I

Certainly one of the objectives of the Marian migrants was to practise their Protestant religion freely. Many of them were also puritans in the making, that is to say advocates of further reformation who took advantage of exile to push beyond the Edwardian forms of worship and church organization.Footnote ⁷ At the same time some of those in their ranks developed a novel fighting creed full of import for the future. Here the best-known exponents are John Ponet, Christopher Goodman, and John Knox.Footnote ⁸ But among the lesser lights were William Whittingham, Bartholomew Traheron, and Thomas Sampson. A key political concept of these clerics was what they called ‘Christian liberty’, defined as a half-way house between the tyranny of the Roman Catholics and the ‘licencious libertie’ of the ‘Anabaptistes’ – the one who inculcated too much and the other too little by way of ‘obedience’.Footnote ⁹ As Ponet further explained, in his A shorte treatise of politike power (1556), corrupt reason was no basis for the foundation of commonwealths. Instead God has prescribed a ‘rule’, namely ‘the lawe of nature, furst planted and graffed only in the mynde of man’. Subsequently this was embodied ‘in writing in the decologe or ten commaundementes’, and finally distilled by Christ. Hence the validity of all human laws depended on their demonstrable biblical underpinning and it followed that true Christians were morally obliged actively to resist injustice in every form.Footnote ¹⁰

Although God has not specified any particular form of polity, whether monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic, experience shows, so Ponet claims, that a ‘mixte state’ is ‘the best of all’. At the same time states of whatever kind tend to degenerate into tyrannies, against which the only safeguard is the wholehearted embracing of ‘Goddes worde’, which teaches that ‘all membres of the body’ must seek ‘the prosperitie and wealthe one of an other’. That is what Christ's commandment to love ‘thy neighbour as thy selfe’ means. Apropos England, parliament is the divinely sanctioned guarantor that ‘kinges should not oppresse the people’. But if a country forsakes God then tyranny will follow.Footnote ¹¹ This is the present situation under Mary with the setting up again of ‘the beastly popyshe masse’, further compounded by her marriage to King Philip II of Spain, whose mistreatment of his own subjects provides a foretaste of what the English can expect.Footnote ¹² The powers that be are ordained to rule well; if they fail to do so it falls to inferior magistrates or even ‘private’ persons to remove them.Footnote ¹³ From this point of view Sir Thomas Wyatt, who rebelled against the Marian regime in 1554, was a hero, while the loss of Calais four years later registered the depth of God's displeasure with England.Footnote ¹⁴

Far from being an isolated eccentric, Ponet had been bishop of Winchester under Edward VI and the intimate of Archbishop Cranmer.Footnote ¹⁵ Similar ideas to those of Ponet were expressed in 1558 by Christopher Goodman, concerning ‘the libertie of the people’, in his How superior powers oght to be obeyd. Tellingly the latter refers to Christ as ‘our Moyses … by whom we are … delivered from bodily servitude’ as well as ‘from … bondage of Satan’. That a shared set of assumptions was involved is further indicated by the dedicatory preface to Goodman's pamphlet, by William Whittingham, which explicitly refers to ‘Christian libertie’.Footnote ¹⁶ With the death of Mary in 1558 the sufferings of the self-styled ‘godly’ appeared to be over, yet their political thinking did not simply fade away. Thus the former Marian exile and layman John Hales, in an oration lauding the accession of Elizabeth, spoke of the deliverance of ‘our country from the tyranny of malicious Mary’ and recalled how ‘manfully’ the likes of Wyatt had resisted. More subversively he suggested that all the parliamentary legislation of the previous reign was invalid, because of electoral malpractice, and warned the new queen that if she ‘fall from’ or ‘juggle with’ God then to ‘look for no more favour than Saul had showed him’ – who was effectively dethroned as king.Footnote ¹⁷

Such attitudes even penetrated the new establishment, to the extent that the lord keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, in his opening speech to the 1559 parliament, described Elizabeth as ‘not … so wedded to hir own wille and fantasie that … she will doe any thinge that were likely to bring any bondage or servitude to her people, or give any just occasion to them of any inwarde grudge, whereby any tumultes or sturres might rise as hath done of late dayes’.Footnote ¹⁸ Nevertheless an underlying tension is evident from the reissue later in the same year of the 1547 Edwardian homilies and their teaching on passive obedience, from which the Marian exiles such as Ponet and Goodman had broken so decisively. Parishioners throughout the land were henceforth officially instructed, and on a regular basis, ‘that all rulers are appointed of God’ and ‘all subjects are bound to obey them as God's ministers, yea although they be evil … for conscience sake’.Footnote ¹⁹

II

By the mid-1560s, however, bigger cracks were appearing in the notional Protestant consensus. An attempt in 1563 by members of convocation to advance on the cautious religious reforms of 1559 had not only failed but deprivation soon followed of some of the more radical clergy – now described by the new-coined term of ‘puritan’.Footnote ²⁰ What, however, drove a deeper wedge was the question of royal succession, the anxiety among committed Protestants, especially those of the hotter variety, being that if Elizabeth died unmarried she would be succeeded by her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots. During the parliamentary session of 1566 Elizabeth came under pressure to legislate against this eventuality, with those whom we may now call puritans very much to the fore. The favoured Protestant candidate was Catherine Grey, sister of the ill-fated Queen Jane. Two former Marian exiles, the laymen John Hales and Robert Beale, had already written tracts explicitly on her behalf, while a third former exile, the cleric Thomas Sampson, went on to make the case for a Protestant settlement at the hands of parliament.Footnote ²¹

