So thick was the throng that their progress slowed to one mile an hour. It was, thought some observers, almost like a royal procession. The living martyrs were home at last. In London itself, some three thousand coaches, and four thousand horsemen, and ‘a world of foot’ awaited them, everyone carrying a rosemary branch. Everyone noticed that the bishops were far from overjoyed. They had every reason for apprehension. Prynne’s warning to Laud that his own career was not immune from ruin was about to be as spectacularly fulfilled as the crudest tragedy.
And Prynne, like many a prophet, was himself one of the main causes of what he had cleverly foretold. On 18 December 1640, Laud was charged with high treason, and when he was removed to the Tower in the spring of 1641, Prynne gained access to his private papers, which he promptly published, carefully providing glosses. For Prynne – as for the young, clever John Milton – the bishops were nothing more nor less than ‘ravenous wolves’. It is fair to say that in bringing Laud to book, Prynne too was an iconoclast, and Laud an icon whose smash would prove his falsity. Just as early reformers had eagerly exposed Christ’s ‘blood’ of Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire to be a fake, so Prynne sought to open Laud to public inspection, to provoke healing ridicule and laughter. But there was always the risk that Prynne and Pym would come to resemble the men who, they felt, had persecuted them.
One of the new pamphlet plays, entitled Canterbury His Change of Diet, was composed to mark the occasion of the condign punishment meted out to the three. ‘Privately acted near the Palace-yard at West-minster’, said the title page. ‘The Bishop of Canterbury having variety of dainties, is not satisfied till he be fed with the tippets of men’s ears.’ Laud’s love of luxury, his links with the court, are turned into a kind of monstrous cannibalism.
The charges against Laud had to do with profound, deepening, widening dread of popery. It was this fear that animated the man who led the Commons, sometimes from the wings but increasingly from centre-stage. The man was John Pym, and his hour had found him. It was Pym’s task not only to reflect but also to whip up anti-popery, to turn headshaking dismay at the queen’s antics into shouting alarm. Only by generating a sense of national crisis – England was in danger, about to be swept away – could Pym hope to overcome the English political system’s tendency to right itself, to seek consensus and shun division.
The ground for his campaign had already been prepared. John Pym’s anti-popery was not unique to him, nor was his use of it in Parliament historically unprecedented. The Parliament of 1621 had been preoccupied with the idea that a Jesuit conspiracy was behind the fall of the Palatinate to the forces of Rome. The Parliament of 1628/9 was anxious that Arminianism was spreading. Arminianism was the belief that men and women could be saved by their own works, and by their own goodness and repentance; the way to heaven was a slow and steady walk, lined with kindness to others. This harmless-sounding idea flew in the face of Calvinism, which held that every person was destined by God to be either saved or damned and could moreover be saved by his grace alone. As Pym’s stepbrother Francis Rous put it: ‘an Arminian is the spawn of a Papist; and if there come the warmth of favour upon him, you shall see him turn into one of those frogs that rise out of the bottomless pit. And if you mark it well, you shall see an Arminian reaching out his hand to a Papist, a Papist to a Jesuit, a Jesuit gives one hand to the Pope and the other to the King of Spain; these men having kindled a fire in our neighbour country, now they have brought over some of it hither, to set on flame this kingdom also.’ Arminianism was seen as a menace because it was believed to prevent the kind of real, passionate soul-searching, with real self-loathing and much anguish, that was needed for true repentance. As a result of heightened anxieties of this kind, becoming an MP came to involve a declaration of religious allegiance. When Richard Grosvenor made a speech in support of candidates in Cheshire in 1624, he roundly announced that they were staunch Protestants, ‘untainted in their religion’. The 1624 elections were especially dominated by anxieties about popery in the wake of the Spanish Match and its failure.
This dread of sneaking popery centred on the court, because it was the queen’s influence that was feared most. Sir William Bulstrode was horrified by the spectacle of people trooping off to Mass with the queen: ‘so that it grows ordinary with the out-facing Jesuits, and common in discourse, Will you go to Mass, or have you been at Mass at Somerset-house? There coming five hundred a time from mass.’ In this atmosphere, Pym scarcely had to work hard to rouse fears that were ever-present.
The fear was renewed by Protestant England’s consciousness of its own history. John Foxe’s book Acts and Monuments, known as the Book of Martyrs, which graphically described the burning of Protestants during the reign of Mary Tudor eighty years earlier, was widely read and highly influential. The godly iconoclast William Dowsing owned three copies of it for his own personal use. So eager was Ipswich for the book that a satirist invented a maiden who shaped her sweetmeats into figures from Foxe. More recent events also haunted the Protestant imagination. Dread was fanned every year in the fires of the fifth of November. The Gunpowder Plot made papists and Jesuits seem especially the enemies of the Houses of Parliament. The godly Samuel Ward always warned his congregations on 5 November of the terrible danger in which they stood. Every year the celebration of Bonfire Night, in which often the pope and not Guy Fawkes was burned in effigy, reminded everyone that Catholic conspirators might be in their midst, but that God had delivered them. In the 1630s, only Puritans celebrated, but by 1644 the whole nation adopted the festival; even Royalists tried to invoke it by claiming that it was Parliament that resembled the gunpowder plotters. November was, besides, a Royalist month; it embraced Princess Mary’s birthday on the fourth, and Henrietta Maria’s on the sixteenth, and the king’s on the nineteenth. Despite all this, spectacular fireworks displays marked the day in November 1647, celebrating Parliament’s victories. The celebrations were themselves a kind of elaborate allegory of popery, and included ‘fire-balls burning in the water, and rising out of the water burning, showing the papists’ conjuration and consultation with infernal spirits, for the destruction of England’s king and Parliament’. They also rang the church bells all over England every 5 November. They grew louder and louder as the 1630s went on, and somehow, in some places, the bells rung for the king’s coronation day become softer, less sustained. Catholic courtiers, Catholic nobles, and above all the queen: men and women began to wonder if they were poised to act, to use the king as their tool.
Everyone had noticed how many Catholics eagerly joined the king’s army against the Scots. All through the 1630s there were stories of plotting papists: a mole-catcher called Henry Sawyer was examined by the council for saying that when the king went to Scotland to be crowned, the Catholics would rise up and attack the Protestants. It was widely whispered that such campaigns would be led by Catholic gentry, but some suspected involvement at higher levels. The Earl of Bridgewater, the young John Milton’s patron, reported worriedly to Secretary Coke that there had been a violent incident; an elderly woman had begged alms of a young gallant on horseback, who had responded by offering her a shilling if she would kneel to the cross on the shilling itself. She refused, and the young man killed her. Terror was increased when the winter of 1638/9 saw freak storms, which contemporaries read as signs. Dennis Bond of Dorset reported in his diary that ‘this year the 15 December was seen throughout the whole kingdom the opening of the sky for half a quarter of an hour’. Henry Hastings reported that a vision of men with pikes and muskets had been seen in the sky. Brilliana Harley thought that in 1639 the anti-christ must begin to fall, while the armies themselves quailed at the spectacle of lightning and thunder. ‘Many fears we have of dangerous plots by French and papists’, recorded Robert Woodforde, while the alarm was such in Northamptonshire that some town marshals in Kettering set up a round-the-clock guard. On further rumours that papists were making ready to set fire to the town, the watch was strengthened. It was becoming clear that Charles couldn’t altogether control the situation. People began to wonder if he could guarantee the safety of the English Church and its members from the dreadful dangers besetting them within and without the kingdom. And Charles himself might be a danger.
The man who rose to greatness by exploiting those fears also believed in them; indeed, he was their creation. John Pym came from Somerset, from an estate which had been