In the autumn of 1641, English contemporaries reacted with horror to the news of the Irish Rebellion. Along with appalling reports of the ‘ravishing of women’ and the transformation of ‘Churches [into] slaughterhouses’ came the chilling prospect that the atrocities might well be a sign of divine wrath. Written ‘to excite the English Nation’, A briefe declaration warned that after the destruction of ‘those hopefull Plantations in the County of Cavan, Farmannagh, Tyrone, Ardmagh, Longford, Letran, [and] Monehans with divers others’, England might expect ‘that curse upon your soulves denounced, Judges the 5. and Verse 23. Curse yee, curse yee them bitterly, that came not to the helpe of the Lord against the wicked.’Footnote 1 This vague, if ominous, prediction became slightly clearer on 14 November when John Goodwin warned his congregation at St Stephen's Coleman Street, a noted puritan enclave in London, that letting ‘Ireland goe’ would seriously jeopardize ‘the peace and safety of your own Land and Nation’. Once Goodwin's sermon appeared in print, the title page cited the Old Testament Judges 5:23 directly: ‘Curse yee Meroz (said the Angell of the Lord) curse yee bitterly the Inhabitants thereof; because they came not out to the helpe of the LORD, to the helpe of the Lord against the mighty.’Footnote 2
Contemporaries were familiar enough with the fifth chapter of the Old Testament Book of Judges, the Song of Deborah, which told of the time when God commanded the Israelites to take up arms to defeat the ‘mighty’ Canaanite armies under the command of the general Sisera.Footnote 3 Yet, despite a steadily growing discussion of the importance and complexity of scriptural exegesis and annotations, it remains clear that early modern texts and commentaries can do little to clarify who the Merozites were, or where they once lived.Footnote 4 The first account of Meroz in English came from William Patten's 1575 The calendar of scripture, a translation of obscure biblical words in which it was described only as ‘Aquae sacramentorum’, ‘the waters of othes [sic]’.Footnote 5 Printed in English in 1643, Giovanni Diodati's biblical annotations explained that ‘Meroz’ was ‘not any where else to be found’ in the Bible outside of the verse in Judges, while in 1645 the clergyman John Downame felt confident enough to claim that Meroz ‘was (as some think) a city neer the river Kishon’, but that it was in fact ‘a place now unknown’.Footnote 6
While the location of Meroz remained a mystery, the reason for its demise was beyond doubt: the Merozites had failed to heed the Almighty's call to war and in doing so were divinely cursed. There was of course little unique about this message; contemporaries could easily pick from any number of scriptural passages that illustrated divine anger over transgressions. Thus Nathaniel Carpenter chose Matthew 11:21 in 1640 when he asked if ‘London with her Sister Citties of great Britaine’ would stand under God's judgement and face ruin as the cities of Chorazin and Bethsaida had for refusing to accept the miracles performed by Jesus.Footnote 7 With the arrival of the Civil War, ministers unfurled a seemingly endless supply of verses that displayed the Lord's vengeance. Thomas Case explicated on Psalm 68:1 in a fast-day sermon to the Commons in October 1642, ‘Let God arise, and led his enemies be scattered, let them that hate him, flee before him’, and in January 1643 John Arrowsmith chose to preach on Leviticus 26:25, ‘I will bring a Sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my Covenant.’Footnote 8 Similar examples abound in literature from the period. And yet, in a culture replete with admonitory verses and curses, Meroz would become an unusually – perhaps singularly – familiar example of divine reprisal.
The popularity of the curse is explained, in part at least, by the fact that it provided an example of providential obligation and consequence that mirrored England's self-perceived responsibility to support an international ‘Protestant cause’.Footnote 9 In late 1641, this meant that the English were bound to providing aid for their suffering brethren in Ireland, just as they had been expected to relieve the Palatinate and help Huguenots during the 1620s, and support the Dutch Protestants earlier in Elizabeth's reign. Transposing the meaning of the curse was simple enough; the English, like the former inhabitants of Meroz, were obligated to come to the aid of fellow Protestants, who were analogous to the ancient tribes of Israel. Not only did this relationship seem obvious in light of a long tradition in which the English had provided support for their godly brethren on the continent, but it also bolstered the English propensity to see themselves as God's chosen people, as modern equivalents to the Israelites.Footnote 10 Thus, Stephen Marshall was confident that the warning contained in Judges 5:23 would resonate with the audience in St Sepulchre's Church, London, just as it had a half mile east and a fortnight earlier when Goodwin addressed the godly parishioners of Coleman Street. Preaching with no shortage of rhetorical flair, Marshall admitted that he was unable to ‘tell whether it was fire or’ one of the Ten Plagues of Egypt that had destroyed the city and inhabitants of Meroz. But he was ‘most certaine’ of one thing: ‘Gods curse is the ruin of those people on whom it lights’ since nowhere in ‘the whole booke of God’ was the ‘city mentioned once againe’.Footnote 11 Doubtless few mistook his meaning; the English would suffer a terrible fate if they refused God's call to help suffering Protestants in Ireland. Printed as Meroz curse, Marshall's text quickly ran through three editions with the intention that they be ‘published’ to reach a wide audience, as the title page notes, ‘in one sheet of Paper, (not by the Author) but by a Lover of the Truth, for their good especially, that are not able to buy bigger bookes’.Footnote 12
By February 1642, the situation in England had changed dramatically. Popular uprisings engulfed London after Charles I's attempt to arrest five members of the House of Commons, and within days the king and his family had fled for their safety. A few weeks after Charles withdrew from London, the Commons invited Marshall to preach their fast-day sermon at St Margaret's Church, Westminster. For this solemn occasion, Marshall returned to the theme of Meroz with new aggressive intent, and by the time that he stepped down from the pulpit he had ignited what Clarendon would later call ‘a strange wildfire among the people’, a directive to take up arms that rapidly spread from the issue of Ireland to the incipient conflict that was unfolding in England. His message proved so powerful that he was soon referred to as ‘the Augustine, the truly polemicall Divine of our times’.Footnote 13
While contemporaries readily acknowledged the importance of the curse of Meroz in general, and Marshall's 1642 sermon in particular, later scholars have been slow to engage with examples of the verse. Only a handful of historians have noted the use of Meroz prior to 1641, and it was not until Hugh Trevor-Roper's essay on fast-day sermons was printed that Marshall's provocative text returned to the limelight.Footnote 14 Subsequent scholarship has largely echoed Trevor-Roper's remarks by highlighting Marshall's invocation of the curse to illustrate the radical nature of parliamentarian sermons from the early 1640s and to demonstrate that the English Civil War was in fact Europe's last great ‘War of Religion’.Footnote 15 Anthony Fletcher, for example, argued that Marshall's ‘intoxicating’ sermon ‘cannot be read any other way than as a bloodthirsty call for total war’, while Glenn Burgess recently used the text as evidence for the permeable relationship between religious and political thought during the 1640s.Footnote 16 Aside from passing judgements, scholars have been silent.
