Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Studies in Modern British Religious History)

Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War

Julie Spraggon

THE BOYDELL PRESS

STUDIES IN MODERN BRITISH RELIGIOUS HISTORY

Volume 6

Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War This work offers a detailed analysis of Puritan iconoclasm in England during the 1640s, looking at the reasons for the resurgence of imagebreaking a hundred years after the break with Rome, and the extent of the phenomenon. Initially a reaction to the emphasis on ceremony and the ‘beauty of holiness’ under Archbishop Laud, the attack on ‘innovations’, such as communion rails, images and stained glass windows, developed into a major campaign driven forward by the Long Parliament as part of its religious reformation. Increasingly radical legislation targeted not just ‘new popery’, but pre-Reformation survivals and a wide range of objects (including some which had been acceptable to the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church). The book makes a detailed survey of parliament’s legislation against images, considering the question of how and how far this legislation was enforced generally, with specific case studies looking at the impact of the iconoclastic reformation in London, in the cathedrals and at the universities. Parallel to this official movement was an unofficial one undertaken by Parliamentary soldiers, whose violent destructiveness became notorious. The significance of this spontaneous action and the importance of the anti-Catholic and anti-episcopal feelings that it represented are also examined. Dr JULIE SPRAGGON works at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

STUDIES IN MODERN BRITISH RELIGIOUS HISTORY ISSN 1464–6625 General editors Stephen Taylor Arthur Burns Kenneth Fincham This series aims to differentiate ‘religious history’ from the narrow confines of church history, investigating not only the social and cultural history of religion, but also theological, political and institutional themes, while remaining sensitive to the wider historical context; it thus advances an understanding of the importance of religion for the history of modern Britain, covering all periods of British history since the Reformation.

I Friends of Religious Equality Non-Conformist Politics in mid-Victorian England Timothy Larsen II Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 edited by Peter Lake and Michael Questier III Bishops and Reform in the English Church, 1520–1559 Kenneth Carleton IV Christabel Pankhurst Fundamentalism and Feminism in Coalition Timothy Larsen V The National Church in Local Perspective The Church of England and the Regions, 1660–1800 edited by Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey S. Chamberlain

Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War

JULIE SPRAGGON

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Julie Spraggon 2003 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2003 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 0 85115 895 1

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA website: www.boydell.co.uk

A catalogue record of this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Spraggon, Julie, 1962– Puritan iconoclasm during the English Civil War / Julie Spraggon. p. cm. – (Studies in modern British religious history, ISSN 1464–6625) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–85115–895–1 (alk. paper) 1. Iconoclasm – England – History – 17th century. 2. Puritans – England – History – 17th century. 3. England – Church history – 17th century. I. Title. II. Series. BR757.S67 2003 274.2⬘06 – dc21 2002012938

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Limited, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Contents List of Plates and Tables

vi

Acknowledgements

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

xi

1. Attitudes to Images from the Reformation to the Meeting of the Long Parliament c.1536–1640

1

2. The Argument for Reform: the Literature of Iconoclasm

32

3. Official Iconoclasm: the Long Parliament and the Reformation of Images

61

4. The Enforcement of Iconoclastic Legislation in the Localities

99

5. The Response in London

133

6. The Reformation of the Cathedrals

177

7. Iconoclasm at the Universities

217

Conclusion

250

Appendix I.

Parliamentary Legislation against Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry

257

Appendix II.

Anti-Stuart Iconoclasm

262

Appendix III. William Dowsing’s Commissions

264

Bibliography

267

Index

305

List of Plates 1. Title page of the royalist newsbook Mercurius Rusticus

53

2. The burning of images, crucifixes and books taken from the royal chapels at Somerset House and St James’s Palace, 1643

74

3. The high altar in the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey, erected by Pietro Torregiano

90

4. A drawing of the ‘Superstitious and Jesuitical’ mark from the communion cup of St Pancras Soper Lane, entered into the vestry minutes book, 15 April 1642

147

5. The demolition of Cheapside Cross, May 1643

160

List of Tables 1. Responses of London parishes to the September 1641 order, 1641–2

144

2. Responses of London parishes to the setting up of the Harley Committee and the August 1643 ordinance, 1643–4

162

3. Responses of London parishes to the May 1644 ordinance, 1644–5

168

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people who have all read and commented helpfully upon this work at some stage in its development: Nicholas Tyacke, Trevor Cooper, Margaret Aston, Kenneth Fincham, Anne Hughes, Barry Coward and Stephen Taylor. Trevor Cooper has been particularly generous in sharing his own work on Dowsing before it was published and thanks to him, too, for drawing my attention to the illustration of Torregiano’s high altar, reproduced here as plate 3. I would also like to thank the staff and archivists at the various libraries, record offices, and cathedral and college archives that I have visited during the course of my research. They have been universally kind and helpful. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my partner, Paul Daintry, and my daughter, Lily, for their continual support and encouragement. I owe them a lot of undivided attention. Plates 1, 2, 3 and 5 are reproduced by kind permission of the British Library; plate 4 is reproduced by kind permission of the Guildhall Library.

For Paul and Lily

Publication of this book has been assisted by a generous grant from the Isobel Thornley Bequest Fund.

Abbreviations Acts and Ordinances BL BRO CCA CCL CKS CJ CLRO CLSC Coates CSPD CSPV DNB DRO GL GRO HLRO HMC HRO LJ Notestein NRO ORO Private Journals PRO VCH WCA YCA

Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–60, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (3 vols, 1911) British Library Berkshire Record Office, Reading Canterbury Cathedral Archives Canterbury Cathedral Library Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone House of Commons Journals Corporation of London Records Office Camden Local Studies Centre The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes from the First Recess of the Long Parliament to the Withdrawal of King Charles from London, ed. W. H. Coates (Yale, 1942) Calendar of State Papers Domestic Calendar of State Papers Venetian Dictionary of National Biography Devonshire Record Office Guildhall Library Gloucestershire Record Office House of Lords Record Office Historical Manuscripts Commission Hampshire Record Office, Winchester House of Lords Journals The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes from the Beginning of the Long Parliament to the Opening of the Trial of the Earl of Strafford, ed. W. Notestein (Yale, 1923) Norfolk Record Office Oxfordshire Record Office The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, ed. W. H. Coates, V. F. Snow and A. Steele Young (3 vols, Yale 1982–90) Public Record Office Victoria County History Westminster City Archives York City Archives

A Note on Conventions Dates are given according to the old style calendar except that the year has been taken to begin on 1 January. In quotations, the original spelling and punctuation have been kept but contractions have been expanded. Place of publication for works cited is London unless otherwise stated.

Introduction The Puritan iconoclasm of the 1640s was as notorious in its own time as it remains today. The destruction of church ornaments and fabric by the parliamentarian army (both spontaneous and directed from above) has been the subject of myth and exaggeration, but it was also a real and meaningful phenomenon, part of a wider official drive against images. The peculiar circumstances of the time – the collapse of Charles’s personal rule following defeat in the unpopular Bishops’ Wars with Scotland, and the outbreak of civil war between the king and his parliament – meant that a minority of godly parliamentarians were in a position to effect political and religious change. This included a major campaign against idolatry in the form of church images and other objects associated with religious worship. It is the nature, extent and impact of this campaign that is explored here. Iconoclasm was not, of course, an invention of the hotter sort of Protestants, nor of the 1640s. It had been an important feature of both the Continental and the English Reformations, with its roots in ‘heretical’ or reforming ideas of earlier periods. Arguments against images were based on the biblical injunctions against idols and graven images in the decalogue and on various other pronouncements against idolaters and stories of godly iconoclasts throughout the Old Testament. The theological case against images was a crucial part of Reformation ideology, if a controversial one (Luther, for instance, remained ambiguous on the subject of their removal). The resulting iconoclasm would prove a major instrument for effecting physical change in the setting and form of worship. This was especially true in England, where the Reformation was imposed from above, with official image-breaking used to establish religious change under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth. The broad and dramatic iconoclasm of the mid seventeenth century was to be the final major resurgence of the phenomenon in this country. Whilst historians have acknowledged the importance of Reformation iconoclasm, no systematic detailed analysis of iconoclasm in England during the 1640s has previously been undertaken. Indeed there has sometimes been a tendancy to underplay the attack on images that occurred in this period – perhaps an understandable backlash against the numerous unsubstantiated claims of destruction by civil war iconoclasts.1 John Phillips, 1

It is often Cromwell who is to blame in these local legends. See Margaret Aston’s comments on this in M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, i: Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988), 62–3ff. On Cromwell’s attitude see G. Nuttall, ‘Was Cromwell an Iconoclast?’, Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society, 12 (1933–6).

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in his overview of English iconoclasm, has dismissed army iconoclasm as little more than the general destructiveness of war. Parliament’s official attack on images has been used by John Morrill to illustrate the ‘miserable failure’ of their more general attempt to eradicate ‘Anglican’ worship. He argues that specific religious orders, including iconoclastic ones, were often ignored, even actively resisted.2 This present study aims to show that the 1640s saw a good deal of official as well as unofficial iconoclasm, even though this may sometimes have fallen short of the radical and broad agenda that parliament intended and for which it legislated. It also seeks to highlight the link between official iconoclasm and the unofficial iconoclasm of soldiers, and to emphasize the significance of the latter. Other recent works have begun to draw attention to the importance of the subject. The publication of Trevor Cooper’s new edition of the journal of iconoclast William Dowsing achieves for the area covered by Dowsing (the seven counties of the Eastern Association) what this book is attempting on a more general basis: it carefully unpeels the layers of myth and hearsay to assess the actual extent of iconoclasm that took place. It not only provides the definitive version of a unique printed source, but contains a number of valuable essays which explore this most notorious instance of organized army iconoclasm, and the man who was the driving force behind it. The case of Dowsing is unique in that a detailed account of his endeavours has survived, and probably also in the scope of the reformation he carried out.3 Dowsing the iconoclast, however, was not unique. He was one of a substantial minority of godly men (and in terms of action, at least, it appears to have been a largely male activity) who took the battle against idolatry into their own hands and drove on the iconoclastic campaign.4 Margaret Aston, who has written extensively on attitudes towards images in England, sees post-Reformation iconoclasm as a phenomenon which helped to define the nature of Puritanism, expressing the individual’s spiritual zeal and a sense of responsibility to act where authorities had been neglectful. The Puritan preoccupation with idolatry gave rise to contemporary caricatures such as that of Ben Jonson’s Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, the very stereotype of the fanatically precise, killjoy Puritan, who sees idols in the 2

Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley, Calif., 1973), 191; J. Morrill, ‘The Church in England’, in Reactions to the English Civil War, ed. idem (1982), 90. 3 The Journal of William Dowsing, ed. T. Cooper (Woodbridge, 2001). Dowsing is discussed in chs 4 and 7 below. 4 However, women no doubt took part in popular iconoclasm. At Halstead, Essex, in October 1640, three women were among those who attacked the clerk stripping him of his surplice and denouncing the prayer book as idolatrous. Sir Humphrey Mildmay recorded how, in 1641, the women of Sandon, Essex, took the communion rails from the church and burnt them on the village green, ‘bravely like devils’ (W. Hunt, The Puritan Moment: the Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 287–9). There were also women who supported iconoclasm, such as Lucy Hutchinson and Mary Pennington (Springett).

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hobby-horses and gingerbread men of Bartholomew Fair and takes it upon himself to destroy them. The commitment of the godly to the eradication of idolatry had its roots in a dissatisfaction with the state of Elizabethan churches. Yet, as Aston points out, the efforts of the Protestant church to remove images had been considerable. The Edwardine and Elizabethan onslaughts against images had achieved a great deal: by the end of the sixteenth century shrines, reredoses, statues of saints and carved rood figures had all been removed and destroyed, wall paintings were whitewashed over and their place taken by scriptural texts, whilst imagery in windows was targeted in the 1559 royal injunctions.5 Nonetheless there were survivals and a certain toleration for objects which were unacceptable by Puritan standards – market crosses, for instance, were not outlawed by religious injunctions but came under constant attack from the godly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Spontaneous iconoclastic acts continued, representing the protests of those who could not rest easy with a prevailing pragmatism which Aston has defined as an ‘uneasy balance between toleration and proscription of religious imagery’. When this balance began to tip, in the 1620s and 1630s, towards a greater acceptance of images an even more violent reaction was provoked. This climaxed in the 1640s, when the fight against Laudian innovations ‘in the shape of fresh images and fresh defenders of church pictures’ led to a widening of opposition and ‘both broadened and altered the iconoclastic agenda’. Parliament would see to it that ‘legislation caught up with wider Puritan objectives’. The violent and radical iconoclasm of the 1640s was, as Aston puts it, the ‘culmination of a long ongoing puritan programme’.6 It was, it will be argued here, the unique circumstances of this decade – the political split between king and parliament and the outbreak of war – which allowed this minority agenda to come to fruition (at least in legislative terms). What differentiated this bout of officially sponsored iconoclasm from those which had gone before was that it was played out within the Protestant church itself, rather than as part of the struggle between the old Catholic faith and the new reformed one. The reformed English church had, since the Elizabethan settlement, been broadly hostile towards imagery. Indeed it has been argued by Patrick Collinson that from the 1580s hostility towards ‘false’ (that is idolatrous) art deepened into an iconophobic hatred of all art-forms which appealed to the senses. Collinson’s concern is not specifically the issue of church images, but rather a wider cultural phenomenon, and his definitions of ‘iconoclasm’ and ‘iconophobia’ are too broad to apply to

5

Aston, ‘Puritans and iconoclasm, 1560–1660’, in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. C. Durston and J. Eales (Basingstoke, 1996), 92–3, 121, 93–4. See also Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (1614). 6 Aston, ‘Puritans and iconoclasm’, 103–4, 109, 121, 117–18. For other works by Aston on related themes see bibliography.

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a study of religious iconoclasm in its strictest sense. Yet, if he is right in identifying a widespread antipathy towards visual art in all walks of life then this would have considerable implications for the motivation and psychology of religious iconoclasts, and should be considered here. Collinson proposes that between the mid sixteenth and the mid seventeenth century there was a shift within the English Protestant movement from iconoclasm (which he defines as ‘a spirited attack’ on unacceptable images) to ‘iconophobia’ (the total repudiation of all images). This was part of a withdrawal from popular culture by religious reformers as seen in three principal areas: printed ballads, stage plays and pictorial art. Collinson contrasts the early use of such forms in the promotion of reforming ideas to the ‘refusal of . . . many late Elizabethan and Jacobean religious communicators to appeal to the senses and to popular taste’. This phenomenon was linked to other changes in attitudes, such as a growing distaste for inns and alehouses, and a general emphasis on moral purity, and is attributed by Collinson to ‘the reception of Calvinism’, with its inherent anti-sensualism.7 Collinson’s thesis has been contested. Both Tessa Watt and Peter Lake have argued that Collinson has over-stated his case for a ‘visual anorexia’ in English culture, and exaggerated the extent to which people were cut off from traditional Christian imagery. In fact there continued to be a proliferation of popular art forms in cheap prints and emblem books, whilst the ruling classes commissioned portraits and funeral monuments – the latter often highly coloured and conspicuously erected in the middle of churches. Watt points out the danger of ‘blurring the distinction between the rejection of religious pictures, and hostility to art in general’, and is right to do so. The objection to religious images was backed by biblical injunction, and as such was an accepted part of the Protestant church. Not all Protestants, nor even all Puritans, were iconoclasts, and it was the minority who held extreme views on the subject, such as the objection to religious images outside churches. It is hard to find evidence to support the claim that many objected to art altogether. Even the godly parliamentarians of the 1640s were careful to protect secular monuments in their iconoclastic legislation, and many kept works of art in their own homes.8 Nevertheless the godly suspicion of sensuality is well known. The Puritan aesthetic valued plainness and simplicity over ornament and luxuriousness, the aural over the visual, and discipline and a literal adherence to biblical 7

P. Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: the Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading, 1988), 8, 22, 27. See also Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 1988), ch. 4. 8 T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), 136, 138; and see P. Lake’s review of The Birthpangs of Protestant England, in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 41 (1990), 688–90, esp. 689. There were, however, zealous Puritans who objected to religious art in secular settings (see the discussions of Robert Harley and William Springett in chs 3 and 4 below). Edmund Gurnay’s view that funeral monuments should be prohibited was certainly exceptional (see ch. 2 below).

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injunctions over the wanderings of the human imagination. Iconoclasm was a physical (as well as a symbolic) manifestation of these values. It also expressed other important aspects of the Puritan temperament: the importance of zeal and of the willingness to act upon one’s godly duty, and the desire to cleanse and purge all that was ungodly from both the church and society at large. The reform of church buildings and church governance in the 1640s was part of a wider campaign for reform on a moral and social level. This would include the prohibition of stage plays and of traditional celebrations such as Christmas and May Day and, at the end of the decade, the introduction of the notorious Blasphemy and Adultery acts. There was also a political aspect to the attack on images. Jacqueline Eales has argued that in England opposition to the Laudian altar policy, which triggered off the spontaneous iconoclasm of 1639–41, was linked to a wide spectrum of secular as well as religious tensions which had intensified under Charles I. The controversy was about not only the correct forms of liturgy, ritual and church decoration, but also about obedience to the crown, which for supporters of the king was equated with religious conformity. For the opposition, the fear of Catholicism was tied in with fear of political tyranny and absolute rule. As Carlos Eire has pointed out, ‘in an age when the “religious” and the “secular” were not as easily divorced as in our own, it is misleading to speak of any motives as strictly “religious” ’. Eire argues that the notion of idolatry had, by the second half of the sixteenth century, evolved into a ‘dramatic political issue’, giving rise to resistance theories such as those postulated by John Knox against the Catholic queens of Scotland and England.9 In a similar way the dangers of idolatry were utilized to mobilise parliamentary support against Charles, and to justify the taking up of arms against the monarch. A study of the iconoclasm of the 1640s not only demonstrates the importance of the religious aspects of the civil war, but helps to illustrate the background of ideas against which the political and military struggles were being played out. The aim of this work is to fill a gap in current research by taking a detailed look at several aspects of this iconoclasm, concentrating as far as possible on primary sources, such as parish records and cathedral archives, in order to get a picture of its real extent and significance. A thorough analysis has been made of the agenda of official iconoclasts – how this changed and developed over time – and of the means through which the enforcement of that agenda was attempted. Parallel to this, the unofficial or 9 J. Eales, ‘Iconoclasm, iconography and the altar in the English Civil War’, in The Church and the Arts, ed. D. Wood (Studies in Church History, 28, Oxford, 1992), 158; C. Eire, War Against the Idols: the Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986), 158, 310 and ch. 8 passim. David Freedberg also argues that iconoclasm, despite its primarily religious meaning, ‘almost always has a significant political dimension’ (D. Freedberg, ‘The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm’, in Iconoclasm. Papers given at the 9th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. A. Byer and J. Herrin (Birmingham, 1977), 167).

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semi-official iconoclasm of the parliamentary soldiers has been explored and its meaning assessed, and it is argued here that such iconoclasm was an important part of the wider movement. Whilst iconoclasm was a predominantly religious phenomenon, it cannot, of course, be divorced from its historical context – the peculiar political situation and the violent upheaval of civil war. This context, it is argued, helped to define the final form and character of this last major occurrence of image-breaking in England. Before setting Puritan iconoclasm in its context, with a more detailed look at attitudes towards images in the hundred or so years between the Reformation and the meeting of the Long Parliament, it would be sensible to give a definition of what exactly is meant by ‘iconoclasm’ and the way in which the term is used throughout this work. Strictly speaking the word refers to the breaking of images, usually those of a religious nature. However, it is used here in a far broader sense, reflecting the way in which the issue of images was compounded with that of other ‘offensive’ objects at the time. Thus iconoclasm is taken as the destruction or removal of not only statues or representational images in paintings, stained glass or on canvas, but of a far wider range of items including liturgical equipment and other utensils associated with worship, as well as church ornamentation generally. This extended usage is justified by the fact that all of these objects were coming under attack in the 1640s. They were the targets of iconoclasts not only in deed but in the relevant official legislation. Parliamentary ordinances were aimed at images or ‘superstitious pictures’ but were also concerned with the repositioning of the communion table, the removal of rails, the levelling of chancel steps, and the removal of altar furnishings such as candlesticks, richly covered books and basins. Superstitious inscriptions on tombstones and crosses were major targets along with vestments, fonts and organs. All of these things were seen by contemporaries as part of the same problem – they were all material manifestations of an erroneous and idolatrous form of worship. The catch-all terms used to describe such objects at the time were ‘innovations’ – applied to objects recently installed under the religious regime of Archbishop Laud – or ‘monuments of superstition and idolatry’ – which in practice could be interpreted with a degree of looseness which enabled it to encompass just about anything objectionable to the Puritan eye. Given this diversity of objects under attack, the phenomenon of Puritan ‘iconoclasm’ could not be fully explored except through such an inclusive approach.10

10

Such a usage is common to historians of the subject. Lee Palmer Wandel writing on Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg and Basel, comments that all objectionable items were viewed as ‘idols’ by the iconoclasts, whilst both Freedberg and Sergiusz Michalski note the inclusion of liturgical equipment amongst the iconoclasts’ targets (L. P. Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg and Basel (Cambridge, 1995), 190; Freedberg, ‘The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm’, 165–177, 171–2; S. Michalski, The Reformation and The Visual Arts (1993), 83).

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Sergiusz Michalski has commented that iconoclasm is an ‘ambiguous expression’ which if used in its strictest sense only would mean that ‘a large number of the events in Protestant lands cannot be regarded as iconoclasm’. He makes the point that some moves against images such as those effected in Zurich did not take the form of a violent tumult or involve the kind of physical destruction which is traditionally associated with the concept of iconoclasm, but were supervised, often gradual, removals of offensive items.11 The official reformation of churches examined here is similarly classified as iconoclasm. It is contended that in aim, spirit and religious significance all of the acts of reformation discussed here can be so labelled without too far distorting the original meaning of the term.

11

Ibid., 75–6.

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1 Attitudes to Images from the Reformation to the Meeting of the Long Parliament c.1536–1640

From the beginning of the Reformation hostility towards religious imagery and an emphasis on the sin of idolatry were important features of Protestant thought. These issues remained a constant topic of discussion throughout the period considered here – from the first official critique of images in the royal injunctions of August 1536 to the meeting of the Long Parliament in November 1640. The iconoclasm of the sixteenth century, which played such a central part in the English Reformation, has been thoroughly analysed, and it is not the aim here to provide a detailed account of early iconoclasm, but rather to look at the development of arguments against images in broad terms as a background to the resurgence of iconoclastic zeal in the mid seventeenth century.1 Eamon Duffy has called iconoclasm ‘the central sacrament of reform’, an almost ritualistic act concerned with the obliteration of past beliefs and practices, a ‘sacrament of forgetfulness’. Similarly, Pieter Geyl, describing the activities of iconoclasts in the Netherlands, saw them as attempting ‘to pull down at one blow a past of a thousand years’. The destruction of the external symbolism of a defeated ideology or regime is a common phenomenon. While this was certainly part of the equation, there was a deeper meaning to the Reformation hostility towards images. Reformist objections to the Roman Church centred on its materialism, its mix of the sacred and the profane, its emphasis on ritual (smacking of magic) and its claim to be endowed with the authority to continue Christ’s work on earth (opus operatum). Luther set against this the simpler and more direct concepts of sola fides and sola scriptura, while later reformers, notably 1

Principally by Margaret Aston, Eamon Duffy and John Phillips. See M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, i: Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988), Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350–1600 (1993), The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge, 1993), and ‘Puritans and iconoclasm, 1560–1660’, in The Culture of English Puritanism 1560–1700, ed. C. Durston and J. Eales (1996); E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–1580 (Yale, 1992); J. Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley, Calif., 1973).

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PURITAN ICONOCLASM

Calvin, were concerned with spiritual worship and emphasized the transcendence of God. Images were inexorably bound up with the material and ritual features of the old religion whilst on a practical level they often depicted objectionable ‘superstitions’ such as purgatory or were tied in with the cult of saints.2 A suspicion of the use of religious images pre-dates Christianity, as well as being found in other religions such as Islam. Plato had argued that representing the divine was both futile (because it was inconceivable) and sacrilegious. Idolatry was an important and recurrent theme in the bible, particularly in the Old Testament: God’s covenant with the Israelites demanded the end of idolatrous worship, whilst the altars and images associated with such worship were overturned time and again, and the wicked countenancers of images defeated. Yet there was an inherent contradiction in the bible which also contained examples of images being sanctioned (some of the most commonly cited being the decorations of Solomon’s temple, the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant and the brazen serpent made by Moses at God’s command). The seed of conflict between opponents and supporters of images was, therefore, always present.3 Controversy over the use of images in Christian churches first flared up in Byzantium during the eighth and ninth centuries. In 726 and again in 730 Emperor Leo III had promulgated a decree forbidding the veneration of images, and both he and his son Constantine pursued a vigorous policy of iconoclasm, actions which in part may have reflected the influence of antimaterialist eastern ‘heresies’. The iconoclasts were condemned at the second ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 787 which established the lawfulness of paying honour to images, but further imperial iconoclasm took place in the first half of the ninth century until its final condemnation at the Council of Orthodoxy in 843.4 The medieval church’s defence of images tended to concern itself with clarifying their legitimate uses, focussing particularly on their educational potential (as a means of instructing the illiterate masses). However, criticism of images did not go away. The actual destruction of images was associated with heresies such as the Cathar movement, and the Lollards. Within the 2 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 480; Geyl quoted in D. Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History (Cambridge, 1990), 54. See also Eire, War Against the Idols, introduction; K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (1971), 59. 3 A. Besançon, The Forbidden Image: an Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. J. M. Todd (Chicago and London, 2000), 1; C. Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993), 255–7. See also J. Gutmann, ‘Deuteronomy: religious reformation or iconoclastic revolution’ in The Image and the Word: Confrontations in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. idem (Missoula, Mont., 1977). On Solomon’s temple, the Ark and the brazen serpent, see 1 Kings 6, Exodus 25, Numbers 21:8–9 and 2 Kings 18:4. 4 Phillips, The Reformation of Images, 13–16; D. Freedberg, ‘The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm’, 165–77.

