In the early 1990s, Conrad Russell popularized the notion of a ‘British’ approach to understanding the English civil war. In his famous explanation of what he called the ‘British problem’ – events in one kingdom prompting counter events in the others, which in turn induce motions and changes in their own rights, entwining the religious and the political – Russell envisioned a model of English history that explicitly incorporated the Irish and the Scots, if not the Welsh.Footnote 1 His model has since been criticized by a number of scholars as English history writ large, as elitist and restrictively high-political, and, most interestingly, as mechanical. Specifically, Ethan Shagan has seen Russell's version of history as ignoring ideology and discounting the powder keg of religio-political conflict built into the Foxean narrative that had become so central to early modern English culture.Footnote 2
In a fruitful synthesis of these perspectives, Tim Harris has argued that both external mechanical and indigenous ideological factors must be taken into account for historians to arrive at any meaningful understanding of not only the civil war, but also of the entire Stuart era. Events in other British kingdoms remain central to England's own history, but these events must be processed through an internal English dialogue.Footnote 3 This argument points to the need for a better understanding of the discursive element of the ‘New British history’ and of so-called British politics. Such a need is made all the more apparent by the recent work of Mark Knights wherein he gestures to the literary, or fictive, quality of politics in an age when the public was acquiring a sustained political agency for the first time.Footnote 4
But how does one approach the problem of extra-English agency within this framework? In particular, what is to be made of the impressive Scottish propaganda campaign undertaken during the Bishops' Wars (1638–40), when the Scottish Covenanting leadership invested large amounts of time and resources in trying to persuade the English to support their cause? Even Harris's model does not satisfactorily explain how to approach the problem of other British nations so overtly trying to co-opt internal English opinions. A possible solution, however, lies in emerging thought about the nature of public life and of publicity in the early modern period.
Current debates about what is often called the ‘public sphere’ swirl around two main questions: when did the public sphere first come into being, and what does it look like? But in most instances, answering the when depends on defining the what, and those who follow a more traditional Habermasian model – of rational-critical and transparent debate aimed at reaching consensus about matters of state – will locate the beginnings of the public sphere no earlier than the eighteenth century, while those who are interested in expanding the agenda of public discourse – to include identity politics, religion, contestation, coercion, and the creation of normative categories – have insistently argued that a ‘public sphere’ never actually existed, and that scholars should instead think in terms of multiple publics and public discourses as early as the sixteenth century.Footnote 5
The propaganda campaign deployed during the Bishops' Wars, in and of itself, suggests that the Covenanters believed there to be some sort of public sphere or network of publics in operation, which enticed them to rely so heavily on print. It is therefore possible to lay aside the question of dating in this instance. What is more difficult – and this returns to the British context – is the matter of who or what the Covenanters thought they were appealing to within England, the role they were assigning this body, and the realities of the response they actually received. By scrutinizing their published tracts, and surveying select letters and journals, it becomes apparent that what the Covenanters hoped to achieve was something relatively close to the Habermasian model: they would reason with the English public in order to reach a consensus and force the king into the appropriate action. But what they actually created was something far more akin to the expanded model of multiple and contested publics. Messy, self-interested, and difficult to control, the publics which the Covenanters unearthed highlighted the fact that the rational-critical sphere is most often relegated to the imaginary. In the process, they concretely demonstrated both the power and the danger of public appeal, a tool which looked increasingly appealing as the three kingdoms negotiated various crises and approached their ‘troubles’.
I
The first Bishops' War evolved out of Charles I's blundered attempt to introduce a new prayer book into Scotland, sparking riots in Edinburgh on 23 July 1637. By 1638, both the king and the Scottish protesters, now known as ‘Covenanters’ for their circulation of, and subscription to, a document commonly called the ‘National Covenant’, were arming. The armies never met, and negotiations for pacification were completed at Berwick in June 1639. Peace proved to be only temporary, and both the king and the Covenanters continued their preparations for war, Charles calling the Short Parliament in a failed attempt to secure the necessary resources and support. Finally, in what became known as ‘the second Bishops’ War', the Scots crossed to English soil on 20 August 1640, seizing Newcastle after only the briefest of skirmishes. This humiliating defeat, and the financial demands made by the Covenanting army in its wake, forced Charles to summon the Long Parliament. The Bishops' Wars have therefore been seen as a pivotal moment for revisionist scholars interested in the short-term causes of England's troubles.Footnote 6
Although little fighting actually occurred during these conflicts, a very real war of words took place. A cursory glance at the English short title catalogue reveals over sixty printed texts, produced on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border, and in the Low Countries, that overtly engaged with the Scottish crisis. Of these, fourteen represent the Covenanters' official religio-political position and/or an explicit attempt to relate the Scottish uprising to English politics, several of which were reprinted on the infamous Cloppenburg Press – a radical puritan printing press which has been linked to Richard Overton.Footnote 7 The body of literature which will be examined in this article is thus ‘quantitatively limited’ but it is also, according to Joad Raymond, ‘disproportionately significant’. This is because, as Raymond has argued, it opened the doorway to the explosion of print in London in 1641.Footnote 8 David Como has taken this interpretation further, claiming that Covenanter propaganda represented a new political initiative as a systematic campaign to ‘bombard a separate kingdom with propaganda, thereby using the printed word to manipulate political opinion and fundamentally to alter the political process of another nation’.Footnote 9 The careful deployment of radical political arguments encouraging popular resistance therefore justifies a close reading of the texts themselves, and scholarly recognition that these texts were ‘propaganda’ assumes that they spoke to a newly available type of audience, inviting an investigation into the theory and reality driving the appeal to such a ‘public’. Theories about the polity and the possibility of resistance, however, had a symbiotic relationship with conceptualizations of the public and its role and both therefore need to be discussed in tandem.