Peter Wentworth, although not then an MP, claimed in retrospect to have been ‘first stirred upp … by Godes good motion’, as well as ‘by sundry grave and wise menn unknowne unto mee’, to involve himself in the succession question around this time.Footnote ²² On the other hand his brother Paul was a member of the House of Commons in 1566 and challenged the right of the crown to silence discussion of the issue. His invocation of ‘liberty’ has traditionally been regarded as an episode in the history of freedom of speech in parliament, yet it can equally be understood within the context of ‘Christian liberty’ as formulated by the Marian exiles.Footnote ²³ That at least was how Sampson, the recently deprived dean of Christ Church, conceived of the matter. Addressing Elizabeth, he wrote that, if ‘you do care like the mother of Englande to kepe it in that Christien liberty into which you, under God, have freed hit’ from ‘tyrannous poperie’, then the succession question must be resolved forthwith. Moreover, were the queen to continue prevaricating, parliament as ‘the place of ffree speaking’ and a body ‘to whome no smale parte of regiment is committed’ could proceed without her – albeit she was their ‘chiff president’.Footnote ²⁴ Like Ponet before him, Sampson also cited the Emperor Trajan who, so tradition had it, commanded that the ‘sword’ be used either for or against him depending on whether he ruled ‘justly’.Footnote ²⁵

Discussing this parliamentary agitation with the queen, the Spanish ambassador Guzman de Silva contrasted ‘the obedience and quietude of the Catholics … with the turbulence of the Protestants’ and their cry of ‘liberty’, which represented, so he claimed, a threat to monarchs everywhere.Footnote ²⁶ In the event Elizabeth stood firm against what she regarded as an organized campaign to force her hand, by those whom she characterized as ‘broacheres and workers’ along with their ‘complyses’.Footnote ²⁷ For the historian Neale this was manifestly ‘opposition’ in action, whereas his leading critic Geoffrey Elton subsequently countered that members of the privy council were really behind the parliamentary agitation.Footnote ²⁸ Nevertheless these two purportedly rival interpretations are in fact compatible, because in the circumstances of the day any opposition seriously intent on influencing policy was obliged to work through sympathetic courtiers – the more powerful the better. Yet the need for such allies does not mean that no distinct puritan agenda existed. Furthermore the succession question was to remain a pressing puritan issue until the end of the century, with Peter Wentworth incarcerated as a consequence in the Tower of London for the last five years of his life.Footnote ²⁹

Also by the second decade of Elizabeth's reign a younger generation of post-Marian and increasingly radical clergy had begun to emerge under the dynamic leadership of Thomas Cartwright. In 1572 they published their Admonition to the parliament, calling for root and branch reform of the English Church along biblical lines. Despite the title, the Admonition was more an appeal for support across the nation, and which led, over the next twenty years, to a remarkable attempt to construct a presbyterian system from the bottom up. Understandably the rise and fall of this predominantly clerical enterprise has caught the attention of historians.Footnote ³⁰ Support by members of the laity was, however, crucial and ensured that puritanism more generally survived the Star Chamber prosecution of Cartwright and others in 1591. As regards this wider network, the Northamptonshire gentleman and MP George Carleton provided the following character sketch dating from the early 1570s. The ‘godely’ Protestants, he wrote, are ‘a great people, daily increasing’ and alienated from the unreformed English Church. True ‘professors of the gospel’, they consist of ‘all degrees, from the nobility to the lowest’. Ranged against them are ‘papists’ and ‘atheists’.Footnote ³¹ Carleton's ‘professors’ can perhaps best be understood as comprising a web of familial and ideological relationships, nurtured by marriage, education, and the ministration of preachers, and capable moreover of transmission down the generations.Footnote ³² The epicentre of the movement was London and the Midlands, with links extending in all geographical directions but especially to the south-east.

Carleton himself belonged to a close-knit body of puritan gentry, which included Peter and Paul Wentworth, Anthony Cope, and William Strickland.Footnote ³³ Despite the subsequent fame of Peter Wentworth, his modern biographers have effectively drawn a blank concerning his early career before he was elected to parliament in 1571 aged forty-seven.Footnote ³⁴ But it transpires that he had served his political apprenticeship at the heart of the late Henrician evangelical establishment, as a member of the household of Sir John Gates who was later to be executed in 1553 for his part in the failed Jane Grey usurpation.Footnote ³⁵ Peter Wentworth was apparently imbued early on with the ideal of building a godly commonwealth and sometime after 1554 he married as his second wife Elizabeth, sister of the Marian exile Francis Walsingham and the widow of Geoffrey Gates – brother of Sir John.Footnote ³⁶ A senior figure in this extended family was Sir Anthony Denny, brother-in-law of Sir John Gates, and latterly groom of the stool in Henry VIII's privy chamber. In his will of about 1545 Denny articulated views probably widely shared by members of the group. He requested that his children be brought up in ‘godly knowledge of good lettres’ to become ‘profytable membres’ of the ‘commonwelthe’, as opposed to ‘idle dronys’ in the hive, ‘having before their eyes that pure and most certeyn lodestarre Jesus Christ’ in order to navigate through the perils of life to the ‘hevynly port’ reserved for God's elect. During the reign of Mary, Denny's three sons Anthony, Charles, and Henry, went abroad with Francis Walsingham, who was their cousin, all four residing for a time at Basle. Wentworth himself remained in England, having sued out a pardon from the Marian regime in October 1553.Footnote ³⁷