2

ATTITUDES TO IMAGES c.1536–1640

medieval church concern was expressed at the danger of the abuse of images with many treatises and sermons on the subject, although this was rarely expanded into an argument against images themselves. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries humanists, such as Colet and Erasmus, were critical of image veneration which they saw as superstitious. Whilst Erasmus was not an iconoclast he seriously questioned the use of images, particularly as part of his critique of traditions such as pilgrimage and the veneration of saints. Moreover, he felt such externals to be a distraction from inner spirituality.5 Iconoclasm was to play an important role in the Reformation: although Luther himself was wary of condoning image-breaking, which became associated with social anarchy particularly after the Peasants’ War, other reformers, such as the notoriously iconoclastic Zwingli in Zurich, were more willing to take direct action against images. By the end of the 1530s action against images had been taken in numerous places including Wittenberg, Zurich, Berne, Basel and Strasbourg, whilst outbreaks of iconoclastic destruction had occurred in Paris, Geneva, Hamburg and elsewhere.6 In England the Lollards had based their opposition to images (particularly those representing God, the Trinity, crucifixes and the Virgin Mary) on the decalogue, and Wycliffe was concerned that such ‘externals’ would hinder rather than help inner prayer. Imagery was a tool of the devil who seduced men through appeals to the senses. Lollard ‘heretics’ not only preached against images but occasionally engaged in acts of iconoclasm, and sporadic incidents occurred throughout the fifteenth century. By the early sixteenth century it seemed as if ‘old iconomachy was getting a new lift from abroad’, with image-breaking spurred on by events on the Continent. During the 1520s there had been a number of iconoclastic incidents, and these increased during the 1530s, mainly concentrated on eastern England. It was reported in October 1533, for instance, that images were being cast out of churches in London. Such cases were dealt with harshly as were the heresies with which they were connected.7 The break from Rome was far from being an endorsement of iconoclasm, or the ideas behind it. However, as defenders of traditional church doctrines tended to be less enthusiastic in supporting the royal supremacy, official policy found itself allied to those of more radical inclinations. This alliance, of the anti-papal cause with that of the iconoclasts, was seen in the carefully stage-managed exposures of various famous images, as well as in the dissolution of the monasteries. The Ten Articles of July 1536 had contained 5

Phillips, Reformation of Images, 16, 21, 31, 33–9. Phillips has argued that although the views of English humanists on images are too fragmentary to make any generalizations, their ideas were not radically different from those of Erasmus (ibid., 35 and n. 20). 6 On Zwingli, see C. Garside, Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven, Conn., 1966) and Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 20, 34–46, 205. 7 Ibid., 98–104, 211–12, 212 (quote); Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 381.

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a qualified acceptance of images: article six forbade idolatrous worship but permitted the use of images for instructional purposes or as ‘reminders of heavenly things’. Yet by August, the first set of royal injunctions was already taking a more critical attitude, arguing against the abuse of images, and those of 1538 went further ordering the removal of abused images, while instituting quarterly sermons to warn of the danger of kissing, or making offerings or pilgrimages to images and shrines. In the same year, Nicholas Partridge wrote to Henry Bullinger expressing his hope that God might now grant ‘that we may really banish all idols from our hearts’.8 The Henrician reformation was a struggle between the restraining hand of the conservative king and those of his ministers and officials, men such as Cromwell, Cranmer and Latimer, who would have liked to move faster and further. Cranmer had first put the issue of imagery on the official agenda with his Paul’s Cross sermon in 1536 in which he spoke out against images, purgatory and the worship of saints. In 1537 his additions to the text of the Bishops’ Book were an attempt to undermine its justification of the use of images, although these were overruled by the king. In 1543, he was to be accused of heresy by conservative prebendaries at Canterbury, and although it has been suggested that the claims against him were exaggerated, his advanced beliefs on images would make themselves known in the more commodious atmosphere of Edward’s reign. His 1548 visitation articles for Canterbury went beyond those of the 1547 royal visitation, requiring the destruction of images rather than just their removal.9 Meanwhile Thomas Cromwell promoted anti-image propaganda recruiting men like Hugh Latimer and William Marshall. Marshall translated works by Erasmus, as well as the controversial iconoclastic work by Martin Bucer, Das Einigerlei Bild. Latimer by the mid 1530s was calling for the total abolition of images, and preached on this theme before the convocation of June 1536.10 The course of reform was halted by the fall of Cromwell in 1540 – although a royal proclamation of November 1538, whilst containing a strong attack on the Becket cult, had already shown a marked conservatism compared to the injunctions of two months earlier. With the accession of Edward VI, however, the reforming cause was renewed with increased vigour, particularly in the campaign against images. Acts of iconoclasm greeted the new reign, in London and elsewhere, whilst the official tone was set with Cranmer’s coronation address, referring to the young king as another Josiah (the biblical king who had been zealous in his abolition of

8 Ibid., 404; Phillips, Reformation of Images, 54; on Henrician legislation against images see Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 222–46. Partridge quoted from ibid., 236. 9 Ibid., 172, 222; Phillips, Reformation of Images, 57; M. L. Zell, ‘The prebendaries’ plot of 1543’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 27 (1976), 241–53; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 461. 10 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 421–4, 205, 172; Phillips, Reformation of Images, 53.

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idolatry and punishment of idolaters). Such references were to become commonplace.11 The official policy on images went further than ever before. The 1547 royal injunctions required the destruction of all abused images, defining even the simple act of censing as abuse, and the removal of all relics, images, pictures and paintings which constituted ‘monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition’. This went so far as to include glass windows, which even the hard-liner Zwingli had exempted from destruction in Zurich. During the actual visitation the commissioners pushed through a radical reading of the injunctions.12 The question of images remained controversial, and in February 1548 the Privy Council issued an order commanding all images to be removed, largely to circumvent dispute on the subject. In 1550, when John Dudley, the earl of Warwick, replaced Protector Somerset the pace of reformation was stepped up. A bill for the establishment of the new Book of Common Prayer also required the destruction or defacing of all ‘images of stone, timber, alabaster or earth, graven carved or painted, which heretofore have been taken out of any church or chapel, or yet stand in any church or chapel’.13 Radicals like bishops Nicholas Ridley and John Hooper took even more extreme action. In May 1550, Ridley ordered the abolition of altars in his London diocese (an order which would be imposed on the whole country under the authority of the Privy Council the following November). His zeal was such that he had to be restrained from pulling down the tomb of John of Gaunt at St Paul’s Cathedral. Hooper, in his 1551 visitation injunctions for Gloucester and Worcester, saw to it that steps and partitions where the altars had been were also ripped out, and forbade the decking of tables.14 Even though images were to be returned under Mary, the expense of refurbishment limited the extent to which the clock could be turned back. Duffy points out that the narrowing of the devotional range of Marian Catholicism was partially to do with this difficulty of reconstruction (whilst also reflecting a general tendency of the counter-Reformation). There was

11

Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 410–11, 449; W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: the Young King (1968), 146–7, 149, 150; S. Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), 423–4, 430–1; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 247, and see 249, n. 83. On the comparisons made between Tudor monarchs and biblical iconoclasts see also Aston, The King’s Bedpost and D. MacCulloch, Tudor Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (1999), esp. ch. 2. 12 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 450–1; Tudor Royal Proclamations, i: the Early Tudors (1485–1553), ed. P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (New Haven and London, 1964), no. 287. 13 Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, ed. E. Cardwell (2 vols, Oxford, 1844), i, 47–9; and see Phillips, Reformation of Images, 94, 96–7, and ch. 4 generally on Edwardine iconoclasm; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 469, citing J. Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in England (4 vols, 1908–13), iii, 183. 14 Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, ed. W. H. Frere and W. M. Kennedy (3 vols, 1910), ii, 276–7 (item 43), 284–5 (item 16); Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 270. On Ridley and Hooper in London, see Brigden, London and the Reformation, 362–9.

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a concentration on the high altar, with the rood and the individual church’s patron saint being the only image made obligatory, and no official attempt made to enforce the restoration of side altars or other images. This was paralleled by a greater emphasis on the cross and redemption.15 Despite their somewhat muted return, by the time of Queen Elizabeth’s accession, in 1558, church images had gained a heightened symbolic meaning, representing the religious reaction of the Marian period. Their removal and destruction was both religiously and politically expedient to demonstrate the establishment of a new regime. A procession the day before Elizabeth’s coronation illustrated the point – figures depicting superstition and idolatry were shown being defeated by another representing true religion in the form of the new royal Deborah. At the level of popular protest adherents of Protestantism did not wait for legislation (which would not come until a cautious seven months later) but in riotous scenes took it into their own hands to smash images. It was reported that ‘in many of the churches of London the crucifixes have been broken, the figures of the Saints defaced, and the altars denuded’.16 The thorough purging of images from churches started with the royal visitation of July 1559. Such a step was not only a reflection of the need to dismantle the symbols of the Marian regime but also an attempt to finally eradicate the conservative leanings of the general population. This time the removal of the paraphernalia and imagery of Catholicism was meant to be final, with clauses in the visitation articles and the royal injunctions allowing for the searching of private houses to discourage the hiding of images. There was also an emphasis on destruction rather than simple removal, and a strict attitude taken against those who attempted to avoid it. It was important that the change of religion should be seen to be permanent and not yet another temporary shift.17 Another factor which had an impact on attitudes towards images in the immediate post-Marian period was the theological influence of the Reformed churches at Geneva, Frankfurt and Zurich, where Protestant refugees had spent their exile. Despite the fairly early divide between those prepared to take office in the ‘but halfly reformed’ church of the Elizabethan settlement and those who chose to stay outside of it (or who were deliberately excluded), most of these men returned with a greater commitment to Reformed religion. Their feelings on the subject of images is clear from their visitation articles, and from their extreme discomfort over the question of 15

Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 563–4. See Phillips, Reformation of Images, 106–7ff., for furtive acts of iconoclasm during Mary’s reign, and the difficulties of reinstating images. 16 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 568; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 295; CSPV, 1558–80, 84 (10 May 1559). 17 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 567; Elizabethan injunctions and articles of inquiry in H. Gee, The Elizabethan Clergy and the Settlement of Religion, 1558–64 (Oxford, 1898), 54, 58, 69 (royal injunctions, clauses 23 and 35; articles of inquiry, item 45).

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ATTITUDES TO IMAGES c.1536–1640

the ‘relics of superstition’ in the queen’s private chapel. Some were notorious iconoclasts in their own right. William Whittingham, who had been in Geneva with John Knox and who was responsible for the English translation of the Geneva Bible, acted zealously against images at Durham Cathedral, where he was dean. Robert Horne who had been at Frankfurt with Jewel, Cox and Grindal, and who became bishop of Winchester in 1561, ordered the destruction of every painted window, image, vestment, and superstitious ornament or structure in the cathedral there.18 Elizabeth herself, however, was far more conservative in her religious leanings. This conservatism together with the priority given to unity and peace in religion – which led to a fairly broad, inclusive, settlement – lent a certain constraint to pronouncements on images in key texts of the Elizabethan church. It was this ambiguity which would allow for varying interpretations of the Elizabethan position at a later date. The Act of Uniformity, at the beginning of 1559, cautiously retained the use of ‘such ornaments of the church and ministers’ as in the second year of Edward’s reign (that is, objects such as crosses and lights, and vestments).19 By comparison the royal injunctions and the articles of inquiry for the royal visitation, drawn up around July 1559, both came out strongly against images. However, there was a subtle difference in the position taken by these two official statements. The visitation articles took a radical line requiring the removal and destruction of ‘all images, all tables, candlesticks, trindals, rolls of wax, pictures, paintings and all other monuments of feigned and false miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition’. Ministers who ‘extolled superstition’, including the use of images, were sought out, as were any parishioners who harboured images, pictures and paintings or other superstitious monuments in their houses ‘especially such as have been set up in churches, chapels or oratories’.20 The royal injunctions struck a slightly more cautious note. Based on the Edwardine text of 1547 they did contain a radical clause ordering the destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition, including pictures and paintings, on walls and in glass windows. However, a clause requiring the destruction of images at the parochial level was omitted and there was a greater emphasis on the dangers of the abuse of images, rather than images per se. The additional orders regarding the removal of altars defined the issue as largely a matter of indifference: ‘saving for uniformity, there seems no matter of great moment’. Margaret Aston has suggested that the reason for the difference in approach was that the injunctions were the formal, official basis of future royal policy, and therefore reflected more obviously 18

See DNB on Whittingham and Horne. On the activities of individual reformist bishops see S. A. Wenig, Straightening the Altars: the Ecclesiastical Vision and Pastoral Achievements of the Progressive Bishops under Elizabeth I (New York, 2000), ch. 4. 19 Documents Illustrative of English Church History, ed. H. Gee and W. J. Hardy (1896), 466; see Wenig, Straightening the Altars, 78. 20 Gee, The Elizabethan Clergy, 65, 66, 69 (items 2, 9, 45).

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the queen’s conservatism. The visitation articles, on the other hand, were drawn up for practical application – the more radical stance being necessary for eradicating the remnants of Marian worship.21 These articles were supplemented by others drawn up by Archbishop Matthew Parker and other bishops, in A Declaration of Certain Principal Articles of Religion (1559). These made no mention of a permissible use for images, but disallowed, amongst other things, ‘all kind of expressing God invisible in the form of an old man, or the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove’.22 The result was widespread and violent iconoclasm. It was reported that in many places, walls wer rased, windowes wer dashed downe, because some images (little regarding what) were paynted on them. And not only images, but rood-loftes, relickes, sepulchres, books, banners, coopes, vestments, altar-cloathes wer in diverse places, committed to the fire.23

Early in 1560 Edwin Sandys wrote to Peter Martyr that ‘all images of every kind were at our last visitation not only taken down, but also burnt’. This excess horrified the queen who issued a proclamation on 19 September 1560 prohibiting the destruction of church monuments. This offered protection not only to secular monuments but forbade the removal or defacing of ‘any image in glass windows in any church without consent of the ordinary’. Cases where spoliation had already occurred were to be investigated and those responsible liable to make good the damage.24 Another possible example of the queen’s conservatism on this subject are certain textual changes in the Homily on Idolatry of 1563, for which it has been suggested that Elizabeth herself may have been responsible. This was the longest of the homilies – four times longer than any of the others, showing the importance of the issue. Its attitude on the subject of images was clear: ‘images which cannot be without lies, ought not to be made, or put to any use of religion, or to be placed in churches and temples’. Yet revisions made to the original text toned down this position. The claim that true Christians ought to have nothing to do with ‘filthy and dead images’ was changed to an acknowledgement that images have no place in temples ‘for fear and occasion of worshipping them, though they be of themselves things indifferent’ [my emphasis]. The queen also seems to have restricted the reading of the third part of the homily – the most vehement against images which reminds readers that God expects Christian princes to act against images and idols. This part 21

Ibid., 54–5 (clause 23); 48 n. 5, 47, 58 (clauses 2, 35), 63; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 298–304. See also Wenig, Straightening the Altars, 79. Cardwell, Documentary Annals, i, 266. 23 John Hayward, ‘Annals of the first four years of the reign of Elizabeth’, quoted from Wenig, Straightening the Altars, 80. 24 The Zurich Letters, ed. H. Robinson (Cambridge, 1842), i, 31, 74 (1 April 1560); Tudor Royal Proclamations, ii: the Later Tudors (1553–87), ed. P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (New Haven and London, 1969), no. 469, 147.

22

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ATTITUDES TO IMAGES c.1536–1640

was not to be read publicly or intended for uncontrolled general reading. Nonetheless, the Homily on Idolatry remained a key text for those who argued against images right up into the 1640s when it was often cited.25 Most of the Elizabethan episcopate were far more hostile towards images than the queen and the tension between the two positions came to a head over the issue of religious ornaments in the royal chapel. The retention of a crucifix and candles on the altar caused a great stir, prompting Matthew Parker and other leading members of the clergy to write to Elizabeth in 1559 enclosing an anonymous tract entitled Reasons Against Images in Churches (in which Patrick Collinson detects the hand of Grindal). There were also several acts of iconoclasm, with the crucifix being broken in 1562, 1567 and 1570. Both Thomas Sampson and John Jewel were prepared to resign over the issue, the latter writing: ‘matters are come to that pass, that either the crosses of silver and tin, which we have everywhere broken in pieces, must be restored, or our bishoprics relinquished’. One of the main fears expressed by the clergy was that of the establishing of a precedent. The bishops’ address to the queen complained of the risk of ‘setting a trap of error for the ignorant, and . . . digging a pit for the blind to fall into’. Parkhurst lamented the ‘lukewarmness of some persons [which] very much retards the progress of the gospels’.26 The queen’s attitude towards rood images also provoked anger. According to Sandys she considered it not contrary to the word of God . . . that the image of Christ crucified, together with Mary and John, should be placed . . . in some conspicuous part of the church, where they might more readily be seen by all the people. Some of us [bishops] thought far otherwise.27

A disputation over the issue of crucifixes was held in February 1560, where among the defendants of Elizabeth’s position were Archbishop Parker and Richard Cox, with Grindal and Jewel arguing against. It has been suggested that the positions taken by Parker and Cox, surprising considering their earlier expressions of dislike for images, actually represent ‘a formal ecclesiastical procedure for the queen’s benefit, not a split in the episcopal ranks’. Elizabeth conceded the point on the matter of rood lofts, with a royal order for their removal on 10 October 1561. However, she was never persuaded to part with the ornaments in her chapel.28 25

On this see Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 320–4. Ibid., 309–14; The Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. J. Bruce and T. Thomason Perowne (Cambridge, 1853), 79; Zurich Letters, i, 129. 27 Ibid., i, 73–4. 28 Ibid., i, 67; Wenig, Straightening the Altars, 104; The Correspondence of Matthew Parker, 96–7. A detailed discussion of this controversy is given in Wenig, Straightening the Altars, ch. 3. See also Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 306–14. 26

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Despite Elizabeth’s personal caution, the period of her reign was important in the development of arguments against images. One of the key reasons for the continued (and increased) emphasis on idolatry as the central sin was its usefulness as a weapon against the Catholic Church, which was perceived as representing a very real threat. It was in the polemical writings against Catholicism of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean years that the common arguments against images were formulated and became widely accepted, although many harked back to the early Reformation and beyond. The differences with Rome on the subject were based upon varying interpretations of the decalogue’s prohibitions against images and idols. Did the law against the making of images mean all images or only idols, that is, images of false gods? If the prohibition was against idols only and not images representing figures of the true church, might such images be offered worship or honour, indeed might God be worshipped through them? The argument for the outlawing of all images was greatly enhanced by a re-ordering of the clauses of the decalogue by reformers. This created a separate second commandment solely concerned with forbidding the worship of images: Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them.29

The subsequent change of emphasis made clear that it was the worshipping of images, and not just of idols, which was forbidden. Thus the issue was not simply a matter of false religion (turning to false gods) but of false worship of the true God, a point brought out in the various texts discussed below. The idea was put forward by Leo Jud in his German catechism of 1534 (with a preface by Henry Bullinger), and taken up by Martin Bucer and by Calvin in 1537. William Marshall, in the 1535 edition of his Goodly Primer, used both the traditional and new sequences, whilst official acceptance of the latter in England came with the publication of Richard Grafton’s authorized primer of May 1545.30 Roman Catholics had, by comparison, officially allowed the veneration of images since the second Nicaean Council in 787. Here it was decreed that images might be used legitimately because they served as reminders of their archetypes (the holy figure which was being portrayed) and inspired contemplation of the divine. Honour paid to images would be passed on to that archetype, images acting as channels between the material world and the

29 30

Ibid., 371–92. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 479; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 380–5, 421, 427–8.

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spiritual one. This theory was expounded by Thomas Aquinas, who made a distinction between the worship due to God alone – latria – and the respect or service owed to holy individuals such as saints and angels, and for images – dulia. A third form of service – hyperdulia – was reserved for those who ‘have special relationship to God such as the Blessed Virgin’. These ‘tricks of relative worship’, as Jewel called them, were almost universally rejected by Protestants. Even William Laud, giving his opinion at the trial of Salisbury iconoclast Henry Sherfield in 1633, would dismiss the dulia/latria distinction as ‘absurd’.31 Another, potentially more controversial point, was the question of whether the use of images in religion was prohibited outright, even when there was no such abuse as the worshipping or venerating of them. Most Protestant writers tended to argue either that all religious images were unlawful, or that the line between idol and image was too fine and too easily crossed over for the latter to be safely allowed. Better to err on the side of caution, especially given the natural proneness of mankind towards idolatry. The idea of the fundamentally corrupt nature of man was reflected in Calvin’s belief that the human mind was ‘a perpetual forge of idols’. Although men had the seed of religion in them, if left to itself, this would always seek expression through false, idolatrous means. Similar ideas were to be found in the early period of the English Reformation, as, for instance, in the work of John Hooper who described how man, from ‘vanity of fond imagination’, attempted to express God in the form of an imagined figure or image, ‘so that the mind conceiveth the idol, and afterward the hand worketh and representeth the same unto the senses’.32 This attitude came to be commonplace among Elizabethan and early Jacobean reformers. The Calvinist bishop Gervase Babington believed that it ‘cleaveth to our bones and the very marrow to be superstitious and delighted with evil’. In the popular A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments, by non-conformist divines John Dod and Richard Cleaver, there was a warning not only against man’s natural propensity for idolatry but against the ‘highly infectious nature of the disease’. Merely looking at an idol, even with ‘good intent’, would quickly ‘set the heart on fire with idolatry’. This inclination towards idolatry, according to Reasons Against Images in Churches, addressed to Queen Elizabeth in 1559, was why God had seen fit to outlaw images in the first place.33

31

Phillips, Reformation of Images, 14–16; Thomas Aquinas quoted from Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 48; Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. Howell (33 vols, 1809), iii, 550. 32 Quoted from Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, 235; quoted from Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 436–7. 33 Gervase Babington, Collected Works (1660), 144; John Dod and Richard Cleaver, A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments (1606), 58, 61; Correspondence of Matthew Parker, 79.

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Opponents of the use of images stressed the importance of the spiritual over the material in worship. Calvin emphasized the mystery of God, and promoted the principle of ‘finitum non est capax infiniti’ (the finite cannot contain the infinite). The influence of this idea can be seen in the works of English writers. Babington, for instance, stressed the incorporeal nature of God – a ‘spirit incomprehensible’ – and argued not only that he could not be seen but that he did not have a body in the human sense. Where the scripture spoke of him having parts such as feet, hands and face, these were merely temporary forms in which he appeared to men and in which ‘he lay hid even when he was seen’. It was not possible to perceive God by the senses – and this is why the ‘hereticks’ were wrong to picture him in human form. Ultimately, worship of God must be either spiritual (rightful) or material (false), it could not be both. According to William Perkins the ‘right practice of the Gospels [is] to put from us all manner of Idols, and to sanctifie God in our hearts’, that is, to ‘serve him in mind and spirit’.34 That Christians had a duty to perform ‘rightful’ worship was an important aspect of the argument against images and idolatry. For Babington ‘every worship not commanded of God is idolatrie, and the worship also that is commanded, if it be done in other manner than is commanded’. Dod and Cleaver went further claiming that men were as guilty as out and out idolaters if ‘they pul up idols and superstition but do not plant the holy worship of God’. Similarly the drive for a preaching ministry reflected both a reformer’s duty to evangelise and an acknowledgement of the superiority of God’s Word as a teaching medium compared to images which were mere inventions of mankind. The Catholic defence of images as laymen’s books and teachers of the illiterate was totally rejected. Such an argument was seen as both absurd – for how could dumb statues instruct – and dangerous, being in George Abbot’s words ‘a very ready way unto superstition’.35 The concept of the ‘dumb’ image was one frequently used in writings against imagery. John Knox defined idols thus: that which hath the form and appearance but lacketh the virtue and strength which the name and proportion do resemble and promise. As images have face, nose, eyes, mouth, hands, and feet painted but the use of the same cannot the craft and art of man give them.35a

The reference here is to Psalm 115 which condemns heathen idols: ‘they have mouths but they speak not, eyes have they, but they see not’. It was 34 On Calvin see Eire, War Against the Idols, 3; Babington, Collected Works, 410–11; William Perkins, A Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times and an Instruction touching Religion or Divine worship (Cambridge, 1601), dedication. 35 Babington, Collected Works, 497; Dod and Cleaver, A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments, 74; Cheapside Crosse censured and condemned by A Letter Sent from the Vice Chancellor and other Learned Men of the famous University of Oxford (1641), 5. 35a John Knox, ‘The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women’, in John Knox On Rebellion, ed. R. A. Mason (Cambridge, 1994), 23.

