops and the Rump’s reliance on superior, because English, soldiers. Relatedly, Heath, Phillips and Davies all recounted Charles II’s ‘miraculous’ escape after the battle. Indeed, it was evidently for them one of the few memorable events of the Interregnum. Not only was the Commonwealth’s failure to catch the king taken as proof that God truly favoured the Stuart cause despite yet another military defeat, but also that the Almighty did not support a Presbyterianinspired and Scottish-led restoration.61 So, the Presbyterian–royalist defeat at Worcester and Charles II’s flight prefigured the judgement against the puritan impulse wrought by the Restoration settlement. Additionally, the Commonwealth’s conduct of the war with the Dutch (1652–4) also merited praise in the sanctioned histories. Heath, for example, admitted that Admiral Blake’s valour during the war gave glory to England. Similarly, in his 1665 edition of the Chronicle, Phillips dwelt at length on Admiral Blake’s naval victories ‘because they were both of them of so extraordinary Advantage to the reputation of the English Nation’. Significantly, however, the 1670 edition of the work did not include the same account of Blake’s exploits at sea, probably out of consideration for the Royal Navy’s more equivocal performance against the same opponent during the Second Phillips mentions his access to Monck’s papers through Clarges at Chronicle (1665), sig. A4. A critic of the 1670 edition of the Chronicle, Thomas Blount, argued that if ‘the Continuer had expiated thus on all the memorable actions such the conquest, ‘tis more than probable the Book would have bulk’d itself into three greater volumes then Foxes Martyrs’; Thomas Blount, Animadversions upon Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle, and It’s Continuation (Oxford, 1672), Wing B3327, p. 99. 60 On the Irish campaign, Davies, Civil Wars, pp. 293–9, Heath, Intestine War, pp. 237–53, Phillips, Chronicle, pp. 638–9. 61 Heath, Intestine War, p. 301; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 669; Davies, Civil Wars, p. 322; cf. W.C., Commons Warre, p. 112. 59

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Dutch War (1665–7).62 Present events could alter aspects of a sanctioned history, if not its overarching aim of portraying the danger of the puritan impulse. Unsurprisingly, another element from the 1650s highlighted by the sanctioned histories was the illegitimacy of their governing authorities. The monarchy was shown to be unquestionably right and good by comparison with the unnatural, wicked and tyrannical governments of the Interregnum period. The transgressive nature of the Commonwealth and Protectorate was conveyed partly by focusing on the individuals responsible for their monstrous births: the regicides and Protector Oliver Cromwell. In Health’s expanded Intestine War he included a list of the king’s judges and their respective fates up to 1662 in order to make clear that wicked men and regimes for the most part do not long prosper.63 Similarly, Davies provided a kind of ‘dishonour roll’ of the regicides for readers ‘that they may stink to future generations’. Phillips’s chronicle likewise included the names of the king’s judges and short descriptions of their origin, social status or character. Thus, Henry Martin was ‘notorious for his ill life’, while Miles Corbet was ‘a Person of a good Family in Norfolk, had his Conditions been answerable’.64 Protector Cromwell loomed large as the chief villain of the decade in the sanctioned histories.65 Both Perrinchief and Heath suggested that Cromwell’s quest for ultimate power propelled the army towards executing the king from 1647.65 Nevertheless, Heath acknowledged that Cromwell actually did the country a favour when he dissolved the Rump Parliament, although his tyrannical Protectorate was the barest improvement. Relatedly, while Heath wanted Cromwell remembered strictly as an oppressive tyrant and notorious dissimulator, Davies and Phillips were willing to acknowledge the man’s courage, resolution and magnanimity, albeit employed in the ‘evil Evils’ of regicide and usurpation.66 He had done some good even though he was largely responsible for the wickedness of the times.

Heath, Brief Chronicle, sig. D4v; Phillips, Chronicle (1665), p. 674; idem, Chronicle (1670), pp. 637–8. 63 Davies, Civil Wars, pp. 47–8, cf. Heath, Intestine Wars, p. 19, and Phillips, Chronicle, p. 534; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 584, cf. Davies, Civil Wars, p. 144; Heath, Brief Chronicle, sig. A8–C2, cf. Davies, Civil Wars, pp. 279–82, Phillips, Chronicle, pp. 609–15. 64 Davies, Civil Wars, p. 278; Phillips, Chronicle, pp. 616–18. 65 Perrinchief, Basilika, p. 43; Heath, Flagellum, p. 53. 66 Davies, Civil Wars, p. 362; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 691; Heath, Brief Chronicle, sig. D2v, and Intestine War, p. 60, where Heath does allow that Cromwell was ‘an indefatigable soldier and of great courage’, but cf. pp. 186–7. 62

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Memorable characters Not all the personalities foregrounded in sanctioned historical writings were as immoral as Cromwell and the regicides. The histories also focused on particular individuals whose lives recapitulated a crucial lesson to be remembered about the recent conflict: the cause defeated in battle in the end was both politically and religiously vindicated. Thus the military heroes and political victims recounted within sanctioned histories were nearly all from the Cavalier–Anglican side. Both Cavalier warriors and persecuted Anglicans could be portrayed as pious victims of the puritan impulse because they fitted the stereotype of honourable and righteous sufferers.67 The restoration of monarchical government, which allowed the construction of an exclusive Anglican polity, justified the truth of the cause for which royalists had fought, suffered and in some cases, died. Significantly, Presbyterians were not numbered among the virtuous losers in the histories, despite the fact that they had also been defeated politically in 1648 and again in 1661. Having been proscribed officially by the Restoration settlement, and blamed for the civil wars, the suffering of Presbyterians and their contribution to the Restoration process were either ignored or downplayed in official narratives. In order to qualify as a heroic figure in the sanctioned histories, a person had to have been obedient and loyal throughout the 1640s and 1650s; the genuine victors were men who fought and suffered for the right, if temporarily defeated, cause. The significant exception to this criterion was General George Monck, at one time Cromwell’s man in Scotland. Monck was celebrated as an ‘ever to be remembered figure’ in Davies’s and Heath’s histories for ordering the readmission of the Secluded Members of the Long Parliament, which had made the king’s return inevitable. What the general did, Phillips declared, was so glorious that the present age and ‘our Posterity’ could not admire it enough.68 The praise that these historians heaped upon Monck distracted from the fact that readmitted Presbyterian members of parliament had voted to restore Charles II in early 1660. It also meant that sanctioned histories could avoid the thorny problem of how to remember the deeds of loyal Presbyterians. As I will discuss below, a Presbyterian royalist was less a conundrum for sanctioned histories and more a contradiction. Sanctioned histories preferred to remember characters from the recent past as either straightforwardly good or bad. The good men tended to be This was true also in the case of defeated anti-revolutionaries in nineteenth-century France; Jean-Clément Martin, La Vendée de la Mémoire, 1800–1980 (Paris, 1989), pp. 72–6. 68 Davies, Civil Wars, p. 378; Heath, Intestine War, p. 442; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 773. 67

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unambiguously Cavalier in political allegiance or Anglican in religion. For example, the combat deaths of loyal and noble royalist individuals, such as the earls of Carnarvon and Sunderland, and Lord Falkland, were described and mourned. Similarly, less exalted people who had demonstrated ‘loyalty and valour’, such as the foot soldiers serving under the earl of Newcastle, were remembered as fighting valiantly while being mowed down at Marston Moor.69 Histories remembered that heroism was not the monopoly of men loyal to the Elizabethan framework of the Church. Heath and Davies celebrated the loyalty of humble Catholics including George Giffard and the Pendrill brothers, who had helped Charles II flee the country in 1651.70 The sanctioned history with the greatest biographical emphasis was David Lloyd’s State-worthies, published in 1665 with Secretary Morrice’s imprimatur and again in 1670. The work emphasised the truth that puritanism and popular politics clashed with genuine public service. Prominent politicians who had not supported the king were either ignored in the book or their erroneous choice of allegiance explained away. For example, Lord Saye’s support for Parliament was put down to his misguided willingness to rely on popular support, while the earls of Holland and Warwick, initially opposed to Charles I, had made the fatal mistake of patronising godly clergymen.71 But for the most part, Lloyd’s collective biography of great statesmen passed over the careers of prominent civil-war parliamentarians, briefly mentioning the earl of Manchester, for example, and completely ignoring parliament’s military leader, the earl of Essex. Instead, State-worthies celebrated the king’s loyal servants, nearly half of whom would later feature in Lloyd’s royalist martyrology. Parliamentarians’ records of service were deemed forgettable for having been disloyal, if only briefly. Sanctioned histories represented the victims of parliament, executed royalists and persecuted Anglican clergymen, as both political and spiritual sufferers.72 In Davies’s Civil Wars, the earl of Strafford was shown to have behaved like a true Christian on the scaffold, forgiving his enemies and expressing his fidelity to the teachings of the Church of England. The earl of Montrose’s execution testified to the perfidy of the Scots and the

Heath, Brief Chronicle, sig. A7, and Intestine War, pp. 19, 61; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 584; Davies, Civil Wars, p. 224; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 625. 70 Davies, Civil Wars, p. 323; Heath, Brief Chronicle, sigs C5–5v. 71 Lloyd, Statesmen, pp. 759–63; idem, State-worthies, pp. 987–92. 72 Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Imitatio Christi with a Vengeance: The Politicisation of Martyrdom in Early-Modern England’, Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700, eds Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas F. Mayer (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 51–7. 69

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Presbyterians, as did the beheading of Archbishop Laud.73 Unsurprisingly, King Charles I was the greatest and model righteous victim. Davies claimed that Charles died a martyr to the liberties and laws of the English people. By contrast, Perrinchief emphasised Charles’s Christ-like offering of his life for the Church. Perrinchief argued that the king had ‘suffered many things so conformable to Christ his King, as did alleviate the sense of them in Him, and also instruct him to a correspondent Patience and Charity’.74 It was a patience rewarded with the resurrection of the monarchy – the return of the king’s son to rule in 1660. The king’s good death was further proof that royalists and Anglicans were the best English Christians during the recent past. According to sanctioned histories, a Presbyterian who died a good death during the Interregnum did not, however, remove the stain of dishonour from that cause. Most significantly, Christopher Love, a Presbyterian minister executed for treason by the Rump in 1651, was not represented as either a heroic or righteous figure in the histories. Davies, for example, noted Love’s death in terse and unadorned prose, along with a reminder of the clergyman’s role in scuttling peace negotiations in 1646 by preaching an inflammatory sermon. In the 1665 edition of the Chronicle, Phillips acknowledged that Love and other Presbyterian ministers suffered because they had become ‘inveterate Enemies’ of the Rump regime. That statement, however, was replaced in 1670 with another one that suggested Love was executed not as loyal subject but to prevent another Scottish and English Presbyterian uprising.75 Evidently Reverend Love’s death was tragic but did not constitute a genuine martyrdom within sanctioned historical writing, since the cause for which he had died, Presbyterian royalism, was deemed to be unsound and wrong. Sanctioned stories in unsanctioned writings Sanctioned histories remembered the civil wars and Interregnum in order to vindicate the Restoration settlements’ proscription of the puritan impulse. For the most past, the regime and its supporters welcomed the wide dissemination of similar explanatory narratives in other prose genres.76 Davies, Civil Wars, p. 144; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 584. Perrinchief, Basilika, p. 55; see also Davies, Civil Wars, p. 282; Phillips, Chronicle, p. 625. 75 Davies, Civil Wars, p. 137; Phillips, Chronicle (1665), p. 658. 76 On dramatic representations of the recent past in the 1660s, see Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy: 1660–1671 (Cambridge, 1992). 73 74

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There were, for example, a number of polemical tracts that recounted the Presbyterians’ leading role in the outbreak of the wars, representing their politics and spiritual tendencies as inherently hostile to the monarchy and the established Church. Two rather lengthy works released by Henry Foulis and Roger L’Estrange in 1662 provided accounts of the rise and fall of the puritan-inspired resistance, to show that Presbyterian religion was inherently seditious. Foulis and L’Estrange used the narrative components of their pamphlets to attack what they understood to be the most dangerous aspects of puritan politics: the doctrines of resistance to tyrants and popular sovereignty. Thus the genuine outcome of Presbyterian politics, according to these authors, was shown in their opposition to Charles I, not in any genuine support for the Stuart restoration in 1660. Foulis’s tract, The History of the Wicked Plots, portrayed the Presbyterians’ role in sparking the civil war as a manifestation of their adherence to the principles that underpinned Calvin’s anti-monarchical reformation.77 Similarly, L’Estrange in his Memento recounted the origin and outcome of the civil wars to show that the puritan commitment to the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and purported concern for more reformed doctrine and worship, simply masked their will to domination.78 Importantly, both Foulis and L’Estrange held that the Presbyterians were chiefly culpable for the regicide because they had violently resisted the king in 1642.79 In other words, having begun the civil wars by opposing Charles I in parliament and then with force, the Presbyterians were responsible for the civil war’s most dreadful outcome – the king’s death. Indeed, the guilt of starting the civil wars mitigated Presbyterian opposition to the king’s trial, their plotting against the Rump, the execution of Christopher Love in 1651, and whatever credit they took for helping to overthrow the Commonwealth in 1660. Other contemporary pamphleteers likewise recapitulated the memory of puritan and Presbyterian politics as the cause of the conflagration. For example, William Assheton in 1663 (Evangelicum Armatum) and David Lloyd writing as Henry Foulis in 1664

Henry Foulis, The History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies of Our Pretended Saints (1662), Wing F1642; see also Jacqueline Rose, ‘Robert Brady’s Intellectual History and Royalist Antipopery in Restoration England’, EHR 122 (2007), 1287–1317. 78 Roger L’Estrange, A Memento. Treating of the Rise, Progress, and Remedies of Seditions: With Some Historical Reflections upon the Series of our Late Troubles (1662), Wing L1270, pp. 16–17. 79 Foulis, Wicked Plots, pp. 157, 105, and 151–2, 154, 158; L’Estrange, Memento, pp. 24–5; see also Roger L’Estrange, Toleration Discuss’d (1663), Wing L1315, pp. 24, 27. 77

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(Cabala) published tracts that linked Presbyterian preaching and popularity during the early 1640s to rebellion and regicide.80 Given what we have seen from these works about puritan politics and the outbreak of civil conflict, it is noteworthy that Peter Heylyn’s historical critique of Presbyterian political theology and practice, Aerius revidivus, written within a few years of the king’s return, was initially held back from publication. Heylyn’s book, like the sanctioned histories, set out to prove that Presbyterians in Scotland and England were to blame for dragging the Stuart kingdoms into ‘a calamitous and destructive war’.81 The puritan–Presbyterian rebellions in both realms made perfect sense, Heylyn claimed, if one remembered that the foundational texts of puritan politics were John Calvin’s Institutes and Theodore Beza’s Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. Both books, Heylyn asserted, prostituted the ‘dignity of the Supreme Magistrate to the lusts of the people’, and exalted the power of ‘popular Magistrates’ over the polity. According to Heylyn, Presbyterian politics in Britain was responsible for causing a war more bloody than the decadeslong strife between the houses of York and Lancaster. More egregiously, the puritan–inspired civil war nearly blasted true religion from the spiritual landscape.82 To ensure that this did not ever happen again, Heylyn hoped the political nation would restore the Elizabethan frame of the Church’s discipline and doctrine, which for Heylyn owed more to the Church Fathers and Luther than Geneva. Yet, while the book’s account of puritan culpability was consistent with the metanarrative of the sanctioned histories, its straightforward equation of Calvinism and inveterate rebelliousness went beyond them. The regime was advised against allowing the book into print for fear of offending the sensibilities of Reformed Protestants in the rest of Europe.83 Heylyn was telling the ‘right’ story about the civil war’s origin, but in the wrong way. The regime’s concern over how Heylyn explained historically the beginning of the puritan impulse was evidently diminished by 1670, when his son Henry had the book printed at Oxford. The date of the book’s publication, William Assheton, Evangelium Armatum, A Specimen … (1663), Wing A4033, sigs A1r, A3v; Henry Foulis (David Lloyd), Cabala, or The Mystery of Conventicles Unvail’d … (1664), Wing L2636, pp. 91–5. 81 Peter Heylyn, Aerius revividus, or the History of the Presbyterians … from the year 1536 to the year 1647 (Oxford, 1670), Wing H1681, pp. 480–2. 82 Heylyn, Aerius, pp. 77, 260, 464–5; 450–2, 480. 83 Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007), p. 210; on Heylyn’s view of Reformation history, see Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 90–7. 80

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around the time that parliament was considering whether or not to reopen the religious settlement, suggests that it was intended to remind the political nation of the inherently destabilising nature of puritan politics and religion. In the dedication addressed to parliament, Henry Heylyn underlined how the history confirmed the ‘excellency of those Laws’ that protected religion and government from the ‘ungoverned Zeal’ of ‘that Party,’ the Presbyterians.84 Thus, while Peter Heylyn’s Aerius was written as a prescription for the health and safety of the body politic and the Church, it was published to ensure the Restoration religious settlement was not undermined by the comprehension of Presbyterians into the national Church.85 It is likewise notable that the Restoration regime blocked the release of the book that later became the most well-known history of the civil wars written in the 1660s. Thomas Hobbes’s Behemoth was overtly hostile to puritan politics, and thus could clearly be read as supportive of its proscription under the Restoration settlement.86 Hobbes’s history blamed the civil war on ‘the Presbyterian preachers, who, by a long practiced histrionic faculty, preached up rebellion powerfully’.87 The reason this history did not pass the Licenser was that Hobbes probably intended it not to be a defence of the Restoration religious settlement but rather as a call to reform the polity so that the state would have more, not less, control over the Church and its clergy. Ultimately, for Hobbes it did not really matter that the ministers who sparked the English civil war were Presbyterians. What was crucial was their conviction that as clergymen they had authority derived from Christ to interpret scripture for the people, and most importantly, to determine for the people when the supreme magistrate was commanding things that [are] ‘against Scripture’.88 Anglican clergymen claimed a similar right, though they would only countenance passive obedience in the face of unchristian policy. As Paul Seaward notes, clergymen in conformity with the established Church would not have appreciated Behemoth’s suggestion that they were just as politically dangerous as puritan ministers. Nor would Henry Heylyn, ‘Dedication’, Aerius, sigs A1r–v. Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 64–77. 86 According to Hobbes, the king himself refused to license the work; Noel Malcolm, ed., The Correspondence – Thomas Hobbes: volume ii: 1660–1679 (Oxford, 1994), Letters 206 and 208, 1679, pp. 771–2. 87 F. Tonnies, ed., Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament (Chicago, 1990), pp. 159; 31, 75. Interestingly, both Hobbes and Heylyn employed a counterfactual suggesting that had either King James or King Charles acted severely to crush the puritan movement, civil war would have been avoided; Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 95; Heylyn, Aerius, p. 379. 88 Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 50; cf. A.P. Martinich, ‘Presbyterians in Behemoth’, Filozofski Vestnik 24 (2003), 121–38. 84 85

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they have welcomed its vision of a radical Erastian overhaul of the postRestoration polity, in which their independent spiritual authority was utterly extinguished. Hobbes’s history of the civil wars, probably composed after Clarendon’s fall in 1667, was simply too anti-clerical to emerge in the public domain. It would only appear in print after the expiration of the Licensing Act, and then at the behest of the Restoration regime’s critics.89 Sanctioned lives and sacrifices Histories that were granted the regime’s imprimatur justified the proscription of the puritan impulse by Restoration settlements, largely by blaming them for the civil wars. The regime also licensed works that recounted the lives and deeds of the heroes and honourable victims of the recent past. Two celebratory works were issued in 1665, one by the recently deceased James Heath, A New Book of Loyal English Martyrs, and the other attributed to a poet and biographer named William Winstanley, The Loyal Martyrology. Three years later, David Lloyd released a book (much dependent upon Winstanley’s) whose brief title was Memoirs of the Lives. The same year witnessed the publication of Peter Heylyn’s biography of Archbishop William Laud. Lastly, a biography of George Monck composed by his former chaplain Thomas Gumble was released in 1671.90 These martyrologies and biographies created a useable past of genuine loyal suffering that underlined the continued proscription of the puritan impulse from political affairs and the established Church.91 Moreover, these histories demonstrated the folly of granting liberty of conscience to radical Dissenters, or comprehending moderate Dissenters back into the Church. To make such concessions to the people who had started the civil wars and persecuted the loyal friends Paul Seaward, ‘“Chief Ways of God”: Form and Meaning in the Behemoth of Thomas Hobbes’, Filozofski Vestnik 24 (2003), 169–88 at 185; idem, ‘General Introduction’, Paul Seaward, ed., Behemoth, or The Long Parliament by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2010), pp. 1–70 at 15. 90 James Heath, A New Book of Loyal English Martyrs (1665 [?]), Wing H1336; [William Winstanley], The Loyal Martyrology; or Brief Catalogues and Characters of the Most Eminent Persons who Suffered for their Conscience during the Late Times of Rebellion … (1665), Wing W3066; David Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings and Deaths of Those Noble, Revered, and Excellent Personages That Suffered … In our late Intestine Wars (1668), Wing L2642; Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus: or, the History of the Life and Death, of The most Reverend and Renowned Prelate William Laud Lord Archbishop of Canterbury ... (1668), Wing H1699; Thomas Gumble, Life of General Monck, Duke of Albermarle (1671), Wing G2230. 91 Martin, La Vendée, pp. 78–9; Freeman, ‘Imitatio Christi’, p. 68. 89

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of the monarchy and the Church, and to reintegrate them into the polity, was an unforgiveable forgetting of the sacrifices of the loyal subjects of the king and the true English faith. For example, Winstanley declared that he simply wanted his subjects to receive the esteem they deserved, and to encourage readers to persist in similarly unwavering loyalty.92 In summing up his account of Bernard Stuart, earl of Lichfield, ‘a temperate Cavalier’ who fell in battle, Lloyd claimed that Lichfield died a martyr to that cause, wherein ‘it was [a] greater honour to be Conquered’ than to be conqueror.93 The ‘miracle’ of 1660 proved indeed that rebellions do not prosper, and that God was faithful to the king and Church’s side. These works highlighted this fact because the ‘miracle’ of 1660 also meant that only Cavalier–Anglican dead could now legitimately be honoured as righteous actors. Despite having lost the war, they had triumphed in the end.94 Additionally, the histories of political and religious sufferers published in the early Restoration period were attempts to create a civil religion of Cavalier Anglicanism. A common aim of Heath’s, Winstanley’s and Lloyd’s books was to make death, as well as discomfort, confinement or property loss for loyalty a species of authentic martyrdom. This was a portentous move within the conventions of this genre, for it meant that these writers equated the cause for which their subjects suffered with ultimate truth.95 Post-Reformation Catholic and Protestant martyrologies were about making explicit the correspondence between individuals who had died for true doctrine and the identity of true Christian people.96 The histories of slain, executed or otherwise oppressed royalists and loyal clergymen deliberately drew upon martyrological idioms to transpose the actions of their protagonists from the civil into the spiritual realm. Admittedly, this elision of the political and the spiritual was an echo of the king’s own cruciform self-fashioning, begun in the late 1640s and perfected in the text of Eikon Basilike.97 But these works of royalist victimology cast their nets much wider than Charles I, although he remained the archetypal innocent sufferer from Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives, ‘A King that when most conquered was more than Conqueror over himself’, p. 185; Winstanley, Loyal Martyrology, pp. 16, 20. 93 Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives, p. 328. 94 Winstanley, Loyal Martyrology, p. 42; G.E. Aylmer, ‘Collective Mentalities in Mid-Seventeenth Century England, II: Royalist Attitudes’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 37 (1987), 17. 95 Freeman, ‘Imitatio Christi’, p. 63. 96 Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 145–54, 320–39. 97 Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 46–7. 92

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the recent past. In these works, the mode and severity of genuine suffering were less important than the fact that it was experienced for the sake of what was portrayed as genuine loyalty.98 Nonetheless, the writers did not agree on exactly what constituted loyalism, or on the exact number of sufferers. The ‘royal martyrs’ for Winstanley were those 41 people who ‘lay down [their] lives for defence of God’s laws and his Annointed’s cause’. Heath defined as ‘martyrs and confessors’ the 37 men who were executed ‘for the maintenance of just and legal government of these kingdoms both in church and state’.99 By contrast, David Lloyd considerably inflated the number of the faithful by encompassing within his notion of martyrdom the experience of suffering for the principle of non-resistance to governing authorities, ‘a truth’, he argued, ‘that keeps up the world’. With this criterion, Lloyd calculated that more than one thousand people were true sufferers. The fact that his list included over two hundred peers and bishops further emphasised the quality of the men who had remained firm to the truth during the recent conflict.100 Among the sufferers were men who had been executed, such as Archbishop William Laud, or who were killed in battle, as was Lucius Carey, Viscount Falkland.101 Lloyd likewise counted clergymen whose livings had been sequestered or otherwise oppressed for their alleged ‘malignancy’ as victims of persecution. For example, he included in his catalogue Bishop Matthew Wren of Ely, who was imprisoned by the Long Parliament, and Peter Heylyn, forced to compound £374 for his estate.102 Another important purpose of these works, as with most early modern martyrologies, was to foster a sense of communal identity through remembering the deeds of the faithful for the sake of truth. These sanctioned stories of civil-war victimisation sought to define the parameters of the loyal community in the present. Simply put, people who presently held to the same principles for which the ‘loyal martyrs’ had yielded up their lives, liberties or estates could be identified as the king’s truly faithful subjects. Nonetheless, the constituent elements of loyalism were not Daniel Woolf, ‘The Rhetoric of Martyrdom: Generic Contradictions in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments’, The Rhetorics of Life-writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, eds Thomas F. Mayer and D.R. Woolf (Ann Arbor, 1995), pp. 243–82. 99 Winstanley, Loyal Martyrology, ‘Preface’; Heath, Loyal Martyrs, pp. 98, 330, 405. 100 Heath, Loyal Martyrs, sig. A5; Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives, pp. 2 and 14–17; Winstanley, Loyal Martyrology, ‘Preface’. 101 Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives: for example, the story of Viscount Falkland, pp. 331–5, and Laud at pp. 225–32. 102 Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives, pp. 526; 612. 98

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uniformly identified across the martyrologies. As noted above, Heath and Winstanley linked loyalism with the defence of the Stuart monarchy and the known laws of the land, while Reverend Lloyd argued that a commitment to non-resistance was the crucial conviction of genuinely loyal men. Indeed, according to Lloyd, the exercise of power within the polity could only reasonably be entrusted with loyal men so defined. Other sorts of men were not ‘fit to be employed’ in the king’s service.103 Further complicating matters for the martyrologists was the fact that both the allegiance and loyalty of particular individuals could not be fixed over the course of the recent past. This issue was embodied in the case of Christopher Love, a Presbyterian executed by the Rump. All three martyrologies had a spot for Love in their lists of sufferers. Yet in each case, Love’s Presbyterian religion counted against his full incorporation into the company of loyal martyrs. For example, Lloyd was obviously very reluctant to include Love in his book, placing the account of Love’s death at the very end of the work, along with a reminder about Love’s incendiary sermon. For his part, Heath acknowledged that some readers might scruple at his inclusion of a Presbyterian, but acknowledged that Love and his fellow conspirators had hoped to restore Charles II from a sense of loyalty that was nonetheless ‘clogged with the aims of their Party’. Winstanley was even more generous. The fact that Love died a Presbyterian ‘abated much of the lustre of [his] Sufferings’, but his attempt to overthrow the Rump’s tyranny deserved a ‘perpetual remembrance’.104 The fact that Presbyterians had helped to engineer the return of the king in early 1660, but had subsequently been excluded from positions of power in the state and the Church by the Restoration settlement, also made it difficult to connect straightforwardly past with present loyalty. Additionally troublesome was the insistence of many ministers ejected for nonconformity after ‘Black Bartholomew’s Day’ (subsequently subject to further restrictions on their freedom) to portray themselves as suffering for the true Protestant faith.105 It was important, therefore, that the ‘loyal’ martyrologies refute the link nonconformists made between the Restoration settlement and what they claimed was persecution. Their exclusion from the Church was justifiable because puritans earlier had shown themselves to be enemies of the state and persecutors of true religion. The puritans’ Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives, sig. B2v. Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives, p. 780; Heath, Loyal Martyrs, p. 327; Winstanley, Loyal Martyrology, p. 32. 105 Worden, ‘Milton, Samson Agonistes’; Southcombe and Tapsell, Restoration Politics, p. 26. 103 104

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attempt to reform England’s government and religion during the 1640s and 1650s was simply a cloak, William Winstanley declared, for ‘pride, envy, covetousness and ambition’.106 According to David Lloyd, the ‘Jesuit principles’ of the Presbyterians – that subjects can legitimately resist bad rulers; that kings are accountable to the people – were memorable because they were contrary to religion, law, government and reason. Indeed, Lloyd chose to reprint the statute that created the High Court that tried Charles I because it epitomised the wickedness of the men who had ‘overthrown all the laws of this nation’.107 One beheaded Presbyterian – Christopher Love – and standing up to London’s religious sectaries in early 1660, could not absolve post-Restoration puritans of the guilt of starting the wars and allowing the king’s death. Nor did these deeds diminish the force of their unchanged and seditious political principles. The king’s truly loyal subjects, the martyrologists’ works demonstrated, were those who had suffered throughout the 1640s and 1650s for the monarchy’s rights and the episcopal Church’s principle of non-resistance. The regime did not, however, automatically support the publication of works celebrating the war’s loyal victims and heroes. The most noteworthy instance of this once again was a work by Peter Heylyn. His biography of Archbishop William Laud, written in the early 1660s, was kept from publication until 1668. Cyprianus Anglicus, like Aerius, was not licensed, probably because it was deemed too offensive to Reformed sensibilities. Moreover, in the period immediately after the Restoration, when the book was finished, it did not help that neither Heylyn nor Laud were universally popular among old Cavaliers. Both of Heylyn’s early Restoration histories had been composed in hopes of influencing the shape of the religious settlement that was under negotiation from 1660 to the early part of 1662.108 It is notable that the books emerged in the public domain when the regime appeared willing to reopen the Restoration religious settlement. Not surprisingly, Henry Heylyn dedicated the biography of Archbishop Laud to a man who could be expected to defend the settlement on principle and for practical reasons, Sir John Robinson, the ‘ultra-anglican’ member of the Commons for Rye, and Laud’s half-nephew. In the dedication, Heylyn referred to the former Archbishop as a ‘patriot’ who died a ‘Martyr to the English Church and State’.109 Winstanley, Loya Martyrology, ‘Preface’. Winstanley, Loyal Martyrology, pp. 99–143; Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives, p. 196. 108 Milton, Laudian Polemic, p. 205. 109 Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, p. 64; idem, ‘Robinson, Sir John (bap. 1615, d. 1680)’, ODNB. 106 107

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Politicians such as Robinson needed to defend the prelate’s vision of the English polity and Reformation if they really wanted to honour Laud’s memory. It was a vision, according to Heylyn’s biography, that could not tolerate a Calvinist or Presbyterian contribution. The narrative began with an overview of sixteenth-century ecclesiastical history to demonstrate that, while in office, Archbishop Laud had intended only to restore the English Church’s genuine Reformation-era belief and practice. In Heylyn’s account, the changes instituted under the Elizabethan episcopate were based on the Bible, patristic theology and Lutheran ecclesiology; Calvinism was portrayed as a destabilising late-comer to the theological scene.110 Laud’s career, as Heylyn remembered it in his biography, was about defending the true spirit of the Reformation from its Calvinist–puritan enemies. According to Heylyn, Laud’s programme of liturgical and doctrinal reform simply reinstated the original spirit and practice of the Elizabethan Reformation. This was evident from how Heylyn divided the different parts of Laud’s career. In the first part, just over two hundred pages long, Heylyn recounted Laud’s life and career up to 1633, when he was elevated to Canterbury. The second part began with a chapter, likewise around two hundred pages, which treated events during Laud’s primacy up to the ecclesiastical Convocation of 1640. The canons issued by that assembly, which had defended Laud’s policies from the charge of innovation, represented for Heylyn the height of the prelate’s achievement. The canons of 1640 also testified to the Church of England’s return to its authentic Reformation roots. Swiftly and sadly, however, the fall of the Church followed. Scottish and English Presbyterians with characteristic animus towards Laud, the bishops and genuine Protestant principles drove the kingdoms on a course to civil violence and spiritual chaos. However, all this might have been averted, Heylyn suggested, if only the king had been willing either during the Bishops’ War or else soon after calling the Long Parliament to ‘unsheath the Sword of justice to cut off such unsound and putrified members’.111 Had a pre-emptive purge of puritan incendiaries from the body politic occurred, the Church and Laud could have been spared. Heylyn’s biography of Laud thus laid out an historical rationale for maintaining the Restoration religious settlement’s proscription of puritan piety and churchmanship. By refusing to comprehend moderate Dissenters the Church was remaining true the memory of Laud and the authentic spirit of the Elizabethan Reformation.

Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, pp. 2, 8, 20; 28–34 and 394. Heylyn, Cyrprianus Anglicus, pp. 330–1.

110 111

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One other life-story that justified the Restoration and its settlements was Thomas Gumble’s biography of General George Monck, released in 1671. The book offered a clear refutation of Presbyterian (and sectarian) claims to have been betrayed by both Monck and the Restoration settlements.112 According to the narrative, Presbyterians could not take credit for the return of the monarchy because it had been Monck singlehandedly, albeit with divine approbation, who brought about the Restoration. Indeed, Gumble devoted considerable space in the biography to prove that, despite having served the Rump and the Protector, his protagonist had always intended to bring back the king. He was prevented from declaring his intentions openly, however, because of the army’s power and double agents in the king’s entourage. In the fullness of time, and with God’s help, he did what was right and required. According to Gumble, Monck was a hero on par with the men and women discussed in the New Testament’s ‘hall of fame’, Hebrews chapter 11. Like them, Monck had obeyed God in a particularly memorable way, and with God’s help had brought about what Gumble considered to be the best form of government and religion for England. Gumble also clearly believed that Monck’s story contained an important message for people who were excluded by the Restoration settlments. Monck’s example, argued Gumble, should inspire those still living to undertake a similar subservience to the divine will. ‘It is to own providence’, Gumble declared, ‘to remember those that are subservient to it,’ such as his blessed subject. The biography could be read as teaching that human agitation against the Restoration settlement was not only a rejection of the Lord’s verdict against the Commonwealth and puritan politics, but also dangerously raised the possibility of further strife. Therefore, if opponents of the Restoration settlement would remember ‘the unhappiness and trouble’ of the civil wars and Interregnum, they would accept the ‘slight’ disabilities the settlement placed on them. Moreover, Gumble pointedly reminded Presbyterians who presumed to claim that they were persecuted, that by early 1660 they also had wanted the sects repressed for ‘publick Peace and Safety, which’, he continued, ‘if they would remember and well consider of, they would be thankful for our present settlement’.113 In other words, the exclusive religious settlement constructed after the king’s return was a monument to moderate Dissenters having been themselves enemies of religious liberty during the Interregnum. Furthermore, the settlement was a continual reminder of the puritans’ culpability for causing the civil wars. Because their ultimate aim remained to ‘gather great numbers of the People to debauch Gumble, Monck, pp. 120–32, 205, 276; 120–3. Gumble, Monck, pp. 280, 486, sigs A5v–A7r.

112 113

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them out of their loyalty and obedience’, they were justifiably proscribed from the polity and the Church.114 Sanctioned villainy The subjects of the martyrologies published during the early Restoration era embodied the truly good, and ultimately victorious, principles of loyalty to the Stuart monarchy and fidelity to the established Protestant Church. The period also witnessed several publications that recounted the careers of men who exemplified the horrors and wickedness of the past conflict. For example, the Independent minister Hugh Peters, who had preached a notorious sermon in 1649 defending the trial of Charles I, was the subject of several pamphlets published in 1660 (the year he was executed for treason), and two short biographies over the following three years.115 However, the major horror-figure of early Restoration historical writing was Oliver Cromwell. Like Peters, Cromwell’s story featured in cheap print, and was the subject of a biography. Yet unlike the Peters’ biographies, James Heath’s history of Cromwell’s career was released repeatedly, in total five times and in three different versions. The first edition, published by F. Coates in 1663, was only 16 pages long. However, a much-expanded second edition with two hundred pages was released the same year by Randall Taylor. The third edition, which contained significant additional material, was published in 1665, after Heath’s death the previous year; it was released twice more (1669 and 1672) without noticeable alterations.116 There was evidently an ongoing demand throughout the early Restoration period for a work that attempted to make sense of the most remarkable, and for Heath, remarkably bad, character from the recent past. Heath’s portrayal of the Lord Protector vindicated the Restoration settlements by demonstrating the diabolical consequences of the union within Gumble, Monck, pp. 239, 377, 130. For example, V.T., Hugh Peters’s Passing-Bell Run out in a Letter to Him … (1660), Wing V12; William Yonge, Englands Shame: or The Unmaksing of a Politick Atheist: Being a Full and Faithful Relation of the Life and Death of that Grand Impostor Hugh Peters (1663), Wing Y44. 116 Anon., The Devils Cabinet-Councell. Discovered, or The mistery and iniquity of the good old cause … (1660), Wing D1225; J[ames]. H[eath], The History of the Life & Death of Oliver Cromwell the Late Usurper … (1663), Wing H1335A; idem, Flagellum: The Life and Death, Birth and Burial of Oliver Cromwell … (1663), Wing H1329: all references below are to this edition unless otherwise specified; idem, Flagellum, 3rd edn (1665), Wing H1330; idem, Flagellum, 4th edn (1669), Wing H1331; idem, Flagellum (1672), Wing, H1332. There were two more releases: 1673 (Wing H1333) and 1679 (Wing H1334). 114 115

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one man of puritan politics and an extraordinary will to power. Nonetheless, Heath also represented Cromwell as a conventional tyrant, prefigured by both classical and contemporary despots. Moreover, as the work’s title, Flagellum, implied, Heath conceived of Cromwell as a divine scourge whom God had permitted to succeed as a consequence of the peoples’ sin. Still, Cromwell’s tyranny was especially memorable because of its spiritual base. Not only had Cromwell justified his government and his policies repeatedly through the language of providence, but he had attained supreme power and maintained his rule by relying first on fellow puritans, and then on religious sectaries. The Protector’s tyranny was more pernicious than previous usurpers, Heath argued, because it derived so much of its potency from his ‘Religious Austerity’ and ‘morose Holyness’. It was also clear from Heath’s narrative that Cromwell’s rapid ascent was not accidental. Long before his astonishing military successes brought him fame and political importance, he dreamed of seizing supreme power.117 Cromwell’s election to the Long Parliament, and its victories in battle gave him the platform whence to reach out and grasp dominion. Today we have a much better grasp of the process by which Cromwell was elected. Andrew Barclay has recently shown that the third edition of Flagellum contains evidence of the collusion of puritans in East Anglia in 1640, initially to get Cromwell made a Freeman of Cambridge, and then elected as one of the city’s two burgesses sent to parliament.118 This momentous event propelled an otherwise unremarkable rustic puritan onto the political stage, where according to Heath, Cromwell subsequently pushed national politics towards the regicide and then assumed control of the state. Fortunately, despite Cromwell’s astounding ambition, all had not been lost for England. According to Heath, God mercifully delivered the nation from catastrophic suffering by not allowing Cromwell to accept the crown, and then by taking away his life before it became necessary for Charles II to reassert his rights by force of arms.119 Significantly, Heath’s unsurprising and overtly hostile portrait of Cromwell’s astonishing rise to power foregrounded a key tension within the Restoration regime’s sanctioned historical explanations for the civil wars and Interregnum. This is particularly evident in the third and subsequent editions of Flagellum, which contained the extended passage about Cromwell’s What that sin was he did not specify; Heath, Flagellum, sigs A3, A5; pp. 32, 6. Heath, Flagellum (1665), 18–22; John Morrill, ‘Rewriting Cromwell: A Case of Deafening Silences’, Canadian Journal of History 38 (2003), 553–78; Andrew Barclay, Electing Cromwell: The Making of a Politician (2011), pp. 13–32, 175–9. 119 Heath, Flagellum, pp. 49–53; 135–6; 192, 212 [196]. 117 118

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election to the Long Parliament. Prior to outlining how Richard Tyms found a way to get Cromwell made a Freeman of Cambridge, Heath (or whoever inserted the passage into the third edition) noted that everything that transpired thereafter could be linked to ‘this slender wire’. By this he meant Tyms’s happening upon Cromwell while the latter was preaching. From that encounter the plan was hatched to put Cromwell forward as the puritan voice for Cambridge in Parliament. Remarkably, Cromwell’s ‘Fate’ had found a way to further his scheme for sovereignty, ‘and by all such uncouth and strange passess, such unexpected & ungover’d contingency of things’, did this little man ascend in such a singular fashion to ultimate power.120 The writer’s evocation of contingency was important because, as noted above, explanations of the conflict in sanctioned historical writing tended to trace its origin to a longstanding conspiracy of religious zealots – puritans and/or Presbyterians – determined to overturn the constitution and the established Church. According to this explanation, while providence had permitted these incendiaries to succeed briefly, in the fullness of time God had ultimately vindicated the Stuart monarchy and the Church at the Restoration. The proscription of puritan politics and piety by the Clarendon Code and the Act of Uniformity was, therefore, legitimated by both the experience of the recent past and the mandate of heaven. The puritans had caused the wars, and the Restoration settlements were one justified consequence of this fault. Their proscription from the polity after 1660 was a consequence of premeditatedly causing the wars. However, the proscription of the puritan impulse was less justified if there was no premeditation. The third edition of Flagellum presented an explanation of the civil wars within a notion of historical accident or contingency. As such, its account made the pursuit of culpable human agents irrelevant and pointless. More importantly, an acceptance of contingency at the expense of human agency and premeditation supported the agenda of oblivion and forgiveness. For, if the wars were a historical accident, then none should be blamed; if none were guilty, none deserved to be punished or proscribed for their past deeds. Significantly, Heath himself appears to have recognised this, for in his address to Flagellum’s readers he referred to Clarendon’s suggestion in a speech to Parliament in support the Act of Oblivion, in which the Lord Chancellor stated that the recent ‘Horrible Defection and Feud’ was caused by ‘the Malicious influence of some Planets’.121 Planets were a much less satisfactory object of blame than mundane Heath, Flagellum (1665), p. 18. Heath, Flagellum, sig. A3; England and Wales Sovereign, His Majesties Most Gracious Speech, Together with the Lord Chancellours, to the Two Houses of Parliament, on Thursday the 13. of September, 1660 (1660), Wing C3169A, p. 6. 120 121

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Presbyterians. Thus, an important tension within the casual framework of early Restoration historical writing was that giving too much allowance for accident or contingency in the wars’ origin risked erasing the accusatory narrative, which provided historic and moral support for the exclusionary aspects of the Restoration settlements. Most historical works overcame this tension by allowing only a small or perfunctory role to contingency. This move was understandable. The less the burden of guilt for the civil wars was put on the puritan impulse, the less historical vindication there was for its proscription under the Restoration settlement. Conclusion The Restoration regime aimed both to limit and shape the cultural memory of the civil wars and Interregnum. The first goal was executed by policing the domain of print through the use of pre-publication censorship. The second was carried out directly by patronising or sanctioning particular published historical works, and indirectly by permitting others to be printed. The regime was clearly concerned about the cultural memory of the recent past, even though its members were unfamiliar with the concept. The regime recognised that its security, which it naturally equated with political stability, could be strengthened by public remembering that vindicated the settlement upon which it governed. Similarly, public remembering along the lines laid down by sanctioned histories legitimated the restrictive settlement upon which the Church of England wielded spiritual and moral authority. For these reasons, after 1660, the regime and its supporters set aside the promise and practice of oblivion in the print domain. What was remembered about the broken past in print rationalised the proscription of puritan piety from the established religion and puritan politics from political culture. Sanctioned histories portrayed a nation that had been recently convulsed by a war of religion. Their particular chronological scope differed, yet these works interpreted the civil wars and Interregnum as unfolding within a ‘long Reformation’ framework. The conflict had originated in a puritan–Presbyterian conspiracy to seize power, in order to remould the states and the Churches of Britain. The conflict ended with the providential intervention of General Monck, the resurrection of the monarchy and the rapturous reception of Charles II. Relatedly, the recent past was shown to be a particularly vivid demonstration of the disastrous consequences of religious dissent for political and social order. Having placed the blame for the bloodshed, property damage and irreligion experienced during the 52

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1640s and 1650s on the puritan impulse, the histories taught that the best prescription for preserving political and religious stability was the newly constituted Anglican polity. Additionally, the loyalist martyrologies refuted the Dissenters’ claim to be innocent victims of this polity, in part because they had victimised the true English Church and its supreme governor. The histories also called on a public to honour the memory of their subjects, and the truth for which they had suffered, by defending their principles in the present. Finally, Heath’s biography of Cromwell, going through multiple editions, reaffirmed the Protector’s metonymic status for puritan sedition, civil-war violence and the transgressive regimes of the Interregnum: Cromwell embodied the horror of them all. Near the opening of his biography of General Monck, the ‘great Restorer’, Thomas Gumble acknowledged the deep hurt that the events of the recent past had inflicted on the body politic and the Church. ‘God knows’, he averred, ‘when we shall see those Wounds and Gashes, that this unlucky War hath made, closed.’122 Gumble’s prose suggested that the memory of the civil wars was an uncontested if still painful fact in Restoration England. Similarly, Jonathan Scott argues that the public memory of the conflicted past bound Restoration political culture in chains.123 Such metaphors of bodily disintegration and constraint ignore what both psychological and ethnographic research suggests about individual and social memory, which is that like cognition more generally it is always intentional and dynamic.124 The public memory of the recent past in Restoration England was similarly a domain in which power played a significant role. The regime was a very intentional player, for in the interest of its security and the durability of the Restoration settlements it sanctioned histories that justified their establishment by blaming one identifiable spiritual–political tradition. The addition of a historical war-guilt clause broadcast in sanctioned accounts of the recent past enhanced the imprecatory and polarising potential of the language of antipuritanism. Public remembering of the recent conflict thus contributed to political and religious division within Restoration political culture after 1660. While national healing was not helped by scapegoating puritans for the civil wars and Interregnum, the sanctioned histories also facilitated the polarisation of English political culture in the way they remembered the Gumble, Monck, p. 9. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), p. 26. 124 Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 97–105. 122 123

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conflicted past. Historical writing in Restoration England adhered firmly to the Renaissance tradition of didacticism. Stories about the past exemplified from experience the truth of timeless and universal principles.125 Essentially, the events and personalities featured in these kinds of histories became metaphors for general rules. The story was less about particular individuals and moments and turning points, and more about the lessons they offered to present politicians anxious to secure the future. Sanctioned historical writing, therefore, was part of a broader trend towards the typological interpretation of contemporary developments within Restoration political culture.126 A moderate Dissenter calling for liberty of conscience was, so this reasoning went, in fact seeking to overturn radically the Elizabethan Reformation in the manner of the Long Parliament. Thus, for Roger L’Estrange, an inveterate royalist, the methods and aims of the Court’s critics in the late 1670s, whom he labelled ‘the faction’, were identical to those of ‘The Faction’ in 1640.127 In other words, the passing of time had not changed the story or the play of the conflict, only the actors. Nevertheless, while historical writing about the recent past formally exemplified the cultural habit of seeing political and religious debate or disagreement as simply the recapitulation of older conflicts, its content and its intention were to defend and secure the Restoration settlements. After 1660 it was impossible to pretend the conflicted past had not happened. However, the Restoration settlements were attempts both to come to terms with the past and secure the future against another conflagration. The histories published in the early Restoration did not advance the agenda of oblivion, or help cure the cuts still causing pain to the body politic. But the histories were not about re-fighting the civil wars. The issues these printed works confronted were different because of the way the Restoration settlements made peace with the nation’s recent past. Sanctioned histories reconstructed the recent past to uphold the legal and moral framework constructed to keep the peace and sustain order into the future. In this sense, they were more about what might happen than what had occurred.

Champion, Pillars of priestcraft, pp. 26–37; Rüsen, History, pp. 12–17. Kewes, ‘History and Its Uses’, pp. 23–4. 127 Roger L’Estrange, An Account of the Growth of Knavery under The Pretended Fears of Arbitrary Government and Popery … (1678), Wing L1193, p. 8. 125 126

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2 Restoration War Stories

The first major pitched battle of the English civil war took place on 23 October 1642 at Edgehill, near Kineton in Warwickshire.1 Long afterwards, two ordinary soldiers, Robert Perry of Wiltshire and John Wright of Cheshire, remembered having fought at that memorable clash of Roundheads and Cavaliers. Indeed, Wright claimed that a bullet fired at him by a parliamentarian that very day was lodged in one of his arms nearly two decades later. Both Perry and Wright’s terse recollections of Edgehill were preserved on petitions to their county’s Quarter Session court. By contrast, Sir Thomas Fairfax and Sir Hugh Cholmley, the first also a parliamentarian and the second likewise a royalist, composed memoirs of their civil-war military careers, including accounts of the great battle at Marston Moor near York. Sir Thomas’s account was derived from first-hand experience, while Sir Hugh’s was based in part on conversations he had with participants a few days afterwards.2 This chapter offers an analysis of narratives of military service – war stories – written or composed by veterans of the English civil wars. The narratives examined here include a selection of descriptions of war service and war-induced injury, conveyed within petitions for relief from injured servicemen from both sides of the conflict, and of memoirs composed by

Thus, His Majesties Declaration to all his Loving Subjects after his Late Victory against the Rebels on Sunday the 23 of October … (Oxford, 1642), Wing C2222, and Nathaniel Fiennes, A Most True and Exact Relation of Both the Battels Fought by his Excellency and his Forces against the Bloudy Cavelliers … (1642), Wing F875. 2 WSRO, QS QA1/110, 1653; CRO, QJF 90/3, 1662; Jack Binns, ed., The Memoirs and Memorials of Sir Hugh Cholmley of Whitby 1600–1657 (Woodbridge, 2000); Thomas Fairfax, ‘Memorials’, Bodl. Lib., MSS Fairfax 36, subsequently published as Short Memorials of Thomas Lord Fairfax (1699), Wing B1971. 1

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veterans.3 Parliamentarian petitions are included partly for reasons of comparison, and because they essentially vanish with the restoration of the monarchy. For these reasons this chapter’s chronological boundary reaches behind 1660. Both veterans’ memoirs and petitions from so-called ‘maimed’ soldiers recalled the experience of soldiering during the civil wars, albeit with markedly different degrees of detail and complexity. These records likewise were undertaken with rather different purposes. Veterans’ memoirs represented reflections on war service for posterity, while disabled veterans’ petitions related aspects of their military careers to secure a pension. Bearing these contrasting features in mind, we find that memoirs and petitions represent a particularly multivalent and rich strand of cultural memory that both reflected and transcended the historical context of their production. Petitioning maimed soldiers such as Robert Perry and former leading officers like Sir Thomas Fairfax drew upon and contributed to the war cultures of early modernity and of Western Europe. Primarily, memoirists and maimed soldiers recounted their war experiences to vindicate their present sense of identity. By connecting military service with self-understanding, the war stories composed by English civil war veterans stand within the long tradition of ‘soldiers’ tales’ produced throughout the early modern and modern eras.4 Relatedly, these soldiers’ stories exhibit the characteristic elements of military memoirs composed in Western Europe before the mid-eighteenth century. For example, the experience of war does not appear to have generated among them any new self-knowledge or fresh truths about the world. Similarly, a war-related disability did not cause a memoirist to question his ideals or re-evaluate his identity.5 The stories of war produced by veterans have long been of interest to lay readers and scholars alike, for a variety of reasons. For example, many non-combatants have relied on war stories for knowledge of what occurred on a battlefield, or what it was like to be a soldier in the past. Although modern historians are rightly sceptical about the reliability of every feature The memoirs are from two royalists and one parliamentarian veteran who composed their accounts before 1670. The analysis of injured servicemen’s accounts draws on a reading of 57 petitions and certificates from parliamentarians and 458 from royalists covering the period 1647–90 held in eight county Quarter Session files: Cumbria, Cheshire, Derby, Devon, Hampshire, West and North Ridings of Yorkshire, Wiltshire. I also consulted the printed records for Warwickshire and relevant QS order books. 4 J.M. Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, 2006), p. 104. 5 Yuval Noah Harari, The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 80–90, 108–10. 3

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of what veterans wrote about their military careers, often decades after they happened, the memoirs of English civil war veterans nevertheless continue to be used as evidence for the experience of warfare in the seventeenth century.6 Likewise, extant petitions from maimed soldiers have played an important role in recent historical debates about the civil wars, including the geographical distribution of allegiance to the two sides, and the depth of plebeian attachment to the royalist cause during the conflict.7 Additionally, a number of historians have studied war stories to discover what they reveal about the divergence between the veteran’s intentions when he composed his account and the published version of his memoirs, as well as the gaps between the known facts and a veteran’s subsequent recollections.8 The assumption underlining this approach is that personal memory is both fallible and liable to narrate, and thus to distort, past experience in light of subsequent events. The malleability and fallibility of civil war veterans’ personal memories are not, however, simply challenges to be overcome in order for war stories to have historical significance. These accounts represent starkly the historical peculiarities and political realities of the late seventeenth century. Civil war memoirists and petitioning maimed soldiers drew upon the symbols and languages of war in the early modern period to represent their military experience. These included ideas and images of honour, loyalty, sacrifice

Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars (1992), p. 367 n. 8. 7 David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985); Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter, 1994), pp. 79–82; John Morrill, ‘The Ecology of Allegiance in the English Revolution. With a reply by David Underdown’, JBS, 26 (1987), 451–79; Malcolm Wanklyn, ‘The People go to War’, The Local Historian 17 no. 8 (1987), pp. 497–8; Mark Stoyle, ‘Memories of the Maimed: The Testimony of King Charles’s Former Soldiers, 1660–1730’, History 88 (2003), 207–26. 8 Edmund Ludlow, A Voice from the Watchtower: Part Five: 1660–1662, ed. A.B. Worden (1978); Andrew Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007); Moritz Pfeiffer, Mein Großvater im Krieg 1939–1945: Erinnerung und Fakten im Vergleich (Bremen, 2012). 6

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and providence.9 The codes and languages veterans used to compose their written recollections of the wars were filtered through the reality of the Restoration settlements. Naturally, petitioners and memoirists had different degrees of engagement with early modern war culture. For example, a military memoir tended to be composed by someone who was not only literate but also probably conversant with existing literatures (both classically and biblically informed) that theorised about warfare and its meaning. A petitioning maimed soldier, by contrast, may well have been illiterate, and the document he submitted was very probably written by someone on his behalf.10 Moreover, a memoir could be several thousand words long, while the lengthiest petitions were not more than few hundred. Nonetheless, more or less consciously, veterans employed these languages in memoirs and on petitions to connect their experience during the civil wars with their present identity. Maimed soldiers used their petitions to prove that they had been and remained disabled parliamentarians or royalists. More literate veterans used their memoirs to show how their war service had confirmed their gentle status and their political or religious principles. As is to be expected, given that the veterans were recalling a civil war, certain ex-combatants had more difficulty than others reconciling their military service and the sometimes debilitating consequences of it, with their present circumstances and the broader contemporary political situation. What is peculiar about Restoration war stories is not, as is commonly the case in many modern military memoirs, that the experience of combat, injury or defeat cast the ex-servicemen’s principles and identity into question.11 Instead, it was the reality of the peace settlement that could seriously undermine the meaning of the wars in the memories and written recollections of veterans.

Although there is a large literature on honour in early modern Britain, for example, Roger Manning, Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms (Oxford, 2003), pp. 51–80, and increasing interest in providence, there is relatively little scholarship on notions of loyalty and sacrifice. For the former, see Rachel Weil, ‘Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War’, History Workshop Journal 61 (2006), 183–91, and Jason McElligot and David L. Smith, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Royalists and Royalism’, Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars, eds Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 1–13. 10 Barbara Donagan, War in England, 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 33–40; Geoffrey Hudson, ‘Ex-servicemen, War Widows and the English County Pension Scheme, 1593–1679’, Unpublished DPhil. Thesis (Oxford, 1995), p. 118; David J. Appleby, ‘Unnecessary Persons? Maimed Soldiers and War Widows in Essex, 1642–1662’, Essex Archaeology and History 32 (2001), 209–21. 11 Harari, Ultimate Experience, pp. 231–2. 9

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The Restoration settlement politicised the written recollections of civil war veterans. Petitioners and memoirists were compelled either to uphold or to contest a paradox with profound implications for the distribution of power and public resources within the political nation. This was the fact that the winners of the military conflict during the 1640s had subsequently lost power. The political triumph of Cavalier Anglicans led to the proscription of the puritan impulse from positions of authority within the state and the state religion, and the exclusion of parliamentarians from the system established for the relief of men disabled by a war-related injury. The paradox was initiated by the Restoration regime and made operative under the Restoration settlement. The war stories of memoirists and petitioners were thus deeply implicated in the particular politics of civil war memory in Restoration England. There and then, probably uniquely in the history of English war culture, was an experience of defeat narrated as confirmation of the pre-war political and religious establishment, and as a vindication of the sacrifices and suffering of the losing side.12 Wounded victors Among the earliest written accounts produced by civil war veterans are those derived from humble ex-servicemen from the victorious side. From the mid-1640s and throughout the Interregnum period, maimed parliamentarian veterans could petition their county Quarter Session court for a pension. This scheme of social welfare has its origin in a system created towards the end of Elizabeth the First’s reign. Set up in response to needs of injured veterans from the war in Ireland, the county pension scheme was designed to assist men whose wounds or ‘maims’ sustained in combat rendered them unfit for further military duty. The war story found on a maimed soldier’s petition was all about recounting his military experience in such a way that his judicial auditors would be moved to ‘commiserate’ with his poverty and weakness.13 Geoffrey Hudson has argued that over the course of the seventeenth century, war veterans came to see the county pension scheme as a sort of social entitlement. Their petitions suggest that,

For a typology of modern responses to defeat, see John Horne, ‘Defeat and Memory in Modern History’, Defeat and Memory: Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era, ed. Jenny Macleod (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 11–29. 13 WSRO, QS QA1/160/2, 1657. 12

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sometimes decades after their service in arms, injured veterans saw a pension as something owed to them on account of their having served the state.14 Additionally, broader events changed the nature of the county pension scheme. After the civil wars, it was profoundly politicised. From 1647, qualification for civil war veterans was inextricably linked to professions of past and present political allegiance. First, former royalist soldiers, and then parliamentarian veterans, were legally barred from receiving a pension for a war-related disability. Veterans of the civil wars seeking relief had an additional burden of proof therefore, in comparison with their late Tudor and early Stuart comrades, when petitioning before a Quarter Session court. Not only did they have to demonstrate that they were disabled from working owing to a war-related injury, but also that their injury had been incurred while fighting for the regime against its internal enemies. The question then that naturally arises is, ‘To what extent did the war stories on petitions represent accurately the veteran’s past experience?’ Assessments have ranged from the deeply sceptical to the cautiously credulous.15 In some instances, the Justices considering a petition would have been former commanding officers, and thereby well positioned to separate true from false claims. Similarly, it would seem reasonable that petitions confirmed or accompanied by certificates from well-known officers were probably more or less accurate accounts of a veteran’s military career. However, it is also probable that in some cases a certificate from a former officer had less to do with crediting the truth of a petitioner’s military career and more to do with his desire to help a former subordinate or social inferior in need.16 There are instances of marked equivocation on some certificates concerning what was really true about a petitioner’s past, particularly as the events concerned receded in time. Thus, in 1683 Captain Bartholomew Gidley stated on a certificate submitted on behalf of James Potter, that while he knew that Potter fought with him for several years, he only Geoffrey L. Hudson, ‘Disabled Veterans and the State in Early Modern England’, Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor, 2000), pp. 117–44; idem, ‘Arguing Disability: Ex-Servicemen’s own Stories in Early Modern England, 1590–1790’, Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter, eds Roberta E. Bivins and John V. Pickstone (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 104–17. 15 For a sceptical assessment of royalist petitions, see Eric Gruber von Arni, Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642–1660 (Aldershot, 2001), p. 87; Hudson argues these records were ‘valid representations’ of an ex-soldier’s experience, ‘Arguing Disability’, p. 106. 16 CRO, QJF 79/3 fols 151 and 162, 1651. 14

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believed the petitioner had been wounded in the king’s service.17 In much the same spirit, the son and namesake of the turncoat parliamentarian, Sir Hugh Cholmley, affirmed on a certificate written in 1685 that he ‘believe[d] the contents of Roland Harrison’s petition to be true, having heard the same confirmed for more then thirty years’.18 Telling the same story over several decades did not itself, obviously, make it true. It makes good sense to interpret the stories conveyed on maimed soldiers’ petitions as reflections of what men actually endured during their military careers, or else to use them as evidence of popular allegiance during the 1640s. It is also legitimate to use petitions for insight into plebeian struggles for social justice from the patriarchal–legal state. Nevertheless, the war stories on petitions from civil war veterans reveal a great deal about their identity – who they were, what their military career and their war injury meant for them – at the time of their composition. What was ultimately important at the moment of petitioning was not the reality of the civil veteran’s past experience but his ability to convince the court that he was a particular kind of person: a former parliamentarian or former royalist serviceman who was now disabled because of a service-related injury. How this was established was by the tried and true method of telling a story. When a wounded veteran recalled his past experience, whatever it really had been, the account was necessarily influenced by the circumstances of its narration and the context in which it was recalled.19 We should not necessarily assume that the stories would have always remained the same over time, or that the identities they were intended to uphold were fixed immutably. The widespread practice of changing sides during the civil wars could have thoroughly muddled the whole question of who had been truly royalist and who had been parliamentarian.20 Moreover, after the fighting stopped, personal circumstances and broader cultural and political trends might have shifted a veteran’s perception of his military career, and who he was in relation to his past. This has been found to be true also of veterans of the First World War.21 DRO, QS 128/28/3. NYRO, QSB 1685, fol. 25. 19 Steven D. Edwards, Disability: Definitions, Value and Identity (Oxford, 2005), pp. 120, 144. 20 The earl of Holland switched sides three times; Andrew Hopper, ‘The Self-Fashioning of Gentry Turncoats during the English Civil Wars’, JBS 49 (2010), 236–57 at 242. 21 Michael Roper, ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal 50 (2000), 181–204. 17 18

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Memoirs tell us a lot about veterans’ experience of combat and the realities of warfare. Veterans’ recollections also shed light on broader post-war social and cultural trends. It is clear, for example, that veterans drew upon public scripts or languages to make sense of their individual experience of the wars. For instance, it has been shown that a good many Australian Great War veterans relied upon the publicly lauded elements of the ANZAC myth – mateship and egalitarianism – to compose years later their personal accounts of military service, despite the fact that their experiences had been in fact socially alienating and intensely hierarchical. The ANZAC legend provided a powerful public script through which Australian veterans gained a sense of comfort and composure both with their past experience and their identity in the present.22 It is reasonable, therefore, to interpret the war stories on the petitions from wounded civil war veterans as crucial components in a similar process of identity construction. Disability and civil war allegiance were not only represented on a veteran’s petition, but also were culturally constructed through his war story. Moreover, since the language infusing the stories of civil war veterans became politicised after the civil wars, so too did the identity of petitioning veterans, whether successful or not, and pensioners. In the case of petitioning veterans, there does not appear to be any direct correlation between the length and quality of a veteran’s war story and whether or not he was awarded a pension by the Quarter Session court. Nor does it appear that there was a straightforward correspondence between the density of narrative detail and amount of pension awarded.23 The petitions of parliamentarian veterans evince a range of descriptions of injury and professions of disability. For example, Richard Mason stated only that he had been wounded in the head, while his fellow county-man James Cawverd provided a rather more detailed contextual account of how he had come to lose the use of an arm and hand.24 Nonetheless, at least some courts did take the trouble to note in the court’s order book, the grounds upon which a veteran had been granted a pension. If nothing else, this practice at least provided a kind of guideline for subsequent courts considering similar petitions, as well as recording publicly the deeds and service of honourable if disabled servants of the English republic, or ‘the State’. Thus the Wiltshire Bench recorded in 1649 that John Ballard had indeed done ‘very good service for the State’ as a foot soldier, and had been ‘maimed’ by a common Alistair Thomson, ANZAC Memories: Living with the Legend (Oxford, 1994), pp. 8–9; Jonathan F.W. Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver, 1997). 23 Appleby, ‘Unnecessary Persons’, p. 214. 24 DBRO, QSB 2/643; QSB 2/647. 22

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bullet shot into his arm. Similarly, the Hampshire order book recorded that John Shamle of Christchurch had faithfully served the State on land and at sea before losing the use of his arms. By contrast, the Warwick Bench noted that Robert Guy had been wounded ‘in the service of this county’, as well as the State.25 War stories on petitions were made up of four kinds of declarations: of military service, of disability, of loyalty and of injury. The first two elements were common to all petitions, while the second couple could be found in most but not all. Furthermore, the majority of veterans were content, or perhaps were simply permitted by the constraints of the genre, to describe their military service and injuring in the briefest of terms.26 The exceptions, such as Thomas Dulton, appear to offer tantalising glimpses into the actions of common civil war soldiers. Dulton claimed to have served in Nantwich Hundred’s militia (trained band) for around 26 years. He had been, he declared, a faithful and constant soldier for Parliament ‘all these late wars’, despite having been injured. Once, while attempting to cross a bridge in Shropshire, Dulton had been ‘shott through his left legge’, which made him lame. On two other occasions during the siege of Chester he was seriously wounded, the second time being left for dead on the ground. On account of being shot and having lost large quantities of blood, Dulton was not only lame but ‘disenabled in his body to work for his livinge’.27 Veterans such as Dulton who petitioned in the 1640s and 1650s drew upon the common petitionary language of faithful service. The purpose of this language was to demonstrate the veterans’ past and present adherence to Parliament and later to the Commonwealth. The recurrence of phrases implying fidelity and constancy connoted two important principles, one about war service in general and the other about the civil war in particular. First, the language of faithful service reflected the commonplace that WSRO, QS QA1 160/1; HRO, Q1/3; S.C. Ratcliff and H.C. Johnson eds, Warwick County Records, Volume III, Quarter Sessions Order Book, Easter, 1650, to Epiphany, 1657 (Warwick, 1900), p. 13. 26 Andreas Würgler, ‘Voices From Among the “Silent Masses”: Humble Petitions and Social Conflicts in Early Modern Central Europe’, International Review of Social History: Supplement 9: Petitions in Social History 46 (2001), 11–34. Sarah Covington suggests that petitions were ‘anti-epic’ due to their brevity, which might mean that they undermined traditional notions of martial honour. However, in early modern Europe war wounds were seen as confirmations of honour: the more wounds, the more honourable the man; Sarah Covington, Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 114. See Harari, Ultimate Experience, p. 108 on the place of wounds in early modern military memoirs. 27 CRO, QJF 77/4, fol. 41. 25

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steadfastness and faithfulness were hallmarks of military honour. Thus the petitioner was, rhetorically at least, identifying himself as a man of honour by characterising his service to Parliament as unwavering. Furthermore, the wounds that the veteran had suffered could be taken as bodily confirmations of the principles that his service had upheld. Secondly, faithful service was a code indicating that the petitioner had not switched sides during the conflict, thereby disqualifying himself from a pension. Parliamentary veterans’ use of the language of fidelity was unexceptional and not unique to petitions from this period. The object of parliamentary veteran’s fidelity was, however, something that sets them off from all others in early modern England. These were war stories of faithfulness in military service on behalf of the legislature and then to the English republic. For example, in 1650 George Fentham claimed to have ‘truly and faithfully served Parliament and the state’, while the following year Thomas Johns stated his service had been undertaken ‘to advance the good of the Commonwealth’. Johns submitted that he warranted a pension on account of his two wounds and ‘having done service to the State as good as any’. Similarly, Richard Hayes declared that he had been ‘ever ready to venture life and limb at the call of the Authority of the State’. Such statements from veterans of their fidelity to an impersonal state do represent a unique strand of identification among ex-servicemen in English history.28 Moreover, they demonstrate that the language of service on maimed soldiers’ petitions became deeply politicised after the civil wars, for while there was consensus that military service in defence of the realm or one’s religion was generally beyond reproof, there was profound disagreement about the legitimacy of fighting against one’s sovereign. Much in the same way that Reformation-era Christians disagreed over the identity of authentic martyrs, Englishmen after the civil war were divided over the question of genuinely honourable veterans.29 Whether or not one accepted that a parliamentary veteran had served faithfully depended largely on whether or not one believed that his cause had been legitimate and right. What is most striking about petitions from parliamentarian veterans, and the complementary orders for pensions in the order books, is not what they convey about the former soldier’s allegiance or war injuries, but what they do not say. There is almost nothing about the veterans’ religious convictions. As would be expected, petitions from parliamentary veterans tend to CRO, QJF 78/1; QJF 84/2; similar sentiments were expressed by three Derbyshire petitioners: DBRO, QSB/2/639. 29 Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999). 28

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fall along a spectrum of more or less intense declarations of fidelity to the Parliament or the Commonwealth, and to the principles underlying them. At the stronger end we can place Thomas Rawlinson from Cheshire, who related that at the beginning of the civil wars he had fled from the king’s commissioners of array because he perceived them to be ‘enemies of the gospel’, under whom life would be impossible. By contrast, John Hunter of Derbyshire did not bother to invoke either fidelity or faith on his petition.30 Nonetheless, while most petitions at least gesture towards the veteran’s fidelity to Parliament during the civil wars, there is almost no direct reference to Protestantism or providence in these documents. Neither is there explicit invocation of the language of anti-popery. On first reflection this is remarkable, since Parliament’s army, particularly in its ‘New Model’ incarnation, was reputed by contemporaries and subsequent historians as having been animated by a profound, if somewhat undisciplined, religious sensibility.31 The lack of religious language in these war stories may be because the New Model veterans who subsequently petitioned were simply irreligious, or else felt no need to invoke divine oversight when recounting their military service with a pension in view. Alternatively, it might also be that parliamentary veterans were not motivated (or encouraged) to invoke providence, because it was not necessary given the war’s outcome: after all, God had honoured the cause of Parliament, and then the Commonwealth, by granting them victory in battle. The very fact that injured parliamentarian veterans were in a position to petition the State for a benefit was further testimony of God’s approbation of their cause and the regime’s legitimacy. Providence did not figure in their war story because in a real sense God was its ultimate author. Other veterans producing written accounts of their military experience could not, or else would not, avoid confronting the language of providence in their war stories. Honourable losers Petitioning veterans from Parliament’s armies used brief and often formulaic war stories in order to gain public recognition of an injury incurred in the course of military service to the State. The venue in which their stories were presented was a relatively open court of law, where the CRO, QJF 74/4; DBRO, QSB 2/642. Richard Baxter, An Abridgment of Mr. Baxter’s History of his Life and Times (1702), pp. 91–4; Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 87–119.