The absence of a thorough examination of Meroz is all the more surprising because it can help us better understand the role of providence in the Civil War. In her meticulously researched book, Alexandra Walsham has argued for the centrality of providentialism in contemporary thought. She has delineated fundamental assumptions about the ways in which contemporaries viewed extraordinary occurrences and maladies as signs from God and in the process alerted historians to the extent that belief in divine intervention permeated – and indeed transformed – the early modern period. Yet, suggestive as her work is, it largely misses the role of political providence during the Civil War and Interregnum. Her foray into the 1640s, for instance, results in only passing mention that Marshall preached on the ‘incendiary subject’ of Meroz repeatedly ‘on the eve of the Civil War’.Footnote 17 Walsham's reluctance to examine the political uses of wartime providentialism contrasts sharply with her own groundbreaking research on the impact of providential polemics during the early Stuart period.Footnote 18 Further, it is at odds with the influential work done by the historians Blair Worden and G. C. Browell. Worden has provided extensive evidence to support the claim that the Civil War and Interregnum were ‘the time when Puritan providentialism’ held ‘its most widespread influence’, and Browell, in a significant but hitherto unpublished dissertation, has shown that providentialism was an ‘indispensable constituent of political decision making’ for both parliamentarians and royalists.Footnote 19 To date, their respective accounts make up the bulk of our information on political providence during the 1640s and 1650s. Valuable as their contributions are, more remains to be explored about the process whereby specific providential texts shaped – and indeed were shaped by – the polemical and political milieux in which they were deployed. This is particularly important with respect to the providentialism that, as Browell has suggested, extended well ‘beyond that of Oliver Cromwell’ and the elite, but instead guided the actions of thousands.Footnote 20
The present article seeks to explore the curse of Meroz as one of these texts – a significant missing element of our understanding of political providentialism during the Civil War and Interregnum.Footnote 21 In approaching this topic, it will develop on the discussions provided by Worden, Browell, and Walsham and suggest that studies of the period stand to benefit significantly from exploring further the political ramifications of individual providential texts. By focusing the curse of Meroz from 1641 through to the Restoration specifically, this article aims to show how a single line from the Old Testament – otherwise obscure and largely anodyne – was transformed to become a vehicle for encouraging popular political engagement and mobilization. In doing so it will provide a unique insight into the structure of adversarial politics and illustrate one of the important means by which Stephen Marshall and his contemporaries were able to influence political decision-making on an unprecedented scale.
I
Marshall and his audience almost certainly knew about the verse well before the Irish rising.Footnote 22 Meroz had regularly appeared – at times prominently – in sermons since late in the reign of Elizabeth. Applications of the curse ranged from critiques of sinful behaviour to millenarianism.Footnote 23 On the eve of the Spanish Armada, Cardinal William Allen published An admonition to the nobility and people of England and Ireland in which he called upon English Catholics to resist the ‘wicked Jesabell’ Elizabeth I or ‘incurr the Angels cursse and malediction upon the inhabitantes of the land of Meros’ and ‘be guiltie of your owne ruine, and the bludd of the people’.Footnote 24 Allen's work led to considerable commotion in the privy council and provoked Lord Burghley to propose ‘payne of treason to any that shall come to have it and not destroy it’.Footnote 25 Yet shortly after Allen's tract, the curse returned in English publications with fresh and radically different meaning; Protestant causers recognized the polemical value of Meroz, claiming that the curse would ‘light vpon al such English-men’ who failed, in turn, to support war against Spain.Footnote 26 Little more than a decade later, the curse was again redeployed, this time to combat the sinful behaviour and excesses of the Jacobean court, with Thomas Adams, vicar of Willington, Bedfordshire, demanding that morally corrupted Englishmen should ‘spunge vp’, turn from ‘Harlottes and vices’, and seek out the ‘the Hall of Charitie’ rather than the ‘Parlour of Pride’. Failure to do so, he admonished, would bring about ‘curseye [sic] Meroz’.Footnote 27 Moral reform remained thematically linked with the curse and the court until the threat of war in the 1620s transformed Meroz again into a favourite of Protestant militants. Eager to thwart Habsburg Spain and reclaim the Palatinate, Thomas Gataker urged his countrymen in 1620 ‘to take to heart the crosses and calamities of their brethren’ to avoid ‘the curse of Meroz’, while in 1623 the evangelical polemicist Thomas Scott heaped praise on King James ‘for hearing our petitions’ and agreeing to finance what proved to be a disastrous expedition to the continent headed by Count Mansfelt and thereby allowing the nation to escape the ‘curse pronounced against pollitique (or rather negligent) Meroz, who stood Neuter whilst religion was in question’.Footnote 28 With the return to peace in the 1630s, Meroz transformed back to its more anodyne meaning as an example of the consequences of personal sin used by ministers to bridle ‘impure mouthes’, ‘saucy wits’, and ‘sinnes of all sorts and sizes’ that might cause the nation to ‘bee trodden under [God's] foot’ as Meroz once was.Footnote 29 The violence of the Irish rising in 1641 was required to send the curse back into its more dramatic role.
It was, perhaps surprisingly, Marshall's initial reputation for moderate nonconformity that led to his appointment as one of the preachers before the Short Parliament in April 1640.Footnote 30 Unable to preach due to the early dissolution of the meeting, Marshall was once again nominated as a fast-day preacher for the Long Parliament; on 17 November 1640 he and Cornelius Burgess delivered initial sermons that lasted seven hours at St Margaret's Church, Westminster.Footnote 31 A year later, Marshall joined Edmund Calamy and James Ussher to preach on a special fast day arranged for the relief of Ireland. Despite his adamant warning on the day that withholding support would surely cause ‘the wrath of God’ to be ‘kindled against us’, Marshall made no mention of Judges 5:23.Footnote 32 It was only after the initial success of his Meroz curse sermon that Marshall decided to elaborate on his earlier theme. This he did in front of the Commons who had gathered on Wednesday, 23 February 1642 for a day of solemn fasting at St Margaret's, Westminster. His fateful decision to preach on the text that day would, as Paul Christianson has observed, help to establish his status as ‘the preacher politician par excellence’.Footnote 33
Marshall first subtly altered the title of his sermon from Meroz curse to Meroz cursed, a minor change that belied the radical transformation to his text. No longer printed as a single ‘sheet of paper’ based on scribal notes, the new text ran to fifty-four pages in which the fate of Meroz was defined clearly and supported by scriptural evidence of God's ‘displeasure, indignation, wrath and curse’.Footnote 34 The particular severity of the curse in Judges 5:23 was not, Marshall explained, simply random; it was in fact directly proportional to the obstinacy of the Merozites. ‘All likewise agree’, he claimed, that the cursed people once ‘dwelt neere Mount Tabor and the River Kison’, a ‘place where this battle was fought, and so consequently neere the danger’. Their transgression, then, was not simply a result of their refusal to take up arms when summoned to join Deborah and Barak to fend off the Sisera and the Canaanites, but rather it was a result of their decision to remain idle while fellow tribes fought on their doorstep. Ignoring the divine call to arms was dastardly, yet their position proved utterly indefensible given their proximity to the field of battle. ‘God’, he went on, simply ‘can not abide to have such ill neighbours to his people when they are in distress’, and therefore He ruined them: ‘if they were a Province their Land proved a desolate Wildernesse. If a City it was destroyed, or grew unpeopled.’Footnote 35 Individuals who refused to fight were ‘neuters’ who might await a chilling demise like that of the enemies of Jerusalem from Zachariah 14:12, where ‘their flesh shall consume whilest they stand upon their feet, their eyes shall rot in their holes, their tongue shall consume away in their mouth’.Footnote 36 No matter what the process was, the outcome was emphatically the same: terrible ruin awaited those who failed to heed the Almighty's orders.