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a common theme expounded, for instance, in a Paul’s Cross sermon by John Bridges in 1571, and by Jewel in his controversy with the Catholic writer Thomas Harding. This dumbness of images was set in opposition to the ‘living’ word and the active medium of preaching. Thomas Sampson condemned those who would ‘look for religion in these dumb remnants of idolatry, and not in the preaching of the lively word of God’.36 If images could be called teachers at all then they were teachers of lies. Jewel likened painters to poets for whose ability to lie Plato had wanted banished. Dod and Cleaver warned that scholars who made use of such ‘laymen’s books’ would ‘grow at length to be even as blockish and foolish as the blocks and stones that they worship’. Time and again the point was made that if Catholics were serious in their desire to instruct they would permit the publication of the scriptures which were both more ‘wise and profitable’ and far less dangerous than images. Images, as the address to Queen Elizabeth pointed out, were ultimately unnecessary for the learned and dangerous and misleading for the weak. It was rather the duty of the learned to set a good example. Jewel cited Deuteronomy 27:18, ‘accursed be he that leadeth the blind out of the way’.37 Another common theme of writers against images was the concept of spiritual fornication, a metaphor which linked the sin of idolatry with that of adultery. The God of the decalogue had declared himself to be a jealous God, one who required a chastity in belief and worship, as Dod and Cleaver reminded their readers. They saw the church as the spouse of God, so it followed that the sin of idolatry was betrayal, a kind of adultery. Calvin had called the worship of images ‘that vilest species of adultery’ and the address to Queen Elizabeth declared the invention of images to be ‘the beginning of spiritual fornication’. The giving of honour which properly belonged to God alone to others (such as the saints or the Virgin Mary) was also adultery. Even if honour was paid to God alone but paid in the wrong way – that is, through the use of images – this was ‘false love’ and therefore ‘true hatred’. The ultimate fornication was that committed by the Roman Church. William Perkins expressed a widely held view that Rome itself was the Whore of Babylon who ‘hath endeavoured to intangle al the nations of the earth in her spirituall idolatrie’.38 The idea of mankind’s spiritual ‘whoring’ after their own inventions tied in with that of image-worshippers as yielding to the pleasures of the corrupt 36

Aston, The King’s Bedpost, 170; The Works of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, ed. J. Ayre (4 vols, Cambridge, 1845), ii, 660; Zurich Letters, i, 63. The Works of John Jewel, ii, 660; Dod and Cleaver, A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments, 62; The Correspondence of Matthew Parker, 79; The Works of John Jewel, ii, 668. 38 Dod and Cleaver, A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments, 75, and see 79–80; Calvin quoted from Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 468; The Correspondence of Matthew Parker, 82, 85; Babington, Collected Works, 24–5; William Perkins, Reformed Catholicke (Cambridge, 1598), 2–3, 6. 37

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senses. They were tempted by material richness and outward beauty and drawn away from the plain and simple worship proper to true faith. ‘Wicked Adulterers will bestow much upon their harlots’, complained Babington, ‘and pinch for anything to their lawful wives.’ Linked to this fusion of spiritual and sexual temptation was the condemnation of marriage to idolaters. The Elizabethan articles of visitation of 1559 required that local church officials should declare against recusants, and numerous writers warned against close relationships with Catholics (or even keeping their company). As images themselves were full of the danger of allurement and corruption, so too were the worshippers of images. According to Dod and Cleaver it was impossible to have so much as a conversation with idolaters ‘and not receive some taint of their superstition’.39 It was the duty of all godly persons to reform idolatry, for God, according to Babington, would be revenged upon the sufferers of idolaters as well as the idolaters themselves. In particular, marriage with idolaters was strictly forbidden and the curse of God was upon such matches. This argument could have important political implications. When in around 1569, there was rumour of a marriage between the duke of Norfolk and Mary Queen of Scots, an anonymous pamphlet (possibly by Thomas Sampson) was published Touching the Pretended match between the Duke of Norfolk and the Queen of Scottes. The example was invoked of King Solomon who, despite his famed wisdom, was tempted to join his wives in idolatry. Objections were made again in 1579, when a marriage was proposed between Elizabeth and the duke of Anjou. Sermons were preached against the marriage and popular lampoons and ballads appeared alongside more learned tracts. John Stubbs was punished with the loss of his right hand for penning The Discovery of a gaping gulf wherein England is like to be swallowed by another French Marriage. Drawing on Old Testament precedents he argued that a match with a ‘popish prince’ was like that of a Hebrew and a Canaanite, and that it would seriously endanger the Reformed faith.40 The same issue was to cause problems in the seventeenth century with regard to the marriage and general conduct of Charles I. In the 1620s, the proposed Spanish match of the prince to the Catholic Infanta was extremely unpopular, prompting Charles’s own chaplain, the Puritan George Hakewill, to write him a paper arguing against the marriage. Nor was Henrietta Maria to be much more acceptable, with her ‘very conspicuous’ troop of Capuchin friars, and Roman Catholic masses sung openly in her chapel. Lucy Hutchinson saw her as being in league with Archbishop Laud

39 Babington, Collected Works, 402; Gee, The Elizabethan Clergy, 70 (item 51); Dod and Cleaver, A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments, 58–9. 40 Babington, Collected Works, 497, 413; Aston, The King’s Bedpost, 199; W. T. MacCaffrey, ‘The Anjou match and the making of Elizabethan foreign policy’, in The English Commonwealth 1547–1640: Essays in Politics and Society, ed. P. Clark, A. G. R. Smith and N. Tyacke (Leicester, 1979), 59–75, 64–6.

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and his ‘prelaticall crew’ in a ‘cruel designe of rooting out the godly out of the land’. Furthermore the king was perceived to be ‘keeping company’ with idolaters at court, where there were a number of Catholics, such as the convert Walter Montague. Charles’s flouting of the common Protestant wisdom against associating with idolaters only served to heighten the religious tension, as well as appearing to prove the point.41 In general the Protestant hostility to images was, as we have seen, an opposition to the use of images as well as to their abuse, the very objects themselves being regarded as the causers of idolatry. For some this was part of a wider attack on other aspects of popular cultural forms, those which appealed to the visual senses. The hostility towards the theatre, for example, was directed at its appeal to the sensuous eye, as well as its peddling of lies (fictional stories or real stories falsely represented). Idolatry was all about things ‘false’, and images were always ‘teachers of lies’. The Puritan John Carter typified this attitude when he wrote that ‘love songs and books . . . filthy objects in pictures, plays or whatever else stirreth up corrupt nature’.42 For the more godly Protestants as well as for Puritans, there was an everincreasing stress on inner as well as outer reformation, and also an urge to moral evangelism on all aspects of life and not just on religious issues. The issue of idolatry also became bound up with intense conscience-searching and self-examination. God’s laws were to be kept spiritually, taught Dod and Cleaver, and they ‘reacheth . . . to the inward parts of every man, and lyeth close upon his conscience’. Perkins warned against idols of the mind arguing that ‘a thing feigned in the mind by imagination, is an idol’. Edward Elton, in his Exposition of the Ten Commandments, interpreted the second commandment as condemning not only ‘outward idolatry of the hand, which is when men make an image . . . and set it up for religious use’ but also ‘inward idolatry of the heart, which is when men misconceiving God, do worship him according to their own misconceit’. The wayward human imagination was prone to such corruptions and was not to be trusted but to be brought under control. The same was true of the equally untrustworthy human senses, which served to feed the imagination. Field and Wilcox in a message To the Christian Reader, expressed the hope that God would help them to ‘overthrowe the imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bring into bondage every thought to the obedience of Christ’.43 41 P. Gregg, King Charles (1981), 73–4; for the conspicuous behaviour of the Capuchins see CSPV, 1630, 304 (22 March); Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. J. Sutherland (Oxford, 1973), 49. 42 P. Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia, 25. 43 Ibid., 27; Dod and Cleaver, A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments, 8; Perkins and Elton quoted in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 453, 458; John Field and Thomas Wilcox, ‘An Admonition to the parliament’ (1572), in Puritan Manifestoes: a Study of the Origins of the Puritan Revolt, ed. W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas (1954), 39.

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Yet even Calvinists did not generally object to art per se, but only that which represented religious themes, especially when sited within places of religious worship. Most godly writers on the subject were clear that images had no place in churches, but that there was no general prohibition on them elsewhere, and that there was no harm in their civil use. Babington, for instance, saw the ‘Turkish’ (Islamic) hostility to naturalistic art in all walks of life as ‘too superstitious’. The address to Queen Elizabeth expressed the belief that images ‘in chambers’ were matters of indifference. Perkins who was absolute in his correlation of idols and religious images, and on the unlawfulness of both, still acknowledged the harmlessness of civil images, pointing out that skills in the arts of painting and engraving were gifts of God. Historical paintings, even biblical scenes were acceptable, as too were images of Christ in his human form, on the strict understanding that these were not to be used for worship or kept in churches.44 Bearing in mind that the subject of this book is Puritan iconoclasm and that it was during the reign of Elizabeth that the name first came into use, the question arises as to whether there was any fundamental difference in the attitudes of so-called Puritans from the rest of the church at this stage. Deciding who exactly was a Puritan is problematic. Peter Lake has highlighted the difficulty of so labelling individuals within an Elizabethan evangelical world-view that to a degree united radicals (including nonconformists and Presbyterians) with establishment moderates.45 This unity was especially clear in the ongoing propaganda war with Roman Catholics in which the critique of images largely found expression. Clerics discussed here have included establishment figures like Jewel, Puritanically inclined bishops like Babington and non-conformists like John Dod. This suggests a broad consensus of suspicion towards, if not active dislike of, images within Elizabethan Protestantism, which was not challenged until the work of Richard Hooker in the 1580s (discussed below). Protestants and Puritans did differ on related issues. Early on in the reign there had developed a split between those who were prepared to conform and commit themselves to a church settlement somewhat broader and more moderate than might have been desired, and those who were unable to accept what they considered to be an only partly reformed church. Those who became the establishment were not necessarily unsympathetic toward the critique of that settlement but saw a need to concentrate on building a stable, inclusive Protestant church. More radical reformers questioned the lawfulness of, amongst other things, certain ceremonies, the use of the Prayer Book (a reformed version of the Catholic Mass Book), and the episcopal form of church government. Issues of Puritan controversy almost 44 Babington, Collected Works, 21; The Correspondence of Matthew Parker, 87; Perkins, Reformed Catholicke, 170, 172, and idem, Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times, 20–1. 45 P. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), 279.

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always had some connection to idolatry or found expression through the concept. The vestiarian dispute was an obvious case, the surplices being objected to as ‘garments of the popish church’ and ‘idol stuff’. This can be seen as part of a wider attack on outward show, pomp and ceremony.46 Similarly, although Presbyterian or separatist arguments against episcopacy were about the governance and structure of the church, they included attacks on the cathedral seats of the bishops and the whole way of life and religious ceremony they represented. Such criticisms continued a tradition of anti-clericalism centred on the cathedral chapters, which were seen as inhabited by the idle and greedy. Field and Wilcox dubbed them ‘popish dennes’ from where popish practices came ‘as oute of the Troian horses bellye, to the destruction of God’s kingdome’. The separatist Henry Barrow argued that ‘such unchristian colledges as these dennes of thieves and idle bellies, ought to be dissolved’. It was even possible for another separatist, John Smyth, writing in 1609, to define episcopacy itself as idolatry, calling ‘a falsely constituted church a real idol’.47 Some of the ceremonies and religious traditions maintained by the Church of England also came under attack as idolatrous. The sign of the cross during baptism was ‘the fyrste opener of the gappe unto that mooste abominable superstition and worshipping of the crosse, the horriblest of all idolatries’. Kneeling at communion, along with the use of specially consecrated wafers, was condemned as smacking of the popish worship of their ‘breaden-god’. The use of a ring in marriage was an ‘abuse’ compounded by the naming of the Trinity during the ceremony, whilst the spouse was made into an idol by the words ‘with my body I thee worship’. The Common Prayer Book was regarded by some as an idol – an attitude which reflected hostility towards formality in worship as well as discomfort with a text rooted in the old religion. It was to Field and Wilcox, ‘an unperfect booke culled and picked from the Popish dunghill’. Barrow, in typically rich language, called it, amongst other things, ‘a piece of swine’s flesh’, ‘Dagon’s stump’, ‘a false idol’ and ‘a mark of the beast’. This attitude prefigures that of parliamentary soldiers in the 1640s who often set upon the Prayer Book, burning or tearing it.48 Henry Barrow took his critique even further, declaring the Church of England to be idolatrous for, amongst other things, commemorating saints in the names of churches, and for the consecrating of churches (the ‘baptising’ of them). He connected such ceremonies to superstition and magical 46 P. Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: a Survey of Printed Sources (1977), 25–7. 47 Ibid., 30, 32; ‘The Writings of Henry Barrow’, in Elizabethan Non-Conformist Texts, ed. L. H. Carlson (1962–6), v, ‘A Brief Discovery of the False Church’, 408; Smyth quoted from Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 458 n. 10. 48 Field and Wilcox, ‘An Admonition to the parliament’, 50, 27, 21; Perkins, Reformed Catholic, 344; ‘The Writings of Henry Barrow’, v, introduction to ‘Four Causes of Separation’, 1.

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beliefs – such as the tradition that cathedral churches could offer protection against storms. The association of Catholic priests with magicians, and of idolatry with witchcraft was a common one, going back to the early Reformation. In 1538, for instance, radical reformer and playwright John Bale directed that the character of Idolatry should be ‘decked like an old witch’. Yet, it was Protestant bishops not popish priests that Barrow referred to as ‘Egyptian enchanters’. This theme was taken up later by William Prynne who in A Looking Glass for Lordly Prelates, of 1636, not only related stories of people bewitched by images, but accused prelates of trying to bewitch men with their ‘sorceries . . . or enchantments’. In the 1650s, Gerard Winstanley would take the argument to an extreme conclusion when, drawing up the legislation for his Utopian society, he decreed that anyone professing the trade of preaching and prayer should be put to death ‘as a witch’.49 For Barrow, representing probably the most radically iconophobic views of the Elizabethan period, the very church buildings were idolatrous, ‘the whole frame and everie part . . . both within and without’. They were ‘material temples’ unto which was paid a ‘grosse material idolatrie’, which contrasted with the ‘bewtie and unutterable excellencie of . . . [the] spiritual temple’ and the ‘elect precious living stones which are gathered unto and built upon Christ Jesus’. Considering the argument that the Elizabethan cathedrals had been purged of idols, Barrow asked: How then doe they still stand in their old shapes, with their auncient appurtinances, with their courts, their cells, isles, chancel, belles, etc? Can these remain, and al idolatrous shapes and relickes be purged from them? Which are so inseparately inherent unto the whole building as it can never be clensed of this fretting leprosie, until it be desolate, laid on heapes, as their yonger sisters, the abbaies and monasteries are.50

This represented the most extreme iconoclasm, and was undoubtedly a minority view. In general terms the Protestant antipathy to images in churches had led to a wide official purge which continued well into the reign of Elizabeth. Nonetheless, there were survivals, particularly in stained glass windows, which could be seen as less dangerous than other forms of representation (such as carved statues) and for which the expense of replacement proved a practical obstacle to reformation. Antonio de Dominis, defending the English Reformation against charges of wanton destruction, could claim in 1617 that there remained an abundance of stained glass in Jacobean

49

Ibid., v, 15, 180; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 401; William Prynne, A Looking Glass for Lordly Prelates (1636), 41–2; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 79. 50 ‘The Writings of Henry Barrow’, v, 469, 279, 468.

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churches, portraying Christ, the Virgin, apostles and martyrs. Such a situation was intolerable to those of a Puritanical nature, and isolated acts of unofficial iconoclasm continued sporadically. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign in 1600, Puritanical inhabitants of Banbury pulled down Bread Cross and High Cross, leading to a Star Chamber case against William Knight and other leading aldermen. Ten years later statues adorning the church walls were also destroyed.51 In Cheshire, in 1614–15, the Puritan John Bruen and others were prosecuted for destroying a number of roadside crosses.52 The Jacobean church has been seen as an attempt to create a ‘unified and broadly based national church which could accommodate “moderate” non conformists’. James, himself, wrote against the worship of representations of God, but like Elizabeth he distinguished between the use and the abuse of images. He was firmly opposed to Puritanism and what he considered to be its extreme iconoclasm.53 When, in 1624, a petition was brought against Samuel Harsnett, bishop of Norwich, accusing him of setting up images, James spoke to his bishops in parliament, calling upon them to fight the Puritans as they would fight papists: I would not have you scared with a speculation they have given in against the bishop of Norwich, who if he be guilty must be punished. But I am very far grieved at this, gentle bishops, that you call the ornaments of the church idolatry, being nothing but the pictures of the Apostles and such like as I have in mine own chapel. I praise my lord of Norwich for thus ordering his churches, and I commend it in spite of the Puritans, and I command you my lord bishops to do the like in your several dioceses.54

The case against Harsnett, coming at the very end of James’s reign, marked a new phase in the war against images. The citizens of Norwich who complained against their bishop were not being over-precise and objecting to forgotten survivals of the pre-Reformation church but were reacting

51

Aston, ‘Puritans and iconoclasm’, 98; De Dominis is quoted by P. White, ‘The Via Media in the Early Stuart Church’, in The Early Stuart Church, ed. K. Fincham (1993), 233; VCH, The County of Oxford, x, ed. A. Crossley (1972), 7–8, 98; W. Potts, A History of Banbury (Banbury, 1978), 145–8. For other examples of Puritan attacks on images in the early seventeenth century see M. Aston, ‘Iconoclasm in England: Official and Clandestine’, in Iconoclasm vs Art and Drama, ed. C. Davidson and A. E. Nichols (Michigan, 1988), 47–91. 52 On the destruction of the crosses see P. D. Yorke, ‘Iconoclasm, ecclesiology and “The Beauty of Holiness”: concepts of sacrilege and the “Peril of Idolatry” in early modern England, c.1590–1642’ (University of Kent Ph.D. thesis, 1997), 42; for other examples of Bruen’s iconoclasm see Aston, ‘Puritans and iconoclasm’, 100–3, and William Hinde, Faithful Remonstrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen (1641). 53 K. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: the Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), 6; see James’s Premonition to All Most Mighty Monarchs, Kings, Free Princes and States of Christendom, cited in Phillips, Reformation of Images, 141 and n. 2; Aston, ‘Puritans and iconoclasm’, 95. 54 BL, Harl. MS 159, fol. 136v.

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against newly erected images, crucifixes and a high altar, set up in the church of St Peter Mancroft. Harsnett, who had aroused opposition with his action against Sunday afternoon lectures, was not personally responsible for these changes but was said to have encouraged the incumbent Samuel Gardiner. The mayor of Norwich testified that £200 had been ‘laid out’ against the wishes of the majority of the parish – the money having been originally raised to repair the church roof. However, despite this opposition, Harsnett, seeing the work ‘blessed those that did it . . . [and] caused it to goe on’.55 The attack on Harsnett was a response to a growing strand of thought within the established church which advocated a more tolerant attitude towards the use of images.56 As early as the 1580s Richard Hooker had defended the use of ceremony and also the beautifying of churches. Had God, he asked, ‘any where revealed that it is his delight to dwell beggarly?’ Whilst true worship was acceptable anywhere, ‘majestie and holiness’ had the virtue of stirring up devotion. Hooker did not argue for or against images as such, but his teaching, as Phillips puts it, ‘set the stage for their acceptance and re-entry into churches’.57 These ideas were further developed in the Jacobean period, as for instance by Lancelot Andrewes, bishop of Winchester. Andrewes argued – against the anti-materialism that was at the heart of Calvinism – that Christian tradition allowed for both the internal and the external expression of faith. God could be worshipped through the soul, but also bodily and through ‘worldly goods’. The vision of a more decorous style of worship was espoused in Andrewes’s sermons and endorsed in the furnishings of his own chapel. Here the altar was railed in and richly decorated with hangings depicting religious stories. The altar plate included a chalice engraved with an image of Christ as a shepherd carrying the lost sheep on his shoulders. Andrewes also made efforts to encourage an improvement in the furnishing of parish communion tables at his diocesan visitations. In his sermons, however, he remained cautious on the subject of images, considering them to be potentially dangerous and a temptation to idolatry.58 A more relaxed attitude towards the use of images has generally been associated with the rise of Arminianism (so-called after the Dutch followers 55

BL, Add. MS 18597, fol. 168r. On Gardiner see F. Blomefield, An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk (11 vols, 1805–10 edn), iv, 188. 56 See C. F. Patterson, ‘Corporations, cathedrals and the crown: local dispute and royal interest in early Stuart England’, History, 85 (2000), 546–71, esp. 555–7, for the argument that Harsnett and other similarly inclined bishops were deliberately placed in episcopal sees renowned as hotbeds of Puritanism as part of James I’s attempt to promote orthodoxy. 57 Richard Hooker, The Works of Mr Richard Hooker, ed. I. Walton (2 vols, Oxford, 1890), i, 463, 466; Phillips, Reformation of Images, 137. On Hooker’s place in the Anglican tradition see P. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans: Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (1988). 58 Phillips, Reformation of Images, 146; Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 28, 140. On Andrewes’s pronouncements against images, and particularly on the furnishing of his chapel at Winchester House in Southwark, see N. Tyacke, ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism’, in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660, ed. P. Lake and M. Questier (Woodbridge, 2000), 7, 9–10, 25.

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of Jacobus Arminius who rejected Calvinist teaching on predestination, and were condemned at the Synod of Dort in 1618–19). This was adopted by some of the leading clergy from the 1620s, and its proponents increasingly found favour at court, particularly after the accession of Charles I. However, there are clear suggestions that a limited acceptance of the use of certain images emerged earlier and that such views were not held exclusively by antiCalvinists. Peter Yorke has argued that from the late sixteenth century, ‘fear of the “peril of idolatry” which determined iconoclastic activity in Tudor England, subsided as Protestantism struck firm root in a realm at peace’.59 There was a school of thought which believed that Protestant teaching had succeeded well enough to eliminate the danger of images being abused by idolatrous worship. Moreover, this was a position adopted by the king himself. James took an anti-iconoclastic stance, Yorke argues, for both political and religious reasons (notably during negotiations for the Spanish match).60 Yorke also gives examples of Calvinist bishops who relaxed their attitudes towards images. Robert Sanderson preached against local iconoclasm in 1621, arguing that superstition had already been eradicated. John Williams, as dean of Westminster Abbey and as bishop of Lincoln, undertook various restoration projects: he restored images at Westminster Abbey and installed stained glass windows at his private chapel at Buckden. His new chapel at Lincoln College contained stained glass windows, including an east window depicting scenes from the life of Christ.61 George Abbot, once a rigorous iconoclast – as a fellow of Balliol College he had burnt a picture of God the Father, and taken down a window containing an image of Christ – appears to have mellowed in his attitude towards images. Having initially objected to Bancroft’s restoration of Cheapside Cross in 1600, he later spoke in praise of it at the archbishop’s memorial service; and, in 1621, a window containing scenes from the Old Testament by Baptista Sutton was erected in the chapel of the hospital Abbot founded in Guildford.62 Nonetheless, this new attitude towards images was more strongly associated with Arminians and with their broad attack on other Calvinist tenets. Arminians challenged the idea of unconditional predestination and 59

Yorke, ‘Iconoclasm, ecclesiology and ‘The Beauty of Holiness’, 10–11. Ibid., 73, 95. Ibid., 73–7, 79, 151. On Williams’s restoration of Westminster Abbey see John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata: a memorial offer’d to the great deservings of John Williams (1693), esp. 44, 46. The windows at Lincoln College have survived. 62 N. Tyacke, ‘Religious controversy’, in The History of Oxford University, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford ed. idem (Oxford, 1997), 582; K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 169–207, at 188; Yorke, ‘Iconoclasm, ecclesiology and ‘The Beauty of Holiness’, 70, 73; M. Archer, ‘Seventeenth century painted glass at Little Easton’, Essex Journal, 12 (Spring, 1977), 3–10, at 9. For Abbot’s original opinion concerning Cheapside Cross see ch. 2. Abbot later denied authorship of the letter condemning the restoration (see Fincham and Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, 199).