The first printed appeal to the English was A short relation of the state of the kirk of Scotland (? July), addressed to ‘our Brethren in the Kirk of England’, and it appeared in the wake of various internal Scottish debates about the new prayer book, the National Covenant, and the nature of obedience more generally.Footnote 10 The main theme was one of order versus disorder: after being treated to a detailed explanation of Presbyterian discipline, the reader was told that sinners who did not like ‘this yoke of Christ’, and who were opposed ‘by the most judicious in this kirk’, began to sow the ‘seedes of Supersptition and Idolatrie &c’.Footnote 11 A narrative of how the corrupt bishops convinced the king to avoid a ‘Free and generall Assemblye’ and to impose a new prayer book using the ‘illegall and unorderlie’ means of prerogative alone then follows, mirrored by the story of ‘loyall and faithfull’ supplications made to the king in a ‘lawfull and peaceable’ way in an attempt to have it repealed.Footnote 12 The tract served as a justification of the Covenanter's non-cooperation with the royal will and highlighted the need for English support in pressuring the king to accept the evil nature of episcopal hierarchy and the doctrinal purity of the Presbyterian system. That said, the English reader was implicitly asked to make a choice: after being presented with all the facts, the reader could choose to support either order or disorder. It seemed self-evident that readers would choose order, and come together to pressure the king, acting as some sort of widespread conglomerate centred on a combination of read material and reasoned choice.
The covenanters also argued that those making the correct choice formed a group complementary to their own. A short relation constantly reaffirmed the amity which the Covenanters felt towards their English brethren, attempting to manoeuvre the English public into a position where it could be easily connected with covenanting principles. The English reader was told that the Scots ‘carried toward them all due respect of Brethren, if they should not be first invaded by them, which was as farre from their expectation, as it was without their deservings’.Footnote 13 The English were seen as friends, living ‘in one Ile, under one King,’ and the Covenanters explained that they were ‘so far from intention to offer wrong to the English, that they are resolved never to suffer England to be wronged by any other nation, so long as their lives and means shall last, and do expect the like brotherly dutie from them, least they bee found even to fight against God himself’. The choice which the tract urged the reader to make is again glaringly obvious, and the ramifications of that choice are clearly explained. By choosing to support God's will, readers would create an English public that would parallel the Covenanting public. Although this English public had to make its own decisions about how best to serve God, if the right choices were made, the English and Scottish publics would naturally support one another. Furthermore, this was a printed statement designed to form and sustain an English public that was potentially as widespread within England as the Covenanting public was within Scotland – the Covenanting public itself coalescing around the National Covenant, which was disbursed as a printed document.
Meanwhile, Scotland's political situation remained unresolved. Charles I sent James, marquis of Hamilton, as high commissioner to negotiate with the rebels, who repeatedly demanded a free General Assembly of the Scottish Kirk lest ‘wee will suffer religion to expire, and the Kirk of Christ to perish by consumption or by combustion’.Footnote 14 Eventually, in November 1638, an Assembly was called in Glasgow but, after only seven days, Hamilton attempted to dissolve it on account of irreconcilable disagreements over its constitution. The Assembly continued in defiance, abjuring and removing episcopacy, the Five Articles of Perth, and the acts of the previous six Assemblies.Footnote 15 To justify this action, the Covenanters published The protestation of the Generall Assemblie of the Church of Scotland, and the noblemen, barons, gentlemen, borrow, ministers and commons.Footnote 16 In it, they defined the rights of such a gathering once it had commenced.Footnote 17 Brashly limiting the royal prerogative, they argued that ‘there is not ground or pretence either by Act of Assemblie, or Parliament, or any preceding practice, whereby the Kings Majesty may lawfully dissolve the Generall Assemblie of the church of Scotland, far lesse His Majesties Commissioner’, citing a 1582 incidence of an Assembly defying royal command. The Covenanters also pointedly noted that in 1582 King James VI received a letter from the General Assembly which ‘did shew clearly, how far his Majestie had been uninformed, and upon misinformation, prejudged the prerogative of Iesus Christ’.Footnote 18 It is worth noting that this example was almost as provocative as the statement itself, since it referred to the Melvillian Assembly which had met during the Ruthven Raid – the seizure of King James VI's person by a group of disaffected Presbyterian noblemen – and had been tainted by its support for this action.Footnote 19
This politically contentious statement, barring the king from dissolving the General Assembly, is strikingly simple as a statement of the rights of the people assembled to protect the church, but it also helps illuminate the Covenanters' interest in print and their desire to create an English public because of its emphasis on misinformation. The theme of misinformation ran consistently though all Covenanter tracts and in An information to all good Christians within the kingdome of England (February 1639), the Covenanters lamented the credit some had given to false reports, ‘partly through the mis-information of our adversaries, and partly for lack of cleare information’.Footnote 20 Likewise, The remonstrance of the nobility (March 1639), again focused on the problem of misinformation, whether it was caused by their enemies or occurred because those ‘who looking at great distances, cannot well perceive’ the truth.Footnote 21 In other tracts, the very fact that the Covenanters outlined their past actions and described their current objectives implied that the public to which they were speaking lacked a proper understanding of events. Furthermore, the quarrel between the king and the Scots itself revolved around correct information and the proper understanding of God's will, since the Covenanters strongly believed that episcopacy was anathema to the true church as described in the Bible. This rhetoric positioned the Covenanters as the voice of truth and their tracts as shedding light on both events in Scotland, and on God's greater plan, in which they were acting their own small, but important, part. It also highlights once again the Covenanter belief that reasonable arguments could be used to illuminate truth and enlighten an increasingly widespread English public who would, in turn, help enlighten the king.
As the voice of truth, the Covenanters continued to explain to Charles and his English subjects the real nature of his prerogative. In The declinatour and protestation of the some some-times pretended bishops, presented in the face of the last assembly, refuted and found futile (1639), which responded to an earlier printed statement by the bishops, the king's powers over the General Assembly were further curtailed.Footnote 22 A vast quantity of facts and precedents were mustered to help win reader support and the Covenanters unabashedly interrogated the limits of the royal prerogative and the role of a godly Assembly. Their Declinatour argued that the king may call a General Assembly, but denied ‘that it is sedition to hold an Assembly without his consent … consent should be sought earnestly: but if he be negligent or wilfully refuse, the kirk may hold her Assemblies, if they finde necessity’.Footnote 23 Put another way, the king could not dissolve an assembly that he had already called, nor could he refuse to call a new one, for it would simply meet without his consent. Any potential pardons were also rejected, since this would imply ‘offence, which is denyed’.Footnote 24 The Covenanters' actions were lawful and proper, and it was the king who should concede. In religious matters, the authority of Scotland's godly people assembled now explicitly trumped the authority of the king, and one can infer from the increasingly impressive propaganda campaign that the Covenanters were hoping to assign similar authority to the English public they were wooing, as manifested in the English parliament.