The English soon proved better neighbours to the Irish than the Merozites had been to their fellow tribesmen. Financial contributions were forthcoming and Marshall was soon implored to preach his sermon in the political heart of London with the hope that his providential warning would inspire new recruits to ‘spend’ their ‘blood in the Churches cause’.Footnote 37 In June, the newly formed committee for Irish Adventurers ordered that ‘all the persons listed’ for service should meet at the London Guildhall to ‘heare a sermon to bee preached by Mr Stephen Marshall, and take the protestation att St Lawrence Church’.Footnote 38 Hearing Marshall preach was clearly intended to instil fighting sprit and a sense of purpose in new recruits, but it also served to motivate soldiers to swear to the terms of the 1641 Protestation in which they were expected to ‘maintain and defend’ with their ‘life, power, and estate, the true Reformed Protestant Religion’, ‘His Majesties Royal Person’, and, critically, ‘the Power and Priviledges of Parliament’.Footnote 39 Originally printed on 5 May 1641, the Protestation was made compulsory for all adult males on 20 January 1642, just days after the king had fled the capital.Footnote 40 It was, in the view of many historians, a key component of the parliament's wresting of authority from Charles I, and central to the development of ‘a partisan political position’ that led the nation towards open civil war.Footnote 41 Indeed, Conrad Russell has gone so far as to claim that ‘many Parliamentarians’ would come to believe that the Protestation supplied ‘their title to be in arms’ against the king's forces.Footnote 42 Meroz helped, then, to solidify their symbolic commission with a terrifying example of the providential punishments that awaited oath breakers.
Far more important than its ability to stir up new recruits, however, was the fact that Meroz cursed arrived at a time when concern over the fate of Protestants in Ireland was rapidly being subsumed by the crisis at home. In the cross-pollination of ideas and cultural anxieties that characterized the late winter and spring of 1642, Judges 5:23 became an applicable warning for the impending conflict at home and a stark reminder of the repercussions in store for citizens who wished to remain neutral in the conflict. As such, the core message of Marshall's sermon – that providential wrath awaited those who failed to defend their brethren – acquired a new incendiary meaning on 22 August when the king raised his banner at Nottingham Castle.
Reprinted three times in 1642, Meroz cursed became a mainstay of parliamentary polemics. Ministers were, as Trevor-Roper noted, ‘explicitly’ repeating Marshall's message in ‘numerous fast sermons’ that made direct appeals for spiritual, monetary, and legal support for the war effort against Charles I.Footnote 43 Thomas Wilson, Thomas Case, Charles Herle, John Ley, Herbert Palmer, and Thomas Hill all preached on the curse in fast-day sermons that went to print over 1642 and 1643. On 28 September 1642, Wilson, an outspoken opponent of episcopacy, warned the Commons who had gathered for the solemn fast that they should beware ‘neuters’ and the ‘luke-warme’ as ‘most loathed persons … as cursed Meroz’. Case, a close associate of Isaac Pennington, the City's radical lord mayor, preached God's rising, his enemies scattering on 26 October 1642, a charged sermon dedicated to the parliamentarian commander Sir William Brereton in which he sought the metaphorical and literal ‘preparing of artillery, and weapons of death’ and warned ‘rich covetous Mammonists’ that they would face ‘the curse with Meroz’ for withholding their monetary support for the war effort. Meanwhile, in November, Herle told parliament that Meroz, ‘one of the fearfullest curses in all Scripture’, should be avoided at all costs. Ley's The fury of warre, preached to the Commons in April 1643, proclaimed the present ‘warre not only lawfull, but so necessary’, adding ‘that to forbeare it is unlawfull, and so he that can and will not assist in it (to his power) commeth under the curse of Meroz’.Footnote 44 The terrible fate described in detail by Marshall a year before had, since the outbreak of civil war, become a warning for failure at home.
The curse gained heightened relevance in the wake of the discovery of Waller's plot, a foiled yet highly propagandized plan to raise a royalist army in London that would, as John Pym claimed, ‘destroy the Parliament’ and later ‘the Kingdome’.Footnote 45 On 28 June 1643, Palmer made use of Meroz in a fast-day sermon delivered to the Commons in which he described his hopes for ‘victory and deliverance’, while Hill, a month later, quoted Meroz as a warning against ‘dull neutrality or wilfull apostacy’ in The militant church, triumphant over the Dragon, a fiery sermon delivered to both the Commons and the Lords. For Hill, Meroz provided an important example of the punishment in store for the English if they failed ‘to deale with Papists and sons of violence, which illegally invade our persons, Religion, Liberty, and endeavour to take away our birthright from us’.Footnote 46 Hill was just one of five ministers who had followed Marshall's lead by invoking Meroz as a means to advocate spiritual, financial, and martial support for war, but his terms stand as a valuable marker for gauging the intensification of parliament's cause: far from an admonitory message about helping Ireland, Hill's curse was provided as an incentive for the defence of English religion, liberties, and legal birthrights that were being assailed by the ‘Papists and sons of violence’ who served the king. These belligerent politico-religious terms bore a striking resemblance to those raised decades earlier by promoters of the Protestant cause, and the frequency with which they were repeated indicates that, as one might expect, Meroz resonated with the Commons and Lords who were directing the war effort.
