On 12 May Strafford walked with firm step to the scaffold on Tower Hill, passing beneath a window where his old friend Archbishop Laud looked down piteously upon him through the bars. Strafford bowed to him. ‘My Lord,’ he asked, ‘your prayers and blessings.’ Laud raised his hand in benediction and murmured a prayer, before falling back fainting from the window. ‘Farewell, my Lord,’ said Strafford, marching on. ‘God protect your innocency.’
‘I sinned against my conscience,’ the King told the Queen after the axe had fallen. ‘It was a base, sinful concession.’ He believed that he would never forgive himself for what had happened that day, and he never did. Yet he also came to believe that Strafford’s death was due not to his having made concessions too late but to his ever having made any concessions at all.
The execution of Strafford seemed to excite the appetite for revolutionary measures of those Members of the Long Parliament who were eager for further reform, who were determined upon what the nonconformist preacher Edmund Calamy described as a ‘second Reformation’. According to one observer, ‘reformation [went on] as hot as toast’, while noncomformist sects proliferated and the extreme amongst them grew ever more outlandish, though few so outré as the Muggletonians, who condemned both prayer and preaching, and the Adamites, peculiarly hysterical descendants of the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, who conceived themselves as being in that state of innocence obtaining in the Garden of Eden before the Fall and believed it appropriate to worship God in Adam and Eve’s condition of nakedness. Inspired by preachers and pamphleteers, by female preachers leading congregations in extempore prayers, and by Puritan writers like John Milton who castigated the clergy of the Church of England for stumbling into ‘new-vomited paganisme’, their prayer book for being ‘the skeleton of a Mass-book’ and their communion table for being ‘pageanted about like a dreadful idol’, apprentices chased Anglican parsons down the streets, calling them ‘Abbeylubbers’ and ‘Canterbury Whelps’ and tearing the gowns from their backs.
From all over the country, now and later, there came reports of altar rails being torn down and altars overturned, of prayer books being thrown about churches and graveyards, of vestments being stripped from the backs of Laudian clergy, of attacks upon those opponents of Calvinist doctrines known as Arminians, and of bishops menaced by gangs of women who threatened to hang them with their lawn sleeves. In one church some wild sectaries, provoked by the curate’s kneeling as he administered the sacrament to his parishioners, kicked the communion bread up and down the chancel; in others candles were trampled underfoot, crucifixes and organs broken and stained glass windows smashed. At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre without Newgate, a woman encouraged her child to urinate on the communion table; in Newcastle women were said to be tearing up surplices as well as prayer books; in Kidderminster there was a riot when some members of the parish objected to the churchwardens’ removal of a crucifix from their churchyard cross. The sectaries ‘make such havoc in our churches,’ wrote one observer, ‘by pulling down ancient monuments, glass windows and rails, that their madness is intolerable.’
At Norwich the Bishop, Joseph Hall, was driven out of his palace which was left without ‘so much as a dozen of trenchers or the children’s pictures’, and his chapel and the cathedral were desecrated and wrecked:
Lord, what work was here! What clattering of glasses! What beating down of walls! What tearing up of monuments! What pulling down of seats! What wresting out of iron and brass from the windows and graves! What defacing of arms! What demolishing of curious stonework!…What tooting and piping on the destroyed organ pipes! And what a hideous triumph on the market day before all the county, when in a kind of sacrilegious procession all the organ pipes, vestments, copes and surplices, together with the leaden cross which had been newly sawn down from the Green Yard pulpit, and the service books and singing books were carried to the fire in the public market place, a lewd wretch walking before the train in a cope trailing in the dirt, with a service-book in his hand, imitating in impious scorn the tune, and usurping the words of the Litany.
Later there were similar scenes at Canterbury, where a Puritan clergyman made use of a guide book to the cathedral to demolish ‘many window-images’, ‘many idols of stone’, ‘seven large pictures of the Virgin Mary’ and a window dedicated to ‘their prime cathedral saint, archbishop Becket with cope, rochet, mitre, crozier…Now it is more defaced than any window in that cathedral. Whilst judgement was executing on the idols in that window, the cathedralists cried out…“Hold your hands, holt, holt, heer’s Sir, etc.” The minister [carrying out the desecration] being then on top of the city ladder, near 60 steps high, with a whole pike in his hand rattling down proud Becket’s glassy bones…to him it was said, “’Tis a shame for a minister to be seen there”…Some wished he might break his neck, others said it should cost blood.’
By the time the work of desecration in Canterbury was finished, a catalogue of the damage done there made sorry reading:
The windows, famous both for strength and beauty, so generally battered and broken down as they lay exposed to the injury of all weathers; the whole roof with that of the steeples, the chapter-houses and cloister extremely impaired and ruined, both in the timber work and lead; the water tables, pipes and much other of the lead in almost all places cut off…The choir stripped and robbed of her goodly hangings, her organ and organ loft.
The communion table [stripped] of the best of her furniture and ornaments. Many of the goodly monuments of the dead shamefully abused, defaced, rifled and plundered of their brasses, iron-gates and bars; the common Dorter (affording good housing for many members of our Church) with the Dean’s private chapel and a goodly library over it, quite demolished, the books and other furniture sold away…Our very common seal, our registers and other books, together with our records and evidences seized, many of them irrecoverably lost; the Church’s guardians, her fair and strong gates, turned off the hooks and burned.
Everywhere self-appointed preachers, ‘cobblers, tinkers and chimney-sweepers’, women as well as men, were haranguing congregations and inciting them to further excesses, talking for hours on end, often unintelligibly. A button-maker had to be dragged from the pulpit of St Anne’s. Aldergate where he had been drawing out ‘his words like a Lancashire bagpipe and the people could scarce understand any word he said’. The leatherseller Praise-God Barebone, whose two brothers were stated to have been named Christ-Came-Into-The-World-To-Save Barebone and If-Christ-Had-Not-Died-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone, preached a sermon reported to have lasted five hours of a winter’s afternoon to a congregation ‘about the number of an hundred and fifty’.
Distressed by such reports and by the speeches of the more vehement and progressive Members of Parliament, a group of more moderate men began to emerge. Among them were Lucius Cary, son of the first Viscount Falkland, an accomplished, impulsive, learned and delightfully good-natured young man, Member of Parliament for Newport; John Hampden’s cousin, Edmund Waller, a vain poet with an exceptional gift for declamation, who confessed that he had a ‘carnal eye’ and that he wished only to enjoy his wealth and popularity in peace; Sir John Culpeper, Member for Kent, a ‘man of sharpness of parts and volubility of language’, in Edward Hyde’s description, a persuasive orator, though short-tempered and irresolute; and Edward Hyde himself, ‘a fair, ruddy, fat, middle-statured, handsome man’, with ‘an eloquent tongue’ and a ‘dexterous and happy pen’, who was then Member for Saltash. The devotion of these men to the Church of England was rarely as fierce as their opponents’ dislike of it: as one of them, Lucius Cary, ‘was wont to say, they who hated bishops hated them worse than the devil, and they who loved them did not love them so well as their dinner’. Yet, as the Puritans became