30 31

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veterans probably learned within hours, if not a few days, whether or not their self-presentation had secured for them a pension. The pension was a public vindication of who the veteran claimed to be through his war story. By contrast, the writers of most military memoirs initially kept their reflections from public scrutiny. The intended audience of a memoir normally was a small circle, such as family members or patrons, or the yet non-existent: posterity. Nonetheless, military memoirists like petitioners composed accounts of their war experience largely to vindicate their sense of personal identity. However, unlike veterans who petitioned for a pension, memoirists tended to go to their graves without knowing whether or not their war story’s representation of themselves was acknowledged and accepted by its intended audience. Writing memoirs was one way for an ex-serviceman to reconcile his understanding of himself with an experience of defeat. Two significantly different reconciliations of experience with identity are evident in the war stories composed by two royalist officers, Sir Hugh Cholmley and Richard Atkyns.32 The former composed at least three short accounts or ‘memorials’ of matters related to his military career, along with a familial and personal saga subsequently known as his ‘memoir’. These were first published many years after Sir Hugh’s death.33 Atkyns, by contrast, wrote and then published his memoir while he was in prison for debt. In the cases of both men, the respective war story suggests that their experience during the civil wars ultimately did not call into question their identity as men of honour. Similarly, serving on the losing side did not cast doubt on the justice of their cause, or on the providence of God. However, while Sir Hugh’s memoirs and memorials presented a story of consistent fidelity to his principles during the conflict, as a way of upholding his honour in the present, Atkyns told a story in which the recovery of his good name depended on God’s faithfulness to him in the future. Although the purposes of Sir Hugh’s ‘memorials’ and his ‘memoirs’ were not identical, they were linked by his determination to vindicate his conduct during the civil war. Sir Hugh had particular cause to do so, since he was notorious for having changed sides in the spring of 1643. Sir Hugh Jack Binns, ed., The Memoirs and Memorials of Sir Hugh Cholmley of Whitby 1600–1657 (Woodbridge, 2000); Richard Atkyns, The Vindication of Richard Atkyns Esquire. As also a Relation of several Passages in the Western War Wherein he was Concern’d (1669), Wing V489; Peter Young and Norman Tucker, eds, Military Memoirs – The Civil War: Richard Atkyns and John Gwyn (1967). 33 R. Scrope and T. Monkhouse, eds, State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, ii (1773), pp. 181–6; The Memoirs of Sir Hugh Cholmley, Knt. and Bart. (1787). 32

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switched his allegiance to Charles I from Parliament, and the legislature denounced Sir Hugh’s action as a ‘false and perfidious betrayal’ of their trust.34 The memorials and the memoir justified Sir Hugh’s honour, by demonstrating that he had in fact adhered constantly to the right, and indeed had remained truly loyal throughout his military service. His war stories show that his identity as a gentleman and soldier, and by extension his family’s reputation, had not been damaged but rather were enhanced by his actions. The three surviving memorials were composed around 1647 at the request of Sir Edward Hyde, who was seeking information about the conduct of the war in the north, for his history. They were produced while Sir Hugh, like Hyde, was living in exile in France. The account of matters ‘tuching Scarbrough’, the city whose garrison Sir Hugh commanded, most directly concerned his civil war career. The memoir, by contrast, was a self-motivated work that was undertaken to help Sir Hugh overcome his grief following the death of his wife in 1655.35 In these two writings, Sir Hugh tackled directly the problem of his switching sides by asserting the constancy of his principles and his loyalty to Charles I. While Sir Hugh might have had difficulty fully committing himself to the principles underlining the royalist and parliamentarian causes, as did other contemporary gentlemen whose sense of personal and familial honour was centred on their bloodline, Sir Hugh, in his war stories represented his actions as motivated by both a principled attachment to peace and an enduring sense of fidelity to the king.36 Sir Hugh explained that the reason he had first sided with Parliament was that he desired to promote peace and preserve the liberties of Englishmen. Moreover, his purpose in taking up arms was to encourage an attempt to work out a negotiated settlement between the king and Parliament.37 Indeed, as he recounted it retrospectively, even the act of accepting a commission from the earl of Essex, Parliament’s chief military commander, had been done out of loyalty to King Charles. Likewise, Sir Hugh had quit his service to Parliament when it became clear that its leading members did not truly want to negotiate a peace settlement with the king. In other words, it had been Parliament that had betrayed Sir Hugh’s trust in their intentions by continuing to prosecute the war vigorously. The repeated use of the term ‘resolution’ in the crucial exculpatory passage in the memorials concerning Scarborough implies that Sir Hugh House of Commons, Votes of the House of Commons relating to Hugh Cholmley (1643), Wing H2906. 35 Binns, ‘Introduction’, Memoirs and Memorials, pp. 123; 39–40. 36 Hopper, ‘Gentry Turncoats’, p. 257. 37 Cholmley, Memoirs and Memorials, pp. 140, 105; 142, 104. 34

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interpreted his decision to switch sides as one that was both irrevocable and consistent with his ultimate loyalty from the very beginning.38 There had been in fact no betrayal of trust in 1643, Cholmley wrote over a decade later in his memoirs, only the performance of what he called ‘the duty and alleagence I owed to my Soveraigne’.39 Sir Hugh’s ‘memoir’ suggests that by the middle of the 1650s he had achieved a higher degree of comfort with his civil war experience than when he composed his ‘memorials’ for Sir Edward Hyde. That his conscience was still bothered in 1647 by Parliament’s accusation of treason is evident in the paragraph of the Scarborough ‘memorial’ in which Sir Hugh ‘left it to impartiall judgements’ whether or not it had been really dishonourable, as the Commons had publicly declared, for him to have gone over to the king’s side after having been previously misled from his allegiance through ‘error and misstakes’. Although Sir Hugh’s choice of verb and use of the passive voice (being misled) suggested that he had been duped into serving Parliament, the fact remained that for nearly 18 months he had fought energetically against King Charles. Less than six years later, Sir Hugh’s memory of changing sides, recounted to Hyde, clashed with his identity as a swordsman, a faithful subject and a man of his word.40 By contrast, when Sir Hugh later composed his memoirs, the text conveyed no suggestion of duplicity or error on anyone’s part, let alone of the charge of treason. Instead, Sir Hugh simply accused Parliament of having broken faith with him. He had remained firm to Parliament’s original war aims, while its leaders had failed to do so. Unsurprisingly then, Sir Hugh characterised his actions in the spring of 1643 as having been executed in a way that upheld his honour as both a gentleman and a soldier.41 Sir Hugh’s memoir thus exemplified a successful reconciliation of his memory of his military experience during the civil war with his present identity. Sir Hugh’s account of his civil war experience, set within a mature and complex narrative of his family’s past, showed that neither the realities of initially fighting against the king and then fighting for him, nor the royalists’ subsequent defeat, had diminished Sir Hugh or his family’s good name.

Cholmley, Memoirs and Memorials, p. 143, where the term ‘resolution’ is used three times; on the political significance of the concept see William Bullman, ‘The Practice of Politics: The English Civil Wars and the “Resolution” of Henrietta Maria and Charles I’, P&P 206 (2010), 43–79 at 55. 39 Cholmley, Memoirs and Memorials, p. 105. 40 Cholmley, Memoirs and Memorials, p. 145; see Binns’s comment at n. 19. 41 Cholmley, Memoirs and Memorials, p. 105. 38

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While Sir Hugh’s martial and personal honour evidently required only the secular validation of his war story,42 Richard Atkyns’s religion was the supreme foundation of his rather different military memoir. The Vindication of Richard Atkyns was published in 1669 while Atkyns languished in Marshalsea prison for unpaid debts. The part of his story concerning his service in arms for Charles I in 1643 was republished in the twentieth century. Significantly, however, the Vindication’s modern editor chose to omit the ‘somewhat puritanical’ sections of the first edition, which Atkyns had called ‘sighs and ejaculations’.43 These prayerful reflections were clearly intended to provoke readers towards spiritual reflections about the events just recounted. Presumably the decision was taken to forgo this aspect of the memoir because it did not enhance Atkyns’s description of his military experience. Whatever the reason, the exclusion of the sighs from the modern edition was unfortunate. Far from representing puritan puff, the prayers that intersperse Atkyns’s text were integral to how he wished to recall his time as a soldier. As with his life generally, Atkyns’s military career, which admittedly was rather brief, had unfolded beneath and testified to the oversight of divine providence. Moreover, the prayers (sighs) show that Aktyns understood himself to be a man who was, and would be, ultimately vindicated by the Lord Almighty. Atkyns’s honour was upheld by recounting in his memoir God’s blessings and chastisements. ‘No man’, he stated in the opening passage, ‘lives so unnecessarily but that God is glorified in his life.’ It is clear that at the time Atkyns wrote the memoir, he believed that God’s hand could be discerned throughout his life story, including his military career. For example, the ninth sigh, which concluded a section describing Caversham fight, recapitulated the Old Testament theme of the Lord’s deliverance of his people in battle. Similarly, the next spiritual ejaculation, which highlighted God as the source of human strength for war, followed Atkyns’s reflection that his insistence on his men’s receipt of the sacrament prior to combat had preserved them from utter destruction at Chewiton.44 Likewise, an intense encounter with a parliamentarian commander, which left Atkyns badly wounded, confirmed that God was watching over him: ‘the hand of the Lord is on my side, I will not fear what men can do to me’. The final sigh of the memoir relating to Atkyns’s military career probably deliberately foreshadowed the Restoration. The prayer invoked the perplexing mystery

Manning, Swordsmen, p. 62. Young, ‘Introduction’, The Vindication of Richard Atkyns, p. 6. 44 Atkyns, Vindication, pp. 1; 24, 29. 42 43

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of God’s judgements and the need for his people to wait patiently, both of which were common themes in royalist providentialist thinking during the Interregnum, and finally, the salvation that God brought to a downcast people. ‘Thou hast’, Atkyns declared, ‘turned our sorrow into Joy, that part of the wheel which was lowermost, is now got uppermost.’45 The redemptive arc of the royalist cause – defeated militarily but victorious politically – provided the underlying framework for Atkyns’s memoir. For, as God had recently vindicated the sacrifices and suffering of the defeated royalist armies by returning Charles II to power, so likewise might an imprisoned gentleman have his freedom and good name providentially restored. Since Atkyns composed his memoir from a place of dishonour and shame, debtors’ prison, it makes sense that he, unlike Sir Hugh, drew heavily on the public script of providentialist royalism. Sir Hugh, by contrast, wrote from the comparatively secure place of honourable loser, with his estates intact if diminished. His status as a swordsman and gentleman were unaffected by the temper of the times. Thus, the cases of Atkyns and Sir Hugh demonstrate how important present personal circumstances, as well as broader contextual realities, influenced both the content and meaning of a veteran’s war story. Sadly for Atkyns, however, God was unmoved by the veteran’s prayers, and he died in 1677 while still in prison.46 Wounded honourable losers In the spring of 1660, the newly reconstituted Long Parliament brought about peacefully what the king’s loyal servants in arms had failed to accomplish on the field of battle: the restoration of the Stuart dynasty. Not surprisingly, the change of regime from republic to monarchy prompted some disabled royalist veterans, such as Bartholomew Venn of Honiton, almost immediately to petition their local Quarter Session courts for relief.47 It was not until 1662, however, that the Cavalier Parliament enacted its own politicised pension scheme for maimed veterans of the civil war. Henceforth, only soldiers and sailors who were disabled as a result of fighting for ‘his said late Majesty or his Majesty that now is during the late Warrs’ qualified for a Atkyns, Vindication, pp. 41; 48; Browell, ‘Providence’, pp. 66, 76. David Stoker, ‘Atkyns, Richard (1615–1677)’, ODNB. 47 DRO, QS 128/64/2, 1660. 48 14 Car. II, cap. 9, ‘An Act for the reliefe of poore and maimed Officers and Souldiers’, SR, v, pp. 389–90. The Act assessed parishes the relatively heavy rate of 6d to 8d per week to fund the pension scheme. With the Cavalier Parliament’s dissolution in 1679, however, the statute lapsed and the rate fell back to its pre-civil war level of 2d weekly. 45 46

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pension.48 Disabled parliamentarian veterans were subsequently ineligible for pensions, and those who had been awarded pensions lost them.49 Over the next few years, thousands of wounded royalist veterans subsequently petitioned successfully for public relief. It is estimated that by 1671 there were 6,100 pensioned ex-servicemen in England, largely concentrated in the west and west midlands.50 Although the war stories on the petitions from wounded royalist veterans were naturally dissimilar in important ways from their parliamentarian counterparts, functionally they were the same. The war stories conveyed on petitions were key components within a process of identity construction. Somewhat ironically to modern readers, petitioners told stories about having been injured in the civil war to demonstrate that they were now ‘fit’ to be pensioned. While necessarily brief and formulaic, a petition’s account of war service and war-related injury connected the man’s past with a present self-fashioning: he was a royalist maimed veteran. Once this identity was acknowledged publicly in court, the veteran generally was accorded the status of ‘king’s pensioner’. In practice, therefore, the narrative representation of a veteran’s royalist credentials on a petition, sometimes accompanied with a certificate attesting to its truth, and the acceptance of that self-presentation by the court, mirrors recent descriptive definitions of royalist identity. A royalist was someone who represented him- or herself as one, and was taken by others to be one.51 Nonetheless, the identity of a pensioned maimed soldier was overseen and occasionally contested by agents of the Stuart state. Thus, the question of the veteran’s fitness did not disappear once a pension was granted. Furthermore, pensioned royalist veterans identified with a public memory about the civil wars that underpinned the Restoration regime. This memory was that the Long Parliament and its puritan supporters had won the civil war but providentially lost the peace. The fact that it was disabled royalist veterans who were supported financially by the county communities of England testified to the honour of their (losing) cause, and the settlement constructed upon its belated and miraculous political triumph. DRO, QS 1/9, 1660; WSRO, QS/QA1/160/2; Radcliffe and Johnson, Warwick County Records, iii, p. 88. 50 Geoffrey Hudson, ‘Internal Influences in the Making of the English Military Hospital: The Early-Eighteenth-Century Greenwich’, British Military and Naval Medicine, 1600–1830, ed. Geoffrey Hudson (Amsterdam, 2007), p. 268, n. 12. This represents about seven per cent of the estimated 90,000 total casualties from both sides of England’s civil wars; Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (2007), pp. 433–9. 51 McElligot and Smith, ‘Rethinking Royalists and Royalism’, p. 13. 49

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As in the case of petitions from parliamentarian veterans, the war stories of royalist soldiers generally contained details of their service, such as its length and their commanding officers, mention of having been wounded, a statement of their present disability and their allegiance. The 1662 Act for Relief played an important role in shaping maimed soldiers’ war stories, particularly their professions of loyalty. According to the statute, only men who had never deserted or switched sides could qualify for a pension.52 In practice, of course, desertion and side-changing were common during the war.53 The statute’s strictures resulted unsurprisingly in widespread professions of unwavering fidelity to the royalist cause. Petitioners emphasised that they had evinced constant loyalty to Charles I during the conflict with phrases such as ‘very faithfully’, ‘never on the other side’, ‘ever faithful and loyal’, and ‘never deserted His Majesty’s service’.54 Occasionally a statement concerning the duration of service was added to exemplify the petitioner’s commitment to the royalist war effort. For example, John Cornelius stated that he had served ‘from the beginning unto the last period’, while George Honey declared that he had done his best to serve Charles I ‘during all the time’ the king had any forces in the field. Somewhat audaciously, a tailor from Yorkshire recalled serving the royal cause ‘from the time the king set up his standard at Nottingham until Oxford and Wallingford was yielded’.55 The quality of the veteran’s service was thus borne out by its quantity. While it is possible that these men were speaking truthfully about the length of their time in arms, it is more probable that they intentionally meshed this aspect of their war stories with the public script of the Cavalier Parliament’s Act for Relief. A particularly post-Restoration variety of royalism was thus the product of the 1662 Act for Relief: the resilient royalist soldier. Petitioners used the language of loyal service to identify themselves with the king and his cause. Their honour as veterans was demonstrated by presenting a story of faithful service. Additionally, the wounds that were the source of their present disability confirmed both the principles to which they resolutely adhered and their identity as honourable men. For example, John Stonas had never fought with ‘the Rebells although [he was] often thereunto solicited’. Similarly, Thomas Massey recalled that ‘never at any time’ had he Article ii of 14 Car. II, C. 9, SR, v, p. 389. Ian Gentles, ‘The Civil Wars in England’, The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1638–1660, eds John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (Oxford, 1998), p. 104. 54 WSRO, Q/QA1/110, 1661, David Slugg and Thomas Carpenter; DRO, QS 128/141; WSRO, QA1/110, 1666, Nicholas Kift. 55 DRO, QS 128/10/1, 1672; CRO, QJF 89/2, 1661; WYAS, QS 1/13/4, 1674. See also WSRO, QA1/110, Thomas Phillips. 52 53

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served with Parliament, but diligently obeyed his orders, ‘faithfully and honestly’ discharging the trust placed in him, and had always ‘demeaned himself civilly to all persons’.56 It is indeed possible that, despite the obvious utility of this language for humble men seeking to negotiate a benefit from their social betters, the rhetoric of resilient royalism represented what the petitioner had come to believe was the authentic reality of his time in arms. Moreover, it would make sense if the language of resilient royalism had become for many veterans a useful public script through which they had become comfortable with the memory of their past experience, and the reality of their disabled bodies. This appears to have been the case for at least a few men. For example, Moses Lane declared that despite the injuries he sustained to his shoulder, arm and leg, he had never deserted but ‘stood still to his principles’. Likewise, the long list of wounds John Cornelius suffered seems to have bolstered his sense of honour. The ‘good testimony of his loyalty and valour’, he declared, was indeed ‘witnessed by receiving therein two severall shotts in his side; one shot in his neck, one other shott in his legg, and a cutt in his head’.57 Nonetheless, it is not transparently obvious that this language reflected a veteran’s emotions and experience during the 1640s. Nor it is necessarily the case that its use speaks to the existence of a continuous and unproblematic popular loyalism or ‘cavalier tradition’, with roots in the earliest recruitment drives.58 What is clear, however, is that by showing what had constituted genuine loyal service in the past, the rhetoric of resilient royalism was very much involved in defining publicly the nature of loyalism, and the identity of the loyal, for the post-Restoration polity. The process of petitioning and pensioning maimed royalist veterans was part of a broader cultural and political debate after 1660 over the meaning of loyalty. This is particularly evident from the certificates that veterans submitted to the court in addition to their petitions. Certificates were, as their names suggests, public confirmations of the soldier’s war story and the identity which it conferred upon him. They were presented by former officers, comrades in arms, and neighbours. Although the Act for Relief required petitioners to produce two certificates from former commanders, it allowed local magistrates to consider statements from credible people if a veteran’s officers were dead.59 Unsurprisingly, certificates also used the NYRO, QSB 1685, fol. 267; WYAS, QS 1/8/5, 1669; cf. DRO, QS 128/117/1, and CRO, QJF 89/2. 57 DRO, QS 128/10/1, 1672; WSRO, QA1/110, 1662; see also DRO, QS 128/13/1, 1660, CRO, QJF 89/2, 1661, and DRO, QS 128/10/1, 1672. 58 Ronald Hutton, The Royalist War Effort, 1642–1646 (1982), pp. 28–9; Stoyle, ‘Memories of the Maimed’, passim. 59 Article ii of 14 Car. II, C. 9, SR, v, p. 389. 56

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language of faithful service to affirm that the petitioner’s self-presentation as a maimed royalist soldier was true. For example, in the summer of 1662 three officers and one chaplain submitted a certificate for Ralph Hassall on which they affirmed that during the wars he ‘continually was ever faithful and loyal and has suffered much for his loyalty ever since’. The certifiers for Thomas Wayle in 1668 affirmed that the ‘desperate wounds’ he had sustained in the wars had left him to the present time ‘infirm in his body’, yet they also noted that notwithstanding Walyle’s injury-induced weakness he had ‘ably demonstrated his loyalty to his sacred Majesty and hath always kept himself firm to the principles of the Church of England’.60 Similarly, while the Reverend Thomas Belton could not say for certain whether or not Thomas Massey was wounded while fighting at Wakefield and York, he did aver that the ‘contents of the petition as to the loyalty impotency and poverty of the petitioner [are] very true’. Certificates such as Belton’s were thus public testimonies of the veteran’s fidelity to the king during and since the civil wars. In other words, he had been on the right side and remained resiliently loyal to the cause of the Stuart monarchy down to the present time. As such, he was a model loyal and honourable man. Naturally, the leaders of local communities would have had a variety of reasons for choosing to certify a veteran’s petition. Confronted with the misery of a disabled man, local leaders might have opted to put him forward as a ‘maimed soldier’ who qualified for a county pension rather than adding the cost of his maintenance to the parish poor rate. In such a case, the certificate did not represent what the signatories knew about the man’s past but what they wanted the court to believe was the truth.61 The Justices of the North Riding (Yorks.) evidently believed this had happened within their jurisdiction, since they noted in 1667 that some men who should not have been awarded pensions nonetheless had secured them ‘by undue certificates’.62 Of course, certificates themselves prove more the petitioner’s social credit than the facts of his past. Relatedly, it is reasonable to infer that certificates bearing numerous signatures were intended to emphasise the former in compensation for uncertainty about the latter. Thus in 1680, thirteen men, including the constable and overseer of the poor of Bondleigh, petitioned on behalf of William Gaunt, stating that ‘to the best of our CRO, QJF 90/2, 1662; WYAS, QS 1/7/2, 1668; WYAS, QS 1/8/5, 1669. Steve Hindle, ‘Exhortation and Entitlement: Negotiating Inequality in English Rural Communities, 1550–1650’, Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy, and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, eds Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge, 2001), p. 110. 62 NYRO, QSM 13, 1666–68, fol. 63. 60 61

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knowledge’ he had fought for king at York and remained faithful to the bitter end ‘of the late unhappy wars’.63 It is also possible, however, that certificates with numerous signatories represent the strength of the petitioner’s local support and the credit of his war story. On this reading, certificates provide evidence that knowledge of the veteran’s military experience had woven itself into the social memory of his parish. For example, William Symons’s supporters noted that not only were they were ‘credibly informed’ about his fighting for the king by the minister and churchwardens of his parish, but also that ‘several other inhabitants’ could testify that Symons’s disability originated from the ‘severall wounds which hee received in His Late Majesty’s wars’. Similarly, Thomas Ezard’s neighbours were relatively precise when certifying that they ‘well remembered’ his enlistment in Lord Garnet’s regiment ‘in the year of our Lord 1643 or 1644’.64 Certificates were not, therefore, uncomplicated and unambiguous statements of public faith in a petitioner’s war story, let alone transparent witnesses about his military experience. Nevertheless, it is clear that certificates from a veteran’s comrades, neighbours and social superiors were important elements in the process between petitioner and the court of negotiating a pension. Whatever the real reason underlying the submission of a certificate on behalf of a veteran, and whatever the certifiers truly knew about his past, these documents represented a public profession of faith in his identity as a maimed royalist soldier, one that was intended to sway the minds of the magistrates in his favour. So, for example, in 1682, 18 men from Broadhempston in Devon affirmed that John Tozer ‘now is and always hath been a faithful and loyal … subject of His Majesty, and of King Charles the First whom he faithfully served’.65 In some instances such a profession was probably crucial for gaining recognition as a maimed royalist soldier who was fit to become a king’s pensioner. Upon granting a pension or gratuity, and recording the decision in the court’s order book, the Justices were likewise publicly acknowledging the veteran to be a certain kind of person: a disabled and loyal veteran. Maimed veterans’ certificates were, for them, an important form of cultural and social remembering. Other public documents that were generated by the petitioning process also appear to have been understood as evidence of resilient loyalism. In Wiltshire, for example, during the months between the king’s return and the Act of Relief of 1662, the clerks noted details from the pensioner’s war DRO, QS 128/11/2, 1680. DRO, 128/98/2, 1675; WSRO, QA1/110, 1666. 65 WYAS, QS 1/10/2, 1671; DRO, QS 128/28/1, 1682. 63 64

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story in the Quarter Session’s order book. For example, the court recorded that Nicholas Jones had ‘behaved valiantly’ while serving the king and also noted the precise injuries that had disabled Jones. Similarly, the order concerning William Greet included information about his constant loyalty, at which battle he had been injured, and which parts of his body were damaged. Such details might have been incorporated within the record as precedents to guide Justices in the future about the sort of man they could consider pensionable. This would have been particularly important during the interval between the Restoration and the Act of Relief, when royalist veterans petitioned more in hope than knowledge that their plight and not those of their old enemies were now matters of public concern. In fact, the records of pensions granted to veterans are increasingly brief and perfunctory in order books after 1662, as county magistrates were confronted with hundreds of petitioners. Indeed, Wiltshire’s Quarter Session was so inundated with petitions that it ordered a halt to submissions until Justices had time to meet separately, in order to ‘get at the truth and fitness’ of the submissions. The following year another stop on petitioning was ordered to permit Justices to enquire into and even inspect the ‘capacity and fitness’ of local petitioners.66 Inspections into the fitness of maimed soldiers did not end, however, once a veteran joined the ranks of the king’s pensioners. The ultimate authority of the Bench over the identity of the king’s pensioners meant veterans had to live out and live up to the principles underlying their war stories long after their petition had been successful. If a pensioned veteran’s actions did not mesh with what his social superiors and peers considered to fit with a king’s pensioner, that is, to be grateful, loyal, peaceable and impotent, his relief could be revoked. This was particularly the case when Justices thought that pensioned veterans were putting an excessive pressure on the county’s resources. In Devon, for example, it is clear that the second and third Dutch wars put a heavy strain on the county’s financial stock for maimed soldiers. During the second Dutch war, the court ordered a county-wide recalibration of all pensioners to take place. The magistrates were commanded to conduct a special inspection of all pensioners, drawing upon the aid of ‘able and skilful surgeons’, in order to determine whether to abate, continue or discharge their pensions. This was not only because Devon’s coastal communities were struggling to care for sick and injured sailors, some of whom, so the Bench was informed, subsequently petitioned WSRO, QA1/160/2, 1661, order to pay Nicholas Jones; 1662, order to pay William Greet; orders to halt petitioning and inspect petitioners at 1662 Michaelmas and 1663 Michaelmas.

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for pensions, but also because complaints had reached the court about ‘disorderly and dissolute’ pensioners, some of whom were indeed able to work. The subsequent court suspended the pensions of 25 men after paying them each between 7s and 20s.67 Contemporary wars clearly had a bearing on the status of disabled veterans. Resilient loyalism in the past did not confer on pensioners a right to relief. In 1667, the Devon Bench ordered another stop of pension payments after receiving more complaints about pensioners who ‘were not maimed’, not in need, and did not fall ‘within the compass of the Act’. All pensioners were ordered to report to the next court to have their status reconsidered. Some pensioners who were not able to attend the next Quarter Session subsequently had to petition to be reinstated. Unsurprisingly, another countywide recalibration of Devon’s maimed soldiers occurred in 1672 during the third Dutch war for similar reasons: the financial pressure of caring for maimed sailors, and complaints of pensioners who were dissolute, disorderly and not disabled.68 A disabled veteran’s identity as a king’s pensioner, at least in Devon, was not something he could always take for granted. He had to demean himself under the eyes of his social superiors as a man who was always grateful for the public reward his military service and disability had incurred. Rewarding maimed soldiers was an opportunity for the men who ran England’s counties and parishes to show charity to a deserving sort of poor person, while holding up before the public the cause of his disability – resilient loyal service.69 The king’s maimed pensioners within a given locality were a recognisable coterie of weak yet honourable men, corporately, and corporeally, testifying to the true meaning of loyalty. That pensioners were an acknowledged and identifiable group is suggested by their periodic regatherings at Easter Quarter sessions, either to have their fitness confirmed, as happened in Devon during the Dutch wars, and by the careful notations of the ‘roll of pensioners’ by some court clerks, as in the West Riding (Yorks.).70 After 1660, wounded royalist veterans had a political value for supporters of the Restoration regime. DRO, QS 1/11, Easter 1666 and Trinity 1666; QS 128/144/2; see also Geoffrey L. Hudson, ‘The Relief of English Disabled Ex-Sailors, c. 1590–1680’, The Social History of English Seamen, 1485–1649, ed. Cheryl A. Fury (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 229–52 at 250. 68 DRO, QS 1/11, Easter 1667; Hilary 1668; DRO, QS 1/11, Trinity 1672. 69 Steve Hindle, ‘Civility, Honesty and the Identification of the Deserving Poor in Seventeenth Century England’, Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800, eds Henry French and Jonathan Barry (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 38–59. 70 WYAS, QS10/4, fols 21r–23, 31v–32r, 70v–72r: 1661 and 1662 pension rolls; QS 10/5, fols 97–100: 1668 roll; QS 10/6, fols 67–9: 1672 roll; QS 10/7, fols 139–44: 1679 roll. 67

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At certain key junctures in later seventeenth-century England, the political value of royalist pensioners increased. It served the leaders of some of England’s counties during times of religious and political tension to add to this collective’s numbers deliberately to remind their communities of the importance of resilient faithfulness to the existing regime. For example, Cheshire’s Justices interpreted the lapse of the Act for Relief in 1679 as licence to stop granting pensions, even though the Elizabethan statute remained in force.71 This contrasts sharply with the practice in other jurisdictions, particularly with Devon. Not only did its Quarter Session continue to receive petitions throughout the 1680s and beyond, but also markedly more than before. Within the court records there are 35 dated petitions for 1680 to 1684, whereas there are just over 40 from 1670 to 1679. Surviving evidence suggests that in total, Devon’s Quarter Sessions received a third more petitions between 1680 and 1690 than during the 1670s. Furthermore, over the 24 months of 1678–9, the court’s order book records 4 orders for pensions, whereas for the years 1680 to 1682 there are 13.72 Although some of this increase can be explained by the death of pensioners, which naturally led other veterans to bid for their place, it is probable that some of this petitioning was at least partially politically motivated. The early 1680s witnessed a marked heightening of political conflict over the succession to the throne and the security of the Protestant establishment.73 It is probable that, around the same time, the Devon Bench recognised the value of publicly backing and rewarding the sacrifices and loyalty of men disabled while fighting against the enemies of the old king and the established religion. Bolstering the number of the king’s pensioners would have reminded the public attached to the court of the paramount importance of loyalty at a moment when another conflagration seemed to threaten national security. Moreover, circumstantial evidence suggests that at this time the Devon Bench was particularly receptive to fulsome accounts of royalist military service during the civil wars. The war stories on the petitions and certificates submitted to the court in the 1680s tend to be much longer and more detailed than earlier ones. The inflation of war stories at this time, nearly forty years after the fighting, can be explained on the one hand as evidence that the court wanted more testimonial evidence from veterans Hudson, ‘Ex-servicemen’, p. 36; See the helpful list of royalist petitioners in Cheshire from 1660 to 1679 in A. Cole, ‘Cheshire Rank and File: Royalist Soldiers in the English Civil War’, Unpublished MA Dissertation (Sussex, 1999). 72 These numbers are based on dated petitions in DRO, QS/128, 1670 to 1690; see also QS 1/11 and 1/12. 73 Grant Tapsell, The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 (Woodbridge, 2007). 71

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to be convinced of their genuine royalist credentials. On the other hand, it also makes sense that during a period when parallels between the present political tension and the fatal divisions of 1641 filled public discourse, the Devon Bench would have appreciated receiving longer war stories heavily laden with the language of constant fidelity and bearing stories of injuries incurred out of loyalty to the Stuarts and the Church. For example, Henry Osment’s certifiers confirmed that he ‘hath always been, and still is a man of loyal principles’ whose support for the king’s government was not in doubt. Osment’s vicar likewise confirmed the petitioner’s fidelity to the Church. Similarly, Robert Cooke claimed to have served to the end of the civil war, and ‘continued faithful and loyal’ to the government of Charles II.74 An increase in the number of king’s pensioners during the personal rule of Charles II demonstrated concretely (and corporeally) exactly the sort of loyalty the county community, and the regime, wished to honour and to be emulated more widely at a time of heightened uncertainty over the viability of the Restoration settlements. A disabled veteran, permanently weakened while fighting for the king and the legally established Church, through his pension became a bodily testament of resilient adherence to legitimate government and the statesanctioned religion, and the futility of resistance to the divinely ordained powers. Preaching at Worcester Cathedral in 1684 on the anniversary of Charles II’s restoration, Reverend Georges Hickes characterised disabled royalist veterans as ‘Monuments’ of loyalty to the king and the Church.75 This was a loyalty that was publicly professed never to have wavered from its attachment to the Stuarts and Elizabethan church settlement. For precisely this reason, it was a brand of loyalism that was exclusionary and perfectly in tune with the politics of public memory underlying the Restoration settlement. The loyalism of the king’s pensioners was exclusively royalist, excluding in theory if not always in practice anyone who had fought against Charles I or Charles II.76 The loyalism conveyed by maimed royalists’ war stories implied that someone such as Sir Hugh Cholmley was not truly loyal despite the protestations of his memoir to have been motivated always by his sense of duty to the king.77 Furthermore, a resiliently royalist brand of DRO, QS 128/65/5, 1684; 128/76/1–2, 1683/4; see also QS 128/11/2 1680, 128/17/2 1683, 128/28/2 1681. 75 George Hickes, A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of Worcester, on the 29th of May, 1684 … (1684), Wing H1867, pp. 34–5. 76 Some former parliamentarians, such as Anthony Purchas of Wiltshire, managed to pass as ‘royalists’ for years: Purchas was only ‘outed’ in 1677; see WSRO, QS/A1/160/3, 1677. 77 See above, page 000. 74

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loyalism did not encompass those former parliamentarians who had been disgusted by the regicide and profoundly uneasy about the legitimacy of the Republican and Protectorate regimes. The resilient loyalism that disabled royalist veterans embodied was politically prescriptive. Within the logic of this kind of loyalty, many former parliamentarians who had helped restore Charles II to the throne in 1660, including General Sir Thomas Fairfax, were not really good and faithful subjects. Belated support for the Stuart monarchy did not count as genuine loyalty, particularly when it was shown by those whom most royalists, and the Restoration regime, blamed for the civil war and regicide.78 Similarly, the resiliently royalist strand of loyalism meshed with reasoning behind the proscription of the puritan impulse in Church and State that was legislated by the Restoration settlements. It also, of course, underlay the exclusion of parliamentarian veterans from the county pension scheme, after 1662. Indeed, petitioning and pensioned royalist veterans provided a kind of indirect historical testimony in support of resiliently royalist loyalism and the Restoration regime. Maimed royalist veterans demonstrated what histories officially sanctioned by the Restoration regime taught: that the true outcome of the civil wars was not in fact Parliament’s military victory in 1646 (and again in 1648 and 1651) but rather God’s mysterious intervention in the affairs of England, leading to the monarchy’s and the Church’s victory in 1660. It was, in other words, providential that the civil war’s honourable losers could seek and receive public recognition of their war-induced disabilities. A lament for a lost victory During the 1660s, when the majority of royalist veterans petitioned for public relief, Sir Thomas Fairfax, a famous parliamentarian General, wrote two brief accounts of his civil war military career. One he entitled ‘Short Memorialls of some things to be cleared During my Command in the Army’, which dealt with the years 1645 to 1651 when Fairfax was Lord General of the New Model Army. The second story concerned ‘the Northern Actions during the war there, from the year 1642 Till the year 1644’.79 Like Sir Hugh Cholmley’s war story, Fairfax’s memoir was intended primarily for his family. The ‘Short memorials’ were self-presentations designed to General Monck was, of course, an honourable exception for having brought about, with God’s help, the Restoration. 79 Bod. Lib., MSS Fairfax 36. 78

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vindicate Fairfax’s conduct as Parliament’s military commander-in-chief, but more particularly the sequel to the civil war of 1648. Fairfax claimed to have done all he could to prevent the king’s trial and execution. He declared, unsurprisingly, that throughout his Generalship his actions were motivated by ‘Loyalty and Conscience’.80 Andrew Hopper has shown that this account distorted the facts, particularly of the General’s role in the death of Charles I.81 Nonetheless, while Sir Thomas’s memoir clearly was intended to exculpate controversial aspects of his public career, the process of narrating his experience also enabled him to come to terms with hugely significant political and religious issues in Restoration England. Fairfax’s memoir was part of a wider literary culture that struggled to reconcile a faith in God’s oversight of human affairs with the disappointing reality of recent past events. After the civil wars many puritans, both radical and moderate, had had great difficulty understanding why Parliament’s military victories had not translated into a more reformed Church or a lasting political settlement.82 Moreover, the Restoration’s religious settlement was a defeat for the puritan impulse in the Church and the state. The experience of defeat and proscription under the Restoration settlements resulted in a lively and oppositional literary culture among Dissenters. While it would be inappropriate to characterise Sir Thomas as a man opposed to Restoration regime, the ‘Short memorials’ do share important characteristics with a number of important literary products of Dissenting culture, such as the farewell sermons of nonconformist ministers, John Milton’s Samson Agonistes and John Bunyan’s Holy War. For one thing, ‘Short memorials’ proclaimed Fairfax’s ongoing belief in divine providence and God’s justice. Moreover, like many old puritans, Fairfax interpreted his past experiences through the lens of biblical history and symbolism. Furthermore, the ‘Short memorials’ were similar to important Dissenting writings in being both commemorative and prophetic. That is to say, the memoir was a recollection of God’s deeds on behalf of his people that was offered up with the hope that the Lord would once again act to honour his faithful people and vindicate their suffering.83

Bod. Lib., MSS Fairfax 36, fols 3r, 4r, 7r. Hopper, Black Tom, pp. 224–9. 82 Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and some Contemporaries (1984). 83 Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 48–58, 101–9; George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 32–7, 159–60. 80 81

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The ‘Short memorials’ represent Fairfax’s attempt to reconcile the Restoration regime’s proscription of puritan politics and piety with the reality of his experience, and his steadfast conviction about the providential nature of Parliament’s military victories during the 1640s. This is apparent from the memoir’s biblical imagery, some of which was later suppressed when Fairfax’s cousin Brian brought out a printed edition in 1696. It is further evident from the order in which Fairfax arranged the memoir in what is taken to be the most trustworthy manuscript version.84 The Bodleian Library manuscript of the memoir, in contrast to the printed edition, begins with the narrative concerning the later 1640s, ‘Some things to be cleared’, which is then followed by Fairfax’s account of the war in the north from 1642 to 1644. This suggests that Fairfax intended the second account to be read in light of the first, a purpose that was obscured by Brian Fairfax when he chose to print the stories in proper chronological order.85 Further evidence that Fairfax wanted ‘Some things to be cleared’ to be the interpretive key to ‘Northern war’ comes from the conclusion of the former account. In it, Fairfax re-emphasised his conviction that God was the real cause of Parliament’s victories in the civil wars. Despite the setbacks that puritan politics experienced in the late 1640s with the triumph of the saints, and again in the early 1660s with the Restoration settlements, he could not believe that ‘such wonderfull successes shall be given in vaine’. Moreover, Fairfax was confident that the same God who had given his people victory on the field of battle would again act to bring them comfort and relief. Sir Thomas ended ‘Some things to be cleared’ with a prayerful profession that ‘God will one day cleare this Action we undertook, so far as it concerns his honour and the integrity of such as faithfully served in it’.86 His memory of God’s approbation of Parliament’s military endeavours was then narrated in greater detail in the subsequent memoir about the war in the north.87 The account of Sir Thomas’s experiences while fighting in the north was both a prayer of thanksgiving for God’s mercies and a lament for his righteous if unfathomable judgements. The memoir of the northern war supported ‘Some things to be cleared’ by showing Fairfax to have been an honourable and holy soldier who always strove to do God’s will. It also suggested that God’s approbation of Parliament and the puritan impulse was confirmed by the outcome of the fighting, but ultimately betrayed at Hopper, Black Tom, p. 225. Thomas Fairfax, Short Memorials of Thomas Lord Fairfax (1699), Wing F235. 86 Bod. Lib., MSS Fairfax 36, fol. 7r. 87 Hopper, Black Tom, p. 228, likewise suggests that this passage contained the ‘very core’ of Fairfax’s self-vindication, but does not note its function in the order of the narrative. 84 85

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Westminster. The memoir opened with Sir Thomas declaring that to have remained quiet about God’s mercies during his days as a soldier verged on the sin of ingratitude. His war story was thus a sacrifice of praise to God for his help in the hour of trial. Throughout the narrative Fairfax would pause to offer thanks to the Lord for his goodness in preserving Fairfax’s life, a mark of the memoirist’s piety, which for the most part was retained in the printed edition.88 For example, after describing a successful assault on Wakefield, which contained twice as many royalist troops as expected, Fairfax described the action as ‘more a miracle then a victory; more the effect of Gods divine power, then humane force; and more his providence then the success of our prudence … let the honour and praise of it be His onely’.89 Considering the frustration of puritans such as Sir Thomas with the political and religious outcomes of both the civil wars and the Restoration, Sir Thomas’s identification of himself with the lamenting Old Testament figures of Job and Solomon is perfectly understandable.90 The ‘Short memorials’ thus ended with the painful recognition that the memory of the wise, and of the winners, ultimately will be lost: posterity will as likely forget as commemorate the deeds of great men.91 Nonetheless, Fairfax firmly believed that God would in the future vindicate the cause of the puritans, even as God had brought about the victories of the Parliament’s armies in the 1640s. Fairfax’s memoir was both a record of God’s providence during the civil war and a protest against the outcome of the Restoration. Blamed for civil wars and excluded from wide swathes of public life by the Restoration regime, old puritans such as Sir Thomas were right to lament their lot. Yet ‘Short memorials’ was a war story that encouraged readers to be patient in the face of present adversity. Like the Christ of Milton’s Paradise Regained, Fairfax’s memoir suggested that the best response to the experience of defeat was to remember God’s past faithfulness while waiting for the Lord to vindicate his people.92 Additionally, the ‘Short memorials’ was also a message to the Lord Almighty. Fairfax’s memoir recounted his past experience as a soldier as an appeal to God that He would remember the suffering of His Bod. Lib., MSS Fairfax 36, fol. 7r; fol. 12, see Short Memorials, p. 57. Bod. Lib., MSS Fairfax 36, fol. 10r; rendered in Short Memorials as ‘more a Miracle, than a Victory; more the Effect of God’s Providence, than humane Force, or Prudence, let the Honour and Praise of all be His only’, p. 35. 90 Bod. Lib., MSS Fairfax 35, fol. 12r quoting Job 1.21; fol. 15r invoking Ecclesiastes 2.16. 91 On Fairfax’s sense of honour, see Hopper, Black Tom, pp. 161–5. 92 John Milton, Paradise Regain’d, III, 430–9, The Poetical Works of Mr John Milton (1695), Wing M2163, p. 46; cited by Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, p. 137. 88 89

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faithful people, and consequently intervene once again on their behalf. The memoir was, in other words, similar to a maimed veteran’s petition, in which an old faithful soldier sought recognition and reward for painful sacrifices borne in the course of service in arms. Conclusion It is clear from Fairfax’s memoir that the old General was not troubled by the recollection of his military experience but rather by the knowledge that fighting and winning the civil war for Parliament had accomplished little that endured. Especially distressing for Fairfax was the fact that puritan politics appeared to have been vindicated decisively by God during the trial of arms between Parliament and Charles I, only to be defeated subsequently in 1648 and then proscribed under the Restoration settlement. After 1660, this remarkable turn of events was bemoaned by some people in private, and celebrated by others publicly as a sign of God’s providential oversight of the English polity. Therefore, a war story such as Fairfax’s was not finally about the civil wars but rather their peculiar and for some people perplexing successor – the return of the monarchy and the establishment of an exclusively ‘Anglican’ political and religious settlement. Indeed, this was in part the case for all the accounts examined in this chapter. Restoration war stories engaged more or less directly with the historic anomaly of England’s civil wars. Normally, a soldier’s tale attempts to connect its author’s military experience with his present reality and self-understanding. A Restoration war story represented an effort to connect the teller’s memory of a war with a contemporary political and religious context that could be interpreted as refuting the conflict’s military outcome. Put simply, the civil war’s losers had come to triumph (eventually) with the peace. This striking reversal of fortune was highly unusual within the broader history of warfare in the British Isles, and stands in marked contrast to the results of the other great civil wars of the Anglo-American world.93 For many contemporaries, whether or not they welcomed restoration of the monarchy and the subsequent reinstitution of the Elizabethan church settlement, these events were best explained as a work of God. Of course, it was also the case that during the civil wars and Interregnum Parliament’s military victories had been credited to the Almighty. Thus, the politics of Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985), pp. 62–152; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

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providentialism before and after the Restoration meant that a civil war veteran’s war story at some level addressed the casual connection between God’s will and the legitimacy of the present regime. Nevertheless, for civil war veterans of all persuasions, neither God’s goodness nor the justice of their respective political and religious causes were ever thrown into doubt by their battlefield experiences or the surprising return and reconstruction of the old regime. For injured parliamentarians petitioning for a pension during the Interregnum, the Lord’s approbation of their cause was evident in the fact that they could seek public relief; similarly so for maimed royalists after 1660. Indeed, the latter could affirm their identity as honourable men precisely for having fought and lost for the cause that God appeared to make his own with the king’s return. It was the political developments after 1660 that made remembering the civil wars a happy experience for royalist veterans. Politics also made remembering the civil wars painful for parliamentary veterans. Sir Thomas Fairfax, for example, had to come to terms with the reality of a distressing outcome, the frustration of puritan politics, while at the same time believing that all things come from an almighty and allloving God. It is sometimes overlooked that belief in providence contained not only the sometimes reassuring notion that what happens is God’s will, and that God’s will is always good, but also the hopeful conviction that God is always working all things for the good of ‘them that love God, and who are the called according to his purpose’.94 The Restoration settlement made it difficult for old puritan–Parliamentarians to see God’s goodness in the present, and to connect it with the memory of their civil war experience. Fairfax achieved a degree of composure with his past by convincing himself that God’s final vindication of Parliament’s arms was still to come. In other words, Sir Thomas’s understanding of himself as an honourable and godly soldier emerged from an eschatological outlook, which was grounded on his faith in God’s enduring loyalty to those ‘who are the called’. Where, when and how the Lord would demonstrate His faithfulness to His people and their cause was of course unknown, but that fact encouraged among the godly a sensibility that was both watchful and hopeful. God would do right and good in the fullness of His own time. The accounts and self-presentations in Restoration war stories were thus framed by the broader politics of public memory instituted by the regime. Veterans’ memoirs and petitions directly upheld or contested what the regime wished to be understood as the true outcome of the civil wars: the anti-puritan settlement erected after the king’s return to rule. The petitions Romans 8.28.

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of maimed royalist soldiers, presented in open courts of law, celebrated the settlement through the language of resilient royalism and the restriction of pensions to the king’s faithful servants. Moreover, the politics of public memory contributed to the politicisation of loyalty that had already begun in the early 1640s. For the remainder of the seventeenth century, ‘loyalty’ was a term of contestation among English Protestants, as formerly it had been between adherents of the old faith and the Reformation.95 Furthermore, it is clear that petitioners and memoirists were concerned about the here-and-now. That is to say, their war stories were not so much about refighting the civil wars as engaging with the political framework constructed by the Restoration regime, and upheld by its legal settlements. Whether or not tales of civil war veterans are useful as evidence of the terrible and heroic realities of war in England, they stand as stirring testimonies to the efforts of large numbers of men who, for reasons of both personal comfort and mental composure, sought to connect what they said they remembered of their military service with a polity that was built upon a partisan public memory of that civil conflict.

Michael Questier, ‘Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England’, EHR 123 (2008), 1132– 65.

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3 Representing the Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1680 –5

One of the most important consequences of the public furore occasioned by revelations of a ‘popish plot’ to assassinate Charles II in 1678, the dissolution of the ‘long’ Cavalier Parliament in January 1679, the subsequent lapse of licensing the press, and a crisis over the succession that pitted some members of Parliament against the Court and its allies, was the explosive growth of popular printed literature.1 A great many texts invoked the national past as part of their arguments for, among other things, the undesirability of a Roman Catholic successor, the importance of Parliament as a bulwark against Stuart pretensions to divine-right monarchy, and even the comprehension of moderate Dissenters within the Church of England.2 The recent past in particular was invoked frequently in public discourse, partly because several events and trends during the so-called ‘exclusion crisis’ appeared eerily similar to what was remembered to have happened, prior to the outbreak of civil war in 1642. For example, attacks in Parliament on the king’s (former) chief minister Sir Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, the recourse to mass petitions to encourage the king to recall Parliament from prorogation, and the increasingly strident adherence among some politicians to the policy of exclusion at seemingly all costs, came to be compared John Kenyon, The Popish Plot (1972); Annabel Patterson, The Long Parliament of Charles II (New Haven, 2008). Recent accounts of the period include Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms (2005), pp. 136–202, 211–59; Gary S. De Krey, Restoration and Revolution in Britain (Basingstoke, 2007), pp.145–96; George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 38–58; Timothy Crist, ‘Government Control of the Press after the Expiration of the Printing Act in 1679’, Publishing History 5 (1979), 49–77. 2 For example [Charles Blount], An Appeal from the Country to the City, for the Preservation of His Majesties Person, Liberty, Property, and the Protestant Religion (1679), Wing B3300A; Henry Care, Paquet of Advice from Rome: or The History of Popery … (December 1678 until May 1680); [John Phillips], The Character of a Popish Successor, and what England may Expect from One Part the Second … (1681), Wing P2080. 1

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to the tactics of Charles I’s Parliamentary critics in 1640–1. 3 Similarly, a revolt in south-western Scotland led by militant Presbyterians in 1679 appeared to be an echo of the Bishops’ Wars of 1639–40.4 Not surprisingly, these factors and developments encouraged the publication of a new wave of civil war histories. Significantly, it has long been argued that during the 1680s memories of the civil wars helped to prevent a second round of bloody civil conflict.5 Weaker articulations of this thesis propose that as part of a successful propaganda campaign against the politics of exclusion, the king and his supporters appealed to the public’s memory of the disastrous consequences of the Long Parliament’s political ambitions.6 The strongest version of this argument has been put forward as part of important theory about historical continuity within seventeenth-century England’s political culture. According to Jonathan Scott, during the exclusion crisis the public memory of the 1640s so powerfully shaped contemporary concerns that the 1680s witnessed a ‘repeat screening’ of the earlier political crisis.7 Nonetheless, there are a couple of striking features about civil-war histories published after 1680 that suggest that contemporaries knew that all was not exactly as it had been before. First of all, in paratexts and titles there are many more references to the representational aspects of historical writing, particularly visual representation. For example, the debate over exclusion evidently prompted the antiquary Sir William Dugdale to publish somewhat prematurely a book he called A Short View of the Late Troubles.8 Similarly, a common councillor from Chichester, Thomas May, released a

Mark Knights, ‘Petitioning and Political Theorists: John Locke, Algernon Sidney and London’s “Monster” Petition of 1680’, P&P 138 (1993), 94–5. 4 Harris, Restoration, p. 331. 5 B. Behrens, ‘The Whig Theory of the Constitution in the Reign of Charles II’, Cambridge HJ 7 (1941), 42–4. 6 Tim Harris, ‘“Lives, Liberties and Estates”: Rhetorics of Liberty in the Reign of Charles II’, The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, eds Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 217–41; Geoff Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, ed. Jason McElligott (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 67–90. 7 Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 7, 27–33; cf. Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 355–8. 8 William Dugdale, A Short View of the Late Troubles in England; Briefly Setting Forth, their Rise, Growth, and Tragical Conclusion (1681), Wing D2492. 3

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history of the 1650s entitled Arbitrary Government Displayed to the Life.9 The introduction to Arbitrary Government overflows with representational and visual metaphors. In the introduction May argued that his history proved an important truth, which was that popular resistance always led to the sort of tyrannical regimes whose ‘most horrid Picture’ his work portrayed.10 The metaphorical link between May’s book and an image of the past was reaffirmed in its conclusion, with the author declaring that he had ‘fully finished my Draught, or Picture of arbitrary and tyrannical government which I have taken from the life, being the true History and Resemblance of the Monster’. His final exhortation to readers was for them to remember the image of the past he had presented, and then avoid acting in a way that would produce a future with similar aspects.11 Likewise, John Nalson positioned his weighty Impartial Collections as works of historical orientation. According to Nalson, the collection gave readers a ‘True Chart of the Treacherous Quicksands of Popularity’, along with ‘a view’ of the way the faction in the Long Parliament had misled the people into rebellion by representing it ‘in the Masquerading Habit’ of religion.12 Another striking development in civil-war histories published after 1680 is the increasing deployment of visual images, particularly depictions of events but also emblems or allegories that epitomised the producer’s argument. By way of comparison, of fifteen histories published between 1660 and 1679, seven contained portraits of figures alive or dead, especially

[Thomas May], Arbitrary Government Displayed to the Life, in the Tyrannic Usurpation of a Junto of Men called the Rump Parliament ... (1682), Wing M1416A. Biographical information on this writer, not to be confused with the Long Parliament’s official historian of the same name, is taken from B.M. Crook, ‘May, Thomas (c. 1645–1718)’, The History of Parliament, The House of Commons 1660–1690, Volume III: Members, M–Y, ed. Basil D. Henning (1983), p. 38. 10 May, Arbitrary Government, p. 6. 11 May, Arbitrary Government, pp. 205, 206. 12 John Nalson, An impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State, from the Beginning of the Scotch Rebellion in the year MDCXXXIX. To the murther of King Charles I ... Vol. I. Published by his Majesties special command, 2 vols (1682), Wing N106, p. iii; hereafter Impartial, I and II; Impartial, II, Sig, A2; idem, A True Copy of the Journal of the High Court of Justice, for the trial of K. Charles I (1684), Wing N116. 9

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Charles I or Charles II.13 Three works had allegorical images as frontispieces, while two used emblems as a frontispiece.14 The other seven works had no images at all, including J. Davis’s The Civil Warres of Great Britain and Ireland, W.C.’s History of the Commons Warre of England and David Lloyd’s Memoirs of the lives.15 Only one work, James Heath’s Brief Chronicle, visually depicted an event: the execution of Charles I in the 1662 edition, and the coronation and marriage of Charles II in the 1663 version.16 However, after 1680 there are comparatively more images within civil-war histories. For example, we find Nathanial Crouch/Richard Burton’s Wars in England recycling depictions of several events from John Vicars, A sight of ye trans-actions of these latter yeares, while, as we shall see below, Thomas May evidently crafted new images portraying important events for his Arbitrary Government.17 Moreover, some of the most well-known allegorical representations of the civil wars and Interregnum, which I also discuss below, were frontispieces to Nalson’s Impartial Collections and May’s Arbitrary Government. Why was there such a strong emphasis on historical writing as orientation, and an increased employment of both realistic and symbolic pictures within civil-war histories published after 1680? Naturally, a key question to emerge from what were unquestionably partisan representations of the past was whose ‘view’ of history was more authoritative? Regarding historical writing, the answer was the one with the best pictures. It is well known that mental images were central to the classical and Renaissance art of memory, and the notion that a historical work offered a picture of the past was a common way of asserting its reliability, adequacy and truth.18 Moreover, James Heath, Flagellum (1665), Wing H1330; (1669), Wing H1331; James Heath, Chronicle (1662), Wing H1318; (1663), Wing H1319; William Fullman and Richard Perrinchief, eds, Basilika (1662), Wing C2075; Edward Phillips, Chronicle (1674), Wing B507; (1679), Wing B508; [William Winstanley], Martyrology (1665), Wing W3066; Thomas Gumble, Monck (1671), Wing G2230; George Bate, Elenchus Motuum Nuperoroum (1661), Wing B1080; (1663), Wing B1081. 14 James Howell, Several Treatises (1661), Wing H3123; Heath, Chronicle (1663); Perrinchief, Basilika, use allegories. Phillips, Chronicle (1665–84) and Bate, Elenchus (1685) use emblems. 15 Wing D393 and D394 (1661 and 1664); Wing C4275aA (1662); Wing L2642 (1668). 16 See note 13. 17 Nathaniel Crouch, The Wars in England, Scotland and Ireland (1681), Wing C7357; John Vicars, A Sight of Ye Trans-Actions of these Latter Yeares (1646), Wing V327. 18 F.R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, 2001); Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), pp. 8–12; Frank Ankersmit, ‘Statements, Texts, and Pictures’, A New Philosophy of History, eds Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (London, 1995), pp. 241–77. 13

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images were useful in establishing the authority of a work’s perspective because prints modelled how seventeenth-century people made sense of the acts of thinking and remembering.19 The most memorable image left the greatest impression on one’s mind – like a print on paper. So, producers of historical writing and images about the civil wars were not invoking ‘a’ particular public memory of the troubles so much as creating authoritative memories – imprints if you will – of the 1640s and 1650s, in order to lead readers to think and act in particular ways. The return to representation in civil war histories reflected awareness among producers that their works were prescriptive re-screenings of the recent past. By re-screening I mean that which is looked at again – a metaphor lifted from modern motion pictures. Civil-war histories published during the turbulent early 1680s, along with other kinds of printed interventions in public discourse, recapitulated aspects of the past in words and images. To visualise time past, however, was to direct remembering towards certain present and future political outcomes; it was not to relive the past. For example, Thomas May’s overt concern for historical writing as representation suggests that he and his contemporaries were aware that they were not reliving the recent past so much as deliberately re-screening aspects of it for polemical reasons. In May’s case, an historical display of the 1640s and 1650s was necessary to convince the public that the polity had narrowly missed a repeat of civil-war and regicidal republican rule. A similar concern for historical representation was evident in the well-known heightened recourse to historical parallelism prevalent in a great deal of the works published at the end of Charles II’s reign,20 whether by making analogical links between past actors and events and contemporary ones; or by reprinting series of documents from the 1630s and 1640s; or else by republishing significant works previously published. Moreover, the expected outcome of reading historical writings was not to see the past qua past but rather to see the present as a parallel of the past. In this way, historical writings and their images offered the past as a kind of filter (another kind of screen) through which to look at and make sense of the present.21 Political action to secure the present and the future could be prescribed once the turmoil of the present was seen through narratives and images drawn from the experience of the previous decades – graphically depicted as a monstrous William B. MacGregor, ‘The Authority of Prints: An Early Modern Perspective’, Art History 22 (1999), 389–420. 20 Paulina Kewes, ‘History and Its Uses: Introduction’, HLQ 68 (2005), 24–5. 21 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, translated by K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago, 2004), pp. 234–6, 275–80. 19

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rupturing of the body politic. What such narratives and images displayed was in fact an argument about the necessity either to contest or to uphold the existing establishment’s legitimacy as the basis for a secure and peaceful future. Furthermore, historical writing focused on England’s civil wars entered the public domain to contest or defend the moral–legal framework erected two decades earlier, which had aimed to guarantee the peace and Protestantism of the realm through the proscription of the puritan political and religious impulse. It had been puritan politics and piety, so officially sanctioned historical writing alleged, that had nearly blasted the constitution and Church to atoms. Thus the debates during the early 1680s over the best route to civil stability and religious unity were less about the civil war and Interregnum past itself and were more concerned with the historic legitimacy and future viability of the Restoration settlements. There were three general elections between 1679 and 1681, and likewise three attempts by parliamentary politicians to exclude the Duke of York from the succession. Yet Charles II’s regime successfully thwarted each of them. Although the government did encounter widespread and significant parliamentary and popular opposition, it is doubtful that that the Restoration regime and the political and religious settlements were in serious danger.22 Similarly, the fact that there were strident calls to reform the political and religious settlements does not mean that they were truly in jeopardy.23 Nonetheless, the political divisions engendered by the vociferous debates over the duke’s succession continued to animate the nation’s political culture during the king’s personal rule – the period between March 1681 and the king’s death in early 1685, when a parliament did not meet. The regime’s efforts to crush political opposition in civic corporations, and Jonathan Scott, ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, eds Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 108–31; John Spurr, England in the 1670s: ‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford, 2000), p. 298. 23 Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second: King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), pp. 357–402; cf. Gary S. De Krey, ‘Between Revolutions: Re-Appraising the Restoration in Britain’, History Compass 6/3 (2008), 738–73, at 754. 24 J.R. Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678–83 (1961); Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, 1986); Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 12–15, 362–70; E.R. Clark, ‘Re-Reading the Exclusion Crisis’, The Seventeenth Century 21 (2006), 141–59. For the influence of political polarization the theatre, see Susan Owen, ‘Drama and Political Crisis’, The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 159–73. 22