Gauging the extent of the curse in sermons outside of Westminster is more difficult.Footnote 47 Yet, there are at least a handful of examples of the curse in manuscript and print that suggest that contemporaries had come to reflect seriously on the implications of Judges 5:23. It was presumably sometime after the outbreak of the ‘home bred & civill wars’ that the unmarked and undated manuscript sermon contained in the Huntington Library's Ellesmere collection was written. With Timothy 6:12, ‘Fight ye good fight of faith’, as its primary text, the anonymous author warned that surely ‘Meroz’ was cursed by ‘ye lord himself’ for failing to act when ‘seeing the threatened’ and that, similarly, ‘the L[ord] himselfe shall cause his wrath to raise upon them [the English], the arrows of ye Almighty shall stick in them; the venime thereof shall drinke up their spirits, & the terrors of God shall fight against them’.Footnote 48 Other reflections on the curse can be dated much more precisely and add similar examples about the anxieties that surrounded the possibility of sin and military obligation. After hearing ‘Mr Dyke’ preach on Romans 8:10 at St Martin Ludgate in late 1642, Walter Yonge was compelled to make a special note of ‘5 Judges Curs you Merosh’. ‘If’, he asked, ‘a man be on his death-bedd & it [Meroz] comes in his mind’ would ‘not it grieve him’ and in turn cause him to ‘promise better obedience’ towards God?Footnote 49 It remains impossible to know the circumstances under which Yonge first encountered the curse, or if, for that matter, Meroz was in fact mentioned explicitly in Dyke's sermon. But it is clearly beyond doubt that Yonge associated the death of the body from sin discussed in Romans 8:10 with the anger exhibited in Judges 5:23 against those who failed to participate in parliament's divinely sanctioned war. Meroz therefore provided Yonge with an arresting example of divine reprisal that reflected both his anxieties regarding ‘obedience to God’ and his personal sense of obligation to contribute to the war effort. William Laud's hopes for a quiet Sunday away from the Tower of London had been dashed months earlier when he encountered a ‘strangely Evil’ sermon given by one ‘Mr Joclin’ on ‘Curse ye Meroz’ that included ‘Personal Abuse of me that was so foul and so palpable, that Women and Boys stood up in the Church, to see how I could bear it’.Footnote 50 Admittedly, the sermon was just one of many affronts recorded privately by the archbishop, but it did leave a lasting impression, since it contained ‘treason sufficient to hang’ the preacher ‘in any other State’.Footnote 51 The timing of Laud's encounter, moreover, on 15 May 1642, less than three months after Marshall preached Meroz cursed, suggests that other ministers were quick to incorporate the inflammatory verse into their own repertoires.
Further evidence suggests that Meroz had in fact reached audiences well beyond parliament and the pulpit; indeed, laypeople were quick to call upon the curse to explain what was at stake in the war. Many thousands of inhabitants from Norwich gathered in July 1642 to put their names to a petition and express ‘that we may justly feare the curse of Merous to befall us’ for ‘not putting the Kingdome into a posture of defence’.Footnote 52 In August, the anonymously written A letter to the kingdome of England called ‘his Majesties Commission [of Array]’, the king's attempt to raise an army, a product of ‘his ill affected Councellors and the Cavaliers’, and further suggested that Englishmen would in fact be able to ‘defend his Majesties Royall person to the last droppe of blood in your Veines’ by refusing the summons. It was, of course, standard procedure to blame England's woes on the king's evil counsellors in 1642. Yet, to read that ‘Meroz Curse wilbe your portion’ added a new incendiary dimension for those who refused to heed the advice.Footnote 53The un-deceiver, another anonymous tract written the following year, warned that the nation's ‘Neuters are in a state of Enmity, and therefore in an accursed condition’ and should thus be spurned according to Luke 11:23, ‘He that is not with me, is against me’ and Judges 5:23, ‘Curse ye Meroz’.Footnote 54 It was, moreover, around this time that William Prynne, proudly wearing the scars that he had earned as a ‘Seditious Libeller’ – or as he preferred ‘stigmata Laudis’ – during the Personal Rule, wrote The fourth part of the soveraigne power of parliaments, a lengthy work that offered legal justification for the parliamentarian war effort. Betrayal of ‘God, your Christ, Religion, Lawes, Liberties, Countrey, Parliament, yea your very selves, your soules, bodies, and posterities’ would, he warned, lead to ‘bitter curse’ in England like the one ‘denounced by God himself against Meroz’.Footnote 55 Prynne and his fellow propagandists and polemicists could scarcely help themselves from using so brief and potent a threat to support their purposes.
Such frequent invocations of Judges 5:23 by parliamentarians left royalists with few options. In 1643, Lionel Gatford printed An exhortation to peace, a tract that he had penned while imprisoned by parliament in Ely House, Holborn. His text condemned parliamentarian warmongers in general, but he recalled with particular horror the dangerous tenor of one minister who ‘pertinently and punctually’ drew parallels between England's present condition and ‘the case of the Merozits’.Footnote 56 Surely the most dramatic example of the curse's broad appeal came around Easter of the following year when Edward Symmons, chaplain to the prince of Wales's lifeguards, met with parliamentarian prisoners in Shrewsbury who were captured after the fall of Brampton Bryan Castle, the Herefordshire home of the staunchly puritan Harley family. When asked why they had fought against the king, the prisoners claimed that they had in fact taken up arms ‘against Antichrist, and Popery’, and that they had been roused to fight after hearing Marshall's sermon, the same one ‘(Preach'd before the Parliament) which we had at Brampton’. Symmons confessed that he was unaware of the specifics of the sermon until later that year when he was browsing ‘a Booksellers shop in Ludlow’, and he ‘chanced to see a Sermon of M. Marshall upon that Text, Jud.5·23, Curse ye Meroz’. If unfamiliar with the curse, Symmons certainly knew the author. He and Marshall had enjoyed an ‘intimate acquaintance’ for more than a decade while they held adjacent livings in Essex.Footnote 57 But their time as neighbours ended abruptly in March 1643 when the parliamentarian committee for scandalous ministers ejected Symmons and his family.Footnote 58 Soon thereafter, Symmons felt compelled to deal directly with Marshall in A loyall subjects beliefe, an open letter in which he sought to ‘answer’ Marshall's justification ‘for resisting the Kings Personall will by force of Armes’ and provide reasons against his own sequestration.Footnote 59
The royalist minister was dumbfounded to see that Marshall had preached the printed sermon in his hands and that it was in fact the same text that had spurred the prisoners from Brampton Bryan to take up arms against the king. He set out immediately to neutralize Marshall's words with a pamphlet entitled Scripture vindicated, from the misapprehensions, misinterpretations, & mis-applications of Mr Stephen Marshall. And while Symmons knew that he could do little to combat the well-established message of Meroz cursed, he did use the opportunity to challenge Marshall and ‘the rest of the Ministers of his party’ who invoked the prophetic verse as a means to promote the war effort in England. ‘Reason cannot apprehend Mr Marshalls way’, Symmons asserted, but obviously he had been ‘plotting how to quarrel with the king’ since the time when he first performed Meroz cursed in the ‘strong hold of London’. Instead of preaching on the topic solely for the relief of Protestants in Ireland, he had taken it on the road ‘to Brampton-Bryan-Castle in Hereford-shire, and to Coventry, and Northampton, and to Namptwitch in Cheshire, and to Gloster, and other such places in England; whose inhabitants and fighting men, were never intended should be sent into Ireland’.Footnote 60 This deeply troubling accusation was at least partially true: even if only ostensibly introduced as a providential motivation for war abroad, Meroz cursed was in fact being preached to raise support for war in England.Footnote 61 The ‘Irish Combustions’ had, Symmons claimed, been ‘raised as a mist, to cloud their purpose at home’. In this sense, Marshall's plan – if in fact it was a plan – proved an unqualified success; for ‘having lapt a little of the blood of an Enemy’ Englishmen had grown ‘wolfeish’ so that ‘on a suddaine doe they thirst for the blood of their friends’. In importing the providential threat, Marshall and his allies had applied the terms of the Protestant cause to the incipient parliamentarian one, and in doing so they had stained their hands with the blood of ‘their own Country-men’.Footnote 62 The prisoners at Shrewsbury confirmed Symmons's fears.