60 61

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advanced a style of worship which strongly emphasized ceremony and the sacraments whilst playing down the importance of preaching. As part of this embracing of ritual they promoted what Laud would call (after Psalm 96) the ‘beauty of holiness’, which in practical terms involved the refurbishment and restoration of churches including the reintroduction of stained glass depicting religious themes – particularly the crucifixion – and the adornment of chancels and communion tables. The result of this was to bring the subject of images and idolatry directly back into the spotlight. Arminians like Richard Montagu were prepared to court the inevitable controversy such an acceptance of images would provoke. In A New Gagg for an Old Goose, of 1624, Montagu took a radical stance. He argued that it was not unlawful to make images or to have them in churches, other than representations of God himself. It was even acceptable to have pictures of Christ because he had taken a human form, and such images were useful ‘for helps of piety’. Even more controversially, Montagu allowed that a certain honour might be given to images. He accepted, albeit with reservations, the Roman Catholic notion of dulia – the respect or service allowed to holy individuals such as saints and angels, and to images. This form of honour was distinguished from the worship which was due to God alone, or latria – a distinction which had become official church policy at the second Nicaean Council of 787 in response to Byzantine iconoclasm. Montagu expressed a qualified acceptance of dulia (‘I quarrell not the terme, though I could’), as long as it was taken to mean a due respect, rather than the actual worship of images, of which in practice he believed that Catholics were guilty. Such niceties, however, were lost on Puritans, who were outraged by Montagu’s ideas.63 In February 1633, a Star Chamber case against the iconoclast Henry Sherfield allowed Richard Neile, archbishop of York, and Laud, then bishop of London, to air their views on the lawfulness of images. Sherfield, the recorder of Salisbury, was being prosecuted for breaking down a stained glass window at his parish church of St Edmund’s, in October 1630. The window, which had survived the Reformation, contained ‘divers forms of little old men in blue and red coats, and naked in the heads, feet and hands, for the picture of God the Father’. Not only was it idolatrous, with its several depictions of God and the story of the Creation, but the window ‘was very darksome whereby such as sitt neere to the same cannot see to reade in their bookes’. Sherfield had received permission from the vestry to remove the window, but the intervention of the bishop of Salisbury, John Davenant, prevented the removal of the window (although Sherfield claimed at his trial not to have been aware of the bishop’s intervention). 63 Richard Montagu, A Gagg for the New Gospell? No: A New Gagg for an Old Goose (1675), 299–304, 318, 319. See also idem, Appello Caesarum: a Just Appeale from Two Unjust Informers (1625), 250–64.

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Sherfield demolished the window with his own hands, injuring himself in the process.64 Representations of God were generally held to be unlawful by most Protestants, and Sherfield cited in his defence several mainstream texts: King James’s Premonition to All Most Mighty Monarchs, Kings, Free Princes and States of Christendom, An Exposition of the Epistle of St Paul to the Colossians, written by his own bishop, John Davenant, and the Book of Homilies, as well as the statutes of Edward VI and the Elizabethan injunctions. He argued that the window was not only idolatrous but erroneous and misleading, showing a false depiction of the Creation: God was pictured seven times although he was ‘only one Deity’, whilst the days of the Creation were set out incorrectly. Worse still, God was pictured creating the sun and moon ‘with a pair of compasses in his hand, as if he had done it according to some geometrical rules’.65 Both Neile and Laud rejected the argument from the Elizabethan injunctions, Neile pointing out the special circumstances of the first year of Elizabeth’s reign when ‘the church was very much out of order’. He further argued that the Homilies were not to be understood ‘as not to allow any manner of pictures or images’. On the question of the lawfulness of representing God, Neile was prepared to declare his belief that it was ‘not unlawful in itself’. He also defended crucifixes, which he thought might be put to ‘a very good use’, expounding that he that shall look upon a crucifix not to adore it, or give any divine worship thereunto, he must needs think within himself how can I but grieve and mourn for these sins of mine, which could not be expiated but by my Saviour’s blood upon the cross? And then I cannot but think of the great love of our Lord Jesus Christ to mankind, that vouchsafed to die for my sins. And then it serves to increase my confidence in him . . . this must work a deep impression on my heart.66

Laud expressed himself rather more cautiously, accepting that representations of God were forbidden. Yet, he argued, the church had previously allowed the depiction of God as the ancient of days in the form of an old man, ‘though erroneously’. Moreover representations of Christ who had 64

Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, iii, 519–62, at 523; Churchwardens’ Accounts of S. Edmund and S. Thomas Sarum, 1443–1702, ed. H. J. F. Swayne (Wiltshire Record Society, Salisbury, 1896), 190. Paul Slack suggests that Davenant, a moderate Calvinist who was at odds with the king and Laud on the issue of predestination, was pushed into prosecuting Sherfield by Laud and Secretary Windebank (P. Slack, ‘Religious protest and urban authority: the case of Henry Sherfield, iconoclast, 1633’, in Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest, ed. D. Baker (Studies in Church History, 9, Cambridge, 1972), 295–302, at 298). For more about Sherfield, see idem, ‘The public conscience of Henry Sherfield’, in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. J. Morrill, P. Slack and D. Woolf (Oxford, 1993), 151–71. 65 Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, iii, 523; 524, 521, 550, 522–4. 66 Ibid., 557, 558.

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been called the ‘express Image of his Father’ were allowed. He qualified this, adding ‘I do not mean to say that the Picture of Christ as God the son may be made; for the Deity cannot be pourtrayed or pictured, though the Humanity may.’ Throughout the trial, Laud was at pains to differentiate between an idol and an image, claiming that there was ‘a great deal of difference’ between them. He did not condone image-worship, but believed the use of images to be perfectly acceptable.67 Sherfield was found guilty, fined £500 and forced to make public acknowledgement of his offence. Both Laud and Neile were among those who pressed for a more severe punishment (a fine of £1000 and the loss of his position as recorder). For Laud the issue of primary importance in the Sherfield trial was that of church authority. The inescapable fact was that Sherfield had acted on his own, and directly against the orders of his bishop. Laud argued that the destruction of idols in the bible was invariably carried out by kings or rulers, or at the direct command of God. In more recent years the removal of images ‘hath been a distasteful thing’, as with the ‘mischief’ in France and the low countries or in England and Germany at the beginning of the Reformation. On the question of whether the window should have been removed he refused to elaborate: ‘whether it be idolatrous or superstitious or no . . . I hold not to be the question. And I shall crave liberty not to declare mine opinion at this time, whether it ought to be removed.’ John Rushworth, who included the records of this trial in his Historical Collections, commented here ‘but he shewed his opinion when upon his promotion to the See of Canterbury, he caused the same kind of Pictures to be set up in his Chapels at Lambeth and Croyden’.68 Laud would be forced to defend his position on the use of images at his trial in 1646 where he stood accused, amongst many other things, of ‘setting up’ idolatrous ornaments and furniture. Again he referred to the use of images by early Christians, citing Tertullian, a third-century church father, who recorded the use of a chalice engraved with a picture of Christ the shepherd carrying the lost sheep on his back.69 He also, to Prynne’s evident amazement, cited Calvin’s Institutes, claiming that Calvin allowed the historical use of images. Calvin had written: ‘I am not so scrupulous as to think that no images ought ever to be permitted’, but believed that only things ‘visible to our eyes’ ought to be painted or engraved. Prynne, rightly, countered that Calvin was here merely accepting the artistic expression of secular 67

Ibid., 533–4, 550–1. Ibid., 562, 553, 559 (and 542), 549, 550 and n. Other members of Star Chamber also considered the issue to be primarily one of authority. Solicitor General, Sir Richard Skelton, thought the main question to be ‘whether a parishioner may of himself undertake to pull down and set up what he conceiveth to be idolatrous, and so take upon him to be a reformer’ (ibid., 525). 69 Lancelot Andrewes no doubt used this passage from Tertullian to justify his use of a chalice with similar engravings (see Tyacke, ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the myth of Anglicanism’, 25–7). William Prynne, Canterburies Doome, or the First Part of a Compleat History of the Commitment, Charge, Tryall, Condemnation, Execution of William Laud, late Archbishop of Canterbury (1646), 58–9, 463. 68

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ATTITUDES TO IMAGES c.1536–1640

subjects for secular use. However, Calvin was quite clear in his utter repudiation of any kind of religious imagery.70 This misunderstanding (disingenuity perhaps, or desperation) on Laud’s part highlights the fundamental difference in attitude between Arminians and Calvinists on this issue. For Arminians man was not, as Calvin taught, instinctively and helplessly prone to idolatry and to idolatrous forms of worship. Therefore images were not automatically idols-in-waiting; they could be harmless ornaments and remembrancers. For Prynne and his fellow Puritans, images and idols were basically one and the same. Thus Prynne could argue of Laud’s restoration projects: ‘he who had so much Popish Idolatry and Superstition of all sorts in his Chappell, Study, Gallery . . . must doubtless have not only some sparkes but flames of Popery, and Romish affections, intentions in his heart’.71 Laud had always been sensitive to such accusations. ‘Some’, he had complained at the Sherfield trial, ‘are ready to slander us as maintainers of Popish superstition and I know not what else’ (a statement which, ironically, Prynne saw as giving ‘great encouragement’ to the setting up of idolatrous pictures, images and crucifixes). Later, as archbishop of Canterbury at the trial of Bastwick, Burton and Prynne, Laud protested: this is the misery: ‘tis superstition nowadays for any man to come with more reverence into a church than a tinker and his bitch come into an ale-house; the comparison is too homely, but my just indignation at the profaneness of the times makes me speak it.72

For Laud and those who shared his ideals, this profanity was exhibited in the neglect of church fabric and furnishings which they perceived as having occurred over the past decades. An illustration of this, and of the determination to rectify the situation, was the proclamation issued by Charles I, on 11 October 1629, ‘for preventing the decayes of Churches and Chappels’. Julia Merritt, however, in her recent study of Jacobean church building in London, has found that the criticism, aimed particularly against Puritans, was exaggerated, and that in fact there had actually been something of a boom in spending on churches. The real difference between Jacobean and Laudian building projects was, she suggests, not quantitative so much as qualitative. Whereas even Puritan parishes had invested in refurbishment, this had been concentrated on enlarging churches, building galleries and steeples, and installing new pulpits and pews. This was very different from 70

Ibid., 462–3; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. J. Allen (2 vols, 1935), i, 108, and see 108–10 (book 1, ch. xi, sections xii–xiii). 71 Yorke, ‘Iconoclasm, ecclesiology and ‘The Beauty of Holiness’, 54ff.; Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 67. 72 Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, iii, 553; Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 103; Laud’s speech at the trial of Bastwick, Burton and Prynne, in Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, iii, 737.

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the projects of the Laudians, whose emphasis was on lavish decoration, images and altars, and for whom the enrichment of church fabric and furnishings had a ‘direct doctrinal significance’.73 In practical terms the new concern with decorous worship, of which the increasingly tolerant attitude towards images was a part, led to the undertaking of elaborate programmes of church refurbishment. Individuals began to act upon such ideas even before the end of the Jacobean period. At Wadham College, Oxford, a series of stained glass windows including a crucifixion was begun as early as 1613, whilst Laud, as president of St John’s College from 1611, oversaw the beautifying of the chapel there. In 1620, Richard Hunt, dean of Durham Cathedral, set up an elaborate marble altar, complete with cherubim and a carved screen. This was followed by the use of old copes embroidered with the Trinity and other images, and the setting up and restoration of some fifty-three images and pictures about the bishop’s throne and in the quire.74 By the end of the 1620s, the exception taken to such ornamentation by Puritans was highlighted by the court case brought against John Cosin by his fellow Durham prebendary Peter Smart, who accused Cosin of introducing images, candles and superstitious rites, and of leading the people to idolatry. Smart had attacked Cosin, and in a broader sense the new trend among the higher clergy, preaching a sermon in 1628 on the theme of Psalm 31: ‘I have hated them that hold of superstitious vanities.’ Despite his initial success against Cosin in the local secular courts, Smart eventually found himself before the ecclesiastical authorities, and he was imprisoned by the High Commission in 1631.75 Further protests followed, especially as the movement for the beautification of churches really took off in the 1630s. Puritans such as William Prynne and Henry Burton complained of an increasing conformity with Rome. Burton noted ‘how unlike our Cathedrals be to that they were formerly, being newly set out with a Romish dresse’. He referred to the bishops as ‘master builders’, and as the ‘re-builders of Babell’.76 As Peter Lake has pointed out, the ‘beauty of holiness and the architectural and liturgical forms that produced it’ were of central concern for Laud 73 J. F. Larkin, Stuart Royal Proclamations (2 vols, Oxford, 1983), ii, 248–50; J. F. Merritt, ‘Puritans, Laudians, and the phenomenon of church-building in Jacobean London’, The Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 935–60. 74 See chs 6 and 7. 75 See Peter Smart, The Vanities and Down-fall of Superstitious Popish Ceremonies; or a Sermon preached in the Cathedral-Church of Durham by one Mr Peter Smart, July 27 1628 (1640), and idem, A Short treatise of Altars, Altar-furniture, Altar-cringing, and Musick of all the Quire, Singing-men and Choristers (1641?). For a full account of the case see J. G. Hoffman, ‘The Arminian and the iconoclast: the dispute between John Cosin and Peter Smart’, The Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 48 (1979), 279–301. 76 Henry Burton, For God and the King (1636), 160, 161–2, and see Prynne, A Looking Glasse for all Lordly Prelates (e.g., 43, 103).

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and his supporters. Biblical texts were put forward to support the use of altars and the legitimacy of bowing and to prove the need for a special holy place in which to worship. Churches were likened to temples, where physical and ritual decorum was appropriate: the author of De templis (1638) believed that God’s glory and majesty should be witnessed ‘in the stateliness and beauty of the building, in the richness of the sacred vessels and ornaments . . . [and] the dignity, holiness and pomp of his ministers’. Others cited Old Testament examples of the decoration of the temple and the tabernacle as precedents for the decoration of Christian churches. Foulke Roberts, for instance, used such arguments to justify stained glass windows in churches, which he argued had been erected not ‘for any matter of worship . . . but for history and ornament’. Churches were sacred spaces in which God’s presence was especially found, most particularly at the altar itself.77 Laud believed the altar to be ‘the greatest residence upon earth, greater than the pulpit, for there ‘tis Hoc est corpus meun, This is my body; but in the other it is at the most Hoc est verbum meun, This is my word’.78 Such ideas were diametrically opposed to the Puritans’ view that holiness could not be attributed to objects or buildings and that God resided everywhere, no more in any one place than another. Laudian beliefs had a direct physical impact – as Nicholas Tyacke comments, ‘it is no accident that during the Arminian ascendancy altars and fonts came to dominate church interiors, for the two were logically connected, sacramental grace replacing the grace of predestination’.79 Ironically, their exhalted view of the altar would lead Laudians to commit their own acts of iconoclasm. In 1636 Laud wrote to the archdeacon of Canterbury, William Kingsley, who had requested his advice concerning a monument in St George’s, Canterbury, which celebrated the defeat of the Gunpowder Plot and of the Armada of 1588. Laud ordered that the monument should certainly be removed if it stood in the east end, such monuments having no place in this inner sanctuary. He further ordered that Kingsley make sure no monuments stood in the east end of the chancel in any of the churches within his jurisdiction; those that did were to be taken down if not promptly moved by the next of kin. Three years earlier Laud had expressed similar displeasure at the fact that the earl of Cork’s monument in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, had

77

P. Lake, ‘The Laudians and the argument from authority’, in Court, Country and Culture: Essays on Early Modern British History in Honor of Perez Zagorin, ed. B. Y. Kunze and D. D. Brautigam (New York, 1992), 149–75, at 151; R. T., De templis, a treatise of temples, wherein is discovered the ancient manner of building, consecrating and adorning churches (1638), quoted from P. Lake, ‘The Laudian style: order, uniformity and the pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in Fincham, The Early Stuart Church, 161–85, at 165; Foulke Roberts, God’s holy house and service (1639), quoted from Lake, ‘Laudians and the argument from authority’, 152–3. 78 Laud’s speech at the trial of Bastwick, Burton and Prynne, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, iii, 738. 79 N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987), 176.

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been built in the place where the high altar traditionally stood. The monument was eventually demolished.80 Laud particularly objected to the depiction of the Armada on the monument at St George’s, which was to be painted over regardless of its location in the church. The archbishop no doubt objected to its anti-Spanish (and by implication anti-Catholic) message or simply to the presence of a political image in a church, especially one which was a common symbol of fervant Protestant propaganda. Such monuments were popular in the early seventeenth century, particularly in Puritan parishes, along with those extolling the Protestant virtues of Queen Elizabeth. They could carry political messages. The Puritan parish of St Antholin erected a gallery, in 1623, adorned with the badges of the English monarchs but including that of the Protestant Elector Palatine. Popular pro-Palatine feeling was seen as a critique of King James’s Spanish policy. Around the same time a plaque was erected at St Mary Whitechapel ‘to the Honour of God, the Advancement of Religion, and in thankfulness to God for the safe Return of our hopeful and gracious Prince Charles from the Dangers of his Spanish journey’. Were these thanks for his physical safe-keeping only, or perhaps also for his spiritual safe-keeping, after the failure of his plan to marry a Catholic Princess?81 Other Laudians were willing to remove church monuments where these stood in the way of their beautification and sanctification of the chancel. In 1637, Laud’s vicar-general, Nathaniel Brent, ordered the removal of an Elizabethan or Jacobean monument from a church in Edmonton to allow room for a new communion table and rails. One of the complaints made against Samuel Harsnett, in 1624, was that he had removed monuments from the east end of St Peter Mancroft in Norwich. In the 1630s, Accepted Frewen’s refurbishment of Magdalen College, Oxford, involved the replacement of Lawrence Humphrey’s monument with a picture of the Virgin, and at Magdalen, New College and Christ Church, Oxford, tombs and monumental floor slabs were replaced with fashionable black and white marble floors. Brian Duppa, dean of Christ Church, was even prepared to take down stained glass windows which had survived the Reformation (and which included the arms of previous benefactors) in order to make room for new windows by Abraham Van Linge.82 Charles I’s whole-hearted endorsement of Arminianism would lend real power to Laud and his followers, allowing them to enforce their beliefs right down to parish level, often in the face of opposition. The desire to see a 80 The Works of William Laud, ed. J. Bliss (4 vols, Oxford, 1853), vi, 459–60 (for St George’s); vi, 358–9, 364–5, 397, and vii, 63, 64, 69, 70, 116, 139, 157, 174 (for the controversy over the earl of Corke’s monument). 81 Ibid., vi, 459–60; For examples of Protestant monuments celebrating the defeat of the Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, including those at St Antholin and St Mary Whitechapel, see Merritt, ‘Puritans, Laudians, and the phenomenon of church-building’, 952–3. 82 Yorke, ‘Iconoclasm, ecclesiology, and ‘The Beauty of Holiness’, 177, 178, 157.

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greater degree of comeliness and reverence in worship was combined, under the Laudian regime, with a demand for uniformity and a sharp reversal of the relatively tolerant attitude of the Jacobean church towards nonconformity – a combination which would prove explosive. At the centre of the Laudian programme was the repositioning of the communion table so that it stood ‘altar-wise’ (running north to south) at the east end of the chancel, and with the addition of fixed rails. The Elizabethan injunctions had required that the table be kept in this position (‘where the altar stood’) when not in use, but that during communion it should be ‘so placed in good sort within the chancel, as whereby the minister may be more conveniently heard’. In fact, tables tended to be moved into the middle of the nave for communion and the 1604 canons sanctioned this practice. The introduction of fixed rails under Laud meant that a moveable communion table was no longer practicable.83 In 1633, a case involving the London church of St Gregory by St Paul’s, where parishioners objected to the altar-wise positioning of the table, was subject to the judgement of the king, who unsurprisingly sided with Laud. It was concluded that in this matter parish practice should be guided by that of the cathedrals, the ‘mother churches’. By the summer of 1635 Laud’s vicar-general was instructing parishes to place their communion tables altar-wise. However, there was opposition, with cases of tables being moved backwards and forwards even as late as 1639. A famously prolonged case of refusal to conform involved the church of Beckington in the diocese of Bath and Wells. This was combined with other opposition in the area, such as that of parishioner Joan Goodman who was presented for ‘verbal disrespect’, having called altar rails ‘idle fools bables’. There were complaints and petitions throughout the late 1630s against incumbents such as Nicholas Grey of Castle Camps, and Edmund Layfield of Allhallows Barking for the setting up of rails and images.84 Popular opposition to Laudianism reached a climax in summer 1640, with the riotous behaviour of soldiers enlisted for the unpopular second Bishops’ War against the Scots. Laud complained that ‘in Essex the soldiers ar verye unrulye, and nowe beginn to pull up the Rails in Churches’, whilst the earl of Salisbury reported soldiers burning rails and breaking down a recently erected church window in Hadham in Hertfordshire. The rector of 83

Frere and Kennedy, Visitation Articles, iii, 27–8; The Anglican Canons, 1529–1947, ed. G. L. Bray (Church of England Record Society, 6, 1998), 376–7 (canon 82). See also Eales, ‘Iconoclasm, iconography and the altar in the English Civil War’; Gee, The Elizabethan Clergy, 63. Note that although rails protecting the chancel were not unknown in the Elizabethan churches their use appears to have been rare. They were more frequently used on the Continent as substitutes for chancel screens (see G. W. O. Addleshaw and F. Etchells, The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (1948), 118, 122). 84 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 205–9; M. Steig, Laud’s Laboratory: the Diocese of Bath and Wells in the Early Seventeenth Century (1982), 297–8, 302–3; Spufford, Contrasting Communities, 236; on Allhallows Barking, see ch. 5 below.

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Radwinter in Essex, Richard Drake, believed that the soldiers who burnt rails and images there were instigated by his own parishioners with whom he had already experienced trouble.85 There were disturbances in London throughout the year, including an attack on Lambeth Palace in May, and another on St Paul’s in the autumn where crowds tore down the altar. Similar instances greeted the calling of parliament: John Rous recorded in his diary in November 1640 how ‘many railes were pulled down . . . at Ippiswich, Sudbury, etc. Marlowe, Bucks: the organs too’.86 The destruction and removal of communion rails and other associated objects was part of the iconoclasm of the 1640s, which did not limit itself strictly to images. Newly introduced images, glass windows and other rich furnishings and utensils were all lumped together along with rails as ‘innovations’ which threatened to bring the English church into line with Rome. In dealing with these innovations, both official and unofficial iconoclasts would broaden their targets to include other items which had formerly mainly been the concern of non-conformists – vestments, organs and the Book of Common Prayer. The renewed and enforced emphasis on externals in church worship (on ceremony and the beauty of holiness) provoked an iconoclasm which was different from that of the previous century in that its targets were within the Protestant church, a church which was already supposed to have been reformed of such things. The zeal of Laud and his colleagues not only conjured up a like zeal from the godly, even some of the more moderate of them, but also refocussed it. Protestant bishops were now inextricably associated with the threat of popery and the sin of idolatry, and increasingly reformers came to the conclusion that the church could not be cleansed without their extirpation. Whilst episcopacy had had its critics during the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, many Puritans had been able to respect the godly bishops of those times, those whom Richard Baxter would call ‘our old solid divines’. Henry Burton had been a conformist until alienated by the ‘new prelatical party’, whilst Prynne only finally gave up on the bishops as defenders of the English tradition around 1636.87 The articles of impeachment against Laud drawn up in 1641 would accuse the archbishop of attempting reconciliation with Rome, of assuming a ‘papal and tyrannical power’, and of nominating ‘popishly inclined’ men to ecclesiastical and

85

M. C. Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns Against Scotland, 1638–1640 (Cambridge, 1994), 265, 101; Aston, Faith and Fire, 228 n. 21. Essex, along with neighbouring Suffolk, was particularly hard hit by the riotous behaviour and iconoclasm of soldiers. On this see J. Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: the Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999), 66 and passim. 86 CSPV, 1640–2, 93; The Diary of John Rous, ed. M. A. E. Green (Camden Society, orig. ser., 66, 1856), 99. 87 P. Collinson, The Puritan Character: Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Los Angeles, Calif., 1989), 14; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 225.

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secular preferment, as well as ‘countenancing the setting up of images in churches, church windows, and other places of religious worship’. The enemy was now within. Sir Simonds D’Ewes believed that, if matters in Religion had gone on twenty years longer as they had done of late years . . . all should have been overwhelmed with idolatrie, superstition, ignorance, profanenes and heresie.88

When the Long Parliament met in November 1640 it would become for the godly a focus of their desire for a thorough reformation of the church, one which would be both absolute and this time final.