The puritanism of Peter Wentworth is not in doubt – his house at Lillingstone Lovell, then in Oxfordshire, becoming a haven for nonconformist worshippers.Footnote ³⁸ But the first recorded parliamentary speech he made, in 1571, was not about religion as such. Instead Wentworth delivered a rebuke to those who sought to ‘inculcate feare into those which should be free’. This was in response to the disciplining of Robert Bell who had ventured to criticize what he deemed an abuse of the royal prerogative by certain privy councillors. What Wentworth had in mind when defending Bell becomes clearer from his notorious speech on the theme of ‘liberty’, delivered five years later in February 1576. Parliament he then said is a ‘place’ to ‘glorifye God and benefitt the comonwealth’, and in order ‘to avoid everlasting death and condempnacion … we ought to proceed in every cause according to the matter and not according to the prince's mynde’. For a ruler is the ‘vicegerent’ of God ‘to execute and do his will, the which is law or justice’. Wentworth also made a direct criticism of the ‘great faultes’ committed by Elizabeth, which led to his initial spell in prison.Footnote ³⁹

Seven months earlier Walsingham, now a privy councillor, had paid his brother-in-law Wentworth a visit and, given their shared worries about Mary queen of Scots, they may possibly have discussed tactics for the coming parliamentary session.Footnote ⁴⁰ Wentworth and his fellow radicals, however, remained very much their own men. Also bound up with the succession question in the first half of the reign was the prospect that Elizabeth would marry and produce an heir. Matters came to a head on this subject in the late 1570s, with plans now at an advanced stage for the queen to marry the Catholic duke of Anjou. Members of the privy council were divided over the issue but it was the puritan hard-liner John Stubbs, brother-in-law of the presbyterian Cartwright, who turned it into an explicit matter of principle. Stubbs's The discoverie of a gaping gulf (1579) argued that such a marriage, between a ‘daughter of God’ and ‘one of the sons of men’, was against the commandments ‘given by Moses’. Old Testament examples abounded of the dire consequences to be expected and this projected French match ran the risk of reintroducing ‘idolatry’ to England, along with the ‘Turkish tyranny of the Valois’ and their ‘brutish exactions’. Although condemned to lose his right hand, Stubbs was widely praised for taking such a public stand, and the hostility towards the Anjou match, which he helped fuel, also contributed to its abandonment. As we shall see, the biblical line of argument employed in the Gaping gulf was later to be revived under James I, by puritans opposed to an Anglo-Spanish marriage alliance.Footnote ⁴¹

III

The 1570s also witnessed a prolonged pamphlet exchange between Cartwright and John Whitgift, the future archbishop of Canterbury, battling over the religious ground originally mapped out in the Admonition to the parliament. This in turn has generated a considerable secondary literature.Footnote ⁴² By comparison historians have paid very little attention to another book with which Cartwright was associated, the Sacra theologia (1585) by his fellow presbyterian Dudley Fenner and which went through at least two further editions during the 1580s. Dedicated to the earls of Warwick and Leicester, and bearing an endorsement by Cartwright, this Latin work includes a section on resisting a ‘tyrant in practice’. It is the role of inferior magistrates ‘to reduce and call back the king unto his dutye, when as he shall either subvert the religion and worship of God, or oppress either the church or commonwealth’. Furthermore, a ruler guilty of violating ‘all or the most principal covenants and decrees’ must be removed by those that have the requisite authority, for example ‘a publick assemblie of al estates and degrees in the land’. Fenner also writes of our ‘common libertie’ under the Christian gospel. There are echoes here of arguments advanced both at the time of the Marian exile and in more recent writings by continental Protestants, such as the Vindiciae contra tyrannos.Footnote ⁴³ The dedication of Sacra theologia to Warwick and Leicester is less surprising in light of a lecture delivered two years previously by Walsingham to the young James VI of Scotland and future James I of England. Walsingham, in his capacity of ambassador, warned James against ruling along absolutist lines, concluding ‘that as subjects are bound to obey dutifully, so were princes bound to command justly; which reason and ground of government was set down in the deposition of Edward the Second, as by ancient record thereof doth appear’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Mary, the mother of James VI, had been deposed by her own Scottish subjects in 1567 and languished thereafter for almost twenty years, as the prisoner of Elizabeth, before finally being executed on grounds of treason in 1587.Footnote ⁴⁵ Puritans especially had clamoured for the death of Mary over the years, Peter Wentworth for example describing her as ‘the most notorious whore in all the world’, and the achievement of this particular goal coincided with an all-out parliamentary campaign to remodel the English Church along presbyterian lines. Although the reformers were decisively defeated at this time, the episode serves to highlight some of the ideological issues involved. Probably in anticipation of the obstacles which his close colleague Anthony Cope and their religious allies in the Commons would meet, Wentworth had produced a revised version of his argument in defence of freedom of speech as well as a list of leading questions to the same end. He described parliament as this ‘great and sacred counsell’ erected by God. Its true modus operandi is a function of the teaching of Christ, as expressed by St Paul – ‘no man [to] seeke his owne but every man another's wealth’ (1 Corinthians 10.24) – and hence to deprive the members of their ‘libertie’ to act is ‘the highest treason to God, our prince and common weale’. In making such claims, Wentworth happily accepted the charge of being an innovator. Are ‘we not bounden in honour to the House, duty, honestie and good consciences to innovate good orders, as well as good laws’?Footnote ⁴⁶