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to enforce conformity to the established Church of England by a vigorous application of the penal statutes, further polarised the political arena.25 Historical writing during the early 1680s, apart from a few major works, has been relatively neglected, which is somewhat surprising given the emphasis placed on public memory during this period by historians and literary scholars.26 The works analysed in this chapter include previously printed biographies and pamphlets, translations, documentary collections, abridgements, a memoir, newly published historical narratives, and several images incorporated within historical works. The sample conveys accurately the strongly pictural nature of historical writing from this period.27 The histories are examined in an order that reflects their particular degree of recapitulation and invention, in terms of both their form and their content. Thus the analysis begins with translations and ends with original narrations. Picturing the past through historical writing arose from a deep concern to show what the conflicted past meant for the present and the future. The overwhelming focus of histories was to establish a continuity of principles and personnel between the conflict-ridden past and a difficult present. These writings offered stories and images as prescriptive parallels of what had happened, and what might happen again, if readers and viewers did not act in light of their perspective on the past. Paradoxically, however, historical parallelism contributed to the formation of new partisan political identities with correspondingly polarised interpretations of England’s mid-seventeenth century. While it is important to remember that during this time political identities were more often in a fluid state of becoming, rather than a solid condition of being, certain key ideological tendencies Grant Tapsell, The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 7, 31–62, 196. Tapsell cautions against an overemphasis on the repression of opposition figures and views after 1681, which the term ‘The Tory Reaction’ facilitates. 26 Royce MacGillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague, 1974), pp. 109–19, 120–44; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740 (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 42–57; and R.C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited, 3rd edn (Manchester, 1998), pp. 18–24; G. Mahlberg, ‘Henry Neville and the Toleration of Catholics during the Exclusion Crisis’, Historical Research 83 (2010), 617–34 at 620. 27 The medieval and ecclesiastical past were likewise represented; see J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 182–228; David L. Wykes, ‘Dissenters and the Writing of History: Ralph Thoresby’s “Lives and Characters”’, Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, ed. Jason McElligott (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 174–88; Peter Hinds, The horrid popish plot: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century (2010), pp. 363–86. 25

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can be attributed to people described as, and increasingly identified by themselves as, whigs and tories.28 For example, whigs did not believe the Restoration settlements were sufficient bulwarks against the threat that a Roman Catholic monarch posed to liberty, property and Protestantism. More strident whigs wanted to overturn the Act of Uniformity, and were willing to renegotiate the relationship between the monarchy and the legislature in order to secure English Protestantism, liberty and property. Tories, by contrast, were more confident that the Restoration settlements could withstand a Catholic king. Their fear was that efforts to alter the establishment in religion, and the succession to the throne through Parliamentary statute, not only were illegitimate, but also had the potential to lead the three kingdoms into another civil war. Tory translations The anxiety over representation within historical writing during the early 1680s stemmed from the blizzard of partisan applications of historical parallelism to contemporary public affairs. Historical writing was an important genre for making public partisan historical comparisons between present and past. Almost all historical writing published during the seventeenth century attempted to foster a sense of continuity and identity through time between the object of the narrative and its intended audience – usually the politically involved public.29 Although the politics of the 1680s were in fact not the same as the 1640s, as contemporaries acknowledged,30 historical writers nonetheless purposefully projected the perception that the early 1680s were a ‘repeat screening’ of an earlier time. This section examines two such efforts. Oxford-based scholar Archibald Lovell and the regime’s official historian, John Dryden, translated foreign-language histories that presented a tory view of the similarity between past and present. Both deliberately used representational metaphors when discussing their works, suggesting that Lovell and Dryden similarly intended their histories each to be a lens through which to see and understand the motives and aims of Charles II’s critics. For example, Lovell noted that twice ‘in the memory of man’ immoral principles and wicked men attempted to ruin the kingdom What follows reflects the debt of my thinking to Knights, Politics and Opinion, pp. 356– 61, and Tapsell, Personal Rule, pp. 123–58. 29 Daniel Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002), p. 126; Paulina Kewes, ‘History and Its Uses’, pp. 23–5. 30 The Character of a Thorough Pac’d Tory, p. 3. 28

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with claims that a Stuart king had a plan ‘of introducing popery and arbitrary government’. Unsurprisingly, Lovell partly justified his labours by repeating the truism that historical writing revealed lessons about human experience ‘as in a Glass’.31 Likewise, Dryden claimed that his translated French history allowed English whigs to see reflected within ‘a View of their own deformities’.32 These translations both reiterated the historic basis of the exclusive Restoration settlements and vindicated ongoing efforts to defend the settlements through a vigorous application of the penal laws by paralleling and so identifying whiggish politics with the disastrous consequences of the puritan impulse. Lovell oversaw the release in 1685 of an English edition of George Bate and Thomas Skinner’s Latin history of the conflicted past entitled Elenchus motuum nuperorum in Anglia. The narrative of Elenchus reaffirmed the historic basis by which the existing religious settlement proscribed the puritan impulse, which was by blaming the English civil war on a Calvinist conspiracy.33 For example, Bate blamed the deterioration of relations between the king and the Parliament on a factious group that had hijacked the legislature ‘under pretext of reforming’ political and religious affairs. Their ambition had been ‘to overturn both Church and State, and, in imitation of the Scots, to new-model the Government’. Subsequently, Bate traced the origin of ‘the Factious’ back to the Reformation. From the reign of Elizabeth there had always been a small group of disaffected men who used the language of ‘religion, liberty and estates’ to create political unrest, which they employed in order to further their own personal ambitions for power. Bate wrote: ‘these good men, whilst they boast of their extraordinary zeal for publick Liberty and the pure reformed Religion, making use of the War for their own private advantages, step into the greatest and most profitable place of the State’. The implications of Bate’s account for the present was clear: Parliamentarians who expressed concern for the safety of the Protestant faith in the early 1640s used rhetorical ‘wheedles’ to deceive the people and foment resistance to the king. Those men who expressed Archibald Lovell, ‘Preface’ to George Bate, Elenchus Motuum Nuperorum in Anglia: or, A Short Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Late Troubles in England … translated by Archibald Lovell (1685), Wing B1083, sigs A7v; A5r–v; p. 43. Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses … Volume III (1813–20), p. 828. 32 Dryden, ‘Dedication’, p. 3. Phillip Harth, Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in its Contexts (Princeton, 1993), p. 231. 33 The book was originally published in Paris in 1649, and was first released in London in 1661; it was subsequently reprinted in 1676; Elizabeth Lane Furdell, ‘Bate, George (1608–1668)’, ODNB. 31

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similar concerns in the present could likewise be viewed as using religion to misrepresent their truly seditious political agenda.34 The newly translated edition of Elenchus thus reiterated tory claims that whigs were simply oldstyle Calvinist incendiaries who were principally concerned to overthrow the constitution and the Elizabethan Reformation. The only work John Dryden released in his capacity as historiographer royal was a translation of Louis Maimbourg’s Histoire de la Ligue in 1685. The purpose of Dryden’s translation was to establish the parallel between the French and English civil wars, but more particularly what he believed was the correspondence between the men responsible for their outbreak and contemporary whigs. Maimbourg’s book presented what Dryden described as an account of a ‘criminal association formed against a sovereign under the pretence of religion’.35 It had been translated, he declared, to ‘prevent Posterity from the like unlawful and impious designs’ of the Catholic Holy League’.36 A proper reading of Maimbourg would convince readers of the parallels between and hence the identity of, the practices and principles of the League, the Parliamentary rebels of the 1640s, and the whig opposition of the 1680s. Indeed, Dryden argued that ‘our sectaries and Long Parliament of 41 had certainly these French Precedents in their eye. They copy’d their Methods of Rebellion.’ The League had also served as a model for English whigs: for example, the action of the Estates-General in passing a bill of exclusion aimed at Henry of Navarre was duplicated by the House of Commons in 1680–1. Additionally, the Protestant Association purportedly formed by the earl of Shaftsbury in 1683 was in fact a recapitulation of the Catholic League.37 Dryden proposed that an English person reading Maimbourg’s history could simply replace the names ‘Holy League and Covenant, England and France, Protestant and Papist’ since between the protagonists there was little substantive difference. ‘To draw the likeness of the French Transactions and ours’, he wrote, was ‘in effect to transcribe the History I have translated.’38 To read about the French Catholic League Bate, Elenchus, Part I, pp. 17–18, 22; 73; 42. John Dryden, The history of the League. Written in French by Monsieur Maimbourg. Translated into English according to His Majesty’s command by Mr. Dryden (1684), Wing M292. 36 Maimbourg, ‘History’, sig. b5–b6; John Dryden, ‘The Postscript of the Translator’, The Works of John Dryden, Volume 18, Prose: The History of the League, 1684, ed. Alan Roper (Berkeley, 1974), p. 415. 37 Dryden, ‘Postscript’, pp. 402, 406; Roper, ‘Editor’s Notes’, The Works of John Dryden, Volume 18, pp. 430–1. 38 Dryden, ‘Postscript’, p. 402. For a fuller survey of English uses of sixteenth-century French political thought and history during the 1680s, see J.H.M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1959), pp. 129–45. 34 35

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was to learn about and see reflected historically the English nation’s past and contemporary political struggles. Readers of Lowell and Dryden’s translations were thus encouraged to appropriate the mid-seventeenth and later sixteenth-century past in a fashion not unlike the longstanding Protestant habit of reading England’s experience into the biblical story of ancient Israel’s history. For generations, godly readers orientated their personal and corporate experiences through their view of the trials and triumphs of God’s chosen people.39 For both Protestant readers of the Bible and tory readers of Maimbourg and Bate, it was not the differences between characters across time that were crucial for understanding the relationship between past and present, and for knowing how one ought to act in the future, but rather the identity of the plot. The tory translations, in particular, showed that nothing new or different could be expected from critics of the monarchy or established religion: whigs and Dissenters were just types of reformists intent on smashing the status quo in politics and the Church for their own selfish reasons. Tory translations thus gave readers historical reason to be grateful that the whigs had failed, while underlining the historical justification for upholding the Restoration settlement. Whig collections Supporters and critics of the Restoration regime attacked the intentions of each other by reprinting large selections of historical documents. One set was published in 1680 by John Rushworth, a former clerk to the Long Parliament and member of each of the three Parliaments elected between 1679 and 1681. Both of Rushworth’s Historical Collections and the Tryal of Thomas, Earl of Strafford presented a whiggish interpretation of the recent past: the first concerned the 1630s and the second an important judicial

Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979), pp. 117–30; Alan Roper, ‘The Language of Political Conflict in Restoration Literature’, Politics as Reflected in Literature (Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 40–5; Kevin Sharpe, ‘Reading Revelations: Prophecy, Hermeneutics and Politics in Early Modern Britain’, Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, eds Kevin Sharpe and Stephen Zwicker (Cambridge, 2003), p. 123.

39

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event overseen by the Long Parliament.40 The Historical Collections showed the liberties of the subject were endangered the longer parliament did not meet. Furthermore, the overall thrust of the Collection was to shift blame for the civil wars from Parliament on to Charles I. Relatedly, the Tryal provided an example of one Parliament’s willingness to embrace its vocation, at least according to whigs, as the supreme guarantor of the constitution. Together, Rushworth’s 1680s histories exemplified whig scepticism concerning the sufficiency of the Restoration settlement to uphold in the future the kingdom’s fundamental laws. The second part of Rushworth’s multi-volume Historical Collections traced the rise and fall of the personal rule of Charles I – what Rushworth called ‘the particular Arts and Methods used in Government in such a long suspension of the Exercise of the Supream Legislative Power’. His history bolstered whig arguments about the supremacy of Parliament and its crucial role in preserving the nation’s liberties.41 The book was the product of Rushworth’s gathering, selecting and editing documents related to important national events, a process that purportedly began before the outbreak of the civil wars. The first volume was published in 1659.42 The collapse of censorship in 1679 was probably decisive for the release of the next installment of the collection, which refuted the anti-puritan explanation of the civil war that underlay the Restoration settlements. 43 As shown by his collection, it was not a puritan–Calvinist conspiracy that had sparked political and religious conflict in the three British kingdoms. John Rushworth, Historical Collections: Second Part, 2 vols (1680), Wing R2318; hereafter Collections, 2, Vols I and II; idem, The Tryal of Thomas, Earl of Strafford … upon an Impeachment of High Treason (1680), Wing T2232. Joad Raymond, ‘Rushworth, John (c.1612– 1690)’, ODNB; Francis Henderson, ‘“Posterity to Judge” – John Rushworth and his Historical Collections’, Bodleian Library Record 15 (1996), 247–59. 41 Rushworth, Collections, 1, sig. A3v; Collections, 2, Vol. I, sig. A1v. 42 The first volume was dedicated to Protector Richard Cromwell; John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (1659), Wing R2316A; hereafter Collections, 1, sig. B1. A ‘surreptitious’ second edition of this work was printed around 1672; Robert Clavel, A Catalogue of all the Books Printed in England (1673), p. 30. It was also republished in 1682 (Wing R2317). 43 The Tryal also was in part Rushworth’s reply to An Impartial Account of the Arraignment, Trial, Condemnation of Thomas Late Earl of Strafford (1679), Wing I68, first released as A Brief and Perfect Relation, of Answers and Replies of Thomas Earle of Strafford (1647), Wing R68. On the reliability of such transcriptions, see Michael Mendle, ‘The “Prints” of the Trials: The Nexus of Politics, Religion, Law and Information in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, ed. Jason McElligott (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 123–37. 40

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Blame in Historical Collections fell first on an overly ambitious clergyman, Archbishop William Laud. By implication, Historical Collections showed that the greatest source of political instability was not puritan politicians but Churchmen, particularly bishops, who interfered in civil affairs.44 Even more damaging had been the king’s style of rule immediately before the Long Parliament. Rushworth’s presentation of documents from the 1630s was intended to demonstrate that the regime of Charles I was ultimately to blame for the fatal breakdown of the political process in 1641. Indeed, the path to war was laid, according to the Collections, before the Long Parliament assembled. Following the dissolution of Charles I’s fourth parliament in 1629, his government had departed dangerously from the normal modes of governance. The 1630s was not a golden age of peace and happiness, as it was portrayed in sanctioned historical writing.45 Rather, the king’s personal rule was a dark detour from constitutional normalcy with devastating consequences for civil and religious peace. Historical Collections presented documents proving the importance of a triumvirate of bad counsellors – the duke of Hamilton, the earl of Strafford and Archbishop William Laud. That Rushworth believed Laud deserved the greatest share of blame was suggested by the way he placed extracts from the prelate’s diary at the head of each year from 1632. According to Rushworth, the extract helped ‘relate more impartially’ the power ‘this Archbishop had upon the King’.46 In addition to Laud’s overweening influence at Court, his ecclesiastical policies combined with Charles I’s misuse of his prerogative provoked anxiety and then opposition to the regime. This was manifest first in the legal arena. For example, John Hampden’s ‘great and memorable’ trial before the Court of Exchequer in the autumn of 1637 was offered as the prime example of ‘the disputes and conflicts’ provoked by Charles I’s reliance upon extra-parliamentary sources of revenue.47 Hostility to Laud’s liturgical initiatives was illustrated using documents related to the prosecutions of three puritan heroes: William Prynne, John Bastwick Mark Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, eds Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 209–31; John Patrick Montaño, Courting the Moderates: Ideology, Propaganda, and the Emergence of Party, 1660–1678 (2002), pp. 155–63. 45 MacGillivray, Restoration Historians, pp. 100–5. 46 Rushworth, Collections, 2, Vol. I, sig. A2, and Vol. II, p. 86, taken from William Prynne, A Breviate of the Life of William Laud, Arch-bishop of Canterbury, Extracted for the Most Part Verbatim out of his Diary, and Other Writings, under his own Hand (1644), Wing P3904A. Rushworth, Collections, 2, Vol. I, sig. A2, italics in the original. 47 Rushworth, Collections, 2, Vol. I, sig. B1v. 44

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and Henry Burton.48 Following the report on the three men’s convictions and punishments, Rushworth’s focus shifted to the outbreak of opposition in Scotland over the adoption of a new prayer book. In Rushworth’s view, the punishment of the English puritan heroes and the beginning of what would become the Covenanter revolt were causally related. That is, he suggested, what truly had frightened the Scots were reports ‘that the bishops in England were the cause of [the new prayer book], and that a Star Chamber would be erected in Scotland to strengthen the power of their bishops’.49 In other words, the Scots feared that the repression of puritan piety in England was the first stage of a prelatical conspiracy against the Kirk. This argument, unsurprisingly, likewise denied the culpability of the puritan impulse and, by extension, the exclusive Restoration settlements. The conclusion of Collections reiterated its whiggish critique of prelates with too much power and not enough genuine piety. Rushworth ended the history provocatively with a series of extracts from speeches delivered in late 1640 and early 1641 by future royalists such as Lucius Cary (‘Of Uniformity’) and Harbottle Grimston (‘About Bishops’), which were very critical of the Laudian episcopate.50 Reprinting these speeches showed readers that criticism of Laudian bishops in the early Long Parliament was not confined to puritan politicians, thereby refuting the simplistic equation within officially sanctioned histories, of opposition to Laud’s programme with a conspiracy to overturn the Elizabethan Reformation. Furthermore, given that the bishops were among James, duke of York’s most vocal defenders, these speeches suggested that the prelates might be once again acting contrary to the national interest. A sitting Parliament was vital, therefore, to restore balance to the polity, and to secure the liberties of Protestant subjects from the danger of a Catholic successor. The second collection Rushworth published during the period presented another argument for Parliamentary supremacy. The Tryal of Thomas, Earl of Strafford concerned what Rushworth called ‘the greatest Tryal whereof we have any account in our English story’. The proceedings against Strafford, which Rushworth attended, had constituted much, if not most, of Parliament’s business from late March to mid-May 1641. For Rushworth, the event’s significance lay in demonstrating the importance of Parliament in the constitution. Reprinting documents from the trial enabled Rushworth Prynne’s case in 1633 before the Star Chamber ‘for printing a libellous volume called Histriomastix against plays, masques, dancings’ takes up Collections, 2, Vol. I, pp. 220–41. 49 Rushworth, Collections, 2, Vol. I, pp. 380–5; 385–408; 750–88; 841–65; 1190–1252. Much of the account of Scottish affairs was based on Gilbert Burnet, Memoirs of the lives and actions of James and William Dukes of Hamilton and Castlehereald etc. (1677), Wing B5832. 50 Rushworth, Collections, 2, Vol. II, pp. 1342; 1349. 48

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to reassert the superiority of Parliament for dealing with threats to the happiness and security of the realm, such as a Catholic successor to the throne. Significantly, he invited readers to imagine themselves present at the proceedings, in order to ‘make [their] own Comments upon the Law and Fact, as it appeared’. In other words, the Tryal was a kind of re-screening of the greatest judicial proceedings of the conflicted past. It was vital to re-vision it historically because, Rushworth contended, the charges against Strafford, ‘of designing to destroy the security of every of their Estates, Liberties and Lives’, concerned all Englishmen. In response to this danger, he noted that the 1640 Parliament had asserted that the ancient constitution was ‘so reserved in the custody of the Supreme Legislative Power, that no Criminals, by violation of those First Principles, which gave Being to our Government can be judged otherwise than in Parliament’.51 The book had an even more immediate relevance to contemporary debates about Parliament’s ability to alter some fundamental laws, such as hereditary succession to the throne, in order to preserve others. It is probable that Rushworth compiled the collection with the Commons’ failed attempt in 1679 to impeach Charles II’s former leading minister, the earl of Danby, in mind. The controversy sparked by Danby’s subsequent royal pardon had raised questions about the relationship between the king’s prerogative and Parliamentary power, which Rushworth may have believed recapitulated the case of Charles I’s great minister. This suggestion is supported by Rushworth’s declared hope that in light of the record of Strafford’s trial, ‘right measures may be taken, that all our future ministers of state may escape the conjoined complaints of the three kingdoms against them; and that the government may be so administered, as shall best conduce to the happiness of the king and the kingdom’.52 This need not necessarily have been seen as directed against Danby in particular, but similarly it would not have been difficult to draw parallels between the two great officials. The Tryal represented the disastrous consequences for Strafford of enforcing the policies of Charles I’s personal rule, polices that were contrary, Rushworth stated, to the kingdom’s fundamental laws. The work was also a record of a particular Parliament that had embodied a whiggish willingness to use the institution out of necessity, in order to secure the ‘Fundamental Rules and maxims of our English Government’. The collector used a combination of his own notes, oral testimony, the Commons Journal and contemporary printed sources to present a kind of chronicle of the proceedings. Rushworth, Tryal, sig. C1v. On the debate over Danby’s pardon, see Harris, Restoration, pp. 175–83; Rushworth, Tryal, sig. C2v.

51 52

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For example, Rushworth used approximately twenty pages to represent the testimonies from the trial’s sixth day (27 March 1641), which focused on the charge that Strafford had subverted the fundamental laws of Ireland.53 The passages from the trial and attainder for treason were followed by a brief narration of Strafford’s final days, and, somewhat surprisingly, an extract from Charles I’s reflections on Strafford’s death from Eikon Basilike. While Rushworth acknowledged that the earl had died honourably, the bulk of evidence presented in the text suggested that Strafford was not simply the victim of rabid puritan parliamentarians, as sanctioned historical writings portrayed him.54 Strafford had, after all, attempted while serving Charles I to subvert ‘that excellent law called the Petition of Right, which he himself (especially in a speech made by him in Parl[iament]. on 22 March 1628) had promoted and pressed with the most ardent zeal as the best inheritance he could leave his Posterity’. From the perspective of Charles I’s defenders, Strafford’s trial and attainder for treason represented an early and ominous victory for puritan politics in the days leading up to the fatal division between Roundhead and Cavalier.56 Unsurprisingly, the Cavalier Parliament in 1662 overturned the earl’s attainder. According to the statute: to the end that right be done to the memory of the deceased Thomas Earl of Strafford bee it further enacted That all Records and Proceedings of Parlyament relating to the said Attainder bee wholly cancelled and taken off the Fyle, or otherwise defaced and obliterated … to the intent the same may not be visible in after ages, or brought into example to the prejudice of any Person.57

The fact that this bill was the final document reprinted in Rushworth’s Tryal suggests that he saw the history as partly a refutation of the Cavalier Parliament and its proscription of puritan politics. The work blatantly contravened the spirit of the law by making public what Rushworth claimed were ‘all Records and Proceedings’ of Strafford’s impeachment. The Tryal was clearly intended to rehabilitate the intentions and the reputation of the Long Parliament, so long aspersed in sanctioned histories. Its Members Rushworth, Tryal, pp. 186–204. Rushworth, Tryal, pp. 734–73; 741 and 744; 775–7. For Rushworth’s assessment of Strafford’s death, see Tryal, p. 762; cf. David Lloyd, Memoirs of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings and Deaths … (1668), p. 17. 55 Rushworth, Tryal, sig. C2v. 56 James Heath, Loyal Martyrs (1665), p. 10; Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (1668), p. 433. 57 14 Car. II, C. 29; SR, v, p. 429. 53 54

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truly sought to defend the constitution from politicians and policies that threatened to undermine it. The threat had come not from the puritan impulse but the architects of the king’s personal rule. Both the second part of Historical Collections and the Tryal represented Parliament as the bulwark of the kingdom’s fundamental law against evil counsellors and kings who wrongly tried to govern without leaning on the legislature. Rushworth’s 1680s collections thus presented a historic case against a personal rule of King Charles II. Tory collections Rushworth’s histories generated two hostile tory counter-collections, which recapitulated the central message of sanctioned anti-puritan histories of the civil wars and Interregnum.58 The first, published in 1681, was Thomas Frankland’s Annals of King James and King Charles. Despite its title, the work was in fact a collection of previously printed documents, arranged by Frankland to prove that puritan–Presbyterians were inveterate enemies of the Elizabethan framework of the Church, the Restoration religious settlement and the established constitution.59 Frankland’s Annals reiterated Peter Heylyn’s contention that the wars in Scotland and England could be traced to the adherents of Calvin’s reformation.60 The root cause of the wars of the three kingdoms, Frankland declared, ‘was for the advancement of that form of Government invented by Mr Calvin of Geneva’. This was made clear, for example, through the occasional glosses Frankland inserted next to or within the documents.61 Next to the declaration of the Scottish General Assembly in which that body declared its determination to use its divinely ordained power to purify the Kirk, Frankland noted that ‘God never put it in their hands, but the devil, who is the Author of all Sedition and Rebellion’.62 For Frankland, it was Calvinists, not Charles I, who were the real source of political instability in Britain before 1640.

[Thomas Frankland], The Annals of King James and King Charles the First (1681), Wing F2078. Nalson, Impartial, I and II; idem, True Copy. 59 G.H. Martin, ‘Frankland, Thomas (1632–1690)’, ODNB. 60 See Chapter 1, p. 00. 61 The text of Charles I’s ‘large declarations’ of 1639 appears at Annals, pp. 757–65. 62 Frankland, Annals, pp. 745–57. 58

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Moreover, it was very evident that Frankland, in contrast to Rushworth, blamed the Long Parliament for starting the war in England. It was important that readers remembered the earlier Parliament’s culpability, he argued, in order to prevent a similar assembly from sparking a new civil conflict by trying to take from the king that which has been entrusted to him by ‘God and the Laws’.63 Nonetheless, like Rushworth, Frankland’s Annals focused largely on the 1630s and early 1640s, yet the latter collector paid greater attention to developments north of the border. Indeed, affairs in Scotland from 1637 to 1640 were at the heart of the work’s explanatory narrative, receiving sustained treatment for the final two hundred pages. 64 He emphasised the instability of Scottish politics by reminding his readers of the irregularity of the Scottish Reformation, and paralleling that event to the subsequent struggles between ‘Crown and Geneva-infected Kirk’. All this had culminated in the Covenanter revolt of the 1630s. He also emphasised the connections between the perpetrators of the Scottish rebellion with the outbreak of the war in England. For example, he claimed that the meetings, religious and otherwise, between the Scottish commissioners in London and the City’s Presbyterians, were the source of many of the petitions and popular demonstrations that forced Charles I from London, and ultimately caused the breach between them and his Parliament.65 Petitions and popular demonstrations led by whigs would lead to a similar outcome. Frankland’s book was an exercise in preventative historical parallelism aimed at vindicating the Restoration settlement. He brought his collection to a close in June 1642, before the outbreak of hostilities, but after Parliament and Charles I had broken decisively over control of the militia. Clearly, Frankland was more interested in explaining the origin of the fatal division within the political nation than its military, political or religious outcomes. The book was, in other words, a map of the steps and principles leading to civil conflict, but not of it. Puritan politics north and south of the border, what Frankland described as the ‘Artifices of … self-seeking persons’, had caused the wars. Similarly, there were by 1681 men in both kingdoms again seeking ‘by Methods and Means not very distant and remote from those, whereby some of us saw them formerly to have attained their evil Ends’. By essentially collapsing historical distance, preventative Frankland, Annals, pp. 813; 913. Charles I’s parliaments of the 1620s take up Frankland’s Annals from pages 108 to 199, and 232 to 342. The years 1630 to 1637 are covered from pages 342 to 600. The Scottish troubles begin to receive sustained treatment at page 609 and remain the focus of the narrative until page 815. 65 Frankland, Annals, sigs A2, B2v; 433; 813–15. 63 64

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historical parallelism left little room for discriminating historical difference or contingency. The contemporary critic of the Restoration settlement or the Court was really a type of puritan–Covenanter incendiary, hiding a principled determination to take the nation towards war, regicide and republic, if given the opportunity. The crucial thing was to avert such opportunities from ever arising again, since the record – Frankland’s collection of documents – showed that puritan politics produced only discord and disaster.66 Preventative historical parallelism was also the foundation of Church of England clergyman John Nalson’s historical collections, issued in three parts between 1682 and 1684. Published at the king’s ‘special command’, the Impartial Collections of the Great Affairs of State presented a tory view of the 1630s and early 1640s to refute Rushworth’s whiggish account of the period. The Impartial Collections pictured puritan politics past to show where they would inevitably lead the kingdom, if left unchecked. Showing readers the ‘the fatal example of their ancestors’, Nalson’s work would help the political nation avoid a re-run of 1641.67 Moreover, they presented simultaneously an ‘Exact Pourtraicture’ of the true source of historic danger to the polity, and a ‘short Map’ of the best way to ensure security and stability in the present and future.68 Additionally, Nalson vindicated the politics of Charles I, the exclusion of Dissenters from positions of power in the polity, and the Restoration settlement’s sufficiency for ensuring the stability and security of the Protestant establishment under a Catholic monarch, by using his collections to recapitulate the anti-puritan explanation of the conflict. Nalson’s collections prescribed a vigorous defence of the Restoration settlement as the key to political and religious stability for the future, by showing the danger inherent in puritan politics across the seventeenth century. He straightforwardly equated puritan politics with Dissenters and whigs, who together sought to realise the political and spiritual ambitions of popery: the destruction of the Church of England. Impartial Collections presented the rise of England’s civil wars as but one chapter in a larger and longer apocalyptic struggle involving the true lawfully established Frankland, Annals, p. 913. Nalson, Impartial, I, p. iii. 68 Nalson, Impartial, I, sig. A1; II, pp. 594; 765. Nalson claimed to be impartial because he held ‘no manner of Animosity against Persons, but the Actions of the late times’; see R.C. Richardson, ‘Re-fighting the English Revolution: John Nalson (1637–1686) and the Frustrations of Late Seventeenth-Century English Historiography’, European Review of History 14 (2007), 1–20. 66 67

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Protestant Church’s war with the agents of Antichrist, disguised as at first as puritans and separatist sects, and more recently as moderate Dissenters. He traced the origin of the puritan hostility to Charles I to a longstanding plot to subvert the Elizabethan Reformation settlement through the agitations of reforming Protestants. ‘We may observe’, he declared, ‘that the chief Rise and Original of our unhappy Divisions and Separations is fetcht from the devilish policy of the Papists, counterfeiting a design to advance the Reformation of the Protestant religion to a greater Purity.’69 Nearly all political and religious controversy since the Reformation was the result of nonconformists – puritans, Anabaptists, Presbyterians, Independents – agitating on behalf of the ‘Purity of the Gospel’. Most outrageously, these same men had slanderously accused two Stuart monarchs ‘of designing to bring in Popery and Arbitrary Power’.70 The only way to end the real popish plot against the Church and the state was for Dissenters to accept that the purity of the Church was sufficiently protected by the Restoration religious settlement and to conform to the Church of England.71 The first part of the work covered the period from the Bishops’ War in 1639 to the opening months of the Long Parliament. The second focused on Parliamentary events, presenting the trial of Strafford and the hectic four months following the Irish revolt of October 1641. Unsurprisingly, Nalson’s collection laid blame for the breakdown between Parliament and the king wholly at the feet of puritan politicians and clergymen. They had falsely accused Charles I, his ministers and the bishops of conspiring ‘to introduce Popery and Superstition into the Church, and Arbitrary Government in these Kingdoms’. Echoing Heylyn’s narrative in Aerius Revididus, Nalson identified the puritan impulse with disorder and danger: its adherents were the ‘perpetual disturbers of the Peace of the Kingdom’. In 1640, a puritan faction had used the Long Parliament, assembled ‘to remove a War from us’, to unleash a long-desired destructive campaign against mitre and crown.72 According to Nalson, histories such as Rushworth’s Collections that critised the king, his advisors and their policies simply reiterated ‘Calumnies and Libels’ that puritan ministers and politicians had, in Nalson’s view, unjustly broadcast in the 1640s. That similar charges about Charles II and the Duke of York continued to be circulated by Presbyterians such as Rushworth was proof for Nalson that their political ambitions Nalson, Impartial, I, pp. lxi; 480. For similar employments of apocalyptic symbolism, see Warren Johnston, ‘The Anglican Apocalypse in Restoration England’, JEH 55 (2004), 467–501. 70 Nalson, Impartial, I, p. lxxviii; italics in original. 71 Nalson, Impartial, I, pp. xliv–xlvii. 72 Nalson, Impartial, I, pp. lxi; 480. 69

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were unchanged, and that the outcome of their triumph would be another civil war. Nalson contended that ‘the same arts, principles, and methods’ that allowed rebellion to succeed in the past ‘must necessarily lead Men to the same Designs and naturally and unavoidably terminate and Centre in the same Ends, unless prevented by the timely Application’ of suitable remedies.73 The documents Nalson chose to reproduce proved, in his mind, that puritan politics always tended to disrupt the body politic and threaten the established Church; consequently, its proponents needed to be crushed. A similar identification of puritan–Presbyterians with popery and sedition grounded Nalson’s presentation of documents from Charles I’s trial. The True Copy of the trial of Charles I, based on John Phelps’s record of the proceedings, was published in 1684 to demonstrate yet again the intellectual and spiritual link between puritan politics, regicide and republicanism.74 The political significance of this equation was in its recapitulation of the historic basis of the Restoration settlement’s exclusion of the puritan impulse from the polity. Puritan politics, whether practised by whigs or Dissenters, was portrayed as an inveterate danger not only to the established political and religious order, but also to peace and security in general. Using the same sort of reasoning, Nalson argued that even moderate Dissenters’ unwillingness to obey the Act of Uniformity was the first step on the slippery slope towards civil violence. ‘For Rebellion with it portentous Retinue’, Nalson asserted, ‘is as naturally included in Separation as Fire in a Flint.’ Wherever these principles prevail monarchy is in danger. It was clearly in the national interest ‘to endeavour to suppress the further growth and progress of the pernicious Principles of Separation’.75 Nalson’s intention in presenting the proceeding was to show that the regicide of 1649 was the logical outcome of the Presbyterians’ principled animus to the Church and the monarchy from the Reformation to the outbreak of the civil war. Unsurprisingly, Nalson refused to accept the Presbyterians’ claim that the break-away Independents were to blame for the trial, since Independents likewise tried to evade culpability by blaming the sectaries. Rather than letting moderate Dissenters exculpate themselves, with the True Copy Nalson revealed for all time the inveterate wickedness of all nonconforming Protestants. His book stripped away ‘the Fig-leaves which these guilty sinners have so Artificially patched together, and to

Nalson, Impartial, I, pp. xi; ii; xxxvi; Impartial, II, p. ii. John Phelps was one of two clerks who served the High Court of Justice; C.H. Firth, ‘Phelps, John (b. 1618/19)’, rev. Timothy Venning, ODNB. 75 Nalson, True Copy, pp. 125, 126. 73 74

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shew to the whole World from their own Memories, that is was the very real Presbyterians, Independents, and other Sectaries, their Associates, and no other, who were actually guilty of the whole Scene of this horrible Murder of the King’.76 Furthermore, the political agitation of whigs and Dissenters during the exclusion crisis was for Nalson a self-evident parallel with the politics that in the 1640s produced the regicide. Thus, the fact that the whigs had employed ‘the same Arts and Engines which overthrew [the Duke of York’s] Royal Father, exclaiming against Popery and Slavery, and by accusing the Government of Designs to introduce them, to fill the heads of the people with furious fears and raging Jealousies’, prompted the collector to publish graphic proof of the inevitable outcome of puritan politics and piety: blood, tears and the victory of popery.77 Whig abridgements Another form of historical writing prominent in the early 1680s was the historical abridgement. Similar to collections, abridgements primarily were constructed from antecedent texts, but unlike collections, the abridgers edited and redacted their sources more thoroughly in order to convey their views of the conflicted past. Three such works concerning the civil wars were published in the early 1680s by Nathaniel Crouch, Henry Duke and John Kidgell.78 Aimed at a less erudite and wealthy readership than either the translations or historical collections, these works tended towards whiggish historical parallelism. The personal rule of Charles I was presented as analogous with Charles II’s unwillingness to allow a Parliament to secure the realm and its religion from a Catholic successor. The abridgements drew this correspondence, somewhat ironically, by condensing Edward Phillips’s editions of Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle of the Kings of England, an officially

Nalson, True Copy, pp. xx; xv, lxi; 14. Nalson, True Copy, sig. A3. Unsurprisingly, similar sentiments run through his pamphlet literature: see, for example, The Character of a Rebellion, and what England may Expect from One. Or, The Designs of Dissenters Examined by Reason, Experience, and the Laws and Statutes of the Realm (1681), Wing N91, p. 2. 78 Nathaniel Crouch, The Wars in England, Scotland and Ireland (1681), Wing C7357; Theophilus Rationalis [Henry Duke], Multum in Parvo, Aut Vox Veritatis (1681), Wing M3061; [John Kidgell], An Abridgment of Sr. Richard Bakers Chronicle of the Kings of England in a Succinct History of the Successions of the English Monarchy (1684), Wing B499. 76 77

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sanctioned chronicle of England’s rulers, which championed the Restoration political and religious settlements.79 Nathaniel Crouch released his Wars in England ostensibly for irenic reasons. He claimed that a ‘serious perusal and consideration’ of his derivative account of the mid-seventeenth-century upheavals could help to quell the country’s ‘present discontents and distractions’.80 Nonetheless, Crouch’s history of the 1640s suggested that the greatest danger to political stability in England was an extended absence of Parliament. This whiggish contention was evident from both his manipulation of his key source text, Phillips’s 1665 edition of Baker’s Chronicle, and from his selection of images.81 Evidence of his whig sympathies is apparent in Crouch’s approach to the actions of the Long Parliament. For example, concerning the publication of the king’s papers captured after the battle of Naseby, Phillips had noted that Charles I’s correspondence was published ‘with less decency and civility than became such an Assembly’. By contrast, Crouch’s description of this incident in Wars indicated that the Long Parliament was within its rights as a combatant to reveal the content of the king’s letters. They were published, he wrote, ‘so that it proved a complete victory to the Parliamentarians’.82 Crouch clearly felt free to approve outcomes that his antecedent text had criticised. Additionally, Crouch seasoned his abridgement of Phillips’s Chronicle with images that contested its scapegoating of Parliament. The images were lifted very probably from a pro-Parliamentarian pamphlet, A Sight of Ye Trans-Actions of these Latter Yeares, first published in 1646 by John Vicars.83 Like Rushworth’s Collections, the images in Crouch’s abridgement undermined the golden legend of the peaceful 1630s. Facing page 18 were three images, labelled ‘Buckingham stab’d by Felton’, ‘Mr Pryn and Bastwick in ye Pillory’, and ‘The Tumult in Scotland upon Reading ye Com[m]on prayer’, recalling respectively the assassination of an over-mighty counsellor, the persecution of the king’s puritan critics during the 1630s, and Scottish Robert Mayer, ‘Nathaniel Crouch, Bookseller and Historian: Popular Historiography and Cultural Power in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1994), 391–419. 80 Crouch, Wars, sig. A3. 81 Edward Phillips, Chronicle of the kings of England (1665), Wing B505. See Martine Watson Brownley, ‘Sir Richard Baker’s “Chronicle” and Later Seventeenth-Century English Historiography’, HLQ 52 (1989), 481–500. 82 Phillips, Chronicle, pp. 588–9; Crouch, Wars, pp. 134–5. 83 John Vicars, A Sight of Ye Trans-Actions of these Latter Yeares (1646), Wing V327. I owe this reference to Gary Rivett. 79

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opposition to Charles and his Archbishop’s liturgical policies. The second group of images provided a graphic record of opposition to the architects of Charles I’s personal rule, Archbishop Laud and the early of Strafford, showing ‘The Insurrection of Apprentices at Lambeth’, and ‘The E[arl] of Strafford beheaded’. Popular anti-popery was recalled by the depiction of ‘Cheapside Cross, pulled down in 1643’.84 Most importantly, Crouch’s treatment of the king’s trial presented a whiggish historical parallel between the true cause of the civil wars and the greatest threat to political stability in the present – an executive ruling without recourse to Parliament. The trial and execution were, not surprisingly, major components of the book’s narrative. For example, the two-year period from the opening of the Short Parliament in April 1640 until the outbreak of hostilities in 1642 was dealt with in fifty-five pages, while, by contrast, the weeks during which the Rump Parliament tried and executed the king used sixty-seven pages.85 Relatedly, the book’s third group of illustrations suggested that the king’s trial was the key event of the later 1640s. They pictured Charles I’s flight from Oxford, his trial, and his death (Figure 1).86 Admittedly, the emphasis that Crouch’s text and its images placed on the trial was neither unique nor in themselves particularly whiggish. However, Crouch’s abridgement presented the trial in a way that was far more sympathetic to the High Court and its officers than most sanctioned historical writing. For example, Crouch listed the names of the judges who found Charles I guilty of treason without comment. By contrast, Heath’s 1663 Brief Chronicle went into great detail about the various bad ends most of the judges subsequently met.87 Crouch was more interested in the political implications of the trial than its legality. For Crouch, the political concerns of the king’s judges deserved more than just a fair consideration – they warranted readers’ approval. In his history, Crouch largely abandoned Phillips’s account of the trial for what was probably a combination of Heath’s Brief Chronicle and other separate accounts published previously. The differences in sympathy between Crouch and earlier sanctioned histories are most evident in their treatment of Chief Justice John Bradshaw’s final speech to the king on 27 January 1649, before pronouncing the sentence of death. Heath denounced the speech as See above, page 100; for ‘reading’ images, see Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (2007). 85 It should be noted, however, that the type-font of the final three pages was at least half the size of the rest of the book. 86 Crouch, Wars, facing p. 139: ‘The King goes from Oxford in disguise 1646’, ‘The Illegall Tryall of King Charles the First’, and ‘The Martyrdom of King Charles 1648’. 87 Crouch, Wars, p. 190; Heath, Intestine Wars (1663), pp. 360–75. 84

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an instance of Bradshaw ‘mis-citing, and wresting, and abusing the truth of History’ to justify treason; he condensed the speech into less than one page. Crouch, by contrast, presented a much fuller version of Bradshaw’s speech for his Wars.88 The import of including a fuller version of the speech is evident in that it essentially blamed the civil wars on the king’s personal rule. While rehearsing the Commons’ case against the king, Bradshaw asserted that the absence of Parliaments during the 1630s was ultimately to blame for the bloodshed. ‘Sir’, Bradshaw had declared, ‘what intermission of PARLIAMENTS hath been in your time it is very well know and the sad consequences of it, and what in the interim instead of these Parliaments hath been by you, by an high and Arbitrary hand introduced upon the People.’89 By representing the text of this speech condemning the king’s failings as supreme governor, Crouch was inviting readers not only to reassess the justice of High Court’s proceedings, but also the argument that the king’s rule without the legislature had resulted in England’s great ‘Confusions and Miseries’.90 It was not, therefore, puritan politics or the Long Parliament that had caused the civil wars, but the king’s extended attempt to govern without attending to his legislature. The parallel with the present suggested that the nation’s peace and security were once again endangered if Parliament was long absent from the scene. Another personal rule, not whig politics, would result in another civil conflict. Similarly, the more polemical abridgement Multum in parvo, attributed to Henry Duke and published the same year as Crouch’s Wars, demanded that another Parliament be called in the near future. Duke’s abridgement compressed Hamond L’Estrange’s and Edward Phillips’s civil-war histories to refute a recently published recapitulation of the sanctioned interpretation of the causes of the civil war.91 After dissolving the short-sitting Parliament

King Charles his Trial (1649), Wing W8 and Thomason Tracts E545[4]; Heath, Intestine War (1663), p. 394; Crouch, Wars, pp. 174–87. Nalson subsequently refused to include the complete text of Bradshaw’s speech in his narrative of the trial because he found it to be, in an echo of Heath, a ‘long Harangue, endeavouring to justify their Proceedings’ by misapplying law and history; True Copy, p. 100. 89 Crouch, Wars, p. 177; the capitalisation is not in King Charles his trial. 90 Crouch, Wars, sig. A3. To suggest, as MacGillivray does, that Crouch refrained from the usual denunciation of the trial to show only that something could be said in favour of the parliamentarians overlooks the weight Crouch’s abridgement gave to Bradshaw’s critique of the personal rule of Charles I; Restoration Historians, pp. 166–7. 91 Hamond L’Estrange, The History of King Charles the First (1656), Wing L1190; Edward Phillips, A Chronicle of the kings of England … (1674), Wing B507. 88

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in Oxford in March 1681, Charles II issued a declaration that explicitly paralleled the aims and methods of his political opponents with those of his father’s critics in the Long Parliament. The aim of both groups, the king declared, was to make their monarch subservient to the legislature. Charles II had decided, therefore, to dissolve the so-called ‘Oxford Parliament’ to preserve his rights, and to prevent a repeat of the escalation of political tension that had ended in violence forty years earlier. The king’s Declaration subsequently provoked a flood of loyal addresses from corporations and county sessions across the nation, most of which echoed the parallelism of past and present parliamentary critics.92 Henry Duke, however, was not impressed or put off by the rising tide of popular loyalism. His response in Multum was to vindicate the goals of the legislatures of 1641 and 1681, and to encourage the king to let another Parliament assemble to bring security and healing to the political nation.93 Released at a time when many people expected that the king would eventually recall Parliament, Multum was genuinely whiggish historical work, rather than an appeal to moderate opinion.94 Rejecting the parallelism set out in the king’s Declaration, Duke’s abridgement offered historical proof that it was indeed safe to recall Parliament, and, moreover, that it was another Parliament that was necessary to save the nation. The history defended the good intentions of the Long and Exclusion Parliaments, and reasserted the accidental nature of the breakdown of violence between Charles I and his opponents. As outlined in Multum, it was truly dangerous for Charles II to repeat his father’s error of ruling without the aid of his legislature. Nevertheless, Duke understandably refused to predict the outcome of another Parliament, particularly if it was possible that ‘a fatality in these present years, as there was about 40 years since, which are by-past and gone, and all things buried (or at least ought to be forgotten)’.95 Paradoxical as it might seem coming from the compiler of a historical work, Duke was suggesting that what the nation really needed to be secure was fewer Charles II, His Majesties Declaration to All His Loving Subjects, Touching the Causes & Reasons that Moved Him to Dissolve the Two Last Parliaments (1681), Wing C3000, pp. 4–5, 7; Scott characterises this text as ‘as masterful appeal to public memory’, England’s Troubles, p. 439. On the loyal address, see Knights, Politics and Opinion, pp. 316–28. 93 He reminded those called ‘disloyal and disaffected to the present Government’ for not going along with the crowds, that Christ also had endured ‘hard censures’ for refusing to follow popular opinion; Duke, Multum, p. 2. 94 Tapsell, Personal Rule of Charles II, pp. 30–36; Duke, Multum, p. 4; Jonathan Scott, ‘Restoration Process. Or, If This Isn’t a Party, We’re Not Having a Good Time’, Albion 25 (1993), 629. 95 Duke, Multum, pp. 1–2. 92

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appeals to its past. Probably what he meant was fewer appeals made from a tory perspective. Henry Duke contested the historical parallelism conveyed through the king’s Declaration by focusing on the intentions of Charles I’s parliamentary critics, rather than on the outcome of their politics. His Multum showed that the Parliament of November 1640, like the one assembled in 1681, had only wanted to defend the subjects’ lives, liberties and estates from a Catholic conspiracy to suppress them. Both Parliaments, Duke contended, were dedicated simply to combating ‘Popery and Slavery, many times slily introduced by some unworthy Sycophants, and corrupt Ministers of State’.96 The Long Parliament’s original aims had been good, even if the consequences of their actions contributed to bloodshed. He noted with approval the Long Parliament’s suppression of the instruments of prerogative rule, including the abolition of the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, the Ship Money levy, and various ‘laws passed for regulating abuses and disclaiming royal privileges’.97 Additionally, Duke denied that by assembling another Parliament, Charles II was setting the stage for an automatic repeat performance of the disastrous breakdown that occurred between his father and the legislature in 1641. Duke emphasised the notion that the civil war was both unforeseen and unrepeatable. For example, while one of Duke’s source-texts, Hammond L’Estrange’s history, had suggested that the Short Parliament should have had the foresight in the spring of 1640 to resolve the country’s rising political tensions peacefully, Duke stated in the Multum that at that juncture ‘the wisest head could not foresee contingent actions [or] … foretell but that His Late Majesty might have been advised by his Grand Council, and not by his Court Favourites’. Mistakes and misunderstandings, and not a conspiracy against monarchical power, ultimately explained the outbreak of civil conflict in England. The inadvertent descent to civil conflict implied that there was less reason to fear whiggish politicians, and relatedly, that the puritan impulse alone was not to blame for the fatal breach ‘which so unfortunately hapned between the Commons of England Assembled in Parliament and his late Majesty’.98 With his view of the accidental collapse of normal politics in 1641, Duke was arguing that there was good reason not to fear calling another Parliament together to settle the kingdom’s fears over a Catholic successor. In 1683 Richard Janeway, the printer of Duke’s Multum, and John Kidgell published another abridged version of Baker’s Chronicle. While this Duke, Multum, p. 49. L’Estrange, History of King Charles, p. 189; Duke, Multum, pp. 38; 46–7. 98 Duke, Multum, pp. 5, 4. 96 97

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abridgement was ostensibly about the continuity of England’s monarchy down through the centuries, its chief concern was clearly about the danger that a Catholic king posed to good Protestant Englishmen. This abridgement drew on earlier whig parallels between the coming reign of James Duke of York and the persecutions Protestants had suffered during the reign of Bloody Mary in the sixteenth century, suggesting that a Catholic succession was the greatest danger facing the nation.99 Indeed, Janeway was a fiercely anti-Catholic publisher, having previously printed pamphlets in favour of excluding the duke of York from the throne. For his part, Kidgell had earlier produced an epitome of Baker’s Chronicle, suggesting that he was the prime mover behind the 1683 abridgement.100 Lacking a dedication or preface, and running at just over fifty pages, Janeway and Kidgell’s Abridgement of Sr Richard Bakers Chronicle presented brief biographies of England’s kings and queens, from Canute to Charles II. The work’s plot was the hereditary succession to the throne. Included in the descriptions of the various reigns were details of the monarch’s accession, a short characterisation of his or her reign, death, burial, wives, and a list of children.101 Significantly, the abridgement terminated rather abruptly with the wedding of Charles II and Catherine of Brazanga in 1662, a union that had produced no children. Bringing the story to a close with the current king’s childless marriage emphasised to readers that the succession would fall to Charles I’s second son, the Catholic James Duke of York. Whether or not the principle of hereditary succession meant that the future was to be feared depended upon the reader’s political convictions. Most tories, for example, were more afraid of a second civil war caused by puritan politics revived in whig form than a Catholic king. By contrast, whigs were more concerned about the implications of King James II for the Protestant establishment and for parliament’s future as an institution than another outbreak of civil conflict. After all, they could argue it had been an accident and so probably was unrepeatable.102 As far as Kidgell was concerned, the story of England’s past monarchs suggested that whiggish fears had more basis in fact. Crucially, the Abridgement’s description of Catholic Mary Tudor’s struggle for the crown in 1553 noted that she had promised the Protestants of Suffolk that ‘they might still enjoy the Gospel so as King [Mack Ninny], A prospect of a popish successor: display’d by hell-bred cruelty: popish villainy: strange divinity: intended slavery: old Englands misery: &c (1680), Wing P3804. 100 H. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Bookseller who were at Work in England … 1668–1725 (1922), p. 170; Edward Cooke, The History of the Successions of the Kings of England. From Canutus the First Monarch (1682), Wing C6000. 101 The reign of James I is dealt with in two pages; Kidgell, Abridgement, pp. 45–6. 102 Knights, Politics and Opinion, p. 323. 99

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Edward had Established it’. Subsequently, however, Suffolk Protestants were among the first people to be martyred for the sake of their commitment to the Reformation. The implication was that the duke of York likewise might not prove faithful to his promises to uphold the Restoration religious settlements in all three British kingdoms. A strict application of the principle of hereditary succession, in other words, would probably lead to a re-run of the fires of Smithfield.103 Memorials Bulstrode Whitelocke’s Memorials, released in late 1681, was positioned by its publisher as a moderate discourse about the conflicted past. While eschewing the overt partisanship of someone like Nalson, Memorials undermined the characterisation of puritan politics, in sanctioned histories, as inherently dangerous to the polity and right religion. Additionally, Whitelocke’s account of the remarkable rise of the English legislature to political supremacy, only to be brought down by forces of its own making, suggested that old puritans and whigs needed to rediscover an attitude of watchful patience as the political tide moved against their principles during Charles II’s personal rule. The Memorials was one of the most significant pieces of historical reflection produced by the literary culture of Dissenters after 1660. Whitelocke, who had died in July 1675, was a prominent Parliamentary politician during the civil wars, and an official under Protector Oliver Cromwell. Whitelocke apparently began to write a memoir, an account of both his career and national politics, soon after the Restoration.104 Although the 1681 Memorials purported to come directly from Whitelocke’s pen, the book had been edited prior to publication by another former Cromwellian, Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey. Not much is known about the process by which Anglesey prepared Memorials for publication, but it is clear that he edited the manuscript substantially; for example, some overt expressions Kidgell, Abridgement, p. 41. Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs: or, An Historical Account of what passed from the beginning of the Reign of King Charles I, to King Charles the Second His Happy Restauration (1681), Wing W1986. The manuscript of this text, which covered the years 1625 to 1656, was later known as ‘Annales of his own life dedicated to his children’. However, the edition published in 1681 was evidently compiled from the ‘Annales’, another manuscript that dealt with Whitelocke’s life after 1656, and previously published pamphlets: Ruth Spalding, ‘Whitelocke, Bulstrode (1605–1675)’, ODNB; Blair Worden, ‘Review: The “Diary” of Bulstrode Whitelocke’, EHR 108 (1993), 122–34.

103 104

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of Whitelocke’s piety were suppressed.105 Thus, the ‘Whitelocke’ who narrates Memorials was in part Anglesey’s literary creation. Additional links between the memoir and the puritan impulse are evident from the context of its publication. The Memorial’s printer was Nathaniel Ponder, the son of a Dissenting minister, and a client of the former Cromwellian Sir Charles Wolseley. Ponder’s sympathy for Dissenters and critics of the Court of Charles II is suggested from his publishing record. For instance, he was imprisoned in 1676 for publishing Andrew Marvell’s Rehearsal Transpos’d, which had satirised the writings of Samuel Parker, a strident advocate of the Restoration religious settlement. Soon afterwards, Ponder printed the first edition of Baptist preacher John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.106 The milieu of Memorials was clearly biased against the religious establishment. There are significant echoes in Memorials of Dissenters’ literary reaction to their proscription under the Restoration religious settlement. For example, the memoir counselled quiet forbearance in the face of popular hostility and exclusion from the political arena. This had been the reality for numerous firm adherents of the puritan impulse, following their purge from civic corporations and parish churches.107 It was a message of particular relevance to whigs, whose brief period of political advantage in the winter of 1680–1 had collapsed in the face of the Court’s alliance with the tories, and the rising tide of popular support for the Court and the Restoration settlement. Somewhat ironically, watchful quietism was eventually the editor of the Memorials fate. After his ejection from the Privy Council in August of 1682, Anglesey wrote an ‘advice’ to Charles II (published posthumously in 1694) in which he echoed Rushworth’s contention in Historical Collections that the civil wars ultimately were caused by an excessively long absence of Parliaments during Charles I’s personal rule.108 As edited by Anglesey, Memorials offered an ostensibly even-handed account of national politics within the generic conventions of neo-classical MacGillivray, Restoration Historians, pp. 122, 131; Worden, ‘Diary’, p. 123. Worden, ‘Diary’, p. 128; Plomer, Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers: 1668–1725, pp. 240–1. Ponder also reprinted the earl of Anglesey’s ‘Observations’ on the earl Castlehaven’s memoirs in 1682, which had reignited controversy over the relationship between Charles I and the Irish Confederate rebels in 1641; see Michael Percival-Maxwell, ‘The Anglesey– Ormond–Castlehaven Dispute, 1680–1682: Taking Sides about Ireland in England’, Taking Sides: Colonial and Confessional Mentalities in Early Modern Ireland, eds Vincent P. Carey and Ute Lotz-Heumann (Dublin, 2003), pp. 230–231. 107 George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 32–7. 108 Arthur Annesley, The Earl of Anglesey’s state of the government & kingdom: prepared and intended for His Majesty, King Charles II. In the year 1682 (1694), Wing T1000. 105 106

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history. Readers would be able trust both the veracity and political utility of its narrative.109 The Memorials’ minimalist–neutralist style, restrained use of commentary or moral reflection increased the probability that readers would seriously consider its political lessons.110 Thus pivotal events, such as the civil war’s battle at Edgehill, received short and indifferent summaries. Concerning that particular battle, Whitelocke noted that both forces had ‘performed their parts with great Valour and Bravery’.111 In stark contrast to officially sanctioned histories from the 1660s, Whitelocke reported the deaths of Cromwell and Bradshaw with no reference to portentous winds or to their posthumous exhumation and dismemberment.112 Of course, complete neutrality was not possible for a former Parliamentarian, and it was not difficult to detect where the narrator’s sympathies ultimately lay. For example, Whitelocke referred to royalist forces as ‘the enemy’. Additionally, he indirectly attacked popular royalism in an anecdote from the treaty of Uxbridge, in which he complained about the hostility of Oxford’s ‘rude multitude’ towards Parliament’s representatives. Part of the people called Whitelocke and his fellow Commissioners ‘Traitors, Rogues and Rebels’ and threw stones and dirt at their coaches. It had been, he commented ironically, ‘a great incouragement and reward for their service to them’, particularly since Parliament was working so hard to preserve their rights and liberties from slavery and popery.113 The Memorials’ moderate approach to its subject matter was important because it worked to undercut much of the rhetoric of moderation that had justified the Restoration settlement. The religious settlement especially, despite its proscription of the puritan impulse, had long been presented as the moderate middle way, and was necessary to ensure peace, stability and the endurance of right religion in England. By contrast, parliamentarians, the regimes of the Interregnum, contemporary critics of the Court and Dissenters, were all dangerous fanatics whose politics and piety threatened to throw the realm off course again.114 The Memorials used the language of moderation and the style of civil history to recapture the middle ground of political discourse for puritan politics and religion. The Memorials, Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 5–11, 211–13. 110 MacGillivray, Restoration Historians, pp. 137–9. 111 Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 61. 112 Whitelocke, Memorials, pp. 675, 687; cf. W.C., Commons Warre, p. 133; Heath, Brief Chronicle, sig. D6v, Heath, Intestine War, p. 408. 113 Whitelocke, Memorials, pp. 96, 147, 199; 107. 114 Montaño, Courting the Moderates, pp. 17–18, 157. 109

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Anglesey noted, was aimed at ‘the civil Reader’ who expected ‘an Honest Neutrality to make Profit and laudable Spoils from the Quarrels and Miscarriages of others’. Whitelocke’s political allegiance could not detract from the utility of his memoir, Angelsey argued, since he had been a man ‘so much upon the Stage during all the time of Action’ that, like the Roman historian Livy, Whitelocke had reported only, as would any gentleman, what happened ‘without Reflecting on Persons’. Additionally, Anglesey took a shot at tory polemicists with his contention that their habit of publicly invoking the party labels from a past civil war was characteristic of historians writing under tyrannical regimes. For example, it had been only in the time of Tacitus that the defeated supporters of the Roman Republic were castigated as ‘Rouges and Rigicides’.115 Memorials presented a moderate Presbyterian’s apparently detached and balanced memoir of an unfortunate and unwanted war. In line with other whiggish accounts, Whitelocke rejected the explanation put forward within sanctioned histories that the war was caused by a Calvinist conspiracy. Whitelocke placed greater emphasis on the accidental aspects of the war’s beginning. Puritan politicians had not planned to lead a revolt in 1641. Rather, the war originated from the disastrous convergence of the Irish rebellion in October 1641 and the king’s ‘sudden Action’ in January 1642 to arrest five members of Parliament. Indeed, the king’s precipitate action was ‘the first visible and apparent ground of all our following Miseries’.116 Whitelocke’s memoir echoed Rushworth’s critique of Charles I’s reliance on Archbishop Laud for political advice. It was very unfortunate for the kingdoms that the Archbishop had been ‘more busie in Temporal Affairs, and Matters of State, than his Predecessors of later times had been’. Likewise, the king’s Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria was indirectly culpable, Whitelocke contended, for the ill-advised departure from Westminster in January 1642.117 The king’s choice of advisors, as well as his style of government, had, in Whitelocke’s estimation, created profoundly difficult political problems for the Court. However, as a conscientious and loyal puritan subject, Whitelocke distanced himself from the trial of Charles I. Whitelocke blamed the king’s death on the Army. He claimed to resent the ease by which officers of the New Model were able to get the Rump Parliament ‘to do their most dirty work for them’. Similarly, Whitelocke roundly condemned Cromwell’s dissolution of Parliament in April 1653 as a blow to ‘honest and prudent Anglesey, ‘Publisher to the Reader’, Memorials, sigs A2, B2; B1v–B2. Whitelocke, Memorials, pp. 45, 50–1. 117 Whitelocke, Memorials, pp. 21, 25; 28; 32; 51–2. 115 116

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indifferent men’. Whitelocke’s own politics were characterised as precisely prudent and honest. Whenever Whitelocke had to justify a controversial decision, he showed that it was an attempt to achieve moderation in tempestuous times. For example, Whitelocke endeavoured throughout the 1650s to uphold the Commonwealth’s interest against the Army’s efforts to meddle in or remodel political affairs. Likewise, he defended his service on the Committee of Safety in 1659 in order to prevent its republican allies from reducing ‘the power of the laws’ and altering ‘the Magistracy, Ministry, and Government of the Nation’.118 Whitelocke’s politics and his piety did not, in other words, represent an inherent danger to the polity, but had been a moderating and ameliorating force throughout unprecedented political upheavals. The memoir’s moderate representation of puritan politics was nonetheless tempered with a recognition that all public endeavours, whatever their source and ambition, were subject to the volatility and disappointments characteristic of mundane affairs. This principle was demonstrated, for example, with the turn of events in April 1653, when the Parliament ‘famous through the World for its undertakings, actions, and successes, having subdued all their Enemies, were themselves overthrown, and ruined by their Servants’.119 Whitelocke’s chagrin recapitulated the struggle within some sanctioned histories of making sense of a popular revolt against a king as good as Charles I. In the end, both explained the seemingly inexplicable by acknowledging human inconstancy and sinfulness.120 Whitelocke, for instance, noted grimly that some of the same men who had cried loudly for the king’s execution in January 1649 in order to ingratiate themselves with the new regime were later ‘as clamorous for Justice for those that were the King’s Judges’.121 Significantly, by pointing out the mutability of human political affections, Whitelocke’s narrative was, consciously or not, invoking a powerful theme running through Dissenting literary culture in Restoration England. It was a theme that counselled watchful quietism as the best response to official proscription and periodic persecution. In light of the instability and uncertainty of temporal affairs, when the great are most likely to fall ‘when we think them highest’, Whitelocke’s narrative suggested patiently waiting on God’s intervention to vindicate puritan Here I disagree with MacGillivray, Restoration Historians, p. 126; Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 687, cf. pp. 354–5 for his service to the Commons during Pride’s purge. 119 Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 529. 120 The parallel with Christ, fashioned by Charles I while he was still living, went a long way towards resolving the conundrum; Perrinchief, Basilika (1662), pp. 71–2. 121 Whitelocke, Memorials, pp. 240; 368. 118

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politics and piety.122 Additionally, this lesson suggested that whigs ought to adopt a similar outlook as they moved towards an uncertain future, one in which a parliament might or might not be called upon to heal the divisions within the political nation or secure its Reformation. Tory pictures The titles of both William Dugdale’s Short View of the Late Troubles and Thomas May’s Arbitrary Government Display’d implied that these histories truly pictured the past. This was not, however, to be achieved by reflecting the past in its alterity but rather its correspondence with prominent aspects of the present. Dugdale’s history portrayed puritan–Presbyterians and whigs as historical types of reformist rebels whose continued existence would probably lead to another outbreak of violent civil and religious discord. Similarly, May’s work paralleled an imagined future spawned by whig politics with a memorable image of the Interregnum. The clear warning from May’s history was that tyranny, disorder and illegality were the logical and necessary outcome of puritan politics. Additionally, both works used the civil-war past to vindicate the Restoration settlements and the repression of those who stubbornly refused to be reconciled to it.123 Published in 1681, the Short View was the last major publication of a noted antiquary whose career was dedicated to literary acts of commemoration. In this particular instance, Dugdale’s book was intended as personal monument to the vileness of Charles I’s enemies.124 The Short View presented, he claimed, a true portrait of the perpetrators of the civil wars, puritan– Presbyterians and concomitantly, their descendants. ‘The main end of this Narrative’, Dugdale wrote, was ‘historically to shew the growth and effects of Presbytery.’  125 Despite this bluntness, the published version of the work

Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 529. William Dugdale, A Short View of the Late Troubles in England; Briefly Setting Forth, their Rise, Growth, and Tragical Conclusion (1681), Wing D2492; May, Arbitrary Government. 124 MacGillivray, Restoration Historians, pp. 55–7; Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995), p. 226. For vindications of Charles I, see Dugdale, Short View, pp. 378–84. 125 Dugdale, Short View, p. 132. 122 123

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was arguably moderate in comparison to the antecedent manuscript.126 Yet even the softened rhetoric of the published version required Dugdale to seek his readers’ pardon for his intemperate remarks about Presbyterians and parliamentarians. His denunciations of them were, he admitted, the consequence of his ‘just indignation conceiv’d against those men, who under specious pretences mask’d the most black designs’.127 For Dugdale, Presbyterians represented a principled danger to the safety of the polity and the security of its religion because they were always arch political and religious hypocrites. They had started a war against Charles I because they claimed his regime was tending toward popery and arbitrary government. Yet when they achieved power themselves, the Presbyterians overturned the ancient constitution and pulled out the rug from under England’s established Protestant Church, thereby causing immeasurably greater damage to the body politic and the Protestant cause than they had imagined was the fault of Charles I during the 1630s. Dugdale’s Short View catalogued examples of Presbyterian hypocrisy and perfidy. For example, he pointed out how the Parliament hijacked by the Presbyterians, despite their claims to be defending the liberty of the subject, had oppressed the nation with high taxes and run roughshod over the law.128 The book drew from parts of Peter Heylyn’s history of Presbyterianism to explain why and how they had managed to stage a revolt. Their use of preaching and polemical print to turn the citizens of London against the king was executed according to the ‘pattern of Geneva’.129 Likewise, Dugdale tried to show that Jesuit political theory epitomised in the writings of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, and Presbyterian principles exemplified in the works of George Buchanan and John Knox, were essentially the same. Thus Bellarmine wrote that ‘In the kingdoms of men, the power of the King is from the people’, and Buchanan in De Jure Regni apud Scotos From a comparison of the manuscript and published version of the text, Stephen Roberts argues that Dugdale toned down his attacks on civil war puritans in the latter to avoid offending his Presbyterian friends, including John Rushworth; Stephen K. Roberts, ‘“Ordering and Methodizing”: William Dugdale in Restoration England’, William Dugdale, Historian, 1605–1686: His Life, His Writings and His County, eds Christopher Dyer and Catherine Richardson (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 66–88. I am grateful to Dr Roberts for permission to read this essay prior to publication. It is also probable that Dugdale moderated his tone to bring the work more in line with the generic protocols of classical historical writing, which called for balance and the appearance of impartiality. 127 Dugdale, Short View, sig. A2; sig. A3v. 128 Dugdale, Short View, pp. 577–97; 112, 127–8, 130. 129 Dugdale, Short View, p. 36, citing Heylen, Aerius, pp. 11-12, and Cyprianus, p. 9; on the importance of London to the ‘contrivers’, see also pp. 40, 66, 79–80, 82, 87, 92, 99. 126

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similarly claimed that ‘the people may confer the Government on whom they please’.130 As further proof of the papist–Presbyterian parallel, Dugdale showed that during the 1630s and 1640s both Scottish and English Presbyterians followed an action plan initially executed in the sixteenth century by the French Holy League. So complete was the convergence of aims and methods, Dugdale noted, that ‘we have just reason enough to conceive that the Contrivers of this Rebellion, did borrow the Plott from thence’.131 Additionally, he intentionally conflated puritan resistance in 1642 with regicidal republicanism in order to accent Presbyterian guilt for the civil war and downplay any exoneration that might have accrued to them after helping to bring about the Restoration.132 Dugdale believed it was a sign of God’s providence that one seditious religious group – the Presbyterians who had ‘first kindled the flames of Civil war amongst us’ – were toppled by the Independents ‘upon the like principles’. Nonetheless, Presbyterians were still ultimately at fault for the regicide since they had ‘originally put themselves in arms’ against their anointed king.133 The Short View’s recapitulation of the anti-puritan explanation of the civil war’s beginnings and its papist–puritan–Presbyterian parallelism vindicated the Restoration settlement’s official proscription of the puritan impulse. This form of parallelism, evident also in Lovell, Dryden and Nalson, was clearly intended to represent puritan piety and politics, whether embodied in Catholic Leaguers or Dissenters, as the true enemy of Protestantism and the constitution.134 The political turmoil of the 1640s was a typical example of the truism that rebellion begins with ‘the fairest Pretences for Reforming of somewhat amiss in the Government’. England’s experience of civil war was essentially the re-manifestation of similar post-Reformation rebellions undertaken with the pretence of enhancing public piety. While the names had changed, the principles, hypocrisy and deeds were the same. Seeing the wars in this way made it easy to view the controversies stirred up by the whigs, ostensibly over fears for the constitution and Protestantism, as evidence of similar designs. The whigs had won followers by their Dugdale, Short View, p. 19. Dugdale, Short View, pp. 600–50 on the Holy League. 132 The prime mover in Dugdale’s account of the Restoration was, unsurprisingly, General George Monck; Dugdale, Short View, pp. 480–8; see Mark Goldie, The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691 Volume I, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 159. 133 Dugdale, Short View, pp. 227–8; 375–8. John Milton made the same charge just after the king’s trial in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), ed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 191–7. 134 Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003), p. 93. 130 131

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declarations in support of liberty and Protestantism, all the while hiding their real ambition, which was ‘to get into power, and so to possess themselves of the Estates and Fortunes of their more opulent Neighbours’.135 The particulars of the complaints across time were less important for understanding what had happened than recognising that the outcomes of such activities were identical, and that the outcomes stemmed from similar intentions. The most dramatic tory civil war history released during this period was Thomas May of Chichester’s Arbitrary Government Display’d. Thomas May’s text demonised the intentions and methods of mid-century puritans and contemporary whig politicians. The structure of the book’s narrative and its images evinced May’s desire to create a memory of the civil wars and Interregnum that vindicated and legitimated the Restoration settlement’s proscription of puritan politics. Unless the people remained loyal to the Restoration political and religious settlements, they could expect to fall into a political abyss. May had perceived that a ‘spirit of discontent’ had possessed a large number of people, some of whom expressed great fears for the safety of English Protestantism and the possibility of arbitrary government in the future.136 He had written a history, he stated, in response to such fears. This book showed in word and image that opposition and resistance to the legitimate authorities, whatever the reason, gave birth to monstrous regimes. In other words, the greatest danger to the polity originated from the principles that animated both the opponents of Charles I and the critics of the Restoration regime. May’s narrative vindicated the Restoration settlement by revealing the continual danger that Presbyterian politics represented to the polity. First, like Dugdale, May highlighted Presbyterian hypocrisy. They made a name for themselves by expressing concern that elements in the Church or Court were leading the nation down the road to arbitrary government, but this was a dodge; they were diverting attention from what they sought for themselves. ‘What in themselves they indulg’d and pleaded for, as their right,’ May argued, ‘they will abhor and will punish in others.’ As instances of this two-faced politics, May contrasted the fiscal exactions and judicial irregularities that the nation endured under the Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes with the much-lamented harshness of Charles I’s personal rule. Thus, while puritans had denounced the punishments meted out to men, such as Prynne and Burton, who published critical assessments of the personal rule or the Laudian programme, the Rump had had no difficulty Roper, ‘Language of Political Conflict’, pp. 40–5; Dugdale, Short View, sig. A2. May, Arbitrary Government, pp. 36; 3.