That the Covenanters dealt with Charles so bluntly is not exceptionally surprising, although it no doubt shocked the king. Several scholars have remarked that in Scotland, the king's position was less elevated and ceremonialized than in England, and the issues raised by a weak Scottish crown and a powerful nobility had been publicly recognized as early as 1521 in John Mair's Historia maioris Britanniae tam Angeliae quam Scotiae.Footnote 25 What should also be noted is that, despite a well-developed Scottish literature about resistance, the Covenanters were always very careful to avoid the language of violence against the king, and thus always maintained a rhetoric of legality and precedent. This conforms to the hypothesis that, when engaging their English public, the Covenanters were working from the principle that rational debate – aimed at the arrival of truth – would naturally and continuously convince people to support them and create sufficient pressure to force the king into concession without relying on physical coercion. They did not ask the English to take up arms, but to follow reasonable arguments, a process which would then likewise compel the king to be reasonable since he did not have the resources to fight the Scots on his own.
The Declinatour continued by describing which General Assemblies and acts created by them were lawful, and which were not. Contrary to their enemies' claims, the Covenanters claimed that the 1638 Glasgow Assembly was lawful, while the 1610 Glasgow Assembly, which appointed bishops as moderators, was ‘a pretended Assembly … The act of Parliament [in 1612] only an act ratifying the act of the same pretended assembly.’Footnote 26 While the bishops had argued that laymen were not allowed to participate in General Assemblies by the act of 1597, the Covenanters insisted that the act of 1568 took precedence and required their presence.Footnote 27 This debate engaged with the unresolved state of the Scottish Kirk, and the relative merits of episcopal and Presbyterian systems, and the argument over the role of lay elders thus generated radical statements about who was allowed to participate. The Covenanters claimed that the role of the General Assembly was to ‘root out Heresies, redresse abuses, and deliberate upon the common affairs’, which was a cause ‘common to the whole of the Kirk’. They concluded, then, that ‘that which concerneth all should be handled and approved by all’. Those who ‘have the gift to expound or open the meaning of scripture’ must have their voices heard, regardless of whether they were laymen or clerics.Footnote 28 This statement represents a willingness to expand the religio-political discussion to previously excluded groups. And while it must be noted that the Covenanters generally tended to maintain traditional hierarchies of authority, and that in this specific context the laymen happened to be social elites, it should also be remembered that the National Covenant circulated throughout the kingdom, and amongst people of all social ranks.Footnote 29
Although this discussion refers to the Covenanting public, it also has ramifications for their conceptualization of the English public which they hoped to persuade. In theory, Covenanter arguments allowed that anyone who possessed the requisite learning and godliness could enter any religious debate – either in Scotland or in England. While it could be argued that the actual confinement of the debate to the elites meant that there was a contradiction in Covenanting thinking, this is a contradiction which the original theorist of a public sphere acknowledged and explained. Jürgen Habermas's model of the public sphere may have many flaws, but his notion that it was predicated on the idea of openness, but restricted the practice of debate to those with the sufficient education and economic means to be free of tutelage, remains useful.Footnote 30 Within a model of the public sphere that aims to achieve consensus in ‘truth’, the idea of openness needs to possess considerable force in order to allow all those who possess right reason and insight to enter the discourse and ensure that the best arguments are available. But as feminist critiques of Habermas have demonstrated, the exclusive quality operating within any such model will, as a result, be equally potent. By the act of establishing categories for debate, such as reason or godliness, the forum either forces people to work within these parameters or forces them out of the public sphere altogether: e.g. one cannot enter if one argues from the heart instead of the head.Footnote 31 Truth established through consensus will be achieved more easily using this system because only the dominant group and their like-minded supporters are allowed to participate in debate, while the theoretically open model undermines critiques that a process of exclusion occurs.
This is precisely how the Covenanters' public was designed, and they spoke theoretically to all, but in practice often only to the elites, believing that debate required certain accepted rules to be successful. The Covenanters' model of public discourse did indeed invite any Englishman who possessed the necessary reason and godliness into their debate, and only excluded those who could not meet this requirement. For the Covenanters this was not hypocrisy. It was common sense: debate required people to speak the same ‘language’ for progress to be made, and as that language evolved, so to would the public that would be able to participate in disputes. The Covenanters' imagined public sphere can therefore be said to be strikingly open; however, this should not be taken to mean that it was democratic, since it was those with education and political experience who would naturally continue to dominate even in their expanded model of participation.
In February 1639, the Covenanters issued An information to all good Christians, a tract noted above for its emphasis on the misinformation that the English had received. As in previous tracts, grievances were outlined and brotherly love was invoked, but now the necessity of creating an English public to support the Covenanting cause was argued with new force since a scheme, ‘First plotted, then corrected and interlined in England, sent down to their associates the pretended Arch-bishops, and Bishops of this Kingdome, to bee printed and pressed upon the whole Church here, without order or consent’, intertwined the interest of England with those of Scotland. The Covenanters sought to put an end to it for the sake of both kingdoms.Footnote 32 They reminded their English brethren that they deplored ‘to offer the least act of hostilitie to our neighbour Kingdome, except in so farre as we shall bee necessitat in our own defence’, and concluded that this ‘sincere manifestation of our reall intentions, wee find our selves obliged, to publish for satisfying all good Subjects in our neighbour nation’.Footnote 33 Although the threat of defensive violence made its appearance, the real goal, and the issue which monopolized the majority of the tract, was thus once again the formation and sustenance of a body of English support. Again, the Covenanters were, in theory, addressing ‘all good Subjects’ instead of named individuals, or even the established ‘godly’ more generally, explaining through print that an English public was required not just to aid their cause, but also to stave off threats to the English polity. The Covenanters therefore offered their pamphlets as common objects around which the English public could coalesce and hoped their arguments would ‘satisfy’.Footnote 34 Given that Scotland was a nation with an under-developed printing trade, their investment demonstrates a belief in the importance of winning and sustaining an English public and alludes to the potential power they felt it could wield – and they were not alone in understanding the potential power of print.Footnote 35 As Kevin Sharpe has noted, Charles I placed the usurpation of print at the top of his list of Covenanting offences.Footnote 36 For Charles, the Covenanters had ‘assumed to themselves Regall power’ because, as he outlined in his February 1639 proclamation, ‘the Print is the Kings in all Kingdomes’. He therefore believed that the question quickly became ‘whether We are their King or not’, and commanded that no English subject receive Covenanting pamphlets.Footnote 37
In The remonstrance of the nobility, barrones, burgesses, ministers and commons, the Scots explained their need to publish, ‘lest by our silence the cause of God and our innocency in defending therefore, receive the smallest prejudice in the mindes of the well affected’, reaffirming their duty to argue for truth.Footnote 38The remonstrance, however, continued by arguing that ‘The pillars of true regal power are religion and righteousness, which by our oath we have endevored to establish.’Footnote 39 The implication was that power was only valid if it was religious and righteous, and that unrighteous power was lawfully resisted, in a context where Charles was beginning to look increasingly unrighteous. When the royal command was unjust, the tract continued, one must not obey because ‘to protest in a faire way, and as beseemeth duetifull subjects, is a customeable, legall and ordinare, and in some cases so necessare for preservation of right’.Footnote 40 For Joad Raymond, this is the first identification of a ‘growing conflict between regal and divine authority’.Footnote 41 While separate obligations to God and to the king had previously been noted in other pamphlets, even within the National Covenant itself, the Covenanters now acknowledged that these duties might conflict. Their view of their own public and its political agency, and that of the English public, from which they desperately needed support, was thus quickly moving away from the descending model of power dominant in English discourse. Although the Covenanters were still careful to avoid a language of regicide and violence against the king, they were now skirting dangerously close to the edges of sixteenth-century resistance theories by suggesting that the monarch could be forcibly led to see the error of his ways. According to such theories, everyone in the community had a responsibility for either the preservation of the true church, or of the common good – by means of force if necessary – depending on whether one follows John Knox or George Buchanan respectively.Footnote 42 Despite rejecting the extremes of this thinking, the Covenanters did embrace the core idea of popular agency and political participation, and grounded it upon public discussions which illuminated truth.