Also incensed by Marshall's text, other royalists joined the fray. Henry Hammond, a devout supporter of the king, composed Of resisting the lawful magistrate under colour of religion in which he ‘beseech[ed] Master Marshall hereafter to write more cautiously, lest hee provoke men to put him and the world in mind of other unjustifiable passages in his writings’.Footnote 63 Discernable in Hammond's text was the view that Marshall's providential message had successfully convinced men throughout England to join the parliamentarian war effort. Hammond, like Symmons, recognized that the curse posed a legitimate threat to the royalist war effort, and he therefore requested ‘that Master Marshall’ might heed his request and set about ‘retracting so many of his misadventures’.Footnote 64 Having exhausted their arguments against the parliamentarian minister and his curse, royalist ministers could think of little more than to simply ask Marshall to cease preaching on the text.
Not surprisingly, their pleas were in vain. Even if Marshall had decided to stop preaching on Meroz, there was little he could do to prevent other parliamentarians from utilizing the verse. This much is evinced by the fact that Wilson, Case, Herle, Ley, Palmer, Hill (and doubtless many others) had already preached on Judges 5:23 and that, prior to the time when Symmons and Hammond were penning their responses to Marshall, the verse had already found its way into tracts such as Prynne's Sovereign power of parliaments. Other printed and spoken mediums followed, ensuring that the verse would remain an active threat. By late 1643, George Wither printed Campo-musæ, a poem in which he recalled serving under the earl of Essex, captain-general of parliament's forces:
The poem proved an immediate success and went into four editions. Celebrated as the scourge of royalists, the curse had become a popular form of theological justification for the fight against the king, a trenchant message for the captured soldiers from Brampton Bryan and for the ministers and polemicists who, seeking their own rationale for war, explicated the curse in sermons, tracts, and poems. In all of these works, Judges 5:23 fulfilled a fundamental purpose: military mobilization. And yet, as the summer campaigns of 1643 would soon reveal, parliament was in critical need of assistance.
II
In early August, Marshall joined Philip Nye as one of the Westminster Assembly delegates who would travel north to Edinburgh to negotiate the terms of a covenant, a binding agreement that pledged Scottish military assistance against the king with the stipulation that parliament adopt Presbyterianism as the official state religion in England. Terms were agreed upon and on 25 September both the Lords and Commons signed the Solemn League and Covenant. Shortly after receiving the English delegation, the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland issued A Declaration of the reasons for assisting the parliament of England, in which they professed that the ‘Controversie’ at hand was ‘betwixt the Lord Jesus and the Antichrist with his followers’. First among the General Assembly's nine reasons for pledging military support was the anticipatory providential curse: ‘if we would not come under the Curse of Meroz, we should come out upon so clear a call, from the Representative Body of England, to the Representative Body of Scotland, and help the Lord against the Mighty’.Footnote 66 By 19 January 1644, the Scottish had made good their agreement; faced with the prospect of parliament's defeat and the Almighty's wrath, Alexander Leslie, earl of Leven, led his troops over the Tweed to join with their new parliamentarian allies. Much like the English, who feared that they would face divine punishment if they failed to come to the aid of their Protestant brethren in Ireland, Scottish forces may well have believed that they would suffer the terrible fate of Meroz if they did not march south to join parliament in the fight against the king.
The alliance with the Scottish Covenanters helped parliament to win major successes at York and Marston Moor, but the imposition of the covenant further stressed the already fragile alliances that held together the parliamentarian war effort. Scholars dealing with the aftermath of the Solemn League and Covenant have focused almost entirely on the divisions that arose between ‘Independents’ and ‘Presbyterians’, labels that remain highly problematic yet must suffice at present.Footnote 67 While there is almost certainly truth to Tom Webster's recent claim that ‘Meroz was a recurrent target for Congregationalists and Presbyterians alike at fast sermons through to early 1643’, it is worth noting that, aside from John Goodwin, all applications of Meroz during the first year of the war came from men who were, or would later become, Presbyterians. Indeed, Marshall, Wilson, Case, Herle, Ley, Palmer, and Hill all went on to become prominent members of the Westminster Assembly, and it was not until well after the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant that the curse became a ‘recurrent target for Congregationalists’ who in many cases invoked the curse in polemics against their Presbyterian opponents rather than as a providential means to mobilize against the king.Footnote 68 Even if both Congregationalists and Presbyterians invoked Meroz in their sermons, the preponderance of use among leading Presbyterians, and indeed direct mention of the curse by the Scottish General Assembly, meant that it had, by early 1644, become firmly associated with Presbyterianism.
Throughout the remaining years of the war, the curse of Meroz offers rare glimpses of the ways in which an initially obscure example of anticipatory providentialism was applied for its ‘dramatic impact’ in a climate that Ann Hughes has rightly defined as one of ‘rival parliamentarian mobilizations’, when participants in the fragmented parliamentarian war effort sought new polemical ways to condemn opponents.Footnote 69 Originally opposed solely by royalists, after 1644 the curse became a lightning rod for popular opposition to Presbyterianism. It was in the polemical wars of politico-religious factionalization that the same Presbyterians who had initially hurled Meroz against their royalist opponents were eventually targeted by Independents and royalists alike for invoking but failing to heed the warning of the curse of Meroz. Thus, the brief verse from Judges provides an important example of the ways in which polemic could be used across traditional divides when there was neither a simple litmus test for politico-religious outlook, nor obviously drawn boundaries in debates. Jason Peacey has argued compellingly that there is much to be gained by looking at texts in terms of ‘particular political functions at specific moments’.Footnote 70 To do so with Meroz after the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant shows that there were times when Independents and royalists – broadly defined groups which purportedly adhered to antithetical views regarding the war and religion – found strikingly similar ways to condemn their opponents; Independents, largely dissatisfied with the Covenant of the Westminster Assembly and the tyrannical authority of its divines, found in Meroz a pre-packaged means to blame Presbyterians for failing to maintain zealous commitment to the war effort, and, eventually, for their reluctance to try and execute their king. Meanwhile, royalists continued their attack on the same Presbyterians who had initially invoked Meroz in the struggle to mobilize against the king.
