But the town-clerk, whose father was a servant to the Earl of Warwick, ‘told them I was the Earl of Warwick’s steward: and his assurance got some credit with them. And so the great cloud vanished. But I could go no further to succour the Lady Rivers. For I heard, from all hands, that there was so great confusion at Melford, that no man appeared like a gentleman, but was made a prey to that ravenous crew.’ So he left the coach at Salisbury, ‘and went a bye-way to Sir Robert Crane’s, a little nearer Melford, to listen after the countess’. He thought he was witnessing the actions of an ‘unruly multitude … the rabble’, not those of ‘honest inhabitants’. He thought that they only pretended to religious fervour, while in fact ‘spoil and plunder were their aim’ and that they acted as if ‘there had been a dissolution of all government’; he concluded that ‘so monstrous is the beast when it holds the bridle in its teeth’.
Countess Rivers’s ordeal was not yet over. On Wednesday 24 August, a multitude of like disposed persons, threatening her death’ nearly caught her; they entered the house ‘before she had fully escaped their sight’ (perhaps she had been loath to use the ‘back gate for beggars and the meaner sort of swains to come in at’, noted by James Howell when he visited the house). So the crowds ransacked the house. John Rous reported that ‘the Lady Rivers house was defaced, all glass broken, all iron spoiled, all likely places digged where money might be hidden. The gardens defaced. Beer and wine consumed and let out (to knee deep in the cellar) The deer killed and chased out.’ She may have been helped to escape by Sir Robert Crane; she sought sanctuary at Bury St Edmunds, thirteen miles away. It shut its gates against her. Eventually she was allowed in, but was forced to flee to London the next day.
The crowds, unsatisfied, moved on to other targets: the Audleys, a Catholic family within the liberties of Colchester, who had already been the subject of a panic in 1640 when it had been said that Catholics were assembling for an insurrection. The family’s house and cattle were plundered. On his funeral monument, Sir Henry had written Non aedes (belli civilis furore diructas) (He did not rebuild his house, destroyed by the fury of the civil war); the doggy, compressed Latin suggests some haste. A clergyman called Gabriel Honeyfold was set upon by ‘a multitude of boys and rude people’ who ‘throng about him … throwing stones and dirt at him’. Another minister, Erasmus Laud, lost his cattle too, and the attackers also took all his wife’s spare clothes. He was attacked solely because his name was the same as that of William Laud, the hated Archbishop of Canterbury. All across the east, local Catholic gentry were assailed; the landed Martins whose chapel was itself a provocation; the house of Carey, a steward to the Rivers family. The riots spread to neighbouring locales, including Maldon, where a Catholic landowner named Edmund Church came under attack; ‘the poor people of the neighbourhood pulled down and carried away a barn and an oxhouse, declaring that Edmond Church was a papist’, and that they would pull down his house if any opposed them. As in other civil wars, people who had been warily tolerant neighbours for years suddenly turned on the minority in their midst. Wherever there was a Catholic family, the crowds gathered: the Petres, the Southcotts. The trouble only stopped when Parliament implemented a vigorous programme of Catholic-watching and sequestration.
Historians have disagreed violently about whether the rioters were motivated solely by religion, or whether class hatred played a part too. For many in the swirling, angry crowds, the war was, precisely, a war on the papists, and the goal was to prevent them from carrying out the hideous designs they were believed to be nurturing. In its paranoia this enabling narrative of recruitment does strongly resemble Nazi anti-Semitism, and like Nazi anti-Semitism it could easily tip over into corruption, profiteering and simple looting. Unlike anti-Semitism, however, it was elastic, able to embrace people (ultimately including Charles himself) who were clearly not Catholic nor even particularly sympathetic to Catholicism, but who were not godly enough, who did not share the culture and aspirations formed among the godly and the indefatigable tellers of their story, the London press. People who said ‘damme me!’ or ‘sinke me!’, people who fought alongside the Royalists or supplied them willingly, could come to be seen as near-papist because they were assumed to be part of a vast and secret conspiracy or else the dupes of that conspiracy. As well, England was swayed by rumours of prominent conversions; Laud was said to have been present when ‘Doctor Prince’ received extreme unction; an Essex man thought most of the bishops were secret Catholics; Suffolk parishioners began to suspect their ministers of Catholicism. Fears centred on the queen; at Bures a local gentleman said that ‘the king hath a wife, and he loves her well, and she is a papist and we must all be of her religion, and that’s the thing the bishops aim at’.
But many of those accused of popery were merely Arminian or not sufficiently godly to abhor Laud’s reforms. No one even knew how many Catholics there were in the Eastern Association, and as some of the stories above make clear, locals were not always sure about who counted as Catholic; there were probably only 30,000 Catholics in the whole country, in a population of around four million. But prejudice was deaf to statistics. The queen’s activism and the Laudian reforms made it seem that Catholics were gaining in strength. So did the rising number of Catholic peers: in 1603, there were nine, and in 1625 eighteen; the number of active, visible priests rose too, and Jesuits went from nine in 1593 to around 180 by 1641. The people of Essex and Suffolk had no direct knowledge of these alarming statistics, but they may have picked up a general and accurate sense that Rome was on the rise.
Dreadful as it seemed for Countess Rivers, worse fates awaited others. In Dorchester, in August 1642, two Catholic priests disobeyed a royal proclamation of 8 March 1641 which had tried to placate the public by insisting that all priests leave the country. They were arrested; one recanted, and the other refused to do so. His name was Hugh Green, and he was fifty-seven years old. He had been making for the ports to try to leave the country when he was arrested by a customs officer. He spent five months in gaol, was tried and convicted.
Green was to be executed on a Friday, by his own desire. They brought the furze for the fires to Gallows Hill, outside Dorchester, on Thursday. Green himself was taken to Gallows Hill on 18 August 1642. A crowd was waiting for him. It was eager and hopeful; after the terror of the Irish, after all Pym had said, it seemed obvious to the spectators that traitors like this one were behind it all. Three women were being hanged, too, for various crimes, and two had sent him word the night before that they would die in his faith. He absolved them with a sign, because he wasn’t allowed close to them. ‘God be with you, sir!’ they cried.
Green gave away his things – his beads, his crucifix, his Agnus Dei, his handkerchief, his book of litanies. However, he would not apologize for what everyone knew to be his treachery. He made a long speech, denouncing heresy. Sir Thomas Trencher’s chaplain, who had once been a weaver, was angry, shouting ‘He blasphemes. Stop his mouth!’ So the sheriff told Green to stop. Then he prayed instead for unity, for peace, and for the king, and forgave everyone. He called a Catholic woman, Elizabeth Willoughby, to him and she came, and he asked her to say goodbye to his fellow-prisoners, and he blessed her and