For the Covenanters, their position was defensive: ‘false and spitefull misinformations of the late pretended Prelats’ had created the threat of ‘armies and hostile invasion from England’, against which it was both ‘lawfull and necessarie’ for the Covenanters to defend themselves.Footnote 43 They were not actively rebelling or ordering the king about, but felt they were doing something more akin to exercising a power of veto upon ungodly actions. The Covenanters claimed that ‘Canterburie himself’ negotiated with Rome in a plot to join ‘both kingdomes in a bloody war, that by weakening both, Rome may be built in the midst of us’.Footnote 44 To remedy this situation, the Covenanters asked only that the English ‘supplicate his Majestie for calling a Parliament’ so that the true malefactors might be discovered.Footnote 45 This emphasized the role of the English parliament in providing counsel, and not only elevated it as the only institution which might presume to correct the king, but also argued for an English public which could demand its summoning. They no longer asked the English public that they had been cultivating merely to acknowledge support for the Scottish plight; now they called upon it to act in the political arena by demanding and participating in an English parliament. The plea, if successful, would resonate with the English desire for an airing of grievances and garner support from radical groups such as that centred around Thomas Scott, who had previously called for the ‘regulating activities of parliament’.Footnote 46
II
In the wake of these pamphlets, both the Covenanting forces and the king's army manoeuvred around the Anglo-Scottish border until 3 June 1639 when Charles, feeling himself outnumbered, accepted a Covenanter petition to treat for peace. For the rest of that summer and into the autumn, Charles negotiated with an unruly Scottish General Assembly, followed by an equally unruly Scottish parliament, neither of which would recognize his authority to deny ratification of the acts passed over the previous year, or to prorogue or dissolve either the General Assembly or parliament. By February 1640, both sides were openly arming for a ‘second round’. Charles thus called the Short Parliament in April in an attempt to garner much-needed financial and patriotic support against the Scots, but was met instead with demands and reproaches. According to Russell, as events came to a head, English support for the Scots, or at least disaffection with the king's approach to the Scots, began to swell.Footnote 47
The Covenanters now focused primarily on creating an image of unity with their English ‘brethren’. Sharpe suspects that their printed materials moved easily through well-established puritan networks, and that the Covenanters also simply scattered many pamphlets through the streets.Footnote 48 Although the theme of misinformation was maintained, the list of grievances now expanded to include civil issues, and the Covenanters pointedly named Archibishop Laud and the earl of Strafford as joint heads of the enemy faction. Their defensive posture was stubbornly maintained and the law of necessity was introduced as their primary defence for taking up arms. There was also a pragmatic obsession with the English Short Parliament and its outcome.Footnote 49 Each pamphlet had a specific function which emphasized a different issue, such as calming English fears about a possible Scottish invasion, but all the issues were raised in all the literature. Therefore, the most explicit examples are provided here from a variety of pamphlets and organized by theme.
In A remonstrance concerning the present troubles (April 1640), the Covenanters' goal was to persuade the Short Parliament to decide in their favour by refusing to vote Charles a subsidy. That the English parliament not provide this subsidy was critical because such a vote would be construed as support for the war, which would then, as Russell notes, taint English resistance with disloyalty and ‘deprive the Scots of their strongest propaganda point: the appeal to English dissidents’.Footnote 50 They therefore wrote that although ‘we may justly suspect the calling of you … bee rather to perswade you to bring oyle then water to quench the flame … we are all, as it were, one house, if it fall we shall be all buried in the ruines, wee are all embarqued in one ship, if it perish or split upon the rocks of division, hardly can we escape’.Footnote 51 Similarly, in Information from the estaits of the kingdome of Scotland, to the kingdome of England (April 1640) the ‘storms which threatend both kingdoms’ are described to the English and the tract concludes with a prayer beseeching God to ‘give wisedome and courage to all those good people in England who will interpose themselves by pleading for us, and impeding the mischief intended’.Footnote 52 Consistently, an argument was thus made that the English and the Scottish publics needed to work together. Their interests were described as the same, as were the threats which they faced. War was the disordered, irrational response which the Covenanters had been patiently and continually arguing against. Instead they wanted the English public to act as a body, aiding the Covenanters by persuading and intervening with the king.