The temerity of Peter Wentworth again resulted in his imprisonment, along with Cope and three others. It also elicited a full-scale response by a series of government spokesmen, headed by Sir Christopher Hatton who spelt out the alleged political implications of the presbyterian proposals. ‘What dangerous propositions the chief patrones of this newe devised government have published of late yeares – how naturall borne subiectes may rebel ageinst their prince, depose him and execute him – every man knoweth.’ As proof he instanced, among other books, the Vindiciae contra tyrannos. Elizabeth herself backed this up with a message stating that ‘the platforme which is desired’ is ‘most preiudiciall to the religion established, to hir croune, to hir government and to her subiectes’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Anti-puritan pressure was maintained thereafter and the 1590s as a whole were a decade of deepening conservative reaction, something most obviously illustrated by the licensed products of the printing press. Here the writings of Richard Bancroft, the future archbishop of Canterbury, are particularly instructive. In 1593 he published two books against presbyterianism, which include attacks on the political thinking of Ponet and Goodman. Commenting more generally, Bancroft also wrote that ‘the world now a dayes is set all upon liberty. Every man allmost is of their humour, which thought scorne that any should bee lifted up above the congregation. The cantoninge of kingdomes is in many men's mouths.’Footnote ⁴⁸

It is conventional to see these years as a period of puritan decline. This view, however, is difficult to reconcile with the nationwide religious campaign mounted by puritan clergy and laity immediately after the death of Elizabeth.Footnote ⁴⁹ There was also a renewed attempt by Peter Wentworth in 1593 to establish the succession, along with the part played in this same parliament by James Morice and Henry Finch, the latter of whom appealed to ‘Gode's lawe’ that ‘no man was condemned without accusers’ (John 8.10) – against the method of proceeding in the Court of High Commission.Footnote ⁵⁰ In addition we need to be wary of using too restrictive a definition of puritanism, almost to the exclusion of ‘commonwealth’ matters. Thus there is little suggestion in Neale, or subsequent commentators, that the major issue concerning patents of monopoly, which blew up in the last two parliaments of Elizabeth, in 1597–8 and 1601, had a puritan dimension. But this is to ignore the extra-parliamentary role of the leading puritan lawyer Nicholas Fuller who had earlier acted for Cartwright. As defence council for the makers of playing cards, Fuller argued that monopolies contravened the law of God in that they threatened livelihoods (Deuteronomy 24.6; 2 Thessalonians 3.10). More generally, Finch held the view that ‘our law’ is ‘built and grounded upon’ that contained in the Old Testament.Footnote ⁵¹

IV

Although Peter Wentworth was dead by the time James inherited the English throne in 1603, some of his erstwhile collaborators sprang into action within days of the accession – conveying to the new king a detailed plan for reform of matters amiss in both ‘commonwealth’ and ‘churche’.Footnote ⁵² Among other things this initiative spawned what became known as the Great Contract, a scheme centring on the commutation of feudal wardship and the debates concerning which helped to shape domestic politics for at least the next ten years.Footnote ⁵³ In the eyes of the puritan Fuller, now an increasingly formidable parliamentary presence, ‘the dischardge of tenures and wardshipps’ would render ‘our lawes … more agreeable to the lawe of God’, since ‘to take away a man's child’ contravenes holy writ. While opposition to wardship, like that to monopolies, extended far beyond godly circles, resort to the Bible in this way served to raise the stakes.Footnote ⁵⁴ The cause of religious reform was also pursued in tandem, puritan MPs such as Sir Francis Hastings refusing to take no for an answer despite the rebuff of their clerical wing by the king at the Hampton Court Conference in January 1604. Hastings and his co-religionists proceeded by a combination of petitions and draft religious legislation.Footnote ⁵⁵ At the same time the question of the extent of free speech in parliament re-emerged, yet as a much less exclusively puritan concern. With such developments in mind, the Venetian ambassador can be found in 1607 commenting on the dangerous appeal of puritanism, which ‘tends … to the ruin of principalities and monarchs’, since ‘the word liberty sounds sweet to everyone’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Meanwhile a new and potentially more fraught fiscal issue than that of monopolies had arisen. Hence in 1610 Fuller can be found recycling some of his earlier biblical material, in order to counter the threat of unparliamentary taxation posed by the additional impositions or customs now being levied on trade. As part of his argument he also invoked the mythical Lucius,Footnote ⁵⁷ ‘the first Christian king in this island’, who had allegedly introduced a legal code based on ‘the Old and New Testaments’. By ‘which law of God we learn to give … custom to whom custom is due, but still according to the rule of law which guideth both the giver and the receiver what to give and what to receive’. Thomas Wentworth, son of Peter and Fuller's fellow MP, stated more succinctly that ‘the lawe of God is the Decalogue, which is that subjects as well as kings should enjoy theyre owne’. In the course of these debates the puritans Fuller and Wentworth powerfully reinforced their more secular minded colleagues, who quoted Magna Carta rather than the Bible, when arguing that impositions were against the ‘liberty’ of the subject. Puritans, on the other hand, tended to cite both scripture and the common law. Fuller was also among the earliest to emphasize that it was the Catholic Mary Tudor, ‘seduced by foreign advice’, who had first collected impositions on the basis of the royal prerogative. But it was the antics in particular of Thomas Wentworth which revived memories of his late father, with King James himself urging that the two cases were equivalent and imprisonment the appropriate punishment for such incendiaries.Footnote ⁵⁸