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incarcerating John Lilburne in 1649 for publishing a pamphlet attacking that regime’s legitimacy.137 Likewise, republican politicians attempted to ban petitioning in 1659, despite the fact that in the early 1640s ‘these very men, had set such examples of this nature so frequently by getting Subscriptions to Petitions and Remonstrances to the Authority then in being’.138 Similarly, the maintenance of the Army had required the Rump to collect ‘a standing Tax of ninety thousand pound a Month’, which May argued was a strange way for the men ‘who made such a stir about Ship-Money’ to help the nation ‘better see their Freedom and Liberty’.139 The bulk of May’s account focused on the consequences, rather than the causes, of the civil wars. The emphasis stemmed from his wish to show that puritan politics naturally produced arbitrary government, which was the great evil that whigs claimed would occur under a Catholic king.140 In fact, tyranny had been the inevitable consequence of the puritan-inspired resistance of the Long Parliament. Although the history offered, May acknowledged, ‘only a brief Narrative of these Usurpers’ proceedings’, it nonetheless was sufficient to reveal to the world a ‘true Picture of Arbitrary Government, and Tyrannical Rule, and of those times’. A memorable exposé of the horrors that triumphant puritan politics produced would, May argued, prevent sympathy for contemporaries whose principles and ambitions would naturally lead to a similar outcome. May was clearly convinced of the necessity of visualising for readers the authentic implications of puritan politics, in both the 1640s and the 1680s. As I noted earlier, Arbitrary Government opened with May using metaphors of representation and orientation to assert that his book reflected the dangers of puritan politics ‘in a Glass’. A true view of their outcome would enable readers to steer clear of ‘the same Rocks’ that had brought down Charles I, thereby avoiding again ‘totally the subverting the Monarchy and fundamental laws of the land’.141 To further that end, May’s history May, Arbitrary Government, pp. 191; 52–3; he was referring indirectly to the punishments meted out to Prynne, Bastwick and Burton in 1637. 138 May, Arbitrary Government, p. 191. 139 May, Arbitrary Government, p. 55; he also claimed that the first Dutch war forced ‘the Junto’ to assess ‘a heavy tax upon the People of £120 000 per month’; p. 84. 140 For example, [Elkanah Settle], The Character of a Popish Successour, and what England may Expect from Such a One … (1681), Wing S2672; Stephen College, A Prospect of a Popish Successor, engraving (1681), British Museum Satires 1110, discussed in Helen Pierce, ‘The Devil’s Bloodhound: Roger L’Estrange Caricatured’, Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Michael Hunter (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 237–54 at 249. 141 May, Arbitrary Government, pp. 3; 6. 137

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Figure 1. Whig printer Nathanael Crouch pictures the downfall of Charles I in The Wars in England (1681). Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. 125

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Figure 2. Images of enslavement in Thomas May’s Arbitrary Government Display’d (1682). 126

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Figure 3. Images of liberation in Thomas May’s Arbitrary Government Display’d (1682). 127

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Figure 4. An image about the civil war. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. 128

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Figure 5. An image of the Interregnum.

used two types of graphic images to reveal the disastrous consequences of puritan politics. First, May included pictures of events that illustrated that puritan agitation resulted in arbitrary rule and slavery. The first group of images included a portrayal of the entry into London of Parliament’s New Model Army, which had been a prelude to its usurpation of power (Figure 2). The illegitimacy of the New Model’s intervention in national politics was evident by their implied movement from right to left, against the grain of normal action and reading.142 By contrast, the second set of pictures depicted the end of puritan rule as the liberation from arbitrary government. Pictured were General Monck’s march into London, Monck and his soldiers pulling down the chains over the City’s gates, a free Parliament voting for the king, and, finally, the entry of Charles II into London (Figure 3). The image of Monck’s arrival showed the movement occurring from left to right, consistent with an action that restored right and order. Similarly, in the depiction of Charles II’s triumphant ride into London, the gaze of the rider was aimed directly at the reader, locking the viewer into the same perspective of the event as the crowds who witnessed and celebrated the end of tyranny.143

May, Arbitrary Government, 1682, Wing M1416A; 1683, Wing M1416B, p. 24. May, Arbitrary Government, 1682, Wing M1416A; 1683, Wing M1416B; Wing M1416C, 1683, p. 200.

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The allegorical frontispieces to the second and third editions of Arbitrary Government were the other key prescriptive images that May used to represent puritan politics as both the cause of the civil war and the tyranny of the Interregnum.144 The 1682 frontispiece (Figure 4) was lifted virtually whole from the poet Frances Quarles’s The Shepheards Oracles, first published in 1645.145 The picture conveyed clearly the historical basis of the Restoration settlement, showing the civil war as the product of the puritan impulse. The civil war was a struggle between law, order and the Church on the one hand; and religious incendiaries on the other. King Charles was shown wielding a sword in defence of the tree of Religion, which was simultaneously watered by Archbishop Laud. Attacking the tree were a horde of imps with axes and picks, probably representing sectarian Protestants, a knife-toting Catholic priest with one arm around the trunk, and a pistol and pike waving tub-preacher. The preacher’s pike had already impaled a bishop’s hat, the liturgy and the Church’s canons. From the top-right corner a sword of wrath hung down, grasped by either an angelic or a divine hand. This image was a relatively straightforward royalist portrayal of what the conflict during the early 1640s was about. The picture did not, however, correspond well with the overall historical image of May’s narrative, which concerned the regimes of the 1650s. The frontispiece to the third edition of Arbitrary Government, by contrast, was a far better reflection of May’s historical agenda, which was to ‘Picture … the most horrid and devouring Dragon, called Arbitrary and Tyrannical Usurpation’. Historically, visual representations of monsters were supposed to verify the reality of a creature understood as being a sign of God’s displeasure at human sin, including the sins of rebellion and disorder.146 The monster depicted at the front of Arbitrary Government, by contrast, was intended to verify the book’s representation of what to May was the chief aspect of the years 1648 to 1660.147 Entitled ‘The Common wealth ruleing with a standing Army’, the frontispiece represented the abominable product of puritan politics.148 Pictured was a large dragon stretching across The second edition was a re-release of the first (Wing M1416B); the third edition, published in 1683, is now very rare (Wing M1416C). 145 Frances Quarles, The Shepheards Oracles (1645), Wing Q114A. 146 Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes, ‘Introduction’, Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2004), pp. 3–13. 147 Ankersmit, ‘Statements, Texts and Pictures’, p. 228. 148 For another account of the image, see Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Politics and Propaganda from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987), p. 135. 144

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the horizontal plane, taking up around half its total space (Figure 5). Below the belly of the dragon was a crowd of men surrounded by the beast’s chainlike tail, ironically labelled ‘liberties’. Above the chained people was written the slogan ‘O wonderfull reformation’. Additionally, out of the mouth of the dragon were written the words, ‘A blessed reformation’. Together, these textual signs suggest that the image belongs firmly within the culture of anti-puritanism.149 A person who called for a blessed Reformation was genuinely monstrous. As a visual representation of May’s argument, ‘Common wealth ruleing’ was both memorable and problematic. The frontispiece was memorable for paralleling graphically the politics that produced the English republic with a terrible beast. Nonetheless, the picture created representational difficulties for May. The amount of explanatory text written onto the picture suggests that May was not wholly confident that simply depicting a puritan-inspired republic as a terrible beast would generate a stable view of the 1650s and their meaning. Unlike earlier images of the monstrous in polemical print,150 the amount of text employed on the ‘Commonwealth ruleing’ to explain the relation of the parts to the whole, over-determined the viewer’s response. Indeed, the explanatory text was so prominent that the frontispiece assumed a diagram-like quality. It might be that part of the reason May inserted so much text onto the image was because representations of the monstrous or the Beast had been typically associated, at least in England, with anti-Catholic, rather than anti-puritan, apocalyptic discourse.151 Nevertheless, the frontispiece portrayed both May’s certainty about the horror of the Interregnum and his uncertainty about the correct reception of his representation. After all, it was not all that difficult to imagine the country’s future under a Catholic king as a triumph for the Beast of Babylon.

Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice’, Religious Politics in PostReformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke, eds Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Woodbridge, 2006) pp. 80–97. 150 See, for example, John Vicars, Behold Romes Monster (1643), Wing V294; Anon., The Kingdomes Monster (1643), Wing K587; K.M. Brammall, ‘Monstrous Metamorphous: Nature, Morality and the Rhetoric of Monstrosity in Tudor England’, Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996), 3–21. On images from this era more generally, see Helen Pierce, Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (New Haven, 2008). 151 Revelation 13.1–10; Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘“The Antichrist, The Babilon, The Great Dragon”: Oliver Cromwell, Andrew Marvell and the Apocalyptic Monstrous’, Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2004), pp. 93–123. 149

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Partisan parallelism In 1681 John Phillips, a polemicist hostile to the prospect of a Catholic successor, reminded readers that the Act of Indemnity had enjoined people not to revive ‘any Name or Names, or other words of Reproach any way tending to revive the Memory of the late Differences’.152 Nonetheless, the early 1680s witnessed a flurry of published historical writing about the civil wars and Interregnum. This happened in part because the government’s power to censor printed matter ended, albeit temporarily, with the lapse of the Licencing Act in 1679. For the first time since the construction of the Clarendon Code, works could be published that openly contested the officially sanctioned historical memory of civil wars, which scapegoated puritan politics in order to justify the Restoration settlement. The heightened recourse to the civil war past in print was also a product of a struggle within the political nation over the future direction of the polity. There was never any doubt that during a political crisis the past would be invoked repeatedly as a guide to action in the future – the crucial struggle was over whose representation of the national past should orient the polity’s direction. By the death of Charles II in 1685, the perspectives provided by published civil-war historical writing were connected to emerging political identities. Whig views of recent history attempted to show that experience proved that Stuart monarchs alone could not always be trusted to safeguard the constitution and the Elizabethan Reformation. The works of Rushworth, Crouch and Whitelocke, for example, encouraged readers to see similarities between the Laudian episcopate and the bishops who held up the exclusion bills in the House of Lords. More crucially, they presented starkly the danger that a long Interregnum between Parliaments posed to the kingdom. Like concerns over the Court’s seemingly increasing affinity with Catholicism, this perception of what the future held was grounded in part on a cultural memory of Catholic atrocities against Protestants.153 Without parliamentary intervention, Protestants could once again roast at Smithfield.154 Additionally, the whig view of the conflicted past supported calls for the return of Parliament to settle the succession, and to reconfigure the Restoration religious settlement so that it would comprehend moderate Dissenters. By contrast, Frankland, Nalson, Dugdale and May posited the identity of the plotters who had caused the civil wars, and those seeking

John Phillips, New News from Toryland and Tantivyshire (1681), Wing P2095, p. 3. De Krey, Restoration and Revolution, pp. 134–6. 154 Anon., Memoirs of Queen Mary’s days (1679), Wing M1669. 152 153

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to alter both the line of succession and the Restoration settlement.155 Like earlier sanctioned histories of the civil wars, tory accounts blamed the wars’ outbreak on a whiggish political impulse that was supported by hypocritical claims to piety and concern for the commonwealth. The contemporary instantiation of the puritan impulse in Dissenters and whigs represented the greatest threat to public safety and genuine Protestantism. The only difference between 1641 and 1681 was that the outcome could be altered by clinging to the Restoration political and religious settlements.156 The fact that James II was generally welcomed in 1685, as a defender of the ancient constitution and Protestant settlement erected in 1662, was partly the result of the political nation’s assent to the tory view of England’s recent history.157 To a degree, this was because the tory perspective corresponded to things that had really happened.158 Moreover, by focusing on the outcomes of action rather than the intentions of historical actors, tory civil-war histories were able to reason convincingly that the puritan impulse in politics and religion had led naturally to civil and spiritual disaster for the nation. The Elizabethan Reformation was overturned, and the civil war did result in the death of the king and a largely Army-ruled republic, all of which were very unpopular. Furthermore, despite the diagrammatical qualities of the second frontispiece to May’s Arbitrary Government Display’d, the tories did better visually in representing the conflicted past, most notably with Roger L’Estrange’s The Committee, Or, Popery in Masquerade.159 For their part, whigs could argue that the politics of Charles I’s personal rule undermined the constitution and the Protestant character of the Church, but their examples of this outcome, by contrast, were underwhelming: the absence of Parliament, one fiscal innovation in Ship Money and a handful of brutalised puritans in Burton, Bastwick and Prynne. Ironically, logocentric puritan politics made for better historical pictures than the visually sophisticated court of King Charles I.160 Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (2006), pp. 41–9. 156 Gary De Krey, ‘Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, 1679–1682’, Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688, eds Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 245–8. 157 Mark Knights, ‘The Tory Interpretation of History in the Rage of Parties’, HLQ 68 (2005), 353–73 at 356. 158 De Krey, Restoration and Revolution, p. 136. 159 Roger L’Estrange, The Committee, Or, Popery in Masquerade (1680), Wing L1226; for a short discussion of the image, see Harris, Restoration, pp. 249–50. 160 Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven, 2011), pp. 190–229. 155

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Remarkably, just under four years after his accession, James II was living in exile, having lost his crown to his daughter Mary and son-in-law William of Orange. The constitutional and political consequences of what was soon called the Glorious Revolution transformed the context in which the conflicted past was used. The next chapter will examine how under these new circumstances civil-war histories sought to identify the groups and principles that had and would again pose the greatest danger to the public, in order to vindicate or to denounce the changes wrought by 1688.

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4 Struggling over Settlements in Civil-War Histories, 1696–1714

The Parliament that assembled to construct a settlement around the revolution of 1688 took a new approach to the question of remembering and forgetting the conflicted past. Several laws enacted by the Convention Parliament had profound implications for the cultural memory of the civil wars and Interregnum. Most significantly, under the Toleration Act of 1689, Trinitarian Protestant Dissenters could worship freely, subject to the granting of licences by local magistrates.1 This meant that for the first time since the Reformation, the crown legally relinquished its role as promoter and enforcer of religious conformity. Moreover, religious toleration implied that the spiritual communities of Dissenters did not pose a threat to the civil polity or the national Church. However, the Convention Parliament did not sever the link made by the Cavalier Parliament between the legally established religion and the polity. Only communicant members of the Church of England were permitted to serve in civil and military offices. Thus, while the Convention Parliament was prepared to jettison a key component of the Elizabethan Reformation – uniformity of public worship –it left untouched the crux of the Restoration settlement – the unity of the

E.N. Williams, The Eighteenth Century Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 42–6.

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English State and the Church by law established.2 Underlying this peculiar compromise was the conviction that Dissenters were not necessarily dangerous to the national Church, the State and their symbiotic connection (instantiated in the monarch’s role as Supreme Governor of the Church), but also not fully trustworthy. After all, their puritan forebears were to blame for the civil war. By the turn of the eighteenth century, and beyond, histories about England’s civil-war and Interregnum past were intended to vindicate the consequences of either the arrival of William of Orange or else the return of Charles II.3 While it is true that published historical writing was a useful mode to advance partisan positions within the emerging late Stuart public sphere,4 civil-war history was written and published for more than the

G.V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975); Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1688 and the Structure of Political Argument’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83 (1983), 513–19; Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution: Religion and War (Oxford, 1999); Tony Claydon, William III (2002), pp. 7–50; Julia Rudolph, Revolution by Degrees: James Tyrell and Whig Political Thought in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke, 2002); John Spurr, The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–1714 (Harlow, 2006), pp. 193–234; Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (2006); Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 235–46; John Spurr, The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–1714 (Harlow, 2006), pp. 193–234; Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, 2009). 3 Mark Knights, ‘Roger L’Estrange, Printed Petitions and the Problem of Intentionality’, Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900: Essays in Honour of Colin Davis, eds Jonathan Scott and John Morrow (Exeter, 2008), pp. 113–30. 4 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated by Thomas Luckmann (1989); Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, eds Peter Lake and Steve Pincus (Manchester, 2007), pp. 1–30; Mark Knights, ‘How Rational was the Later Stuart Public Sphere?’, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, eds Peter Lake and Steve Pincus (Manchester, 2007), pp. 252–67.

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service of party interest.5 Civil-war histories contributed to an important debate about the future of the nation: was the preservation of the exclusive Restoration settlement still necessary for the security of English Protestantism and the safety of the polity?   6 At the heart of this debate was the question of historic culpability for past conflict. The answer provided by the history, however, was crucially concerned with the present and the future. Determining who or what was to blame for the civil wars also showed who or what represented the greatest danger to peace and Protestantism in the present, and whether or not retaining the proscription of the puritan impulse was essential to minimising or even eliminating the threat. A few histories posited that the post-Revolution status quo was sufficient by dividing blame for the civil war between the combatants, or else by attempting to avoid the issue of responsibility altogether. Relatedly, a handful of histories addressed the question by shifting their focus from blame for the outbreak of civil war to the king’s death. The landscape of civil-war historical writing had changed after 1689. The Restoration settlement, however, remained the focalising lens for most civil-war historical writing in the late Stuart era. At issue was the peculiar compromise worked out by the Convention Parliament. On the one hand, religious toleration appeared to renounce a key component of the Restoration polity. On the other hand, the established Church and public offices remained off-limits to adherents of the puritan impulse. Admittedly, a few histories tried to show that retaining the proscription of David C. Douglas, English Scholars, 1660–1730 (1951); Laird Okie, Augustan Historical Writing: Histories of England in the English Enlightenment (Lanham, MY, 1991); Royce MacGillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague, 1974), pp. 98–119; G. Watson, ‘The Augustan Civil War’, Review of English Studies 36 (1985), 321–37; J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 65–79; A.B. Worden, ed., Edmund Ludlow, A Voice from the Watchtower: Part Five: 1660–1662 (1978), and idem, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (2002), pp. 37–114; but cf. Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), pp. 94–6; Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: The Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca, 1987), pp. 155–62; Anthony Claydon, William III and the Godly Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 100–5; Melinda Zook, ‘Restoration Remembered: The First Whigs and the Making of their History’, The Seventeenth Century 17 (2002), 213–34; John Seed, Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in Eighteenth-Century England (Edinburgh, 2008). 6 Geoff Baldwin, ‘The “Public” as a Rhetorical Community in Early Modern England’, Communities in Early Modern England, eds Alexandra Walsham and Phil Withington (Manchester, 2000), p. 203; Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002), pp. 65ff. 5

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Dissenters from public offices and the national Church was unnecessary because King Charles I, not puritan parliamentarians, was to blame for the civil war. However, most published histories that took a stand on the question of culpability recapitulated the anti-puritan position of earlier sanctioned works. For some, reminding readers that it had been the puritan ancestors of contemporary Dissenters who plunged the realm into civil conflict was sufficient justification for retaining the exclusive Restoration settlement. For others, puritan war-guilt was good reason for readers and the nation at large to reconsider the rationale for religious toleration. To such people it seemed that Dissenters were even more dangerous after 1689 than before. Generally, the more supportive a historian was of the achievement of the Glorious Revolution, the more likely he was to suggest that the political nation could afford to forget the question of puritan culpability. Indeed, for some the real danger to peace and Protestantism lay across the English Channel. This was the message Revd White Kennett preached in 1704 on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution. Kennett’s sermon essentially blamed the outbreak of the civil war and ultimately the regicide on the pernicious influence of French Catholicism, the same force with which the nation was then at war. By marrying Henrietta Maria, King Charles had brought over to England ‘Evils and Mischiefs that disturb’d his whole Reign’. For someone such as Mary Astell, however, Kennett’s casual linkage of French influence at Charles I’s court and the civil war was simply a ruse intended to distract people from the fact that there still existed ‘a Party, and that a restless and busie one, who act by those very Principles that brought the Royal Martyr to the Block’.7 The continuing danger posed by the contemporary adherents of puritan politics and religion, whigs and Dissenters, made the retention of the Restoration settlement the bare minimum for public safety and the preservation of English Protestantism. Most late Stuart civil-war histories likewise suggested that security and peace for the future depended on retaining in memory the hitherto dominant explanation of who was truly guilty for the civil war. This chapter examines the struggle over the political and religious implications of the Restoration and Glorious Revolution waged through civil war histories published between the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 and the accession of the first Hanoverian monarch. Following the end of licencing, successive governments used libel prosecutions at common law to maintain White Kennett, A Compassionate Enquiry into the Causes of the Civil War ... (1704); pp. 4, 6, 12; Mary Astell, An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom: In an Examination of Dr. Kennett’s Sermon … (1704), p. 58.

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a degree of control over what could be broadcast in print. Nevertheless, in the absence of censorship, a relatively free press emerged in England, with profound implications for the cultural memory of the civil wars. Histories of the conflicted past which the Restoration regime would have considered seditious could be and were printed. Often such works stimulated the publication of other histories intended to refute their arguments. The end of government censorship was thus crucial for ensuring that civil-war histories developed a dialogical quality that remains in place to the present day.8 The chapter begins by examining those works that attempted to divide blame or even avoid assigning it altogether as a way of suggesting that the Glorious Revolution had truly settled the nation. The remainder of the analysis concerns histories that gave sole responsibility to a person or a party, both as a means of identifying the greatest present threat to the public and as a way of vindicating or undermining the exclusive Restoration settlement. Civil war memory in the service of consensus Between 1696 and 1706 Roger Coke, a political economist, James Welwood, royal physician, and White Kennett, an Anglican clergyman, each released a history of the previous century whose chief aim was to defend the revolution of 1688. Their approach to the question of who should be blamed for the civil wars was crucially connected to their conviction that the Glorious Revolution and its settlement were the best guarantee of a safe and stable future for the kingdom and its Protestant religion. While these histories relieved puritans of sole responsibility for the conflict, they did not suggest that the time was right to remove the civil disabilities placed on their descendants by the Restoration settlement. Additionally, these works were meant to foster a view of the conflicted past that would encourage English Protestants to unite themselves against their common foes – Jacobites at home and French papists in Europe. Coke’s account of the Stuarts’ tenure as kings of England showed readers how grateful they should be for the arrival of William and Mary. After all that King William had done to save the nation, ‘by god’s blessing’, from the danger of the French king, Coke argued that it was ridiculous for anyone to want the restoration of James II. Coke compared Jacobitism to the counterfactual wish of Christians living under Emperor Constantine Raymond Astbury, ‘The Renewal of the Licensing Act in 1693 and its Lapse in 1695’, The Library, 5th series, 33 (1978), 296–322; Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2004), pp. 223–38.

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that the notorious persecutors Diocletian and Maxentius would return.9 Coke’s The Detection of the Court and State of England during the Four Last Reigns highlighted the dynasty’s lamentable political failings: ‘these last four kings of the Scottish race’, he declared, ‘which should have been the Guardians of England, in preserving the Laws and Constitutions of it, and to have maintained the Honour of it abroad, made it their business to have subverted them’. As rulers, the Stuarts had a habit of making their will into law, leading invariably to what Coke called ‘a divided Dominion’. Significantly, Coke faulted Charles I for attempting to govern in the manner of his absolutist Bourbon relatives. His dealings with Parliament during the 1620s, and his personal rule during the 1630s, were ‘Perfectly French’ and eventually ‘brought on a miserable War’. Indeed, Coke claimed that the king’s over-reliance on his royal prerogative was leading the kingdoms into tyranny. If it had not been for the actions of the Long Parliament putting a ‘full stop to the Kings Absolute Will and Pleasure’, he averred, ‘God only knows where it would have ended’; clearly, it would not have been good.10 Despite the implication that the Stuarts had an almost genetic disposition to run rough-shod over their subjects’ liberties, Coke’s history did not completely vindicate the Long Parliament. His story pointed out that the summer of 1641 represented a brief moment of constitutional equilibrium that had been undermined by a ‘Faction’ of parliamentarians seeking to alter the Elizabethan religious settlement. Subsequently, the Faction challenged the king’s authority while promising ‘to defend the Protestant religion, defend the person and office of the king, the privileges of Parliament, and liberties of the subject’, yet hardly anyone had agreed that these things needed the Faction’s special protection. Thus, differences of opinion in religious affairs had wrecked the balance in the constitution and led to civil conflict. Moreover, Coke argued, Parliament’s demand for control over the militia in 1642 was as much an assault on the fundamental law as the king’s personal rule had been. Coke’s condemnation of a religiously motivated parliamentary cohort clearly recapitulated the anti-puritan explanation for the civil wars that underlay the exclusive Restoration settlement. He observed that in contemporary England, men as obstinate as the Faction were clinging to their religious opinions to the extent that they ‘think themselves thereby discharged from joining with other Christians, in celebrating Praises and Roger Coke, The Detection of the Court and State of England during the Four Last Reigns, and the Inter-regnum. The Second Edition Corrected (1696), Wing C4974, sigs A5r–A6r; Book IV, p. 42. 10 Coke, The Detection, sig. A3r; Book I, pp. 6, 130, 133–4; Book II, pp. 72–3, 1; pp. 42–3, 54. 9

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Thanksgiving to God, for the publick Benefits they alike partake’, which underlined for Coke the necessity of retaining the Restoration settlement’s proscription of the puritan impulse for the foreseeable future.11 James Welwood’s Memoirs of the Most Material Transactions in England for the Last Hundred Years was the closest thing to an official history to be released after the end of pre-publication licensing. Written originally at Queen Mary’s request for her personal edification, the history took as its chief purpose to rally readers in support of the Revolution and King William’s regime. By restoring harmony between the crown’s prerogatives and the subjects’ liberties, the Revolution had, according to Welwood, finally accomplished what the Restoration settlements had attempted but failed to do. Similarly, Welwood’s discussion of the recent past, including the civil wars and Interregnum, aspired to foster social harmony. Previous histories were, Welwood declared, blighted by the sort of partisanship that he had ‘endeavour’d to avoid’. It is clear that Welwood believed consensus concerning the meaning of the past conflict would be best achieved by downplaying its significance and accentuating its accidental origin.12 By dividing the blame and foregrounding historical contingency, Welwood’s Material Transactions dissociated the memory of the conflicted past from partisan struggles in the present. People hostile to Dissenters could not use the civil-war past as evidence that contemporary adherents of the puritan impulse likewise planned to overthrow the Church and monarchy, while similarly, critics of the Restoration settlement could not argue that those who cherished the memory of King Charles the Martyr wanted to bring back his personal rule. While Welwood did not think the nation was ready to forget the midcentury conflict, his Material Transactions downplayed its memory and by implication its significance for the post-Revolution polity. For example, the narrative covered in just over ninety-eight pages the reigns of Elizabeth, James I and Charles I, including the civil war, which together lasted nearly a century; by contrast, James II’s rule, which lasted less than four years, required eighty-four pages. Additionally, of the twenty-three appendices that reprinted important documents or letters, eleven concerned events or reflections from 1685 to 1688. The chronological structure of Welwood’s history clearly implied that the most memorable transaction from the recent past, the Glorious Revolution, should orient readers’ thinking about the relationship between the past and the present. Furthermore, although the civil wars could not yet be forgotten, Welwood’s explanation of their Coke, The Detection, Book II, pp. 132; 133, 153; sigs A6v–C5v. James Welwood, Memoirs of the Most Material Transactions in England, for the Last Hundred Years, Preceding the Revolution of 1688 (1700), pp. 113, 147; sigs A7r–8v.

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origin was designed to discourage the sort of remembering that spurred political and religious conflict in the present. Firstly, Material Transactions emphasised the faults on both sides. King Charles I was undoubtedly a good man, Welwood acknowledged, yet ultimately his regime collapsed because he chose to listen to bad advice, and more seriously, possessed an ‘Immoderate Desire of Power, beyond what the Constitution did allow’.13 Similarly, Welwood characterised the Long Parliament as a ‘great assembly’ that was derailed from its good purpose ‘by a Chain of concurring Accidents ripen’d for destruction’. As the last statement indicates, the second key component of Welwood’s consensual explanation of the conflict was to emphasise its contingent beginning. For example, when discussing the crucial period between the king’s return to Westminster from Scotland in late 1641 and his precipitate departure in January 1642, Welwood argued that Charles I was undone by ‘a continued Series of Misfortunes … and several favourable Accidents that seem’d from time to time to promise better Events’. Significantly, Welwood concluded that the question of which of the protagonists caused the irreparable breach of 1642 was not really important once the killing started; ‘whatever side begun the War, it was carried on in the beginning with equal successes’.14 The tragedy of Englishmen accidentally at war with each other was something all readers could agree upon, and lament. Like Welwood, the compiler of the volume of the Complete History of England that concerned the seventeenth century, Revd White Kennett, saw historical writing as an important means to build a consensus around the achievement of 1688.15 By granting toleration to Dissenters, the Glorious Revolution fulfilled the original promise of liberty to tender consciences that underlay the Restoration. Although Dissenters were still subject to civil disabilities, they were free to cooperate with Church Protestants in the spiritual uplift of the people – particularly those fallen into sin and vice, and in the world-historical struggle of English arms against French Catholic hegemony. As an Anglican clergyman, Kennett did not narrate the civilwar past to vindicate puritan politics or spirituality. However, as a Church Whig, he was concerned to demonstrate that the contemporary remnants of that impulse – moderate Dissenters – did not endanger the stability of the polity or the integrity and authenticity of the established Protestant church. To this end, he showed that England had not suffered the disastrous effects of a puritan–Presbyterian rebellion. Relatedly, Kennett argued that Welwood, Memoirs, pp. 261–402; pp. 3, 7; pp. 18, 19, 87. Welwood, Material Transactions, pp. 45, 74, 66. 15 [White Kennett], A Complete History of England: With the Lives of All the Kings and Queens Thereof ... In three volumes …, Volume III (1706), p. 175; Okie, Augustan Historical Writing, pp. 28–9. 13 14

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the kingdoms were not victimised by the Stuarts’ genetic disposition to unbalance the constitution or roll-back the Reformation. Rather than divide or apportion blame between the protagonists, Kennett argued that the civil war was caused by a single unfortunate quality they both shared: the tendency to politicise what were otherwise purely doctrinal or ecclesiastical matters. Kennett eschewed the anti-puritan explanation for the civil wars. The Complete History made no mention of a long-term Calvinist or puritan conspiracy against the monarchy or the episcopacy, and there were relatively few references either to providence or to political martyrdoms. In his discussion of the tensions between Charles I and his early Parliaments, Kennett compared their relationship to a quarrelling married couple, which was not the sort of parallel conducive to a conspiratorial explanation about the rise of civil conflict. For Kennett, the wars’ explanation lay in the politicisation of religion by leading politicians and clergymen from the accession of Charles I. This development heightened tensions and ultimately created an irreparable breach within the political nation in 1641–2. Admittedly, the process began in the 1620s at Court, as Charles I and Buckingham appeared to patronise doctrinal Arminians exclusively. Thereafter, divines more loyal to Calvin’s teaching became identified with ‘the Country Party, in favour with the People’. To make themselves and their principles more appealing, these country divines embraced the identity of orthodox Protestants. Other clergymen who preferred to read the Church Fathers to the Reformers, or else tried to reconcile the roles of human will and divine grace in the work of salvation, became linked to the Court, Buckingham and King Charles. Their puritan opponents, for political reasons, equated these Arminians with popery to make them ‘more odious to the Common People’.16 Subsequently, the Parliament of 1640 should have been satisfied with getting rid of the excesses of the personal rule and Arminian hegemony in the Church. Instead, the Faction used its temporary advantage in the political sphere to reform the Elizabethan Reformation settlement. ‘This dear Correspondence between the Scots in Arms, and the Commons of England in Parliament, was the Combination that destroy’d the King.’ Kennett’s Complete History explained the mid-century conflict in a way that encouraged Protestant unity in the face of a common Catholic enemy. For example, the Scottish Covenanter revolt was caused by a factor that Heylyn and Dugdale had ignored: national pride. The king’s problems with the Scots stemmed partly from his insensitivity to Scottish fears that the bishops were undermining the Kirk’s autonomy. ‘This made them now the Kennett, Complete History … Volume III, pp. 30, 33; p. 55.

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more averse to Episcopacy and Forms of Prayer,’ Kennett claimed, ‘because they were the Rites of the Church of England, from which they were to preserve themselves distinct and independent.’ Furthermore, Kennett rejected the idea that there was a direct causal connection between Calvinist Presbyterianism in Scotland or England, Parliament’s opposition to Charles I in 1640–1, and calamities of 1649–59. In particular, he noted that Presbyterians in England had repented of their war on Charles I prior to the regicide, and became genuine loyalists from 1650 onwards.17 Additionally, Kennett highlighted the role of the French in fostering divisions among British Protestants, during both the Scottish revolt and the regicide. Subsequently, Cardinal Mazarin had planned to use French and Spanish forces to restore Charles II in order to pressurise him to tolerate Catholics; providentially the king was restored peacefully and unconditionally. 18 Sadly, the moderate proposals put forward by Charles II and the bishops in 1661 to heal the nation’s religious divisions were not matched by comparable goodwill from Presbyterians and Independents. Thus, Kennett traced the tragically exclusive Restoration settlement to a lack of good faith shown by puritans after the Restoration, not their inherent malevolence towards the Elizabethan Reformation.19 Therefore, Dissenters deserved a role with Anglicans in the common defence of the Revolution and the Protestant interest, both at home and in Europe.20 Civil war memory in service of the Revolution Kennett, Welwood and Coke recalled the conflicted past essentially to show that the Glorious Revolution, unlike the Restoration, had truly reestablished balance and harmony to the body politic and spiritual realms. The old struggles between crown and parliament, prerogative and liberty, and puritan and Churchman, had been resolved. This was cultural memory put to work in the service of social peace. Most historical writing to emerge after the mid-1690s remembered the civil wars and Interregnum to attack the enemies of either the Revolution or the Restoration settlement. The first to emerge in print re-emphasised the culpability of Charles I as a Kennett, ‘Preface’, Complete History … Volume I, sig. A3v; Complete History … Volume III, pp. 47, 84, 89; 175, 185. 18 Kennett, Complete History … Volume III, pp. 100, 92,178; p. 218. 19 Kennett, Complete History, Volume III, pp. 225¬9. 20 Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 152–92. 17

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warning against the dangers of a second Stuart restoration, and for one historian, of the pernicious consequences for the kingdom of revering the memory of King Charles the Martyr. The latter was the first salvo in a cultural memory war waged in Augustan England over the question of the conflicted past’s true villains and authentic victims. The answer a historical work provided simultaneously pointed out the identity of the greatest present danger to peace and right religion. Another strand of histories recalled the good work of puritan politicians and clergymen during the civil wars to foreground the injustice of their proscription. John Seller and David Jones, the latter man a friend of Roger Coke, released histories in 1696 and 1697 respectively that vindicated the Glorious Revolution partly by focusing on the Stuart dynasty’s political faults during their tenure as Scottish and English monarchs. Seller’s history, aimed at a popular audience, essentially recapitulated whig explanations from the 1680s: the mid-century upheavals were the result of the king’s misguided attempt to govern without the cooperation of the legislature. ‘Never any Prince fell out with his Parliament,’ Seller argued, ‘and went about to establish an Arbitrary Power, but he not only found himself Mistaken, but also thereby made himself Miserable’.21 Similarly, Jones’s Secret History of White-Hall justified the Revolution on account of the dynasty’s political peccadillos. For example, he charged both James I and Charles I with ‘maleadministration’, and said that Charles II wanted Parliaments that were as compliant as Oliver Cromwell’s. Concerning the mid-century crisis, Jones argued that Charles I’s high-handedness with his Parliaments and imposing a prayer book on the Scots, were ‘the foundation[s] of those dreadful Wars’. Peace was established with the Restoration, Jones argued. The Convention Parliament made a mistake in 1660 when it invited Charles Stuart back into England ‘without any Preliminaries of asserting the Rights and Liberties of the English, so manifestly violated by his Father and Grandfather …; which did not a little contribute to the succeeding uneasiness of his Reign, as well as the Nations trouble’.22 Thus for Seller and Jones, as well as for Coke, Welwood and Kennett, Charles I, like his predecessor and successors, was guilty of political errors, which tragically led to civil conflict. Certainly John Seller, The History of England: Giving a True and Impartial Account of the most Considerable Transactions in Church and State, in Peace and War, during the Reigns of all the Kings and Queens (1696), Wing S2474aA, sig. A2v, pp. 600–2. 22 David Jones, A Continuation of The Secret History of White-Hall … (1697), Wing J929, p. 292, cf. pp. 317, 328–9; 381; 329; 377. Along with Coke’s Detection, Jones drew upon Edward Peyton, The Divine Catastrophe of the Kingly Family of the House of Stuarts: or, A Short History of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine Thereof … (1652), Wing P1952. 21

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there was no hint that Charles I had been personally wicked or a ‘man of blood’ in these histories. In 1698 John Toland, a promoter of sceptical philosophy, anonymously published an historical pamphlet that attacked the Revolution’s critics through an iconoclastic assault on the memory of King Charles I. Entitled King Charles I. No such Saint, Martyr, or Good Protestant, Toland’s work issued a strident call to revolutionise the public memory of the civil wars and continue the unfinished agenda of the Glorious Revolution.23 Toland’s history was meant to demolish the memory of King Charles as a holy victim of perfidious puritans and sectaries. Moreover, it was intended as an attack on the doctrine of jure divino kingship many of its clerical supporters articulated in their annual sermons exalting Charles’s sacrifice for the true English Church, and denouncing the outcome of the Glorious Revolution.24 Additionally, the cult of King Charles the Martyr was the most powerful cultural justification of the exclusive Restoration settlement. The Convention Parliament of 1660 passed a law setting aside the anniversary of Charles I’s execution, 30 January, as a fast day for the national church.25 The congregation was called upon to pray that God in his mercy would not punish the nation, as it justly deserved, for the sin of shedding the blood of its divinely anointed Sovereign.26 Underlying this liturgy lay the conviction that the king was personally and politically innocent concerning the civil wars, and that his trial was both unjust and illegal.27 This was, for Toland, a false memory that posed a threat to the long-term survival of the Glorious Revolution. Toland demanded that the annual commemorations of the so-called royal martyr be terminated for the sake of genuine Christian martyrs, and the truth about the origin of the civil wars. King Charles had not died, Toland argued, ‘for being a Witness or Confessor of the Revealed Truths in D.J. [John Toland], King Charles I. No such Saint, Martyr, or Good Protestant as Commonly Reputed … (1698), Wing J7; J.P. Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (1993), pp. 32–5. 24 John Milton Eikonoklaste¯s in Answer to a Book intitl’d Eiko¯n Basilike¯ … (1649), Wing M2112; Justin Champion, ‘“Religion’s safe, with Priestcraft is the War”: Augustan AntiClericalism and the Legacy of the English Revolution, 1660–1720’, The European Legacy 5 (2000), 547–61; Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2003). 25 12 Car. 2, cap. 30, ‘An Act for the Attainder of Severall Persons Guilty of the Horrid Murther of his Late Sacred Majestie King Charles the first’, SR, v, p. 288. 26 Church of England, ‘A Form of Common Prayer to be Used Yearly upon the xxxth of January’, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments (1670), Wing B3637, sigs X1r–X3r. 27 Eiko¯ n Basilike¯, the Portrature of his Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings (1649), Wing R18840. 23

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God’s Word’, but for attempting to subvert the laws and liberties of England, and for making too many concessions to Catholics. Toland sought to undermine the cult by characterising the king’s rule as oppressive and dangerous to English Protestantism. As evidence of the king’s tyranny, Toland cited ‘his raising, without Act of Parliament, £200,000 on the poor Merchants for Ship-money, [and] Coat and Conduct money’. Toland cast doubt on the king’s Protestant credentials by recounting his taking a Catholic wife, his sponsorship of the anti-Sabbatarian Book of Sports, his willingness to trust Catholics with high offices of state, and finally, his correspondence with Catholic Irish Confederates during the civil war. The Church’s 30 January liturgy avoided these inconvenient facts, and suppressed the real reason for the king’s death: the trajectory of his reign towards popery and tyranny. Instead, parishes were annually subjected to ‘lying Stories, and dangerous Notions’. If the truth about the conflicted past that was commonly preached on the 30 January was in fact a lie, the political nation would recognise that the war of 1642 was justified. Relatedly, Toland suggested that a true perception of the 1640s, contrary to that promulgated at King Charles the Martyr services, meant that the Long Parliament’s leaders, including the earls of Bedford, Manchester and Essex, as well as Lords Paget, Mandeville, Wharton, Hollis, Brook, as well Sir Thomas Fairfax, John Hampden, John Pym and Sir Arthur Haslerig, were all ‘worthy Patriots’.28 If, as Toland argued, these men were remembered as national heroes, the historic basis for the proscription of the puritan impulse would vanish. It was also imperative from a political standpoint, Toland argued, to suppress the cult of Charles the Martyr because observing 30 January as a day of humiliation and prayer provided Jacobites with a potent argument against the legitimacy of the Glorious Revolution. If the Long Parliament had acted as rebels, ‘how much more are they Rebels that against their own principles of Passive Obedience and Non Resistance, turned out their Jure Divino King, the late Tyrant James, who had not committed half so many arbitrary and illegal Actions’ as his father was charged with?  29 By contrast, if Charles I was innocent, it was hard not to conclude that James II was also guiltless, and that the Glorious Revolution was, at best, a mistake.30 Against this conclusion, Toland argued that Parliament’s war had been a legitimate act of popular resistance to tyranny. Charles I had taken more steps to ‘undermine the Liberties of England, and put Tyranny into an Art, than any British King before him’. From 1625 until 1640, the reign of Charles I Toland, King Charles I, pp. 19–20; 1. Toland, King Charles I, p. 13; pp. 10–11, 15; pp. 16–17, 19; pp. 10, 26. 30 Kenyon, Revolution Principles, pp. 65, 77–9. 28 29

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witnessed levels of ‘Popish Tyranny and Oppression’ such that the legislature took up arms to deliver the nation ‘with the greatest cheerfulness’.31 In Toland’s thinking, the Revolution had not fulfilled the Restoration; it had rightly completed (mostly) the agenda of the Long Parliament. It was this memory from the conflicted past that needed to be celebrated annually, not the supposed martyrdom of a wicked tyrant. Toland’s effort to bring to publication a series of civil-war memoirs was partly motivated by the same desire to undermine the cult of King Charles and the demonisation of puritan politics it inspired. Between 1697 and 1699, Toland and a group of politicians and printers published the recollections of Edmund Ludlow, Sir Thomas Fairfax, Denzil Holles and Sir John Berkeley, all of whom, with the exception of Berkeley, had been parliamentarians during the 1640s.32 The timing of their release and the differences between their manuscript and published versions suggests that these histories represented a radical whig attempt to synthesise republican political thought with the ‘Country party’ opposition in Parliament. Their target was the ‘Junto Whig’ Lords and their alleged betrayal of the Glorious Revolution.33 In these memoirs, both the king’s death and the loss of liberty under Cromwell’s Protectorate were the fault of the Army, or a faction within it. Thus these histories could be read as a warning that the achievement of the Glorious Revolution was similarly endangered, if King William retained a standing army in peacetime.34 Additionally, the memoirs demonstrated the political and religious reliability of Presbyterian politics by exonerating its adherents of culpability for the king’s death. What the sanctioned Toland, King Charles I, pp. 2; 19–20. Denzil Holles, Memoirs of Denzil Lord Holles, Baron of Ifield in Sussex, from the year 1641, to 1648 (1699), Wing H2464; Thomas Fairfax, Short Memorials of Thomas Lord Fairfax (1699), Wing F235; John Berkeley, Memoirs of Sir John Berkley … (1699), Wing B1971. 33 The Junto included Lords Somers, Halifax, Wharton, Orford and Sunderland. D. Hayton, ‘The “Country Interest” and the Party System, 1689–c. 1720’, Party and Management in Parliament 1660–1784, ed. C. Jones (1984), pp. 44–5; Patricia Crawford, Denzil Holles, 1598–1680: A Study of his Political Career (1979); Andrew Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007), pp. 225–7; Mark Goldie, The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691 Volume I. Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 217–23. On early modern autobiographical literature, see Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox, ‘Introduction’, Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, eds Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 1–13. 34 Charles-Edourd Levillain, ‘Cromwell Redivivus? William III as Military Dictator: Myth and Reality’, Redefining William III: The Impact of the King-Stadholder in International Context, eds Esther Mijers and David Onnekink (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 159–76. 31 32

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civil-war histories and the cult of King Charles the Martyr had long argued, and what the exclusive Restoration settlement implied, were false; according to Toland, Presbyterians had always been on the side of liberty and right religion, before and after 1660. The memoirs by Holles and Berkeley, for example, refuted one of the key arguments underlying the proscription of the puritan impulse under the Restoration settlement: that Presbyterians could be blamed for the regicide. Holles’s work, originally written in 1648 while he was in exile in France, was both an apologia for the principles of political Presbyterians and for Holles’s own political career during the civil wars. The true rebels were men who opposed Presbyterian-inspired politics, Oliver Cromwell and Oliver St John in particular, not the politicians who led Parliament into civil war. Significantly, Holles’s minimalist explanation of the war’s origin downplayed politics and intentions altogether, but rather than emphasising contingency as the alternative, he invoked the decisive role of providence. Because God had permitted ‘a Spirit of Division between the King and the Parliament’ to emerge, Holles believed that the only remedy was an ‘appeal to the sword’. The crucial turning point in Holles’s narrative was the Army’s revolt against the Presbyterian-led parliament in 1647. The New Model Army and their sectarian supporters subsequently overturned the good work accomplished by Parliament’s victory in the civil war. ‘All I desir’d and aim’d at in disbanding that schismatical factious Soldiery’, Holles declared, ‘was only to do my best endeavour to defend [King, Parliament and Kingdom] and my self from a rebellious Army that was marching up for all our destructions.’ The expulsion of Presbyterians from Parliament was ‘exceedingly against nature, and [would] turn all upside down’. The trial and execution of Charles I had proved Holles correct. His memoir suggested that regicidal republicanism was not the natural product of Presbyterian politics, although why God had permitted it to triumph was a question Holles could not answer in human terms.35 The former royalist Sir John Berkeley’s memoir offered additional testimony of the New Model’s singular culpability for the execution of Charles I. The Memoirs, probably originally composed during the Interregnum, focused on Sir John’s activities for the king from July to December 1647. In the first part of the work, Berkeley recounted his negotiations with Parliament’s Army, which ultimately collapsed; the second part related the king’s escape attempt via the Isle of Wight, which was a disastrous failure. Berkeley claimed that the ‘Grandees’, including Cromwell and Ireton, had Holles, Memoirs, p. 211, for his identification of his enemies as rebels and traitors, see also pp. 77, 99, 101, 177, and 208; 71, 8; 4, 212–13.

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genuinely desired to settle with the king, but the talks came to naught due to the combined pressure from the different interest groups, including Army agitators, the Levellers and parliamentary Presbyterians. Cromwell and Ireton ultimately decided to support the faction of the Army that demand justice against the king. Thus the king’s blood could not, and should not, be charged on mainstream puritan parliamentarians. Rather, it was the fault of men, Berkeley claimed, who believed that God ‘had put all things under their feet, and therefore [that] they were bound to finish the Work of the Lord, which was to alter the Government according to their first Design’.36 After 1688, the most significant memoir published in defence of civilwar Presbyterian politics centred on the career of Revd Richard Baxter, who also happened to be the most famous exponent of late seventeenthcentury puritan piety. Significantly, the history of Richard Baxter’s ministry published in 1702 demonstrated not only that puritan politics and piety did not pose a threat to the kingdom’s stability or true religion, but also that in fact they had constituted the moderate impulse within English political and religious culture until unjustly proscribed by the Restoration settlements.37 At the time that Edmund Calamy published his abridged edition of the Reliquiae Baxterianae, contemporary exponents of the puritan impulse were fighting to ensure that the Glorious Revolution’s achievement of religious toleration was not overturned by the Restoration settlement’s strongest defenders.38 Therefore, Calamy’s version of the memoir was in part a massive vindication of moderate Dissenters and the protections they enjoyed under the Toleration Act. Moreover, the Abridgement provided early eighteenth-century Presbyterians and Congregationalists with a respectable and rational story of origin with which to refute the High Anglican and tory charge that a principled separation from the established Church was axiomatically seditious and schismatic. Baxter’s history showed that moderate Dissenters’ separation from the national Church had not been, in fact, their fault. Rather, England’s true Protestants were betrayed during the civil wars and Interregnum by the sectaries’ ‘Obstinate Separation’, and then after the

Berkeley, Memoirs, pp. 20, 43; Goldie, Entring Book, Vol. I, p. 220. Richard Baxter, An Abridgment of Mr. Baxter's History of his Life and Times … (1702). 38 Baxter’s literary executor, Presbyterian clergyman Matthew Sylvester, supervised the release of the first edition of the memoir; Richard Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ: or, Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times ...(1696), Wing B1370; N.H. Keeble, Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford, 1982), p. 146; Geoffrey Nuttall, The Manuscript of the Reliquiae Baxterianae (1954); William Lamont, ‘Richard Baxter, “Popery” and the origins of the English Civil War’, History 87 (2002), 346–8. 36 37

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Restoration by the established Church’s ‘Profane and Formal Persecutors’. The latter argument was brought out most famously in the ninth chapter of the Abridgement, which focused on the lives of ministers ejected for nonconformity in 1662. For such men, represented as ‘the sober, sound, Religious Part’ of the English Church, the troubled times had continued from 1660 until 1689.39 Calamy’s Abridgement transformed Baxter’s first-person account of his ministry into a third-person history of the puritan movement. Baxter was portrayed as the archetypal serious and sober clergyman, seeking Christian unity in the midst of civil and religious conflict, working for and welcoming the king’s return in 1660, only to have been expelled unjustly from the national Church because he would not compromise with his conscience. Indeed, Calamy’s Baxter became the true representative of mainstream Protestantism, and his doctrine the authentic via media for the English Church; ‘in Ecclesiastical matters, [he] was equally fearful of the Arbitrary Encroachments of the Assuming Prelates, and the Uncharitable and Dividing Principles and Practices of the Sectaries’.40 Calamy made Baxter’s history of his ministry into Calamy’s story of the rise and fall of seventeenthcentury English puritanism. Calamy’s book explained why puritans had not caused the civil war, and why they had been beset by more extreme religious opponents. The Abridgement covered the civil war and Interregnum period over four chapters roughly divided by subject matter: chapters 4 and 5 contained Baxter’s reflections on public affairs from 1641 to 1660, and were followed by two that recounted his service to church and state over the same period. In the brief account of public events, two prominent themes emerged. The first refuted Heylyn’s anti-puritan account of the connection between England’s Reformation and the origins of the civil wars. Baxter argued that religious tension in England between 1560 and 1640 was not the fault of Calvinists dissatisfied with the Reformation settlement, but rather could be traced back to the split between ‘Diocesan’ and ‘Disciplinarian’ Protestants

W.M. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium: Protestant Imperialism and the English revolution (Totowa, NJ, 1979), p. 79; David L. Wykes, ‘“To let the Memory of these Men Dye is Injurious to Posterity”: Edmund Calamy’s Account of the Ejected Ministers’, The Church Retrospective: Papers Read at the 1995 Summer Meeting and the 1996 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, Studies in Church History, 13, ed. R.N. Swanson (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 383–4; Lamont, ‘Richard Baxter’. 40 Calamy, Abridgement, sig. A6v; p. 74. 39

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during the 1550s. The split remained and hardened under both Elizabeth and James I. During the reign of Charles I, the bishops supported a ‘looser’ style of Christianity which had appealed both to segments of the aristocracy and to ‘the rabble’. At the same time, the bishops put severe pressure on puritans to conform strictly to their interpretation of the prayer book. Baxter argued that ministers who had preached against this trend were not trying to overturn the established ecclesiastical order, but rather were simply calling the nation back to authentic Reformation ideals. It had been their legitimate fears for the safety of English Protestants in the aftermath of the Irish revolt that forced them to support the Long Parliament’s call to arms in 1642. Puritans were not to blame for the conflict. The second theme of these chapters echoed the argument of Holles’s and Berkeley’s memoirs, which blamed Cromwell, Henry Vane, and their sectarian supporters for betraying the cause of puritan religion in 1647 and especially in 1649. It was this cohort of regicidal republicans that conspired against the king and constitution. Serious Protestants, the ancestors of early eighteenth-century Dissenters, were innocent of causing the king’s death. Baxter reminded readers that Presbyterian ministers ‘all this Time generally Preach’d and Pray’d against Disloyalty’. Calamy bolstered this argument in a long marginal digression, which blamed the regicide on undercover Jesuits, referring to several publications that proved his case with ‘Authentick Evidence’.41 It was thus wrong and unjust, according to Calamy’s history, for sanctioned histories to blame the king’s death on puritan piety. The story of Baxter’s public service was central to Calamy’s vindication of puritan politics during the civil wars and Interregnum, and concomitantly of Dissenters’ good intentions in the present. The Abridgement portrayed Baxter as a consistently prudent pastor working to restore balance in the polity: ‘in Political Matters, [he] endeavour’d equally to shun the Slavish Principles of the Assertors of Absolute Monarchy, and the Confounding Notions of Democratical Projectors’. For example, during Baxter’s time as a New Model Army chaplain, ‘he set himself from Day to Day, to find out the Corruptions of the Soldiers, and to Discourse and Dispute them out of their Mistakes, both Religious and Political’. The narrative defended the conduct of serious Christians – Presbyterians – during the Interregnum, emphasising, for example, the refusal of ‘the Moderate Church Party and the Presbyterians’ to take the Engagement of loyalty to the Commonwealth,

Calamy, Abridgement, pp. 46–7; 56–8; 60–6. Peter Du Moulin, Vindication … (1664), Wing D2571; William Prynne, True and Perfect Narrative … (1659), Wing P4113 or P 4007; Ed Pearse, Conformists Plea for the Nonconformists (1681), Wing P976/976F. 41

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unlike many Episcopal divines. Furthermore, Baxter was no slavish admirer of Cromwell’s rise to power, but considered it to have been a ‘monitory monument or pillar to Posterity’ of where sin and an ‘erring deluded Judgment’ would take an otherwise good man. Baxter had, Calamy noted, moderately condemned Cromwell’s usurpation, without resorting to invectives that could have ‘irritate[d] him to Mischief’.42 Baxter’s loyalty to the monarchy, his attempts to secure unity in Christian essentials, and to find the moderate middle way between prelacy and schism, demonstrated that the puritan impulse in no way posed an historic danger to the polity or Protestantism in England. Calamy issued a revised and expanded edition of the Abridgement of Mr. Baxter’s History in 1713, this time seeking to vindicate puritan politics in the face of a government willing to restrict the liberties that Dissenters had gained after the Glorious Revolution. A landslide tory electoral victory in 1710 gave High Church hostility to Dissent a strong political base. Most of the new material in the 1713 Abridgement concerned the expulsion of the puritan impulse from the Church in the aftermath of the Restoration’s religious settlement. The main difference between the two editions was that the chapter concerning ministers who had been ejected for nonconformity after the Restoration was expanded into a second volume. The most significant addition to the narrative of the civil wars in the second edition concerned the role of Presbyterians in the death of Charles I. In the second edition, Calamy made a more positive case for Presbyterian innocence in response to Kennett’s suggestion, in The Complete History of England, that London Presbyterians’ public denunciations of the king’s trial were late and ineffective, if laudable.43 Calamy inserted a retort to Kennett into the Abridgement. The 1713 version now included a summary of Presbyterian ministers’ published condemnation of the king’s trial as contravening the Protestation of May 1641 and the Solemn League and Covenant; Calamy also inserted a list of the Presbyterian ministers who had subscribed to the condemnation. Their words and their actions were, he claimed, testimony to the Presbyterians’ integrity and courage in dangerous times. Calamy clearly wanted to show that the Complete History had dishonoured the memory of loyal and pious men by arguing that their principled

Calamy, Abridgement, pp. 74; 89; 62–3; 70–1; 110, 118. Kennett, Complete History, Volume III, p. 175.