88 John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (7 vols, 1691 edn), pt 3, i, 196–202; Notestein, 139–40.

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2 The Argument for Reform: the Literature of Iconoclasm

It has been seen that part of the reaction to the increased beautification of churches and other features of the new Arminianism was a protest focused, amongst other things, upon a perceived increase in ‘idolatry’. The main targets for protesters were communion rails, but there was also a clear feeling that images – loosely defined to include pictures, hangings, ornaments and other ‘monuments of superstition’ – were on the increase. The controversy about church decoration and ornamentation sparked a renewed interest in the issue of imagery and a vigorous campaign on the subject. The calling of parliament in November 1640 was seen as an opportunity for this issue to be addressed, inspiring a number of works which argued for the removal and destruction of images. This chapter gives an overview of the published literature which formed a backdrop to the official and unofficial iconoclasm of the period. The majority of the works directly concerned with images and idolatry were published in 1641 and, to a lesser extent, 1642. This ties in with both the collapse of press censorship – followed by an enormous increase in the amount of printed material circulating – and the pouring forth of previously repressed feelings against the Laudian religious regime. Indeed it was as part of the attack on Laud and the bishops that a lot of the anti-imagery and anti-cathedral works appeared at this point – mostly in the form of cheap satirical verses and woodcuts. The printed works attacked the bishops as pawns of the pope, who were aiding him in his endeavour to bring back popery and were responsible for the growth of idolatry – represented by the use of images in churches. This was summed up in the anonymous verse Bishops, Judges, Monopolists, of 1641, which accused the bishops of: inclining to the Arminian Sect And preaching in the Roman Dialect They labour’d mongst us Protestants to intrude What our Reformed Church did quite exclude. New Canons, Oathes & Altars, bending low, To where, in time the Images must grow 32

THE ARGUMENT FOR REFORM

Reviving ancient & forgot Traditions Grounded upon old Popish superstitions.1

Other lampoons from 1641 included, for instance, the Leveller and religious radical Richard Overton’s Lambeth Faire wherein you have all the Bishops trinkets set to Sale, reprinted as New Lambeth Faire in 1642. The bishops’ trinkets consisted of vestments, crucifixes, altars, ‘sacred fonts and rare guilt Cherubims’ along with ‘pictures for Bibles and such pretty things’. By 1642 such satires were announcing themselves as published ‘in the Clymactericall yeere of the Bishops’.2 It was not only in satires that the association between bishops, popery and images was made. There were more serious publications such as Robert Baillie’s The Canterburians Self-Conviction, which picked over the works of Laud, Montagu, Cosin, Heylyn and other ‘Canterburians’ (supporters of Archbishop Laud), who were said to have joined with Rome ‘in her grossest idolatries’. Baillie took particular offence at assertions that ‘pullers downe of images . . . [were] clowns and knaves pretending onely religion to their prophane covetousnesse and that they were truly iconoclasticke and iconomachian hereticks’.3 Apart from the works primarily concerned with attacking episcopacy, the year following the calling of the Long Parliament produced some serious works specifically concerned with the question of images or altars in churches. One of the first of these was John Vicars’s The Sinfulness and Unlawfulness of making or having the Picture of Christ’s Humanity, to which William Prynne contributed a verse against images. Vicars, born in 1580, was a Presbyterian who over the next few years was to write in favour of iconoclastic reform and in praise of parliament’s efforts to bring this about. In 1644, he would act as an assistant in the pulling down of a painting of a crucifix at Christ’s Hospital where he had been a pupil. Vicars had also been educated at Queen’s College, Oxford, although there is no record of him graduating. He has been described as a ‘poet and polemicist’ and a ‘fierce writer against Rome’, turning his fury upon the bishops in the 1640s.4 Shortly after the opening of parliament, Vicars had attempted to publish his work arguing against images of Christ. Like many other writers he expressed the concern that images, particularly those depicting Christ, were increasingly reappearing in churches. This trend he described as a ‘rankgrown Epidemicall evill, even among us Protestants’, with such pictures or

1

Bishops, Judges, Monopolists (1641), 2. Richard Overton, Lambeth Faire wherein you have all the Bishops trinkets set to Sale (1641), 3–5; see, for instance, the title pages of A True Inventory of the Goods and Chattels of Superstition (1642) and The Last Will and Testament of Superstition (1642). 3 Robert Baillie, The Canterburians Self-Conviction (1641), 51, 55. 4 DNB; John Vicars, Magnalia Dei Anglicana or England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle (1646), pt 3, 290. 2

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images the subject of ‘too frequent abuse in these our daies’.5 Vicars undoubtedly saw the calling of parliament as an opportunity for reform and a sign that the times were about to change. However, his work still came up against opposition in the form of the censor Dr Thomas Wykes, who refused to issue a licence. Wykes, chaplain to Bishop Juxon, argued that ‘the Image of Christ was in Churches as yett, and, untill they were pulled down there, he would not license itt’.6 The case came before a sub-committee of the Committee for Religion on 7 January 1641 and the work was finally published on 20 February 1641 ‘with Authority’. It was dedicated to John White and Edward Dering – chairmen respectively of the Committee and Sub-Committee for Religion. The publication was well timed as a bill to abolish ‘superstition and idolatry’ was just then being debated in parliament. Vicars’s radical stance can be seen in the fact that he argued not just against the presence of Christ’s image in places of worship, but also its secular use. He declared ‘the simple and meere making and having of the picture of Christ, even for civil or morall uses, to be utterly unlawfull, and so absolutely sinful’. Whilst Vicars accepted the lawful and even ‘laudable’ civil use of pictures generally he warned that caution should be taken in the choice of subjects – the implication being that they should not be religious in theme.7 Vicars used traditional anti-imagery arguments, citing throughout his work the Elizabethan Homily against the Peril of Idolatry, John Dod’s and Richard Cleaver’s A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments, and also the recent work of Edmund Gurnay, Towards the Vindication of the Second Commandment, printed in 1639. Following Gurnay he argued that to represent Christ in physical form was to profane and blaspheme his person – showing him dead on the cross when he was in fact alive and in glory. If it was profane to turn churches, chalices or sacramental bread and wine over to everyday use, how much more so to turn ‘the holy humanity of Christ into a meere civill and common use by pictures, images, and statues of him’. Christ should be worshipped spiritually, through the holy scriptures, or through the poor living members of his church. Another traditional idea was the opposition of the spiritual and the worldly or ‘carnal’. ‘Flesh naturally lusts against the spirit’ argued Vicars, and ‘these kinds of pictures are so well pleasing to all sorts of carnall men and women’ – reason enough to abjure them.8 5

John Vicars, The Sinfulness and Unlawfulness of making or having the Picture of Christ’s Humanity (1641), epistle 12b, 3. 6 Notes taken by Sir Edward Dering as chairman of the Sub-Committee of Religion appointed November 23, 1640, in Proceedings in Kent, ed. L. B. Larking (Camden Society, 1st series, 80, 1862), 94. The case against Wykes was heard on 7 January 1641 when the stationer John Rothwell described the refusal of a licence as occurring ‘five weeks since’. On Wykes see Licensers for the Press to 1640, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford, 1962), 101–6. 7 Vicars, Sinfulness and Unlawfulness, epistle 9, 2. 8 See Book of Homilies, and Dod and Cleaver, A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments; Vicars, Sinfulness and Unlawfulness, 21, 58–9, 60, 64–5.

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As well as pictures of Christ, Vicars also condemned the depiction of the Holy Ghost as a dove, and representations of angels which as ‘meere spirits’ ought not to be given bodily form. Images of doves representing the Holy Ghost were to come down in many places in response to the House of Commons’ order against innovations of September 1641, although technically as symbolic images they were not absolutely outlawed until the ordinance of 1644 along with representations of angels.9 Tacked onto the end of the Vicars tract was an ‘epigram in verse against Crucifixes and pictures of Christ’ by William Prynne. This largely repeated the arguments used by Vicars. Ultimately, Prynne wrote, No pictures can so lively represent Christ’s Death and Passion as the Sacrament And Word . . .

Prynne also complained that popish representations did not even match the few descriptions that there were of Christ the man. He was continually depicted as a ‘faire Nazarite’, ‘fleshy’ although described as lean, and with long hair which according to St Paul (and to most Puritans) was shameful in a man.10 Another important work against images published in 1641 was Edmund Gurnay’s An Appendix unto the Homily against Images in Churches. A minister from Harpley in Norfolk and a fellow of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, Gurnay was a staunch Puritan. He had been cited to appear before his bishop for failing to use a surplice, and a story is told that when instructed to always wear one, he ‘came home and rode a journey with it on’.11 In 1639, Gurnay had published his first work against images. Printed at Cambridge, Towards the Vindication of the Second Commandment was based around a key biblical text from Exodus 34:14 (‘for the Lord whose name is Jealous is a jealous God’). The title itself indicates why Gurnay felt the need to enter the debate – if the second commandment needed vindicating, then he was clearly of the opinion that it was being flouted. This work was part of the reaction against the trend for adorning and beautifying places of worship, which was especially conspicuous in its impact on the university chapels. It is also likely that it was a direct response to Bishop Montagu’s visitation of his Norwich diocese the previous year. Montagu’s position had been made clear in his enquiries which sought information concerning any incidents of monuments being defaced or stained glass removed, especially depictions ‘of our Saviour hanging on the cross’.12 Gurnay’s reply was to become an influential text for writers, like

9 10 11 12

Ibid., 41–2. Ibid., 69, 73–4. Prynne cites Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:14–16. See DNB. Quoted in Aston, ‘Puritans and iconoclasm’, 105.

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Vicars, who would use the greater freedom of the post-1640 period to push more radical ideas against images. Gurnay set himself the task of countering recent arguments in defence of images. The first he addressed was the argument that images were not in themselves dangerous, that it was ‘a frivolous (fantasticall, iconoclastical) piece of work to make business about such poore things’. In response Gurnay cited the many biblical instances where God’s wrath had been visited upon idolaters and image worshippers. All sorts of images had been made into gods – saints, princes, animals, ‘hateful creatures’ such as dragons, even images of ‘parents’. This last is interesting and is developed further in Gurnay’s later work attacking funeral monuments, a very radical stance. The true God, Gurnay argued, ‘takes up his mansion only in the heart’, and those who worship ‘Image-Gods’ resist putting their confidence and faith in the invisible one.13 The notion that the English now had ‘better strength and judgement’ than to abuse images was also roundly dismissed, Gurnay reminding readers that the decalogue was of eternal force. The wisest and strongest men of the past had fallen by images, as for instance the Greeks and the Romans, and ‘if people were not so foolish, why have there needed to be lawes’. Indeed images were too dangerous to allow even if it were true that they served some good purpose as their defenders argued. Considering the idea that images were useful as teachers – especially of the illiterate – Gurnay pointed out that to use them in this way was risky given the commonly acknowledged fact that mankind had a natural disposition to ‘sin by images’. In any case the instructive abilities of images were to be seriously questioned. They might convey a matter of fact, but no commentary on whether this fact was good or bad, a model or a warning, or any detailed consideration of its causes and consequences. Images therefore confused rather than clarified. Even if it could be proved that images were profitable as means of instruction that would hardly assuage a jealous God who had strictly forbidden them.14 Gurnay went on to compare the nature and properties of the true God with those of images. God is invisible, and incomprehensible, images are comprehended even by children; God calls to man inwardly, ‘rapping at the doore of the heart’, images appeal only to the eye; God is true and images are counterfeit. The distinction between dulia and latria was also condemned, Gurnay arguing that in Greek the two expressions were normally used to signify the same thing. In any case God did not intend honour of any sort to be paid to images and none should be ‘unless we find His express word under his own handwriting for it’.15 13 Edward Gurnay, Towards the Vindication of the Second Commandment (Cambridge, 1639), 6, 21, 30–1, 42–4. 14 Ibid., 6, 43–4, 50, 52–3, 103, 194–5, 107–8, 111. 15 Ibid., 124–5, 92–4, 56, 78.

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On the whole Gurnay expressed himself in fairly traditional terms using the kind of arguments Elizabethan writers had in their debates with Roman Catholics half a century earlier. However, Gurnay was replying not to Catholics but to fellow Protestants within the Church of England, those Laudian bishops whom he considered to be crypto-Catholics. Given the detailed and thorough arguments against images in Towards the Vindication of the Second Commandment, why did Gurnay feel the need to write again on the subject? It was obviously an issue which he considered extremely important and in urgent need of addressing. In the first work he had stated that he considered it his duty to write, even though he did not expect to succeed – other more learned men having failed before him.16 He was undoubtedly prompted to add to the ongoing debate in 1641 from a similar motive. In 1641, the godly were expecting and impatiently waiting for parliament to act against images, although attempts to get legislation through were faltering under the pressure of weightier business and conflicting views about religious change. Gurnay’s work was one of a number which appeared at this time, no doubt in the hope of spurring parliament on and to keep the issue at the forefront of public concern. Furthermore, with the collapse of the Laudian religious regime and the abolition of High Commission in July 1641, Gurnay was able to express himself with far greater freedom. An Appendix unto the Homily against Images in Churches was mainly devoted to two particular issues. The first, which took up most of the work, was an attack on those who argued that images adorned and ‘beautified’ churches. This was effectively an attack on Laud and his followers and on recent ideas about the beauty of holiness – an attack which Gurnay may not have felt able to make so directly in 1639. The second issue tackled was the unusual one of funeral monuments. In general terms the work was a push for further reformation, one which went beyond the removal of recent additions to churches and a return to the Elizabethan status quo. This is implicit even in the title – the idea of an ‘appendix’ suggesting additional thoughts upon the Homily, and an extension of its prohibitions. Gurnay is clear in stating his concerns about the increase in idolatry and specifically in images, observing ‘the proneness of the times to advance them’. To ‘utterly deface’ such images would not be an act of rashness, he argued, but one in fact required by the authority of church doctrine. The idea of images as harmless ornaments was given short shrift. Gurnay had already argued that they were certainly not harmless but nor were they beautiful – their very presence was ‘prophanation, pollution and prostitution’. Such beauty as they possessed was a ‘mere outward and forged beauty’ contrasting starkly with the ‘inward vigour’ of true beauty. The godly, on the

16

Ibid., 5.

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other hand, ‘esteeme a Holiness for Beauty, righteousness for Clothing, good works for Decking and the gathering of the nations unto the Gospell as the principle ornament of Gods church’. Such people would avoid places which offended them through ‘the gawdiness of Images’.17 Gurnay’s objection to funeral monuments came from the idea that ‘the ordinary originall of idolls hath been from Sepulchres, and such kind of monuments’. It had been a heathen practice to erect altars over the dead and then build temples over the altars turning the dead into the gods of the temple. God had kept the burial site of Moses a secret to prevent any such idolatry. Moreover, funeral monuments were not necessary, serving only the purpose of honouring the dead which was not a biblical requirement. Indeed it had been decreed that the bodies of the dead should be sown ‘in corruption’ until they rise again. To bury them with pomp and glory was a falsification of the state of the dead. Even for purposes of remembrance a monument was an unreliable witness – sculptors and painters could only represent the outer parts of the man. More suitable would be an inscription or epitaph which set forth the ‘inner part’. After all, argued Gurnay, it was a book of remembrance which the Lord promised for the dead.18 Although there were to be isolated incidents of the defacing and destruction of funeral monuments during the 1640s, there was never a general condemnation of them. In fact even the iconoclastic members of parliament were keen to preserve such monuments from damage, adding clauses to that effect to both of the ordinances against images and innovations. Another staunchly Puritan tract published in 1641 was A Treatise against Images and Pictures in Churches, by layman George Salteren. The subtitle of the work revealed its main argument: ‘an Answer to those who object that the times are changed’. This was aimed at Arminians who had argued that strict measures against images were no longer necessary. Montagu, for instance, had written that the position taken against images in the Homilies was appropriate to the beginning of the Reformation, when it was essential to counter the gross abuses that were prevalent, but that now the church was reformed it was less relevant. Salteren refuted this vehemently. The ban on images did not come from the Homilies alone, but from God’s direct command. Nor had anything fundamentally changed: the serpent or devil was still the father of lies, ‘full of inventions and devises to draw men from God’, and ‘the wicked heart of man is still like itselfe’, that is, prone to the temptation of idolatry.19

17 Edward Gurnay, Gurnay Redivivus, or an Appendix unto the Homily against Images in Churches (1660 edn), 2, 8, 59, 20–3, 38. 18 Ibid., 77–8, 81, 88–9, 83, 88 (Malachi 3:16). 19 Montagu, Appello Caesarum, 264; George Salteren, A Treatise Against Images and Pictures in Churches (1641), 1–2.

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Salteren was rigid in his attitude on the subject. Images and idols were one and the same, and idolatry could not be avoided without the total abolition and destruction of images and pictures in churches. The prohibition of ‘graven’ images should be extended to include all images ‘molten, carved or painted’. Described by God as ‘deceits, uncleannesse, filthinesse, dung, mischiefe, and abomination’, images were not to be made or worshipped but to be actively destroyed, and their makers, servicers and worshippers should be cursed.20 A less zealous approach was taken by Thomas Warmestry, whose speech against ‘images, altars, crosses, the new canons and the oath’, which had been made at the convocation of the previous year, was published in May 1641. Warmestry, rector of Whitchurch in Warwickshire and clerk for the diocese of Worcester, recorded his disagreement with much that was passed by convocation, including ‘many things’ in the new canons. He argued that images and altars in churches were ‘private innovations’ which were scandalous because they brought the church into ‘suspicion of inclination to Popery’, and were consequently driving people away. Whilst he accepted the need for ‘outward reverence’ in the worship of God as well as inner devotion, he argued that men were beginning to abhor such reverence because they were afraid of seeming idolatrous. Warmestry’s tract shows an awareness of the alienation recent innovations had caused amongst many and he argued for unity between those of diverse opinions – a goal which of itself was reason enough to avoid offending those who objected to images. The alternative was seeing churches increasingly filled with ‘congregations of dead Images and Saints, and empty . . . of the living images of God’.21 At the same time Warmestry was not altogether against the ornamentation of churches, which he personally ‘loved’, as long as the ornaments were ‘not toyish or theatrical’. Churches should be outwardly ‘grave and decent’, and as God is the author of men’s riches it was perfectly right and acceptable that those riches should be used to serve him. Ultimately, however, whilst there was no need for churches to be abolished when they could simply be reformed, ‘if there were such need . . . better fortie Churches demolisht than one Soule ruined’. Again stressing unity, the work ended with a call for the clergy to be ‘repairers of the breaches in the walls of Jerusalem, and Re-edifiers of the House of God’.22 On 1 September 1641, the first order against innovations (including communion rails, as well as images), was passed in the House of Commons. These were not officially printed until 8 September, but an unofficial version 20

Ibid., 2, 14–15, 24. Thomas Warmestry, A Convocation Speech . . . against images, altars, crosses, the new canons and the oath, &c. (1641), 2, 3, 7. On Warmestry see DNB, and Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 241–2. 22 Warmestry, A Convocation Speech, 9–10, 22.

21

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was printed by Bernard Alsop on 1 September along with arguments justifying them. The anonymous commentator argued (citing Exodus 34:13) that it was God’s ‘will that men break down all Images; and wholly depend on Him, with all their hearts’. Those who feared God should ‘Praise the Name of God, that the publicke abomination, and great offence is in time removed, and taken away’.23 At around the same time, probably inspired by the controversy over the Commons’ order, there appeared a work entitled The Retractation of Mr Charles Chauncy . . . wherein is proved the unlawfulness of rayling in Altars or Communion Tables. A non-conforming minister at Ware in Hertfordshire, Chauncy had found himself before the High Commission in 1634 for speaking out against altar rails at a private chapel in nearby Ware Park (the home of Sir Thomas Fanshawe). After spending several months in prison, Chauncy had made submission before the court but wrote a retractation in 1637 before emigrating to New England. It was this retraction which was now printed, giving his arguments in full against communion rails. These he described as an ‘innovation, a snare to men’s consciences [and] a breach of the Second Commandment’, being an ‘ingredient’ in the making of a high altar and an invitation to idolatry. Even where the rails were of ancient rather than recent origin, Chauncy believed that they had been subject to abuse. He argued that ‘indifferent things polluted and defiled by superstition are to be abolished’.24 In answer to the Laudian claim that communion rails had been made mandatory for the sake of uniformity and order in churches, Chauncy pointed out that in fact the opposite was true – they had rather ‘unavoidably occasion[ed] disorders’. This idea was mirrored in the Commons’ order against innovations, published on 8 September 1641, where one of the stated aims was ‘the preservation of the publick peace’. Another common piece of Laudian reasoning was that the rails were there simply to preserve the communion table from being ‘annoyed with boyes or dogges . . . or laying on of hats’. Yet, Chauncy countered, other parts of the church or pieces of church furniture were also subject to such abuse and there was no reason why the communion table should have ‘special privilege’.25 Whilst the tract was specifically about communion rails it also showed some concern with the issue of idolatry generally and with the perceived 23 See BL, E.171.(8.), The Orders from the House of Commons for the Abolishing of Superstition and Innovation in the Regulating of Church Affaires (1641). On Alsop, see H. R. Plomer, Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (1907), 3–4. 24 Charles Chauncy, The Retractation of Mr Charles Chauncy formerly Minister of Ware in Harfordshire. Wherein is proved the unlawfulnesse and danger of rayling in altars or communion tables (1641), 4, 13, 36–7, 38. Details of Chauncy’s clash with the Laudian authorities are given in the preface to this tract. See also DNB. 25 Chauncy, The Retractation of Mr Charles Chauncy, 22–3, 27–9. See ch. 3 for the September 1641 order.

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increase of this in recent years. The erection of communion rails was a great sin, and one ‘which brings in conformity with the Papists and Idolaters [and therefore] ought not to be indured in reformed Churches’. Still the author could comment that such things were actually ‘a small matter . . . in these times, wherein grosse idolatry & image-worship is openly practised’.26 Other similar works were given timely reprints in 1641, or else previously unpublished material found its way into press, as in the case of a biography of the iconoclast John Bruen, A Faithfull Remonstrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen, written originally in the 1620s by William Hinde, curate of Bunbury (near Bruen’s estate at Bruen Stapleford). Hinde recorded how Bruen had pulled down ‘painted puppets, and popish idols’ in the stained glass windows of his family chapel in the church of Tarvin and ‘beautified’ them with white glass. In doing so, he was acting on ‘the truth of God’, for ‘though the Papists will have images to be lay men’s books, yet they teach no other lessons but of lies, nor any doctrine but of vanities to them that profess to learn by them’. These ‘dumb and dark images’ both ‘darken[ed] the light of the church, and obscur[ed] the brightness of the gospels’.27 There also appeared reprints of two works by Peter Smart, the Durham prebendary who had been jailed by the High Commission for preaching a sermon against innovations at his cathedral. In late 1640 or early 1641, there was a new edition of Smart’s original sermon entitled The Vanities and Down-fall of Superstitious Popish Ceremonies, based on the text of Psalm 31:7, ‘I have hated them that hold of superstitious vanities’. In the sermon Smart warned against the workings of the human imagination: ‘every man is a lyar, and the imaginations of mans heart are onely evill continually saith God. Therefore, we must not love but hate our owne imaginations, inventions, and lyes.’ Details of such inventions in the form of images, altars and ceremonies, as brought in by Wren and Cosin at Durham, were given in the introduction to the sermon.28 Another work by Smart was A Short treatise of Altars, Altar-furniture, Altar-cringing, and Musick of all the Quire, Singing-men and Choristers. Here he again argued against innovations, including organs. Like other writers, Smart adopted the theme that true beauty was not a matter of sumptuous decoration but a spiritual one. He described the correct form of worship: The Word of God ought to be read, taught and heard; the Lords holy name ought to be called upon by publike prayer, and thanksgiving: his holy Sacrament ought duly and reverently to be 26

Chauncy, The Retractation of Mr Charles Chauncy, 33, preface. William Hinde, A Faithfull Remonstrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen (1641), 79 (and see ch. 26 generally). On Bruen see Aston, ‘Puritans and iconoclasm’, 100–3. 28 Peter Smart, The Vanities and Down-fall of Superstitious Popish Ceremonies; or a Sermon preached in the Cathedral-Church of Durham by one Mr Peter Smart, July 27 1628 (1640), introduction, 1, 2.

27

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administered (not gawdily, flauntingly, theatrically) due reverence is stirred up in the hearts of the godly, by the consideration of these true ornaments of the house of God, and not by any outward ceremonies, and costly and glorious decking of the said house or Temple of the Lord.29

The debate over the issue of images found a focus in the campaign for the demolition of Cheapside Cross, with several publications on the subject. The cross was a free-standing monument, one of the Eleanor crosses erected to commemorate the wife of Edward I at the end of the thirteenth century. It stood some thirty-six feet high, in three stone tiers, with niches containing statues of saints, apostles, kings and bishops, and a Virgin and child. At the top was a gilded cross and a dove representing the Holy Ghost. The cross had been the target of iconoclasts many times since the Reformation. In 1581 the Christ child had been removed, the Virgin defaced and the arms hacked off other images. Royal support for the cross, however, led to its restoration and remodelling in 1581, 1595, 1600–1 and 1603. In 1595 the Virgin had been replaced by a statue of the classical goddess Diana, deemed to be less controversial, but the Virgin was restored in 1601.30 The principal objection to the cross was that it was a relic of the old religion, and that it encouraged idolatry. It was the monument’s high profile, its scale and very public position that made it a symbolic target for iconoclasts, even though most moderate iconophobes concentrated their hatred of imagery on that found in places of religious worship. Shortly after an iconoclastic attack on the cross in January 1642, there appeared in print a tract entitled Cheapside Crosse censured and condemned by A Letter Sent from the Vice Chancellor and other Learned Men of the famous University of Oxford. This letter contained the opinions of George Abbot, in his judgement against the restoration of the cross in 1601.31 Abbot had removed images himself at Oxford, and here he strongly condemned crucifixes, images of members of the Trinity and particularly representations of the Holy Ghost as a dove (such as that at the top of the monument), which he described as ‘one of the highest points of Popery’. Images of Christ were also condemned on the grounds that God had ordained the Word and the Sacrament to be the only ‘resemblances’ of Christ’s Passion. The desire for images, Abbot argued, implied a great weakness of faith, 29

Idem, A Short treatise of Altars, Altar-furniture, Altar-cringing, and Musick of all the Quire, Singing-men and Choristers (1641?), 3–4. Smart also took advantage of the changing times (and his new freedom from prison) to produce another work on this theme, A Catalogue of superstitious Innovations in the Change of Services and Ceremonies (1642), listing the offences of the Laudians at Durham. 30 See D. Cressy, ‘The Downfall of Cheapside Cross’, in idem, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension (Oxford, 2000), 235–8. 31 Cheapside Crosse censured and condemned by A Letter Sent from the Vice-Chancellor and other Learned Men of the famous University of Oxford (1641 edn).

