Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ English insult apparently first coined in 1641.) A woodcut dating from the 1650s gives this view of the wars in full. The two-headed eagle, symbol of the Catholic Habsburg emperors who had driven the Thirty Years War, is seen straddling the North Sea, with one wing in the Netherlands and the other in Yorkshire. For those who feared a vast popish conspiracy, it was all one war: a war of desperate self-defence and also of liberation.

Winning the Peace

      During 1642, each party found to its surprise that its rival did not crumble. Instead, both entrenched themselves in their regional strongholds. The supposedly swift war lasted three and a half years, during which more than eighty thousand people were killed and large parts of England, especially the heavily contested Midlands and West Country, were laid waste.

      The king’s aim was simply to put down a vast rebellion. Parliament’s aims were more complex. At first, Parliamentarians believed they were fighting to defend themselves against the Catholic plotters who had deceived their king, a king to whom they still swore fealty. But as they began to realize what victory could mean, visions of a new England began to take shape, some more radical than others.

      The most obvious route was the one endorsed in the summer of 1643 by a military alliance between the English Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters. The alliance, the Solemn League and Covenant, was sealed by a joint religious programme which came close to making this a war for Presbyterianism: to import Scotland’s national church into England. Several high-powered Scots now joined the Westminster Assembly, a gathering of theologians set up by the English Parliament in order to work out a post-war religious settlement. This was what English Puritans had long hoped for. England’s unfinished Reformation would be purged of its popish dregs and brought into line with international Calvinism.

      The Westminster Assembly set itself earnestly to work. In 1644, it produced a newly austere order of service for the English church in place of the uncomfortably traditionalist Book of Common Prayer. In 1646, the assembly produced a new confession of faith, which is still a touchstone for Presbyterians around the world. Parliament supported the assembly’s work by banning the old Prayer Book, abolishing the office of bishop, and – to underline the point – executing Archbishop Laud. In place of the bishops, a Presbyterian structure of elected elders and regional assemblies was haltingly erected. However, to Presbyterian dismay, Parliament insisted on retaining oversight of those assemblies. The Scottish church’s robust independence would not be imported. Presbyterian purists, whose temperament was not suited to seeing a glass as nine-tenths full, scented betrayal.

      The moment when England might have turned Presbyterian came after a crushing defeat of the royalists by a Scots–Parliamentarian army at the battle of Marston Moor on 2 July 1644. There was talk of a negotiated peace in which a chastened king would have accepted a house-trained Presbyterian church. But if Charles had been the kind of man to accept such terms, the war would never have begun. By the winter, it was clear that Parliament would have to fight to the end, although no one yet knew what that end might be. And that meant defeating the king in his western heartlands, which required a new strategy. So, fatefully, in January 1645 Parliament voted to consolidate its various regional forces into a “new-modelled” army, a professional, national force that could fight the war to the finish.

      In military terms, this was bruisingly effective. On 14 June 1645, the New Model Army crushed a veteran royalist force at the battle of Naseby in Northamptonshire. In September, it took the ruined remains of Bristol, a royalist stronghold and once England’s third-largest city. By early 1646, royalist resistance was virtually over. The army’s career, however, was only beginning. In a series of further campaigns in England, Scotland, and Ireland over the following decade and a half, it was to prove itself an exceptionally formidable fighting force: man for man, a match for any army in the world. It also quickly became, and remained until 1660, the primary source of political power in the British Isles. The king was defeated not by Parliament but by the army. That fact determined everything that followed.

      When armies intervene in politics in the modern world, we generally see them as authoritarian and conservative. But this army was created to be God’s and the people’s army, a meritocracy of true believers. It imagined itself to be a truer custodian of the godly cause than the House of Commons, whose ageing electoral mandate dated from another world. In 1647, one zealous London artisan called it “our Army . . . the Army that we had poured out to God so many prayers and tears for, and we had largely contributed unto. They were as our right hand.”⁶ The soldiers had earned their authority with their own blood, and God had plainly endorsed it by giving them an unbroken run of victories.

      The army’s godliness, however, was of a particular kind. The breakdown of religious authority since 1640 had given a vocal minority of English Protestants a taste for religious experiment. Even if they still believed in a unified national church, it took heroic patience to wait to reach it in lockstep. A vanguard of advanced reformers wanted to enjoy true Christian purity here and now. Already in 1641, some high-profile Puritans were advocating a network of “independent Churches”, governed neither by bishops nor by presbyteries but by the law of Christ and by mutual consultation and advice.⁷

      There were not all that many Independent congregations, but they were zealous and high-profile, and they bridled at all attempts to make them march to a slow, orderly national tune. John Milton, one of the Independents’ publicists, bracketed bishops and presbyteries together as disciplinarian “forcers of conscience”. Independents began to talk of toleration and religious freedom. In 1644, with Parliament trying to reimpose order on London’s unruly printers, Milton famously defended a free press as a matter of principle. Castellio, a century earlier, had argued that “to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to kill a man”. Milton now argued that “as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God’s Image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the Image of God”. Making the classic Protestant appeal to conscience, he claimed the freedom “to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”.⁸

      The Presbyterians’ retort was that liberty of this kind led directly to heresy and blasphemy. Thomas Edwards, Presbyterianism’s painstaking and horrified chronicler of errors, warned that Independents were not merely orthodox Calvinists who had rejected external oversight, but concealed views that were “higher flown, more seraphical”. That was untrue. Plenty of Independents were essentially orthodox in their theology, including the most famous of them all, Oliver Cromwell, an MP who became the army’s most brilliant general. But for some, Independency was a gateway drug. Even as Presbyterianism’s victory over royalist crypto-Catholicism was in its grasp, it was unravelling on its other flank, and Parliament could muster neither the votes nor the will for a serious crackdown.

      In the long term, the most important of the new groups now emerging were the Baptists, who went from being a marginal sectarian movement in pre-war England to a church tens of thousands strong by 1660. Their existence proves that the old barrier between “magisterial” and “radical” Protestants had collapsed. For over a century, “magisterial” Protestants had insisted on infant baptism as a necessary feature of a universal, all-embracing church. Now, in revolutionary England, it was becoming plain that such a church no longer existed. So why not stop pretending that infant baptism was biblical and embrace being a sect? Crucially, doing this did not make you a wild radical. Many Baptists were, theologically, pretty conventional Calvinists. But they had mixed “magisterial” doctrines with a “radical” structure: allowing congregations to organize themselves, and sharply separating their community of baptized believers from the mass of corrupt humanity. It was a potent mix. From this starting point, the Baptists would spread across the Atlantic and then across the planet, to become one of the world’s leading Protestant denominational families.

      The primary vector for this and other, even more radical infections was the New Model Army. It is not simply that the army’s СКАЧАТЬ