42 43

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opposition to the Army was ‘to no purpose’.44 The memory of Presbyterian loyalism presented in the Abridgement proved that the puritan impulse did not equal regicidal republicanism. This was a past, in other words, that refuted and rebuked the continuing proscription of Dissenters from full participation in what was by then the British state.45 Vindicating the Restoration Histories that blamed the civil wars on King Charles and the regicide on the New Model Army provoked a spate of replies and refutations at the turn of the seventeenth century. In part, these histories were a reaction against the enhanced public profile of Dissenters and printed attacks on the Church’s doctrine, including its cult of Charles the Martyr, since the mid-1690s. These works showed that Dissenters’ continuing exclusion from the polity under the terms of the Restoration settlement was necessarily both punitive and prudent. The legal proscription of Dissenters, whose ancestors were to blame for the civil wars, was necessary to ensure the stability of the realm and the security of the Protestant Church of England. These civil-war histories vindicated the cult of King Charles the Martyr as an indispensable and legitimate memorial to his personal and political innocence, and of the guilt ever clinging to the party whose politics and piety had caused his death. Moreover, these works lent prescriptive weight to tory and High Church attempts to outlaw occasional conformity – the practice whereby Dissenters took Anglican communion at least once a year, in order to meet the religious test for serving on corporations and holding public office. Defenders of the Anglican establishment feared that having duplicitously rejoined the polity, occasionally conforming Dissenters would eventually revoke the Restoration religious settlement and overthrow the Church’s historic doctrine and discipline.46 Their civil-war histories were Edmund Calamy, An Abridgment of Mr. Baxter's History of his Life and Times ... 2nd edn (1713), pp. 60–2, extracting The Vindication of London Ministers (1648), Wing B5691; A Serious and Faithful Representation (1649), Wing S2604aA; see Elliot Vernon, ‘The Quarrel of the Covenant: The London Presbyterians and the Regicide’, The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I, ed. Jason Peacey (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 202–24. 45 Seed, Dissenting Histories, p. 22; J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 36, 42–6. 46 Mark Knights, ‘Occasional Conformity and the Representation of Dissent: Hypocrisy, Sincerity, Moderation and Zeal’, Parliament and Dissent, eds Stephen Taylor and David L. Wykes (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 41–58. 44

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very much about the present and future danger the puritan impulse posed to the body politic and Anglican religion. Ironically, one of the first civil-war histories released after the turn of the century to defend the memory of King Charles as a blameless victim of puritan politics was penned originally by a parliamentarian, Sir Thomas Herbert.47 Published by the fiercely loyalist publisher Robert Clavell, Herbert’s work was meant to prove that the Church of England was eminently justified in commemorating annually the death of an innocent monarch.48 Herbert had been one of a select number of parliamentarians attending the king from early 1647 until his execution. The account of Herbert’s service to Charles I was originally a letter written to fellow antiquary Sir William Dugdale in late 1679 or early 1680.49 Given the peculiarity of Herbert’s experience during the late 1640s, the fact that his narrative focused on the last nineteen months of the king’s life is not surprising. However, the memoir’s chronological focus – beginning in 1646, at the conclusion of the first civil war – meant that Herbert’s narrative avoided the problem of assigning blame for the initial descent into civil violence. What was crucially at issue in the work, in other words, was not which party had started the civil war but who was culpable for the breakdown of the subsequent peace process, and more tragically, the king’s unjust execution. Herbert’s memoir focused on the character of Charles I; politics and matters of law were definitely secondary concerns in Herbert’s narrative. His account provided eye-witness testimony of the king’s genuine efforts for the cause of peace, his innocence concerning the renewal of the war, and personal goodness. Throughout his memoir, Herbert repeatedly underscored the king’s devotion to his faith, even under extreme pressure from his opponents. For example, Charles’s response to the Army’s Remonstrance, which intimated that those they deemed chiefly responsible for the renewal of civil conflict should be brought to justice, was to go into prayer. It was there, Herbert recalled, in private during ‘his Addresses to God’, that the king found the ‘surest way’ to comfort.50 According to Herbert, the king was a good man incapable of political deviousness. For example, Herbert’s memoir refuted the claim that the Thomas Herbert, Memoirs of the Two Last Years of the Reign of that Unparallell’d Prince, of Ever Blessed Memory, King Charles I … (1702). 48 Robert Clavell, ‘Preface’ to Herbert, Memoirs, sigs A2r–v; Clavell published Thomas Frankland’s hyper-loyalist The Annals of King James and King Charles in 1681. 49 The manuscript memoir was called Threndonia Carolina; Anthony à Wood later used it for the 1691 Athenae Oxoniensis; Ronald H. Fritze, ‘Herbert, Sir Thomas, first baronet (1606–1682)’, ODNB. 50 Herbert, Memoirs, p. 105; see also pp. 12, 40, 45–6, 106 and 118. 47

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king had secret knowledge of the Scottish invasion from his Catholic wife. Reports concerning a letter from Henrietta Maria about the Scots were falsehoods, Herbert declared, ‘only design’d to asperse the King, and to blemish his Integrity’. Indeed, most of the narrative was apolitical, focusing on Herbert’s personal interactions with a good king seeking to bring peace to his domains, and journeying with Christian patience towards his doom. Herbert repeatedly underscored the king’s overriding desire for a just settlement, even when it seemed to others that he was prolonging the bloodshed. For example, by October of 1648 the Newport negotiations had reached the point where ‘most Men … verily believe[d] there would be a happy Union and Agreement between His Majesty and the Parliament’. Sadly, the officers of the New Model Army recognised that peace would be dangerous to them, and so the nation’s ‘good Hopes and Expectations were suddenly blasted’ with Colonel Pride’s purge of Parliament. It was clear to the king by that point, Herbert remembered, that God would not let peace return to the kingdom without exacting a human sacrifice for its people’s wickedness.51 Herbert’s memoirs thus provided a parliamentarian witness to the memory that undergirded the cult of King Charles the Martyr: the Lord’s anointed had suffered and died at the hands of a faction in payment for the sin of civil conflict.52 A more recognisably loyalist historical vindication of both the legitimacy of the king’s martyrdom and the exclusive Restoration settlement was Sir Philip Warwick’s Memoires of the reigne of King Charles I, published in 1701. The text was evidently first produced between November 1675 and February 1677 when Sir Philip was concerned about the strained relations between Charles II and his Parliament.53 When published, however, the Memoires were offered less as story that could restore harmony to the political nation and more as a reply to recent assaults on the innocence of Charles I. Warwick’s history, the publishers announced, rescued ‘the Memory of that Injur’d Prince from the false Imputations and Indignities that have been cast upon Him by Prejudiced and Malicious Men’.54 Indeed, on the very first page of the Memoires Warwick emphasised the king’s good intentions and personal virtue. ‘Having no transports unto any vice, but Herbert, Memoirs, pp. 18–19, 32–3, 77. Despite the Army’s culpability for the king’s death, Herbert noted at several points the civility with which its officers, and even private soldiers, treated their royal prisoner; see pp. 25, 86 and 101. 52 Lacey, Cult of King Charles, pp. 46–7. 53 Philip Warwick, Memoires of the reigne of King Charles I. With a continuation to the happy restauration of King Charles II (1701); David L. Smith, ‘Warwick, Sir Philip (1609–1683)’, ODNB. 54 ‘Preface’ to Warwick, Memoires, sig. A3r. 51

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endowed with habits of knowledge and piety’, Warwick claimed that ‘an invasion upon the liberty or property of his Subjects’ was the farthest thing from the king’s desire. Warwick explained that the eventual recourse to prerogative measures during the 1630s had not stemmed from any wish on the king’s part to rule absolutely or arbitrarily, but was simply a reaction to ‘some early rude attaques of a popular faction’. Warwick’s book offered personal testimony of the ‘golden’ 1630s. For Warwick, Charles I’s administration and concern for the Church of England could not be justifiably criticised. For one thing, the peace and prosperity of the 1630s were proof that Charles I had governed well and fairly, especially when considering that at the same time much of Western Europe endured terrible wars.55 Moreover, Warwick believed the king’s commitment to ‘the foundations of his own Church’ demonstrated fidelity to the Church’s true nature as both Catholic and Reformed. For example, Charles I always insisted on retaining Church government by bishops ‘because he well understood it to be a pure member of the Catholick Church’, even though this resolution ‘created much trouble from the designs and obstinacy of all Dissenters’.56 Warwick’s Memoires similarly underlined Archbishop Laud’s good intentions, with an acknowledgement that his strident defence of the Church’s rights ‘as the law of this our Realm had apply’d to our circumstances’ set him at odds with many common lawyers. The prelate and, as it turned out the king himself, were deficient in the necessary statecraft to suppress ‘malignant humors’ in the body politic. Warwick identified this political disease as an aristocratic–clerical conspiracy that wanted to roll back the royal prerogative and erect the ‘sharing of soeveraignty between the King and the two Houses of Parliament’. The civil war ultimately was caused when members of this faction in the Long Parliament attempted to supress aspects of Charles I’s ‘Regall jurisdiction’.57 Crucially, King Charles was able to rally an armed defence of his prerogative rights with support from members of the Church of England. This made perfect sense, according to Warwick, since alone among Christian churches the English Church served princes as part of its worship; others did so only ‘for secular ends’.58 The Memoires’ conclusion was simple, that the peace and security of the realm would be best protected if the ‘establisht religion and Warwick, Memoires, pp. 1; 64. Warwick, Memoires, pp. 67–9, 77. The introduction of the new prayer-book to the Scottish Kirk was, Warwick argued, simply a continuation of Elizabeth and James’s earlier policies of bringing greater conformity between the two national churches; pp. 100, 121–2. 57 Warwick, Memoires, p. 79; see also pp. 7–9, 60, 176, 189–91. 58 Warwick, Memoires, pp. 205–6. 55 56

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law’ were preserved.59 The Restoration settlement was, in Warwick’s mind, the key to future safety. Similarly, the earl of Clarendon’s multi-volume History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England was meant to be read as a reminder of the danger the established Church and ancient constitution faced from Dissent.60 This aim is evident in the volumes’ introductory or paratextual sections, which authors, editors or publishers often used to orient the readers’ interpretation of the work.61 In the preface to the first volume of Clarendon’s History, released in 1702, Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester, critiqued a political aspect of the puritan impulse, much denounced in earlier sanctioned civilwar histories. Rochester argued that England’s conflicted past showed that those who acted upon the ‘right’ to resist an oppressive government invariably brought down on their own backs ‘a more severe Bondage than they had shook off’. Thus the men who fought and defeated Charles I had not secured the people’s freedoms and rights but instead facilitated Cromwell’s ascent to supreme power. Therefore it was foolhardy as well as wrong to argue, as did some defenders of the Glorious Revolution, that the people had a natural right to overthrow bad governors.62 Rochester clearly intended to use his father’s great history to score points for the cause of the Church. In the preface to the second volume of the History, Rochester emphasised the historic danger of puritan piety. King Charles I had fought and died ‘in the Defence of [his] Church’ at the hands of men ‘who were no better friends to Monarchy than to true Religion’. They had, Rochester reminded readers, complained about the

Warwick, Memoirs, pp. 2, 403–4. Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641 …Three Volumes (Oxford, 1702–4). For recent scholarship on the work, see Paul Seaward, ‘Introduction’, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion: A New Selection (Oxford, 2009), pp. vii–xxvi; idem, ‘Clarendon, Tacitism, and the Civil Wars of Europe’, HLQ 68 (2005), 289–303; Martine Watson Brownley, Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form (Philadelphia, 1985); Ronald Hutton, ‘Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion’, EHR 97 (1982), 70–88. 61 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge, 1994), p. 28. 62 Rochester, ‘Preface’, History of the Rebellion, Vol. I, pp. 4–5; although subsequently the most well-known, John Locke’s articulation of resistance theory in the Two treatises of government … (1690), Wing L2766, was not embraced by most whigs in the 1690s; Rudolph, Tyrrell and Whig Political Thought, pp. 10–12. 59 60

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‘Ceremonies and outward Order of the Church’; their actions showed that these critiques were simply a preliminary part of their plan totally to subvert the state. Additionally, it was very dangerous to the polity that Dissenters were permitted to run schools in which young people were trained in ‘Principles directly contrary to Monarchical and Episcopal Government’.63 The History should, Rochester was suggesting, spur the government to act to protect the national Church from its most deadly internal enemies. The conflicted past as narrated by Clarendon was, Rochester reminded Queen Anne in the preface to the third volume, a monument to the threat that Dissenters represented to the political nation and established Church. He doubted Dissenters could and ever would be able to remove the taint of violent sedition, since his father’s narrative demonstrated their true and unchanging nature; ‘this History hath shewn Your Majesty their fruits in the late times, by which You shall know them still; for Your Majesty may well remember Who has said, that Men do not gather Grapes of Thorns, or Figs of Thistles’. Moreover, Rochester denounced the notion that strident defenders of the Restoration settlement, such as he, were really treasonous opponents of Revolution. He challenged Dissenters who ‘falsely asperse the Sons of the Church of England for being Jacobites’ to prove that they did not secretly celebrate 30 Januarys with ‘scandalous mirth’, while teaching ‘the fiercest Doctrines against Monarchical and Episcopal Government’ at their academies.64 The lessons of Clarendon’s History were not, however, reserved only for exalted readers. Both the continuing importance of the memory of the civil war for public discourse at the turn of the seventeenth century, and the growing popularity of historical writing are evident from the publication of an abridgement of Clarendon’s History by John Nutt in 1703. Having heard that ‘the Price of that History was the Reason a great many gave for their not reading it’, Nutt had determined to make it accessible to a wider audience.65 The abridgement did, in fact, faithfully reproduce both the essence of its antecedent text and Rochester’s purposes in publishing it.66 Nutt Rochester, ‘Preface’ History of the Rebellion, Vol. II, sigs A2r–v; B1r–v. On the importance of Rochester’s Anglicanism to his politics and the release of The History, see Grant Tapsell, ‘Laurence Hyde and the Politics of Religion in Late Stuart England’, EHR 125 (2010), 1443–7. 64 Rochester, ‘Preface’, History of the Rebellion, Vol. III, sigs D2r, D1r. 65 John Nutt, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641 … Faithfully Abridg’d … (1703), sig. A2r. 66 For an examination of Nutt’s approach to Clarendon’s text, see Matthew Neufeld, ‘Narrating Troubled Times: Memories and Histories of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1660–1705’, Unpublished PhD Thesis (Edmonton, 2008), pp. 260–1. 63

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echoed Rochester’s rationale for releasing yet another history of the conflict, with the argument that because the civil wars simply could not be forgotten, as much as one might have preferred their falling into oblivion, it was better for more people to remember the former Lord Chancellor’s ‘clear and impartial account’ of the conflicted past than anyone else’s. Additionally, it was crucial that as many as possible recalled the fact that England’s civil war had started uniquely with a cohort of ‘busie Men’ who used a pretended concern for law and the ‘Cloak of Religion’ to seduce some of the people out of their due allegiance. Echoing the partisan parallelism of histories published two decades earlier, Nutt hoped that the abridged version of Clarendon’s narrative would be the humble person’s weapon ‘against the like Attempts’ to mislead the country into ruin. There were equally dangerous characters still lurking in the present, Nutt claimed, waiting for the next ‘Opportunity to open those Wounds afresh’.67 Nutt’s abridgement of Clarendon thus suggested that false memories about the causes of the wars enhanced the likelihood of another conflagration; peace and security would be secured if the broadest of reading publics remembered what the History showed: the Restoration settlement was the kingdom’s best defence against the historic and ever-present menace that Dissent represented.68 By the early years of Anne’s reign, honouring the memory of one side from England’s past conflict was really about demonising one’s enemies in the present. For example, Sir Edward Walker’s Historical Discourses had been compiled over several periods of time during the 1650s and 1660s. Significantly, he later claimed to have kept it from publication during his lifetime, out of respect for the reconciliationist spirit of the Act of Oblivion. The Act of Oblivion, Walker noted, intended that ‘Persons of all Parties and interests enjoy the Safety, Happiness and Protection of the king’s government’.69 Clearly, Walker believed that making his story public contravened that intention. Walker’s family had no such qualms by the early part of Queen Anne’s reign. The Discourses were published in 1705 by Walker’s great-grandson, a minor Warwickshire gentleman named Henry Clopton, as a reminder of the innocence of Charles I, the wickedness of his enemies, and the necessity Nutt, ‘Preface’, History Abridged, sigs A1v–A2r. Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, pp. 209–18, 238, 276 for the role of heroes and villains in contemporary partisan discourse. 69 Edward Walker, Historical Discourses, upon Several Occasions … (1705), sig. A2r–B2v. The book contained three annalistic narratives, three tracts, one biography, one collection of primary documents and one survey of King Charles I’s reign; the ‘Postscript’ that recorded his decision to publish after his death was dated 1 August 1674. 67 68

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of preserving the Restoration settlement. There remained at large, Clopton pointed out in the book’s dedication to Queen Anne, a ‘Party’ hostile to the crown and the Church, which lately had been impudently and industriously propounding the principles that underlay the ‘black Tragedy’ of 30 January 1649. Echoing the earl of Rochester, Clopton suggested that the best application of his ancestor’s account of the past was to uphold the settlement that excluded Dissenters from places of authority in the polity. Their religion, he asserted, was simply a mask covering a menacing will to power. Clopton insisted that the queen and her ministers would truly honour the ‘Memories of courageous, loyal and worthy Men’, such as her and his direct forebears, by taking concrete steps to provide ‘further securities for the Church and Monarchy against its enemies’.70 The suggestion that additional measures were necessary to protect the Church and crown probably points to Clopton’s support for outlawing the practice by which crafty Dissenters got around the Restoration settlement: occasional conformity. Although Walker’s Discourses acknowledged that Charles I bore some responsibility for the collapse of the royalist war effort, it emphatically vindicated the king and his policies up to 1640. Walker had been a herald and secretary to the Privy Council during the first civil war, and then served as chief secretary to the king during the Newport negotiations.71 The first two of his discourses were essentially annals of the royalist campaigns of 1644 and 1645, by which Walker did not reflect at great length on the causes of the conflict. However, his eighth discourse, ‘A short Review of the Life and Actions of King Charles I’, was a strident defence of his former master and a recapitulation of the anti-puritan explanation of the civil war.72 The ‘Review’ blamed the war on ‘the Factious Part of traitorous Subjects’, who were not only the ‘principal Causers of the King’s Misfortune’, but ‘the only Tyrants and Usurpers that for a long time, and still do, oppress the People’. Puritan politicians had criticised the king’s government, Walker claimed, because they wanted to seize power for themselves. Walker not only attacked Charles I’s opponents but also vindicated the king’s controversial policies. For example, Walker argued that the king’s repeated uses of the royal prerogative were not unwarranted since they

Henry Clopton, ‘Dedication’, Edward Walker, Historical Discourses, sigs A2r–6r. Hubert Chesshyre, ‘Walker, Sir Edward (1612–1677)’, ODNB. 72 Walker, ‘A Short Review of the Life and Actions of King Charles I’, Historical Discourses, pp. 361–9. This piece, dated October 1655, was composed in response to Hamon L’Estrange, The Reign of King Charles … (1655), Wing L1189. 70 71

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were done only to preserve the king’s authority. If there were any ‘Acts of seeming Oppression or Usurpation done in that time’, they were the fault of the Commons, ‘either doing or forcing such to be done’. Walker also emphasised the unparalleled prosperity and harmony enjoyed during the 1630s, highlighting the king’s paternal affection for his people. For example, Charles I had issued the ‘Book of Sports’ in 1634 to liberate the English from the tyranny of seditious puritan preachers. Their Sabbatarianism, Walker charged, concealed a malevolent penchant for treason, murder and rebellion.73 Recapitulating the anti-puritan explanation of sanctioned civil-war histories, Walker’s representation of the conflicted past showed the necessity of retaining and strengthening the Restoration settlement against its enemies. The anti-puritan explanation for the civil wars played an important role in two complex historical treatments of the conflicted past, released in the aftermath of a second tory reaction in 1710. Edmund Curll’s publication of a French history of the Stuart dynasty, and Jeremy Collier’s ecclesiastical history of England under the Tudors and Stuarts both intended to prove the political and spiritual necessity of the Restoration settlement, while downplaying or else rejecting the achievement of the Glorious Revolution. In the first work, the discussion of the causes of the wars showed that resistance to authority was not a principle that could be held by genuine English Protestants. In the second, the memory of puritan guilt for the civil war was part of a broader history of the danger of Erastian doctrine for the integrity and authenticity of the English Church. The History of the Revolutions in England, written in the early 1690s by a French Jesuit, Pierre D’Orleans, was translated into English and published in 1711 by Edmund Curll. The history had been originally intended to demonstrate that the war between France and England was a confessional struggle. Curll translated and published D’Orleans’s book partly to vindicate the reign of James II, and partly to suggest that the Glorious Revolution had not truly settled the nation. Significantly, Curll had links to the tory ministry elected in 1710. In particular, during that year’s controversy over Dr Henry Sacheverall’s impeachment for seditious libel, Curll had published anonymously two tracts, one of which attacked Bishop Gilbert Burnet for defending the right of resistance. Publishing an English version of D’Orleans’s History was consistent with hostility to whig politics and whiggish Anglicans such as Burnett who refused to recognise the danger

Walker, Historical Discourses, pp. 365–6; 361.

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that Dissenters posed.74 Nonetheless, it is also probable that this work was translated to give the English a chance to see how their conflicted past looked to their enemies. Curll suggested that such ‘a moderate Volume with no less Perspicuity than Strictness, and with a beautiful Mixture of short Characters, nice Reflecxions, and notable Sentences’ would undoubtedly find a readership.75 Whether drawn initially out of curiosity or for instruction, or some combination of the two, English readers of D’Orleans’s book encountered a view of their history that demonstrated the political peril of religious disunity. Historically, religious disunity led to bloodshed and usurpation, a lesson Frenchmen also knew well from their own civil wars of the sixteenth century. D’Orleans put Britain’s mid-century civil conflict firmly within the context of England’s ‘Long Reformation’. The British kingdoms, he argued, set themselves on the road to internecine warfare after abandoning their union with the Catholic faith. Contentions between the two chief ‘sects’, the Episcopal church of England and Presbyterians, ‘mere Calvinists’, in Curll’s rendering of D’Orleans’s formulation, ‘and otherwise call’d Puritans’, had wracked the British kingdoms ever since. In the ‘Advertisement’, Curll acknowledged that D’Orleans’s argument about Henry VIII’s ‘crimes’, and his equating of Anglican and Presbyterian ‘sects’ would be problematic for most readers. However, the publisher suggested that the author’s bias made what the book said about the religion of the Stuarts and their enemies all the more valuable. Importantly, it was clear which of the two ‘sects’ D’Orleans thought was the more dangerous.76 According to his account, the aim of British puritans from the mid-sixteenth century onwards was to limit the monarch’s powers and get rid of the bishops. Thus it was to be expected that the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s could be traced to a puritan–Presbyterian campaign in both kingdoms against ‘regal Authority in both Church and State’. While admitting that in fact it had been a newer sect, the Independents, who were most guilty of killing the king, D’Orleans recapitulated the commonplace that Presbyterians shared some

[E. Curll and R. Gosling],‘Advertisement Concerning this History’, Pierre J. D’Orleans, The History of the Revolutions in England under the Family of the Stuarts … (1711), sig. A1v; idem, Histoire des Revolutions d'Angleterre depuis le Commencement de la Monarchie (Paris, 1694, 1695); [E. Curll], Some Considerations Humbly Offer’d to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Salisbury (1710); idem, A Search after Principles (1710). 75 Curll, ‘Advertisement’, sig. A1v. 76 Curll, ‘Advertisement, sig. A1v. 74

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of the blame by first rebelling in 1642; they had ‘prepared the way and the Victim for the sacrifice to come’.77 D’Orleans’s narrative thus suggested yet again that a nation where adherents of Calvinist resistance theory existed both in and outside of the established Church could expect more conflict in the future. Moreover, a country where religious diversity was officially tolerated could probably expect it sooner, rather than later. In the long run, the Glorious Revolution’s compromise with the settlement of the Elizabethan Reformation was endangering the stability and safety of both the nation and its Church. Jeremy Collier’s Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain recapitulated the anti-puritan explanation of the civil wars as part of a blanket rejection of the Glorious Revolution, and relatedly, a vindication of non-juring Anglican ecclesiology. The two-volume work presented a vision of the Church and its relationship to the temporal powers that clergymen such as Collier believed had been undermined in the 1640s. That relation to the so-called magistrates was reaffirmed by the Restoration settlement, only to have been betrayed in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. The post-Revolution regime had illegitimately trampled over the spiritual independence of the Church, by unilaterally appointing bishops into the places of men who had refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary.78 Collier’s history, by contrast, articulated a vision of the Church as a spiritual polis, which derived its authority and coercive power over its members from Christ’s institution, not any human regime. In the first volume of the Ecclesiastical History, published in 1708, Collier described the sometimes uneasy relationship between civil and spiritual powers during England’s medieval period. The focus of the second, released in 1713, concerned the Church’s history since the accession of Henry VIII. Collier’s treatment of the mid-seventeenth century conflict was a warning about the dangerous spiritual consequences of Presbyterian and Low Church Erastian theology. The book summoned all Churchmen to defend their inheritance from clergymen such as Bishop Gilbert Burnet, whose understanding of English Christian history seemed to collapse the Church into a department of the state.79 For Collier, the age-old struggle over the

Curll, ‘Advertisment’, sig. A3v; D’Orleans, Revolutions in England, p. 329; pp. 101, 128; pp. 20, 33, 55. 78 Jeremy Collier, An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, Chiefly of England (1708–14); Rose, England in the 1690s, pp. 155–60. 79 Andrew Starkie, ‘Contested Histories of the English Church: Gilbert Burnet and Jeremy Collier’, HLQ 68 (2005), 335–43. 77

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Church’s rights and responsibilities within England was far from over in the reign of Queen Anne. His history was meant to be a weapon for clergymen like himself determined to protect the Church’s spiritual authority from Erastians in and outside holy orders. Collier’s treatment of the civil war’s origins was unique in that, for a clergyman, he did not think it necessary to place the blame on Calvinist theology or ecclesiology. Instead, the Ecclesiastical History conveyed an anti-Erastian history of Britain’s civil wars. The tensions between the Court and Parliament during the 1620s, and between Charles and his Scottish subjects after 1637, stemmed from ambitious laymen who sought to restrict or roll back the Church’s rights and liberties. Collier identified the origin of the Scottish revolt and the wars between Charles I and Parliament with a Presbyterian–puritan conspiracy against Archbishop Laud and episcopacy. Archbishop Laud had, in Collier’s judgement, perhaps unwisely defended Richard Montague’s sermons on behalf of the royal prerogative, but he had acted rightly out of legitimate fears that the Reformation settlement would be at risk if ‘controversies in Religion were determin’d in the last Instance by the Laity’. Relatedly, Collier acknowledged that Laud’s necessary reforms had generated lay opposition for various reasons, but did not bother to explore them in depth.80 Collier’s history put the Church and not the king at the centre of its analysis. For example, although Collier accepted Kennett’s point in the Complete History that the Covenanter revolt was provoked in part by fears that the new prayer book was too much like the English one, he contended that what had really animated most Scots, the lairds in particular, ‘was an Apprehension the Bishops might recover something of the Patrimony of the Church, which was seized in the Disorders of the Reformation’. Laymen’s greed, in other words, not concern for the Kirk’s doctrine or discipline, had started the kingdoms down the road to religious warfare. Significantly, Collier’s Ecclesiastical History did not dwell at great length on the suffering of Charles I, nor on the issue of whether or not Charles I was a genuine martyr. In fact, Collier noted rather disapprovingly that towards the end of his life, the king had regretted allowing Strafford’s execution more than excluding bishops from the House of Lords. More important to Collier than Charles I’s efforts to protect the prerogative were Laud’s efforts during the 1630s to refurbish the Church through a greater emphasis on liturgical uniformity and restoring ornament and order to parish worship. In Collier’s judgement, the wars were ultimately the fault of coordinated Calvinist–Presbyterian opposition to Laud’s campaign for altars to replace communion tables, and Collier, Ecclesiastical History, pp. 734; 754, 760, 777; 795.

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his suppression of lectures and sermons that supported Calvinist doctrine. Ironically, having ‘imbroiled the Kingdoms, kindled and carry’d on a calamitous War’, during which more lives were lost than in all the fifteenthcentury Wars of the Roses, the Presbyterians achieved nothing of lasting significance.81 Collier’s justification of the Restoration settlement was grounded ultimately on its congruence with his ecclesiology. For Collier, the greatest tragedy of the conflicted past was not the regicide or the emergence of a republic, but the temporary triumph of a Parliament committed to an Erastian frame of religion. This development almost ended true religion in England. Without the bishops in office to check the excesses of the laity, true religion lay prostrate. Although Collier did mention that the loyal clergy had suffered during the wars and Interregnum, his focus on doctrine, public discourse and the episcopate meant that the experience of Churchmen at the parish level during these years was not emphasised. Furthermore, the stress of Collier’s narrative on the spiritual independence of the Church from temporal powers, and the necessity of preserving its apostolic form of government, were exemplified by the fact that he devoted only ten pages to the Interregnum period. According to Collier, during that time the Rump Parliament and then Cromwell had driven the true Church of England underground. Indeed, it was almost as if there had been no church in the 1650s. By contrast, the two years between the Restoration and the Act of Uniformity, when the Elizabethan frame of the Church was resurrected by the Cavalier Parliament in the face of Presbyterian opposition, received eighteen pages. Clearly, a Parliament that upheld and affirmed the bishop’s authority had done right by the Church, even if it was not technically in a position to deny or affirm those rights in the first place.82 Sadly for Collier, this good work was overturned after the Glorious Revolution when a different Parliament saw fit, in his mind, to victimise clergymen who affirmed the doctrine of hereditary succession and the Church’s spiritual independence. 1688 had been the undoing of 1660. Guilty pasts and present dangers As had been the case since 1660, civil-war histories published around the turn of the seventeenth century were concerned to remind readers about who had been right and who had been wrong before and during England’s Collier, Ecclesiastical History, pp. 820; 760, 777, 855. Collier, Ecclesiastical History, pp. 788; 841; 828–9; 860–70, 871–89.

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civil wars. This approach to the question of remembering past conflict was so important because the answer enshrined in the Clarendon Code, which essentially scapegoated the puritan impulse, legitimated a polity from which adherents of that impulse officially were proscribed. The proscription remained in place after the Glorious Revolution. Nonetheless, the fact that Dissenters were granted limited religious freedom suggests that the political nation no longer considered them a direct threat to the Church and the state, despite Dissenters’ ‘seditious’ past. Relatedly, it became increasingly common after the end of pre-publication censorship for Dissenters or their Anglican friends to use histories of the civil wars to suggest that the memory of the civil war underlying the Restoration settlements was wrong. The question of who to blame for the conflict in histories of the civil wars was connected to two fears animating public discourse during the reigns of William and Anne: where did the greatest danger to the nation lie, and which of the two settlements – Restoration or Revolution – was the best defence against that threat? If the civil wars were indeed the result of the Stuart dynasty’s predilection for French-style absolutism and perhaps even French Catholicism, then the cooperation of all sincere English Protestants to defend the achievement of the Glorious Revolution against its enemies was essential. Concomitantly, those who sought a second Stuart Restoration were truly the greatest danger to peace, stability and Protestantism in Britain.83 As I have shown in this chapter, the greater a historian’s support for the outcome of the Glorious Revolution, the less likely the history was to blame the civil wars on a puritan conspiracy. More attention would be paid to contingency and even the mistakes, and in extreme cases, the sins of Charles I. Relatedly, the religious aspects of the conflict could be downplayed or, as we saw in White Kennett’s Complete History, redefined. Such suggestions prompted a wave of civil-war histories and memoirs that reasserted the guilt of puritan–Presbyterians and vindicated their subsequent and ongoing exclusion under the Restoration settlements. Not only had their ancestors illegitimately resisted Charles I and overthrown the Reformation settlement of Elizabeth I, now some of the Dissenters’ more extreme advocates dared to suggest that Charles I was to blame for the civil wars. If it was true that Charles I was responsible for the bloodshed of the 1640s, then he could

Daniel Szechi, ‘The Jacobite Movement’, Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. H.T. Dickenson (Oxford, 2002), pp. 81–96.

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not truly be considered a Christian martyr. For many people, these kinds of denunciations of King Charles I’s character and his policies threatened to undermine not only the legitimacy of the religious settlement erected after the Restoration but also the political position of the Anglican Church in the polity. Relatedly, historical vindications of the puritan impulse both during and after the civil wars were widely interpreted by Anglicans as dishonouring the memory of the true victims of the conflicted past: the loyal clergy. Their stories, and the attempt to honour their suffering in print, are the focus of the following chapter.

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5 John Walker and the Memory of the Restoration in Augustan England

In 1705, Ann Harris was an old woman who possessed an increasingly rare and precious resource: a personal memory of the civil war years. Indeed, it is possible that by the turn of the seventeenth century she was the only person remaining in the parish of Coleorton, Leicestershire, who could recall that tumultuous period. During the 1640s, Harris had been a servant in the household of William Pestell, Coleorton’s rector. Six decades later, she claimed to remember very well the abuse her employer had received at the hands of parliamentarian soldiers. Forced by them to ride over sixteen miles to Tamworth on a bareback horse, Pestell had endured several beatings along the way. Additionally, the clergyman’s wife was forcibly removed from their home despite being heavily pregnant. We know about Ann Harris and her purported recollection of the Pestells’ mistreatment during the civil war because she was the sole witness cited in a letter that William Hunt, the parish’s early eighteenth-century rector posted to another clergyman, John Walker of Exeter.1 As Hunt and Walker knew, during the ‘grand Rebellion’ all too many Anglican clergy and their families had endured hardship and experienced harm.2 Soon On writing letters at this time, see Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark, NJ, 2005). 2 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 239; Alexander Du Toit, ‘Walker, John (bap. 1674, d. 1747)’, ODNB; I.M. Green, ‘The Persecution of “Scandalous” and “Malignant” Parish Clergy during the English Civil War’, EHR 94 (1979), 507–31; Judith Maltby, ‘Suffering and Surviving: The Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Formation of “Anglicanism”, 1642–1660’, Religion in Revolutionary England, eds Christopher Durston and Judith D. Maltby (Manchester, 2006), pp. 158–80; Anthony Milton, ‘Anglicanism and Royalism in the 1640s’, The English Civil War: Conflicts and Contexts, 1640-49, ed. J.S.A. Adamson (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 61–81, 252–7; Fiona Youngman, ‘“Our Dear Mother Stripped”: The Experiences of Ejected Clergy and Their Families During the English Revolution’, Unpublished DPhil. Thesis (Oxford, 2008). 1

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after the accession of Queen Anne, it had become Walker’s special mission to collect memories from people such as Ann Harris, which were to be a crucial source for a major historical work about Anglican clergymen. Those clergy had incomes and homes sequestered by the Long Parliament or under the English Republic. Today, the correspondence that makes up the bulk of the Walker papers at the Bodleian Library is one of the most important resources for first-hand or communicative memories of the 1640s and 1650s from ordinary people, such as Ann Harris.3 The personal recollections that the letters represent, most of them recorded by correspondents, but a few written by witnesses themselves, are especially poignant since they came from elderly women and men whose living memories of the wars would soon be forever lost. Furthermore, because Walker relied heavily on letters from parish clergymen to write his history of Anglican suffering, the correspondence represents a unique resource for exploring the transformation of communicative memory into cultural memory in Augustan England. The communicative memories of mistreated clergymen recounted within Walker’s papers, and Walker’s history of Anglican suffering, which was published in 1714, represented a significant collective effort by parish clergy during the reign of Queen Anne to vindicate historically the Restoration religious settlement, and the proscription of Dissenters from state and Church.4 Moreover, parochial recollections of seventeenth-century Anglican suffering were collected and recorded to reaffirm the established Church’s pre-eminent position in the more competitive religious context created in England after the Glorious Revolution. Once published, they could be employed to reinforce High Churchmen’s conviction that Anglicanism represented England’s authentic catholic and reformed Christian communion, from which the nation’s spiritual bearings necessarily derived. The letters and Walker’s history also shed light on the historical sensibilities of High Church Anglicans at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The G.B. Tatham, Dr John Walker and The Sufferings of the Clergy (Cambridge, 1911); Ann Laurence, ‘“This Sad and Deplorable Condition”: An Attempt Towards Recovering an Account of the Sufferings of Northern Clergy Families in the 1640s and 1650s’, Life and Thought in the Northern Church c. 1000–c. 1700: Essays in Honour of Claire Cross, ed. Diana Wood (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 465–88; Burke Griggs, ‘Remembering the Puritan Past: John Walker and Anglican memories of the English Civil War’, Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England, eds M.C. McClendon, J.P. Ward and M. MacDonald (Stanford, 1999), pp. 158–91. 4 John Walker, An Attempt Towards Recovering an Account of the Numbers and Suffering of the Clergy of the Church of England ... who were sequester’d, harrass’d, etc., in the late times of the Grand Rebellion, etc. (1714). 3

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accounts that High Churchmen and Churchwomen sent to Walker were shaped by memories of vulnerability during the conflicted past. Relatedly, the hostility shown by many Anglicans towards Dissenters as an identifiable collective, particularly moderate Presbyterians and Congregationalists; and towards the practice of occasional conformity, was clearly informed by a sense of past victimisation by adherents of the puritan impulse. Not surprisingly, it was the publication of a puritan history of the seventeenth century that provoked parish clergy to record and recount, and for John Walker to collect, the memories of people such as Ann Harris. Yet despite generating an extraordinary level of public support, the legacy of Walker’s project within public memory was equivocal. The first part of this chapter examines briefly the reasons why many Anglicans felt themselves and their church to be endangered at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The sense of vulnerability provides the necessary context for understanding the origin of what I am calling Walker’s project: the collection of testimony, both oral and written, to provide the evidentiary basis for a history of puritan persecution that would uphold the legitimacy of the Restoration settlement, the religious tests for civil office and the integrity of the established Church. The chapter’s second part will examine the key parameters Walker set for his project, and how his correspondents at the parish level attempted to demonstrate their adherence to the project’s protocols. The next section turns to the early correspondence, foregrounding the resonance of its accounts with similar kinds of testimonial literature. The following section examines the degree of identity between the stories in the letters and Walker’s use of them as evidence in his history. It will be clear that for the most part Walker respected the content and form of parochial memories of Anglican suffering. The final section considers the massive support the project generated and the impact of Walker’s history within the cultural memory of the civil wars and Interregnum. High Church vulnerabilities Personal and parish memories of abusive puritan parliamentarians made many High Anglicans feel vulnerable at the turn of the seventeenth century. The letters that John Walker received from parish correspondents were a significant response to a series of perceived frontal assaults on the honour and integrity of the Anglican Church. Many firm supporters of the Restoration religious settlement, who also believed strongly in the Church’s independent spiritual identity and authority, understood their church’s place within the polity to be in danger. The danger came from three recent 171

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developments in the religious landscape: the advent of a relatively free market in Protestant worship; a rising number of printed attacks on core Church beliefs; and the continuing practice of occasional conformity by moderate Dissenters.5 The Church’s honour was further insulted by the ecclesiological implications of Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae, an abridged version of which was published in 1702.6 Walker’s project represented a call to Anglicans at the dawn of a new century to renew their commitment to the true faith, and to stand united against Dissent as their ancestors had against the puritan onslaught during the civil wars and Interregnum. During the 1690s, many Anglicans were deeply troubled by the political and ecclesiastical consequences of the Glorious Revolution.7 The state’s commitment to enforcing Protestant uniformity, which many Churchmen since 1660 had regarded as crucial to the survival of the Elizabethan Reformation settlement, terminated finally with the Toleration Act of 1689.8 Henceforth, Anglicans and Dissenters would be free to compete for adherents from the population. Consequently, during the 1690s, attendance at some parish churches dropped while Dissenter meeting houses opened across the country. Yet the end of state-sponsored religious uniformity did not mean the end of ill-feeling among English Protestants. High Churchmen remained naturally wary of those whom they regarded as the spiritual (and biological) descendants of the puritans, who had led the assault on the Church during the 1640s. Moreover, competition for the religious allegiance of women and men not surprisingly produced tensions, while

See Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (1987); Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000); J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 61–82; for an account of a revolution in the political orientation of senior clergy during the 1690s, see Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, 2009), pp. 402–25. 6 See above, pp. 150-153. 7 What follows is informed by Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion and War (Oxford, 1999), pp. 171–80; Donald A. Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660–1740 (Cambridge, 2000); William Gibson, The Church of England, 1688–1832: Unity and Accord (2001); John Spurr, The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–1714 (Harlow, 2006), pp. 193–234. 8 Mark Knights, ‘“Meer Religion” and the “Church-State” of Restoration England: The Impact and Ideology of James II's Declarations of Indulgence’, A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration, eds Alan Houston and Steven C.A. Pincus (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 41–70. 5

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hardening denominational boundaries between Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Anglicans.9 The rising number of printed attacks on the Church’s teachings in the late 1690s was another cause of deep concern for many orthodox Anglicans. The lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 permitted the publication of works that sought to undermine universal Christian beliefs, such as the Trinity, and a particularly crucial aspect of Anglican piety: the annual fast day services that commemorated Charles I’s execution.10 The controversy over the cult of King Charles the Martyr was linked to significant public disagreement over the nature of religious and political authority in postRevolution England.11 While the liturgical focus of the service was mostly penitential – repenting for allowing God’s anointed to be murdered – its homiletical emphasis was invariably political.12 It was underlined repeatedly in 30 January sermons that Charles I had died for the causes of divinemonarchy, the Christian duty of obedience to the governing authorities, and the obligation of the state to retain a confessional character tied to the Elizabethan Reformation.13 As discussed in the previous chapter, John Toland (among others) argued that it would be better for the nation if High Anglican clergy would stop using the anniversary of King Charles’s execution to attack the Glorious Revolution and its outcome.14 Most Anglican clergymen perceived such attacks on the cult to threaten both monarchical

Mark Goldie, The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, Volume I. Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 243–5; John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000), pp. 198–206. 10 John Toland, King Charles I. No such Saint, Martyr, or Good Protestant as commonly reputed … (1698), Wing J7; Animadversions on the Two Last 30th of January Sermons … (1702). 11 Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2003). For later resonances, see Andrew Starkie, The Church of England and the Bangorian Controversy, 1716– 1721 (Woodbridge, 2007). 12 Church of England, ‘A form of common prayer to be used yearly upon the xxxth of January’, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments (1670), Wing B3637, sigs X1r–X3r. 13 See, among many examples, John Gilbert, A Sermon Preached at St. Andrew’s Plymouth, January 30th… (1699), Wing G711, p. 31; William Baron, A Just Defence of the Royal Martyr, K. Charles I (1699), Wing B897, sig. A2; John Williams, The Case of Martyrdom Considered, in a Sermon Preached before the House of Lords (1702), p. 14. 14 Animadversions, p. 27. 9

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government and the mutually supportive relationship between the state and the established Church.15 That relationship was further threatened by the practice of occasional conformity.16 In the 1660s and 1670s, moderate Dissenters periodically took communion at their parish church as a way of demonstrating Protestant solidarity, and of showing that they still desired comprehension within the established Church. With the advent of religious toleration, however, occasional conformity was increasing criticised by Churchmen as a political expedient, since moderate Dissenters who took communion at an Anglican service at least once a year met the religious requirement for civil and military office. In 1697, for example, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Humphrey Edwin, attended a parish church in the morning; and then in the afternoon, while still in his ceremonial robes, he worshipped at a Dissenter meeting house.17 Theoretically it was possible that the practice of occasional conformity could allow Dissenters to gain control over certain borough corporations, which in turn could allow them to influence the election of parliamentary representatives. Some Anglicans therefore worried that occasional conformity would lead to a Parliament packed with the supporters of Dissent, which might then enact legally their comprehension within the Church. Such a move would have been regarded by many devout Anglicans as calamitous, since it would bring people regarded as ‘schismatics’ into the bosom of a hitherto pure branch of the universal Church. More worryingly, if less probable, occasional conformity could produce a Parliament that might attempt yet another magisterial reform of the Elizabethan

John Spurr, ‘Religion in Restoration England’, The Reigns of Charles II and James VII & II, ed. Lionel K. Glassey (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 90–124; Jacqueline Rose, ‘Royal Ecclesiastical Supremacy and the Restoration Church’, Historical Research 80 (2007), 324–45. 16 John Flaningham, ‘The Occasional Conformity Controversy: Ideology and Party Politics, 1697–1711’, JBS 17 (1977), 38–62; M. Greig, ‘Bishop Gilbert Burnet and Latitudinarian Episcopal Opposition to the Occasional Conformity Bills, 1702–1704’, Canadian Journal of History 41 (2006), 247–62. 17 Kenyon, Revolution Principles, p. 84. 15

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Reformation, as had been conducted by the Long Parliament during the 1640s, or else simply disestablish the episcopal Church.18 Thankfully for High Anglicans, such disasters appeared much less probable in 1702, with the accession to the throne of a strong supporter of the established Church. However, Queen Anne’s inaugural year witnessed the publication of a memoir that seriously disrespected Anglican doctrine and honour. The Reliquiae Baxteriae, edited and abridged by a Presbyterian clergyman, Edmund Calamy, provocatively suggested that the Restoration religious settlement effectively undermined the Church’s identity as a true Christian communion. The Reliquiae was both an ‘autobiography’ of Restoration nonconformity’s most famous minister, Richard Baxter, and a puritan history of the seventeenth century.19 The ninth chapter of Calamy’s Abridgement listed the names and described the travails of ministers who were ejected from their livings on ‘Black Bartholomew Day’, because they could not conform to the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Calamy inserted these accounts to show that clergymen, such as Baxter and Calamy’s own grandfather, had suffered religious persecution on account of their faith.20 The representation of Dissenting ministers as genuine Protestant martyrs meant, concomitantly, that the Restoration religious settlement had transformed the Church by-law-established into a community of persecutors.21 This was a charge that went to the heart of Anglican self-understanding, since John Morrill, ‘The Attack on the Church of England in the Long Parliament, 1640– 1642’, History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick, eds Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 105–24. For their part, Dissenters and their whig allies perceived attacks on occasional conformity as preliminary moves that aimed ultimately at overturning or else greatly restricting religious toleration; Mark Knights, ‘Occasional Conformity and the Representation of Dissent: Hypocrisy, Sincerity, Moderation and Zeal’, Parliament and Dissent, eds Stephen Taylor and David L. Wykes (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 42–57. 19 Richard Baxter, An Abridgment of Mr. Baxter’s History of his Life and Times. With an Account of Many Others ... By Edmund Calamy (1702). 20 John Seed, Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in EighteenthCentury England (Edinburgh, 2008), pp. 13–40. 21 Admittedly, some of the men Calamy listed had been ejected between 1660 and 1662; David L. Wykes, ‘“To Let the Memory of These Men Dye is Injurious to Posterity”: Edmund Calamy’s Account of the Ejected Ministers’, The Church Retrospective: Papers Read at the 1995 Summer Meeting and the 1996 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, Studies in Church History, 13, ed. R.N. Swanson (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 379–92; Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999); G. Glickman, ‘Early Modern England: Persecution, Martyrdom and Toleration?’, HJ 51 (2008), 251–67. 18

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a church that persecuted was in fact no church at all: persecution was the work of anti-Christ. Walker’s project was part of the Anglican response to the Reliquiae Baxteriae’s attack on the Church’s integrity and the legitimacy of the Restoration religious settlement. Some even regarded Calamy’s book as the prelude to another puritan assault on the established Church. ‘Is it come to 40 again? Are to the saints to reigne in this century?’ wondered one of Walker’s early correspondents.22 For such men and women, the Restoration religious settlement’s proscription of the puritan impulse from the national church was justified in part because of the seditious, even unchristian nature, of reform-minded Protestants. This had been demonstrated conclusively, it was recalled, during the civil wars and Interregnum. Like their mid-seventeenth-century puritan ancestors, Dissenters were regarded as axiomatically enemies of the establishments in both the state and the Church. Walker’s project was thus strongly linked to fundamental questions confronting the English polity at the dawn of the eighteenth century. Remembering the civil-war sequestrations experienced by Anglican clergymen was a window into the identity and ambitions of Augustan Dissenters. The civil wars and Interregnum years had witnessed an attack, led by the spiritual and biological ancestors of contemporary Dissenters, on England’s true Church. To Walker’s mind and that of most of his correspondents, Dissenters were thus men ‘who were ever Insatiable in their Demands, Implacable under Disappointments; always Tyrants in Power, and Rebels out’. ‘Let any one Judge’, Walker declared, ‘whether the same Principles will not produce the same Practices.’  23 Furthermore, Walker’s project purposed to prove historically an important religious truth, namely, that ministers of the established Church had suffered far more than had the ministers ejected in 1662 as a result of the Restoration religious settlement. According to one of Walker’s correspondents, ‘the patient suffering’ endured by Anglican clergy during the civil wars and Interregnum was truly a ‘passiveness rather to be gloried in with the cross than ridiculed and reproached by some of those very Persecutors of late yet living and their numerous and flourishing offspring’.24 Anglicans had suffered, while Dissenters only had been inconvenienced for disobeying the law of the land.25 Moreover, demonstrating Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 211; for some other public responses, see Matthew Neufeld, ‘The Politics of Anglican Martyrdom: Letters to John Walker, 1704–5’, JEH 62 (2011), 491–514 at 497. 23 Walker, Attempt, pp. xi–xii. 24 John Northleigh to Walker, Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 356. 25 Walker, Attempt, p. xx. 22

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the Church’s martyrological credentials also provided historical vindication of the Church’s status as a true Christian communion, thereby legitimating its continuing position at the centre of the nation’s religious and political affairs.26 Walker’s method and local memories of sequestered clergy Although High Anglicans keenly felt their Church to be endangered by latter-day puritans, their response was for the most part thoughtful and measured. Walker planned to answer Calamy’s challenge with what for the time was a rigorous method of research; he circulated printed questionnaires to parish clergymen.27 This method of data collection was also much favoured by contemporary antiquaries and natural historians. By the middle of 1704, Walker was appealing for information concerning sequestered clergymen. There are two versions of Walker’s questionnaires, or ‘queries’, that survive. The questionnaires prompted most of the ‘notices [that] came in Single Papers’ that Walker subsequently received from his locally based correspondents, which eventually totalled nearly five folio volumes.28 The first one hundred or so letters came from across the country, while most of the two hundred following were from Walker’s native county of Devon. The first questionnaire, dating from 1704, was directed primarily at clerics from the diocese of Exeter, while the second was sent out across the country in 1705. For reasons that remain obscure, the earlier version contained many more particular questions than the later one. Nonetheless, both questionnaires asked general questions about the identity of the sequestered clergyman, followed by a request for further details, including the manner of his ejection and his subsequent hardships, as well as the sort of person who ‘intruded’ on the living. Furthermore, both questionnaires On the broader context, see Thomas Freeman, ‘Imitatio Christi with a Vengeance: The Politicisation of Martyrdom in Early-Modern England’, Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 63–5; idem, ‘Introduction: Over their Dead Bodies: Concepts of Martyrdom in Late-Medieval and Early-Modern England’, Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700, eds Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas Mayer (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 20–7. 27 Woolf, Social Circulation, pp. 159–62; Jan Broadway, ‘No Historie So Meete’: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 100–9; Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2004), pp. 12–3; 51º2; Adam Fox, ‘Printed Questionnaires, Research Networks, and the Discovery of the British Isles, 1650–1800’, HJ 53 (2010), 593–621. 28 Walker, Attempt, pp. xxiii–xxvii. 26

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encouraged clergymen to tap into local communicative memories of the civil war era. Walker asked that inquires be made from ‘the Antient People of your Parishes, the Relations or Descendants of such as were concerned in those Times (especially any Relations and Descendants of their own, or their intimate Acquaintance and Friends) and Learned Gentlemen in your Parish’.29 Walker wanted information from eye-witnesses, but only after a thorough check on their truthfulness. Significantly, Walker’s research methodology, and indeed the purpose of his project, paralleled an important ‘microhistory’ of radical Protestants written by a Presbyterian minister, Thomas Edwards.30 Edwards’s Gangraena, published during the civil war, was meant to serve as a ‘catalogue’ of the doctrinal errors of London’s separating congregations. By stark contrast, Walker was determined to protect the religious establishment created in 1662 from the descendants of civil-war era Presbyterians. No doubt Edwards would have been horrified to learn that Walker and his correspondents considered Presbyterians to be separating brethren together with Independents, Baptists and Quakers. Nonetheless, Edwards and Walker had much in common. Both clergymen hoped that their projects would mobilise public support for the ‘right’ form of religion for England, and for the correct relationship between spiritual and temporal powers. Both Edwards and Walker saw their projects to be what Ann Hughes calls ‘methodologically self-conscientious, truth-telling enterprise[s]’. Furthermore, Edwards and Walker similarly claimed to be able to identify true and false Christians, partly through the information they received from local corresponding informants. Likewise, the two authors each went to great lengths to underline the credibility of the testimony these letters conveyed.31 Nonetheless, when it came to asserting the veracity of such accounts, Walker faced a greater challenge than Edwards. This is because Edwards wrote essentially contemporary ecclesiastical history focused largely on London, the city where he lived. By contrast, Walker’s project concerned events six decades past that occurred throughout the country. Naturally, the Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 326; Tatham, Walker, pp. 86–7. Thomas Edwards, Gangraena: or A Catalogue and Discovery of Many Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time (1646), Wing E228. I thank Mark Knights for drawing this comparison to my attention. 31 Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), pp. 21, 64–78, 88–91, 102–4, 112, 117–21, 131, 153, 202–3; idem, ‘Approaches to Presbyterian Print Culture: Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena as Source and Text’, Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, eds Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia, 2002), pp. 97–116 at 107. 29 30

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greater temporal distance between Walker and his subject meant that the Exeter clergyman was reliant on an ever-diminishing supply of parish-based communicative memory of the civil war era. Only a handful of Walker’s early correspondents, primarily the children of clergy, wrote accounts that were derived at least in part from personal memory. For example, William Satterly wrote that ‘I (being a child in those times) can give you but a slender account of his [father’s] usages from my own memory’.32 By contrast, much of what could be known about the suffering of Anglican clergy had to be ‘collected singly from the Memories of so many Different and Distant Persons’. In other words, Walker’s most important sources were very old. As Walker himself later admitted, this presented a difficulty for his project because, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, tales from such ‘Mean and Ignorant’ people concerning their locality were increasing rare and also less trustworthy to educated readers.33 Walker responded to the challenge of collecting and reproducing authentic knowledge derived from elderly personal memories in two ways. One of them he directed at his correspondents. Walker’s questionnaires gave clear instructions about whose memories should be tapped for testimony about the sequestrations, and how they ought to be acknowledged in correspondence. He required his correspondents only to ‘set down the Names and Qualities of the Person from whom you have your Relations, as from a Son, a Friend, a Brother, etc of the Minister himself; Or whatever else the Relator’s Condition may be that renders his Testimony credible: And to send nothing but what you have good Grounds to believe is true.’  34 As we shall see below, from the sort of material that eventually appeared in the published history, Walker appears for the most part to have trusted the information sent in by correspondents. Walker’s second response to securing the veracity of locally sourced knowledge about the past was aimed at readers of the Attempt. In the preface to the work, Walker credited his information by affirming the trustworthiness of his clerical correspondents. Such men, ‘tho’ by no means exempt from Error and Mistakes, must however be Allow’d on many Accounts better Qualify’d to Collect and Report such Notices, than any other Body of Men whatsoever’.35 Tempting as it might be to accuse Revd Walker of special pleading, the trustworthiness of clerical sources was in fact vital to other Augustan researchers, particularly antiquarians who, like the Exeter Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 245. Walker, Attempt, p. xlii. 34 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 326. 35 Walker, Attempt, pp. xxxiv, xlii, xxxvii. 32 33

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rector, were dependent upon the parish clergy for local topographical and historical knowledge.36 Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that Walker, arguably working from a Baconian commitment to fact-gathering, was ultimately compelled to defend his history’s authenticity by crediting the trustworthiness of his sources on account of their vocation, rather than the content of their testimony.37 It is evident that Walker’s early correspondents were equally aware of the epistemological challenges facing an historical project reliant upon the ‘common voice’.38 The decades that had elapsed since 1660 had increased the value of communicative memories by reducing the available stock of witnesses, while also heightening the risk that what was remembered was partial or even untrue.39 For example, William Beetham confessed that he had based his letter’s story on the testimony of a man who had ‘lived in that sad time, and was a spectator of those affairs … [but] time has worn some things out of his memory’. According to Edward Bradford, if only Walker had started his project two decades earlier, he would have had a much richer fund of personal memories upon which to draw. ‘I had then’, he wrote, ‘divers very aged persons, of 80 years and upwards [who had lived] in my parish in the times of Confusion.’40 With each passing day, and with each passing eye-witness, it was more difficult to know the truth about the time of sequestrations. However, the response of many letter writers to the lack of human sources, and those people’s failing capacity to remember, was surprisingly somewhat more thorough than Walker’s. Many correspondents sought to demonstrate both the social credit and mnemonic expertise of their informants by passing on certifying details concerning witnesses and their knowledge of sequestered clergymen.41 For example, Thomas Gipps concluded his epistle with the declaration that ‘the Account I here give you I rec’d from Robert Barlow husbandman aged 72; from Elizabeth Meadowcraft aged 76; and from Elizabeth Kay of Cobbs aged about 80 years’. Particularly thorough Sweet, Antiquaries, pp. 51–2. Griggs, ‘Remembering the Puritan Past’, pp. 167, 185; Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994). 38 Daniel Woolf, ‘The “Common Voice”: History, Tradition and Folklore in Early Modern England’, P&P 120 (1988), 26–52. 39 For similar challenges faced by the disseminators of local memories, see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England: 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 259–97; Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 138, 150–62. 40 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 244; c. 2, fol. 148. 41 On the broader social and cultural importance of expertise, see Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of the Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, 2000). 36 37

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in crediting his sources was the Suffolk minister Isaac Raye, who named his informant, Edward Elliston, gave his age, and had Elliston put his signature on the document to certify its contents. The empirical work of John Evans was truly remarkable. He claimed to have travelled to two nearby parishes to interview the ‘two men living that can speak to this barbarity of their own knowledge’. He averred that he had ‘examined them apart about the matter of fact, and tho’ they knew nothing of me or my Design yet they both agreed in their testimony’.42 This certifying approach to personal testimony about the past was sometimes also applied by letter writers to their own narrativisations of what they had heard. Particularly conscientious was Edward Voyer, who included on his letter a signed attestation from Francis Hutchinson, declaring that ‘Mr Voyer of Okley is now an Antient clergyman of great learning and sobriety and I rec[ommen]d the above letter from him’. Similarly, Mr Ford assured Walker that the information contained in his letter was ‘what I have heard and I believe you may depend upon the truth of what I have written’.43 The correspondents wanted Walker to know that they were careful collectors of credible testimony. The extent to which these crediting strategies were undertaken simply out of a desire to comply with the protocols laid out in Walker’s questionnaires, rather than from a self-motivated desire to convey genuinely true knowledge, is not always obvious from the style and content of the letters. It is fairly clear in some cases that a letter was written with the questionnaire firmly in view, whereas in others the correspondent chose to recount what he or she had experienced or heard without any regard for Walker’s methodological protocols. For example, both John Rost and Elizabeth Bentham properly provided descriptions of the ejected minister’s character, the manner of his ejection and subsequent suffering, and gave examples of the unorthodox actions and views of the clergyman’s replacement. By contrast, Gideon Edmonds was forced ‘off-script’ by the fact that his predecessor had taken advantage of his puritan connections to evade ejection; Edmonds ended up noting that an uncle of his had lost his living after having been fined several times. Similarly, an anonymous letter writer from Suffolk supplied an account that resembled, significantly, a legal brief on behalf of his subject’s travails. He or she even gave the story a title: ‘The case of Lionell Playters: Clerke, Rector of Uggeshall in the County of Suffolk relating to his sufferings in the years 1642: 43 and 1644’.44 More significant, however, than the degree to which the correspondents adhered to the protocols laid Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 244; c. 1, fol. 228; c. 2, fol. 97; c. 1, fol. 213. Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 297; c. 1, fol. 329. 44 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 226, 97b; c. 2, fol. 287; fol. 271. 42 43

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out by Walker’s questionnaires, is the evident desire across the correspondence to record and report stories that corresponded to the aim of Walker’s project.45 Making martyrs of the sequestered clergy Unlike early Restoration-era books about men who suffered for adhering to both the king and the Church during the civil wars and Interregnum, Walker did not think of his project as producing a ‘martyrology’.46 Nevertheless, the accounts that Walker received from parish-based correspondents tended to have strong martyrological features, such as a concern to demonstrate that their subjects were guiltless victims of vile men. Moreover, many stories had, not surprisingly, resonances with themes long prominent in religious historical writing, including apocalypticism and providentialism. Yet, howsoever much the correspondents wished to prove that sequestration had been a form of religious persecution they did acknowledge, albeit indirectly, the political valence of Anglican suffering during the civil wars. As was common within martyrological writing, most accounts emphasised the piety, goodness and therefore the innocence of ejected clergymen. The obvious utility of these characterisations was to underscore the hypocrisy of their persecutors; their so-called piety had been only a cloak for ambition, self-interest and natural cruelty. For example, Thomas Dunbar wrote that before Thomas Lant of Middlesex was sequestered, he was ‘well known to be a person of a truly primitive Temper and blameless Deportment, who never spoke evil of any man, even those who persecuted him, and was ever ready to doe good to all men’. Correspondents encapsulated a clergyman’s moral uprightness with key words emphasising his decency and fidelity; phrases such as ‘loyal and learned’, ‘pious and exemplary’, ‘very generous and good natured’, and ‘of a good life and conversation’ were used liberally in letters.47 Edward Bradford noted that his predecessor was serious, sober and orthodox, as exemplified by his devout and reverent reading of the Church’s prayers and homilies. The vicar of Cransford in Suffolk See also R.W. Serjeantson, ‘Testimony and Proof in Early-Modern England’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 30 (1999), 195–236. 46 For example, Heath, Loyal Martyrs (1665); the subjects of Heath’s book were all men. 47 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 176; Robert Hanbury’s description of Mr Simson Paige of Huntingdonshire: c. 1, fol. 177; Joseph Wood on Mr Joseph Stock of Yorkshire: c. 1, fol. 216; an anonymous author on Dr Whittington of Warwickshire: c. 1, fol. 283; Ezra Pierce on Mr Henry Owen of Somerset: c. 1, fol. 295; John Paine on Dr Robert Warren of Suffolk, c. 1, fol. 309; Richard Paulett on Dr John Crofts of Suffolk: c. 1, fol. 307. 45

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was described by those who remembered him as a good man and decent preacher, but most of all as someone who showed ‘liberal charity to the poor’.48 These ministers had been the farthest thing from malignant and scandalous. A further way for correspondents to demonstrate that Anglican clergy were wrongly persecuted, as opposed to legitimately prosecuted, during the civil wars was to show that the charges of scandalous actions or malignancy were baseless.49 The men and their families had suffered either out of spite or, more piously, on account of their convictions. However, these principles were regarded as both spiritual and civil. As an example of frivolousness of some sequestrations, Thomas Archbold of Havington in Worcester was known to have supported firmly the king and the Church, yet it was reported that he lost his living because he had opposed the plan of a few parishioners to enclose the common field.50 These sorts of stories demonstrated that the hypocrisy of puritan parliamentarians. They said they wanted to reform the Church, but really were trying to seize its power and wealth for themselves. Correspondents more commonly, however, emphasised the sinister spirituality that underlay the sequestration of Anglican clergymen. Of course, since the Henrician Reformation, the English state had become confessional in ways that would make it very difficult for early modern people (and subsequent historians) to make neat distinctions between actions and beliefs that were purely ‘political’ and others that were merely ‘religious’.51 Generally, Walker’s correspondents simply equated faithfulness to the Stuart monarchy with a firm commitment to the religious truth incarnated in the established Church’s doctrine and discipline.52 The loyal clergy had been committed to upholding the Elizabethan Reformation, as shown by their willingness to suffer for a cause that was spiritual and political – fidelity to the established temporal and ecclesiastical authorities. For example, the rector of Great and Little Leak, Nottinghamshire, Edward Bigland, Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 296; c. 1, fol. 397. Examples of such cases were presented in John White, The First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests (1643), Wing W1771D. 50 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 184; Lionel Playters was said to have been ejected for his excessive fondness for custard; c. 1, fol. 271. 51 Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003); Patrick Collinson, ‘The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics in Elizabethan England’ Historical Research 82 (2009), 74–92. 52 During the civil wars such equations were not always automatic; see Anthony Milton, ‘Anglicanism and Royalism in the 1640s’, The English Civil War: Conflict and Context, 1640–49, ed. John Adamson (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 61–81, 252–7. 48 49

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had endured sequestration and imprisonment ‘only for his loyalty to the King, and firm adherence to the Church’. Likewise, Abraham Spenser of St Michael’s in Herefordshire was turned out of his vicarage ‘for the vertues’ of loyalty to the king and constancy to the Church. Other correspondents were more specific about the content of the clergyman’s fidelity. A number of men, including John Pynsent and Thomas Tyllot, were remembered to have been sequestered for not swearing to Parliament’s anti-episcopal Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots. Indeed, in the case of Tyllot, his refusal to swear had led to a spell in prison.53 Thus, good clergymen during the civil wars were persecuted simply for being orthodox ministers and faithful subjects of the divinely ordained higher powers. Unsurprisingly, the correspondents overwhelmingly represented the 1640s and 1650s using the binary moral categories characteristic of biblical apocalyptic literature. The keyword that correspondents employed most frequently to characterise the period resonated with Lucifer’s great crime – rebellion – to which were added various modifiers such as ‘great and wicked’, ‘most horrid’ and ‘ungodly times of’.54 Moreover, numerous accounts evinced what literary scholars would recognise as the romantic features of apocaplyticism, that is, a struggle of good against evil, the triumph of good after a series of setbacks, and a conclusion in which the protagonist lives happily ever after.55 For example, Henry Walmsley reported that the rector of Settrington in Yorkshire, Thomas Carter, had been ejected by ‘soldiers in a rude and barbarous manner’, but later ‘at the Restauration [was] … restored to his living’. Thereafter he ‘prudently, carefully and laudably watched over his own Flock until he was called to give an account of his Stewardship unto the great Shepherd and Bishop of our souls’.56 It was probably no accident that this correspondent chose to equate Christ with the episcopal office. Of course, not all the stories in the letters that Walker received had happy endings. Some correspondents related tales of ministers who had suffered bad ends. For example, Abraham Spenser had managed to ‘A solemn league and covenant for reformation and defence of religion’, The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688, ed. J.P. Kenyon (Cambridge, 1966), p. 264. Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 335; c. 1, fol. 303. Unsurprisingly, none of the early correspondents chose to compare the ejections over the Covenant in 1643 with those over its renunciation two decades later as demanded by the Act of Uniformity; see Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism and the Political Nation, 1553–1682 (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 179–99. 54 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 153; c. 2, fol. 340; c. 1, fol. 211; c. 1, fol. 205; c. 1, fol. 228. 55 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957). 56 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 176; fol. 343; c. 2, fol. 246. 53

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survive until the king’s return ‘by the Providence of God’, yet sadly because of his ‘great age and many infirmittys’ he had slipped into a form of senility that stopped him regaining his rightful living.57 The moral framework of most accounts clearly resonated with the apocalyptic vision of Christian martyrologies, which went all the way back to the Book of Revelation. Additionally, as the recollection of Spenser’s endurance through hard times suggests, Walker’s correspondents had little difficulty placing their stories within a providential understanding of the past. According to an extreme formulation of this view, during the 1640s and 1650s, English Christians had been enslaved and persecuted by worshippers of false gods, only to be astoundingly liberated at the time of God’s own choosing. For the most part, the correspondents appear to have believed that God had allowed Anglican clergy to suffer not to purify or to chastise them but ultimately to vindicate the truth of their confession and discipline. Among the early letters that directly or obliquely evoked divine oversight (just over two dozen), the majority related accounts of God’s general providence in upholding and provisioning sequestered clergy during their travails – for example, through the charity of neighbours – and then restoring them to their livings after the king’s return.58 For example, the ‘one extraordinary Instance’ of God’s goodness shown to Dr John Neile during his time of suffering was a very timely receipt of cash conveyed by Dr Henry Hammond on behalf of ‘several well disposed persons’. After the Restoration, Neile was restored to his post, and ended his career as Dean of Ripon cathedral. In these kinds of stories the parallelism of the monarchy’s return, the minister’s restoration and Christ’s resurrection was readily apparent.59 Nevertheless, there was very little of the miraculous within the correspondence up to 1705; one correspondent’s father, who had narrowly escaped being shot in the head by a parliamentary trooper while riding along the road, chose to commemorate what he perceived was a ‘great Deliverance’ with an annual feast for his neighbours and the poor.60 But Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 224; c. 1, fol. 329. Ronald J. VanderMolen, ‘Providence as Revelation: Puritan and Anglican Modifications of John Calvin’s Doctrine of Providence’, Church History 47 (1978), 27–47. On providentialism in Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, see Patrick Collinson, ‘Truth, Lies, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century Protestant Historiography’, The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1550–1800, eds Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 56–8; Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fols 66, 124, 235, 246, 263, 270, 276 307, 387; c. 2, fols 40, 217, 221, 252, 259, 263, 270, 283, 299, 281, 316, 329, 333. 59 Christopher Hill, The Bible and the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution (1993). 60 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 124. 57 58

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John Riland’s personal preservation was ultimately subsumed and superceded in the miraculous turn of events in 1660. Like the monarchy and the legitimate Church, Riland had suffered for a time but was ultimately vindicated at the moment of God’s own choosing. The persecutors, according to Riland, had been cast down, and rightly excluded from power after the Church’s marvellous restoration. Making the case for the Restoration religious settlement Walker’s correspondents had turned their elderly parishioners’ personal memories of the civil wars and Interregnum into stories that bear a strong resemblance to the testimonies about violent crimes used in legal proceedings.61 As in the case of court-generated narratives, the aim of the stories in the letters was to argue a case about the identity of the alleged perpetrators and their victims. Furthermore, the malice and wickedness of the assailants were highlighted the better to assert the innocence of the assailed. Ultimately, these accounts provided empirical evidence for Walker’s historical defence of the settlement that had secured the Church by proscribing from it, and from places of civil power, the puritan impulse. Moreover, many accounts in the correspondence were framed by a profound concern over personal and household honour, which can also be found in legal narratives that recounted interpersonal violence.62 Households were the heart and soul of early modern communities. As the basic unit of economic production, spiritual and personal formation and governance, households were the key to good order and right relations between human beings. Within honourable households, men and women, children and servants fulfilled their mutually acknowledged obligations to each other and the community at large.63 As told to and by Walker’s correspondents, Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 38–54. 62 Stuart Carroll, ‘Introduction’, Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 6–31; Mervyn James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642’, P&P Supplement (1978), pp. 309–413; Richard Cust, ‘Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England: The Case of Beaumont v. Hastings’, P&P 149 (1995), 57–94; cf. Linda Pollock, ‘Honor, Gender and Reconciliation in Elite Culture, 1570–1700’, JBS 46 (2007), 3–29. 63 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, 1985), pp. 154–92; Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, 2000), pp. 27–86. 61

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sequestration was remembered as the systematic, desecrating invasion of holy households. This was, for the correspondents, in evidence by the destruction of household property and church fabric, and by the attacks on the clothes and bodies of clergymen and their families.64 The often forcible ejection of a family from its home, or a minister from his pulpit, was an egregious transgression of the boundaries of public and private, sacred and profane, social status and gender. Attacks on the houses and bodies of clergymen and their families heralded a world-overturning assault on the key institution for human being in the world. The violence of puritan sequestrations was recalled as an abomination of desolation engineered by a cadre of so-called reformers, who had temporarily gained overweening power. Truly, puritans were not only the moral but also metaphysical enemies of the bodies politic and ecclesiastic. The implication of these stories was that the puritans and Augustan Dissenters were hardly moderate and respectable religious movements. Rather, they were anti-Christian and anti-life.65 The High Anglican animus towards moderate Dissent at the start of the eighteenth century, and the combative vigour with which its adherents continued to defend the Restoration religious settlement, stemmed in part therefore from a sense of historic vulnerability that clearly lingered at the parochial level in communicative memories, and which Walker’s historical work aimed to transpose into a more public memory. One strategy employed by letter-writers to heighten the moral and metaphysical contrast between the Anglican clergy and puritan sequestrators was to use labels that suggested that the latter were base and dishonourable men. For example, it was reported that the rector of Thorpe and Westwich in Norwich was insulted by ‘rude and barbarous officers’ who employed ‘all the opprobrious and base language’ imaginable during his ejection. Indeed, letter-writers often used the adverbial form of ‘barbarous’ to describe a clergyman’s treatment by parliamentarian soldiers or officials. This is understandable since barbarians were literally people beyond the boundaries of sense and reason; they represented the forces of disorder bent on spreading darkness and destruction. There was almost nothing good to be said for the The concern for the clergy’s honour as professional men is noted in Ann Laurence, ‘“Begging pardon for all mistakes or errors in this writing I being a woman and doing it myself”: Family Narratives in Some Eighteenth-Century Letters’, Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (2001), pp. 194–206. 65 For similar themes in print, see Laurence Hyde, ‘The Dedication’, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641 … Volume the Second (Oxford, 1703), sig. A2v; Henry Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren, Both in Church, and State …, 1709 (1709). 64

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puritan parliamentarians’ approach to the Church and for them as people, during the civil wars. Further proof of the wickedness of the sequestrators for correspondents was the fact that neither barbarians nor puritans respected the Church’s property, demonstrated first by the fact that they illegitimately deprived men of their livings. Puritan barbarism was also in evidence by their theft of clergymen’s belongings. For example, Samuel Seaward’s valuable collection of books and manuscripts was taken away by the sequestrators, which he had ‘deeply lamented, as a thing that went near him’.66 As barbarians and thieves, the civil-war puritans could hardly be recognised as deriving from the same national community as the Anglican clergy. Significantly, William Wake was incredulous that ‘so barbarous and inhuman’ practices as the sort experienced by his father during the 1640s ‘could ever be committed by Englishmen in their own Country’.67 As is to be expected, another dishonourable label attached to the sequestrators was ‘rebels’. One correspondent, Richard Towgood, dramatically characterised his father’s assailants as ‘those cursed first born brats of Hell [who] so disguised themselves as to pass for pure sanctity and true holiness’.68 Additionally, a few correspondents denigrated puritans by equating them with antinomian and separating sects, the so-called ‘fanatics’, who in fact were anathema to Presbyterians such as Thomas Edwards during the civil wars.69 That the ancestors of moderate Dissenters deserved to be dishonoured with imprecatory labels was supported with memories of the despoliation they had wrought during the 1640s and 1650s. Anecdotes of iconoclasm and the disruption of divine service meshed with the equation of sequestration with barbarism used in many letters. Moreover, the stories of iconoclastic actions testified to puritan profanations of the house of God and their lack of respect for the local households whose donations had provided them. Crucially, the invasion of church property by soldiers, and assaults on the physical accoutrements of the local church, also suggested that the perpetrators had no respect for the divinely constituted sacral parish community.70 The stories that recalled the puritans’ insouciant and Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 172; see similar accounts at c. 2, fol. 223; c. 1, fol. 211. Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 185; see, for example, John Laurence’s use of the phrase ‘barbarously dragg’d’, c. 1, fol. 263; c. 1, fol. 143. This William Wake of Shapwick, Dorset, was probably not the eponymous Bishop of Lincoln. 68 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 133. 69 Bod. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 307; c. 2, fol. 350. 70 Dan Beaver, ‘Behemoth, or Civil War and Revolution in English Parish Communities, 1641–1681’, The English Revolution, c. 1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Manchester, 2007), pp. 129–49. 66 67

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sacrilegious disruptions of holy offices were clearly intended to give the lie to early eighteenth-century Dissenters’ self-designation as respectable Christian Englishmen. Thus, N. Gwynn reported that soldiers belonging to Colonel Massey’s regiment had burst in upon John Feneber while the minister was administering the sacrament of baptism. Gwynn claimed that despite the inclement weather outdoors, Feneber was dishonourably stripped ‘of all his clothes, but a pair of drawers’, before being led into custody. Likewise, Philip Phelips wrote that one Sunday during the worship service, Mikepher Alphery [sic] was confronted by ‘a file of Musketers’. The soldiers ‘came and pulled him out of his pulpit, turn’d him out of the church, and went to the parsonage house and threw out his wife and children with his goods’. Similarly, according to a 73-year-old witness, in August 1641 the Presbyterians had disgraced the incumbent of the parish of Melford, Sussex, by barging in on him during the liturgy. They had proceeded to denounce the clergyman as a false prophet, then forcibly removed him from the pulpit, and dragged him back to his house while ‘one of the said party beat a frying pan before him in derision, saying “This is your saints bell”’.71 This particular anecdote was remembered to have occurred on St Bartholomew’s Day, a significantly portentous occasion given the fact that the same day twenty-one years later hundreds of Presbyterian ministers lost their pulpits for not assenting to the Act of Uniformity. The sins of the puritans during the civil wars had found and forced them out after the Restoration. The stories of the rough handling that Feneber and Alphery received point to a further notable aspect of such memories of suffering Anglican clergymen: the dishonour shown to them as male heads of households by puritan sequestrators. This was particularly clear in reports of clergymen being stripped of their clothes, thereby suffering the shame of unwanted physical contact and the enormous indignity of public exposure.72 Indeed, to have one’s underwear made visible was to be deemed naked. Additionally, the disorder and disrespect, which for correspondents had characterised the era of parliamentarian sequestrations, was epitomised in accounts that related the poverty, as well as the verbal and physical abuse and imprisonment of loyal Anglican clergymen. Reports of clergymen and clergy families experiencing material deprivation revealed how puritan sequestrators had

Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 123; c. 1, fol. 161; c. 1, fol. 309. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, pp. 42, 52.