V

The unresolved question of impositions was to paralyse the next parliament, in 1614, although not before an attempt was made to revive a version of the Great Contract and almost certainly at the hands of some of those responsible for the original initiative back in 1603.Footnote ⁵⁹ Resurfacing in the 1620s, impositions were to dog the early years of Charles I. In the shorter term, however, the apparent impasse meant that no parliament met between 1614 and 1621 and it was during this interim that the subject of royal marriage again became a politico-religious issue. In 1612 King James had married his daughter Elizabeth to the Calvinist Frederick V of the Palatinate, an action interpreted in godly circles especially as consciously aligning England with the international Protestant cause. The king, however, probably always meant it as part of a diplomatic balancing act, the aim being to marry Elizabeth's brother Prince Henry to a Catholic princess. On the death of Henry, also in 1612, this role devolved upon his younger brother Charles. By 1617 the favourite candidate to emerge was a Spanish infanta, an additional attraction being the prospect of a large dowry.Footnote ⁶⁰ But this prospect in turn elicited a very remarkable response and one moreover which historians have ignored. Thus an alternative scheme was launched that December by a group of unnamed persons ‘of high and honourable place’, whereby the ‘well affected in religion’ would in effect pledge themselves in advance to make a ‘large’ parliamentary grant of taxation as a quid pro quo for James abandoning the Spanish match. In some ways this plan sounds like a foreign policy equivalent of the bargaining earlier involved in the Great Contract.Footnote ⁶¹

Our knowledge of the 1617 proposal mainly derives from documents, now among the state papers, interception of which most likely killed it. The documents comprise ‘Reasons’ in favour of the proposed course of action, with a letter from the apparent author, Andrew Willet, and a further missive from the recipient Sir John Heigham. Both puritans and each based in Suffolk, Willet was a well-connected clergyman and Heigham a prominent member of the county gentry. Similar letters, so Willet wrote, had been sent to six other counties and it was requested that the scheme be canvassed among the justices of the peace at the forthcoming quarter sessions, ‘only such excepted as are popishlie affected’.Footnote ⁶² Religion was indeed the heart of the matter, the fear being that a Spanish bride for Charles was a kind of Trojan horse to usher in popery and tyranny. Back in 1612 Willet had written of the marriage between Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V in the following terms: ‘blessed … are those thrice renowned parents which have not sought out a match for their daughter from among the Canaanites, but with Father Abraham from the kindred and household of faith … and have set more by the pious education of both, then by the promised mountains of gold’. Referring to Mary Tudor, he had also commented that ‘out of Spanish blood budded that branch that overshadowed the gospel in England’.Footnote ⁶³

Unsurprisingly those most vehemently opposed to Charles marrying a Catholic princess were the ‘godly party’, as the contemporary Thomas Ball described them in his biography of John Preston – a cleric at the centre of puritan politics during the 1620s. As a fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge, Preston became renowned for his links with members of the puritan nobility and gentry, their sons congregating in his college rooms for ‘prayer’ with deprived ministers such as John Dod and Arthur Hildersham.Footnote ⁶⁴ Preston himself is thought to have ghosted a letter in 1620 against the Spanish match. Addressed to Buckingham, the royal favourite, this circulated widely in manuscript and took a religious line reminiscent of John Stubbs over forty years before and of Willet more recently. It was ‘forbidden’ to the Jews ‘to marrie with one of a differing religion’ and the requirement still remained for the truly religious to match with those of the ‘same spirituall kindred’. The case of Solomon, who married Pharaoh's daughter and became an idolater, was cited as an object lesson. Turning to much more recent history, the author also reminded the reader of Wyatt's rebellion under Queen Mary and ended by urging that a parliament be summoned as the best way of relieving ‘the necessities of the crown’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Trying to prevent the marriage of Charles to a Catholic remained a puritan priority when parliament met the following year, in 1621. To achieve this end, however, a united Protestant front was essential and hence the sensitivity evinced at this time by members of the ‘godly party’ about the epithet ‘puritan’, which they suggested was essentially a papist smear. Such was the theme of the maiden speech delivered by John Pym, defending his colleague Sir Walter Earle who had been attacked as a ‘puritan’ for introducing a bill designed to secure stricter observance of the sabbath. But, despite the tone of injured innocence adopted, both Earle and Pym can be shown to have favoured relaxing the terms on which puritan clergy with conscientious scruples were admitted to the ministry.Footnote ⁶⁶ Furthermore, the fateful proposal to petition the king that his son might marry a Protestant emanated from a member of this same group – namely Thomas Crewe, MP for Northampton. He based his case on the teaching of the Old Testament and can also be shown to have subscribed to the myth of King Lucius.Footnote ⁶⁷ The decision by the Commons to act on Crewe's advice led in turn to a constitutional confrontation with King James and dissolution of the parliament. Although by the time the next parliament met, in 1624, the Anglo-Spanish negotiations had collapsed it was also becoming increasingly clear that an alternative marriage with a French Catholic princess was definitely going ahead. As a consequence puritans especially now concentrated on damage limitation, the overriding fear being that a secret condition of the marriage was sweeping concessions to English Catholics.Footnote ⁶⁸