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suggesting that those who needed them were unable to apply their minds to Christ through the proper means of reading, praying and listening to the preaching of the word. Furthermore images were a temptation to idolatry, and Abbot was one of many who firmly believed that Cheapside Cross had ‘reverencers’. He suggested that the cross should be replaced with another less offensive monument, ‘some pyramis or matter of meere beauty, and not an Angel or such like’. However, he also made it clear that only those with the proper authority should undertake reformation in these matters and that it was certainly not for ‘inferiour men to run headlong about such means, and to rend, breake and teare as well within as without the churches’.32 Printed with Abbot’s original letter was another subscribed to by ‘five learned men’ – Oxford fellows Henry Ayray, Ralph Kettell, Leonard Taylor, Thomas Thornton and John Reynolds. This was concerned with alerting Queen Elizabeth to the grave dangers of allowing the cross to stand. The biblical story of Gideon was cited, wherein the creation of a golden ephod (a ceremonial vestment) became ‘a snare unto Gideon, and to his house’ (Judges 8:27). In an appendix containing ‘divers arguments out of a sermon . . . by a Minister of All Hallows Lombard Street’ a further general warning was given that war and plague always followed idolatry. Finally, the anonymous compiler of the pamphlet added his own comment declaring of Cheapside Cross that there was not such a superstitious monument in Spain, France or Rome.33 Another edition of this work would appear in April 1643 around the time when the parliamentary Committee for the Demolishing of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry was created, and when the City of London authorities were petitioning parliament for permission to demolish the cross. It was to be finally taken down at the beginning of May 1643.34 Another serious commentator on Cheapside Cross was the Baptist Samuel Loveday who in February 1642 responded to a defence of the cross, entitled The Dolefull Lamentation of Cheap-Side Crosse: or Old England Sick of the Staggers. The anonymous author of this attack on Puritans and religious radicals wrote that ‘it is easier to reckon up all the Species and kinds of nature than to describe all the Sects, Divisions, and opinions in Religion, that is now in London’.35 Loveday’s An Answer to the Lamentation of Cheapside Crosse contained the usual biblical arguments against images from Deuteronomy and Exodus, and the equally common warning of the dangers

32 For Abbot’s iconoclasm at Balliol College, see ch. 1. Cheapside Crosse censured and condemned, 2–5, 6–7, 3–4, 9, 7. Abbot moderated his opinion on the subject of Cheapside Cross, praising Bancroft’s restoration, just before he became archbishop in 1611 (discussed in ch. 1 above; see also Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England, and K. Fincham and P. Lake, ‘The ecclesiastical policy of James I’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 188, 195). 33 Ibid., 11–13. 34 The Thomason collection in the British Library has two copies: E.135.(41.), February 1642, and E.100.(2.), April 1643. 35 The Dolefull Lamentation of Cheap-Side Crosse: or old England Sick of the staggers (1641), 3, 8.

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of corruption presented by the cross. The monument was ‘in its own nature’ (that is, by its very existence) idolatrous, as it was against God’s direct command to make such a thing. The susceptibility of mankind to idolatry was noted, and the tendency to ‘desire a visible God’. Allowing the cross to continue to stand would have ‘evil consequences’ – for the godly it would be ‘smoake to our eyes, and thornes in our consciences . . . and scandalize our pure profession of religion’, whilst for others it would ‘keep them from coming to look for Christ in an invisible way’. Indeed it had already been ‘credibly reported’ that some had been seen worshipping or bowing to the cross.36 Loveday also criticised those who expressed sorrow for the probable fate of the cross, contrasting this to the lack of lamentation in the days ‘when Good-men lost their eares’. However, like other writers, he did not wish to incite popular iconoclasm stressing that it was not ‘fit for everyone to pull them [crosses] downe, but them in authority’.37 Loveday’s work raised a couple of points which differ from the standard, traditional arguments against images, and which can be seen as peculiar to this time. First is the reference to the Protestation Oath which had been taken in the House of Commons on 3 May 1641 and which was required to be taken by all adult males over the age of eighteen. Part of the undertaking in the oath was to defend the ‘true reformed Protestant religion as expressed in the doctrine of the Church of England, against all Popery and popish innovations’. Allowing Cheapside Cross to stand was considered by Loveday to be a breech of this covenant.38 Another new idea was that this was a special time, when the fall of Antichrist (represented by the pope) was imminently expected along with the establishment of a truly reformed church. Loveday likened Cheapside Cross to Dagon, the idol which fell in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant (1 Samuel 5). He commented that, now we have great cause to hope that our arke is coming home . . . which the Philistins have so long kept from us, and therefor good reason dumb idols should fall before him.39

This ties in with the millenarian ideas which were current among the godly – those like Brilliana Harley, wife of the iconoclast Sir Robert, who wrote in 1639 that soon ‘Antichrist must begin to fall’. Others, like Prynne, had argued that previous reformations were incomplete, and that the failure

36

Samuel Loveday, An Answer to the Lamentation of Cheapside Crosse. Together with the Reasons why so many doe desire the downfall of it, and all such Popish Reliques (1642), clauses 1–3, 6. Loveday cites Exodus 20:23, pointing out that in fact God’s command against images is repeated twice in the same verse (see also verses 4–5); Exodus 32 (particularly emphasizing verse 35, where God sends a plague upon those who had worshipped the golden calf); and Deuteronomy 27:15. 37 Ibid., 2, 3–4. 38 Ibid., clause 5; S. R. Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–60 (Oxford, 1979), 155. 39 Loveday, An Answer to the Lamentation of Cheapside Crosse, clause 4, 1.

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to pluck up the root of idolatry had allowed it to creep back into the church.40 In contrast, the present reformation was directed by God and was to be absolute. The anonymous author of A Spirituall Snapsacke for the Parliament Soldiers made comparisons with that ‘most sweet and glorious Reformation in matters of Idolatry and prophanesse’ effected by Josiah, but found that the current effort was to be even greater – for God had ‘opened the eyes of worthies’ and ‘increaseth the numbers of Reformers’. This attitude can also be seen in the unpublished writings of the London artisan Nehemiah Wallington, who recorded how he had witnessed the breaking down of idolatrous windows and had saved some fragments ‘for a remembrance to show to the generation to come what God hath done for us, to give us a reformation that our forefathers never saw the like’.41 Another work inspired by the debate around Cheapside Cross was the anonymous The Popes Proclamation . . . whereunto is added six articles exhibited against Cheapside Cross. More populist in tone, this began with a mock proclamation in which the pope advised ministers to sell off rails, crosses, images, crucifixes and organ pipes, and use tapers and candles for burning in their closets, ‘for we perceive that the Church will no longer be corrupted therewith’. The second part of the tract was more serious, consisting of articles against Cheapside Cross, which was said to amount to ‘first a pr[a]emunire, second, high treason’. The cross, it was argued, had been consecrated and set up by authority of the pope ‘to the intent that it should be Idolized’, and it continued to ‘maintain and extol’ a form of worship which was against the tenets of the English Church. Once again it was pointed out that the presence of the cross was ‘contrary to the Protestation’ and that it provided comfort to the king’s enemies – papists.42 There were other populist works against Cheapside Cross which formed part of an ongoing dialogue for and against the cross. Richard Overton published Articles of High Treason Exhibited against Cheap-side Crosse in 1642, which accused the cross, amongst other things, of having ‘occasioned tumultuous, political and national disturbances’, and of seducing the king’s subjects from the true Protestant religion to Catholicism, ‘to the utter subversion and ruin of the Kingdome by civill warre’. Defenders of the cross replied in print with such works as The Dolefull Lamentation of Cheap-Side 40

Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley, ed. T. Lewis (Camden Society, 1st ser., 58, 1845), 41 (6 April 1639); see, e.g., William Prynne, Anti-Arminianisme or The Church of England’s old Antithesis to New Arminianisme (Amsterdam, 1630), and the introduction to the 1644 edition of Field and Wilcox, An Admonition to the Parliament, quoted in Puritan Manifestos, xxxv. 41 A Spirituall Snapsacke for the Parliament Soldiers containing cordial encouragements, Effectuall Perswasions, and hopefull Directions, unto the Successfull prosecution of this present cause (1643), 12–13; Nehemiah Wallington, Historical Notices of Events Occurring Chiefly in the Reign of Charles I, ed. R. Webb (2 vols, 1869), 259. See also P. S. Seaver, Wallington’s World, A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (California, 1985). 42 The Popes Proclamation . . . whereunto is added six articles exhibited against Cheapside Crosse (1641).

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Crosse, already mentioned, and A Vindication of Cheapside Crosse against the Roundheads printed at Oxford in May 1643 after the demolition of the cross. This latter tract defended crosses in general as ‘blessings’: They say they’le pluck the Tower of Babel down, All things go right where there’s no Crosse i’th’ Towne. But who can live without them? Crosses are The good man’s blessings, and his certain share. He that would win an everlasting Crowne, Must elevate his Crosse, not throw it downe.43

The reference to ‘elevating’ the cross was provocative and exactly the sort of thing to which Puritans objected, coming dangerously close to the notion of worshipping the cross and being, therefore, potentially idolatrous. One tract, The Remarkable Funeral of Cheapside Crosse, took a satirical swipe at all parties. This was written in response to an attack on the cross in early 1642 which the anonymous author believed had dealt a ‘mortal wound’ – rather precipitously as it turned out. At the subsequent ‘funeral’ the mourners included bishops, Jesuits, papists, cavaliers, Arminians and ‘Nuterals’ [neutrals], while the cross itself was born away by an Anabaptist, a Familist, a Brownist, an Adamite, a separatist, a Rechabite, a precisian and a Puritan.44 The breaking down of images in windows was the subject of one anonymous work, which was published at around the same time as much of the Cheapside Cross material (early 1642) and which took what the author clearly considered to be a moderate line against the zeal of the iconoclasts. Written in verse, The Arraignment of Superstition or A Discourse between a Protestant, a Glazier, and a Separatist, showed both the Protestant and the glazier defending images in churches against the separatist, who urged their demolition, For sure the Lord on us for them doth frowne And truly brethren should we let them stand, I feare ‘twil bring a terrour to this land.45

Painted windows were an obstacle to true faith in practical as well as spiritual terms, according to the separatist, barring the light so that ‘scarce at noone day can we see to read/the holy Bible for the paint and lead’. Not only should they be pulled down but also broken into small pieces to avoid future restoration. By contrast both of the others considered such pictures harmless, even those depicting Christ. For the glazier it was a pity that 43 Richard Overton, Articles of High Treason Exhibited against Cheap-side Crosse (1642); A Vindication of Cheapside Crosse against the Roundheads (Oxford, 1643). 44 The Remarkable Funeral of Cheapside Cross (1642). 45 The Arraignment of Superstition or A Discourse between a Protestant, a Glazier and a Separatist (1642), 1.

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‘curious windows’ and ‘ancient monuments’ should be torn down when they had stood for so long. The Protestant argued that it was ‘a comely decent thing, To see our Saviours picture in the church’, an opinion which earned him the epithet ‘adopted son unto the Pope’ from the separatist. The piece ends with the glazier’s plea for reconciliation between the two men.46 The separatist in this work was accused of labelling everything he personally disliked as popish. The attack on popery in the popular press reached a peak in early 1642. It formed a background against which the debate on images, as expressed in the Cheapside Cross material, could be played out. An anonymous series of short satires against ‘Superstition’ were published in the first three months of the year, and these may have been influenced by the Commons’ action against idolatry represented by the order issued in September 1641, and by the continuing debates in parliament between January and March. Certainly some of the works referred approvingly to the undertakings of parliament. A True Inventory of the Goods and Chattels of Superstition, of February 1642, described parliament as having made the pope swoon by making ‘good and wholesome laws against idolatry’.47 In The Last Will and Testament of Superstition, of the same date, the character of Superstition claimed that it was ‘the Lawes and Ordinances of the High Court of Parliament . . . by whom I have received my deadly wound’. This diagnosis was confirmed by Superstition’s brother Little Wit the Papist in Little Wits Protestation to defend Popery. Here again it was the various proclamations and orders of parliament which were seen to have been ‘the principal cause of my sister Superstition her sicknesse, whereof at last she died’.48 The tracts supported the efforts of parliament, attacking images, crosses, ceremonial vestments and utensils. Yet their concern was not exclusively with church imagery, as it was in the specially written scholarly works which appeared in 1641. These had a broader general target, in the form of popery, and they were clearly aimed at a wider, more popular readership. The timing of the publication of these works is relevant – they reflected the feelings of panic and fear running through the country in the light of the political split between parliament and the king, and in the wake of the Irish Rebellion. Petitions flooded into parliament during these same months, the most prominent theme of which was the fear of popery and the belief that the rebellion was a prelude to a general insurrection or invasion. An example of this can be seen in A True Inventory of the Goods and Chattels of Superstition, where it was argued that the pope had raised the rebellion in Ireland and was attempting to stir up English Catholics in reaction to parliament’s moves 46

Ibid., 1, 4–5. A True Inventory of the Goods and Chattels of Superstition (1642), 4. The Last Will and Testament of Superstition (1642), 5; Little Wits Protestation to defend Popery (1642), 2.

47 48

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against Laud and the bishops. By distracting parliament with ‘such mutinies’ the pope hoped that they ‘may neglect their proceedings in settling true Religion, and abolishing Superstition’.49 In Little Wits Protestation to defend Popery, Little Wit laments the death of his sister Superstition and blames it upon parliament’s proceedings against ‘the family’ of popery. These proceedings included the impeachment of the bishops, the rejection and outlawing of ‘ceremonies’ and taking away the votes of ‘learned and godlesse Prelates’. ‘Learned and godlesse’ is a curious coupling of words and implies a critique of the kind of education received by clerics, which was in itself no guarantee of spiritual wisdom or truth. Such an attitude may have been a reaction to the association of the universities with the spread of Laudian ideas but also hints at the kind of arguments which would later be expounded by some separatists and radicals. To a number of religious radicals the idea of a formally educated clergy was diametrically opposed to their belief in an unofficial ministry where anyone moved by an inner truth could preach. Those suspicious of university education would include George Fox, James Nayler, Gerard Winstanley and William Dell. Dell argued that ‘it is one of the grossest errors that ever reigned under Antichrist to affirm that the universities are the fountain of the ministers of the gospel’. It was reportedly a commonly held opinion among ‘mechanick’ preachers that ‘universities is of the devil and human learning is of the flesh’.50 The author of Little Wits Protestation recommended that to prevent the restoration of Superstition’s offspring further measures should be taken by parliament, including taking away the voting rights of those Lords ‘who favour our family’ and the abolition of organs and singing in cathedrals, and of deans and prebends. These last are described as ‘worthy instruments for the preservation of the family’, illustrating the association of episcopacy and popery in the Puritan mind. In The Last Will and Testament of Superstition, the various popish goods, pictures and images belonging to Superstition are bequeathed to her ‘well-beloved Cosens, Newters, halfProtestant, halfe Papist’. This highlights one of the important themes in Puritan thought: the notion of zeal as both a duty and a proof of godliness. There was no place among God’s people for neutrals, for the lukewarm. Milton, berating the bishops for their lack of reforming zeal, had described them as exhibiting a ‘queazy temper of luke-warmnesse, that gives a Vomit to God himselfe’.51 49 On these petitions see A. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (1981), especially ch. 6; A True Inventory of the Goods and Chattels of Superstition, 4. 50 On this see C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (1972), 300–5. Willliam Dell, Several Sermons and Discourses (1709 edn), 406, and These Tradesmen are Preachers (1647), both quoted in The World Turned Upside Down, 302–3. 51 John Milton, Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline in England, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. D. M. Wolfe (8 in 10 vols, New Haven, 1952–82), i, 537.

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The subject of imagery and other ‘innovations’ continued to be a concern within the broader issues of idolatry and popery after 1642. Works on related themes were given timely publications when parliament was taking action against images in 1643 and 1644. The idea of parliament as spear-heading a reforming drive against images has already been seen in the satirical tracts of 1641–2. A more serious work, anonymously published in 1641 and entitled England’s Glory in Her Royal King and Honourable Assembly, also praised parliament’s efforts. This was a scholarly argument against episcopacy in the form of a discourse between John Calvin and ‘a Prelaticall Bishop’. The bishop was condemned amongst other things for his unbiblical use of altars, crucifixes and surplices, which were described as a ‘defilement thrust into the church by Satan’. Parliament was hailed as ‘Hezekiah in the first year of his reign’ – a reference to the iconoclastic Old Testament king – and thanks were given that ‘they goe on still, continuing the repairing of the House of God, and purging of the Church from idolatry, popery, superstition, and all filthinesse’.52 In May 1643, a time when the Commons was pushing forward iconoclastic reform in London, beginning with the demolition of Cheapside Cross, A Spirituall Snapsacke for the Parliament Soldiers, was published. This reminded readers of how God has stirred up the heart of the State of the Kingdome, viz: the parliament . . . to looke out and endeavour after a Reformation of all things they can find displeasing to God.53

Parliament’s endeavours were also defended in a reprint of the 1572 work An Admonition to Parliament by radical Puritans John Field and Thomas Wilcox. Republished in 1644 as An Advertisment to Parliament, this work was an attack on episcopacy, cathedrals and on ‘popish’ things remaining within the English church (although not specifically on images). The introduction to the new edition noted that When Constantine began the great work of Reformation, it was the complaint of some who were wedded to the old Idolatry, That he brought in innovations of Religion; The like complaints are frequent by the blindly zealous of these times, against our worthy Patriots, who are purging our Idolatry, Errour, Superstition, and Profanenesse, which made many places of this Land as loathsome as the Augean stall, and as laborious to cleanse.54

It was also argued that the failure to ‘pluck up this root’ of idolatry when the text was first presented had led directly to the present ‘fruits of idolatry and superstition’.55 52

England’s Glory in Her Royal King and Honourable Assembly in the High Court of parliament, above her former usurped Lordly Bishops (1641), no page numbers. 53 A Spirituall Snapsacke for the Parliament Soldiers, 12. 54 Field and Wilcox, An Admonition to the Parliament, in Puritan Manifestos, xxxv. 55 Ibid.

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Another way in which parliament’s attack on images was both encouraged and promoted was through sermons, huge numbers of which were printed during these years. The sermons delivered to parliament at the monthly fasts allowed ministers to speak directly to MPs and exhort them to do their godly duty. On 17 November 1640, the first such sermon was preached by Cornelius Burgess, the minister of St Magnus the Martyr who would come to have a great influence on both religious and political affairs. Burgess drew attention to the back-sliding of the church with regard to images, noting ‘the grosse Idolatry daily increasing among us and committed not (as adultery) in corners only, but in the open light’. The present times were likened to those of Josiah which had been plagued by ‘a pack of rotten men, both Priests and People, very great pretenders to Devotion, but indeed mad upon Images, and Idols’. Burgess rallied the members of parliament directly to lead the reformation, carefully censuring any uncontrolled, unauthorized iconoclasm: You all I think, agree upon the necessity of a great Reformation. Where should you begin then, but where God ever begins? Look into the Stories of Asa, Jehosaphat, Hezekiah, Josiah . . . and you shall ever finde that they began their grand Reformation at Idols and Idolatry committed with them. I speake not this to backe or countenance any tumultuous or seditious spirits that have been lately stirred up to do things without Commission; but to You, whom God hath duly called to the worke, and indispensably requires it at your hands.56

Idolatry was one of the most popular themes of these sermons, and was directly linked to the political situation. In April 1643, for instance, John Ley, rector of St Mary at Hill, reminded the godly members that the country’s present troubles were caused by the vengeance of God, brought down upon them by three principle sins which had been on the increase. The most important of these was idolatry, followed by the profaning of the Sabbath and contempt for ‘God’s most faithful servants’, that is, the godly ministers who had been stopped from preaching or driven out of the country under the Laudian regime. The theme was taken up by William Greenhill, preacher to the congregation of Stepney Church, who described idolatry as a ‘Kingdome destroying sin’. God had threatened cities because they spared idols and images. ‘Let us secure our Cities and save God that Labour’ he exhorted parliament. There was much to do: are there no Altars? no high places? no Crucifixes? no Crosses in the open streets that are bow’d unto and idolized? lay your Axe to their rootes and hew them downe. 56

Cornelius Burgess, ‘The First Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons at this Publique Fast’ (1640) in The Fast Sermons to Parliament, ed. R. Jeffs et al. (33 vols, 1970), i, 76, 84, 86. On Burgess see DNB and T. Liu, Puritan London: a Study of Religion and Society in the City Parishes (1986), 112.

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This last was a direct reference to Cheapside Cross whose fate was then in the balance following a recent petition from the City authorities, and which would be destroyed within days of this sermon.57 In June 1643, Stephen Marshall, vicar of Finchingfield in Essex and lecturer at St Margaret’s, Westminster, preached to the Commons on the text of Revelation 15. The present time, he argued, ‘hath produced . . . events answering the type’ as forseen in the Revelation, proving that the apocalypse was at hand. Although the wrath of God would be poured upon the world, this would affect the worshippers of Antichrist only, therefore, let none feare any hurt from these judgements which Christ is now inflicting, but such as either secretly or openly harbour any of AntiChrist’s accursed stuff which must be destroyed; and let it be I beseech you, your speedy care to cast out of this Nation and Church all those reliques, which are the oyl and fuel that feed the flame which burnes amongst us: God calls you now to this work, and will be with you while you set your hearts and hands to do it.58

This is again illustrative of the kind of millenarian ideas which were popular at the time. The printing of these sermons served to promote the iconoclastic cause. The iconoclast Willam Dowsing, for instance, possessed an almost complete collection of fast sermons and his marginal notes show that he was clearly inspired by them.59 Published by the authority of parliament, the sermons were part of a wider series of works which acted as propaganda and particularly as encouragement to the parliamentarian army. In January 1645, a tract entitled Idolators Ruine and Englands Triumph was published ‘according to order’. Subtitled ‘meditations of a maimed soldier’, the author, William Whitfield, was mainly concerned with justifying the taking of arms against Charles, which he did by citing biblical kings who had favoured idolaters or fallen prey themselves to idolatry. The implications were clear. It was cruel and ungodly for a king to ‘inforce his people to forsake the true God to worship Idols; or to deny the true worship of God, and imbrace idle superstition and idolatrous worship’. This work is illustrative of the way in which the concept of idolatry was used as propaganda during the war. It was also used to stir up the army, who are described as fighting under the banner of Jesus.60 57

John Ley, ‘The Fury of Warre and the Folly of Sinne’ (1643), in The Fast Sermons, vi, 56–7; William Greenhill, ‘The Axe at the Root’ (1643), ibid., 120, 135–6. 58 Stephen Marshall, The Song of Moses the Servant of God and the Song of the Lambe (1643), 3, 8 (original emphasis). 59 On Dowsing see John Morrill, ‘William Dowsing, the beaurocratic Puritan’, in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England, 173–203, or the revised version of this essay ‘William Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm in the Puritan revolution’, in The Journal of William Dowsing, ed. T. Cooper (Woodbridge, 2001), 1–28, at 3–4ff. 60 William Whitfield, Idolators Ruine and Englands Triumph (1645), 11.