Critically, the English parliament's role, according to the Covenanters, was to support and protect the English public – creating a forum wherein the opinions so carefully generated through the preceding public discussions might be given political force. Thus, the Covenanters complained that parliaments were supposed to ‘ease the grievances of the subject’ but had recently only been called to ‘supply the necessities of the Prince’.Footnote 53 Furthermore, the Covenanters reminded those sitting that ‘it was your glorie to bee the faithfull guardians of the Subjects right, it can not but blemish your reputation to be found now the overthrowers of your brethrens libertie’.Footnote 54 Parliament should persuade the king of the true nature of the issues in much the same way that the Covenanters had persuaded the English public. The ‘pressures and grievances of the Subjects daily more and more increased’ only because Charles had recently been deprived of these ‘faithfull counsels’, and parliament alone could rectify this situation by providing the appropriate advice.Footnote 55
Protecting parliament's function in government was especially important because, according to Robert Baillie's Ladensium autokatakpiΣis, or the canterburians self-conviction (April 1640), absolutism threatened both kingdoms. Although most princes were content to be ‘limited within the bounds of the laws’ and usually believed that ‘the greatest glorie of their prerogative’ lay in the upholding of those laws, Baillie argued that the Arminians – led by Laud – were leading Charles astray.Footnote 56 According to the tract, the Arminians wanted to convince him that he was ‘far above all law’ in matters of both church and state, that he could change the confession of faith at his whim, and that parliament was a mere council ‘which in the making or anulling of his Lawes, hee may use or note use as hee pleaseth’.Footnote 57 Therefore, he noted that the Canterburians hoped that ‘Soveraigntie being advanced to an unmeasurable height, may be a statelier horse for them to ride upon’.Footnote 58 Resistance was thus necessary to combat the Arminian and absolutist threats and to preserve the vision of the body politic which the Covenanters had so carefully laid out. Moreover, the Covenanters claimed that resistance
hath been the tenet of our Church since the reformation, it hath been the right and practice of our Kingdome since the first foundation, a number of instances thereof approved in our standing acts of Parliament unrepealed to this day, it hath been the practice of all reformed churches abroad, wherein, by Queen Elizabeth, King Iames & King Charles they have been allowed, and the most of them countenanced with powerfull assistance of men and money.Footnote 59
The legitimacy of resistance was also argued from the law of nature, or the law of necessity, and the extremity of the situation was held up as justification for equally extreme actions. In The intentions of the armie of the kingdome of Scotland, declared to their brethren in England (August 1640), issued just before their march into England, the Covenanters noted that ‘wayting for our owne destruction at the discretion of our mercilesse enemies … is not onely against Religion, but Nature; teaching and commanding us to study our own preservation’.Footnote 60 It also now, according to The lawfulnesse of our expedition into England manifested (August 1640), required offence and ‘all men know and confesse, what is the great force of necessity, and how it doth justifie actions otherwayes unwarrantable’.Footnote 61 During the first Bishops' War, the Covenanters had protested that they would not take up arms unless ‘first invaded’ by the English, and that it was always far ‘from our intention first or last, to offer the least act of hostilitie to our neighbour Kingdome’.Footnote 62 By 1640, they were asking ‘whether it be wisdome and piety to keep our selves within the Borders till our throats be cut, and our Religion, Lawes, and Countrey be destroyed’.Footnote 63 Wisdom and piety, two traits which the Covenanters had continually deployed in their attempts to persuade the English that they were bearers of truth, were now mustered in defence of armed resistance. While the English parliament still remained the authoritative arena for persuading the king, the Covenanters were now using rhetorical appeals to truth and reason to justify force. The English were not asked to participate, but they were presented with the notion that, in extreme cases, public consensus could legitimate any action demanded by necessity.
Furthermore, in both The intentions of the armie and The lawfulnesse of our expedition, the Covenanters carefully outlined that an offensive war would specifically be undertaken to support the English public and should thus be supported by it. The Covenanters would attack only the ‘prevalent Faction of Papists & Prelates, the Authors of so many woes to both Nations’, and they noted that to ‘come into England, and to pursue them’ was not the same as to ‘invade the Kingdome’.Footnote 64 Once in England, ‘when our own moneyes and meanes are spent’, they would ‘crave nothing but upon sufficient surety of repayment, how soon possibly it can be made’, although this should not be necessary since ‘the rule of humanity and gratitude will teach them to furnish us with necessaries’.Footnote 65 When the Covenanters' army did actually cross the border, they distributed a broadsheet entitled Information from the Scottish nation, to all the true English, concerning the present expedition, reiterating these statements and claiming that ‘we desire nothing but what in the like extreamity … we would most gladly upon the like Declaration grant unto you, comming with your Supplications to the Kings Majestie, were he living among us’.Footnote 66 The Scots and the English would be held together in the face of clashing armies on account of their common cause: overthrowing the corrupt bishops. The two publics – the original Scottish Covenanting public, and the carefully cultivated English supporting public – would come together since the Covenanters asked only the same liberty to argue their case before the king that they encouraged the English to seek through parliament for themselves.
Although the Covenanters framed their narrative in terms of a ‘popish plot’ in its broadest sense, it is striking that they risked associations with alternative ideas about popular conspiracy and theories of resistance.Footnote 67 Recent research on seventeenth-century fears about popish plots attests to the prevalence of this interpretative mode of understanding crises, and Alastair Bellany has even argued that, after the 1588 threat of the Armada and the Gunpowder Treason of 1605, ‘contemporaries were culturally predisposed to take such rumours seriously’.Footnote 68 It would thus have made strategic sense for the Covenanters to restrict their printed complaints to the exposition of such plots. Instead, they tried to navigate between the two, putting forward a positive theory of popular politics – one less antagonistic to the monarch than the sixteenth-century models, but more complex than the basic English belief in the need to combat popish plots. Unfalteringly loyal, this theory nevertheless allowed for the correction of the monarch if his will conflicted with that of God, and redefined the role of parliament, according it a much more prominent position. Guardian of the ‘just Liberty of the Subject’, parliament was presented as the supreme counsellor to the king.Footnote 69 Its duty was to preserve good order in the state and to protect the reformation. In doing this, parliament would be guided by the public who stood in defence of the church. Were any part of this system threatened, especially the kirk – since regression in reformation would invite God's wrath – the public had a right to self-defence, and that self-defence could take whatever form was required by necessity. And since the English and the Scottish publics were encouraged to support each other, they were a force to be reckoned with.