Further light is shed on the paradigm, or frame of reference, within which Pym and other puritan MPs were operating during the 1620s, by a poem entitled The interpreter, published in 1622. Analysing the use of the terms ‘puritan’, ‘protestant, and ‘papist’, the anonymous author claims that what were originally religious labels have become politicized in the context of the fate of the Palatinate, and European Protestantism more generally, at the hands of Spain. ‘Time was’ puritans were ‘counted such’ who voiced opposition to church ‘ceremonies’ and ‘government’ by ‘bishops’, whereas today they are identified with those who would ‘freely spend’ their ‘money’ and ‘blood’ in defence of the Protestant cause. Furthermore a puritan is ‘he that speakes his minde in parliament’ and stands ‘for the lawes and truth’, by which kings – as opposed to ‘tyrants’ – ‘onely do command’. In sum ‘hee's one that would a subject bee, no slave’. By contrast the ‘protestant’, or ‘formalist’, makes ‘God of the king’ and in siding with the Hispanophile ‘papist’ has traded ‘libertie’ for servitude.Footnote ⁶⁹

VI

Such was the ideologically charged context in which Charles succeeded to the throne, on the death of his father in 1625. With war against Spain looming, the government was in urgent need of a generous grant of taxation. Instead the Commons proceeded to draw up an elaborate petition on religion, in the drafting of which puritan MPs, under the guidance of Pym, played a significant part – notably as regards the sections on silenced ministers, pluralism and non-residence.Footnote ⁷⁰ There was in addition growing disillusionment with the duke of Buckingham. Initially puritan peers such as Viscount Saye and the earl of Warwick had hoped to work with him. But during Charles's second parliament, in 1626, they threw their weight behind the attempt to impeach the duke. This was blocked by the king and the ensuing dissolution of parliament, without a grant of taxation and in time of war, produced an explosive situation.Footnote ⁷¹ The subsidies which the Commons had failed to vote were now levied by the crown, under the auspices of the royal prerogative and in the guise of a forced loan. This unprecedented step was justified in part by a clutch of court-sponsored sermons which carried the ideological war into the enemy camp, both metaphorically and literally in the case of Robert Sibthorpe. Preaching at All Saints Northampton, in the heart of puritan territory, Sibthorpe explicitly refuted the teaching of the Marian exiles Goodman and Knox who ‘make the law above the king, and the people above the law, and so depose princes by their tumults and insurrections’. Payment of tax or tribute was part of the unconditional obedience owed by subjects to their divinely appointed rulers.Footnote ⁷²

Resistance to the forced loan was widespread and many gentry were imprisoned for refusing to pay. Very striking, however, is the prominent role played by puritans, headed by the earl of Lincoln – a former pupil of John Preston, along with cohorts of Northamptonshire and Essex refusers led respectively by Richard Knightly and Sir Francis Barrington. Lincoln urged all ‘honest men’ to stand firm against the loan, lest England go the way of continental absolutism.Footnote ⁷³ Someone on the face of it in need of no such prompting was Thomas Scott, a Kentish gentleman and MP for Canterbury, whose views can be reconstructed in great detail thanks to the rare survival of a large body of manuscript commentary by him on public events – especially during the late 1620s. Born in about 1566, Scott was an unreconstructed puritan who hated such ‘popish’ remnants in the Prayer Book as surplices, signing with the cross in baptism, and kneeling at communion, as well as wanting the introduction of ‘Christ's discipline’ – that is to say a presbyterian eldership.Footnote ⁷⁴

A grandson of Sir Thomas Wyatt the rebel and proud of it, Scott was in addition related by marriage to the Wentworth brothers, Peter and Paul. By his own account Scott had also ‘dwelt many yeares’ in the London parish of St Anne Blackfriars, under the combined puritan ministry of Stephen Egerton and William Gouge.Footnote ⁷⁵ Two preoccupations running through his writings are the need to advance the cause of godliness and to preserve what he calls ‘immortall’ liberty. He was particularly incensed by a sermon preached in defence of the loan by Isaac Bargrave, dean of Canterbury, who had singled out those ‘whose purity consists in parity, whose conscience in disobedience’, as being most opposed to the levy. In response Scott defended the ‘conscientious puritan’, who rightly grasped that the highest duty was owed to God. As a consequence ‘subjects may disobey and refuse an unworthie kinge’.Footnote ⁷⁶ He also drew here on ideas which he had already begun to develop in the context of the failed impeachment of Buckingham. If necessary the ‘subordinate magistrates’ must act alone on behalf of the ‘state’, because kings are ‘made by men’ whom God created ‘free’. Scott concluded by quoting the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, against the teachings of James I on divine right monarchy.Footnote ⁷⁷

The views of Scott were undoubtedly extreme, although they may not have been that far removed from those of some of his fellow MPs who arrived at Westminster, in March 1628, for what turned out to be the last parliament until 1640.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the ensuing debates the Commons collectively condemned the forced loan. But Pym and his stepbrother Francis Rous, puritans both, also used the Bible to buttress arguments based on common law. Their chosen vehicle was the proceedings against Roger Manwaring, which they masterminded between them. Manwaring, like Bargrave and Sibthorpe, had preached in favour of the forced loan and the extravagance of his claims on behalf of monarchy made him an obvious target. Rous when presenting the case to the Commons, in May 1628, ended by invoking the ‘true prophet’ Samuel, who ‘writ the Law of the Kingdom in a book and laid it up before the Lord … that the king may know what to command and the people what to obey’. Manwaring, on the other hand, ‘finding the law of this kingdom written in books tears it in pieces’. He is a ‘false prophet’ and ‘an evil tree’, deserving to be cut down and cast into the fire. This anti-absolutist gloss on the Book of Samuel was in the tradition of Ponet and the Vindiciae, and Pym followed with a speech some days afterwards in which he accused Manwaring of endeavouring to turn ‘God's word’, which is ‘the only rule of justice and goodness’, into a ‘warrant for violence and oppression’.Footnote ⁷⁹