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From the very beginning of the war parliamentarian soldiers had been extolled as a godly army. In 1643, A Spirituall Snapsacke for the Parliament Soldiers, a fairly moderate tract dedicated to the earl of Essex, had encouraged the ordinary soldier to think of himself as fighting for God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost and the gospels.61 The Soldier’s Catechism of 1644 went further, expressing approval of the troops’ iconoclasm. Its author, Robert Ram minister of Spalding, wrote seeing that God hath put the Sword of Reformation into the soldier’s hand, I thinke it is not amisse that they should cancel and demolish those monuments of Superstition and Idolatry, especially seeing the Magistrate and the Minister that should have done it formerly, neglected it.62

Ram was a chaplain in the parliamentarian army, and this work – which also contained a justification of the taking up of arms against the king – was reprinted seven times by the end of 1645. The editor of the 1684 edition claimed it had almost official status during the war.63 Painting the royalists as idolaters and papists was another way in which the issue was used as propaganda. In December 1645 a letter from Major General Massey was printed alongside a sensational story of A True and Strange Relation of a Boy who was entertained by the Devill to be Servant to him. The letter relates the uncovering of a box of relics and a large crucifix hidden in Tiverton Church in a wall recently built by cavaliers. The combination of a real letter with such a tale clearly increases the iniquity of the cavaliers associating the use of crucifixes with devil worship – in the boy’s trip to Hell he meets several deceased cavaliers and royalists including Lady Scot, Lord Goring’s sister, and Sir Peter Ball, ex-commissioner of Exeter.64 The subject of images and idolatry was, however, something of a two-edged sword in the propaganda war. Royalists could capitalize on the objections of those many ordinary people who did not share the Puritans’ zeal against church ornaments, reporting (and exaggerating) the profane and sacrilegious activities of both army and civilian iconoclasts. The royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus reported various acts of iconoclasm committed by parliamentary troops, and by the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry in London – describing its chairman Sir Robert Harley as tearing down images in Westminster Abbey with his own hands. On 20 May 1643 was published the first issue of Mercurius Rusticus, a periodical written by the minister Bruno Ryves, which was to run for another

61

A Spirituall Snapsacke for the Parliament Soldiers, 6–7. Reprinted as Cromwell’s Soldier’s Catechism, ed. W. Begley (1900), 20–1. 63 Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, ed. R. L. Greaves and R. Zaller (Brighton, 1982–4). 64 A True and Strange Relation of a Boy who was entertained by the Devill to be Servant to him (1645). 62

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Plate 1. Title page of the royalist newsbook Mercurius Rusticus. The illustrations include the destruction of exterior crosses at Canterbury Cathedral; soldiers at Christ Church, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge; the plundering of private houses; an attack on a royalist minister at Wellingborough; and a bonfire lit to celebrate the abolition of episcopacy. Note the depiction of parliamentary soldiers attacking the king’s portrait at Sir Richard Minshull’s house. BL, 599.a.19., Angliae Ruina (1647 [1648]), title page 53

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six months. It was subtitled ‘The Countries Complaint of the Murthers Robberies Plunderings and other Outrages committed by the Rebells on his Majesties faithful Subjects’, and listed in detail such outrages especially highlighting iconoclastic attacks upon cathedrals and churches. Both periodicals were keen to tie in the profaning of churches with attacks on the monarchy – for example, Aulicus accused Harley of destroying pictures of kings and queens at Whitehall Palace, while Rusticus highlighted such things as the alleged vandalising of the statues of James and Charles at Winchester Cathedral.65 An omnibus edition of Mercurius Rusticus entitled Angliae Ruina or England’s Ruine was published in 1646 along with Querela Cantabrigiensis, a report of iconoclasm in the colleges and churches at Cambridge. The same year also saw the Oxford publication of Henry Hammond’s Of Idolatry, a defence of images in Protestant churches. Hammond was a royalist who was soon to be ejected from his presidency of Magdalen College by the parliamentary visitors. He accepted some of the arguments used against images, agreeing that men were by nature idolaters and that to have an image was against the word of God and therefore unlawful. However, he distinguished between a ‘graven’ image, implying a sculpted or three dimensional image, and a simple picture, ‘a plain painting . . . without any protuberancy or bunching out’, a window or hanging, for instance. These were less likely to be worshipped, although caution was still recommended when setting them up in country churches. Hammond also distinguished between the use of images and the worshipping of them – one did not automatically lead to the other. Worshipping God in a church where images were present only as ornaments ‘cannot be affirmed idolatry’. Similarly, whilst to make an image of God was an ‘irrational folly or mistake, for which there is no excuse’, being as it was specifically forbidden, yet this in itself was not idolatry. Ultimately, it was argued, it was not necessary to have such strict prohibitions against images as the zealous would like. ‘The worship of images or of anything but God’, Hammond wrote, ‘is not a thing to which English Protestants for these late yeares (especially the Catechiz’d and knowing) have generally had any strong temptations.’ He ended with a plea that men concentrate on the reformation of their own sins rather than condemning the innocent actions of others.66 The publication of Angliae Ruina and Of Idolatry, between April and June 1646, no doubt reflected fear of iconoclasm in Oxford as the city’s surrender was becoming inevitable. The parliamentarian press meanwhile

65

Mercurius Aulicus, 16–24 June 1644, 1040. Seven issues of Mercurius Rusticus, which was printed throughout 1643, survive in the British Library. Omnibus editions under the title Angliae Ruina or England’s Ruine were published in 1646, 1647 [1648], 1685 (twice), 1723 and 1732. I have used the 1647/8 edition. See Angliae Ruina, 233. 66 Henry Hammond, Of Idolatry (Oxford, 1646), 3, 27, 37, 38, 31, 45.

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was increasingly taken up with internal disputes between Presbyterians and Independents and the various different religious sects that were emerging. A radical twist to the argument against images and other objects associated with an unreformed or partly reformed church was the extension of the idea of idolatry to apply to church buildings themselves. Irredeemably polluted by the idolatry of the distant and recent past these were considered by some to be dangerously tainted and not safe even to be turned to secular usage. This kind of thinking was usually connected to a rejection of any form of national church however loosely structured. Similar arguments had already been used against cathedral churches in the sixteenth century, as in the writings of Henry Barrow.67 The condemnation of cathedrals had become far more mainstream among the godly of the 1640s. Parliament’s ordinance for the repair of churches, passed in February 1648, specifically excluded cathedrals as well as collegiate churches. For religious extremists ordinary parish churches were now regarded with the same hatred and suspicion. By the 1650s, radical sectarians, like Ranters and Quakers, would commonly use the term ‘steeple houses’ or ‘high places’, likening churches to the heathen temples of the bible.68 Samuel Hering, a social and religious reformer, did not, like some, go so far as to argue that churches should be demolished. A follower of the teachings of Jacob Boehme – who held that God resided within – Hering emphasized the importance of the spirit compared to the material world. He suggested to parliament in 1653 that they should ensure that ‘churches . . . have noe out-ward adornements, but the walls . . . [should be] coullered black, to putt men in minde of that blacknesse and darkenesse that is within them . . . alsoe all gay apparell should be forbidden in such places, and noe superiority of place’.69 One who did call for the abolition of churches was Samuel Chidley. A Leveller and religious pamphleteer who had been an apprentice with John Lilburne, Chidley had set up his own separatist church in Bury St Edmunds along with his mother Katherine (also a radical writer). In Thunder from the Throne of God against the Temples of Idols, of 1653, Chidley argued that churches could not be properly purged except through complete demolition. He compared them to houses and castles that gave advantage to the enemy in times of war, and as these were pulled down, he reasoned, so should ‘Idol Temples . . . that give advantage to spiritual enemies’. That Chidley’s opinion on this was a minority one is evident from his own work – in a second tract on the subject, To His Highness the Lord Protector and to the

67

See ch. 1. Acts and Ordinances, i, 1065–70. 69 Original Letters and Papers addressed to Oliver Cromwell, ed. John Nickolls (1743), 99. Hering was probably a member of Henry Jessey’s Baptist church at Swan Alley (see Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century).

68

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Parliament of England, published in 1656, he lamented the general failure to take seriously the warnings of his former book ‘which the foolish people count a work of madness’.70 The vocal minority of radicals represented by Chidley were deeply concerned that the reform of churches had not gone far enough. Chidley commented in 1653 that although some glass windows and images had been removed ‘in many places they are not taken away’, whilst ‘Idolatrous High Places’ were maintained out of a ‘pretence of usefulness and convenience for worship’. He was particularly concerned that some cathedral churches were being used as preaching houses – in To His Highness the Lord Protector and to the Parliament of England, Chidley expressed his concern at the recent order of parliament allowing Gloucester cathedral to be used in such a manner.71 The Quaker Henry Clark also wrote against idolatry, which he believed still remained ‘in the Rulers of England, their Ministers, and the people who follow their wayes’. In A Rod Discovered, found and set forth to whip the Idolators til they leave off their Idolatry, of 1657, he argued that ‘the Houses of high places here in England were never reformed, but in part’. Like others, he commented upon the increase of idolatry in the days of the late king, when the bishops and the Clergy by his authority had got an encrease into their High Places of their Organs, their Rails, their Altars, their white surplices, Tippets, Hoods, and Copes.

Although the Long Parliament had reformed all of this they had left the churches themselves, which continued to stand ‘like the stump of Dagon’.72 Clark dubbed churches ‘Houses of Pictures’, although his interpretation of what constituted an unlawful picture was extreme. He cited Deuteronomy 4:16–19, probably the most comprehensive of biblical injunctions against graven images, and applied it absolutely. Forbidden images which were still tolerated in churches included pictures of men, women and children . . . of Kings and Queens, Earls, Lords, Ladyes, and their children, and others . . . the likenesses of Angels, Eagles, Doves, Lyons, Wolves, Hinds, Asses, Snakes, and the likeness of Boughs, or Trees and the likeness of Water, and the likeness of the Sun, Moon and Stars and Firmament.73 70

Ibid. See also T. G. Crippen, ‘Samuel Chidley, philanthropist and iconoclast’, Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society, 5 (1911–12), 92–9; Samuel Chidley, Thunder from the Throne of God against the Temples of Idols (1653), 27, 30; idem, To His Highness the Lord Protector and to the Parliament of England (1656), 2. 71 Ibid., 2, and see ‘postscript’. 72 Henry Clark, A Rod Discovered, found and set forth to whip the Idolators til they leave off their Idolatry (1657), title page, 19, 23. 73 Ibid., 18.

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This represents literalist interpretations of the bible taken to extremes, and such attacks largely came from those who remained discontented with the religious situation of the 1650s and saw the Cromwellian regime as having lost its reforming zeal. More generally the subject of church images seems to have become less of an issue in the 1650s. There was a small resurgence of texts on this and related issues at and immediately after the Restoration. Gurnay’s An Appendix unto the Homily against Images was reprinted in 1660 under the title Gurnay Redivivus, followed by an edition of his earlier Towards a Vindication of the Second Commandment in 1661. These were both published by John Rothwell along with The Sinne of Altar Worship by Zachery Crofton, whilst ex-Council of State printer John Field brought out an edition of A Warning against Idolatry and other works of William Perkins in September 1660.74 The underground press which operated in the years after the Restoration, run by and catering for those who could not accept the return of the monarchy or the bishops, published material which relied a good deal for its effect on stories of prodigies and portents. These were interpreted as the judgements of God against those who conformed to the restored church, as in the notorious work Mirabilus Annus, or the Year of Prodigies and Wonders. One prodigy was the alleged appearance in Hertfordshire of two suns, a phenomenon which was interpreted as meaning the end of innovations in religion, as well as the fall of great men. In another, an Essex minister died following a fall from his horse after baptising a child with the sign of the cross.75 Such works show a renewed interest in the subject of ‘innovations’, idolatry and images, and are indicative of the fears of religious radicals and others of the return of the episcopal church government. Taking an overview of the period, it can be seen that the subject of images was one of concern mainly in the early to mid 1640s. This can be ascribed in large part to its role as a focus for anti-Laudian and anti-episcopal feeling. After the outbreak of war, the perceived increase in idolatry served as an explanation for the unprecedented turmoil and civil strife, whilst its reformation was a tool through which the godly could attempt to take some control over the situation. The bulk of writing directly against images, however, does seem to have been concentrated in 1641–2, with relatively little appearing to support the main pieces of iconoclastic legislation in 1643 and 1644. This suggests that the chief inspiration behind the writing and publication of such works was the need to campaign for reform when it was by no means the inevitable outcome. Throughout 1641, parliament was unable 74

See Short Title Catalogue, ed. D. Wing (3 vols, New York, 1988 edn), for the various postRestoration editions of Gurnay. For Field’s reprints of Perkins’s works see A Transcript of the Register of the Worshipful Company of Stationers of London 1640–1708, ed. Eyre and Rivington (3 vols, 1913–14), 7 September 1660. 75 R. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: the Radical Underground in Britain 1660–63 (Oxford, 1986), 214.

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to achieve agreement over religion and even when the order of September 1641 tackled the issue of images head on, they were not uncontested and remained legally unenforceable. The background of rising tension which came with the Irish Rebellion in October 1641 and the king’s split with parliament in January 1642 lent the issue still more importance, as antiCatholic fear reached a high point. As has been noted, many of the arguments used in the 1640s were based on traditional ideas on images, the same ideas as those propounded in the debate against the Catholic Church in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.76 Common themes included the belief that man was by nature prone to idolatry; an emphasis on the carnality of images with idolatry as a form of spiritual fornication; and a rejection of the notion that images had a legitimate use as teachers. Such ideas can be found expressed in all of the serious works against images described here. They were not exclusively Puritan ideas but rather mainstream Protestant ones, the widespread acceptance of which can be seen in their use by non-Puritans, including future royalists like Henry Hammond and Thomas Warmestry. The texts of the 1640s, however, contained new features which reflected current circumstances, and were also indicative of a far broader condemnation of images and other objects which were thought to have no place in a truly reformed church. This was partly because most of the authors were Puritans – as, for instance, Vicars, Gurnay, Salteren, and Loveday. Yet another factor was concern with the apparent increase in idolatry and the fear that the Church of England was being pushed into a closer proximity to Rome. The reaction against this often resulted in a wider acceptance of ideas which had previously been the preserve of a minority of ‘hotter Protestants’. Virtually all of the works of this period complained of the recent increase of images and idolatry, and this was linked to the behaviour of the higher clergy. Whilst an association between idolatry and episcopacy had been made by radicals and Presbyterians in the sixteenth century, as in An Admonition to Parliament by Field and Wilcox, there had also been a strong tradition of godly bishops who, like Jewel and Abbot, themselves wrote against images. In the seventeenth century, the Laudian emphasis on clerical hierarchy and formal ceremony, with its elevation of the power and status of the bishops, stirred up widespread hostility. Bishops were attacked as ‘Lordly’ and ‘usurping’, and seen as a threat to Church and State. Thus attacks on episcopacy and on cathedrals which had been on the fringes of Elizabethan writing against idolatry and images came – via the works of 1630s dissenters like Prynne and Burton – to be in the mainstream of such writing in the 1640s.77 76

See ch. 1. See, e.g., Prynne, A Looking Glasse for all Lordly Prelates, and Anti-Arminianisme, and Burton, For God and the King.

77

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One new idea was that of a popular reformation. The new reformation was described in A Spirituall Snapsacke for the Parliament Soldiers as coming ‘from the people’, whilst Overton wrote of Cheapside Cross as being doomed by ‘vox populi’. In 1644, Mercurius Britanicus defended the ‘excellent [iconoclastic] services’ of Waller’s troops against criticism, expressing the belief that the Army and the mean multitude will act further than some of our Pretending Ministers in a Reformation: our slowness to the removal of this old Superstitious, Idolized stuffe . . . will undo all our success . . . if not timely remedied.78

The clear (if unofficial) sanction given to the iconoclasm of the ordinary soldiers in Robert Ram’s Soldier’s Catechism has been noted above. Such statements played into the hands of royalists and religious opponents of parliament. In 1641 the anonymous author of The Dolefull Lamentation of Cheapside-Crosse opined at length on what he considered would be the social and political consequences of the attack on crosses. He rebuked the iconoclasts: the next crosses which you will find fault withall, will be those rich monied men, whose bags lye crosse in their chests . . . if you be suffered to pull downe all things that are acrosse you will dare to pull a magistrate off his horse, because he rides acrosse his horseback, and pull his chain to pieces because it hangs acrosse his shoulders . . . as long as we have such crosse people, crosse every way, especially to magistrates and men of Authority, and still go unpunished, we shall always have such crosse doings.79

It was not just the opponents of iconoclasm who were concerned with the maintenance of order. Many of the writers against images, as has been seen, expressly reminded readers that reform was the preserve of the magistrate and those in authority. A broadsheet of 1641, describing the riotous actions of a Scot who tore up the service book in St Olave Jewry, added an admonition ‘to all such abortives amongst us, to perswade them to waite the time of the Lords Reformation by parliament and not to be so disorderly’.80 The expectation that parliament would lead the reformation against images was apparent in most of the works discussed here. This in itself is indicative of the distrust of the episcopal church government which was clearly considered too tainted by the recent changes and ‘innovations’ to put its own house in order. The appeal was to the secular authorities to intervene, 78 A Spirituall Snapsacke for the Parliament Soldiers, 12; Overton, Articles of High Treason against Cheapside Crosse, 4; Mercurius Britanicus, 1–8 July 1644, 334. 79 The Dolefull Lamentation of Cheapside-Crosse (1641), 8. 80 A True Relation of A Scotch man . . . who coming into the Church of St Olave in the Old Jury in London, at such time as the people were receiving the Communion, did much disturb them, and by force tore the service book in peeces (1641).

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firstly to correct the deviations of the bishops but also to instigate a further reformation. With parliament mainly in the hands of godly reformers after the outbreak of war, action against images seemed certain, and by April 1643 the setting up of the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry, closely followed by the demolition of Cheapside Cross, showed that parliament was taking its role as the new Hezekiah seriously.

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3 Official Iconoclasm: the Long Parliament and the Reformation of Images

One of the main elements which distinguished the iconoclasm of the mid seventeenth century from that of the mid-sixteenth century was the heavy involvement of parliament as the driving force behind it. Whatever questions remain about the extent to which iconoclasm was actually pursued in the country at large (and these are questions which will be addressed throughout this book), there can be no doubt that parliament took the issue seriously and that a series of increasingly radical pieces of legislation was passed. The legislation can be seen as setting an official standard which may or may not have been met generally but which nonetheless constituted an agenda for official iconoclasts. This chapter looks at the iconoclastic measures taken by parliament and also at the work of its special committee set up to address the issue in and around London.

The Passage of Iconoclastic Legislation Concern with the direction that the church was taking under Laud had found brief expression during the Short Parliament (13 April–5 May 1640) where several members presented petitions from their constituencies complaining of innovations. On 29 April 1640 a Commons’ committee was appointed to prepare for a conference with the Lords on religion. John Pym had the task of reporting on innovations, including the issue of the position of the communion table as well as the setting up of crosses, images and crucifixes in cathedral and parochial churches. The dissolution of parliament less than a week later meant that no further action could be taken. Meanwhile outside of parliament, tension mounted with an attack on Lambeth Palace and threats against the queen’s Catholic chapel at Somerset House. Throughout the summer, hostility towards the war with Scotland led to iconoclastic riots, mostly committed by conscripted soldiers but often with the collusion of the local populace. The calling of a new parliament was greeted with similar scenes – in the first week of November a crowd 61

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violently entered St Paul’s Cathedral, breaking down the altar and tearing books containing the new canons.1 When parliament met on 3 November 1640, the issue of religion was at the forefront of its first debates. The London ‘Root and Branch’ petition presented on 11 December complained of ‘the great conformity and likeness both continued and increased of our church to the church of Rome’ – both in ceremonies, vestments and the ‘setting up of images, crucifixes, and conceits over them’.2 By 19 December the Commons had set up a select committee to look into the decay of preaching, the increase of popery, and ‘scandalous’ ministers. This committee was to receive petitions from individual parishes with complaints against their ministers, some of whom were cited as having erected superstitious images. Committees were also quickly set up to look into the cases of Bishop Wren and Dr Cosin, both accused of ‘setting up idolatry’. On 31 December Sir Simonds D’Ewes proposed that an act ‘to abolish Idolatry, Superstition, prophanenes and heresie’ should be put forward for the king’s assent as part of the subsidy bill, although the idea was not taken up.3 On 22 January 1641, Francis Rous reported from the committee which was investigating the case against Cosin. The Commons were told how more than £2000 had been spent adorning the cathedral at Durham, including the setting up of an altar with images on it, and the purchase of copes decorated with images, including one of God. In response, Sir Henry Mildmay proposed that commissioners should be appointed to ‘remove and deface those idols now sett upp amongste us’, whilst D’Ewes suggested a committee ‘to provide a new law to abolish all idolatrie’. The matter was referred back to the committee dealing with Cosin which was ordered to draw up proposals for a conference to be held with the House of Lords on the matter.4 The next day, 23 January, pressure was put on the Commons by Isaac Pennington, alderman and member for the City of London. Pennington reported the dissatisfaction of the City authorities with parliament’s lack of action on religious matters, notably the reprieve of the Jesuit Thomas Goodman, who had been accused of treason. They had also been offended at ‘a letter [which] came latelie from the Lords of the Upper House to the Cittie for the countenancing of innovations’. This ‘letter’ was probably the printed order of the Lords concerning divine service, issued on 16 January. 1 CJ, ii, 11, 16; CSPD, 1640, 150–1, 174–5; and see Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars, ch. 7. On the May 1640 riots in London, see K. Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), 4–7; CSPV, 1640–2, 93. For the iconoclasm of Scottish soldiers in Newcastle around this time, see Memoirs of the Life of Mr Ambrose Barnes (Surtees Society, 50, 1867), 333. 2 For a summary of the early speeches in parliament, see W. A. Shaw, The English Church 1640–60 (2 vols, 1900), i, ch. 1; Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 140, clauses 14 and 16. 3 Shaw, The English Church, i, ch. 1; CJ, ii, 54; Notestein, 270–2. 4 Ibid., 270–2. On Cosin see Hoffman, ‘The Arminian and the iconoclast’, 279–301.

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The principal purpose of this had been to quell the disorders which had been going on in some churches over such issues as the position of communion tables, communion rails and other ‘innovations’. Whilst it hardly ‘countenanced innovations’, it did support the pre-Laudian status quo and might easily be seen by radicals like Pennington as a brake on those reformers who were ready to tear down images and furnishings and who waited impatiently for parliamentary action. In consequence of their dissatisfaction in these matters, Pennington reported, the City was no longer prepared to lend parliament the proposed sum of £60,000, ‘or any part of it’.5 The Commons, in an attempt to appease the City, repeated its proposal for a conference with the Lords to discuss the idea of commissioners to be sent into all Countries, for the defacing, demolition, and quite taking away of all Images, Altars, or Tables turned Altar-Wise, Crucifixes, superstitious Pictures, Monuments, and Relicts of Idolatry, out of all Churches and Chapels.6

There is no record of this conference going ahead, although the Lords would later set up their own committee to discuss innovations in the church. Meanwhile the Commons continued their attempts to instigate reform, driven on by Pennington. On 5 February the alderman brought in what D’Ewes described as ‘an excellent act’ to abolish superstition and idolatry and set up ‘true religion’. This was given a second reading and committed on 13 February, the committee working on the bill including D’Ewes, John Pym, Robert Harley and Oliver Cromwell as well as Pennington himself. It also included more moderate parties such as Lord Falkland, John Culpeper and Edward Hyde.7 The passage of this bill, however, was slow, reflecting the extreme pressure on parliamentary time: after a debate on certain (unspecified) amendments in March, it was not heard of again for a further three months.8 During March, the reading of, and debates over, the articles of impeachment against Cosin kept the issue of innovations alive. One of the articles against him focused on images set up in Durham Cathedral, including that of ‘our Saviour with a Golden Beard, and a blew Cap on his head’. Cosin was also charged with employing Roman Catholics to undertake painting and glazing work, including the erection of images depicting God and the Trinity. This article caused some controversy, with some MPs arguing that it was not against the law to employ Catholics, although D’Ewes thought it significant that Catholics would ‘performe that service which a good Protestant would not have undertaken’.9 5

Notestein, 277. CJ, ii, 72. 7 Notestein, 327; CJ, ii, 79, 84. 8 Notestein, 452, 485. 9 Ibid., 447–8, 457–8. The case against Cosin was not proven and he was restored to his prebendaryship by the House of Lords in July 1641 (see Hoffman, ‘The Arminian and the iconoclast’, 299, and also The humble Petition of Peter Smart (1640)). 6

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On 1 June the committee for the bill against innovations was ordered to stand and continue with the bill, an order repeated on 5 and 15 July, when a date of 8 August was set aside for its report. On 8 August the report was postponed for a further day, although it did not materialize even then. Nonetheless, Pennington told the Commons that he thought the time fit ‘to make some declaration that might tend to the glory of God’ and he suggested that an order be made for the pulling down of rails and the repositioning of communion tables, arguing that ‘many of the weak brethren suffered very much by the innovations now crept into the Churches’. This idea was adopted and the House declared that churchwardens should have the power to act in their own churches. At the same time it was made clear that ‘no man shall presume to oppose the Discipline or Government of the Church established by law’ – a rider designed no doubt to prevent recurrences of the church riots which had broken out in London during the previous month linked to pre-emptive and sometimes violent attempts to remove communion rails.10 This declaration was repeated on 31 August, when the levelling of recently erected chancel steps was added to the removal of rails and repositioning of communion tables as the responsibility of churchwardens. Later the same day a committee was set up to consider the broader issues, including the removing of Communion Tables in the Universities, and the Inns of Court; and the book of Sports; and all other matter of innovations that have happened in Debate this forenoon; and to frame an order upon them.

The committee consisted of many of those who were previously involved with the drawing up of the bill against innovations, and the outcome was the reporting the next day, 1 September 1641, of what were to become the Commons’ Order for the Suppression of Innovations.11 This order was not particularly radical, being mainly directed at the excesses of Laudianism and towards a return to a previous status quo. It was targeted primarily at the ‘divers Innovations, in or about the Worship of God . . . lately practised in this Kingdom’, in parish and cathedral churches and chapels, in the colleges and universities and in the Inns of Court. Responsibility for their enforcement lay with churchwardens and deans, vice-chancellors and heads of colleges, and benchers and readers respectively, with cases of default to be notified to parliament by justices, mayors and ‘other head officers’.12 The basic tenets of the order were: the moving of communion tables from the east end; the removal of communion rails; the levelling of chancels, 10 11 12

CJ, ii, 162, 183, 199, 212, 246; BL, Harl. MS 164, fol. 7v. On rail riots in London see ch. 5 below. CJ, ii, 278, 278–9. For the full text of the 1641 order see Appendix I.