Faced with crushing defeats and repeatedly hampered peace proposals, royalists continued in their quest to silence the dangerous text. Writing from Oxford in late 1644, Gerard Langbaine, an outspoken defender of episcopacy, pleaded that ‘the Scots should sit still and hold their peace’ and that ‘they need not feare the curse of Meroz’ since parliamentarians had hurled the providential text ‘under the yoak of antichristian Tyranny’.Footnote 71 Langbaine's request was by no means unusual for a man loyal to the king, but the anonymous tract that arrived just a few months after his own proved altogether novel. Printed under the pseudonym Martin Mar-Priest, Martin's eccho was in fact written by Richard Overton to alert contemporaries to the parallels between the recent rise of Presbyterianism and the Elizabethan Marprelate Controversy over episcopacy from October 1588 until September 1589.Footnote 72 An active agitator and pamphleteer, Overton intended Martin's eccho to serve as the original Marprelate tracts had done, but in this case to protect the ‘Liberties of the common People from’ the dangers of ‘Synodicall Classicall Presbyterian predominancy’. The infamous ‘Meroz’ curse, Overton claimed, was the centrepiece of several earlier Presbyterian ‘reproches, lies, slanders and calumnies’ that were constructed in order to lead common people to accept blindly the Covenant. The true intention of the ministers who had followed Stephen Marshall's charge, he lamented, was to ‘free us from Episcopall Persecution’ only ‘to devour us with Presbyterian cruelty’.Footnote 73 Overton's argument was unequivocal: ministers who had invoked Meroz under the guise of protecting England from God's curse had simply been advancing their own Presbyterian agendas. Despite their radically different political and religious outlooks, both Overton and Langbaine believed that Meroz was being deployed as part of a well-constructed Presbyterian plot to establish the religious authority of the Westminster Assembly and to secure Scottish martial support. Moreover, both men – Langbaine, by all visible measures a royalist, and Overton, a Leveller – had come to hold similar outlooks regarding both the Presbyterian alliance with the Scottish and the curse of Meroz. For Langbaine, the imminent threat was the Presbyterian alliance that would destroy episcopacy in England; for Overton, the issue was the replacement of episcopacy with an equally oppressive presbytery, one that would stamp out the rights of the parliament and the liberties of the individual. Powerless to prevent additional printing, Meroz cursed went into a fourth edition in 1645.Footnote 74
Attacked by royalists and ‘sectarians’ alike, Presbyterian ministers turned their attention to the production of sermons and heresiographies that denounced the divisions of their opponents.Footnote 75 In a fast-day sermon delivered to the Commons in May 1646, Richard Heyrick, a prominent member of the Westminster Assembly, predicted that it was in fact ‘temporizers that halt betwixt two opinions’ who would eventually ‘betray the City when a truth in Religion is questioned’. Their inexcusable actions, he warned, stood to bring about ‘a multiplyed Curse’ of ‘Meroz’ that would light ‘against the lukewarm’ for their failure to establish a unified ‘Religion’.Footnote 76 In Heyrick's view, Presbyterians would not bring on the curse; it would instead be brought about by any who refused to commit to the unified religious programme set forth in the Solemn League and Covenant. Meanwhile, Samuel Rutherford, a leading Presbyterian Scottish commissioner to the Westminster Assembly, argued that an obvious answer was to target separatists and for their own radical invocations of Meroz prior to the outbreak of war. Having been blamed alongside his brethren for falsely invoking the curse of Meroz, Rutherford returned the favour with A survey of the spirituall Antichrist, a heresiography in which he blasted Antinomians in New England as ‘the first authors of wicked opinions’. Rutherford reserved particular scorn for ‘the American Jesabel’ Anne Hutchinson and the ‘abominable’ sectarian John Wheelwright who hastily ‘pronounced the curse of Meroz on them who would not joyne with them against the churches of the legalists’ in Massachusetts in the late 1630s.Footnote 77
Amid the increasingly complex web of polemical battles in which Meroz was invoked as an example of divine retribution, defenders of the monarchy could do little more than assail the credibility of their opponents by testing the authenticity of their claims. In August of 1648, Marchamont Needham used his popular newspaper Mercurius Pragmaticus to rail against the unrestrained republican Henry Marten for crying out ‘Curse ye Meroz’ to ‘defie the government of King, Lords, and Commons’.Footnote 78 Doubtless many readers were unsurprised to hear that Marten had uttered the incantation; he had developed an unsavory reputation for using more than ‘insolent Language’.Footnote 79 Meanwhile, an unapologetic assessment of the damage caused by Meroz came, ostensibly at least, from the king's own hand in 1648. Supposedly written from Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, The kings most gracious messages for peace referred to Judges 5:23 as ‘that scripture (you all know)’. Addressed to all the king's subjects, the tract served as an answer to parliament's Declaration of the Vote of No Address from January 1648, an ordinance that legally ended all negotiations with the king based, as Gardiner succinctly put it, ‘on his rejection of the Four Bills, and on the necessity of the “utmost endeavours speedily to settle the present government” ’.Footnote 80 Written, in fact, by Edward Symmons, the tract reiterated the familiar view that a small group of ill-affected men had deceived the king's subjects and attempted to seize control of the state. Parliamentarian ministers were, as they had been in Symmons's earlier Scripture vindicated, responsible for having ‘seduced’ English subjects ‘to think ill of the King’ in their attempts to win over military support for parliament. Charles suffered ‘great oppressions’ at the hands of ‘enemies’ and ‘evill workers’ whose deeds made them ‘more the people of Gods curse, then those Canaanites were’. ‘And if Meroz was lyable to so sharp a doome, for not helping the Lord against them’, Symmons warned, ‘then well may we feare a like portion if we be backward in our assistance to the downfall of these men.’Footnote 81
The kings most gracious messages for peace was just the first of many tracts that demonstrated for royalists, as Andrew Lacey has suggested, ‘that Charles had been striving for peace and a just settlement since the outbreak of the first Civil War’.Footnote 82 Yet, it also reveals that Meroz retained a strong grip on the imaginations of English subjects who wished to defend their monarch. Royalists such as Symmons remained, unsurprisingly, outspoken critics of those who used the text as a means to mobilize support. But such chastisements were about to shift dramatically. The king, whose options for war or escape had gradually eroded over the course of 1648, was finally moved back to London in January to face trial by a high court of justice under the accusation that he had ‘traitorously and maliciously’ levied war against ‘Parliament and the people therein represented’.Footnote 83 Refusing to enter a plea on his own behalf, Charles was pronounced guilty and beheaded at Whitehall on 30 January.