III
Over the course of two years of fighting and arguing, the Covenanters therefore became increasingly specific about their grievances and rights as a public and the role that an imagined complementary English public should play. Ignoring the well-studied distaste of Stuart monarchs for vulgar meddling in matters of state, they spoke to this English public in what can be described, in many instances, as a Habermasian mode: believing that reasoned argument would illuminate truth, persuade a large body of Englishmen to support them, and thus pressure the king and his advisers into correcting their errors by forcing and directing a parliament which would stabilize the two nations in godly consensus. In 1638 they had begun by describing their loyalty, orderliness, truthfulness and friendship to the English, but the requirements of polemic pushed them towards a much more explicitly articulated vision of the rights of the people when acting as a public.Footnote 70 As a public with public grievances, then, the Covenanters not only defended their actions and invoked their assumed rights, but also described those of the English public who supported them. They demanded that conciliar institutions like Parliament and the General Assembly be allowed to meet freely in order to advise the king properly, and they invoked natural rights to self-defence as insurance against counsel being ignored.
Covenanter discussions about the aims of their propaganda campaign or the importance of cultivating an English public are more scarce in letters and other manuscript evidence, but they do exist, and they help to clarify the Covenanting agenda. Most notably, Robert Baillie, the author of Ladensium autokatakpiΣis, later a commissioner to the Westminster Assembly, kept meticulous records of all his correspondence which highlights a firm belief in the importance of fostering a body of English support that could reinforce the Covenanting movement. Baillie felt that he could guide this public by employing rational arguments and distributing them through printed texts. In a letter to his cousin, William Spange, Baillie recounted that upon receiving news that Charles was preparing an army, ‘Our first care, was to send in a true Information to England of all our purposes.’Footnote 71 He noted that the Covenanters once again ‘laboured to clear ourselves of all slanders’, and that the result was that they had ‘satisfied so fullie the hearts of that nation’ that their cause ‘began to be much more pitied then before, and our inraged partie, the bishops, to be the more detested’.Footnote 72 The Covenanters' enemies failed because they pressured the king into issuing declarations which were ‘contrare to all reason and law’, and because the English were ‘now sufficientlie informed, that the Scotts quarrel and their own was bot one’. Baillie therefore thought that the key to winning support was the following of ‘reason and law’, and believed that distributing reasoned arguments through print was the best way to ‘sufficiently inform’ the English public, which he referred to also as the entire ‘country’.Footnote 73 This process would make the English public impervious to the trickery of evil counsellors; and, since the Covenanting cause was clearly just, ensure its support.
Baillie also clearly believed that the English public he was speaking to was potentially varied in its social composition. While preparing Ladensium autokatakpiΣis, he wrote to another leading Covenanter, Archibald Johnston of Wariston, that ‘my text [is] short enough; my length is onlie in my marginall probations, which any common or hastie reader may passe at his pleasure’, welcoming both impatient and unskilled readers. He therefore expected his readers were of different backgrounds and invested different amounts of interest and consideration when reading his arguments. Nevertheless, he still felt the need ‘to give a testimonie to the undermyndit and oppressed trueth; that the posteritie, seeing the true ground of our sufferings, may judge the more charitablie of all our poroceedings bygane and to come in this great and deep action’. Footnote 74 Thus, truth would win over all of these disparate Englishmen, creating a unified body of support ‘charitable’ to the Covenanting plight.
Although David Dickson, Covenanter and moderator of the 1639 General Assembly, did not address the propaganda campaign directly, his thoughts on debate complement Baillie's. During the Edinburgh Assembly, Dickson asked the high commissioner to voice any concerns explicitly because ‘we have said or done nothing but what may well byde the light, and we are able to convince, in reason, a reasonable man, such as your Grace is’. He then noted that ‘here, in a manner, are verie confident that the more we be put to give our reasons, the clearer our cause shall be, and we shall be able to give more satisfaction’.Footnote 75 Although the debate here was confined not only to Scotland, but even more narrowly to the General Assembly, it clearly demonstrates that the Covenanters felt rational debate could force people to shift allegiances once truth was revealed. Reason had real power, and printed tracts allowed the Covenanters to distribute the same reasoned arguments they used in their Assemblies to a larger audience across the border.
Unfortunately, records of exactly how many copies of their printed arguments the Covenanters produced do not exist, but Raymond has estimated that print runs were as high as 10,000 copies per tract.Footnote 76 Precisely to whom the Covenanters distributed this literature is also unclear, although fragmentary evidence suggests that they sought to reach as wide an audience as possible. Edward Rossingham, in his manuscript newsletters, accused the Covenanters of regularly sending pamphlets through the post, his suspicions being confirmed when Francis Windebank, secretary of state under King Charles, began opening letter packets.Footnote 77 The list of intended recipients reveals a range of social standing: a gentleman, a merchant, a glass seller, a draper, an apprentice, a factor, a comfitmaker, and a woman, whilst the rest of the names on Windebank's list do not include occupations.Footnote 78 Furthermore, Rossingham recorded that books were simply scattered about in city streets and at sports gatherings, and that when proclamations were made to surrender them to the authorities, there were apparently numerous copies in circulation.Footnote 79 Most alarming for English authorities, copies of various Covenanting pamphlets had even reached troops in the king's army.Footnote 80 The potential readership was thus clearly diverse. The Covenanters may have written personalized letters to army commanders, and delivered ‘notes’ to the mayors of Berwick and Carlisle, but as argued above, this does not represent a contradiction in Covenanter thinking or restrict their vision of the English public to the elite.Footnote 81 They simply appealed to everyone, recognizing that social elites would probably prove most able to participate in the debate and also be most useful to the Covenanting cause.
It is important to note that up to this point, the Covenanter appeal to their English public has suggested that they conceptualized public debate and the role of publics in a roughly Habermasian way: rational-critical debate, theoretically open to all, would eventually achieve consensus, forcing government to concede in the face of self-evident truth. But there is one crucial respect in which Covenanter thinking does not fit the Habermasian model. Whereas Habermas was interested in how to reach consensus about secular issues, the Covenanters saw their debates as moderated by God, and aimed, ultimately, at securing religious discipline. According to Baillie, it was Christ who gathered people into assemblies ‘ruileing his awin house and effaires in all the dominiounes of the Earth’.Footnote 82 And although the Covenanting movement depended on consensus being reached to achieve success, reason alone was insufficient, both for them and their English supporters. Thus, Archibald Johnston reflected in his diary that debate ‘maid me earnestly pray that the Lord wald read thir difficulties; unit our mynds and judgments’.Footnote 83 In some instances, reason needed a little help from faith. This is unsurprising, given that the Covenanters' constant goal was to secure the Presbyterian discipline – ultimately bargaining with both the parliament and the crown during the civil wars in an attempt to achieve this – but it is an important distinction nonetheless.