During the related debates about the forced loan in the House of Lords Viscount Saye emerged as a notable champion of the liberties of the subject. Earlier, in 1622, he had been imprisoned for refusing to contribute to the levy of a benevolence – on grounds of ‘conscience’, because ‘a subject should not be compelled to give out of parliament’.Footnote ⁸⁰ He was also the most religiously radical among the peers at this date and an apparent admirer of the puritan cleric William Ames, who had departed for the Netherlands in about 1610 and gone on to produce a series of works attacking both the Prayer Book and church government by bishops. Ames was in addition the author of De conscientia. Although not actually published until 1630, this represented the fruit of his teaching on ethics over many years. The fifth and final section of the book includes a chapter on ‘the mutuall obligation betweene magistrates and subjects’. According to Ames, the ‘power’ of magistrates ‘is not absolute but carries a double limitation, one from the will of God whose minister every magistrate is (Deuteronomy 17.18–20)’ and ‘another from the will of man, which is included in those conditions and lawes in which the power of rule is founded’. The ‘chief care’ of the magistrate ought to be the promotion of ‘true religion’. At the same time he should ‘further and promote the external happinesse of his subjects and not disturbe and overthrow their fortunes by unjust exactions (Proverbs 28.15–16 )’. Come 1630, in what looks like a calculated act of defiance, three of Saye's sons would enrol together at the university of Franeker, in the Netherlands, where Ames was currently professor of theology.Footnote ⁸¹

Back in June 1628 Charles had been persuaded to accept the Petition of Right, which was intended by its framers to outlaw all forms of unparliamentary taxation for the future. The House of Commons then renewed the attack on Buckingham, but without success. Two months later he was assassinated. The perpetrator, John Felton, claimed to have been partly inspired by a remonstrance of the Commons against Buckingham and the assassin himself was lauded as a deliverer in a number of manuscript poems circulating at the time. One of these poems describes Felton as ‘Christ's freeman’ and the redeemer of ‘our English Israell’ from tyranny. It also compares him to various Old Testament liberators. So too did Scott of Canterbury: God has ‘raised us up a saviour’, like ‘Ehud who stabbed Eglon (Judges 3.15, 19)’, or ‘brave Judeth’ who ‘did cut off Holophernes his head’ (Judeth 13) and ‘blessed Jael’ who ‘hammered Sisera (Judges 5.26)’.Footnote ⁸²

Yet the death of Buckingham turned out have achieved nothing and the parliament was finally dissolved, in March 1629, amidst scenes of high drama with MPs trying forcibly to prevent the speaker of the Commons doing the royal bidding. During the debates of the last weeks puritans especially talked in increasingly alarmist terms of a home grown popish plot – aimed at the subversion of both religion and liberty. Here the lead was taken by Rous, who conjured up the spectre of an encroaching ‘Romish tyranny and Spanish monarchy’.Footnote ⁸³ Not only had the Petition of Right failed to prevent the king levying impositions, and customs more generally, without parliamentary consent, but a newly dominant faction among the episcopate now appeared to be leading the English Church back towards Rome. The bishops in question, led by William Laud, were dubbed ‘Arminians’ after the Dutch dissident theologian Jacobus Arminius and on the grounds of being doctrinal defectors from the Calvinist heritage of the Reformation. Puritans recognized correctly that they had most to lose from this counter-reforming movement, and the fears expressed in 1629 about religious and constitutional change were increasingly born out by events over the following decade.Footnote ⁸⁴

VII

As early as the parliamentary debates in 1626 Sir Dudley Carleton, the then secretary of state, had warned that failure by the Commons to co-operate would force the king to adopt ‘new counsels’ – along the lines of other ‘foreign countries’ where representative institutions had withered away. Certainly by 1637 the Venetian ambassador Anzolo Correr, an acute observer of English affairs, was convinced that Charles and his advisers were far advanced on a ‘daring’ experiment in absolutism, its centrepiece being the high-yielding ship money tax which had now become an annual levy across the nation. The only real danger, so Correr thought, was presented by the puritans, who were becoming increasingly exasperated by the changes in worship introduced under Archbishop Laud and might be goaded into rebellion.Footnote ⁸⁵ Meanwhile the earl of Strafford warmly welcomed the initial judicial decision in favour of ship money and suggested to King Charles that a further such ruling should be sought to allow for the funding of a ‘land army’ upon ‘the same exigent of state’. Yet even more than at the time of the forced loan those who now emerged in the forefront of opposition were puritans. Viscount Saye having failed to get himself put on trial for refusing to pay ship money was more successful in the case of the Buckinghamshire squire John Hampden. Alluding to the puritanism of the latter – ‘a great brother’ – Strafford wrote that ‘the very genius of that nation of people leads them to oppose, as well civilly and ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Although the trial verdict went against Hampden, the judges voting seven to five in favour of the crown, the mounting of this test case in 1637 is impressive testimony to the existence of an organized puritan opposition by this date, its membership forged during the political struggles of the 1620s but with an ancestry stretching back much further – ultimately to the Marian exile.Footnote ⁸⁷

