Cavaliers and Roundheads. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ therefore, felt unable to resist a whole series of measures which declared monopolies and taxes levied without Parliamentary consent illegal, required the calling of Parliament every three years, reversed the judgements in several Ship Money cases, abolished prerogative courts, settled the limits of the royal forests, roundly condemned Laudism, and, in March 1641, demanded that the Earl of Strafford should be brought to trial on a charge of High Treason.

      The conduct of this trial in Westminster Hall demonstrated only too painfully to the King’s friends how far his Majesty had fallen in public esteem. Sitting in a small curtained room at the back of the throne, he was ‘little more regarded’ than the guards upon the doors. There was ‘loud clattering’, so a witness recorded, and ‘much public eating not only of confections but of flesh and bread, and bottles of beer and wine going from mouth to mouth without cups, and all this in the King’s eye’.

      The accused looked tired and ill, his beard grey, his back bent, though he was not yet fifty. But he answered the questions that were put to him quickly, calmly, occasionally with contempt, gaining much support by his skill and courage, obliging his accusers to conclude that a charge of High Treason would not serve their purpose and that instead they should bring in a Bill of Attainder which, if Parliament would pass it and the King assent to it, would secure the prisoner’s execution on the grounds that it was necessary for the safety of the state.

      Mobs paraded about the streets demanding Strafford’s death. Robert Baillie, the Scottish Presbyterian divine who was in London at the time, recorded that ‘on Monday some thousands of citizens and prentisses awaited all day at Westminster, cryed to every Lord as they went in and in a loud and hideous voyce for justice against Strafford and all traitors…On Wednesday a sudden bruite ran through the Citie that the Papists had set the Lower House on fyre and had besett it with armies; in a clapp all the Citie is in alarum: shops closed, a world of people in armes runnes down to Westminster.’

      The Commons passed the Bill by a majority of 204; the Lords’ majority was seven. Strafford’s life now depended upon the King, who had given him his word that he would never let his minister suffer ‘in life, honour or fortune’. With the mob shouting for the traitor’s death beneath the windows of Whitehall Palace and threatening to break down the doors, Strafford wrote to the King to release him from his promise, urging him, ‘for the prevention of evils’ which might result from his refusal, to give his assent to the Bill. For two days the King hesitated, listening to conflicting advice. But, warned that the lives of the Queen and their children might be endangered by his stand, and advised by the Bishop of Lincoln that a monarch had two consciences, one public and one private, and that while the private conscience might find the condemnation of Strafford abhorrent, the public conscience must be concerned with the danger of further bloodshed, the King eventually persuaded himself that it was his duty to submit. He signed the commission with tears in his eyes.

      On 12 May Strafford walked with firm step to the scaffold on Tower Hill, passing beneath a window where his old friend Archbishop Laud looked down piteously upon him through the bars. Strafford bowed to him. ‘My Lord,’ he asked, ‘your prayers and blessings.’ Laud raised his hand in benediction and murmured a prayer, before falling back fainting from the window. ‘Farewell, my Lord,’ said Strafford, marching on. ‘God protect your innocency.’

      ‘I sinned against my conscience,’ the King told the Queen after the axe had fallen. ‘It was a base, sinful concession.’ He believed that he would never forgive himself for what had happened that day, and he never did. Yet he also came to believe that Strafford’s death was due not to his having made concessions too late but to his ever having made any concessions at all.

      

      The execution of Strafford seemed to excite the appetite for revolutionary measures of those Members of the Long Parliament who were eager for further reform, who were determined upon what the nonconformist preacher Edmund Calamy described as a ‘second Reformation’. According to one observer, ‘reformation [went on] as hot as toast’, while noncomformist sects proliferated and the extreme amongst them grew ever more outlandish, though few so outré as the Muggletonians, who condemned both prayer and preaching, and the Adamites, peculiarly hysterical descendants of the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, who conceived themselves as being in that state of innocence obtaining in the Garden of Eden before the Fall and believed it appropriate to worship God in Adam and Eve’s condition of nakedness. Inspired by preachers and pamphleteers, by female preachers leading congregations in extempore prayers, and by Puritan writers like John Milton who castigated the clergy of the Church of England for stumbling into ‘new-vomited paganisme’, their prayer book for being ‘the skeleton of a Mass-book’ and their communion table for being ‘pageanted about like a dreadful idol’, apprentices chased Anglican parsons down the streets, calling them ‘Abbeylubbers’ and ‘Canterbury Whelps’ and tearing the gowns from their backs.

      From all over the country, now and later, there came reports of altar rails being torn down and altars overturned, of prayer books being thrown about churches and graveyards, of vestments being stripped from the backs of Laudian clergy, of attacks upon those opponents of Calvinist doctrines known as Arminians, and of bishops menaced by gangs of women who threatened to hang them with their lawn sleeves. In one church some wild sectaries, provoked by the curate’s kneeling as he administered the sacrament to his parishioners, kicked the communion bread up and down the chancel; in others candles were trampled underfoot, crucifixes and organs broken and stained glass windows smashed. At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre without Newgate, a woman encouraged her child to urinate on the communion table; in Newcastle women were said to be tearing up surplices as well as prayer books; in Kidderminster there was a riot when some members of the parish objected to the churchwardens’ removal of a crucifix from their churchyard cross. The sectaries ‘make such havoc in our churches,’ wrote one observer, ‘by pulling down ancient monuments, glass windows and rails, that their madness is intolerable.’

      At Norwich the Bishop, Joseph Hall, was driven out of his palace which was left without ‘so much as a dozen of trenchers or the children’s pictures’, and his chapel and the cathedral were desecrated and wrecked:

      Lord, what work was here! What clattering of glasses! What beating down of walls! What tearing up of monuments! What pulling down of seats! What wresting out of iron and brass from the windows and graves! What defacing of arms! What demolishing of curious stonework!…What tooting and piping on the destroyed organ pipes! And what a hideous triumph on the market day before all the county, when in a kind of sacrilegious procession all the organ pipes, vestments, copes and surplices, together with the leaden cross which had been newly sawn down from the Green Yard pulpit, and the service books and singing books were carried to the fire in the public market place, a lewd wretch walking before the train in a cope trailing in the dirt, with a service-book in his hand, imitating in impious scorn the tune, and usurping the words of the Litany.

      Later there were similar scenes at Canterbury, where a Puritan clergyman made use of a guide book to the cathedral to demolish ‘many window-images’, ‘many idols of stone’, ‘seven large pictures of the Virgin Mary’ and a window dedicated to ‘their prime cathedral saint, archbishop Becket with cope, rochet, mitre, crozier…Now it is more defaced than any window in that cathedral. Whilst judgement was executing on the idols in that window, the cathedralists cried out…“Hold your hands, holt, holt, heer’s Sir, etc.” The minister [carrying out the desecration] being then on top of the city ladder, near 60 steps high, with a whole pike in his hand rattling down proud Becket’s glassy bones…to him it was said, “’Tis a shame for a minister to be seen there”…Some wished he might break his neck, others said it should cost blood.’

      By the time the work of desecration in Canterbury was finished, a catalogue of the damage done there made sorry reading:

      The windows, famous both for strength and beauty, so generally battered and broken down as they lay exposed to the injury of all weathers; the whole roof with СКАЧАТЬ