But what sort of public, or publics did the Covenanters actually get? In practice, the Habermasian model is simply too tidy, and the Covenanters were faced with the reality that not only had they not convinced everyone in England that their cause was just, but that those they had convinced might not be the public they wanted. That not all Englishmen supported the Covenanters is clear, and the reasons for this are related to broader questions about the causes of the wars of the three kingdoms. Scholars have interrogated the role of the Covenanters in the breakdown of English politics and, in different ways, Conrad Russell and John Adamson have argued that support for the Scots was a defining feature of future parliamentarians, while those who disagreed with their aims were likely to support the crown – Adamson, reading support for the Covenanters as merely convenient for noble factions, rather than as reflective of shared grievances or convictions.Footnote 84 Sharpe's account of the relative tranquility of the personal rule also seems to imply that the breakdown in English politics was intimately related to the turmoil caused by the interjection of Scottish propaganda, and eventually of war. For him the Scots ruptured consensus instead of creating it.Footnote 85 Peter Donald is more moderate. Although his study acknowledged that the Scottish rebellion had ramifications in England, and that there was a public debate generated by it, he has doubted that it was the ‘main problem in England’.Footnote 86 Donald's position is useful, and, as Harris has emphasized, it is indeed impossible to explain anything as complex as the civil wars by relying solely on one factor. That said, it would appear that Covenanter propaganda and the Bishops' Wars have a role to play, if not necessarily the primary one, in the process of political breakdown. The propaganda campaign, and the attempt to generate an English public, in particular, unleashed a force which neither the Covenanters, nor anyone else, knew how to control. The English people began to organize themselves into publics, deploying ever increasing volumes of print, a phenomenon that has been well charted for the 1640s.Footnote 87
The public that did support the Covenanters was therefore not exactly what they had originally imagined. Beyond the fact that it simply did not represent all of England, it was wild and unruly – and one of the best examples of this is the appearance of the pro-Covenanter The beast is wounded, or information from Scotland, concerning their reformation (1638). Although the imprint claims that it was produced in Scotland, the Covenanters were not responsible for it and it has been suggested that it originated in Amsterdam.Footnote 88 The tract is relatively short, and the main body of text is a standard Covenanter-style account of recent disquiet in Scotland. What differentiates it from other Covenanter tracts is, however, a running dialogue in the margins that parallels each Scottish grievance with an English one. The language is simple, yet fiery, and Raymond has observed that the style is reminiscent of the infamous Marprelate tracts, which also relied heavily on marginalia.Footnote 89 Instead of formally debating abuses, the tract was vehement in its anti-episcopalianism, hurling epithets and personal abuses. The bishops were called ‘little foxes’, ‘Locusts’, and ‘venemous snakes’, a faction led by Archbishop Laud and the earl of Strafford.Footnote 90 They were tyrannous, and proved that ‘if you [the Scots] complaine of oppression, and thinke you have just cause for it, to wound the Beast, What may wee [the English] say of our oppressions, which are more for number, more heinous for nature, longer for continance, and more common and generall’.Footnote 91 Robert Baillie was not amused, noting that ‘That Wounded Beast, is a beastlie piece; we all myslike it.’Footnote 92
Despite the Covenanters' distaste for the style, The beast is wounded echoed arguments that they had been disseminating through print, and reflects an involvement in the same debates. According to the marginalia, recent Scottish events provided a worthy example for the English who should consider ‘what cause thou hast to free thy selfe, out of the hands of these theeves & murderers, who have many yeares bound thee … with their Canons, Articles, Injunctions … to row for them, Romes boat’. Although the anonymous author noted that the Scottish Prayer Book Rebellion was too riotous a means of expelling the bishops, he would nonetheless ‘be glad to see them whipt out [of England], by the K. & Parliam’.Footnote 93 ‘Our State’, he continued, ‘hath learned now of Scotland, how to bee eased of their burden.’Footnote 94 The pamphlet was thus clearly arguing that the English should follow the Covenanters' example. It explained that God had decreed through the Covenanters' success that innovations must not be allowed in his church and that the English must follow the Scottish example or face his wrath. Furthermore, the tract borrowed and emphasized Covenating concepts of conditional loyalty and public agency. The marginalia claimed that ‘As the 3 Nobles in Daniel were the Kings good and dutifull subjects, albeit they bowed not before the image; So are the Nobilitie, Gentrey & Ministers in Scotland, good & dutifull subjects, although they refuse the service-booke.’Footnote 95 In fact, they were better subjects than the English were because of this. Serving God properly was portrayed as the best service to the king, and ‘it is the shame & blot of our Nation, that in matter of Gods worship, we are as our Princes are, and ready to turne and change as they doe, and what doth this argue, but that men serve not the Lord Jesus, but their owne bellies’.Footnote 96 The Covenanters' call to choose sides had been taken up, and this tract added to the discourse around which disaffected subjects could coalesce. But it was not in the mode that the Covenanters sanctioned. Truth was illuminated more by providential victory than by faith and reason, and conclusions relied on spite and venom more than considered argument. Furthermore, the whole issue of resistance, which the Covenanters treated with delicacy and caution, was here taken up as a cudgel.
Equally important, there were five Covenanting tracts printed or reprinted by the Cloppenburg press which also reflected engagement with the Covenanters' propaganda campaign. These, in order of appearance, were: An information from the states of the kingdome of Scotland (?March 1640), A remonstrance concerning the present troubles (?April 1640), The intentions of the armie of the kingdome of Scotland (?August 1640), The lawfulnesse of our expedition into England manifested (October 1640), and Our demands of the English lords manifested (October 1640).Footnote 97 The first three appeared either simultaneously with, or very shortly after, their Edinburgh cousins were printed, the fourth was reprinted several months after the original Scottish edition, and the last was the only original work dealing with the subject matter to emerge from the Cloppenburg press. According to Como, all these tracts were printed in England by English puritans who, despite their lack of Presbyterian leanings, exploited the Scottish situation to put forward their own disparate radical ideas. The Covenanting discourse, then, was momentarily taken up by the English radical religious fringe and ‘puritans of subtly different shadings were willing to put aside or ignore latent differences that would later become painfully clear’. A public had formed, self-constituted by recognition of and support for a body of literature, certain political acts, and the need for religious reform in a vague sense.Footnote 98 This much was precisely what the Covenanters hoped for.