III
John Milton was among the first to offer up a tract supporting the regicide. Written while the High Court of Justice deliberated the fate of Charles Stuart, Milton's The tenure of kings and magistrates revealed point by point reasons for regicide, but it also exposed the author's deep loathing for anyone who sought to recast themselves as moderates when faced with the prospect of trying the king on charges of treason. Presbyterian opponents of the trial were key targets, lambasted as hypocrites for abandoning their early bellicosity in favour of accommodation with a king who repeatedly proved incapable of maintaining his sworn obligations. Such ‘clov'n tongues’, Milton professed, had formerly called out exhaustively ‘against a Canaanitish King’ with their ‘Sermons, Prayers, and Fulminations that have bin utterd this sev'n yeares’. But having since filled ‘thir bellies, and fed them[selves] fatt upon the foolish people’, they had all gone silent and in doing so ‘mock'd the vengeance of God’. Presbyterians, Milton claimed, were not mistaken for originally calling upon the people to take up arms, but they were in danger of provoking vengeance by ‘stirring up of new discord’ and seeking to ‘acquit’ the king when it came time to arraign him for treason in a Court of High Justice; one moment they called men ‘to civil Warr and bloodshed’ and ‘exasperating the people against’ their king, yet in the next they had refused to carry out the sentence. So obvious was their ‘hypocrisie’ that they had risked ‘visit[ing] upon thir own heads that curse ye Meroz’ that was once ‘the very Motto of thir Pulpits’.Footnote 84
A sizeable and sympathetic audience endorsed Milton's attack on Presbyterians for their flagging zeal for war, and many saw Meroz as an obvious punishment for backsliding; John Goodwin, the same minister who had initially preached on Meroz in light of the Irish Rising in 1641, did so the following May in Hybristodikai, a legal and religious justification for the ruling of the Court of High Justice against Charles. The king, Goodwin assured his readers, had proven himself ‘the greatest Delinquent, guilty of the bloud of hundreds of thousands of Protestants, the bloudiest man under heaven’.Footnote 85 Copying Milton's own writing almost verbatim, Goodwin proceeded to claim that William ‘Prynne and his partisans’ who sought to acquit the ‘Canaanitish King’ in the last minute were to be cursed ‘as bitterly as Meroz was to be cursed’. The king's ‘Advocates and Friends’, he concluded, were ‘no more to be reckoned for, than the bloud of so many dogs in the time of a pestilence’.Footnote 86 Others were equally upset by what they saw as dissimulation on the part of ministers who either opposed or sought to distance themselves from the trial and regicide. In The city-ministers unmasked, William Dell offered targeted arguments against tracts by Cornelius Burges and Thomas Gataker that were printed in January 1649 to display their ‘loyall hearts and affection’ to the king and opposition to the tribunal.Footnote 87 London Presbyterians had, according to Dell, ‘turned backward and forward’ to their own ‘advantage; first preaching, Curse ye Meroz, because they went not forth to help the Lord against the mighty, & after, curse Israel, because they did goe forth to help the Lord against the mighty’. So baffling were their messages that it had become nearly impossible ‘for the best men at all times to escape your curse’.Footnote 88
In the wake of widespread accusations of a Presbyterian volte-face, it would appear that printed references to the curse went into sharp decline.Footnote 89 This change may be explained in part by the attempts at political reconciliation between Presbyterian and Independent divines that characterized the period shortly after the king's execution.Footnote 90 Adding to the general decline of invocations was an overall disparity in terms of the quality of the references to the curse. Among the few who ventured to comment on Meroz during the Interregnum was John Price, a scholar who recalled the burdensome days when ‘London preachers’ had ‘seduced Auditors’ and ‘exhorted all men upon pain of Meroz curse, to come out and help the Lord against the mighty’.Footnote 91 Two years later, in 1652, Henry Haggar denounced those who ‘teach the people to murmur against the present Powers, and to complain of the great Taxes and heavie burthens’, since ‘indeed they were the [same] men that first caused them, by stirring up the people, crying out, Curse ye Meroz’. Meanwhile, the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers found a use for the curse in 1654 when he foretold that ‘The day draweth nigh!’ and that ‘Curse ye Meroz’ had been pronounced upon the people, while Jeffrey Corbet, a London grocer, offered somewhat more tangible fears when he warned that ‘the Pope's bloody Designes’ might somehow bring about ‘Curse Yee Meroz’ in the City.Footnote 92
These brief references to Judges 5:23 share little in common aside from a sense of impending destruction at the hands of a divine interlocutor; indeed, separated in each case by two years and invoked by a scholar, a millenarian, and a grocer, respectively, they demonstrate that the nation's relationship to the curse had changed dramatically. They suggest, moreover, that the few people who remained willing actively to interpret and discuss Meroz in print after 1649 did so primarily from the margins, and certainly well outside of the polarized religio-political frameworks that characterized earlier polemics between parliamentarians and royalists and Presbyterians and Independents. Cast in terms of heavy taxation, impending apocalypse, or anxiety over the threat of a foreign Catholic invasion, Meroz had undergone yet another transformation; a pale shadow of its former self, the curse ceased to serve as a fixed polemical text to which reference could be made and meaning assumed. It had, in short, become anodyne.
IV
But this innocuousness was to prove short-lived. The restoration of monarchy in 1660 brought harsh punishments for those deemed to be enemies of the late king. As Mark Stoyle has recently demonstrated, a royal policy was put into effect both to legitimate the accession of Charles II and to see that ‘the enmities of the past’ would ‘be brushed over as far as possible’.Footnote 93 Among the more important aspects of this new policy was the arrest and trial of regicides. When charged with treason for his outspoken promotion of the king's execution more than a decade earlier, Hugh Peter claimed that he had done no more than other ministers at a time when ‘preaching was Curse ye Meroz, from Scotland to England’. It was, Peter professed, unreasonable that he should be singled out for his subversive actions when he had been ‘force[d] upon’ to join ‘the best Ministers’ who were taking their sermons ‘into the field’ to drum up fighting spirit.Footnote 94 Unconvinced, his commissioners ordered that he suffer a traitor's death, and in mid-October he was sent to the block. Less than four months later, the twelfth anniversary of the king's beheading was marked by another grizzly act with the exhumation and display of the decomposing remains of Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw, Henry Ireton, and Thomas Pride. Marshall fared only slightly better when it was decreed by royal warrant that his burial in Westminster Abbey was unauthorized; he was disinterred in the following September and his body was unceremoniously tossed into a pit in the churchyard of St Margaret's, very near to the place where he had preached Meroz cursed to the Commons two decades earlier.