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eliminated the key responsibility and characteristic of patriarchal manhood, which was the capacity to provide a decent living for their families.73 The sequestrators dishonoured the Church by depriving clergymen of a decent living. For example, after suffering sequestration, Samuel Ware ‘became very poor’ and maintained his family with only the ‘small contributions’ from sympathetic neighbours. Similarly, because the man put in (the so-called intruder) to replace the rightful minister of Harberton had refused to pay the amount required by law to support the ejected clergyman, the sequestered Anglican was forced to support his wife and ‘nine or ten children’ on just £20 per year.74 Furthermore, while it is not surprising to find within the correspondence typically martyrological accounts of Anglican clergymen who for their convictions suffered imprisonment at the hands of puritan persecutors, such stories also underlined the puritan assault on godly households, since incarceration temporarily deprived families of their chief breadwinner. According to one correspondent, Thomas Gibson endured five periods of imprisonment during the civil wars and Interregnum, which only compounded the extreme poverty his wife and six children experienced as a result of the sequestration.75 Sequestrations had also, it was remembered, permitted assaults on the social and spiritual hierarchies ordained by God. Clergymen were recalled being dishonoured, by having to endure rough treatments at the hands of men who were regarded as their social inferiors. Ministers were spat upon, insulted and ‘barbarously dragg’d’ from their homes. Frances King, the daughter of an ejected clergyman, recalled that her father had been plundered by a collar-maker known for his love of alcohol. Another minister, one Michael Dolling, reportedly felt the painful effects of the ‘barbarous and disgraceful treatment’ he received from soldiers months afterwards. They had forced him to ride with them to prison ‘on a bare bon’d lean hard trotting horse of theirs without saddle’. At least two correspondents noted that the violent treatment their pious subjects had received resulted in their Susan Dwyer Amussen, ‘“The Part of a Christian man”: The Cultural Politics of Manhood in Early Modern England’, Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, eds Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester, 1995), pp. 213–33; Alexandra Shepherd, ‘From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500–1700’, JBS 44 (2005), 291–2. The primacy for masculine honour of sexual reputation and control over dependants’ sexuality is emphasised by Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (1999). 74 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 223; c. 2, fol. 274, underscoring in the original. 75 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 31 and likewise fol. 56; a more straightforward martyrological representation of imprisonment, involving psalm-singing while in chains, is in Giles Satterly’s story of his father, c. 2, fol. 245. 73

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deaths.76 Yet, by showing them such disrespect, the puritans had honoured the Church’s clergymen with the mantle of martyrdom. Puritan–parliamentarians had furthered dishonoured the loyal clergy by invading the physical space of their households, the domains over which patriarchs were to exercise their God-given autonomous authority over female and male dependants. By trespassing over the boundaries set by doorways, the sequestrators had shown their inveterate hostility to the divinely ordained hierarchies that ordered both temporal and spiritual realms. Most egregiously, man-handling the bodies of clergymen’s wives, particularly those with child, epitomised the puritan desecration of holy households. As in the accounts of abused clergymen, the stories of mistreated wives demonstrated for the correspondents the continuity of these women with earlier Christian female martyrs, and foregrounded the cruelty of Dissenters’ spiritual and biological ancestors.77 Ultimately, stories of mistreated women’s bodies represented the puritan impulse as tending toward the destruction of the patriarchal political and religious orders that were ordained by the Almighty. Particularly chilling was an account submitted by an anonymous correspondent about the conduct of an intruder named Woodward. When the incumbent’s wife, Mrs Thomas Smith, resisted her family’s ejection from their home by clinging tightly to a bedpost, Woodward ordered a group of soldiers to remove her by force, which they refused to do. Then, according to the letter writer, Woodward, ‘more cruel and merciless then they’, went to her and ‘having a new pair of shoes on kickt her upon the belly with great violence, that it gave her a rupture’. Within a year the woman was dead, most people attributing her demise to Woodward’s malice.78 Such an attack was especially degrading and destructive to female honour since it threatened to quash her reproductive capacity.79 Similarly distressing and dishonouring for correspondents were the handful of accounts relating the brutalities inflicted on pregnant women. A number of letter-writers noted that pregnancy or lying in childbed had not stopped sequestrators from throwing clergymen’s wives out of their homes, even in the dead of winter. For example, Frances King recalled that in the act of searching her mother’s pockets for clandestine correspondence, Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 329, c. 1, fol. 85 and fol. 263; c. 1, fol. 26; c. 2, fol. 311; c. 1, fols 142 and 172. 77 Thomas Freeman, ‘“The Good Ministrye of Godlye and Vertuous Women”: The Elizabethan Martyrologist and the Female Supporters of the Marian Martyrs’, JBS 49 (2000), 8–33. 78 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 326. 79 Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, pp. 61–2. 76

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a sequestrator had ‘soe frightened [her], that itt caused a miscarriage of a child, and much indangered her life’.80 Memories such as this, which tended to make their way unaltered into Walker’s published history, showed that neither the honour of Mother Church nor the wives of Anglican ministers had been safe from the destructive fury of the so-called godly. 81 When combined with the annual commemorations of the regicide, communicative memories of the suffering of the clergy proved to the eighteenthcentury public that the puritan impulse was axiomatically hostile to the God-ordained patriarchal order that upheld the world. The descriptions of intruding ministers within the letters provided yet more evidence of the disrespect shown to the household of God by puritans during the civil wars and Interregnum. In the places of pious, learned and orthodox clergymen, the Long Parliament had installed faulty, foolish and at worst, false preachers. A few correspondents admitted that after the loyal minister was sequestered the parish was well shepherded. For example, Edward Bynes, the Independent intruding minister put into the pulpit in Upton Pyne, was remembered as personally upright. Nonetheless, the letter-writer, one Mr Gay, noted with disapproval that ‘the great neglect of the sacrament of the L[ord’s] S[upper] in his time was very scandalous’.82 However, the overwhelming conclusion to be gleaned from the early correspondents’ accounts of intruders was that the disestablishment of episcopal Protestantism in the 1640s had brought the nation to the brink of a spiritual abyss. Evidence of such spiritual darkness included the man who had replaced Thomas Haywood at Radeby, Huntingdonshire. He was remembered by the ancient people of the parish as having ‘always a huge pitcher of ale by the chimney corner’, and for leaving divine service to answer nature’s call ‘when the psalm was a-singing’. Similarly, there was nothing memorable about Peter Saxton’s ministry at Leeds, save for his ‘Ignorance, scurrility, and stirring the people up to Rebellion’.83 Several letters told of intruding ministers’ ridiculous acts and dangerous doctrines, which proved their unsuitability for spiritual ministry in an orthodox church. Residents of the village of Hitcham, Suffolk, remembered their replacement curate, Myles Burkett, offering up a prayer the Sunday following the execution of Charles I, in which he asked ‘Almighty God if he had not smelt a sweet savour of Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fols 176 and 37; c. 2, fol. 15; c. 1, fols 28 and 283. For example, Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 37 appears at Walker, Attempt, II, p. 6; c. 1, fol. 184 at Attempt, II, p. 277. 82 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 316. 83 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c.1, fol. 255; c. 1, fol. 181; fol. 235. 80 81

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blood’. According to Richard Paulett, during a sermon in which the theatrical Mr Legate ‘feared some would be disgusted’ by one of his arguments, he declared that ‘if this be not true I will cutt my Bible in pieces’; Legate proceeded to pull out a knife, and began to hack and slash ‘as though he meant what he said’. The illustrative sword-play that Legate enacted was incarnated by a former army chaplain named Thomas Larkham. He was remembered ‘by all’ the people of Tavistock as ‘a sower of discord and hatred’, who had once claimed that, like Christ himself, he had come ‘not to bring peace but the sword’. Reflecting upon the state of religion during the 1650s led Robert Browber to assume the persona of an Old Testament prophet, denouncing in his letter the ‘mighty flood and terrible torrent’ of heterodox theologies and schisms that had captured and ruined the souls of thousands, while loyal and orthodox ministers were forbidden to administer the sacraments, to preach, or even work as chaplains or schoolmasters.84 Although recent research suggests that English Episcopalian Protestants managed relatively well under the Commonwealth and Protectorate,85 the letters’ bleak if not starkly pessimistic assessments of the pastoral capabilities of intruders echoed a powerful Restoration-era commemorative tradition. As will be discussed more fully in the following chapter, the Church’s annual 29 May Thanksgiving services characterised the civil war and Interregnum period as the nation’s Golgotha, from which it had been providentially rescued in the annus mirabilis of 1660.86 Almost no good religion and much bad faith characterised the years when the king and Church were knocked down from their proper places. Anecdotes of poorly qualified and uncouth intruders bolstered the Anglican contention that episcopal ordination and oversight were necessary to maintain a truly godly ministry across the land. Furthermore, these stories reinforced the importance of legitimacy, for both the correspondents and the protagonists of their letters, for protecting and preserving the Church’s ministry. The men who had intruded into the clergy’s livings during the civil wars and Interregnum were agents of unlawful authorities, put into positions of spiritual care, thanks only to the power of Parliament and its army.87 Once installed, such men were allowed, according to the letter-writers, to broadcast illegitimate and Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 244; c. 1, fol. 307; c. 2, fol. 294; c. 2, fol. 231v. Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity 1646–60’, Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum, eds Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (Manchester, 2010), pp. 18–43; Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, ‘Vital Statistics: Episcopal Ordination and Ordinands in England, 1646–60’, EHR (2011), 321–44. 86 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fols 270 and 276. 87 I thank J.R. Jones for discussion of this point. 84 85

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therefore false versions of the gospel to shepherdless flocks. Ultimately, the descriptions of intruding ministers’ foibles, failings and false teachings justified historically the subsequent ejection of many of them under the Restoration religious settlement. The proscription of the puritan impulse had been necessary to bring righteousness as well as balance back to the spiritual and temporal spheres. The Long Parliament’s campaign against ministers it had deemed scandalous and malignant was narrated within Walker’s correspondence as an assault on the fundamental landmarks of the kingdom. Echoing common themes of legal narratives that recounted violent crimes, numerous letters paid particular attention to the threat sequestrations had posed to the heart of the social, economic, political and religious order: the household. This was most graphically demonstrated in the dishonourable trespasses sequestrators had made into the domestic spaces and onto the bodies of clergymen and their families. Without flourishing households there could be no productivity, no governance, no right relations between men and women, parents and children, neighbours with neighbours, and between the people and their God. The disrespect shown by puritan sequestrators towards the households of ministers and the houses of God were, in short, assaults on the kingdom’s future. It was in order to protect the future of England as a Christian nation that the proscription of the puritan impulse in Church and state after the Restoration had been necessary. As we have seen, correspondents recounted the travails of Anglican clergymen during the civil wars and Interregnum, to defend both the Restoration’s religious settlement and the established Church’s honour from the aspersions cast on them by Calamy’s edition of Richard Baxter’s memoir. One Hertsfordshire vicar told Walker that he had gladly composed an account of his late loyal godfather’s misery ‘to confront the Unhappy collection of Mr Calamy’. Similarly, John Gilbert rejoiced that Walker’s project would bring before the public the stories of men like his father Henry, who were ‘the lasting honour of the English nation’. Ironically, Calamy’s puritan ancestors had brought eternal shame on themselves by honouring the loyal Anglican clergy with the badge of martyrdom. Upon its completion, Walker’s project would be forever, Gilbert hoped, a ‘lasting monument’ to such worthy men and their families.88 How Walker constructed that monument, and its immediate significance, are the subjects of this chapter’s final section.

Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 333; c. 1, fol. 90.

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From parish memories to public remembering The end-product of Walker’s project was a complex publication that for the most part faithfully transmitted the information he received from parishbased informants. Walker’s book, the Attempt, was a composite work. First, it contained long lists of suffering clergymen. The book also included a lengthy history of the Long Parliament’s campaign against the loyal clergy written by Walker. The character of the Attempt echoed the structure of the most famous English martyrology, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments; it also resembled the historical compilations assembled by the great Restoration documentary collectors, Rushworth and Nalson. The significance of the Attempt’s structure lies less, however, in the book’s similarity to other martyrologies and historical collections, and more in making clear its fundamental purpose: to serve as an eighteenth-century archive of Anglican suffering, during the civil wars and Interregnum. Walker’s book, like all archives, had an agenda that was related to what would be remembered about the past by future generations. In the case of Walker’s Attempt, that agenda was to influence the kinds of narratives that would explain Anglican suffering during the 1640s and 1650s, and its meaning for the present.89 As a consequence of Walker’s faithful representation of his sources, the memories of suffering loyal clergy conveyed by his publication paradoxically left both a light and a long-lasting impression on the landscape of public memory. By and large, Walker was a careful transmitter of communicative memories of sequestered clergymen. In the preface to his Attempt, Walker assured his readers that the information he had acquired from private individuals had been ‘set … down Verbatim†’: the marginal caveat being ‘only abridg’d sometimes where they were too long’. From a sample of sixteen stories drawn from the early correspondence it appears that while for the most part Walker did ‘put down straightforwardly what he found in his sources’, he was not averse to massaging their content to put their subjects in a better light.90 For example, in eight cases Walker transplanted a letter’s text directly to his book.91 He did not, however, always acknowledge his Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz (1994). 90 Walker, Attempt, p. xxxii; A.G. Matthews, Walker Revised: Being a Revision of John Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy during the Grand Rebellion, 1642–60 (Oxford, 1948), pp. xii–xiii. 91 Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 40, Attempt, II, p. 83; c. 1, fol. 124, Attempt, II, p. 348; c. 1, fol. 211, Attempt, II, p. 274; c. 1, fol. 255, Attempt, II, p. 271; c. 1, fol. 303, Attempt, II, p. 383; c. 1, fol. 388, Attempt, II, p. 266; c. 2, fol. 245, Attempt, II, pp. 353–4; c. 2, fol. 311, Attempt, II, pp. 188; c. 2, fol. 376, Attempt, II, p. 415. 89

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borrowing from a correspondent, nor was he consistent in his method of citation. For instance, Walker introduced his passage on William Satterly by noting that it came from the sufferer’s son. He concluded his entry on Benjamin Harrison with a straightforward quotation of A. Mills’s letter, in which the correspondent had described a providential punishment; in this instance, Walker indicated his debt to Mills through the use of inverted commas. He also noted that this story was derived from communicative memories, one man who ‘hath often heard it from his own Mouth, and others [who] were present at the time’. Walker was faithful with his sources, if not always consistent in his use of them. His method of citing material from the letters was idiosyncratic. For example, Walker sometimes inserted into the book the contents of a letter but did not signal this with punctuation. From the sample there does not appear to be any clear reason why in some instances Walker used inverted commas and in others, he did not.92 It is probable that Walker was simply overwhelmed by all his material, and simply lost track of what was a direct quotation and what was a paraphrase. In several other cases, Walker clarified or queried aspects of a letter whose contents he otherwise inserted, unaltered. For example, in a marginal note to the entry on Mikepher Alphery, Walker stated that he thought it was improbable that the minister had, as the correspondent had claimed, ‘declined an invitation to return to rule’ the Russian empire. Yet Walker included this information in part because had received two letters from the same correspondent, and in part because his other information suggested that ‘the Sequestration of the Parish at least, is confirmed’.93 Ever the empiricist, Walker went with what his credible informants declared was true. And clearly, Walker gave most of his informants the benefit of the doubt. In a few cases, however, Walker’s commitment to the innocence of the sequestered clergy overrode his principle of publishing all that his correspondents said. For example, the parts of the letter about James Burnard’s imprisonment can be found verbatim, although unacknowledged, in the Attempt. Yet the portion of the epistle outlining the charges brought against the minister was significantly paraphrased for its appearance in Walker’s book. The correspondent, John Burrough had written that [t]he crimes of which Mr Burnard was accused to the Sequestrators were excessive drinking (of which, it must be confessed, he was sometimes guilty) and keeping Walker, Attempt, II, pp. 353–4, 256, 197, 348. Bod. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 1, fol. 161, Attempt, II, p. 183; c. 1, fol. 271, Attempt, II, pp. 334–5; c. 1, fol. 283, Attempt, II, p. 383; c. 2, fol. 245, Attempt, II, pp. 353–4.

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By contrast, in the book, Walker simply noted that the reasons given for Burnard’s sequestration were Drunkenness and Incontinency: The last of which Crimes was never thought of, until his Loyalty and Zeal for the King’s Cause had rendered him Obnoxious to the Party, and put them upon trumping up that Accusation against him.94

Walker was thus not above supressing details provided by his correspondents in order to make their subjects look more like innocent victims. Of course, most early modern historians can be found guilty of suppressing data that conflicted with their overarching agenda. It is now well known, for example, that a contemporary of Walker’s, John Toland, took great liberties with the manuscript of Edmund Ludlow’s civil-war memoirs, transforming a puritan’s lament at the twists of providence into a classical history of the civil wars.95 By comparison, Walker’s editorial hand was very light indeed. Walker’s fidelity to his sources was probably a function of his declared desire to hand over his correspondents’ own words to his readers, which itself was rooted in an age-old understanding of Christian history as the passing down of the testimony of faithful witnesses.96 Walker’s evidently was more a transmitter of testimony than an interpreter of oral evidence. It is also probable that Walker’s book transmitted the unaltered content of many letters because he simply did not have the time or energy to edit them to any great extent. Moreover, Walker did not need to shape the stories greatly since a fundamental congruence of purpose existed between him and his correspondents in relation to the public memory of the civil wars and Interregnum. Both Walker and his correspondents wanted the suffering of Anglican clergy, and the persecutions practised by Dissenters’ puritan Matthews, Walker Revised, p. xi; Burrough’s letter is at Bodl. Lib., MS J Walker, c. 2, fol. 311, cf. Attempt, II, p. 197. For a similar example, see the account of Thomas Archbold, c. 1, fol. 184, cf. Walker, Attempt, II, p. 188. 95 Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (2001), pp. 39–121. 96 John Spurr, ‘‘‘A Special Kindness for Dead Bishops”: The Church, History, and Testimony in Seventeenth-Century Protestantism’, HLQ 68 (2005), 313–35. 94

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ancestors, placed at the centre of public remembering of the civil wars. The question then naturally arises: to what degree did Walker’s project and its public achieve their aims? Walker’s Attempt produced mixed outcomes in the realm of public memory. As would be expected, the book was warmly welcomed by its ‘chief demographic’. For example, in late 1716 Revd Thomas Bisse hailed the work in a sermon to the Sons of the Clergy, declaring his hope that Walker’s ‘martyrology’ would find its way into every church and cathedral from which Anglicans had been unjustly sequestered.97 However, the book appears to have been rather less successful outside its base of support. For one thing, Dissenters and their Anglican allies were not stopped from producing public critiques of the Restoration settlement and the Restoration Church. Indeed, just prior to its publication, Calamy did not seem to be too concerned by what Walker’s book would reveal about Calamy’s puritan forbears. In the preface to the second edition of his abridgement of Reliquiae Baxteriae, published in 1713, Calamy welcomed the impending release of Walker’s history as a warning ‘against Rigor and Severity upon Occasion of any Religious Differences, in all Times to come’.98 This was probably not the sort of response Walker would have anticipated from one the Dissenters’ chief advocates when Walker started his project in 1704. As it happened, Calamy did not get around to responding directly to Walker’s work until 1719. This is probably because in the immediate aftermath of the Attempt’s publication, the adherents of the Dissenting denominations were focused on more pressing matters, such as taking advantage of the accession of King George I.99 While Calamy’s rebuttals to Walker’s project were certainly important for the politics of public remembering in early Hanoverian England, they reveal only one aspect of the response to the Attempt’s agenda. Looked at as a monument to Anglican suffering, the book had only a minor impact on public debates over the meaning of the civil wars and the place of Dissenters within the Georgian polity. A few examples of Anglican reflections on the necessity of the restrictive religious tests for civil and military office suggest that Walker’s book was not used as a resource for public remembering. For example, four years after Thomas Bisse, A sermon preach’d before the Sons of the Clergy, at their anniversary meeting in the cathedral-church of St. Paul, December 6, 1716 … (1717), p. 19. 98 Edmund Calamy, An Abridgement of Mr. Baxter’s History of his Life and Times. Vol. II (1713), p. xxviii. 99 Edmund Calamy, The Church and the Dissenters Compar’d, as to Persecution. In Some Remarks on Dr. Walker’s Attempt to Recover the Names and Sufferings of the Clergy that were Sequestered … (1719); Seed, Dissenting Histories, pp. 28–9; 32. 97

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the Attempt was published, Thomas Sherlock, then Dean of Chichester cathedral, argued that the civil disabilities placed on Dissenters ought to be maintained because of their historic propensity to ‘hurt the Church of England’. Although Sherlock referred to the sequestrations and ‘barbarities’ that the Dissenters’ ancestors had inflicted upon ‘the Crown, the Nobility, the gentry, and the Clergy’ during the civil wars and Interregnum, he did not invoke any names nor provide any details about particular suffering Churchmen that the Attempt contained.100 Similarly, in the 1730s, Sir Arthur Croft and John Perceval, Lord Egmont, echoed Sherlock by arguing that Dissenters’ persecuting past justified the civil disabilities under which they continued to live. Lord Egmont pointedly reminded Dissenters that while it was all very good for Edmund Calamy to commemorate the piety of men such as Richard Baxter and the other Bartholomeans, there had never been any public renunciation forthcoming from them or their descendants of the hardships inflicted on the Church during their era of domination. While this was not exactly true, neither Archer nor Egmont mentioned Walker’s Attempt in their work. Nor did they illustrate their cases with stories of suffering clergymen and their wives.101 Thus, while Walker’s project clearly had a large public when it finally was released in 1714, the parochial memories of the sequestrations that its published outcome conveyed were mostly ignored. The Attempt’s light footprint on the landscape of public memory was undoubtedly a function of both its content and its publishing context. As John Seed has argued in Dissenting Histories, the book, particularly its preface, was not well written. Its lack of a unifying organising principle, and its great length (over six hundred pages) probably deterred all but the most ardent reader. Furthermore, the political climate following the accession of George I did not favour the kind of ardent defences of the Restoration religious settlement that were provided by the Attempt. It appears that to some Anglicans, the agenda represented by Walker’s book was too close to the reactionary politics unleashed by the preaching and subsequent trial of the High Anglican hero, Revd Henry Sacheverell. After the accession of George I, the high-flying tory politics that Sacheverell embodied were themselves, paradoxically, proscribed. Thomas Sherlock, A Vindication of the Corporation and Test Acts (Dublin, 1718), pp. 13, 17, 19–20. 101 Calamy, The Church and Dissenters, p. 23; Sir Archer Croft, The mischief and danger of repealing the Corporation and Test Acts (1736), pp. 7, 15–16, 22; John Perceval, earl of Egmont, A Full and Fair Discussion of the Pretension of the Dissenters, to the Repeal of the Sacramental Test (1733), pp. 16–17. 100

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The Attempt did not make much of an impression within Georgian public memory of the civil wars because, paradoxically, as an archive of Anglican suffering it fulfilled its memorialising purpose too well. Walker’s Attempt was known and viewed as a repository of stories of puritan persecutions and Anglican martyrdoms, but was not much consulted or reflected upon. Similarly, the unintended consequence of many modern memorials is that once they are erected, they encourage people to forget about the past event that is being commemorated. In effect, the monument keeps the memory of the past event (or person) so that people do not have to. Moreover, monuments allow people to recalibrate the meaning of the commemorated past to fit new circumstances as necessary.102 Concerning the impact of Walker’s Attempt, it is a likely possibility that for most eighteenth-century Anglicans, it was enough to remember that the book was there, and that it was about persecuted clergymen. The details of those men’s stories did not matter. The communicative memories collected by Walker’s correspondents were thus, for the most part, buried within what was a successful artefact of cultural memory, the book known simply as ‘The Sufferings of the Clergy’. The book seemed to do the job of preserving the memory of the suffering clergy so well that it was hardly used to remember what that suffering entailed, and what relation those travails had to the politics of religion in eighteenth-century England. Despite having only a minor impact within Augustan public memory, Walker’s project was not, however, a complete failure. Importantly, the archive of Walker’s correspondence still exists and is a crucial resource not only for the politics of Anglican martyrdom in early eighteenth-century England, but also for the social history of the English civil wars. Indeed, Walker’s project can be viewed as a success, if for no other reason than until very recently, the prevailing narrative of Anglican experience during the 1640s and 1650s had remained within the tradition of victimisation and vindication.103 New research is showing that the reality for many episcopal Protestants under the Republic and Protectorate was not all pain and poverty. Indeed, approximately three-quarters of all parochial ministers retained their livings or were able to re-enter the ministry, during the civil wars and Interregnum, until they were removed by death or saved by Restoration.104 As the final chapter will show, the endurance of the narrative of Anglican Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989), 7–24 at 13–14; cf. Eelco Runia, ‘Burying the Dead, Creating the Past’, History and Theory 46 (2007), 313–25. 103 Most recently in Maltby, ‘Suffering and Surviving’. 104 Fincham and Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity’, p. 19. 102

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victimisation and vindication commemorated by Walker’s project can be partly explained in part because the myth of the Restoration as salvation was lodged firmly within late seventeenth-century public memory.

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6 Thanking God those Times are Past

In the summer of 1660, the Convention Parliament unanimously enacted a statute making 29 May, the birthday of King Charles II, and the date on which he had arrived in London and Westminster, a national day of remembrance. According to the Act’s preamble, the peaceful restoration of monarchical government after years of the ‘most deplorable Confusions Divisions Warrs Devastations and Oppression’ was a miracle: a ‘signall Deliverance both of his Majestie and His People’. Henceforth the people of England were to use the day to offer up to Almighty God ‘their unfeigned hearty publique Thanks’ for all the ‘publique benefits received and conferred on them’ by the king’s return to rule.1 As earlier chapters have already shown, the Restoration settlements profoundly shaped and influenced public remembering of the civil wars and Interregnum. This chapter shifts its focus from individual testimonies and historical writing to another powerful form of public remembering in late Stuart England: sermons preached at annual religious services of thanksgiving. 29 May was the day chosen by Parliament to celebrate the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, not the date on which the remnant of the Long Parliament called for new elections and voted to dissolve itself (16 March), not the date when the Convention Parliament first met (25 April), nor the date when it voted Charles II to have been king since 1649 (8 May), or the day when the king landed at Dover (25 May). The coincidence of the king’s birthday and his rapturous welcome by Londoners seemed an irrefutable symbol that the ‘late unhappy times were over’.2 Making 29 May a national anniversary was a clear attempt by legislators to link the reestablishment of monarchical government with an unusual display of public rejoicing. Furthermore, establishing the anniversary of the king’s birthday 12 Car. II, cap. 14, ‘An Act for a Perpetuall Anniversary Thanksgiveing on the nine and twentyeth day of May’, SR, v, p. 237. 2 Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658–1667 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 124–5; N.H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford, 2002), p. 32. 1

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as ‘Restoration Day’ provided subsequent commentators and interpreters with a vast fund of regenerative images and narratives through which to give meaning to that moment in the nation’s story – rebirth, resurrection, renewal, spring-time, salvation, restoration, and of course, deliverance.3 The most ubiquitous, and subsequently accessible, interpretations of that moment were the sermons delivered by clergymen at 29 May Thanksgiving services. These sermons represented attempts by an individual minister, acting at the behest of the regime, the whole or a part of the established Church, his denomination, or his own conscience, to shape public memory. Thanksgiving sermons were important platforms from which clergymen defined or redefined a key national myth – a myth in the sense of a story that reveals the origin of the world. The dominant myth underlying 29 May sermons was a story of divine deliverance, national liberation, and political and spiritual redemption. Preachers of 29 May Thanksgiving sermons were required to engage with a story that explained the origin of the political and social and religious order – the Restoration settlement. On ‘This Day’, as it was invoked in numerous sermons, by the power of God, England was saved. By retelling the story of the country’s rebirth, they were drawing their auditors, and their subsequent readers, into an interpretation of the civil wars, the Interregnum and the events of 1659 and 1660, that had, for the preachers at least, clear and important applications for the public and public affairs. Sermons preached in celebration of Restoration Day were part of a long tradition of public commemorations of God’s providence. The thanksgiving services were important liturgical moments for attending to the past and the present, both as separate temporal events and in relation to each other. Importantly, representations of the past in 29 May Thanksgiving sermons were often similar in form and content to history conveyed within the Hebrew Bible. The decisive thing for both the biblical narrator of Israel’s past and the preacher of a 29 May Thanksgiving sermon was the word of the Lord breaking into human affairs to punish or to save the people. 29 May Thanksgiving sermons gave ministers an opportunity to take stock publicly of the nation’s direction in light of the myth of deliverance and the longer story of providential deliverances, such as the victory over the Armada in 1588 and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605.4 29 May Sharon Howard, ‘Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-century Childbirth: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World’, Social History of Medicine 16 (2003), 367–82. 4 Kevin Sharpe, ‘The Royal Image: An Afterword’, The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, ed. Thomas Corns (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 288–309; David Carr, Time, Narrative and History (Bloomington, 1986), p. 55. 3

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Thanksgiving preachers and sermons consciously invoked the long story of God’s interaction with human affairs. Additionally, the sermons preached at 29 May Thanksgiving services were occasions for the political nation and the wider population to reassess the importance of the civil wars, Interregnum and Restoration, in light of subsequent events. That said, David Cressy’s argument that contemporary fears gave 29 May Thanksgivings, and other commemorations of divine mercies, new meaning requires a degree of qualification.5 The myth of liberation undergirding Thanksgivings for the king’s return in 1660 gave preachers a powerful interpretative tool through which to respond to and assess contemporary events, such as the Revolution of 1688 and the accession of Queen Anne. Moreover, the late Christopher Durston’s contention that Fast Days and Thanksgivings reflected a spirituality of godly Calvinism that was alien to the majority of English Christians, and therefore unimportant, also ought to be modified in light of a consideration of late Stuart Thanksgiving sermons. The endurance of observances, albeit at times spotty, evident from diaries such as John Evelyn’s and Ralph Josselin’s, and the steady stream of printed sermons coming from official and parochial pulpits, suggests that these events were part of the mainstream of Anglican piety throughout the era.6 Attending to 29 May sermons as recapitulations and reapplications of a myth of deliverance reveals a profound and important paradox about public remembering and legacy of the civil wars and Interregnum. The story of the king’s return as conveyed in the vast majority of printed sermons effectively pushed the events of 1660 out of the realm of politics and into what biblical scholars call ‘salvation history’ (Heilsgeschichte). What really mattered when narrating the ‘end’ of the conflicted past was not what humans had done, but what God had wrought on the plain of human history’.7 Framing the Restoration as a ‘kairos’ moment – happening according to God’s time and by His hand – did not, however, prevent preachers from drawing mundane, and sometimes controversial political lessons from the nation’s liberation. By the same token, the potency and prevalence of the myth of liberation was important for subsequent understandings of the 1640s and 1650s as a national misery, comparable to Israel’s captivity in David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 171–2. 6 Christopher Durston, ‘“For the Better Humiliation of the People”: Public Days of Fasting Days and Thanksgiving During the English Revolution’, The Seventeenth Century 7 (1992), 129–46. 7 Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, Volume 1: The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions, translated by D.M.G. Stalker (Louisville, KY, 2001), p. 344. 5

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Babylon, from which only negative lessons could be drawn. In other words, the myth of deliverance helps us to understand why, as recent historians have argued, the civil war and Interregnum period was rarely mined for historical precedents by subsequent generations of political and social leaders.8 In this chapter I will show how preaching about what happened on 29 May 1660 was employed both to commend and to contest the settlements erected in the aftermaths of the Restoration and Glorious Revolution. What follows is a chronological analysis of printed 29 May sermons dating from the first anniversary of the king’s entry into London, until the initial observances under George I. A printed sermon, like the public thanksgivings and fasts ordered during the civil wars by royalists and parliamentarians, represented an attempt to set a particular meaning on a past event.9 This point is strengthened by acknowledging that a printed sermon did not necessarily correspond precisely with what was delivered orally to the public. The printed version of a sermon was an attempt to fix for the public what the preacher intended to say – what we could call the sermon’s more ‘public face’. Once published, these texts became part of a broader public dialogue about what had happened, and how what had happened ought to affect people’s actions and what they believed.10 Furthermore, 29 May Daniel Woolf, ‘From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past’, HLQ 68 (2005), 44; Blair Worden, ‘The Question of Secularization’, A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, eds Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge, 2001), p. 27; Edward Vallance, A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries – The Men and Women who Fought for Our Freedoms (2009), pp. 197; 202. 9 Gary Rivett, ‘“Remembrance of the Good Done”: Public Thanksgiving and Parliament, 1641–1651’, Unpublished PhD Thesis (Sheffield, 2010), pp. 128–66; cf. J.P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 62–79; John Spurr, ‘“Virtue, Religion and the Government”: The Anglican Uses of Providence’, The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, eds Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (Oxford, 1990), pp. 29–47; Tony Cladyon, William III and the Godly Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 110–14; Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2002). 10 Mary Morrissey, ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, HJ 42 (1999), 1111–23; Tony Claydon, ‘The Sermon, the “Public Sphere” and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth century England’, The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750, eds Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester, 2000), pp. 208–27; James Caudle, ‘Preaching in Parliament: Patronage, Publicity and Politics in Britain, 1701–60’, in The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750, eds Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester, 2000), pp. 235–63; Ian Green, ‘Orality, Script and Print: The Case of the English Sermon c. 1530–1700’, Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, Volume I: Religion and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, eds Heinz Schilling and István Gyögy Tóth (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 236–55. 8

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Thanksgiving sermons were attempts to engage a public in a particular ongoing narrative about the civil wars, the Interregnum, and their end; by end I mean both the conclusion and the ultimate purpose of those years. Preaching about the past was a form of public communication. Michael Warner has argued that preaching was not truly public discourse, since it was addressed to auditors as singular recipients of the Word of God. I disagree with Warner, because, as James Rigney points out, printed sermons gave readers more scope for making meaning than the original auditor had. Print also opened up the possibility that the sermon would generate its own reading public.11 Printed 29 May sermons were thus a kind of homiletical ‘show and tell’ about the past for the public, what John Evelyn called in his diary entry of 29 May 1685, ‘rememorating and exhorting’.12 Sermons in print moved the preacher’s message out of doors, enabling communication between strangers about the preacher’s story and its application. By teaching English people that the 1640s and 1650s were a time of sin, 29 May Thanksgiving preachers went a long way towards inculcating the idea that very little could be learned from that period of England’s past. The narrative underlying most 29 May sermons was of a nation delivered from disorder and wickedness by an astounding act of God. From the very beginning, the myth of deliverance was particularly powerful and attractive for explaining the Restoration because it gave the ancient constitution, the subsequently the re-established episcopal Church and the proscription of the puritan impulse the mandate of heaven. The Restoration political and religious settlements were founded, by implication, upon a salvific miracle. As literary scholars, historiographers and even social scientists have noted, a story of salvation is the ultimate narrative of historical progress.13 What is bad or lost is transformed over time into something that is redeemed and found; the best it ever could have been. Furthermore, the myth of deliverance in 29 May sermons created a near absolute break with the civil war and Interregnum past. Life before the king’s return was shown in sermon after sermon to be the moral opposite of what returned on 29 May. This homiletical construction of historical discontinuity centred upon May 1660, Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002), pp. 83–5; James Rigney, ‘“To Lye upon a Stationers Stall, Like a Piece of Coarse Flesh in a Shambles”: The Sermon, Print and the English Civil War’, The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750, eds Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester, 2000), pp. 189–203. 12 E.S. de Beer, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn, Volume 4, Kalendarium, 1673–1689 (Oxford, 1955), p. 446. 13 Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago, 2003), pp. 15–17. 11

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splitting up the past into a very bad ‘before’, followed mercifully and thankfully by a wholly good ‘after’, inflated the distance and difference between the 1640s and 1650s and what we call ‘Restoration’ England. The myth of deliverance thus cut off the civil war and Interregnum era, especially the 1650s, from the present, and reinforced its identity as a transgressive ‘other’. Paradoxically, this temporal truncation allowed preachers to talk about the civil wars and Interregnum in a way that complemented the wish of many men within the Restoration regime that only some aspects of those years be swept into the ashes of oblivion. Those years were worthy of remembrance insofar as they evoked horror and revulsion, and most importantly, vindicated the proscription of puritan politics and piety by the Restoration settlement.14 Within the logic set out by the myth of liberation, after the Restoration, only a fool or a sinner would strive to overturn the work of God’s own hand, or to bring forward aspects of the broken times in the present. Similarly, only a sinner or a fool could fail to acknowledge the return of the king as a divine blessing. That this was widely accepted, or at least not deemed worthy of refutation, is suggested from the almost total absence of printed challenges to particular Thanksgiving sermons between 1661 and 1715. The first Restoration Day sermon to have provoked a published answer was Gilbert Burnet’s 1710 homily to Salisbury Cathedral; it was attacked by Charles Leslie, a clergyman ejected from his living for not swearing allegiance to William and Mary after the Revolution of 1688.15 Furthermore, there do not appear to have been any additional preachers who bothered to challenge openly the myth of liberation as part of a Thanksgiving sermon until Thomas Bradbury in 1715.16 It is also possible that ministers less enamoured with the festivities associated with remembering the Restoration on what was sometimes called ‘Oak Apple Day’,17 and its underlying myth of liberation, chose to counter its message either by ignoring its printed instantiations, or by upholding the priority of earlier deliverances, such as the Gunpowder plot and the defeat of the Armada. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 25–40. I thank Gary Rivett for reminding me about the links with oblivion. 15 Gilbert Burnet, A Sermon Preach’d in the Cathedral-Church of Salisbury, on the 29th day of May in the Year 1710 (1710); Charles Leslie, The Good Old Cause, or, Lying in Truth … (1710). 16 Thomas Bradbury, Eikon Basilike. A Sermon Preach’d on the 29th of May, 1715 (1715). 17 The name is a reference to the tree in which Charles II took refuge after losing the battle of Worcester in 1651. 14

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In the main sections of this chapter I examine in turn three different modes of relating ‘the blessing’ of 29 May 1660 to the settlement that was designed to secure its benefits for the future. From 1661 to 1679, preachers of 29 May sermons called on their congregations and readers to acknowledge the Lord’s blessing by conforming to the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Between 1680 and 1685, preachers strove to secure that blessing from what they deemed were its growing political and religious enemies. Finally, from 1690 to 1715, preachers increasingly tested and contested the blessings that flowed from Charles II’s return. This tripartite approach to the story of the 29 May sermons after 1660 also reflects the punctuated nature of their publication as evident in the English Short Title Catalogue: from the forty-three sermons that are directly discussed in this chapter (derived from a total sample of fifty-eight), there are thirteen that date from 1661 and 1662, but only another seven printed between 1663 and 1679. The first half of the 1680s witnessed the publication of just over twenty sermons, but only one, itself a reprint from 1685, was printed from 1686 to 1691. Of the remaining sermons from the sample, six were preached between 1692 and 1698, five from 1700 to 1705, and eleven from 1710 to 1715. Among the criteria by which I included a particular sermon within this chapter’s analysis were its date of release, the originality of a preacher’s exegesis and his application of the lessons of the past to the present. The number of 29 May Thanksgiving sermons printed at any given time in late Stuart England corresponded roughly to the level of concern within the political nation, Parliament and the Court, over the construction and possible reconstruction of the Restoration religious and political settlements. I say ‘roughly’ because the paucity of sermons from the 1670s, a decade that was hardly a non-partisan calm before the tempest of the Popish Plot and succession crisis, appears anomalous, and will require further investigation.18 So will the gap between 1685 and 1691, not an unexceptional half-decade. More study into the production and reception of 29 May Thanksgiving sermons will be necessary to enhance our understanding of the ways auditors applied the lessons of the day to their own thinking. The chapter does not aspire to be the last word about this mode of historical homiletics. It presents 29 May Thanksgiving sermons as textual efforts to forge and re-forge the public memory of the civil wars and Interregnum that drew on longstanding debates over the nation’s relationship to its religion and to its past, and how those relationships should, or should not, shape its John Spurr, England in the 1670s: ‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford, 2000), pp. 58–83; Montaño, Courting the Moderates, passim; Gary S. De Krey, Restoration and Revolution in Britain: A Political History of the Era of Charles II and the Glorious Revolution (2007), pp. 94–140.

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worship and public business. Essentially, the myth of liberation reaffirmed England’s identity as a legally Protestant country, specially protected by Almighty God, but whose experience had shown that for the sake of peace and public piety, many ardent Protestant subjects – Reformed-minded Presbyterians, Independents and sectarians – were legally excluded from positions of authority in the national church and local government. The sermons thus affirmed that the monarchy and the Elizabethan Reformation were restored by a miracle, but were to be secured for all time by the legal exclusion of the puritan impulse from the polity and national religion. Acknowledging God’s blessing, 1661 to 1679 Preachers of Thanksgiving sermons during the 1660s and 1670s portrayed the return of the king as a providential vindication of Charles II and the Stuart monarchy, the ancient constitution of king, lords and commons. Many preachers also connected the miracle of the king’s return with the Elizabethan framing of the Church of England’s doctrine and discipline. The link between the Restoration and what preachers understood to be the hallmarks of the Elizabethan Reformation was made more forcefully in 1661 and 1662. This is understandable because it was during this time that the Restoration religious settlement was being negotiated in Parliament. The connection between the king’s return and divine approval of the Stuart monarchy came more to the forefront once contemporary events could be read as suggesting that God was displeased by the policies of the king’s government. In 1661, official preachers at Court and before Parliament used the first anniversary of the Restoration to reaffirm the providential origin of Charles II’s return, and of the king’s oversight of spiritual affairs. The providential basis of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy was particularly important in the spring of 1661, as the Cavalier Parliament set out to erect an uncompromising religious settlement that would demand full agreement with the Elizabethan framework of the Church.19 In a sermon preached at Whitehall palace, Henry King expounded upon the divine origin of governing authority. He characterised the 1650s as a time when the woeful consequences of so-called popularly based government were seen. Unable to construct publicly beneficial policies or institutions, the ‘Filthy Dreamers, Phanaticks and Enthusiasts’ governing the country only pulled down everything rep Montaño, Courting the Moderates, pp. 57–71.

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resenting decency and order.20 Thomas Pierce preached to Parliament the same day from Deuteronomy 6.12, ‘Then beware lest thou forget the Lord, who brought thee out of the Land of Aegypt’. In order to avoid a relapse into chaos, now that the days of peace had returned, Pierce called upon his auditors to recognise the king’s supremacy in religious affairs, and to restore God’s holy messengers, the bishops, to their rightful places of spiritual oversight. ‘You especially must not forget him presented to you in his Vicegerent,’ Pierce declared, ‘whom the more you do enable to be indeed what he is stiled, Defensor Fidei ... the better you will provide for your childrens safety.’ The ‘Restauration remains imperfect,’ he continued, so long as the king’s fellow sufferers, the bishops, were denied their ancient privileges and rights.21 As part of a call for a religious settlement grounded on episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer, several unofficial sermons of 1661 presented the mercy of 29 May as a divine vindication of the king and the pre-civil war Church. For these preachers, the mercy of 29 May demonstrated that a compromise with Presbyterians and Independents over the established doctrine and government of the Church was contrary to the dictates of providence, a position long shared by the king’s Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde.22 Peter Heylyn’s message, delivered at St Peter’s, Westminster, compared the sufferings of David during his son Absalom’s rebellion with Charles II’s hard time of exile, ‘driven out of all the Forts and Cities of his own Dominions, by the power of his enemies’. Heylyn also paralleled the hardships of David’s loyal followers and the difficulties endured by royalists and the loyal clergy during wars and Interregnum; ‘imprisoned, plundered, sequestered, ejected; their wives and children miserably turned out of doors, some of them left for dead in the open streets’. God’s faithful servants had suffered during the recent past, but their constancy had clearly been remembered and rewarded by Him. Although the sufferings of loyal clergy and royalists were, according to Heylyn, worse than what David’s people had endured, ‘so was the kindness of the Lord more marvelous in his preservation’ of the loyal clergy. The conclusion of the sermon encapsulated the argument of Heylyn’s historical writings about the career of Archbishop Laud and the

Henry King, A Sermon Preached at White-Hall on the 29th of May ... Published by His Majesties Command (1661), Wing K504, pp. 8–9, 30. 21 Thomas Pierce and A. Hertocks, A Sermon Preached at St. Margarets in Westminster before the Honourable the House of Commons ... (1661), Wing P2198, pp. 11, 17, 19, 35. 22 Geoffrey C. Browell, ‘The Politics of Providentialism in England, 1640–1660’, Unpublished PhD Thesis (Canterbury, 2000), p. 60. 20

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rise of Presbyterianism. For the sake of civil peace and pure religion, he asserted, a full restoration of episcopal power was necessary.23 Other important clergymen used the occasion of 29 May to draw a line between the miraculous return of the monarchy and what they saw to be God’s will for the Church of England. Preaching on Psalm 77, verse 22 at Exeter Cathedral, John Copleston used biblical parallelism to call for the restoration of the bishops, figured as England’s Aaronic priesthood. Copleston argued that Presbyterians and Independents would do well to remember that God had already acted This Day to vindicate both the Crown and the Mitre, whatever religious settlement Parliament might be contemplating. It should not be forgotten, Copleston contended, ‘that with our Ancient Monarchy God has been pleased graciously to restore our Ancient, Primitive, Apostolitical Episcopacy’. Likewise, Thomas Washbourne, preaching at Gloucester Cathedral, characterised the wars and Interregnum as a time so awful that the king’s return appeared more ‘a Romance’ than a true story, ‘so strange, so unexpected, so beyond hope, that it seemed rather a phancy in a dream than a real deliverance’. The preacher was concerned that the ‘curse’ of the recent past would not fully be lifted until all the Church’s patrimony was returned. More realistically, however, he hoped that ‘all ministers will strive for unity in a happy settlement of all matters Ecclesiastical, and by their humble submission to that Order and Discipline in the Church as is or shall be established by lawful Authority’.24 For these preachers, it was clear that because God had preserved his chosen political instrument, the king, the next necessary and logical step was for Parliament to restore episcopal power. It could be very dangerous, these preachers believed, if Parliament failed to introduce an exclusive and uniform religious settlement. In three 29 May sermons printed in 1662, the preachers warned of future disasters unless the blessing that was the return of the monarchy and the ante bellum frame of the Church produced a harvest of political obedience and religious uniformity.25 At first glance, the shift to a kind of ‘prophetic mode’ evident in Peter Heylyn, A Sermon Preached in the Collegiate Church of St Peter in Westminster, on Wednesday may 29th ... (1661), Wing H1734, pp. 26–30, 39; see above, pp. 40–41, 46–7. 24 John Copleston, Moses Next to God, and Aaron Next to Moses Subordinate and Subservient: Opened, in a Sermon Preached Preached at St. Peters in Exon … (1661), Wing C6083, pp. 28, 22; ‘Thou leadest thy People like a flock, by the hand of Moses and Aaron’; Thomas Washbourne, The Repairer of the Breach; A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of Glocester ... (1661), Wing W1027, pp. 15–17, 18, 17. 25 Patrick Collinson, ‘Biblical Rhetoric: the English Nation and National Sentiment in the Prophetic Mode’, Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, eds C.E. McEachern and D.K. Shuger (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 15-45. 23

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the tone of these sermons is somewhat surprising. Only two years on from the unparalleled display of public unity and joy at the king’s return, and preachers were already suggesting that the nation was in danger of another round of judgement for sin. In part this may be explained as a product of the sermonic genre: not many ministers ever moved their congregations towards lives of greater holiness and faithfulness by telling them that everything and everyone was ‘just fine!’ It is also probable, however, that the prophetic mode reflected concerns that clergy sympathetic to puritan piety, particularly to Presbyterians, might resist the implementation of the uncompromising religious settlement. The recently legislated Act of Uniformity required full acceptance of the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles, episcopal ordination and renunciation of the Solemn League and Covenant.26 The prophetic warnings about the danger of forgetting the Restoration miracle might have been aimed at magistrates who preferred to leave Presbyterian ministers alone. Indeed, the preachers had reason to be concerned that England’s chief magistrate, and supreme governor of the Church, Charles II, would attempt to dispense individual ministers from the Act’s demands.27 Prophetic 29 May sermons warned politicians that the blessing of the Restoration could be lost if the religious settlement was not rigorously enforced. It is clear that 29 May Thanksgiving preachers felt that a relapse into the sin and chaos of the civil wars and Interregnum was an ever present danger. For God’s mercy, shown in the return of the king and Church, to be secured, their Restoration needed constantly to be remembered, and shown to be remembered through obedience. Thus when Richard Allestree delivered a sermon at Hampton Court from Hosea 3.5,28 he represented the civil wars and Interregnum as a type of national captivity caused by the people’s sin of renouncing Charles I’s authority. By rejecting the king, the English had in fact rejected the Lord. In consequence, true religion was on the verge of extinction. ‘Christianity was crumbled’, Allestree recalled, ‘into so many, so minute professions, that ’twas divided into little nothings.’ Securing the Lord’s blessing, Allestree claimed, required uniformity of public worship: ‘one Worship make hearts one. Hands lifted up together in the Temple they will joyn and clasp: and so Religion does fulfil its name a religando, binds David J. Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration NonConformity (Manchester, 2007), pp. 175, 224. 27 Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford, 1989), p. 189. 28 ‘Afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek the LORD their God, and David their king; and shall fear the LORD and his goodness in the latter days.’ 26

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Prince and Subjects together.’ Enforcing the Act of Uniformity was, for Allestree, the key to religious and civil peace for the future. Preachers at 29 May Thanksgiving services also resembled Old Testament prophets in how they characterised the civil wars and Interregnum: a national disaster caused by sin. Preaching in Massingham Magna, Norfolk, Revd John Beridge portrayed the 1640s and 1650s as a national catastrophe whose only redeeming feature was to teach the nation that monarchy was essential for stable government and peace. Beridge compared England’s past conflict with the time when ‘there was no King in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes’ (Judges 17.6). ’Was there ever any more disorder, or confusion, deceit and falsehood, dissimulation or hypocrisy, malice and envy, backbiting or hatred, impiety and injustice’, Beridge asked, ‘then there was in those late days ... when both Law and Religion were laid aside.’ Unless the nation continually returned thanks to God for the return of its ‘just rulers and governors’, the Lord’s favour, and the present days of peace, could swiftly end.29 A similar warning was delivered in a sermon to the lawyers of Grays Inn, preached by Richard Meggott of St Olave’s church, Southwark. Echoing Christ’s admonition to the healed paralytic, ‘Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee’ (John 5.14), Meggott cautioned his auditors and readers to avoid the transgressions that had sparked the wars. Not surprisingly, Meggott’s list of national sins resembled an anti-puritan and anti-populist explanation of what went wrong in 1641: Sin no more by your unthankfull repining, sin no more by your tumultuary complaining; Sin no more by your Factions sidings. Parliaments! Sin no more by Disloyal Votes and Ordinances. Preachers! Sin no more by Seditious Doctrine and discourses. Citizens! Sin no more by Rebellious Armes and Contributions.30

According to such preachers, it was clear from recent history that puritan politics and piety were themselves sins that had to be repressed for the sake of the nation’s spiritual and civil health. The Church’s revised Book of Common Prayer also connected the blessings that sprang from 29 May 1660 with conformity to the new religious settlement. The Form of Prayer prescribed by the Church for 29 May Thanksgiving services was a blend of confession of sin and thanksgiving Richard Allestree, A Sermon Preached at Hampton-Court … (1662), Wing A1164, pp. 31, 17; John Beridge, No King in Israel ... (1662), Wing B1960A, pp. 17, 20, 44–7. 30 Richard Meggott, The New-Cured Criple’s Caveat: Or, England’s Duty for the Miraculous Mercy of the King’s and Kingdomes Restauration … (1662), Wing M1618, p. 34. 29

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for God’s hand in the nation’s redemption. Explicitly linked was the return of the king and the true faith. By leading Charles II to his right, God did ‘thereby [restore] to us the open and publick profession of thy true Religion and Worship’. Importantly, the petitionary prayers on behalf of the king and the Church suggested to participants that future sin, particularly disobedience, might provoke God’s wrath. For example, after praying that Charles II would long rule over them, worshippers asked that ‘we may dutifully obey him as faithful and loyal Subjects; That so we may long enjoy him with the continuance of thy great blessings’.31 In this annual prayer, congregations acknowledged that the God’s blessings were contingent on their obedience to the king and conformity with his Church. The Church’s official liturgy did not, however, consider the consequences of a king whose actions might provoke divine judgement. As time passed, however, it was possible for some people to view the heavy losses of life and property wrought by plague and fire in 1665 and 1666 as punishments for the licentious behaviour of the king and his courtiers. 32 To such people, John Kerswell’s Thanksgiving sermon, preached in 1664 but not printed until 1665, offered a moderate rejoinder in defence of the Restoration and its settlement. In answer to the eternal but now more pressing question, ‘why does God allow bad things to happen?’ Kerswell argued that evil times were simply God’s teachable moments. Calamities and distractions, such as England had suffered during the civil wars and Interregnum, were a means by which God sought to instruct his people to be more thankful for all his blessings. Viewed in this light, contemporary hardships were yet another opportunity for people to confess their (unspecified) sins, and to give God thanks for his creation, for salvation in Christ, and for the return of the country’s father on 29 May, at whose approach ‘rebellion and usurpation, with their horrid Attendant Confusion, are chased away, and Concord and Loyalty recalled in their room’.33 In effect, Kerswell’s sermon argued that the people should welcome hard times as a reminder of the good that came from being thankful for the political and religious status quo. Two years later, however, the duke of York’s almoner, Henry Killigrew, preached a sermon at Court on the topic of thankfulness during tough times to reassert the Lord’s approbation of Charles II and the Stuart monarchy. Published at royal command, Killigrew’s message offered a strong reminder Church of England, A Form of Prayer, with Thanksgiving ... (1662), Wing C4171A, pp. 26–7. 32 Keeble, The Restoration, p. 159; De Krey, Restoration and Revolution, pp. 71–5. 33 John Kerswell, Speculum Gratitudinis; Or, David’s Thankfulness Unto God for all His Benefits … (1665), Wing K353A, p. 137. 31

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to readers that the king governed with the mandate of heaven. His text was Psalm 2.6, ‘Yet have I set my King upon my holy hill of Sion’. More appropriate to the moment, however, was Killigrew’s exhortation to rejoice in the Restoration by recollecting the era of the Republic. ‘O let us not forget in the loud joyes, and Gaiety, and Festivity of this day,’ Killegrew declared, ‘the daies of sadness and silence, of scarcity and Doubtfulness of Soul, when we had no King.’ The 1650s had been an awful time of inversion: to be noble was to be guilty, the orthodox were regarded as enemies of the state, mechanics qualified to render judgement, and fanatics given the ‘highest charges and honours’. Killigrew’s inelegant point was clear: the present hard times with the monarchy were far superior to former years without it. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that the nation did bear some culpability for its present woes. God had shown profound mercy to England in restoring the king, yet the blessing had been squandered ‘from our neglect and contempt’ of it. Killigrew promised that greater remembrance and gratitude, particularly a recommitment to ‘exercising all Vertues Civil and Divine’, would bring back God’s blessing.34 As Killigrew described them, the recent hardships were simply a reminder of how bad things could get if the people rejected the king and established Church. For John Lake, another Court preacher, the difficulties of the mid-1660s were taken not as signs that God was displeased with Charles II’s morality, but rather as further proof that the king was specially chosen by God to govern his people. Lake’s sermon, preached in 1670 and, like Killigrew’s, based on Psalm 2.6, began with the increasingly commonplace parallel of David and Charles II. This historical analogy was invariably used in 29 May Thanksgiving sermons to assert the Lord’s approval of the Stuart monarchy. Preachers pointed out that both rulers experienced rebellions, both were forced to flee their capitals, both had been divinely protected from harm while in flight, and both were restored to their thrones by the power of God. As Lake outlined in his sermon, God’s love for and approval of Charles II and David could be seen from significant events during both reigns. God’s approbation of Charles II was shown first, by foregrounding the political instability of the 1650s, which Lake regarded as proof that the Republic was an affront to God. Second, God’s approval for the Stuarts was in evidence by the miraculous nature of the king’s return. Lake contended that the fact that a ‘Banish’d Prince ... should be brought back to His Kingdoms again, and with such Peace’ when his enemies had ‘Men, Moneys, and all Means’ at their disposal, could only be ascribed to providence. Loyal subjects were Henry Killigrew and A. Hertocks, A Sermon Preached before His Majesty at White-Hall. May 29th. 1668 ... Published by His Majesties Special Command (1668), Wing K447, pp. 34, 29, 35. 34

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enjoined to rejoice on this day, but not to let their celebrations lead them into riotous drunken excess. ‘The sins of the Royal Party’, Lake warned, ‘may ruin the King ... this is to countermine God, who hath set up the King, and by unseen and unsuspected trains to blow up him and his Throne.’  35 So it was former royalists, and not the royal Court, whose actions threatened to provoke God’s wrath again. The 29 May sermons of 1670s demonstrated that the gulf between conforming and non-conforming Protestants was widening, as a result of their different interpretations of the historical implications of the day’s blessing. Anglican divines continued to maintain that the miracle of the Restoration extended from the monarchy to the Church of England. In that view, God had brought the king back to save the true English church. Proper celebrations the Restoration were also a mnemonic antidote to rebellion, leading the king’s true followers, and from them to the whole people, to even greater loyalty and piety. William Smith told the magistrates of Norwich that the mutually supportive relationship between the monarchy and established Church had heaven’s approbation. Truly being thankful for the Restoration involved remembering the ‘incomparable miseries from which the Church and State’ both were saved with the king’s return.36 Similarly, John Horden identified the true people of God as those who soberly celebrate the king’s return on 29 May. According to Horden, the very existence of Dissenters contradicted the purpose of the annual commemoration. So too, however, did the excessive revelling of old Cavaliers. ‘Remembering who we are, and [who] he is to us,’ Horden concluded, ‘let us demean ourselves suitably to our obligations.’  37 Significantly, there is at least one surviving sermonic response to the Restoration delivered by a Dissenter during the 1670s. Unsurprisingly, the preacher of this 29 May sermon suggested that gratitude for the miracle did not require acknowledging the justice of the Act of Uniformity. Preached and printed in Devon in 1673, the anonymous Dissenter’s message focused on the providential origin of the Restoration and royal government. Significantly, no connection was made between the miracle of 1660 and the re-establishment of the Church of England. The minister’s message was a retrospective justification of the king’s right, as God’s chosen ruler, John Lake, A Sermon Preached at Whitehal upon the 29th Day of May … (1670), Wing L197, pp. 9–24, 42, 46–7. 36 William Smith, Two Sermons Preached at the Cathedral Church of Norwich … (1677), Wing S284, pp. 21, 30. 37 John Horden, A Sermon Preached at St. Martins in the Fields, to the Natives of that Parish … (1676), Wing H2788, pp. 25–6, 22. 35

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to grant freedom of worship to oppressed Dissenters. There was nothing in the sermon about the duty to obey divinely instituted rulers, about the evil of rebellion, or the religious condition of the realm in the 1650s. Charles II was paralleled in this sermon to the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great, who had allowed the Jews to go back to Judea after years of exile in Babylon, and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. As the Jews could be grateful to Cyrus for letting them go home, so could the members of the preacher’s ‘licenced meeting house’ give thanks to God for ending the strife of the 1650s on this day, thirteen years prior. The comparison between Cyrus and Charles II as restorers of the godly people’s worship, and the concluding exhortation to prepare for the ultimate ‘Day of the Lord’ by living holy lives, demonstrated that Dissenters too, could rejoice in the benefits of 29 May. That is, they could remember and be glad so long as the king used his office to grant the moderate among them the privilege to meet in peace. Sadly for the preacher, Parliament was not willing to let the king use his prerogative powers to suspend the execution of the penal statutes that upheld religious uniformity. Indeed, Charles II was compelled not only to withdraw the licences granted to Dissenter meeting houses, but to strengthen the Restoration religious settlement by assenting to a statute – The Test Act – that required civil and military officers to take Anglican communion at least once per year.38 Dissenters could not be thankful for the Restoration so long as Parliament prevented Charles II from fulfilling the promise he had made in 1660 to grant liberty to tender consciences. By the middle 1670s, parliament’s decision to mark annually 29 May as a divine mercy – a singular moment in the nation’s salvation history in line with 5th November and 1588 – provided regular opportunities for conforming, and even nonconforming, clergymen to engage their auditors and the wider reading public in a powerful myth of liberation. This myth explained how the monarchy and the Church were returned to the nation sola gratia. On this day, by this miracle, an unprecedented and calamitous experience of social disorder and irreligion ended. By implication, the Stuart monarchy and the episcopal Church held together and protected the post-Restoration political and religious worlds with the mandate of heaven. Although observance of 29 May services appears to have been patchy in different places and different times – for example, Ralph Josselin did not mark the day at his parish church after 1662 until 1679 – most people would have heard, or at least encountered at some point, the commonplace linkage of the king’s

Anon., A Sermon Preach’d on May the 29th, 1673 in One of His Majesties Licens’d Meetings in Devon (1673), Wing S2640, pp. 18–19, 23.