The Cloppenburg editions, however, also added a distinctly English twist to several of the tracts. While content replicating Edinburgh literature remained consistent, the title pages of both The lawfulnesse of our expedition and Our demands of the English lords stated that they had been printed by one ‘Margery Mar-Prelat’.Footnote 99 This was a pointed allusion to the boisterous and railing personal attacks on English episcopacy undertaken by Martin Marprelate in 1589 and 1590, during his well-known campaign to involve a more popular audience in English religious controversy.Footnote 100 Como has aptly interpreted this as being suggestive of a continuity of radical religious ‘tactics and political style’ from Marprelate to the civil war and in many ways, use of the pseudonym served as recognition that the Covenanter rebellion held meaning for English religious culture, placing it within the historical narrative of internal English debate.Footnote 101 The addition of the name acknowledged the unity of cause which the Covenanters had so determinedly argued for, and took it one step further through its anglicization of the issues. It also, however, alluded to traditional styles of argumentation that the Covenanters abhorred and thereby emphasized that the goals and principles which drove the Cloppenberg press were not exactly the same as those motivating the Covenanters. Marprelate had been raucous, bawdy, and too uncouth even for his fellow English Presbyterians. This was not an association that would have conformed easily with Covenanting visions of how the English public should behave.
Other English men and women who were engaged in the broader debate, but who did not participate in the printed exchange, did not behave themselves any better. While some, admittedly, piously defended the Scots as being within their rights, as good subjects, or as reformers of England, others were less respectful.Footnote 102 Rossingham reported that libels were cast into the king's privy lodgings and privy gardens, which were somewhat alarmist in character, one noting that the difference between the nations might prove more fatal than the threat either of the Spanish Armada or of the Gunpowder Plot.Footnote 103 Disorder among the king's forces has been well documented by Mark Fissel, and probably reflected, at least in part, an anxiety about fighting fellow Protestants and an agreement with Covenanters that reforms were necessary. Altar rails were broken, alleged papists were attacked and even murdered, and shots were discharged in the royal camp.Footnote 104 These actions were effective as statements of discontent with the current royal policy, but far from the more aloof moral pressure which the Covenanters sought to create. Furthermore, the inactivity on the part of the English elites was driving Baillie mad. ‘If the English wil now be beasts and dastardlie cowards’, he wrote, then ‘they must lie without any man's pitie under their slavish servitude for ever: We put little doubt bot we shall get for our selves fair enough conditions; bot it wil be to our great regrate, if we get not all the King's dominions to our happinesse.’Footnote 105 It was proving painfully difficult to mobilize the patient, ordered, rational public that the Covenanters desired. Reactions and support from this disparate group were often self-interested and emotive – and this did not even include the likes of those who could never be persuaded of the justness of the Covenanters' cause. Incorporating some men, such as secretary Windebank's son Thomas, into the Covenanters' ideal public sphere, was simply impossible. This was because Thomas kept his spirits up with the hopes of ‘rubbing, fubbing, and scrubbing those scurvy, filthy, dirty, nasty, lousy, itchy, scabby, shitten, stinking, slovenly, snotty-nosed, logger-headed, foolish, insolent, proud, beggarly, impertinent, absurd, grout-headed, villainous, barbarous, beastial, false, lying, roguish, devilish, long-eared, short-haird, damnable, atheistical, puritanical crew of the Scotch Covenant’.Footnote 106 The Covenanters may have won the Bishops' Wars, but they most certainly did not succeed in generating the type of English public they desired. Indeed, the Covenanters awoke many publics, ranging from those rationally seeking debate to those founded on venom and spleen, blindly lashing out at authority. They had employed a powerful tool, and its success encouraged others to try to do the same, but it was not a tool which was so easily controlled, so unitary, or so focused as initially envisaged.
IV
Covenanting literature offers a window into the conceptualization and importance of publics in this period. Acutely aware of the potential of print to reach a diverse English audience, the Covenanters pursued a rhetorical campaign alongside their military one. They spoke not to defined individuals, but to the English as a whole, hoping to find sufficient sympathetic readers to create a mirror Covenanting public in England. Once such a public coalesced, they hoped that it would pressure the king, through parliament, to cease military preparations and to concede to the Covenanters' demands. In one respect, they seem to have been successful. First and foremost, they won the war. More specifically, however, the author of The beast is wounded clearly supported Covenanting principles and desired that the English follow suit. He also entered the printed debate himself, providing another perspective that might better expose the truth. The Cloppenburg press also responded eagerly to the Covenanter appeal to enter public discussions, and it would have required an entire network of religious radicals support it. Although we know nothing about the press's location or the binders and distributors of its tracts, the Marprelate press with which it intentionally associated itself had represented a community effort and had hidden in a variety of private homes between 1588 and 1589.Footnote 107 Those involved in producing Covenanter tracts on the Cloppenburg press can be seen as a self-constituted and active association, producing new material in an attempt to expand the scope of the radical public – but this was a public which, according to Como, would fracture in the wake of the Scottish rebellion.Footnote 108
The overall response to the Covenanters was also already fractured in 1638–40, and when it came to ensuring that the English public shared unified goals and conclusions perfectly paralleling their own, the Covenanters were not so successful. They failed to convince everyone, and those they did convince were not always interested in rational or godly debate. People took up the issues, and the whole notion of public appeal, for a range of reasons – sometimes their arguments and conclusions overlapped with the Covenanters and sometimes they did not. Put another way, the public was not so much a sphere as a series of overlapping and competing organic forms, which expanded and contracted according to various rhythms. Scholars influenced by the work of Michael Bakhtin have argued that public discourse is ‘wild’ and that the language upon which it is based is slippery and can be dislodged from its initial context.Footnote 109 This is precisely what the Covenanters encountered in The beast is wounded, allusions to Marprelate, noble delays, and unruly English soldiers. But the Covenanter tracts did demonstrate, through their part in the Scottish victory, that publics had a political role to play and therefore encouraged similar strategies of communication during the wars of the three kingdoms. That said, the disparity between thought and practice would continue to haunt those that followed their example. Part of the appeal of speaking to the public is, after all, that one is indeed speaking to the public, and the fiction that this could be accomplished – if only one could deploy the right arguments – would fuel the now familiar explosion of print which occurred in the 1640s.
