Cheshire under Charles I was an ancient palatinate still retaining elements of self-government. Its long-settled, intermarried gentry rarely left the county. Delegation and consensus were preferred over factional or religious strife. In the 1970s, the county was the focus of one of the best-known county studies, authored by the leading civil war historian John Morrill. Since then, the idea of court versus county, of inward-looking counties opposed to the center, has faded, challenged by the work of Clive Holmes and Ann Hughes pointing to the strong forces and structures of centralization in the early modern state. In Gentry Culture and the Politics of Religion: Cheshire on the Eve of Civil War, Richard Cust and Peter Lake's stated aim is to revisit the county study as a “viable unit through which to analyse the politics of early modern England” (1) and, in the light of newly discovered primary source evidence, challenge some of Morrill's arguments.
This is a book of two halves, each with its own arguments, interrelated through an overarching interest in high politics and religion, and the individuals involved. In the first part, Cust and Lake argue that the Cheshire palatinate, a five-day's journey from London, should have typified the insular county community, but did not. Its gentry were well connected to the center, and gained much of their local status from performing the administrative roles central government created for them. They knew about events in London and at court through newsletters and correspondence with sons at university or the Inns of Court. Yet the county community model is still useful as an ideological construct, a fiction of permanence, harmony, and virtue, masking a somewhat different social reality. Many of the Cheshire gentry are categorized here as “patriots,” uniting godly self-fashioning with dedication to public service. Yet their godliness was flexible, encompassing an enthusiasm for horse racing, bowling, and other sports rarely permitted to the godly clergy.
Cust and Lake broaden the focus of the traditional county study by using examples of architecture and decoration. Most revealing are the 186 county coats of arms on display in the great hall of Adlington, arranged in order of status. Ingenious wooden frames made reordering possible as families’ perceived ranking changed. What appeared an unchanging hierarchy was more akin to a league table, with families moving up and down as they prospered or fell in the turbulent early seventeenth-century economy. Anxieties over this contestable status made the gentry all the keener to propagate the idea of a community of honor within the county as a symbolic construct.
Subsequent sections of the book are informed and sophisticated histoires événementelles, dissecting particular events and conjunctures in Cheshire religious politics. Aligning itself with recent academic interest in the religious middle ground, one focus is on moderate puritan John Ley and his relationship with Bishop Bridgeman, while another revisits and reconceptualizes the pre–Civil War petitioning campaign of Sir Thomas Aston, which is seen as representative of moderate prayer-book Protestantism by Judith Maltby and John Morrill. Aston, it suggests, was more a shrewd and skillful political operator who, excluded from representing his county in parliament, turned to a mass-petitioning campaign to attract the notice of the king and court. His moderation was calculated and opportunistic; he eventually revealed himself by becoming an aggressive royalist. Truer moderates were Ley and the gentry “patriot” group, still desperately seeking accommodation in 1642, insisting that king and Parliament were like “Hippocrates” [Siamese] twins who “must laugh and cry, live and die together,” as all possibility of consensus collapsed around them in a new world of polarized opinion (339).
Presumptions of an instinctive popular attachment to prayer-book religion certainly merit questioning. The authors contend that the prefaces under which people signed the Cheshire prayer-book petition of 1641, taken as key evidence for traditionalism by Maltby and Morrill, were actually quite varied. Those ambiguously referring to the “settling” of the liturgy could have encompassed the possibility of negotiated reform. This is surely significant, albeit not unnoticed by Maltby, whose careful exposition of the way the prayer-book petitions were collected is acknowledged, while rightly challenging her conclusion that individuals within parishes were unpressured to sign.
Cust and Lake's interests lie in early seventeenth-century gentry culture, elite politics, and religious controversy. The reader does not find much here on how the Cheshire elites made their money; their influence on their tenants, pertinent when thinking about building civil war allegiances, is discussed only in the conclusion. Nor do we really learn what it meant to be a female member of the Cheshire elite, although their brief appearances here suggest some were formidable: Lady Cholmondley domineering over her parish church; the wife of JP Thomas Marbury who would not kneel for communion. The first part is thematic, the rest episodic, so we do not get such a broad overview of Cheshire's clergy community as we do of the gentry. Sometimes the quest for a distinctive line of argument strains credibility, with Brereton's 1642 petition against the “abominable idol of the mass” (perhaps encompassing the prayer-book, often thus described by its opponents) even equated to the “most puritan possible reading” of the Aston's pro-prayer book petition. Claims (conflating royalism with Laudianism?) that Aston was “very likely” a “crypto-Laudian” seem doubtful (294, 359). Did Laudian clericalism ever appeal as much to the gentry as to the clergy? The word itself was unknown until the 1670s, and religious positions were rarely so well defined or fixed. Samuel Rutter, mentioned only in passing for criticizing the treatment of William Prynne (211, 213, 223), eventually gained a Restoration bishopric for helping the royalist Countess of Derby during the siege of Lathom House.
Gentry Culture is aimed at a knowledgeable, academic audience who will learn much by steering themselves through the book's denser sections and some ill-advised or overused colloquialisms. It broadens our understanding of the ideology and material culture of the pre–Civil War gentry, and it shows how, even in counties with long efforts at consensus, tensions in the localities ratcheted up and became insurmountable only in the months leading up to the start of the wars.