Public trials and the gruesome treatment of human remains were accompanied by the production of tracts that celebrated Charles II's return and condemned leading figures from the Civil War and Interregnum. Chief among those targeted for their crimes were ministers who had preached seditious works that turned the nation's people against their late king. Cromwell's bloody slaughter-house, a trenchant tract attributed to John Gauden, author of the famous ‘king's book’, Eikon basilike, laid blame for the execution of Charles I squarely on Cromwell and his conspiring ministers who as ‘slippery and vertiginous Serpents’ had hatched a plot to ensnare the king's subjects and sink the nation into a state of ‘war, bloud, Rebellion, Famine, Death, Desolation and Damnation’. Alarming as their supposed designs were, so also was the fact that their ‘subtil, sly, and perplexed designs’ were to come to fruition under the charge of the ‘curse of Meroz’.Footnote 95 Roger L'Estrange, who had narrowly escaped a ‘Judgement of death’ by court martial for his plan ‘to betray Lynne in Norfolke to the King’ during the war, was more than happy to brandish loyalty to the new monarch.Footnote 96 L'Estrange targeted ‘Marshall’ as ‘the prime person in the Agency betwixt the two Nations; – He, that cursed MEROZ’.Footnote 97 Meanwhile, Lucifers life-guard offered up a handy guide that listed the sixty-two ‘Antichristian, Anabaptistical, Atheistical, Anarchial and Infernal Imps’ who had each played their part in fomenting war and bringing about the king's execution. Listed with memorable alliterative epithets were ‘Negromancer [Philip] Nye’, the ‘Pimp [Hugh] Peters’, and ‘Meroz Marshall’.Footnote 98
Of course, Marshall did not live to see that his name had become synonymous with Meroz, or that he had earned for himself a special place in the national memory for frequently preaching the seditious curse; singled out as an agitator of the first order, he was, Clarendon insisted, one the architects of the kingdom's woes, guilty of the ‘wresting and perverting of scripture’ in order to ‘destroy and root out all the malignants, who in any degree opposed the parliament’.Footnote 99 And yet there was no shortage of irony in this assessment. For while Marshall had in fact invoked the prophetic curse on the eve of the Irish Rebellion, he had done so in the wake of John Goodwin's own preaching on the subject in Coleman Street. Further, his later career was marked by the search for religious accommodation that alienated him from more ardent Presbyterians like Robert Baillie, a Scottish divine who complained in late 1644 that Marshall had foolishly attempted ‘a middle way of his own’.Footnote 100 Hard-line Presbyterians tended to agree with Baillie's assessment, while Independents such as Dell were free to accuse him of having ‘prevaricated’ by preaching the curse in the war against the king.Footnote 101 Marshall, for his part, never again invoked Meroz as a call to arms, but he did continue to preach on portentous verses.Footnote 102 His tarnished yet varied reputation – as a pariah among Presbyterians, a hypocrite among Independents, and a demagogue among royalists – stands as testament to the fact that the Civil War cut deep and lasting scars into the political and religious landscape of Britain, but it also demonstrates that contemporary notions of radicalism were by no means fixed, and that specific providential texts – in this case Meroz – played crucial roles shaping political opinions and perceptions.
Accompanying ad hominem rebukes were popular histories, songs, and poems that offered general denunciation of the curse. The clergyman Thomas Bradley railed against ‘Judges the 5th’ in Appello Cæsarem, claiming that the ‘frequently preached and printed on’ incantation had been devised by Presbyterians ‘in Sion Colledge’ during the 1640s. The royalist George Wharton recalled the convulsive years in poetry, lamenting the
Meanwhile, the cavalier poet Alexander Brome issued The rump serv'd in with a grand sallet. Set to the popular ‘Tune of the Blacksmith’, Brome's song targeted the widespread role played by the curse in toppling the church and government when
Although the deluge of printed propaganda condemning the former regime slowed to a trickle by the middle of the decade, Judges 5:23 remained a popular and powerful reminder of the recent past when preachers and revolutionaries had sought to destroy episcopacy and, subsequently, their monarch. Fifteen years after the Restoration, the celebrated poet Andrew Marvell warned that Meroz was one of ‘several Texts of Scripture that’ caused people to ‘ignorantly and superstitiously’ commit treason by taking the National Covenant that bound them in an oath against their king, and three years later Samuel Butler printed the final installation of his satirical poem Hudibras, in which he recalled how subversive ‘Murther and Rebellion Texts’ had
Clearly, then, Judges 5:23 was not an inconsequential theme limited to the sermons of Marshall and a few other incendiaries who strove to rally men to arms in the early 1640s. Rather, it had by the Restoration become an indispensable reminder of the providential means by which parliamentarians had convinced people to mobilize and later, in the case of Presbyterians in particular, adhere to the Solemn League and Covenant. To chart the trajectory of Meroz to this point – from esoteric and anodyne verse to polemical trope – is to illustrate the lifespan of a politico-religious concept transformed by the crucible of war.
In the end, the writings of men such as Wharton, Brome, and Marvell alert us to the immediacy with which English writers sought to explain the causes of their revolution. Historians of late have of course explored the role of divine guidance in this process, from surveys of the ways in which providentialism permeated new mediums and crossed over religious, political, and social divisions, to detailed and systematic examinations of the impact of political providence during the 1640s and 1650s. Given the wide-ranging recognition of the importance of Meroz, it stands to reason that we might now give more than a passing glance to some of the other biblical verses that proved so important and disconcerting to contemporaries.
Indeed, Clarendon was among the many authors who came to share their scathing assessments of the impact of Judges 5:23, calling it an ‘odious’ curse against all ‘who in any degree opposed the parliament’. But there were, he recalled, plenty ‘more than Mr. Marshall’ who had set out to ‘stir up the people against their most gracious sovereign’, and within their myriad ‘seditious sermons’ were discussions of verses such as Jeremiah 10:48; ‘cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood’, and Proverbs 5:25; ‘take away the wicked from before the king, and his throne shall be established in righteousness’. ‘It would’, Clarendon concluded, ‘fill a volume to insert all the impious madness of this kind.’Footnote 106 Just one example of such ‘madness’ can help to explain the bloodshed and bewilderment that was caused by likening England's fate to that of an obscure ancient city that once stood in Israel. Turning appropriate scholarly attention to other biblical verses may well lead to other discoveries.