During the actual Hampden trial the pros and cons of ship money were argued on relatively narrow legal grounds. When times changed, however, and the judges found themselves impeached in 1641 critics felt free to describe the levy both as a facet of ‘arbitrary and tyrannical government’ and an affront to ‘divine’ justice. This second theme was elaborated by Denzil Holles, a prominent puritan and ally of Pym, in a very revealing speech to the House of Lords in July 1641. Worse than ‘the unjust judge in the gospel’ (Luke 18.2–6), these wicked men deserved condign punishment for having so flagrantly broken the commandment of God. Likening his fellow members of the Commons delegation to the ancient Israelites, as described in the Old Testament, Holles spoke of them being sent ‘to stand upon Mount Ebal … to denounce a curse upon them whom have removed our land-marks [Deuteronomy 19.14, 27.17], have taken away the bound-stones of the propriety of the subject, have left us no meum et tuum’. His own ‘errand’, by contrast, was to stand upon Mount Gerizim (Deuteronomy 27.12) to pronounce a blessing on the former chief justice Sir Randolph Crewe. The latter had been dismissed from office in November 1626 as a consequence of his opposition to the forced loan. Crew chose to ‘lose his place rather than to do that which his conscience told him was prejudicial to the commonwealth’ and now Holles requested compensation for ‘this good old man’, who ‘in a time of general desertion … preserved himself pure and untainted’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Randolph Crewe was the brother and uncle respectively of Thomas and John Crewe, and probably shared their puritan views.

VIII

Even more compelling evidence of organization than the engineering of the Hampden trial is the way in which the English puritan leadership grasped the opportunity represented by the rebellion on the part of their co-religionists in Scotland, which broke out in the summer of 1637. Continuing failure to subdue the Scots forced Charles in early 1640 to summon a parliament and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the puritan opposition seized the initiative from the beginning.Footnote ⁸⁹ Pym in the Commons and Saye in the Lords each played key roles, while a clutch of obviously orchestrated county petitions complained of ‘the freeholders’ having been ‘troubled and grieved in … consciences, persons, and estates’. Moreover, at the very outset of proceedings the puritan lawyer Harbottle Grimston brushed aside Secretary Windebanke, to demand justice against ‘the authors and causers of all our miseryes and distraccions in church and commonwealth’. Grimston focused especially on the abrogation of the Petition of Right ‘by expositions contrary to the lawes of God, the lawes of man, and reason’, going on to quote Ezra 7.26 that ‘whosoever … hath not done the lawes of God and the king lett judgement bee speedily executed upon him’. What Grimston seems to have had particularly in mind was ship money, and the unwillingness of Charles to dispense with this valuable source of income led once again to parliament being dissolved. This was followed by the arrest of lords Brooke, Saye, and Warwick, along with the commoners John Crewe, Hampden, Earle, and Pym, an indication of the central role of these puritans in opposing the crown.Footnote ⁹⁰

By the autumn of 1640, however, with a victorious Scottish army encamped in the north of England, the situation of the monarchy had become perilous in the extreme and it was against this background that a new parliament assembled in October. The grip exerted by Pym in the Commons and his allies in the Lords proved even stronger, and from a position of weakness Charles reluctantly agreed to the dismantling of much of the apparatus of prerogative government. But the king had no intention of being permanently reduced to the status of what he styled a ‘Duke of Venice’.Footnote ⁹¹ Ironically his political salvation came in the form of a petitioning campaign, on the part of puritans, for the outright abolition of bishops which, by way of reaction, helped to create a royalist party.Footnote ⁹² Although there was nothing inevitable about the onset of Civil War in 1642 it would not have surprised the late Thomas Scott of Canterbury, who as early as 1626 prophesied the coming of such a conflict between the godly and those who sought to reduce England to a condition of ‘miserable bondage’. Almost a century of teaching had prepared puritans for this eventuality. Hence both ‘liberty’ and ‘religion’ were their watchwords when they finally went to war in the cause of a higher king than Charles I, the Bible depicted on their battle standards symbolizing what they regarded as the ultimate guide to the conduct of public as well as private life.Footnote ⁹³

In the late 1620s Scott of Canterbury had also argued that even a monarch could commit treason, the charge on which Charles was to be found guilty in 1649. Justifying the execution of the king, the solicitor general John Cooke then claimed that ‘the law of nature and the law of God, written in the fleshly tablets of men's hearts’, is that rulers who become tyrants ‘shall die for it’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Regicide was not for the faint hearted, but Edmund Ludlow took a similar line – maintaining that ‘tyranny’ is ‘witnessed against by the spirit of the Lord, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of the Revelations’.Footnote ⁹⁵ It was John Milton, however, who in The tenure of kings and magistrates (1649) traced these ideas via ‘our fathers in the faith we hold’: Ponet, Goodman, Knox, Whittingham, Fenner, and Cartwright. Milton followed this up with the Pro populo anglicano defensio (1651), which includes the resounding declaration that ‘our liberty … is a birthday gift to us from God himself’, and the elaborate biblical exegesis provided by him at this juncture can be seen as, in many ways, exemplifying the puritan paradigm of English politics. Thus King Charles has now been brought to ‘the tryal of justice, which is the sword of God’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Untypical in their republican extremism such views nevertheless help to illuminate a much wider field of puritan political thought and action, from the Marian period onwards, as successive generations of the godly rang the changes on the theme of freedom versus tyranny.Footnote ⁹⁷