God’s Fury, England’s Fire
Power to the people
Michael BraddickAllen Lane, 758pp, £30,
Robert Stewart on Michael Braddick's account of the English Civil War
Charles had a difficulty. ‘It was widely acknowledged in Reformation Europe,’ Braddick writes, ‘that a people divided from their monarch on matters of religion could not be depended upon as loyal subjects.’ Charles ruled over three kingdoms, each with a different national church. Not unreasonably, he sought to impose a religious uniformity on his subjects. The trouble was that in England there was no agreement about what constituted either the doctrines or the forms of true religion. The widest agreement, very nearly universal, was that popery was not the true religion. Alas for Charles, the Laudians, followers of Archbishop Laud whom Charles had allowed to secure themselves at court and in much of the episcopacy, were, because of their interest in high ceremonial — a raised altar behind rails, priestly vestments, choral services — vilified by most of the English people as papists. Anti-popery fears mounted, and virulent anti-court sentiment found vent in an explosion of printed materials — pamphlets, tracts, ballads, satires, newsletters — that in its abundance was new to English politics. Also new, and shocking to many, was the printing and distribution to the populace of parliamentary debates. All this popular airing of views in a public arena foreshadowed the prominence of Independency in Cromwell’s New Model Army and the radical programme of the Levellers. Braddick’s treatment of the ‘paper combats’ and other manifestations of popular feeling is the most valuable part of his book. Never before has a history of the civil war been so rooted in the sentiments and behaviour of the whole population.
Braddick proposes that, both by taking part in the paper combats and and by learning from them, the English people became to an unprecedented degree an informed political nation. There were about 9,000 parishes in England, each with its parish council, and one thing that everyone knew about and cared about was the conduct of services in his parish church. Hating popery and Laudian ‘innovations’, the common people were drawn by religion into far-reaching constitutional controversies. Even women entered the lists. In January, 1642, a group of them presented to parliament a petition relating to the army and the reform of the Church. Braddick does not suggest that pressure from below had a direct influence on the actions of King Pym and his followers, but large street demonstrations by Puritans, especially but not only in London, gave succour to those reformers, with episcopacy in their sights, who were denounced by opponents as ‘Puritan populists’. Moreover, the people who, up and down the land between 1640 and 1642, tore down altar rails and smashed stained-glass windows, were not mobs, but organised groups with a political cause. What S. B. Chrimes many years ago called ‘self-government at the king’s command’ had brought ordinary men in the shires into the administration of local government. Braddick argues forcefully that participation in local activities such as quarter sessions and the raising of militias combined with immersion in the ‘paper combats’ made ‘political awareness ... available to the villagers of Stuart England’. He calculates, also, that at the elections to the Long Parliament in 1640 an astonishing one in three adult males had the right to vote.
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