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return, the end of the troubles, and the handiwork of God.39 Most, or at least many, would know or have heard on occasion the standard application of the myth of liberation: that gratitude for the blessing of this day should be demonstrated by obedience to the government, and conformity with the Church that was by law established. Securing God’s blessing, 1680–1685 As the third decade of the king’s direct rule dawned, it was evident that significant numbers of Charles II’s subjects, while acknowledging, perhaps, God’s hand in the events of early 1660, did not believe that the government and the Church re-created in the aftermath of that mercy were above reproach and reform. In the aftermath of heightened public fears about the security of Protestantism, Parliament and liberty sparked by the Popish Plot scare, such sceptics strove unsuccessfully in several Parliaments to reopen the Restoration religious settlement. Many of them did so with the hope of readmitting most nonconformist ministers, and to alter the succession of the throne away from the Roman Catholic heir, James duke of York.40 The agenda and methods of whiggish politicians, and their followers in London and other parts of the country, provoked aggressive replies in Restoration Day sermons to protect the blessing of 29 May.41 Sermons during this period of political and religious tension explicitly called on magistrates to punish Dissenters for threatening to overturn God’s work, preachers pointed out how the mercy of the Lord in 1660 told against any renegotiation of the succession or religious settlement. They contained more evocations of the conflicted past and offered increasingly detailed historical proofs of the miracle of 1660, trying to convince their auditors and readers that attempts to alter the religious establishment and the succession to the throne would call down another round of divine chastisement and misery. God had not brought the king back so that a legislature could trample over the Church’s rights, or alter its discipline and doctrine.

Josselin, Diary, 29 May 1662 at p. 489; in the entry for 1680, Josselin noted that ‘not 30’ people were at the service ‘on the Kings day’, p. 628. 40 Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994); Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (2005), pp. 139–85, 212–52. 41 Gary S. De Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 161– 218. 39

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In a 29 May sermon delivered at Norwich Cathedral in 1680, Charles Robotham decried parliamentary attempts to comprehend moderate Dissenters within the Church, as well as efforts to alter the succession and the Restoration settlement, as being contrary to God’s will. Speaking from Isaiah 49, with its evocative image of kings (and queens) as ‘nursing fathers’ of the true community of faith, Robotham strongly affirmed the principle of royal ecclesiastical supremacy.42 Yet whereas in the Devon Dissenter’s 29 May sermon of 1673, the anonymous minister had hoped the royal supremacy could withstand parliamentary efforts to quash the Declaration of Indulgence, Robotham invoked the principle of royal supremacy to denounce Parliament’s attempt to overturn the Act of Uniformity. The king, Robotham argued, had received from God pre-eminent power for commanding and ordering the nation’s religion. For the preacher, this meant that Charles II was miraculously restored to his temporal rights in order to uphold the independent spiritual authority of the English Church. ‘These Rights’, Robotham insisted, ‘were vested in the Church long before any State became Christian, and are so to remain after; as standing upon a distinct Ground, Gift and Original.’  43 For Robotham, Parliament had no authority to tamper with the religious settlement that safeguarded the miracle of the Restoration. Thomas Long had a similar message in the sermon he preached at Exeter in 1681 from Ecclesiastes 8.10: ‘Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this’. Long’s main point was that an excessive airing in public of political grievances could lead only to greater sins and calamities than the ones from which the nation was saved in 1660. Long declared that the best way for him to celebrate the miracle of the Restoration was to attempt ‘the mortification of those murmuring and discontented voices which were the cause of our former troubles, and reduced us to so low a condition, that none but Gods own hand could deliver us, as with all thankfulness we acknowledge’.44 For Long and Robotham, parliamentary attempts to reopen the Restoration settlement verged on the sins of disobedience and ingratitude. As such, Parliament’s actions threatened to bring another round of divine punishments on a nation that had forgotten the blessing of 29 May 1660. See Jacqueline Rose, ‘Royal Ecclesiastical Supremacy and the Restoration Church’, Historical Research 80 (2007), 324–45. 43 Charles Robotham, The Royal Nursing-Father; Discoursed in a Sermon Preach’d at the Cathedral in Norwich … (1680), Wing R1729C, pp. 51, 42. 44 Thomas Long, A Sermon Against Murmuring: Preached in the Cathedral Church of St. Peter Exon … (1680), Wing L2982, sig, A3v, pp. 22–7, 8, 9–10, 24. 42

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The fact that 29 May preachers believed that the achievements of the Restoration were under serious threat during the Exclusion Crisis is evident where they explicitly refer to personal memories of the horrors of the Interregnum. Moreover, these preachers sought to underline the rational grounds for believing the king’s return was a genuine miracle. For example, Henry Anderson’s 29 May sermon was a strong a reminder that God alone was responsible for return of peace and liberty with the king’s direct rule. Anderson emphasised this point with a florid evocation of the disorder and discord during the civil wars and Interregnum: in those days ‘men in Buff durst proclaim themselves the only Legal Authority of the Nation: and these like a mighty Torrent did drive all before them, with an unruly violence’. Anderson was confident that the living memory of the late times would enable the public to decode the language of the establishment’s critics. The ‘Fallacy’ of those he called the ‘pretended preservers of peace and defenders of liberty’ would not a second time lead ‘men of sober and rational judgements’ to disobey their king and turn against their religion.45 Similarly, Benjamin Calamy warned the leaders of London that unless the City remembered the Restoration as a miracle, and secured its accomplishment, they put the nation at risk of another civil war. He blamed the nation’s political controversy on an excessive focus on the future, which had led too many men to forget their ‘former deliverances’. He suggested further that no proof of the wickedness of resistance to the governing powers was needed when the memory of the nation’s suffering was ‘still fresh and the Scars still remain’. The way to ensure peace and religion was to leave politics to the politicians, and conform to the established Church.46 Anderson’s and Calamy’s sermons show that ministers still feared that the accomplishment of the Restoration was not assured. That fear was especially in evidence when the public was to remember the amazing nature of the king’s return in May 1660. Not all ministers invoked emotions such as fear to make their point about the necessity of securing the Restoration’s blessing. George Hickes, preaching at Worcester Cathedral in 1684, used his 29 May sermon to outline the reasonableness for remembering the Restoration as a work of providence. Hickes sought to demonstrate of the providential nature of the causes and effects of the day’s ‘Blessing’. The benefits of the king’s return, Hickes preached, had continued and become more prominent as Charles Henry Anderson, A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church at Winchester ... (1681), Wing A3093A, pp. 21, 25–6, 27. 46 Benjamin Calamy, A Sermon Preached before the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of London (1682), Wing C216, pp. 5, 10, 18, 21. 45

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II’s reign progressed. The intent of Hickes’s sermon was clearly to show that it was reasonable to regard 29 May 1660 as what later biblical scholars would term a ‘kairos moment’. Such an event was understood to be both an in-breaking of God to bless the nation and a turning point in its salvation history.47 From this theological and historical commonplace, Hickes exhorted his audiences to honour God’s mercy positively, by demonstrations of charity, and negatively by dissociating themselves from all men who sought to alter the succession and Restoration religious settlement.48 The sermon’s application of the past to the present merits a fuller discussion. Hickes’s first key point of applied historical reasoning was that rebellion against a limited monarch automatically led a ‘free People’ into captivity and slavery. Hickes supported this argument with a fulsome account of the civil and fiscal miseries suffered by the nation during the wars and Interregnum. For example, he raged against the Rump Parliament’s ‘Sultanical Ordinances’, unsurprisingly beginning with the financial exactions placed on royalists and the ‘loyal clergy’.49 The second crucial point of Hickes’s sermon, that God in God’s mercy delivered the nation from arbitrary government on 29 May 1660, was proved through an extended application of seven ‘rules’ for determining the hand of providence in an event. The fact that ‘Republicans with Royalists, Churchmen with Church-robbers, Rebels and Traytors with Loyal Subjects, Papists with Protestants’ had agreed to let Charles II return, only made sense if it had been the Lord’s doing. Similarly, since Hickes equated the royalist cause and episcopacy, he regarded divine intervention to be the only rational explanation of the fact that the king returned at just the right time to prevent the utter destruction of righteousness. Relatedly, Hickes argued that God was the first cause of the public benefits that accrued from the Restoration, including the return of ‘our Lives, our Religion, our Liberties’, the punishment of the wicked regicides, and the vindication of the suffering clergy.50 The clear lesson of Hickes’s sermon was that God made the Restoration happen, so that anyone who tried to tamper with its political and religious consequences was fighting against both God and history. Isabell Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 53–8; but cf. Mary Morrissey, ‘Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching’, JEH 53 (2002), 686–707. 48 George Hickes, A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of Worcester … (1684), Wing H1867, pp. 15, 9–11, 15–30. 49 A Remonstrace (1647), Wing G1486, pp. 6–8. 50 Hickes, Sermon, pp. 36–7. 47

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By the height of the political reaction against whigs and Dissenters, 29 May sermons were equating gratitude for the miracle of 1660 with the active suppression of Dissenters. For instance, Richard Bulkeley, in his sermon of 1684 to the loyal inhabitants of Hereford, proclaimed that the king’s subjects ought to show their thanks by crushing those who had not reconciled themselves to the Restoration or the Church. ‘All Conventicles and Meeting-houses, the very Nurseries and Seminaries of Rebellion’ should be closed, and ‘all the wholsom Penal Laws [put] in Execution’ against Dissenters. The recent agitations in and outside Parliament for the exclusion of the Duke of York, and the failed plot to kill the king near Rye House, Hertfordshire, had proved before the public that Dissenters had not forgotten the rebellious doctrines of John Knox and George Buchanan. ‘A thousand Acts of Oblivion’, Bulkeley declared, will never win Dissenters from ‘their old Fourty Eight Republican Principles’. It was the duty of all ‘good Christians’ to renounce disloyal practices and antimonarchical principles, to pray for the king’s and his brother’s safety, and the Lord’s blessing upon the established Church.51 Similarly, Thomas Sprat preached a Thanksgiving sermon to the Mayor and Aldermen of London in 1684 that commended the government’s campaign in defence of the Church. Addressing an overwhelmingly tory audience, Sprat was keen to emphasise the ecclesiastical significance of the 1660 liberation.52 The greatest blessing of This Day was not the return of lives, liberties and estates, but rather, ‘a mercy worthy of your perseverance in such a cause, to behold the King, and with the King, his, and your beloved Church of England restor’d’. Sprat rejoiced at the outpouring of loyal addresses and ‘abhorrences’ that had flowed into the king’s court in the aftermath of the Rye House plot.53 Sprat understood these recent declarations of loyalty to be signs of ‘the very Restoration of the King’s Restoration’.54 It is also clear that for him, and ministers such as Bulkeley, the severe suppression of Dissenters and whigs was proof that the blessing of the Restoration was being properly remembered. The accession of new Catholic king in 1685, James II, had the potential to throw into doubt the longstanding connection between godly magistracy and the upholding of true religion, not to mention the idea of the king as a nursing father to the Church. Had God saved the nation and its Richard Bulkeley, A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral-Church of Hereford … (1685), Wing B5406, pp. 7, 14, 15. 52 De Krey, London and the Restoration, pp. 355–85. 53 Knights, Politics and Opinion, pp. 258–74; Harris, Restoration, pp. 266, 281. 54 Thomas Sprat, A Sermon Preach’d before the Right Honourable Sir Henry Tulse, Lord Mayor, and the Court of Aldermen … (1684), Wing S5060, pp. 28, 34, 21, 20. 51

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true Protestant Church, only to have its position undermined by its apostate monarch? These vexing questions prompted the Church and 29 May Thanksgiving preachers to shift the focus of gratitude from the person of the monarch to his family. Sermons for Restoration Day and public prayers now provided historical and biblical vindications of the Stuart dynasty as a whole. The Church’s commitment to the principle of non-resistance was also re-emphasised in public prayers and by preachers. For example, the Church re-issued the Form of Prayer for 29 May. In the new prayer, the congregation’s expression of thanks for the return of the monarchy, and the restoration of right religion in the realm, was linked with promises to obey King James as God’s Anointed. The service concluded with a petition that the king’s enemies would be draped ‘with Shame and Confusion, but upon himself and his Posterity let the Crown for ever flourish’.55 The Form of Prayer suggested that having a Catholic king did not undermine the Church’s thankfulness for the return of the Stuart monarchy, or the Church’s commitment to obey always its supreme governor. Official 29 May sermons printed in the first year of James II’s reign emphasised similar themes as the revised Form of Prayer. The sermons assured readers that the king’s Catholicism did not threaten the security of the Restoration’s religious settlement. Additionally, the preachers pointed out that obedience to the higher powers was not contingent on their particular religious views. The best way to preserve the established Protestant Church of England, and to show gratitude for the miracle of the Restoration, was to obey the new Catholic king. For example, Thomas Turner’s Court sermon used the occasion of 29 May to show that rebellion against divinely appointed governments only produced calamities like the civil wars and Interregnum. Turner’s message, a meditation on Isaiah 1.26, mostly concerned the divine ordination of governing authorities, and the consequences of rebellion.56 England’s recent history proved, for Turner, the resistance and rebellion produced only ‘oppression, rapine and slavery’, rampant heresies, ‘and all the disorders and confusions imaginable’. The unexpected and marvellous nature of the king’s return proved, Turner argued, that God is the ultimate royalist. From a human point of view, hopes of the monarchy’s return were almost extinguished in 1659, yet swiftly and bloodlessly, with the assent of both loyal and disloyal people, the national calamity ended. The preacher did Church of England, A Form of Prayer, with Thanksgiving to Almighty God for Having Put an End to the Great Rebellion by the Restitution of the King and Royal Family (1685), Wing C4173. 56 ‘I will restore thy Judges as at the first, and thy Counsellors as at the beginning; afterward thou shalt be call’d the City of righteousness, the faithful City.’ 55

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not, however, link the mercy of the monarchy’s return with the restoration of true religion, as Sprat had done the year previously. However, he did contend that the preservation of the principle of hereditary succession was Charles II’s greatest achievement. If James II had been excluded from the throne by virtue of his Catholicism, Turner claimed that miseries far worse than those suffered during the wars and Interregnum would have followed. He concluded that it was the duty of English Christians to remember that the God who had maintained and delivered them in the past would remain faithful in the future. Arguably, Turner’s conclusion was a politically astute acknowledgement that the Stuarts might not turn out to be the strongest defenders of the established religion.57 Under James II, Churchmen such as Turner had to concede that not only rebellion could threaten the safety of the Church of England. Another official 29 May sermon from early in James II’s reign emphasised the importance of obedience to the higher powers, even Roman Catholic ones, as the best way to show thanks for the miracle of the Restoration. In his sermon to Parliament, William Sherlock contrasted the benefits and blessings the kingdom had enjoyed while living obediently under their divinely appointed sovereign, Charles II, with the miseries that their disobedience to Charles I had caused. During the civil wars and Interregnum, Sherlock recalled, ‘mean and ignoble persons trampled upon Crown and Mitres, enriched themselves with the spoils of the Church and State, but governed like Slaves’. Sherlock connected the happy memory of 1660 with the present by arguing that the return of the monarchy permitted the restoration of England’s true Church, and the peaceful accession of James II: a prince who ‘though not of the Church, has given his word to defend it’. Sherlock’s final admonition to the tory-dominated Commons was to remain firm in their ‘Church of England’ loyalty to the crown. By this Sherlock meant to refuse any and all attempts to relax the religious tests for civil office, and resolutely to oppose efforts to legislate the comprehension of moderate Dissenters within the Church. ‘If we change our Religion,’ Sherlock averred, ‘we must change the Principles of our Loyalty too.’  58 The greatest danger to peace and Protestantism in England was not a Catholic king but political disobedience and religious dissent. Both Charles I and Charles II had at times agreed to erect Presbyterian-style ecclesiastical frameworks in England, and Charles II had granted Dissenters and Catholics a limited freedom of worship; Thomas Turner, A Sermon Preached in the King's Chappel at White-Hall … (1685), Wing T3340, pp. 20, 24–5, 30–1. 58 William Sherlock, A Sermon Preached at St. Margarets Westminster … (Dublin, 1685), Wing S3346, pp. 9, 11–12. 57

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Unofficial printed sermons also emphasised the importance of obedience to the higher powers as the most acceptable way of showing gratitude for the miracle of the monarchy’s restoration and the redemption of the Protestant Church of England in 1660. Thomas Fysh affirmed the Lord’s approbation of the Stuart dynasty to the congregation of St Margaret’s, Kings Lynn, from a general discussion of God’s providence, and a vivid narration of the kingdom’s miraculous liberation from slavery in 1660. The minister not only paralleled the Interregnum era to Christ’s time on the cross, but inserted a fictionalised lamentation from a despondent royalist of the 1650s. The salvific blessing celebrated on This Day, Fysh argued, truly stemmed from the return of the rightful dynasty. Like Turner, the Norfolk preacher rejoiced at the preservation of the principle of hereditary succession, as testified by the defeat of Exclusion and by James II’s peaceful accession. ‘Remember’, Fysh warned his flock and readers, ‘that the Wrongs done to thy Anointed below, take Heaven at their Rebound; and he cannot be innocent to his God, who is an Offender against his King.’  59 Similarly, the injunction always to obey the powers ordained by God was at the core of William Jegon’s sermon to Norwich Cathedral. The message’s climax was a florid statement of the Church of England’s loyalty to its Catholic Supreme Governor, and a reminder that any man who still publicly adhered to the principle of legitimate resistance was not sorry for the civil war. Gratitude for the Restoration led Jegon to condemn strongly the human agents responsible for the nation’s miseries between 1640 and 1660, particularly preachers who misled the people into rebellion. The civil wars were a punishment from God to the nation for having believed ministers, such as John Goodwin, whose exegesis of Romans 13 removed the Apostle’s clear warning of eternal damnation for all who oppose the civil magistrate. Revd Jegon also employed the commonplace charge that the parliamentarians’ claim to be acting in defence of true religion was simply hypocritical posturing. Had not ‘Harry Martin’, Jegon recalled, ‘honestly disclaim’d when he cry’d out in the house against snivelling for Religion, as the ground of resisting the King, We have fought (says he) all this while for Liberty, and are we now snivelling about Religion?’  60 Thanksgiving sermons on 29 May delivered by official and unofficial preachers in 1685 underscored the providential underpinnings of the Stuart dynasty and the kingdom’s Catholic monarch. The remainder of the decade Thomas Fysh, A Sermon Preached upon the 29th of May, in the Parish-Church of St. Margaret in Lyn-Regis … (1685), Wing F2569, pp. 9–11, 19–21, 35. 60 William Jegon, The Damning Nature of Rebellion: Or, the Universal Unlawfulness of Resistance Under Pain of Damnation, in the Saddest Sense … (1685), Wing J530, pp. 35, 37, 39. 59

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did not witness the release of any new 29 May sermons. In 1686 John Evelyn noted in his diary that the service was overlooked in his home parish, although St Mary’s Oxford observed the anniversary according to Anthony à Wood.61 It is possible that the Court and conforming clergy were satisfied that the peaceful accession of James II had demonstrated the nation’s genuine thankfulness for the ongoing blessing of settled government and a secure Church under the Stuarts, thereby making homiletical reminders of the nation’s salvation in 1660 unnecessary. It is also probable that the king’s shift in 1687 away from the Church party towards indulging the worship of Dissenters and Catholics, threw into doubt Churchmen’s association of a miraculous Stuart restoration and the security of the Church.62 Yet by the autumn of 1688, thanks to pressure from conforming clergymen and their lay supporters, James II reversed his religious policy. Once more the king pledged to make the defence of the Restoration religious settlement one of his highest priorities.63 However, this successful ‘Anglican Revolution’ was cut short in early November 1688 by foreign military intervention. Contesting God’s blessings, 1690–1715 The invasion of William of Orange in November 1688, James II’s flight to France the following month, and the offer of the crowns to William and James’s daughter Mary in February 1689, transformed the political landscape of the three British kingdoms.64 The Glorious Revolution also led to a recalibration of the relationship between the English state and the established Church, and between the nation’s conforming and nonconforming Protestants. The accession of a Dutch Calvinist king, combined with anti-episcopal violence in Scotland, hardened Anglican Churchmen and tory politicians against proposals to alter the Act of Uniformity so that moderate Dissenters could be comprehended into the national church. The Toleration Act of 1689 was thus regarded by leading Anglicans and tories as a recapitulation of the Act of Uniformity, since by granting freedom De Beer, Diary of John Evelyn, Vol. 4, p. 513. Mark Knights, ‘“Meer religion” and the “Church-State” of Restoration England: The Impact and Ideology of James II’s Declarations of Indulgence’, A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, eds Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 41–70. 63 Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (2006), p. 278. 64 Ronald Hutton, Debates in Stuart Studies (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 184; Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, 2009). 61 62

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of worship to Dissenters, the statute signalled again their exclusion from the Church of England.65 The Revolution thus preserved the Restoration religious settlement, but at the price of permitting Anglicans and nonAnglicans to compete for adherents. Another legacy of the Revolution was heightened competition among politicians for support from the public, particularly during elections to the House of Commons. What became known later as the ‘rage of party’ was marked in part by partisan recollections of the recent past in public discourse.66 The Glorious Revolution thus preserved the Restoration religious settlement, while significantly shifting the Church of England’s political position relative both to the state and to Dissenters. The Glorious Revolution prompted reinterpretations of the ‘Restoration event’ in 29 May sermons printed during the 1690s. While the myth of liberation remained the most prevalent plot with which preachers explained and interpreted the return of the monarchy, the Restoration’s relevance to contemporary debates was for the first time in the period downplayed by some preachers. These men argued that the more recent divine mercy should define the nation’s political direction and public gratitude. This contention was subsequently vigorously contested by clergymen who were determined to reassert the providential origin of both England’s monarchy and the Church re-established by the Restoration settlement. The Lord’s historic support for the established religion was connected to the importance of retaining the proscription of the puritan impulse. In the second decade of the eighteenth century, calls for public gratitude on 29 May were frequently linked to the particular policies of Queen Anne’s ministers. Preachers used the remembrance of the nation’s divine liberation to provide historical and theological vindications of what were, to them, the core aspects of English and Christian identity. Yet by the time George I celebrated his first Thanksgiving service in 1715, it was possible to suggest in print that 1660 had not been such a great mercy after all. As Tony Claydon has emphasised in his study of the ‘courtly reformation’ of the 1690s, official 29 May sermons preached at the Court could celebrate the Restoration as a divine mercy that had been recapitulated in 1688.67 Within this historical typology, however, it was still important to link the nation’s salvation with the Lord’s concern for the Elizabethan framing of Mark Goldie, The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, Volume I. Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 241–6. 66 Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2004), passim. 67 Claydon, William III, pp. 109ff. 65

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the Church. For example, William Lloyd’s sermon to Queen Mary in 1692 began with a reasoned exposition of the rules for recognising providence in history, followed by an application of those rules to the events of 1660 and 1688. For Lloyd, the key point of overlap between the two moments was the dire state of the Church prior to the Lord’s deliverance. In the 1650s Christianity in England had been grievously wounded; ‘our liturgy, our sacraments, our offices of worship’ were dissolved, Lloyd remembered, and ‘our discipline was trod under foot’. From these hurts the Church would surely have died if God had not given the Church new life ‘at the Kings Restauration’. Likewise, in 1688 the Church was in the gravest danger, and probably would have fallen to Jesuit machinations ‘if they had held their Power six Months longer’. William’s invasion to save English Protestantism was like ‘an irresistible impulse of God’. Lloyd’s admonition to his readers, since it could hardly be doubted that his auditors would have quibbled, was that they ought to show the same ‘concern’ for the Church, and its royal saviours, as God had.68 A providential perspective allowed Lloyd to argue that the Restoration and Revolution were comparable events because at both times the Church had been ‘saved’; the first time from puritans and the second time from Catholics. Similarly, Gilbert Burnet’s sermon delivered before Queen Mary in 1694, based on Psalm 105.5, was a historical survey of the punctual providences that testified to God’s special favour towards the English nation and its Protestant Church.69 For example, Burnet declared that in 1660, the Lord miraculously delivered the kingdom from ‘Blood and Misery’ by restoring its legal government. The Glorious Revolution was, according to Burnet, ‘the compleating of that happy change’. Significantly choosing to ignore the intervening gloom of James II’s reign, Burnet focused rather on the fact that the mercy of 1660 had prepared the ground for ‘the happiness that is now enjoyed’: the Protestant establishment secured, and a king in place who enabled the kingdom once again to assume its divinely assigned role as champion of international Protestantism.70 The Glorious Revolution did not, for Burnet, represent a break in the nation’s past, but a providential restoration of its vocation on the stage of world history.

William Lloyd, A Sermon Preached before Her Majesty … (1692), Wing L2716, pp. 5–12, 15, 18, 19. 69 Gilbert Burnet, A Sermon Preached before the Queen at White-Hall … (1694), Wing B5901, pp. 9–20; ‘Remember his Marvellous Works that he hath done, his Wonders, and the Judgements of his Mouth.’ 70 Burnet, A Sermon Preached, pp. 20, 28. 68

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It was one thing to suggest that the Glorious Revolution was yet another divine liberation of the English nation and the Church. It was something else, however, to argue that 1688 was the fulfilment of the Restoration. Such typological reasoning implied that the later event was superior to the former, and thus ought to have more significance for the nation’s political and moral direction. This historical logic was evident in John Trenchard’s 29 May Thanksgiving sermon to the Corporation of London, in 1694. God had saved the nation from tyranny by bringing back one king in 1660, and delivered it from slavery by helping the people remove a tyrannical king in 1688. In Trenchard’s exposition of Psalm 118, ‘This is the Lord’s doing’, the historical case for the superiority of the nation’s divine liberation in 1688 served to prove the Lord’s approbation, and the people’s heavenly mandate, to remove tyrannical princes from office. Indeed, Trenchard denied that the Church of England taught people ‘blind obedience’ to kings such as James II, who had commissioned ‘his Booted Apostles to Rifle them of their Goods, to Disposes them of their Estates, and to rob them of their Lives, in order to make them fit Converts for Popery and Slavery’. Although Trenchard admitted that there would never have been a Glorious Revolution without the Stuart Restoration, it was clear from the rest of his sermon that he believed that the true significance of the earlier moment was as a precursor of the later one.71 In other words, supporters of the Revolution had both history and God on their side. A number of preachers were critical of this line of reasoning in subsequent 29 May sermons. For example, William Finch used the sermon he preached in 1701 to reaffirm the primary significance of the 1660 liberation to vindicate the Church as established by the Act of Uniformity, and the exclusion of Dissenters from the polity. Preaching to the Lower House of Convocation, the Church’s representative assembly, Finch did not mention the Glorious Revolution at all and barely mentioned William III. Finch also indirectly critiqued the idea that the Church was saved in 1688, by reaffirming the good work of Charles II in re-establishing true religion after his restoration. Indeed, Finch suggested that criticisms of Charles II’s reputation, which were a feature of much Court preaching in the 1690s, were in fact assaults on the integrity of the Church, and ‘spiting the blessing of This Day’. Finch’s exhortation defended the divine mandate underlying the Act of Uniformity by purposely eliding the miraculous return of the king with the construction of an exclusive religious settlement. The Church’s miraculous preservation during the 1650s, when the ‘Pure John Trenchard, A Sermon Preached before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor … (1694), Wing T2114, pp. 12–13, 23.

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Gospel of Christ’ was trampled upon by the ‘strangest Nonsense and wildest Extravagances’, proved that the practice and profession of Christianity as it was re-established 29 May 1660 was specially blessed by heaven, and so ought to be maintained.72 Similarly, Philip Stubs preached a 29 May sermon that defended the Restoration religious settlement by downgrading the Glorious Revolution. First of all, the restoration of Charles II was a superior miracle, ‘a surprising Example of Gods Goodness to his National Church’, which ‘no former Restauration can parallel, no later Revolution must pretend to match’. It followed from this argument that the settlement constructed after the Restoration was similarly unparalleled. Secondly, Stubs asserted that all the blessings enjoyed by Englishmen over the succeeding decades were derived from ‘the mercy’ of 29 May. If republicans and Dissenters would truly see the miracle of 1660 for what it was, Stubs reasoned, they would renounce their seditious and schismatic principles, and subsume themselves within the providentially protected national Church.73 The religious toleration that Dissenters enjoyed after 1689 represented, in Stubs’s estimation, a failure to acknowledge properly the handiwork of God in 1660. As time passed, more preachers used the occasion of 29 May to criticise the consequences of the Glorious Revolution. For example, in 1705 John Mather used his discussion of the miraculous nature of the Restoration to endorse a parliamentary bill that would outlaw occasional conformity. Since all that was good in England could be attributed to the nation’s regeneration on 29 May 1660, Mather reasoned that any sins that threatened to cripple the body politic again must be eliminated promptly. He identified three such transgressions: first, the Dissenters’ rebellious separation from the Church; second, the practice of occasional conformity; third, calls to comprehend Dissenters back into the Church. A kingdom divided by schism, Mather concluded, could have little hope of a ‘safe and long enjoyment of those Blessing we this Day commemorate’.74 For Mather, the freedoms that Dissenters enjoyed since 1689 both dishonoured the memory of God’s miracle in 1660, and endangered the nation. Mather was hardly original in employing the myth of liberation associated with 29 May Thanksgivings to justify a particular policy or shift Leopold William Finch, A Sermon Preach’d before the Reverend Clergy of the Lower House of Convocation … (1701); the first mention of William III is at page 22; pp. 21, 22, 12, 19. 73 Philip Stubs, The Restauration of the Royal Family, a Blessing to Three Kingdoms … (1702), pp. 15, 14, 16, 21, 18. 74 John Mather, A Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford … (Oxford, 1705), pp. 8, 12, 23. 72

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in the direction of public affairs. As I noted earlier, the sermons of 1661 and 1662 commended the reconstruction of an episcopally administered Prayer-Book Church of England. Two decades later, preachers portrayed the suppression of Dissenting worship as a proper mark of public thanks for the mercy of Restoration Day. The narrative of God’s deliverance allowed official ministers to cast the regime-change of 1688 as a historical parallel to, or as the historical fulfilment of, the Stuart Restoration. The final phase of Queen Anne’s reign would witness more strenuous reinsertions of the myth of liberation into the messy realities of party conflict. 29 May Thanksgiving sermons became occasions for preachers to evoke the myth as a prelude to historical and theological vindications of the current ministry, and to commend or to contest the political theology of High Churchmen. In other words, while the myth of divine liberation in 1660 remained the commonplace interpretation of the Restoration in 29 May Thanksgiving sermons, the requisite exhortations for practical demonstrations of public gratitude increasingly testified to the partisan divisions of English political culture. A clear example of this trend towards partisan uses of England’s recent history is seen in Bishop Gilbert Burnet’s 29 May sermon to Salisbury Cathedral, preached in 1710. Burnet’s message was a straightforward defence of an embattled whig ministry, which was reeling from a massive public controversy that had been initiated by a High Churchman’s sermon. Two months earlier, London had been rocked by two days of riots, sparked by the controversial trial of Dr Henry Sacheverell. The clergyman was a fierce critic of Dissenters, whig politicians and their ‘Low Church’ allies, as his 5 November 1709 Thanksgiving sermon, ‘The Perils of False Brethren’, amply demonstrated.75 By the second decade of the eighteenth century, public commemorations of providential deliverances were opportunities for preachers to lambaste the principles and leaders of political parties. In response to the Sacheverell affair, Burnet chose to preach his Thanksgiving sermon on Matthew 22.21, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ From his exposition of Christ’s maxim, Bishop Burnet proceeded to defend the Revolution of 1688 and the Act that restricted the throne to the Protestant descendants of James I.76 Not surprisingly, Burnet likewise denounced the doctrine of

Geoffrey S. Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (1973). Sacheverell was charged with seditious libel on account of that sermon, and although he was found guilty, he received a comparatively light sentence. 76 The Act of Settlement, 12 and 13 Will 3, c. 2, 1701. 75

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absolute non-resistance, and the hereditary rights of the Pretender, claimed by Jacobites. Burnet acknowledged that the Stuart Restoration was a miraculous deliverance, but pointedly reinserted 1688 into the series of punctual providences that had preserved the ancient constitution and Protestant faith in England. Burnet claimed that the Church’s position and Christian unity were best defended by endeavouring to ‘bring others into it by the Strength of Reason’, not by rioting, as Sacheverell’s supporters had done. Tories and High Churchmen had disguised their ingratitude by loudly proclaiming their zeal for the queen while denouncing those who have ‘happily conducted matters under her’. True thankfulness for both the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, Burnet argued, ought to be shown by obeying the queen and supporting her whig ministers.77 For Burnet, being grateful for a whig government was the best way to remember the miracle of the Restoration. Gilbert Burnet’s 29 May sermon in 1710 provoked the first printed refutation of a 29 May Thanksgiving sermon. The tract was written by Charles Leslie, a clergyman who had refused to swear allegiance to William III. Leslie was appalled that Burnet had turned an occasion, which typically revealed the ‘wicked principles’ that had sparked the civil wars, into one that apparently vindicated them. Leslie’s discussion criticised key elements of Burnet’s attack on the doctrine of passive obedience. For example, Leslie argued that if resistance was legitimate, then Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate had just as much legitimacy as the restored monarchy of Charles II.78 Comparisons of any politician with Cromwell were regarded by most people as deeply offensive, and supporters of the Glorious Revolution had no interest in suggesting that Cromwell’s regime was justifiable. Unsurprisingly, soon after Leslie’s work was released, Benjamin Hoadly published a defence of Burnet, denying that Burnet had justified Cromwell’s Protectorate. Furthermore, according to Hoadly, in Burnet’s sermon the Bishop had described the civil wars and Interregnum as a kind of ‘fall’ from righteousness. Hoadly argued that this description implied that Burnet believed that the Presbyterians were wrong to have resisted Charles I in the 1640s. Yet, according to Hoadly, what had happened in the 1640s was different from the legitimate opposition to James II in 1688.79 Burnet’s 29 May Thanksgiving sermon of 1710 thus provoked a conflict between supporters of 1660 versus 1688, as well as between whiggish and Jacobite views of English history. Gilbert Burnet, A Sermon Preach’d in the Cathedral-Church, pp. 2, 9, 16, 12. Burnet, A Sermon Preach’d in the Cathedral-Church, p. 2; Leslie, Good old cause, p. 2. 79 [Benjamin Hoadly], The New Ill Designs of Sowing Sedition, Detected ... in a Modest Reply to a Scurrilous Pamphlets, Entitul’d, The Good Old Cause (1710), pp. 24–5, 28. 77

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Hugh Todd’s sermon of 1711, however, uniquely evoked the 1660 Convention Parliament’s efforts to forget the civil wars and Interregnum, in order to heal and pacify the political nation. Addressing the House of Commons, Todd’s 29 May sermon ascribed every positive political and religious feature of the contemporary scene – the freedom of Parliaments, the flourishing of the Church – to the ‘Triumphant and Amazing’ return of Charles II. The preacher insisted that gratitude for the Restoration ought to include a renewed willingness to forget the animosities of the past. Todd recalled that Charles II had himself admitted that some of his former enemies had rebelled, contrary to their intentions. Furthermore, some of these reluctant rebels were ‘very Instrumental in bringing about the National Blessing which we now Thankfully Commemorate’. The preacher reminded his auditors and readers that the divisions of other civil conflicts had long since ceased to matter. ‘At this Day’, he pointed out, ‘no One knows (unless inform’d by the Histories) ... Who was of the Lancastrian, Who of the York Interest.’  80 Todd therefore implied that it was likewise time to forget about whose ancestors stood on what side of the battlefield at Edgehill. But Todd’s call in 1711 to forget the culpability of puritans for the civil wars was subsequently ignored by official Thanksgiving preachers. Robert Phillips’s sermon to the House of Commons in May 1712 equated gratitude for the blessing of the Restoration with support for the current tory ministry, and commitment to the doctrines of passive obedience and divine-right monarchy. With Church-Whigs such as Burnet in view, Phillips concluded that ‘no true Son of the Church of England’ could oppose the principle of passive obedience.81 According to Phillips, the civil wars and Interregnum were a punishment from God inflicted upon the whole nation for their brief flirtation with notions of popular sovereignty and resistance to authority. 29 May services would remain supremely relevant, Phillips claimed, so long as men who adhered to these wicked principles remained at large and uncontested. Thomas Brett made much the same point in a 29 May sermon preached at Court in 1713, although he was much more pointed in his critique of Low Churchmen and whig politicians. For Brett, it was clear that whigs, Low Churchmen and Dissenters were carrying forward the

Hugh Todd, A Sermon Preach’d before the Honourable House of Commons … (1711), pp. 16–17, 19, 20. 81 Robert Phillips, Religion and Loyalty. A Sermon Preach’d at St. Margaret’s Westminster … (1712), pp. 22, 15–16, 23. 80

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puritan tradition of abusing language to lead the people into sin.82 Brett argued that puritans in the Long Parliament had deluded the people with fears of a Catholic plot at work in the Court and the Church, whereby ‘everything which was contrary to what these Popular Preachers taught them, was down-right Popery’. Puritan and parliamentary opposition to Charles I and the bishops was in fact the very sin for which the nation was punished with a civil war and a republic.83 By God’s amazing grace, the kingdom was healed, and the king and Church restored. So the best way to show gratitude for the blessing of This Day, Brett declared, was to perceive the age-old puritan charge of popery in the Church for what it really was, ‘nothing but a Cant made use of, to ensnare the People, and to raise in them an Abhorrence’ for orthodox Protestant Christianity.84 The accession of Elector Georg Ludwig of Hanover to the British throne in August 1714 provoked another series of sermonic re-evaluations of the myth of 29 May 1660 as the nation’s liberation from slavery under the puritans. Importantly, disagreement over the significance of the Stuart Restoration in sermons reflected contrasting views about the consequences of the Glorious Revolution. For example, Timothy Awbrey’s 29 May sermon to the House of Commons reasserted the salvific priority of the Glorious Revolution in the chain of punctual providential deliverances. He did this in part by linking the mercy of 1688 to the accession of the Protestant George I. While admitting that the Restoration was indeed a miracle that ‘cometh forth from the Lord of Hosts’ (Isaiah 28.29), Awbrey viewed the birth of Georg Ludwig, now King George, on 28 May 1660 as a comparable act of providence. The Protestant Elector’s peaceful accession as king was, to Awbrey, another marvellous work of God, since it ensured the continuance of true religion in Britain. This most recent mercy, Awbrey noted, would not have occurred except for the Glorious Revolution. The preacher also used his 29 May sermon to bring to bear on the present moment an important strand of thinking, dating back to the birth of Protestant England. In his sermon, Awbrey reflected on the significance of godly magistrates for the well-being of Christian countries. Echoing the preface to John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Awbrey claimed that since the con-

Mark Knights, ‘Faults on Both Sides: The Conspiracies of Party Politics under the Later Stuarts’, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution, eds Barry Coward and Julian Swann (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 153–73. 83 Thomas Brett, The Dangers of a Relapse. A Sermon Preach’d at the Royal chapel at St. James’s … (1713), pp. 9–10. 84 Brett, The Dangers, pp. 14, 23. 82

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version of Emperor Constantine, God had seen fit to let Christian rulers, and Christian legislatures, look after ‘the care of the Propagation of the Purity of his Worship’.85 The Act of Settlement (1701), which fixed the line of succession to James I’s Protestant descendants, was simply the latest example of the king and his great council protecting Christian faith from popery. Awbrey also defended Dissenters as less-than-perfect Protestant brethren in the common struggle against Catholic power. Recent history proved that ‘unfortunate and misled Dissenters’ were more opposed to the ‘Idolatrous Forms and Tyrannical Discipline of the Church of Rome’ than the discipline and worship of the established Church.86 There was no complementary irenic gesture towards Anglican Christianity forthcoming from one of Dissent’s fiercest defenders. While not attacking the Church directly, Independent minister Thomas Bradbury preached a 29 May sermon that employed biblical parallelism to denigrate the Restoration regime, and cast doubt on the myth of divine liberation. Entitled Eikon Basilike, a reference to the martyrological work attributed to King Charles I, and regarded as proof of his moral and political innocence, the sermon was a meditation, based on Hosea 7.7, on the providential punishments suffered by Israel’s wicked kings.87 Bradbury’s list of their sins was clearly intended to be heard and read as a critique of Charles II. The ‘image’ of the king Bradbury presented was an idolater, a drunkard, a blasphemer, a persecutor of the godly and a secret ally of pagan foreign rulers. While the present king was a demonstrable zealot for the Protestant faith, Charles II was known ‘to die a Papist’, after living ‘a Life of Luxury and Profaneness’. 88 From this perspective, the Restoration was not a miracle but a divine chastisement. Bradbury also took aim at the myth of divine liberation. Leaving his readers to find out for themselves from histories the ‘blessings’ that flowed from This Day, the Independent preacher re-inserted human agency into his story of the Restoration. ‘If any Party have wherof they may glory’ in what was accomplished on 29 May 1660, Bradbury proclaimed to his Dissenting congregation, ‘this belongs to you.’ Without the efforts of Independents and Presbyterians, there would have been no rapturous welcome for Charles Stuart. The preacher re-emphasised the Dissenters’ longstanding claim that the proscription of the puritan impulse constituted an Anglican Admittedly, this is a theme that can be traced back as far as Eusebius. Timothy Awbrey, A Sermon Preach’d before the Hon[ora]ble House of Commons … (1715), pp. 14, 18, 14–15. 87 ‘All their Kings are fallen, there is none among them that calleth unto me.’ 88 Thomas Bradbury, Eikon Basilike, pp. 12–17, 19, 14. 85 86

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betrayal.89 Furthermore, it was widely known, he claimed, that the preachers and people ‘who were afterwards turn’d out with so much Contempt, had the main share in that change’. The best that Anglican clergy could do in 1660 was ‘to drink Healths, and read Collects’.90 The strongest defenders of the Restoration had, in actual fact, done nothing themselves to bring it about. Therefore the Restoration settlement was, in Bradbury’s assessment, an historic injustice imposed on Dissenters, based on a lie. At another London church, however, the myth of liberation was invoked at yet another 29 May sermon to vindicate the Restoration religious settlement, and to prove that the realm was in danger from Dissenters. At St Sepulchre’s a Mr Smith, preaching on the story of King David’s triumph over his rebellious son, argued that the Lord’s marvellous rescue of the nation and the Church on 29 May 1660 was a sign of divine favour. The truth of the episcopal Church’s teaching and discipline was proved by the suffering of loyal clergy.91 The Churchmen, Smith declared, ‘whose Houses were burnt, whose cattle were seiz’d, whose Lives were most barbarously and inhumanely taken away’, had been the greatest partners in the exiled king’s ‘Miseries and Afflictions’. Yet, the authentic English Church of God survived the persecution of ‘Antimonarchian Canters’, and was reborn to flourish ‘under his auspicious Majesty’. Furthermore, the civil wars and Interregnum showed that there never were, or could never be, peaceable and genuinely Protestant denominations, separate from the established Church. The self-ascribed ‘moderation’ of Independents and Baptists, for instance, was belied by the violence they had committed against Anglicans during the past conflict. The Dissenters’ puritan ancestors had claimed to be genuine Christians, but then used the doctrine to popular resistance to foment a sinful rebellion.92 The preservation of the Restoration religious settlement, and its proscription of the puritan impulse, was in this preacher’s view, the best way to preserve the mercy of 29 May 1660. Conclusion The 29 May Thanksgiving sermons of Thomas Awbrey, Thomas Bradbury and Mr Smith of St Sepulchres demonstrate the depth of division among De Krey, Restoration and Revolution, pp. 44–5; Goldie, Entring Book, Vol. I, pp. 149, 163–77. 90 Bradbury, Eikon, p. 18. 91 Browell, ‘Politics of Providentialism’, p. 46. 92 Mr. Smith, A Sermon Preach’d at St Sepulchres Church … (1715), p. 7. It is probable that Smith had read his Walker. 89

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Augustan English Protestants, both Anglican and Dissenter, over the meaning of the Stuart Restoration. The myth of divine liberation, upon which the Act that set aside 29 May as a day of national remembrance and thanksgiving was grounded, both explained and made understandable what had happened, and who had made it happen. The Restoration was a miracle that saved the kingdom and Protestant Christianity. We have seen how that myth of liberation was rearticulated at different moments over the late Stuart era to show God’s commitment to the Stuart monarchy and to the established Church. After the Glorious Revolution, however, it was possible for preachers to portray the return of Charles II as the mere shadow, the anti-type, of the much more important arrival of William and Mary. According to these ministers, the latter event had fulfilled the promise of the former by securing once and for all English liberties and the nation’s true faith. Subsequently, the Glorious Revolution was downplayed by High Churchmen who feared for the safety of legally established Protestantism in the wake of religious toleration. 29 May Thanksgiving sermons also became platforms to contest the political theology of the Church, and to uphold the policies of the current ministry. By upholding the monarchy and the Church through the myth of liberation, 29 May preachers were operating within a Reformation historical framework. Whether understood as moment or process, the Reformation was a profound break with the past in early modern England, as significant as the expansion of the state and rise of the market. The break with Rome and traditional Christianity that the Tudors supervised received a dynamic justification from the vision of English history, powerfully articulated by John Foxe in Acts and Monuments. According to Foxe, the true English Church had been providentially preserved down through the centuries, despite the invasion and then persecutions of the papacy, and the accretions of superstitious and extra-biblical beliefs and practices.93 The doctrine of God’s preservation of, and periodic interventions to save, genuine Christianity in England, also helped Elizabethan and Jacobean preachers give divine sanction to the royal ecclesiastical supremacy, and by implication, to the stripping of the altars and the laicisation of a massive amount of ecclesiastical property. Furthermore, the history of God’s punctual actions to save his true English Church, as celebrated and commemorated in Elizabethan and early Stuart preaching, was crucial in the process of confessionalisation, turning a legally Protestant country into a country of (mostly) believing and David Loades, ‘Afterword: John Foxe in the Twenty-First Century’, John Foxe and His World, eds Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 277–89.

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self-identifying Protestants.94 Yet the strength of providential history is also its greatest weakness. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there were always Roman Catholics capable of re-framing what Protestant preachers said were punctual divine mercies as simply mundane events caused by human agency; in other words, not kairos but chronos. According to critics of the English Reformation, the agents behind such events, or else who benefited from them, employed religious language in a Machiavellian way. Protestant politicians and preachers expressed pious sentiments to hide what were, to Catholics, patently base motives: greed, lust and ambition. It was also possible to interpret so-called Protestant mercies as really God’s tests for his true, meaning Catholic, flock. Unsurprisingly, this way of thinking was adopted by moderate Dissenters and sectarian Protestants under Charles II.95 A late example of this is provided by the Independent minister Thomas Bradbury’s reading of the ‘Blessing’ of Restoration as, in fact, the beginning of almost thirty years of suffering for the godly. Yet Revd Bradbury’s was by far the minority view of 29 May preachers. Most were like Mr Smith, who had nothing but praise for the state of religion under Charles II’s government, but just the opposite for the 1640s and 1650s. Preachers of 29 May Thanksgiving sermons disagreed over which seventeenth-century divine deliverance, 1660 or 1688, should take priority in the nation’s cultural memory. At issue was the question of which of the two events had been truly crucial for the survival and safety of English Christianity, and the constitution. This dispute, I argue, was rooted in earlier controversies concerning the nature of the reformed Church of England, and of the nature of its relationship to the state and political life. It makes sense, therefore, to understand 29 May sermons, particularly those emerging after the Revolution of 1688, as profoundly engaged in the politics of Reformation.96 Debates about the Church’s relationship to the state were also intimately bound up with questions concerning the source of the nation’s moral life, and whether or not a clerical order endowed by Christ with sacerdotal power should have the ultimate authority to articulate that moral core.97 When standing before an official or parochial gathering of auditors, Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 245–80. Peter Lake, ‘“The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I” Revisited (by its Victims) as a Conspiracy’, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution, eds Barry Coward and Julian Swann (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 87–111; Walsham, Providence, pp. 232–8. 96 Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (2007), pp. 23, 591–2. 97 Andrew Starkie, The Church of England and the Bangorian Controversy, 1716–1721 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 11–18. 94

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29 May preachers attempted to apply the myth of liberation to those questions. In doing so the preachers were offering more than commentary on current affairs in light of the civil wars, the Restoration, or the Revolution; their sermons were yet another element in England’s extended Reformation debate.98 The process of turning the Church in England to the Protestant Church of England had stimulated profound disagreements about the constitution of the Church, and about who was ultimately responsible for its integrity. Such questions vexed public authorities and private individuals well into the eighteenth century. The civil wars complicated these issues by giving space for new modes of Protestant Christianity to come to expression, which the restrictive religious settlement of 1662 subsequently institutionalised, albeit unintentionally and gradually.99 The Act of Uniformity was, from a certain view, simply an attempt to recapitulate the Elizabethan settlement over what was perceived to have been a kind of spiritual anarchy. Yet from other perspectives, the Restoration religious settlement was newly restrictive because it implied that the Elizabethan Reformation would definitely not be reformed. The repeated attempts by 29 May Thanksgiving preachers to show that the 1650s were ‘time on the cross’, and the return of Charles Stuart as a type of the resurrection, demonstrates the lengths to which they sought to justify providentially the political ‘freeze’ on religious reform. Sermonic memories of 29 May 1660 were thus part of England’s Long Reformation, insofar as they affirmed repeatedly that it was well and truly over in 1559. The polemical remembering of the conflicted past conveyed in Restoration Day sermons also contributed, albeit unintentionally, to the secularisation of eighteenth-century historical representations of England’s wars of religion. The message of 29 May Thanksgiving sermons was that nothing good happened during the civil wars and Interregnum. There were no positive lessons to be learned for the nation’s spiritual or civil affairs, and not one thing from that time was worth bringing forward. Nonetheless, this message was not taken to heart by everyone after 1661. For example, some Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Introduction’, England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (1998), pp. 22–5; Jeremy Gregory, ‘The Making of a Protestant Nation: “Success” and “Failure” in England’s Long Reformation’, England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (1998), pp. 313–14. 99 Justin Champion, ‘“My Kingdom is not of this World”: The Politics of Religion after the Revolution’, The English Revolution, c. 1590–1720: Politics, Religion, Communities, ed. N. Tyacke (Manchester, 2007), pp. 186–96; John Spurr, The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–1714 (Harlow, 2006), pp. 328–31. 98

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of the Long Parliament’s fiscal innovations were eventually adopted by the Restoration regime, and the Rump’s Commission of Sick and Wounded Sailors was resurrected in every subsequent naval conflict of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.100 These imitations of parliamentary or republican policies were undertaken by men who had a direct experience of the 1640s and 1650s, and the measures they adapted or applied were instrumental, capable of bolstering or securing the authority of any regime. Thus, putting the Treasury into commission, or reviving a Board for Sick and Hurt Sailors, did not necessarily recommend or undermine a particular constitutional arrangement or a specific politics of religion. In other words, they were not obviously wicked from the standpoint of the myth of liberation. By contrast, in the vast majority of 29 May Thanksgiving sermons, the ideological basis of Parliament’s quarrel with Charles I, and the puritan impulse to reform the Elizabethan Reformation were straightforwardly characterised as sin. For such transgressions, the kingdoms suffered a deluge of bloodshed, false religion and bondage. Although the 1640s and 1650s were called to mind in nearly every printed 29 May sermon, it was only as a kind of monster – intended to scare people into obedience and conformity. Those who wished to revive what they saw as commendable principles from those years in late Stuart England were usually compelled to disguise or transform them so they would seem less monstrous. Thus, preachers of 29 May sermons made the 1640s and 1650s into another kind of myth: a calamity with almost no relation to what came before them or after them. In the mode of public remembering promulgated by most 29 May preachers, the civil wars and Interregnum were an episode outside of human history; they were England’s time on the cross.

Scott, England’s Troubles, pp. 413–18; Paul Seaward, ‘The Cavalier Parliament, the 1667 Accounts Commission and the Idea of Accountability’, Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England, eds Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 149–68; J. Keevil, Medicine and the Navy, Volume II, 1649 to 1714 (1958), p. 75.

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Conclusion In the spring of 1715, the day after he celebrated his 55th birthday, King George I attended a service of thanksgiving at St James’s palace chapel. The king’s court had gathered to remember the providential restoration of the established state and Church, heralded by the popular rejoicing that had greeted King Charles II upon his entry into London in May of 1660. The sermon, subsequently published at royal command, was delivered by William Burscough, an Oxford don and one of the new king’s chaplains. Taking as his text Psalm 147.1, ‘For it is Good to sing Praises unto our God’, Burscough proposed several reasons why it was good to take time to recall the happy end of the civil wars and Interregnum. Significantly, however, the preacher chose not to narrate any particulars about the miseries and tribulations from which the people had been delivered almost six decades earlier. It was better, he claimed, to avoid any kind of ‘black Representation of that time’, let alone to point out yet again which party and principles had wrought such trauma upon the bodies politic and ecclesiastic. Rather than remembering who was to blame for England’s seventeenth-century civil wars, Burscough exhorted his auditors and readers to render thanks for the political stability and religious peace that their kingdom’s moderate constitution had secured since the return of Charles II. The minister encouraged all people who wanted to ensure the happy endurance of stability and peace to be grateful always for the great miracle of 29 May 1660. Additionally, Burscough prophesied that so long as the British peoples valued their constitution, the memory of ‘This Day’ would never end.1 Burscough’s sermon evokes two important strands of this book’s argument. The first is that the public memory of England’s conflicted past after 1660 was the outcome of political processes designed to secure a particular future. Public remembering was very much the result of decisions made and upheld by legislators and officials in the interest of preserving what they believed were the necessary foundations of peace and order. As an example, the statute that set aside 29 May for remembering the Restoration sent a William Burscough, The Duty of Praise and Thanksgiving. A Sermon Preached before the King, at the Royal Chapel at St James (1715), pp. 18, 22–3.

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message to the English about how they were to understand and use their recent history of civil conflict.2 Burscough’s sermon captured the message nicely in his refusal to represent particulars about those dark times. As we saw in the previous chapter, the whole point of commemorating 29 May was to make the civil wars and Interregnum a forgettable interlude in the longer history of divine deliverances that had preserved the nation. Moreover, the aim of this kind of public remembering of the conflicted past was to keep minds focused on what the political nation had achieved after 1660. In the first chapter, we saw how the regime sanctioned directly or indirectly historical writings that vindicated the legal framework that reestablished the monarchy and the exclusive episcopal Church. Similarly, the Restoration settlement shaped how civil war veterans could or could not make sense of their military experiences, and narrate them to officials empowered to relieve their suffering. Likewise, the content and contours of historical writing about the civil wars and Interregnum during the tumultuous 1680s and after the end of pre-publication censorship in 1695 demonstrate the importance of the state, and eventually different government ministries, in promoting and contesting particular narrations about the conflict and its ultimate outcome.3 Relatedly, I have argued throughout this book that the politics of the Restoration settlements were the fundamental continuity within the public memory of the civil wars and Interregnum. It was not the violence of the civil wars but the forceful proscription of puritans from borough corporations, parish pulpits and civil and military offices – the violent consequences of the peace – enacted by the Cavalier Parliament that shaped and became the focus of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century public remembering of England’s recent conflict. The settlements’ attempt to make peace with the past had the greatest impact on how and why the troubled past was called to mind in late Stuart England. Burscough’s prophecy about the link between commemorating 29 May and the security of the constitution points to the related argument that civil-war public memory helped to make a newly exclusive polity. After 1660, the question of remembering and forgetting the past conflict was refracted through the changing politics of the Restoration process. The process initially was concerned with public forgetting as a means to foster reconciliation and social peace. Of course, even within the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, certain men and deeds, especially those people On law and forms of national remembering, see Robert M. Cover, ‘Foreword: Nomos and Narrative’, Harvard Law Review 97 (1983), 4–10. 3 Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 211–15. 2

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associated with the death of Charles I, were exempt from pardon and forgetting.4 Subsequently the process of Restoration shifted to securing the political nation from future harm. The legislative product was a confessional polity that proscribed the party and principles remembered as being responsible for putting the nation on the road to civil war and revolution. The Restoration settlements’ scapegoating of the puritan impulse thus made an identifiable politics of religious reform the key to remembering ‘properly’ the conflicted past. Significantly, people who rejected or were disappointed with the Restoration settlements, such as John Rushworth, Sir Thomas Fairfax and Bulstrode Whitelocke, usually put the issue of liberty at the centre of their remembering the wars’ origins. The presence of different approaches to the balance of religious and political issues in the conflict’s causes make the earl of Clarendon’s decision not to look behind 1625 for explanations of the descent into violence all the more remarkable. 5 For Clarendon, what had happened in the 1640s was always more than simply a war of religion. One of the great ironies of late Stuart historiography is that Clarendon’s name became a short-hand for the post-Restoration proscription of puritan piety and politics.6 By re-emphasising the denigration of puritan politics and piety in public remembering after 1660, my argument has implications for how this particular patch of early modern England can be understood. Part of what made the ‘experience of defeat’ so painful for many old puritans during the Restoration era was that for over a century after the accession of Elizabeth I, their political and spiritual ambitions were represented as mainstream, or else as the forgotten core of domestic and foreign policy, even as their opponents worked assiduously to highlight their subversive potential.7 By 1660, the fears of Elizabethan and Jacobean Churchmen who were hostile to puritan religious politics, such as Richard Hooker and Richard Bancroft, seemed to have been vindicated; consequently, the puritan impulse had to be banished officially from political and religious life. Although elements Clauses xxxiv and xxxv of 12 Car. II, C. 11, ‘An Act of Free and General Pardon Indemnity and Oblivion’, SR, v, pp. 231–2. 5 Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 121; Peter Heylyn, Ecclesia Restaurata: Or, The History of the Reformation of the Church (1661), Wing H1701. 6 Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, The History of the Great Rebellion … (1702), pp. 3–4; the label being the ‘Clarendon Code’. 7 Patrick Collinson, ‘Antipuritanism’, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds John Coffey and Paul C. Lim (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 19–33; cf. Peter Lake, ‘The Historiography of Puritanism’, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds John Coffey and Paul C. Lim (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 346–72. 4

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of puritan politics were themselves subsequently vindicated at the Glorious Revolution, for example, the king became more accountable to Parliament and committed to an aggressively Protestant foreign policy, religious reformation and Reformed politics were increasingly detached from puritan piety and separatist religious groups.8 Furthermore, my argument suggests that the Restoration and its settlements marked a major turning point in the political and religious cultures of England and the rest of the British Kingdoms. The Restoration was a kind of revolution, attended with a dramatic change of regime with long-lasting political, social and ecclesiastical consequences. In the process of crafting the Restoration settlements, the modus vivendi hammered out between Henry VIII and the political nation over the prostrated body of the Church was jettisoned. After 1660, the leaders of England’s county communities, who had been appalled by the social and religious upheavals of the recent past, forced Charles II to accede to the construction of an exclusively Anglican polity. The Restoration polity was spiritually and politically tied to the Church’s Elizabethan discipline and doctrine.9 This new ‘old regime’ continued through the Glorious Revolution and down into the nineteenth century.10 Subsequently, the question remained whether or not it was safe for the nation to reincorporate the heirs of the puritan impulse into public life and places of authority. This question lay at the heart of the various tests and crises that late Stuart England experienced. This question endured through and after the Glorious Revolution’s recalibration of the balance of power within the ancient constitution and the religious landscape. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 5, the stronger a commentator’s commitment to the necessity of retaining the proscription of the puritan impulse, the more likely he was to be lukewarm, if not downright hostile to the outcome of 1688. Ironically, less than half a year after Burscough’s sermon before George I, the Hanoverian monarchy faced its first major crisis, when thousands of subjects took up arms in the hope of recapitulating the first Stuart restoration.11 Mark Goldie, The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, Volume I. Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 197–208. 9 D.M. Loades, Politics and Nation: England 1450–1660 (Oxford, 1999); Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658–1667 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 181–3. 10 J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 19–34. 11 Daniel Szechi, ‘The Jacobite Movement’, A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. H.T. Dickinson (Oxford, 2002), pp. 81–95. 8

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The Restoration polity lasted until the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. With the full inclusion into civil society of Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters, the focus of the civil wars within English cultural memory underwent a remarkable shift. Increasingly, public remembering of the civil wars showed how those defeated after 1660 had, like the stone that the builders had first rejected, become the cornerstone of the Victorian polity. By the time of the great historian Samuel R. Gardiner’s death in 1902, seventeenth-century puritanism had come to stand for liberty, religious toleration and parliamentary democracy.12 The public memory of the mid-seventeenth century conflict mutated over the course of the twentieth century. As scholars such as Edward Vallance have demonstrated, the 1640s and 1650s were recalled in a wide range of political and religious, and eventually social debates.13 By the Second World War, for example, the civil wars and Interregnum were remembered as a crucial turning point in England’s path towards modern industrial capitalism, partly to provide historical legitimacy for socialist politics.14 By the turn of the twentieth century, public recollections of the civil wars were largely divorced from contemporary political debates in England. Nonetheless, the conflicted past retains a prominent place in both popular and historical memory, even though the two domains appear to have less and less time for each other.15 This book has argued that it is important to remember the impact of public recollections of the mid-seventeenth-century conflict on the course of early modern English history. Cultural memories of the civil wars and Interregnum were an important symbolic apparatus through which the governors and the governed of England prescribed and performed the division of power and authority in the ancien régime reconstituted after the return of Charles II.16 Much work remains to be done on how the dominant narratives Timothy Lang, The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage: Interpretations of a Discordant Past (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 20–1; Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain. Theatres of Memory, Volume II (1999), pp. 278–9. 13 Edward Vallance, A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries – The Men and Women who Fought for Our Freedoms (2009). 14 Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (1980), p. 144; John Adamson, ‘Introduction: High Roads and Blind Alleys – The English Civil War and its Historiography’, The English Civil War: Conflicts and Contexts, 1640–1649, ed. John Adamson (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 7–14. 15 Ronald Hutton, Debates in Stuart History (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 56–8. 16 Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2009), pp. 13–15. 12

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of puritan culpability and the providence of 1660 were contested in subcultures of public and semi-public remembering. Moreover, there is much scope for research into cultural memory conveyed in genres such as popular print, songs, plays and drama, and material culture.17 The legacy of the civil wars and Interregnum on the landscape is only just beginning to come into focus, as is its legacy in the other British kingdoms.18 Furthermore, there remains a great deal to be learned about how readers at different times responded to the arguments set forth in historical writing about the wars, or to sermons preached on fast days and at services of thanksgiving. Despite these gaps in our knowledge of the popular memory of England’s 1640s and 1650s, a number of historians have argued that the knowledge of the English revolution inoculated the political nation from further recourses to violence in the settling of major civil disagreements.19 However, while it is true there has not been another ‘effusion of blood’ on the scale of the civil wars to this day, political and religious violence have not been total strangers to the north-west Atlantic archipelago since 1660. Arguably, the Glorious Revolution was brought about and subsequently defended with levels of popular and military violence comparable to the bloodshed surrounding the birth of the first French republic.20 Additionally, it is clear that memories of the civil wars did not prevent the Prince of Orange from invading the country with 15,000 troops, or prevent James II from trying to imitate his father, in bringing over an army of Irish to subdue his rebellious English subjects. Memories of the recent past could just as easily be catalysts for violence as for peace, as the Sacheverell riots of 1710 against Dissenting meeting houses clearly demonstrated. Nevertheless, it was not only memories of the violence that pressurised politicians and the political nation to seek peaceful solutions to serious problems, but also the Angela Jones, ‘Subjects and Objects: Material Expressions of Love and Loyalty in Seventeenth-Century England’, JBS 48 (2009), 871–86 at 877; Edward Legon, ‘Communicative Memory of the English Revolution, 1660–1690’, Unpublished MA Dissertation (London, 2011). I thank Mr Legon for permission to read his work. 18 Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2004), pp. 253–8; Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), pp. 526–30; Sarah Covington, ‘Oliver Cromwell and Ireland: Folklore, History, and Memory’, paper presented to the Early Modern Seminar, Department of History, University of Warwick, 19 October 2010. 19 Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2000), p. 795; Jason McElligott, ‘Introduction: Stabilizing and Destabilizing Britain in the 1680s’, Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, ed. Jason McElligott (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 5–6; Ivan Roots, The Great Rebellion, 1642–1660 (Stroud, 1995), p. 278. 20 Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, 2009), Chapter 9. 17

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Restoration settlement’s solution to the problem of remembering and forgetting past conflict. By proscribing the puritan impulse officially from the public domain, the Restoration settlements created an identifiable ‘other’, which could become, when necessary, the focus of public anger and fear. The fanatic sectary and hypocritical Presbyterian remained figures of which the majority of English people remained deeply suspicious and wary for many, many years. The ‘black Representations’ that characterised narrations of the puritan movement within the cultural memory of the civil wars and Interregnum thus served to unify the public, and rally support around the Stuart, and then Hanoverian regimes. The political price exacted by this mode of peace-making remained a source of controversy and conflict long, long after 1660.

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Select Bibliography Manuscripts Bodleian Library, Oxford MSS J Walker MSS Fairfax Chester and Cheshire Record Office, Chester QSJF 89-105 Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock QSB 2 Hampshire Record Office, Winchester Q1 Devonshire Record Office, Exeter QS 128 QS 1 House of Lords Record Office HL/CL/JO/1/33 North Yorkshire Record Office, Northallerton QSB 1686-1690 West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield QS 1/7 to 1/26 Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office, Chippenham QS A1/110

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Early Printed Sources Allestree, Richard. A Sermon Preached at Hampton-Court on the 29th of May, London, 1662. An abridgment of Sr. Richard Bakers Chronicle of the kings of England, London, 1684. Anderson, Henry. A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church at Winchester, London, 1681. Anon. A Sermon Preach’d on May the 29th, 1673. in One of His Majesties Licens’d Meetings in Devon, London, 1673. Astell, Mary. An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in This Kingdom, London, 1704. Atkyns, Richard. The Vindication of Richard Atkyns Esquire. As also a Relation of several Passages in the Western War Wherein he was Concern’d, London, 1669. Awbrey, Timothy. A Sermon Preach’d before the Honble House of Commons on the 29th of May, London, 1715. Bate, George. Elenchus Motuum Nuperorum in Anglia, translated by Archibald Lovell, London, 1685. Beridge, John. No King in Israel, London, 1662. Berkeley, John. Memoirs of Sir John Berkley, London, 1699. [Bethel, Slingsby]. The World’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell, London, 1668. Blount, Thomas. Animadversions upon Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle, and It’s Continuation, Oxford, 1672. Bradbury, Thomas. Eikon basilike. A Sermon Preach’d on the 29th of May, 1715, London, 1715. Brett, Thomas. The Dangers of an Relapse. A Sermon Preach’d at the Royal chapel at St. James’s, London, 1713. Bulkeley, Richard. A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral-Church of Hereford, on May the 29th, London, 1685. Burnet, Gilbert, A Sermon Preached before the Queen at White-Hall, on the 29th of May, London, 1694. –––––. A Sermon Preach’d in the Cathedral-Church, London, 1710. Burscough, William. The Duty of Praise and Thanksgiving. A Sermon Preached before the King, at the Royal Chapel at St James, London, 1715. Calamy, Benjamin. A Sermon Preached before the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of London, London, 1682. Calamy, Edmund. Richard Baxter. An Abridgment of Mr. Baxter’s History of his Life and Times, London, 1702; 1713. Charles II. His Majesties Declaration to All His Loving Subjects, Touching the Causes & Reasons that Moved Him to Dissolve the Two Last Parliaments, London, 1681. Church of England. A Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving to be Used, of All the Kings Majesties Loving Subjects, the 29th of May Yearly for His Majesties Happy Return to His Kingdoms, London, 1662. –––––. A Form of Prayer, with Thanksgiving to Almighty God for Having Put an End to the Great Rebellion by the Restitution of the King and Royal Family, London, 1685. Churchill, A. and J. A View of the Reign of King Charles the First. Wherein the True Causes of the Civil War are Impartially Delineated … (1704) Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of. The history of the rebellion and civil wars in England begun in the year 1641 … Faithfully abridg’d, London, 1703. 252

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the civil wars after 1660 Jegon, William. The Damning Nature of Rebellion: Or, the Universal Unlawfulness of Resistance Under Pain of Damnation, in the Saddest Sense; Asserted in a Sermon Preached at the Cathedral of Norwich, May 29, London, 1685. Jones, David. A Continuation of the Secret History of White-Hall, London, 1697. Kennett, White. A Compassionate Enquiry into the Causes of the Civil War, London, 1704. Kerwell, John. Speculum Gratitudinis; Or, David’s Thankfulness Unto God for all His Benefits. Expressed in a Sermon on the 29th of May, London, 1665. Killigrew, Henry and A. Hertocks, A Sermon Preach’d before His Majesty at White-Hall May 29th 1668 … Published by His Majesties Special Command, London, 1668. Lake, John. A Sermon Preached at Whitehal upon the 29th Day of May, London, 1670. Leslie, Charles. The Good Old Cause, or, Lying in Truth, London, 1710. L’Estrange, Roger. A Memento. Treating of the Rise, Progress, and Remedies of Seditions, London, 1682. Lloyd, David. Memoirs of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings and Deaths of Those Noble, Revered, and Excellent Personages That Suffered … In our late Intestine Wars, London, 1668. Lloyd, William. A Sermon Preached before Her Majesty, on May 29, London, 1692. Long, Thomas. A Sermon Against Murmuring: Preached in the Cathedral Church of St. Peter Exon, on the XXIXth of May, London, 1680. Mather, John. A Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford, at St. Mary’s, on Tuesday May 29th, Oxford, 1705. May, Thomas. Arbitrary Government Displayed to the Life, London, 1682. Meggott, Richard. The New-Cured Criple’s Caveat: Or, England’s Duty for the Miraculous Mercy of the King’s and Kingdomes Restauration, London, 1662. Nalson, John. An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State, from the Beginning of the Scotch Rebellion in the Year MDCXXXIX, London, 1682. –––––. A True Copy of the Journal of the High Court of Justice, London, 1684. D’Orleans, Pierre J. The History of the Revolutions in England under the Family of the Stuarts, London, 1711. Phillips, Edward. Sir Richard Baker, A Chronicle of the Kings of England, London, 1665; 1670. Phillips, Robert. Religion and Loyalty. A Sermon Preach’d at St. Margaret’s Westminster, Before the Honourable House of Commons, upon Thursday the 29th of May, London, 1712. Pierce, Thomas and A. Hertocks. A Sermon Preached at St. Margarets in Westminster before the Honourable the House of Commons, London, 1661. Robotham, Charles. The Royal Nursing-Father; Discoursed in a Sermon Preach’d at the Cathedral in Norwich, on the 29th of May, London, 1680. Rochester, Lawrence Hyde, Earl of. ‘Prefaces’, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641 … Written by the Right Honourable Edward Earl of Clarendon, Oxford, 1702–1704. Rushworth, John. Historical Collections: Second Part, London, 1680. –––––. The Tryal of Thomas, Earl of Strafford, London, 1680. Seller, John. The History of England, London, 1696. Sherlock, Thomas. A Vindication of the Corporation and Test Acts, Dublin, 1718. Sherlock, William. A Sermon Preached at St. Margarets Westminster, May 29, London, 1685. Smith, Mr. A Sermon Preach’d at St Sepulchres Church, on Sunday the 29th of May, London, 1715. 254

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the civil wars after 1660 –––––.‘Petitioning and Political Theorists: John Locke, Algernon Sidney and London’s “Monster” Petition of 1680’, Past & Present 138 (1993), 94–111. ––––– Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681, Cambridge, 1994. –––––. Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture, Oxford, 2004. –––––. ‘Roger L’Estrange, Printed Petitions and the Problem of Intentionality’, Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900: Essays in Honour of Colin Davis, eds Jonathan Scott and John Morrow, Exeter, 2008, pp. 113–30. –––––. ‘The Tory Interpretation of History in the Rage of Parties’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005), 347–66. Knoppers, Laura Lunger and Joan B. Landes, ‘Introduction’, Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe, Ithaca, 2004, pp. 3–13. Kolbrener, William. ‘Gendering the Modern: Mary Astell’s Feminist Historiography’, The Eighteenth Century 44 (2003), 1–24. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated by Keith Tribe, New York, 2004. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca, 1998. Lacey, Andrew. ‘“Charles the First, and Christ the Second”: The Creation of a Political Martyr’, Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700, eds Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas Mayer, Woodbridge, 2007, pp. 203–20. –––––. The Cult of King Charles the Martyr, Woodbridge, 2002. Lacey, Douglas R. Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661–1689: A Study in the Perpetuation and Tempering of Parliamentarianism, New Brunswick, NJ, 1969. Lake, Peter. ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, Conflict in Early Stuart England, eds R. Cust and A. Hughes, London, 1989, pp. 72–106. –––––. ‘Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice’, Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke, eds Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, Woodbridge, 2006, pp. 80–97. –––––. ‘Joseph Hall, Robert Skinner and the Rhetoric of Moderation at the Early Stuart Court’, The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750, eds Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough, Manchester, 2000, pp. 167–85. Lake, Peter and Steven Pincus. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, Journal of British Studies 45 (2006), 270–92. Lamont, W.M. Richard Baxter and the Millennium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution, Totowa, NJ, 1979. –––––. ‘Richard Baxter, “Popery” and the Origins of the English Civil War’, History 87 (2002), 336–52. Laurence, Ann. ‘“Begging Pardon for All Mistakes or Errors in This Writing I Being a Woman and Doing it Myself”: Family Narratives in Some Eighteenth-Century Letters’, Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell, London, 2001, pp. 194–206. –––––. ‘“This Sad and Deplorable Condition”: An Attempt towards Recovering an Account of the Sufferings of Northern Clergy Families in the 1640s and 1650s’, Life and Thought in the Northern Church, c.1000–c.1700: Essays in Honour of Clair Cross, ed. Diana Wood, Woodbridge, 1999, pp. 465–88. 262

select bibliography Lebow, Richard Ned. ‘The Memory of Politics in Postwar Europe’, The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, eds Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fugo, London, 2006, pp. 1–39. Levine, Joseph M. Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography, Ithaca, 1987. Lewalski, Barbara K. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric, Princeton, 1979. Lim, Paul C.H. ‘Puritanism and the Church of England: Historiography and Ecclesiology’, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim, Cambridge, 2008, pp. 223–40. MacGillivray, Royce. Restoration Historians and the English Civil War, The Hague, 1974. Maguire, Nancy Klein. Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy: 1660–1671, Cambridge, 1992. Mahlberg, G. ‘Henry Neville and the Toleration of Catholics during the Exclusion Crisis’, Historical Research 83 (2010), 617–34. Maltby, Judith. ‘Suffering and Surviving: The Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Formation of “Anglicanism”, 1642–1660’, Religion in Revolutionary England, eds Christopher Durston and Judith D. Maltby, Manchester, 2006, pp. 158–80. Manning, Roger. Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms, Oxford, 2003. Margalit, Avashi. The Ethics of Memory, Cambridge, MA, 2002. Martin, Jean-Clément. La Vendée de la Mémoire, 1800–1980, Paris, 1989. Martinich, A.P. ‘Presbyterians in Behemoth’, Filozofski Vestnik 24 (2003), 121–38. Matthews, A.G. Walker Revised: Being a Revision of John Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy during the Grand Rebellion, 1642–60, Oxford, 1948. Mayer, Robert. ‘Nathaniel Crouch, Bookseller and Historian: Popular Historiography and Cultural Power in Late Seventeen-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1994), 391–419. McElligott, Jason. ‘Introduction: Stabilizing and Destabilizing Britain in the 1680s’, Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, ed. Jason McElligott, Aldershot, 2006, pp. 1–12. –––––. Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England, Woodbridge, 2007. McElligott, Jason and David L. Smith, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Royalists and Royalism’, Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars, eds Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 1–13. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740, Baltimore, 1987. Mendle, Michael. ‘The “Prints” of the Trials: The Nexus of Politics, Religion, Law and Information in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, ed. Jason McElligott, Aldershot, 2006, pp. 123–37. Miller, John. After the Civil Wars: English Politics and Government in the Reign of Charles II, Harlow, 2000. Milton, Anthony. ‘Anglicanism and Royalism in the 1640s’, The English Civil War: Conflict and Context, 1640–49, ed. John Adamson, Basingstoke, 2009, pp. 61–81. –––––. Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn, Manchester, 2007.

263

the civil wars after 1660 Montaño, John Patrick Courting the Moderates: Ideology, Propaganda, and the Emergence of Party, 1660–1678, London, 2002. Morrill, John. ‘The Puritan Revolution’, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 67–88. –––––. ‘Rhetoric and Action: Charles I, Tyranny and the English Revolution’, Religion, Resistance and Civil War: Papers Presented at the Folger Institute Seminar ‘Political Thought in Early Modern England, 1600–1660’ (Proceedings of the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought, 3), eds Gordon J. Schochet, P.E. Tatspaugh and Carol Brobeck, Washington, DC, 1990, pp. 91–113. Morrissey, Mary. ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, Historical Journal 42 (1999), 1111–23. Nora, Pierre. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989), 7–24. Norbrook, David. ‘The English Revolution and English Historiography’, The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N.H. Keeble, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 233–50. Nuttall, G.F. The Manuscript of the Reliquiae Baxterianae, London, 1954. Okie, Laird. Augustan Historical Writing: Histories of England in the English Enlightenment, Lanham, MD, 1991. Olick, Jeffery K. The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility, New York, 2007. Owen, Susan. ‘Drama and Political Crisis’, The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 159–73. Parry, Graham. The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford, 1995. Peacey, Jason. ‘The Paranoid Prelate: Archbishop Laud and the Puritan Plot’, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution, eds Barry Coward and Julian Swann, Aldershot, 2004, pp. 113–34. Percival-Maxwell, Michael. ‘The Anglesey–Ormond–Castlehaven Dispute, 1680–1682: Taking Sides about Ireland in England’, Taking Sides: Colonial and Confessional Mentalities in Early Modern Ireland, eds Vincent P. Carey and Ute Lotz-Heumann, Dublin, 2003, pp. 213–30. Perry, Ruth. ‘Mary Astell and Enlightenment’, Women, Gender, and Enlightenment, eds Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, New York, 2005, pp. 357–70. Pierce, Helen. ‘The Devil’s Bloodhound: Roger L’Estrange Caricatured’, Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Michael Hunter, Aldershot, 2008, pp. 237–54. Pincus, Steve. 1688: The First Modern Revolution, New Haven, 2009. Plomer, Henry R. A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667, London, 1907. Plomer, Henry and Arundell Esdaile, eds. A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725, Oxford, 1922. Pocock, J.G.A., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge, 1957.

264

select bibliography –––––. ‘Modes of Political and Historical Time in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 91–102. Pollock, Linda. ‘Honor, Gender and Reconciliation in Elite Culture, 1570–1700’, Journal of British Studies 46 (2007), 3–29. Potter, Lois. ‘The Royal Martyr in the Restoration: National Grief and National Sin’, The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, ed. Thomas Corns, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 240–62. Questier, Michael. ‘Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England’, English Historical Review 123 (2008), 1132–65. Rad, Gerhard von. Old Testament Theology, Volume 1: The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions translated by D.M.G. Stalker, London, 1975. Raymond, Joad. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, Cambridge, 2003. Richardson, R.C. The Debate on the English Revolution, 3rd edn, Manchester, 1998. –––––. ‘Re-fighting the English Revolution: John Nalson (1637–1686) and the Frustrations of Late Seventeenth-Century English Historiography’, European Review of History 14 (2007), 1–20. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting, translated by K. Blamey and D. Pellauer, Chicago, 2004. Rigney, James. ‘“To Lye upon a Stationers Stall, like a Piece of Coarse Flesh in a Shambles”: The Sermon, Print and the English Civil War’, The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750, eds Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough, Manchester, 2000, pp. 188–207. Roberts, S.R. ‘“Ordering and Methodizing”: William Dugdale in Restoration England’, William Dugdale, Historian, 1605–1686: His Life, His Writings and His County, eds Christopher Dyer and Catherine Richardson, Woodbridge, 2007, pp. 66–88. Roper, Alan. ‘Drawing Parallels and Making Applications in Restoration Literature: The Language of Political Conflict in Restoration Literature’, Politics as Reflected in Literature, Los Angeles, 1989, pp. 31–65. Roper, Michael. ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal 50 (2000), 181–204. Rose, Craig. England in the 1690s, Revolution, Religion and War, Oxford, 1999. Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, London, 2007. Rose, Jacqueline. ‘Royal Ecclesiastical Supremacy and the Restoration Church’, Historical Research 80 (2007), 324–45. Rudolph, Julia. Revolution by Degrees: James Tyrrell and Whig Political Thought in the Late Seventeenth Century, Basingstoke, 2002. Runia, Eelco. ‘“Forget About It”: “Parallel Processing” in the Srebrenica Report’, History and Theory 43 (2004), 295–320. Rüsen, Jörn. History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation, Oxford, 2005. Sawday, Jonathan. ‘Re-writing a Revolution: History, Symbol, and Text in the Restoration’, The Seventeenth Century, 7 (1992), 171–99.

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the civil wars after 1660 Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford, 1985. Schneider, Gary. The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700, Newark, NJ, 2005. Schwyzer, Philip. ‘Lees and Moonshine: Remembering Richard III, 1485–1635’, Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010), 850–83. Scott, David. Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49, Basingstoke, 2004. Scott, Jonathan. Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683, Cambridge, 1991. –––––. ‘England’s Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot’, The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, eds Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 108–31. –––––. England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-century English Political Instability in European Context, Cambridge, 2000. –––––. ‘Restoration Process. Or, If This Isn’t a Party, We’re Not Having a Good Time’, Albion 25 (1993), 619–37. Seaward, Paul. The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667, Cambridge, 1989. –––––. ‘“Chief Ways of God”: Form and Meaning in the Behemoth of Thomas Hobbes’, Filozofski Vestnik 24 (2003), 169–88. –––––. ‘Clarendon, Tacitism, and the Civil Wars of Europe’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005), 289–311. –––––. ‘General Introduction’, Paul Seaward ed., Behemoth, or The Long Parliament by Thomas Hobbes, Oxford, 2010, pp. 1–70. –––––. ‘Introduction’, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion: A New Selection, Oxford, 2009, pp. vii–xxxiii. –––––. ‘A Restoration Publicist: James Howell and the Earl of Clarendon, 1661–6’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 6 (1988), 123–31. Seed, John. Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in EighteenthCentury England, Edinburgh, 2008. Serjeantson, R.W. ‘Testimony and Proof in Early-Modern England’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 30 (1999), 195–236. Shapin, Steven. The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, Chicago, 1994. Shapiro, Barbara. A Culture of the Fact: England, 1550–1720, Ithaca, 2000. Sharpe, Kevin. ‘Reading Revelations: Prophecy, Hermeneutics and Politics in Early Modern Britain’, Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, eds Kevin Sharpe and Stephen Zwicker, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 122–66. –––––. ‘The Royal Image: An Afterword’, The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, ed. Thomas Corns, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 288–309. –––––. Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England, Oxford, 1979. Shepherd, Alexandra. ‘From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500–1700’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 281–95. Shuger, Debora. ‘Life-writing in Seventeenth-Century England’, Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, eds Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewis and Jill Kowalik, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 63–78.

266

select bibliography Southcombe, George and Grant Tapsell. Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture, Basingstoke, 2010. Spaeth, Donald A. The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660–1740, Cambridge, 2000. Spalding, Ruth. The Improbable Puritan: A Life of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675, London, 1975. Speck, W.A. ‘Politicians, Peers, and Publication by Subscription 1700–50’, Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabell Rivers, New York, 1982, pp. 47–68. Springborg, Patricia. Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination, Cambridge, 2005. Spurr, John. England in the 1670s: ‘This Masquerading Age’, Oxford, 2000. –––––. ‘Later Stuart Puritanism’, The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds John Coffey and Paul. C.H. Lim, Cambridge, 2008, p. 89–105. –––––. The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–1714, Harlow, 2006. –––––. ‘Religion in Restoration England’, The Reigns of Charles II and James VII & II, ed. Lionel K. Glassey, Basingstoke, 1997, pp. 90–124. –––––. The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689, New Haven, 1991. –––––. ‘“A Special Kindness for Dead Bishops”: The Church, History, and Testimony in Seventeenth-Century Protestantism’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005), 313–35. Starkie, Andrew. ‘Contested Histories of the English Church: Gilbert Burnet and Jeremy Collier’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005), 335–43. Stoyle, Mark. Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War, Exeter, 1994. –––––. ‘Memories of the Maimed: The Testimony of King Charles’s Former Soldiers, 1660– 1730’, History 88 (2003), 207–26. –––––. ‘Remembering the English Civil Wars’, The Memory of Catastrophe, eds Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver, Manchester, 2004, pp. 19–30. Sweet, Rosemary. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain, London, 2004. Szechi, Daniel. ‘The Jacobite Movement’, Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. H.T. Dickenson, Oxford, 2002, pp. 81–96. Tapsell, Grant. ‘Laurence Hyde and the Politics of Religion in Late Stuart England’, English Historical Review 125 (2010), 1414–48. –––––. The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85, Woodbridge, 2007. Tatham, G.B. Dr John Walker and The Sufferings of the Clergy, Cambridge, 1911. Thomson, Alistair. ANZAC Memories: Living with the Legend, Oxford, 1994. Tonkin, Elizabeth. Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History, Cambridge, 1992. Tyacke, Nicholas. ‘The Puritan Paradigm of English Politics, 1558–1642’, Historical Journal 53 (2010), 527–50. Vallance, Edward. A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries – The Men and Women who Fought for Our Freedoms, London, 2009. –––––. Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism and the Political Nation, 1553–1682, Woodbridge, 2005.

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the civil wars after 1660 VanderMolen, Ronald J. ‘Providence as Revelation: Puritan and Anglican Modifications of John Calvin’s Doctrine of Providence’, Church History 47 (1978), 27–47. Vernon, Elliot. ‘The Quarrel of the Covenant: The London Presbyterians and the Regicide’, The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I, ed. Jason Peacey, Basingstoke, 2001, pp. 202–24. Walker, Garthine. Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England, Cambridge, 2003. Walsh, John, Colin Haydon and Stephen Taylor, ‘Introduction’, The Church of England c. 1689– c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 1–64. Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England, Oxford, 1999. Walter, John. Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers, Cambridge, 1999. Watkins, John. Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty, Cambridge, 2002. Watson, G. ‘The Augustan Civil War’, Review of English Studies 36 (1985), 321–37. Weil, Rachel. ‘Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War’, History Workshop Journal 61 (2006), 183–91. Winship, Michael. ‘Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c. 1570–1606’, English Historical Review 124 (2009), 1050–74. Withington, Phil. ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England’, American Historical Review 112 (2007), 1016–38. Wood, Andy. The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770, Cambridge, 1999. Woolf, D.R. ‘Conscience, Constancy, and Ambition in the Career and Writings of James Howell’, Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer, eds John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf, Oxford, 1993, pp. 243–78. –––––. ‘From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500–1700’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005), 33–70. –––––. The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and ‘The light of truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War, Toronto, 1990. –––––. ‘Narrative Historical Writing in Restoration England: A Preliminary Survey’, The Restoration Mind, ed. W. Gerald Marshall, Newark, NJ, 1997, pp. 207–51. –––––. ‘Of Nations, Nationalism, and National Identity: Reflections on the Historiographic Organization of the Past’, The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-cultural Approaches to Historiography, Essays in Honor of Georg G. Iggers, eds Q. Edward Wang and Franz L. Fillafer, New York, 2007, pp. 71–103. –––––. Reading History in Early Modern England, 1475–1750, Cambridge, 2000. –––––. The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730, Oxford, 2003. –––––. ‘Speaking of History: Conversations about the Past in Restoration England’, The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1700, eds Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf, Manchester, 2000, pp. 119–37. Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution: 1625–1660, Oxford, 2000. Worden, Blair. ‘Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration’, Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration, ed. Gerald Maclean, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 111–56. 268

select bibliography –––––. ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, Past & Present 109 (1985), 55–99. –––––. ‘The Question of Secularization’, A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, eds Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 20–40. –––––. ‘Review: The “Diary” of Bulstrode Whitelocke’, English Historical Review 108 (1993), 122–34. –––––. Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity, London, 2002. Wrightson, Keith. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain, New Haven, 2000. Würgler, Andreas. ‘Voices From Among the “Silent Masses”: Humble Petitions and Social Conflicts in Early Modern Central Europe’, International Review of Social History: Supplement 9: Petitions in Social History 46 (2001), 11–34. Wykes, David L. ‘Dissenters and the Writing of History: Ralph Thoresby’s “Lives and Characters”’, Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, ed. Jason McElligott, Aldershot, 2006, pp. 174–88. –––––. ‘“To let the Memory of these Men Dye is Injurious to Posterity”: Edmund Calamy’s Account of the Ejected Ministers’, The Church Retrospective: Papers Read at the 1995 Summer Meeting and the 1996 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, Studies in Church History, 13, ed. R.N. Swanson, Woodbridge, 1997, pp. 379–92. Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory, London, 1966. Zerubavel, Eviatar. The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life, Oxford, 2006. –––––. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Chicago, 2003.

Unpublished Theses Browell, Geoffrey C. ‘The Politics of Providentialism in England, 1640–1660’, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Canterbury, 2000. Cole, A. ‘Cheshire Rank and File: Royalist Soldiers in the English Civil War’, Unpublished MA Dissertation, Sussex, 1999. Hartman, Mark. ‘Contemporary Explanations of the English Revolution, 1640–1660’, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Cambridge, 1978. Hudson, Geoffrey. ‘Ex-servicemen, War Widows and the English County Pension Scheme, 1593–1679’, Unpublished DPhil. Thesis, Oxford, 1995. Rivett, Gary. ‘Make Use Both of Things Present and Past”: Thomas May’s Histories of Parliament, Printed Public Discourse and the Politics of the Recent Past, 1640–1650’, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Sheffield, 2010. Tapsell, Grant. ‘Politics and Political Discourse in the British Monarchies, 1681–5’, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Cambridge, 2003. Youngman, Fiona. ‘“Our Dear Mother Stripped”: The Experiences of Ejected Clergy and Their Families during the English Revolution’, Unpublished DPhil. Thesis, Oxford, 2008. I 269

Index Annesley, Arthur, earl of Anglesey, 115–18 Arbitrary Government Displayed to the Life (May), 123–33 historical parallelism, 88–9, 91 visual images, 90–1, 120, 124, 126–9, 129–31, 133 Assheton, William, 39 Assmann, Jan, 6 Atkyns, Richard, 66, 69–70 An Attempt Towards Recovering an Account of the Numbers and Suffering of the Church of England (Walker), 179, 195–201 See also Walker, John, research project Awbrey, Timothy, 235–7

Page numbers in italics refer to visual images. An Abridgement of Sr Richard Bakers Chronicle (Janeway and Kidgell), 113–15 An Abridgment of Mr. Baxter’s History of his Life and Times (Calamy), 150–4, 172, 175, 194, 199 An Account of the Growth of Knavery (Roger L’Estrange), 54 An Act for a Perpetuall Anniversary Thanksgiveing, 203 Act for Relief (1662), 72–3, 75–6, 78 Act of Indemnity and Oblivion in first Restoration settlement, 4, 10, 17 provisions, 10, 17, 19–21, 132, 244–5 public remembering and, 2, 20 purposes, 19, 160 Act of Security (1661), 20–1 Act of Settlement, 236 Act of Uniformity (1662) impact on nonconforming clergy, 175–6 providentialism and, 51 provisions in, 11, 175, 213, 227–8 Thanksgiving sermons on, 209, 214, 220, 230–1, 240 Acts and Monuments (Foxe), 195, 238 Aerius Revidivus (Peter Heylyn), 40–1, 46, 121 Allestree, Richard, 213 Anderson, Henry, 221 Anglican Church. See Church of England Anne, Queen, 175, 232

Baker, Sir Richard. See Chronicle of the Kings of England Barclay, Andrew, 50 Basilika: the Works of Charles I (Royston), 24 Bastwick, John, 32, 99–100, 109, 133 Bate, George, 95, 97 Baxter, Richard, 150–4, 172, 175, 194, 198–9 Behemoth (Hobbes), 23, 41–2 Bellarmine, Cardinal Robert, 121 Beridge, John, 214 Berkeley, Sir John, 148–50, 152 Bethel, Slingsby, 22 Beza, Theodore, 40 biblical allusions and analogies Charles I and, 38 Charles II and, 211, 216 historical parallelism, 97

271

the civil wars after 1660 Cavalier Parliament overturning of Strafford’s attainder, 102–3 second settlement, 10–11 censorship and publication control enforcement, 21–2 impact of pre-publication censorship, 7, 13–14, 21–2, 52, 98 lapse of Licensing Act, 132, 138–9, 173 libel prosecutions, 138–9 public remembering and, 9 sanctioning procedures, 21–5, 52 treason and, 20–1 unsanctioned publications (16601673), 39–42 Charles I, King biblical parallels, 38 biography, sanctioned, 24, 32 character of, 155–7 conspiracies against, 28–9 fast days on anniversary of execution, 138, 146–7, 155, 173 in histories (1660-1673), 22, 28–30, 38–9, 43–4 in histories (1680-1685), 98, 99, 100–3, 109–11, 118 in histories (1696-1714), 140, 143–8, 149, 152–3, 167–8 in histories (1696-1714) vindicating the Restoration, 155–62, 165 martyrdom, 38, 43–4 martyrdom cult, 146–8, 154, 156, 168, 173–4 religious faith, 155, 157 Strafford’s trial and execution, 26, 100–3 Thanksgiving sermons on (16901715), 235 trial and execution of, 107–8, 118, 125–6, 149, 153 unsanctioned publications on, 22

in Thanksgiving sermons (16611679), 211–14, 216 in Thanksgiving sermons (16801685), 220, 224, 226 in Thanksgiving sermons (16901715), 229–30, 232, 235–6, 243 in veterans’ memoirs, 82–3 Bisse, Thomas, 198 Black Bartholomew’s Day, 11, 45, 175–6, 189 Book of Martyrs (Foxe), 235–6 Book of Sports, 32, 147, 162 Bradbury, Thomas, 208, 236–7, 239 Bradshaw, John, 110–11 Brett, Thomas, 234–5 A Brief Chronicle of all the chief Action (Heath), 30–1, 90, 110–11 Buchanan, George, 121, 223 Bulkeley, Richard, 223 Bunyan, John, 81 Burnet, Gilbert, 162–3, 164, 208, 229, 232–3 Burscough, William, 243–4 Burton, Henry, 32, 90, 100, 133 Cabala (Foulis), 39 Calamy, Benjamin, 221 Calamy, Edmund, 150–4, 175–6, 194, 198–9 Calvin, John, 40 Calvinists conspiracy theories about, 29 in histories (1660-1673), 40–1, 47 in histories (1680-1685), 95–6, 103, 118 in histories (1696-1714), 144, 151, 164–5 Carey, Lucius, Viscount Falkland, 37, 44 Catholic Holy League, 96–7 Catholics Popish conspiracy theories, 28–9 Post-Reformation martyrologies, 43 visual images of, 128, 130

272

index sanctioned history, 24–6 support for settlements, 27 terms ‘puritans’ and ‘nonconformists,’ 31 Chronicle of the Late Intestine Wars (Heath), 24, 26, 30–1, 35 Church of England in Collier’s Ecclesiastical History, 164–6 competition for religious adherents, 170, 172 Convocation of 1640, 47 Erastians during civil wars, 164–6 fast days on anniversary of Charles I’s execution, 138, 146–7, 155, 173 High Church vulnerabilities (early 18th c.), 171–7 in histories (1696-1714), 164–6 impact of Toleration Act, 172–3 occasional conformity, 154, 171, 172, 174–5, 231 religious settlement, overview, 11 See also Walker, John, research project on sequestered clergy The Civil Warres of Great Britain and Ireland (Davies). See Davies, John, Civil Warres Civil Wars and Interregnum casualties and costs, 3 causes in sanctioned publications, 29–32, 42, 46, 51–4 causes in tory collections, 103–8 causes in unsanctioned publications, 39–42 communicative memories, 6 figurative language in histories, 30 as historical accident, 51–2 in historical writing during, 178 in historical writing in 19th to 21st c., 247 in histories (1660-1673), 20, 29–35, 51–2 in histories (1680-1685), 118–21, 124, 126–9, 130–2

veteran petitioners who served, 6 visual images of, 90, 110, 125–6, 128, 130 whig views on, 133 Charles II, King biblical analogies, 211, 216 hereditary succession, 114–15 historical analogies, 218 in histories (1660-1673), 27–8, 32–4 in histories (1680-1685), 94–5, 112–13, 114–15, 127, 129 in histories (1696-1714), 136, 145 political processes and settlements, 9–10 providentialism and, 27–8, 34, 50–1 return from exile, 4, 9 statute on day of remembrance, 203 succession controversy, 13, 92–3 Thanksgiving sermons on, 211, 216, 218, 231, 238 visual images of, 90, 91, 127, 129 See also Thanksgiving sermons Cholmley, Sir Hugh, 55, 61, 66–8, 70, 79, 80 Chronicle of the Kings of England (Edward Phillips and Richard Baker) abridgement by Janeway and Kidgell, 113–15 abridgement in Crouch’s Wars in England, 108–11, 125, 132 abridgement in Duke’s Multum in parvo, 111–13 causes of civil wars, 30 on Christopher Love, 38 on civil wars and Interregnum, 32–5 conspiracy theories, 29 on Cromwell, 35 on Dutch wars, 34–5 editions, 31, 38 on Monck, 36 on New Model Army, 34 portrayal of puritans, 26–7 purposes, 25 on recent past, 33

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the civil wars after 1660 first settlement, 9–10 in histories (1696-1714), 145 religious toleration, 135–8 Copleston, John, 212 Corbet, Miles, 35 Corporation Act, 10–11, 247 county pension scheme, 59–60 Covenanters, 10, 26, 100, 104–5, 143–4, 165 Cressy, David, 205 Croft, Sir Arthur, 199 Cromwell, Oliver dissolution of Rump Parliament, 35 in histories (1660-1673), 23, 35, 49–53 in histories (1696-1714), 149, 152–3, 166 providentialism, 50–1 Thanksgiving sermons on (16901715), 233 Cromwell, Richard, 23 Crouch, Nathaniel, 90, 108–11, 125, 132 Curll, Edmund, 162–3 Cyprianus Anglicus (Peter Heylyn), 46–7, 121

in histories (1696-1714), 141–4, 146–7, 148, 150–1, 157–64, 165–8 Hobbes’s Behemoth on, 41–2 Interregnum in sanctioned histories, 33–5 political and religious debates after, 4–5 public memory as prison, 5 public remembering, 2–3, 243–9 Restoration as ultimate meaning of, 32 Thanksgiving sermons on, 204–9, 212–14, 221, 234, 238, 240–1, 243 visual images of, 126–9, 130–1 See also veterans’ memoirs; veterans’ petitions for pensions; Walker, John, research project on sequestered clergy Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 67–8, 158–60, 211, 245 Clarendon Code, 51, 132, 167 Claydon, Tony, 228–9 clergy in sanctioned histories, 36–8 See also Church of England; Walker, John, research project on sequestered clergy Clopton, Henry, 160–1 Coke, Roger, 139–41, 145 collective memory. See memory Collier, Jeremy, 162, 164–6 The Committee, or, Popery in Masquerade (Roger L’Estrange), 133 communicative memory. See memory A Complete History of England (Kennett), 142–4, 153–4, 167 Congregationalists, 172–3 Coniers, Joshua, 17 conscience, freedom of. See religious toleration A Continuation of the Secret History of White-Hall (Jones), 145 Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670, 11 Convention Parliament

Danby, earl of, 101 Davies, John, Civil Warres causes of the civil wars, 32 on Charles I, 38 on Charles II, 32–3, 90 conspiracy theories, 29 on Cromwell, 35 figurative language, 30 on Interregnum, 33–5 memorable Cavaliers and Anglicans, 36–8 on New Model Army, 34 providentialism, 27 purposes of, 26 sanctioned history, 25 visual images, lack of, 90 De Jure Regni (Buchanan), 121–2 Declaration of 1681 (Charles II), 112–13

274

index Elenchus motuum nuperorum in Anglia, 95–6 Evangelicum Armatum (Assheton), 39 Evelyn, John, 205, 207, 227 Exeter diocese, research on sequestered clergy. See Walker, John

The Detection of the Court and State of England (Coke), 139–41 Devon, pension system, 78–9 Dissenters conspiracy theories about, 28–9 Exclusion Crisis, 87–90, 108, 220–1 Fairfax’s memoir and literary culture of, 81 in histories (1660-1673), 29 in histories (1680-1685), 99–100, 105–6, 115–20 in histories (1696-1714), 150–4 impact of religious settlements on, 11 impact of Toleration Act on, 172–3 literary culture, 115, 119 moderate views in Whitelocke’s Memorials, 115–20 occasional conformity, 154, 171, 172, 174–5, 231 proscription of puritan impulse and, 2–5 religious toleration of, 135–6 terminology, 31 Test Act requirements, 218 Thanksgiving sermons, responses by, 217–18 unsanctioned publications, 22 visual images of, 128, 130 D’Orleans, Pierre, 162–4 Drogheda, battle, 34 Dryden, John, 94, 96–7 Dugdale, Sir William, 88, 120–3, 132–3 Duke, Henry, 108, 111–13 Durston, Christopher, 205 Dutch Wars, 34–5, 76–7

Fairfax, Brian, 82 Fairfax, Sir Thomas, 55–6, 80–5, 147, 148–9 Falkland, Lord, 37, 44 Finch, William, 230 Five Mile Act of 1665, 11 Flagellum (Heath), 49–52 Foulis, Henry, 39–40 Foxe, John, 195, 235–6, 238 France influence on court of Charles I, 139–40 translations of French histories, 94–7, 162–4 Frankland, Thomas, 103–5, 132–3 freedom of conscience. See religious toleration freedom of press. See print culture Fysh, Thomas, 226 Gangraena (Edwards), 178 Gardiner, Samuel R., 247 George I, King, 138, 235, 243, 246 Glorious Revolution Anglican fears, 172 competition for religious and political adherents, 170, 172, 228 in histories (1696-1714), 162, 164–7 in histories (1696-1714) defending Revolution, 144–54 in histories (1696-1714) with divided blame, 139–44 rejection of, 164–7 religious toleration, 135–6 Thanksgiving sermons on, 227–37 vindication of changes, 167 Gumble, Thomas, 15, 42, 48–9, 53

An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (Collier), 162, 164–6 Edgehill, battle, 55 Edwards, Thomas, 178 Eikon Basilike, 43 Eikon Basilike (Bradbury), 236 Eikon Basilike (Perrinchief). See Perrinchief, Richard

275

the civil wars after 1660 in histories (1680-1685), 122–3 in histories (1680 to 1685), 88–9, 93–5, 94–7, 104–5, 108, 110–11, 113, 132–3 in histories (1696 to 1714), 13–14, 91 memory and, 91–2, 94 overview of, 13–14 prescriptive parallels, 93 preventative parallels, 104–5 tories, 94, 132–4 tory translations, 94–7 visual images, 91–2 whigs, 108, 132–4 historical writing as cultural product, 6–7 defined, 8 figurative language, 17, 30, 53, 124 moral arguments in, 20 political processes and, 8–9 See also memory and historical writing; visual images historical writing (1660-1673) causes of civil war, 31–2 conspiracy theories, 28–9 didacticism, 54 Dutch Wars, 34–5 figurative language, 30, 53 Howell as historiographer royal, 24 influence on polarisation of political culture, 53–4 Interregnum in, 33–5 martyrologies, 42–9, 53 memorable Cavaliers and Anglicans, 36–8 overview of, 17–20 pamphlets and tracts, 21–2, 39–40, 49 portrayals of puritans, 26–32, 52–4 Presbyterians in, 36, 38–9 proscription of puritan impulse, 12–13, 18–20, 23, 92 providentialism, 23, 24, 27–8, 48 public remembering and, 12–13, 19, 25, 52–4 purposes of, 23, 25–6, 38, 52–4

Hamilton, duke of, 99 Hampden, John, 99, 147 Heath, James biography of Cromwell, 23, 35, 49–53 Brief Chronicle, 31–2, 90, 110–11 causes of civil wars, 30 on Christopher Love, 45 on Dutch wars, 34 editions, 31–2, 35 Flagellum, 49–52 on Interregnum, 33–5 Intestine Wars, 24, 26, 30–1, 35 Loyal Martyrs, 42–4 martyrs, 42–4 memorable Cavaliers and Anglicans, 36–8 on Monck, 36 on New Model Army, 34 Presbyterians, 31–2 purposes of history, 26–7 on recent past, 33 support for settlements, 27 visual images, 90 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 118, 138, 147, 156 Herbert, Sir Thomas, 155–6 Heylyn, Henry, 41, 46 Heylyn, Peter Aerius Revidivus, 40–1, 46, 121, 151 biography of Laud, 42, 46–7, 211–12 on Calvinists, 40, 47, 103 Cyprianus Anglicus, 46–7, 121, 151 as a martyr, 44 on Presbyterians, 23, 40–1 Hickes, George, 79, 221–2 Histoire de la Ligue (Maimbourg), 96 Historical Collections (Rushworth), 23, 97–100, 103 Historical Discourses (Edward Walker), 160–2 historical parallelism biblical analogies, 97 foreign-language translations, 94–5 formation of partisanship, 93–4

276

index freedom of press, 138–9 histories to defend Glorious Revolution, 138–9, 144–54 histories vindicating the Restoration, 138–9, 154–66 histories with divided blame, 139–44 partisan historical parallelism, 13–14 proscription of puritan impulse, 14, 137–8 providentialism, 149 public remembering and social peace, 144 rejection of Glorious Revolution, 164–6 religious toleration, 135–9 translations of French histories, 162–4 See also memory and historical writing The History of England (Seller), 145 The History of King Charles the First (Hammond L’Estrange), 111, 113 History of the Commons Warre (Coniers), 17 History of the Commons Warre of England (W.C.), 90 The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars, Faithfuly Abridg’d (Nutt), 159–60 The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars (Clarendon), 158–60, 245 The History of the Revolutions in England (D’Orleans), 162–4 The History of the Wicked Plots (Foulis), 39–40 Hoadly, Benjamin, 233 Hobbes, Thomas, 23, 41–2 Holles, Denzil, 148–9, 152 Holy War (Bunyan), 81 Hopper, Andrew, 81 Horden, John, 217 Hotham, Sir John, 32 Howell, James, 24, 29–30 Hudson, Geoffrey, 59 Hughes, Ann, 178 Hyde, Laurence, earl of Rochester (son of Edward), 158

on recent past, 32–3 sanctioned biographies and martyrologies, 36–8, 42–9 sanctioned histories and lessons, 24–8 sanctioned stories, 23, 28–35 sanctioned stories of villainy, 49–52 sanctioned writing, 52–4 sanctioning procedures, 21–5, 52 Scottish licences, 25 on sufferings of royalists, 23 support for settlements, 18, 27 unsanctioned publications, 38–42, 52 villainy, 26–7 visual images, 89–92 See also Act of Indemnity and Oblivion; memory and historical writing historical writing (1680 to 1685) end of pre-publication censorship, 132, 138–9, 173 formation of partisanship, 93–4, 132 historical parallelism, 94, 96, 108, 110, 113, 122–3, 132–3 historical parallelism as preventative, 104–5 impact of pre-publication censorship, 13 increase in print material, 88–9 memorials, 115–20 moderate views of history, 117–19, 121 providentialism, 122 public remembering, 13, 93 purposes of, 92–3 tory collections, 103–8 tory translations, 94–7 tory visuals, 120–31, 125–9, 133 types of print material, 93 whig collections, 97–103 whig historical abridgements, 108–15 See also memory and historical writing; visual images historical writing (1696 to 1714) blame for past conflicts, 137–9 dialogical qualities, 139, 154 277

the civil wars after 1660 L’Estrange, Hammond, 111, 113 L’Estrange, Sir Roger, 21–2, 39, 54, 133 liberty of conscience. See religious toleration Licensing Act lapse of, 138–9, 173 provisions, 21–2, 24 time in force, 21, 132 Life of General Monck (Gumble), 15, 42, 48–9, 53 Lloyd, David on Christopher Love, 45 martyrs, 43–4, 46 Memoirs of the Lives, 42, 43–4, 90 memorable Cavaliers and Anglicans, 37–8 State-worthies, 37 Statesmen and Favourites, 25 visual images, 90 writing as Henry Foulis, 39–40 Lloyd, William, 229 Long, Thomas, 220 Long Parliament in histories (1680-1685), 102–4, 109, 112–13 in histories (1696-1714), 140, 147 in Walker’s Attempt, 195 Love, Christopher, 38, 39, 45, 46 Lovell, Archibald, 94–7 The Loyal Martyrology (Winstanley), 42–6 Ludlow, Edmund, 148–9, 197

Impartial Collections of the Great Affairs of State (Nalson), 89, 90, 105–8 Indemnity Act. See Act of Indemnity and Oblivion Independents, 163 Institutes (Calvin), 40 Interregnum. See Civil Wars and Interregnum Intestine War (Heath), 35 Jacobites, 147 James I, King, 30, 145, 236 James II, King in histories (1680-1685), 114–15, 133 in histories (1696-1714), 139, 141, 147, 162 succession controversy, 4, 92–3 Thanksgiving prayers for, 224 Thanksgiving sermons on, 223–7, 229–30 Janeway, Richard (printer), 113–14 Jegon, William, 226 Jones, David, 145 Josselin, Ralph, 205, 218 Kennett, White, 138–9, 142–4, 145, 153, 165, 167 Kerswell, John, 215 Kidgell, John, 108, 113–14 Killigrew, Henry, 215–16 King, Henry, 210 King Charles I (Toland), 146–9 Knox, John, 121, 223

Maimbourg, Louis, 96–7 Marston Moor, battle, 55 Martin, Henry, 35 Marvell, Andrew, 22, 116 Mary I, Queen, 114–15, 141 Mather, John, 231 May, Thomas. See Arbitrary Government Displayed to the Life (May) McElligott, Jason, 21 Meggott, Richard, 214 A Memento (Roger L’Estrange), 39

Lake, John, 216–17 Last Instructions to a Painter (Marvell), 22 Laud, William biography, 23, 42, 44, 46–7 in histories (1680-1685), 99–100, 118 in histories (1696-1714), 157, 165–6 in sanctioned histories, 38 Thanksgiving sermons on, 211–12 visual images of, 110, 128, 130 Leslie, Charles, 208, 233

278

index See also Walker, John, research project on sequestered clergy military service heroes in sanctioned histories, 36–8 military memoirs, 55–9 veterans’ memoirs of WWI, 61 See also New Model Army; veterans’ memoirs; veterans’ petitions for pensions Miller, John, 4 Milton, John, 81 monarchy hereditary succession, 114–15 jure divino kingship, 146 in sanctioned histories, 35 Monck, George Gumble’s biography, 15, 42, 48–9, 53 in sanctioned histories, 33–4, 36 visual images of, 127, 129 Montague, Richard, 165 Montrose, earl of, 37–8 Multum in parvo (Duke), 111–13

Memoires of the reigne of King Charles I (Warwick), 156–8 Memoirs of Denzil Lord Holles (Holles), 148–9, 152 The Memoirs of Sir John Berkley (Berkeley), 148–50, 152 Memoirs of the Lives (Lloyd), 42, 43–4, 90 Memoirs of the Most Material Transactions in England (Welwood), 141–2 Memoirs of the Two Last Years (Herbert), 155–6 Memorials of the English Affairs (Whitelocke), 115–20 memory collective memory, 5–6 communicative memory, 6 cultural products, 6–7 functions of, 6 intentional and dynamic qualities, 53 personal memory, 57–8, 60 social memory, 5–6 visual images and, 90–1 memory and historical writing communal identity, 44–5 communicative memory, 6 as cultural products, 6–7 future research, 248 historical writing, defined, 8 national and local narratives, 8 oral and written testimonies, 8 political processes and, 8–9, 15–16, 243–4 proscription of puritan impulse and, 2–5, 15–16, 170, 243–9 public memory, 7–8 public remembering, 8, 19, 198–9 published materials and, 8–9 sanctioned historical writing and, 52–4 strategies and recent conflicts, 1–2 veterans’ memoirs and petitions, 55–60, 75, 85–6

Nalson, John historical parallelism, 89 Impartial Collections, 89, 90, 105–8 political views, 132–3 True Copy, 107–8 A New Book of Loyal English Martyrs (Heath), 42–4 New Model Army Gen. Fairfax’s memoir, 80–1 in histories (1696-1714), 148–50 in sanctioned civil war histories, 34 veteran petitioners, 65 visual images of, 126, 129 See also military service Nutt, John, 159–60 occasional conformity, 154, 171, 172, 174–5, 231

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the civil wars after 1660 print culture dialogical qualities, 139, 154, 194, 198, 206–7 freedom of press, 13, 20–1, 138–9, 173 growth of (1680-1685), 13, 87–8, 93 growth of (after 1695), 139, 173 pamphlets and tracts (1660-1673), 21–2, 39–40, 49 political processes and, 9 public remembering and, 8–9 sermons, 22, 206–9, 217–18, 226, 233 treason and, 20–1 unsanctioned publications (16601673), 39–42 See also censorship and publication control; historical writing Protestant Association, 96 providentialism Act of Uniformity and, 51 Charles II and, 27–8, 34, 50 Cromwell and, 50–1 in Dissenters’ literary culture, 81 in histories (1660-1673), 23, 24, 27–8, 32, 48, 50–1 in histories (1680-1685), 122 in histories (1696-1714), 149 Presbyterians and, 28, 48 salvation history, 207, 222 in Thanksgiving sermons, 204–5, 207, 210–12, 221–2, 226, 238–9 in Thanksgiving sermons after Glorious Revolution, 228–9, 235 in veterans’ memoirs, 66, 69–70, 81–5 in veterans’ petitions for pensions, 80 in Walker’s research on sequestered clergy, 182, 185–6 Prynne, William, 32, 99–100, 109, 133 puritans. See Dissenters puritan impulse defined, 9–10, 11–12 in histories in 19th to 21st c., 247 memory and proscription in historical writing, 2–5, 15–16, 170, 243–9

Paris, Erna, 1 pensions, veterans’. See veterans’ petitions for pensions Perceval, John, Lord Egmont, 199 Perrinchief, Richard, Eikon Basilike causes of civil wars, 30 conspiracy theories, 29 on Cromwell, 35 on Interregnum, 35 on martyrdom of Charles I, 38 meaning of recent past, 32 providentialism, 27–8, 32 sanctioned biography of Charles I, 24, 32 support for settlements, 27 personal memory. See memory Peters, Hugh, 49 Phillips, Edward. See Chronicle of the Kings of England Phillips, John, 132 Phillips, Robert, 234 Pierce, Thomas, 211 Ponder, Nathaniel, 116 Presbyterians causes of civil wars, 26, 31–2, 104 Covenanters, 10, 26, 100, 104–5, 143–4, 165 in histories (1660-1673), 26, 28, 31–2, 36–8, 39–41, 45–7 in histories (1680-1685), 103, 104–5, 107–8, 120–3 in histories (1696-1714), 148–9, 150, 152–4, 165–7 in Hobbes’s Behemoth, 41–2 impact of Toleration Act on, 172–3 proscription under settlements, 36 providentialism and, 28, 48 role in return of Charles II, 45 in sanctioned martyrologies, 46 support for monarchy, 28 See also Heylyn, Peter; Love, Christopher

280

index See also Act of Indemnity and Oblivion; Act of Uniformity; Charles II, King Restoration Day. See Thanksgiving sermons Revolution of 1688. See Glorious Revolution Rigney, James, 207 Robinson, Sir John, 46–7 Robotham, Charles, 220 Royston, Richard (royalist printer), 21, 24 Rump Parliament in histories, 34–5, 45, 123–4, 126, 166 Rushworth, John Historical Collections, 23, 97–100, 103 political views, 132 Tryal of Thomas, Earl of Strafford, 97–8, 100–3

Quarles, Frances, 130 Reformation historical framework, 133, 163, 164, 238, 240 puritan impulse and, 11–12 Rehearsal Transpos’d (Marvell), 116 religious toleration after Glorious Revolution, 172, 227–8 Dissenters’ views, 54, 218 in histories (1660-1673), 42–3 in histories (1696-1714), 142, 150, 153 increase after Glorious Revolution, 135–6 sanctioned historical writing and, 42 Thanksgiving sermons on (16901715), 231 unsanctioned publications on, 22 See also Toleration Act (1689) Reliquiae Baxterianae (Baxter), 150, 172, 175–6, 194, 198–9 remembering. See memory Restoration and Restoration settlements in histories (1680-1685), 92–5, 97–8, 104–7, 120, 122–3 in histories (1696-1714), 137–8, 175–6 in histories (1696-1714), vindication of Restoration, 154–66 meaning of civil wars and, 17 overview of settlements, 9–12 proscription of puritan impulse, 11–12, 14, 87–8, 95, 137–8 proscription of puritan impulse and public remembering, 2–5, 170 public remembering, 243–9 in Reliquiae Baxteriae, 175–6 sequestered clergy research as vindication for, 170, 172, 186–94 significance of, 54 Thanksgiving sermons on, 219–22, 231, 234, 238 visual images of, 128, 129–31

Sacheverall, Henry, 162, 199, 232–3 Samson Agonistes, 81 Scotland Covenanters, 10, 26, 100, 104–5, 143–4, 165 sanctioned histories, 25 See also Presbyterians Scott, Jonathan, 5, 53, 88 Seaward, Paul, 4, 41 Secret History of Whitehall (Jones), 145 Seed, John, 199 Seller, John, 145 sermons on anniversary of execution of Charles I, 138 on disabled royalist veterans, 79 political relevance on public days, 14 on trial of Charles I, 49 unsanctioned publications, 22 See also Thanksgiving sermons Several Treatises, 29–30 Shaftsbury, earl of, 96 The Shepheards Oracles (Quarles), 130 Sherlock, Thomas, 199

281

the civil wars after 1660 prophetic mode, 212–14 providentialism, 204–5, 207, 210–12, 215, 221–2, 226, 228–9, 235, 238–9 public remembering, 204, 207, 241, 243–4 purposes, 14, 193, 207–9, 238–41, 243–4 Restoration, 204–5, 219–22, 231, 234 salvation history, 205, 207, 218, 222 sermons (1661-1679), 208, 209, 210–19 sermons (1680-1685), 209, 219–23 sermons (1685-1688), 223–7 sermons (1690-1715), 209, 227–37, 243 services, observance of, 205, 218–19, 227 statute for, 203 See also biblical allusions and analogies Thomas Frankland’s Annals of King James and King Charles (Frankland), 103–5 Todd, Hugh, 234 Toland, John, 146–9, 173, 197 toleration, religious. See religious toleration Toleration Act in histories (1696-1714), 150 provisions, 135, 172, 227–8 tories collections of documents, 103–8 formation of partisanship, 93–4 historical parallelism, 94–7 histories with visuals, 120–31, 125–9 political views, 94–5, 132–3 tory translations, 94–7 treaty of Uxbridge, 117 Trenchard, John, 230 Tryal of Thomas, Earl of Strafford (Rushworth), 97–8, 100–3 Turner, Thomas, 224–5, 226 The Twelve Several Treatises of the Later Revolutions (Howell), 24, 29–30

Sherlock, William, 225 Short Memorials of Thomas Lord Fairfax (Fairfax), 80–5, 148 A Short View of the Late Troubles (Dugdale), 88, 120–3 A Sight of Ye Trans-Actions of these Latter Yeares (Vicars), 90, 109–10 Skinner, Thomas, 95 Smith, Mr. (St. Sepulchre’s), 237, 239 Smith, William, 217 social memory. See memory Solemn League and Covenant, 10–11 Southcombe, George, 4 Sprat, Thomas, 223, 225 St Bartholomew’s Day, August 1662, 11, 45, 175–6, 189 St John, Oliver, 149 State-worthies (Lloyd), 37 Statesmen and Favourites (Lloyd), 25 Strafford, earl of, 99 in histories (1696-1714) vindicating the Restoration, 165 in Rushworth’s history, 97–9, 100–3 in sanctioned histories, 26, 31, 37 visual images of, 110 Stubs, Philip, 231 Tapsell, Grant, 4 Test Act of 1673, 11, 18, 218, 247 Thanksgiving sermons, 203–41 call to reopen settlements, 219–21 on civil wars and Interregnum, 204–9, 212–14, 221, 234, 240–1, 243 historical analogies, 230 human agency, 236–7 myth of divine liberation, 14, 204–8, 210, 218–19, 222, 228, 231–2, 235–41 overview of, 14, 193 prayers at services, 214–15, 224 printed sermons, 206–9 printed sermons, responses to, 208, 217–18, 233 printed sermons, unofficial, 226

282

index personal identity and, 61–2, 71, 73, 75, 85 personal memory and, 60 political value of royalist pensions, 77–80 politicisation of (before 1660), 59–61, 64, 85–6 politicisation of (after 1660), 70–1, 85–6 providentialism in, 80 public remembering, 13 purposes of, 58–9 relief act, 72–3, 75–6, 78 responses to, 15 self-knowledge and, 56 social standing of pensioners, 77 statistics on, 71 storytelling and, 61–2, 72, 78–9 symbols and languages of war, 57–8 Vicars, John, 90, 109 The Vindication of Richard Atkyns Esquire (Atkyns), 66, 69–70 Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (Beza), 40 visual images in Crouch’s Wars in England, 109–10, 125 in Dugdale’s Short View, 120 historical parallelism, 91–3 in histories (1660-1679), 89–90 in histories (1680-1685), 88–93 in May’s Arbitrary Government, 120, 124, 126–9, 129–31, 133 memory and, 91 truth assertions and, 90–1

veterans’ memoirs Atkyns’ memoir, 66, 69–70 audience for, 66, 80 biblical allusions, 82–3 Cholmley’s memoir, 55, 61, 66–8, 70, 79, 80 cultural memory and, 55–9, 85–6 Fairfax’s memoir, 55–6, 80–5 as historical sources, 56–7 impact of settlements on, 58–9 personal identity and, 66–8, 70, 84 politicisation of, 59, 66–8, 84–6 providentialism in, 66, 69–70, 81–5 purposes of, 58 religious reflections, 69, 82–5 self-knowledge and, 56 storytelling and, 84–5 symbols and languages of war, 57–8 of WWI, 61–2 veterans’ petitions for pensions adjustment or stopping of payments, 76–8 certificates for, 60–1, 73–5 communicative memories, 6 county pension scheme, 59–60, 70–1, 74 court procedures and decisions, 62–6, 72, 74–6 cultural memory and, 55–60, 75, 85–6 declarations of service, disability, loyalty and injury, 63, 72–5 eligibility for relief, 15, 59–60, 71–2, 80 as historical sources, 56–7, 56n.3 impact of contemporary wars on, 76–7 impact of settlements on, 58–9 inspections of veterans, 76–7 lack of religious language, 64–5 language of faithful service, 63–4, 72–4, 86 length of individual petition, 58 literacy and, 58 loyalty, debates on, 73–4

Walker, Edward, 160–2 Walker, John, research project on sequestered clergy, 169–201 apocaplyticism, 182, 184–5 communicative memories, 14, 169–70, 178–80, 187, 195–6, 200 competition for religious adherents, 170 credibility of sources, 178–81, 195–6

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the civil wars after 1660 William and Mary, King and Queen in histories (1696-1714), 136, 139, 148 Thanksgiving sermons during reign of, 227–37, 238 Winstanley, William, 42–6 The World’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell (Bethel), 22 Wren, Matthew, Bishop of Ely, 44

female martyrs, 169, 191–2 frivolous sequestrations, 183 High Church vulnerabilities (early 18th c.), 171–7 household and personal violations, 186–7, 189–91, 194 intruding ministers, 192–4 labelling of sequestrators, 187–8 martyrs, 44, 182–6, 191–2 parish and property violations, 188–9 political purposes, 170, 172, 176, 178, 186–7, 192, 194, 195 providentialism in, 182, 185–6 public reception of Attempt, 198–200 public remembering, 198–201 publication in Attempt, 179, 195–201 questionnaires, 177–9, 181 recent research, 193, 200 research methods, 170–1, 177–82 social and divine hierarchy violations, 190–2 support for Restoration settlement, 186–94 See also Black Bartholomew’s Day; Church of England Walker, Sir Edward, 160–2 Warner, Michael, 207 Wars, Civil. See Civil Wars and Interregnum The Wars in England (Crouch), 90, 108–11, 125, 132 Warwick, Sir Philip, 156–8 Washbourne, Thomas, 212 Welwood, James, 139, 141–2, 145 whigs collections of documents, 97–103 in Dugdale’s Short View, 120 formation of partisanship, 93–4 historical abridgements, 108–15 historical parallelism, 108 in histories (1680-1685), 96–103 political views, 94, 132–3 See also Rushworth, John Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 115–20, 132

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STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Women of Quality Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 Ingrid H. Tague II Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690 Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas Clare Jackson III Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 Andrew C. Thompson IV Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 Nick Harding V The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 Grant Tapsell VI Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England Jason McElligott VII The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 Gabriel Glickman VIII England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion Joseph Cope IX Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 Matthew Jenkinson X Commune, Country and Commonwealth: The People of Cirencester, 1117–1643 David Rollison

XI An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain Lord Shelburne in Context, 1737–1805 Edited by Nigel Aston and Clarissa Campbell Orr XII London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War Jayne E.E. Boys XIII God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720 Brodie Waddell XIV Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England Edited by Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter XV Common Law and Enlightenment in England, 1689–1750 Julia Rudolph XVI The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy The Revolutions of 1688–91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts Edited by Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor

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This book examines the conflicting ways in which the civil wars and Interregnum were remembered, constructed and represented in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. It argues that during the late Stuart period, public remembering of the English civil wars and Interregnum was not concerned with re-fighting the old struggle but rather with commending and justifying, or contesting and attacking, the Restoration settlements. After the return of King Charles II the political nation had to address the question of remembering and forgetting the recent conflict. The answer was to construct a polity grounded on remembering and scapegoating puritan politics and piety. The proscription of the puritan impulse enacted by the Restoration settlements was supported by a public memory of the 1640s and 1650s which was used to show that Dissenters could not, and should not, be trusted with power. Drawing upon the interdisciplinary field of social memory studies, this book offers a new perspective on the historical and political cultures of early modern England, and will be of significant interest to social, cultural and political historians as well as scholars working in memory studies.

Frontispiece, Thomas May. Arbitrary Government Displayed (1683) © The Trustees of the British Museum (BM Satires 1127)

THE CIVIL WARS AFTER 1660 MATTHEW

The Civil Wars after 1660 PUBLIC REMEMBERING IN L AT E S T UA RT E N G L A N D

NEUFELD

MATTHEW NEUFELD is Lecturer in early modern British history at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

Matthew Neufeld