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‘as heretofore they were before the late innovations’; the taking away and abolishing of crucifixes, ‘scandalous pictures’ of members of the Trinity and all images of the Virgin Mary; the removal of all tapers, candlesticks and basins from the communion table; and the abolition of bowing at the name of Jesus, towards the east end of the church or towards the communion table. Whilst the clauses against pictures and images were primarily aimed at those recently erected, in glass windows and elsewhere, they could also be used to demolish similar objects which had survived the Reformation. One aspect of this legislation that was radical compared to measures against images taken in the sixteenth century, was that the responsibility for enforcement was put almost entirely into the hands of local clergy and laymen. The September 1641 order named parsons and vicars alongside churchwardens as the persons designated to carry out the removal of images and other innovations, bypassing the traditional church hierarchy. Previously, local church officials could not act in such a capacity without permission from the higher clergy. An Elizabethan proclamation of 1560 had forbidden any defacing or taking down of glass without licence from the Ordinary, whilst during the trial of the Salisbury iconoclast Henry Sherfield in 1633 the question of authority had been the main issue, concerning even those sympathetic to the defendant.13 In 1641 such concerns were given added import in the light of the recent iconoclastic riots in London and elsewhere with churchwardens and parishioners taking the law into their own hands. Yet it was part of the aim of the order to resolve conflict over these matters at a local level by giving direction, and by removing the offensive items which were provoking good people to disorder. The preamble to the order stated that its purpose was the preservation of the public peace; D’Ewes would later argue that its neglect in some parts would be a direct cause of further tumults.14 The great significance of devolving power into the hands of local and lay officials was the distrust of the higher clergy which such a move expressed. Godly Elizabethan bishops may have done their duty and overseen the reformation in their dioceses (albeit some more zealously than others), but in the immediate post-Laudian era the struggle was seen to be against an innovating and dangerously inclined prelacy. The Commons’ order was to lead to a clash with the Lords and the publication of contradictory declarations by the two Houses. The Upper House had not ignored the issue of innovations but had in fact made several moves to address the problem. On 16 January 1641, prompted by the recent and continuing disorders in churches, they had passed their own order concerning the performance of divine service, which was to be read out in all the parish churches of London, Westminster, Southwark ‘and [the] liberties and suburbs thereof’. It stated that 13 14

See ch. 1. Coates, 12.

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the Divine service be performed as it is appointed by the Acts of Parliament of this Realm; and that all such as shall disturb that wholesome Order shall be severely punished, according to law; and that the Parsons, Vicars, and Curates, in several Parishes, shall forbear to introduce any Rites or Ceremonies that may give Offence, or otherwise than those which are established by the Laws of the Land.15

Whilst the text was somewhat ambiguous it generally suggests a moderate statement that prioritized peace-keeping and order. On 1 March the Peers further ordered that bishops should give directions to ensure that every Communion Table, in every church in his Diocese, doth stand decently, in the ancient Place, where it ought to do by Law, and as it hath done for the greater Part of these threescore years last past.16

Again, this statement was open to interpretation: the 1559 Injunctions had required tables to stand ‘in the place where the altar stood’, being moved into the chancel for convenience only during communion.17 It is made clear, however, by other actions that the position the Lords were defending here was a pre-Laudian one. A committee of lords and bishops was set up, at the same time to ‘take into consideration all Innovations in the Church concerning Religion’. This committee was headed by the bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, who had famously clashed with Laud over the positioning of the communion table, and other ‘learned divines’ – moderate Puritans such as the archbishop of Armagh and Drs Prideaux, Warde, Twisse and Hacket. The sorts of innovations which the committee was interested in investigating included: the turning of the communion table altar-wise and calling it an altar; bowing towards the communion table or to the east; the use of candlesticks upon the ‘so-called’ altar; the erection of canopies over altars with traverses and curtains; the compelling of communicants to receive communion at the altar rails; and the ‘advancing’ of crucifixes and images upon the altar-cloth. There was even some discussion over ‘idolatrous’ ceremonies in the Book of Common Prayer – a radical departure going beyond a concern with Laudian innovation. The committee considered whether ‘it be not fit to have some discrete Rubrique made to take away all Scandall from signifying the signe of the Crosse upon the infants after Baptisme’, as well as the possibility of altering the words used in matrimony (‘with my body I thee worship’).18 Nothing seems to have come from the work of this committee – perhaps its ideas were too controversial, or it may have been abandoned from sheer

15 16 17 18

LJ, iv, 134. Ibid., 174. Gee, The Elizabethan Clergy, 63. Shaw, The English Church, ii, appendix I: Bishop Williams’s Committee.

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pressure of business. On 22 April 1641, following more church riots, this time in Cheshire, the Lords reissued their order concerning divine service, again stressing peace and order and discouraging the involvement of ordinary parishioners. The Lords remained primarily concerned with a return to a pre-Laudian position. In the case of St Saviour, Southwark, where rail riots took place in June 1641, the Lords ordered that the broken rails be restored at the offenders’ expense, but only ‘in the same Manner as they have been for the space of fifty years last past . . . not as they were for four or five years last past’. Even this part of the sentence was remitted when the defendants pleaded poverty after a spell of imprisonment.19 On 8 September 1641 the Commons sent a message up to the Lords desiring a committee of both Houses to consider the ‘restraint’ of superstition and innovations in churches. The Lords, however, decided to form their own committee which debated the recent Commons’ order, and came up with three resolutions or amendments. The first concerned chancel steps which the Commons had decreed should be levelled ‘as heretofore they were before the late innovations’. The Lords put a more precise definition on this, confining it to those which had been raised within the last fifteen years (a figure not dissimilar to that which would be used by the Commons in their 1643 ordinance, where those less than twenty years old were to be demolished). The second resolution of the Lords required that crucifixes and scandalous pictures of persons of the Trinity should be removed ‘without limitation of the Time since their Erection’, making it clear that they disapproved of images just as much as the Commons. Interestingly, however, their proscription of images of the Virgin Mary applied to the last twenty years only, suggesting perhaps that not only were these less offensive than depictions of the Trinity, but also that there may have been more of such pictures installed within the last few years. The main sticking point for the Lords was the issue of bowing at the name of Jesus. It’s ‘abolition’ was controversial: it was not strictly an innovation but appeared in the 1559 royal injunctions and the 1604 canons. The third resolution of the Lords’ committee was that the practice should be ‘neither enjoined nor prohibited’.20 Unable to gain the assent of the Lords, the Commons decided to go ahead and publish their order, which was issued by the king’s printer Robert Barker on 8 September. In response the Lords voted the next day to reprint their own earlier order concerning divine service, despite the refusal of the Commons to assent to this and some dissenting voices amongst their own ranks – unsurprisingly, figures like the earls of Bedford and Warwick and Lord Kymbolton. The Commons reacted by printing a declaration 19

Ibid., i, 73; LJ, iv, 225, 277, 321. For more on the June 1641 rail riots see ch. 5 below. If the original rails at St Saviour were fifty years old they must have been a rare example of Elizabethan rails (see ch. 1, n. 82). 20 LJ, iv, 391 (see also HLRO, Braye MS 20, 8 September 1641).

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(also 9 September) justifying their publishing of the order; they commented on the narrowness of the vote in the Lords (a mere eleven to nine), which gave them hope that an agreement could be reached in the future. In the meantime they proposed ‘that the Commons of this Realm do . . . quietly attend the reformation intended’.21 The leaders of the Commons continued to pursue the matter throughout the parliamentary recess, from 10 September to 20 October 1641. In his report on the activities of the Recess Committee, given to the reconvened parliament, Pym discussed the response to the iconoclastic order. He described how ‘divers’ copies had been sent into the country where ‘good ministers’ had duly published the order (that is, read it out to the parishioners) and seen to its performance. Yet in other places the order had been ignored and ‘evil ministers’ had chosen instead to read out the Lords’ order regarding divine service. Consequently, on 28 September, a further Commons’ order had been made requiring that the original order be published in every parish and that churchwardens comply with it. Petitions from St Giles Cripplegate in the City of London and another, unnamed, parish requesting that they be allowed to keep their communion rails were given short shrift: the Recess Committee would ‘not any wayes condiscend to their desires’, but advised them to submit or answer for contempt.22 However, the order proved difficult to enforce – neglect was reported, for instance, at St George, Southwark and at St Giles in the Fields. The parish of St Giles Cripplegate continued to offer resistance. John Chambers, the servant of MP Sir Roger Burgoyne, was violently attacked by the churchwarden Thomas Bogh whilst delivering a copy of the order. His petition, read in the Commons on 20 October 1641, told how he was taken by the throat and ‘otherwise misused and reviled’. Bogh was also alleged to have spoken against the order saying that ‘hee wondered why the house of Commons was so invious against the Raile, [and] that they were all asses’.23 This case highlighted the problems with the Commons’ order. D’Ewes reported how the question of its validity was ‘long debated’, with many speaking both for and against. On 21 October another heated discussion

21 Ibid., 395; Rushworth, Historical Collections, pt 3, ii, 387. For copies of the order (8 September) and declaration (9 September) see BL, 190.g.13.(4.), An Order for the removal of the Communion Table, Crucifixes, Pictures etc., from the Churches (1641), and E.171.(13.), A Declaration of the House of Commons made September the 9th 1641 (1641). 22 CJ, ii, 289; Coates, 11, 12 and n. 3; Proceedings in Parliament by the standing Committee appointed to sit during the Recess of both houses, 28 September & 1 October (1641), 368. For the 28 September order see also BL, 190.g.13.(5.), At the Committee appointed by the Commons House . . . to sit during the Recesse (1641). 23 Coates, 3, 5, 17, 19–20, 38, 41. On 1 March 1642 another debate was held on the subject of St Giles Cripplegate, and an order was issued for the immediate removal of the rails. Whether this was carried out is not known as the churchwardens’ accounts for the church do not survive (A Continuation of the true Diurnall of all the Passages in Parliament, February 28–March 6 1641[2], 59). The rails at St Giles were said to be eighty years old.

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took place with Edward Dering and Orlando Bridgeman, both lawyers, arguing that Bogh could not be punished because the order, having been published without the Lords’ consent, was of dubious legality. Sir Edward Nicholas wrote to the king, informing him that ‘no way [was] found or resolved on, to punish those that disobeyed, for that order was conceaved by most in yt House not to be justifyable by lawe, and therefore not binding’. This was probably an overstatement, but, nonetheless, there is a sense that further attempts to settle the matter were avoided as too controversial, or simply embarrassing. Debates were scheduled several times but postponed, and when Harbottle Grimston tried to bring the topic up during a discussion of the Remonstrance, on 16 November, he was shouted down.24 D’Ewes believed that lack of compliance with the order remained a major problem, commenting that if this weere a time to preferre Petitions . . . touching all those that had slighted our orders for the taking away of Innovations . . . we might have complaints enough from all parts.25

Part of the problem was that the Commons simply did not have time to deal with the issue. The order had stated that certificates reporting compliance or default were to be delivered to the House by 30 October, yet, according to D’Ewes, no time had been set aside to receive these and ‘divers persons’ who attended on that date were dismissed. The business was put off until 3 November when many of those with certificates returned to parliament, only to be put off again until the next day. Even then no action was taken. Isaac Pennington moved for a debate on the subject but it was decided that it should be laid aside for other more urgent reports, and D’Ewes also unsuccessfully tried to raise the issue on the same day (4 November).26 Throughout December 1641 London apprentices (with the connivance of their ‘Puritan Masters’, according to the Venetian ambassador) had taken to showing themselves at Westminster every day demanding the removal of the bishops and the exclusion of Catholics from parliament. This spilled over, on 28 December, into an attack on Westminster Abbey, when there was an attempt to demolish the altar, organs and royal tombs.27 Such actions 24

Ibid., 20; Rushworth, Historical Collections, pt 3, ii, 392-3; ‘The private correspondence between King Charles I and Sir Edward Nichols’, in Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. W. Bray (4 vols, 1906), iv, 110; Coates, 20 n. 9, 150 and n. 12. 25 Coates, 17. 26 Ibid., 78, 79, 81. It had already been put off from 2 November (ibid., 66, 150). Such certificates are known to have been returned from Corpus Christi and St Catharine’s colleges, and St Trinity Church, Cambridge (ibid., 49, 59, and see ch. 7 below). An example also exists from the mayor of Chester (dated 26 March 1642), which confirms that the order had ‘bin punctually observed within this Citty’ (Cheshire Archives and Local Studies Centre, DCC 14/68, discussed in chs 4 and 6 below). 27 CSPV, 1640–2, 272, and B. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (1991 edn), 142. On the popular tumults of the ‘December Days’ see ibid., ch. 4.

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illustrated a degree of popular support for legislation against innovations (in London at least) but added to the controversy surrounding the whole issue. On 22 January 1642 there was a debate in parliament concerning the Common Prayer Book, which, according to Sir Robert Pye, had been abused in several places, torn up and ‘trampled underfoot’. Pye attached the blame for this on the actions of the Commons, especially the Order for the Suppression of Innovations, which he claimed had been made in a ‘thin House’. D’Ewes, however, disagreed. Having himself attended both the committee which drew up the September order and the subsequent debates, he declared ‘I do not believe that ever any order passed in this House upon greater deliberation.’ Rather the problem was that the order had been obstructed by the prelates sitting in the House of Lords, who had forced through the publishing of their ‘old dormant order’, which had allowed ‘popishly affected clergymen’ to continue with ‘their former superstitions and errors’ – the lack of full parliamentary support for the Common’s order being used as an excuse to ignore them.28 D’Ewes also strongly rejected the idea that ‘all innovations were now well laid down’. He argued that he was afraid upon inquiry we shall find . . . that they have taken new heart and in divers places again set up their tables altar-wise and placed the rails before them which they had removed.29

It was not until 12 February 1642 that it was decided to bring in a bill against innovations based upon the September order. This bill was to cover the issue of rails, bowing and ‘other superstitious things’ such as images. It received a first reading on 16 February and a second the next day. The topic was still one which caused controversy – according to the parliamentary diarist John Moore, it passed the second stage only after ‘much speaking’, and further discussion followed its reporting on 12 March 1642. During this debate D’Ewes expressed his concern over the possible impact on secular monuments and tombs. The bill included a provision to protect these things, but D’Ewes felt this should be monitored more closely. He argued that if we commit the work to ignorant men only, as the churchwardens for the most part are, to deface what they list and leave it to their judgement only to distinguish what is a superstitious image and what not, we may have that defaced which we would not.30

During its third reading, on 21 March, an amendment was added which specified the age limit for chancels to be levelled as those erected within the last twenty years. The bill was finally passed by the Commons on 23 March, but then met with further delay in the Lords. Messages were sent up from the

28 29 30

Private Journals, i, 137. Ibid., 137–8. Ibid., 360, 405; ibid., ii, 31 (for quotation). See also CJ, ii, 436, 437, 465 and 476.

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Commons to ‘hasten’ and to ‘expedite’ the passage of the bill on 12 April and again on 4 June. It had been included in the Nineteen Propositions, presented to the king at the beginning of June, but was still being debated by the Lords in July, when it was referred to a committee which was to consider their suggestion that commissioners be appointed in each county to oversee the removal of stained glass windows. This proviso illustrates the concern of the Upper House that iconoclastic legislation should be enforced in a carefully controlled way. The bill passed with this amendment on 16 July, but did not gain the full assent of both Houses until 1 November. Finally, on 27 December, a short bill had to be introduced to amend the time limits set out in the bill which were now out of date.31 The bill had been included in the peace propositions of 20 December 1642 in the hope of receiving royal assent. This was not forthcoming and parliament did not at this point consider recreating the bill as an ordinance – a step which would have been necessary to give it legal standing without the king’s assent. Although this bill does not appear to have been put into action, the Commons did proceed with other measures against specific idolatrous offences. On 10 November Captain Gower was ordered to see to the defacing and removal of the crucifix and altar at ‘Lambeth Church’. It is likely that this was actually Laud’s chapel at Lambeth Palace where a large crucifix had been restored in the east window over the high altar, and it may have been during the carrying out of this order that an attack was made by soldiers on the organ. The men were quickly brought under control by their captains.32 At the same time the sheriffs of London and Middlesex were ordered to carry out the reformation of the royal chapel at St James and the queen’s Catholic chapel at Somerset House, and the Capuchin friars who had been attached to the queen’s chapel were given notice to leave the country.33 The queen’s chapel had been designed by Inigo Jones and built at a cost of over £4000, with a lavishly decorated and gilded interior. The celebration of the first High Mass, in December 1635, had been a major event followed by three days of religious ceremony which attracted large crowds. The presence of the friars and the openly practised Roman Catholic worship made the chapel a focus of anti-Catholic fear.34 In November 1640 31

Ibid., 489, 493; Private Journals, ii, 158; iii, 15; LJ, iv, 210, 212; ibid., v, 214, 248, 425; CJ, ii, 831, 908. For its inclusion in the Nineteen Propositions see Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 252, clause 8. 32 Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 59–61; Laud, Works, iii, 247 (24 November 1642). There is no record of any such iconoclasm at St Mary’s parish church at Lambeth, making it more likely that the directive was aimed at Laud’s chapel (see Lambeth Churchwarden’s Accounts, 1504–1645, ed. C. Drew (Surrey Record Society, 2, 1950)). Other windows at Lambeth Palace chapel were broken down on 1 May 1643 (Laud, Works, iv, 21). For descriptions of these windows see Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 59–61. 33 CJ, ii, 903; LJ, v, 504, 581–3; CJ, ii, 847. 34 A. Milton, ‘ “That Sacred Oratory”: religion and the Chapel Royal during the personal rule of Charles I’, in William Lawes (1602–45): Essays on his Life, Times and Work, ed. A. Ashbee (Aldershot, 1998), 88–9.

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there had been a riotous attack on Catholics outside of the chapel. An attempt had been made by the City of London authorities to persuade parliament to act against the Capuchins in December 1640, but this failed due to the pressure of other business. In May 1641 placards had been posted outside Somerset House exhorting Londoners to eradicate the idolatry being practised there, and further attacks had occurred in January and February 1642. The Commons’ reasons for wanting to be rid of the friars was made clear in a later message to the House of Lords, where they expressed their fear that the state shall draw upon themselves the Guilt of Idolatry by unnecessary permitting, and voluntary conniving at, the Exercise of the Mass within this realm.35

The removal of the Capuchins, however, along with the reformation of the queen’s chapel, did not actually occur until the spring of 1643, delayed by the protests of the French ambassador, who cited articles in the queen’s marriage treaty. On 13 March 1643 the Commons revived its original order to address the issue. This included the taking of the Capuchins into custody and the ‘demolition of Superstitious Monuments etc. in the said Chapel’. The order was repeated on 18 March when a committee, headed by Henry Marten, was appointed to oversee its performance, accompanied by the trained bands of London and Middlesex.36 Further protests from the French ambassador seem to have made the Lords reluctant to comply with the order for the removal of the friars, and a conference between the two Houses was held on 30 March. The Commons were determined to go ahead with the reformation of the chapel even without the Lords’ consent, and the same day it was ordered that all the Vestments and Utensils, belonging to the Altars and Chapel of Somerset House be forthwith burnt; and that the Committee for the Removal of the Capuchins do give Order for the burning of them.37

The cleansing of the chapel was, at least according to hostile witnesses, done with some violence. The Venetian ambassador, recording the event some days later, wrote of the smashing of altars, the breaking and defiling of images and the burning of ornaments. John Vicars, a more approving commentator, confirms that ‘images, crucifixes, papisticall books and a great

35

CSPV, 1640–2, 97, 100, 148–9; Lindley, Popular Politics, 78–9; LJ, v, 687 (3 April 1643). CJ, ii, 1005; ibid., iii, 8. For the intervention of the French ambassador and the debates between the Commons and the Lords over the expulsion of the Capuchins see CJ, iii, 24, 25, 46–7 and LJ, v, 687, 692. 37 CJ, iii, 24. 36

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many base Babylonish trinkets . . . were taken away and burnt in a great fire of purpose provided for it’ (see plate 2).38 By this time the Capuchins were in the custody of the sheriffs of London and Middlesex, and they were finally ordered to be carried forcibly to France on 17 April.39 The Roman Catholic nature of the queen’s chapel and the friars had made them obvious targets for attack. However, the drive against idolatry had a broader base. In the tense atmosphere of these first months of war, when the royalists seemed to have the upper hand, it was natural that the godly members of parliament should feel the need to appease God. An ordinance, passed on 5 February 1643, exhorted ‘all His Majesty’s good subjects . . . to the duty of Repentance, as the only remedy for their present Calamities’. In this ordinance idolatry was highlighted as one of the sins which had ‘a more immediate Influence upon the Distruction of a Kingdom’. The other was bloodshed – but that came second. The expulsion of the Capuchins was seen by the parliamentarians as a success, being linked directly to the victory at Reading which occurred shortly afterwards.40 It was in this mood that, on 24 April 1643, the Commons made a decided effort to enforce reform in the capital with the creation of the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry, to be headed by Sir Robert Harley. This committee (the work of which is discussed in detail below) was principally created to oversee the reformation of Westminster Abbey and parish churches in London and the surrounding areas. It was to issue an order to churchwardens, based upon that of September 1641 but with additional clauses making it more radical, and it was to be involved in the removal of crosses and other monuments from public spaces. Other measures sanctioned by parliament around this time were the destruction of Cheapside Cross in May 1643, and the reformation of the Temple church. On 27 May the treasurers of the Temple were required to pull down the communion rails and crosses in the church, remove the communion table from its altar-wise position and level the ground at the east end of the church. The Temple treasurers were also obliged to ‘lend’ parliament the basins and candlesticks which had been used on the altar, as part of the Public Faith (a means of raising money for the war effort in the form of a loan). At the same time it was ordered that an ordinance should be brought

38 CSPV, 1642–3, 262, 264; Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 2, 294. The dating of this event is unclear: Vicars gives 31 March and Clarendon 30 March (the day that the order was given), whilst Mercurius Aulicus gives 3 April (Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), iii, 11; Oxford Royalist Newsbooks, ed. P. Thompson (4 vols, 1971), i, 196–7). 39 CJ, iii, 27, 46–7, 48. For the reluctance of the Lords see LJ, v, 692 (5 April 1643), when it was decided that it would not be ‘fit to send them away speedily’. 40 Acts and Ordinances, i, 80. The Venetian Ambassador noted how pamphlets being distributed in the City of London were attributing the victory at Reading to the recent expulsion of the Capuchins (CSPV, 1642–3, 272).

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74 Plate 2. The burning of images, crucifixes and books taken from the royal chapels at Somerset House and St James’s Palace, 1643. The order for this was actually given on 30 March, and it probably took place before the date given here (23 May). BL, G.4099, John Vicars, True Information of the Beginning and Cause of all our Troubles (1648), 19

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in ‘for borrowing of the Plate in all Cathedrals superstitiously used upon their Altars’.41 Whilst these measures were partially motivated by financial need, they were also inspired by the perceived need to push forward the reformation, with a direct link made between such godly action and the fate of parliament’s army. This attitude was no doubt combined with a desire to impress the Scots, with whom an alliance was beginning to look possible. On 19 June – only days after the official calling of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, set up to look at the broader issue of church governance – an ordinance ‘for the utter demolition . . . of all Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry’ was introduced into the Commons. It was passed in the Lower House on 19 July, the same day that a petition was delivered from the Assembly calling for speedy action on a number of issues ‘wherein God is more specially and more immediately dishonoured’. Included among these was the matter of monuments of idolatry and superstition, which it was desired should be abolished along with the ‘whole body and practice of popery’. The petition had been prompted by a ‘deep sense of God’s heavy Wrath lying on us, hanging over our heads and the whole Nation, and manifested particularly by the Two late, sad and unexpected Defeats of our Forces in the North and in the West’.42 The bill was agreed to by the Lords on 26 August, and finally passed with the assent of both Houses on 28 August 1643. Parliament may also have been responding to popular pressure. According to the Venetian ambassador, a demonstration held by numerous ‘old Walloons’ marched upon parliament demanding ‘the utmost severity against the Popish idolators, and the abolition everywhere of images and figures of every sort’.43 The August 1643 ordinance was the first major piece of legislation for the iconoclastic reformation of churches and other ‘places of publique prayer’, and was an attempt to impose the radical initiatives which had been taken in London under the auspices of the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry onto the nation as a whole. The impact of the split with the king and the outbreak of war played a significant part in this development towards increased radicalism, removing the more conservative elements from parliament and allowing the zealous members a freer rein: the committee which drew up the September order in 1641 had included future royalists Falkland, Culpeper and Hyde, and the order had 41

CJ, iii, 57, 63, 106. R. S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the ‘Grand Debate’ (Edinburgh, 1985), 69; Rushworth, Historical Collections, pt 3, ii, 344–5; see CJ, iii, 134, 135, 155, 220. 43 LJ, vi, 133, 198, 200; I have found no corroborative evidence for this demonstration which is described in a letter from the Venetian ambassador dated 11 September 1643, but which must have taken place some time earlier, presumably before the passage of the August ordinance (CSPV, 1643–7, 17). 42

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been narrowly defeated in the Lords largely because it still contained religious conservatives. It was the belief of D’Ewes that the Lords were responsible for obstructing the execution of the order in the country, although its legality had been a topic of debate even in the Commons.44 Unfettered by the restraints of moderate or conservative members, the August 1643 ordinance showed signs of a more thorough, far-reaching agenda. It repeated and redefined those objects prohibited by the earlier order, and went further in adding new items to the list and including areas outside of religious buildings. The ordinance required: all altars and tables of stone to be demolished; communion tables to be removed from the east end and placed in the body of the church; communion rails of any kind to be taken away; chancels raised within the last twenty years to be levelled; tapers, candlesticks and basins to be removed from the communion table and no ‘such like’ things to be used; crucifixes, crosses, and all images and pictures of persons of the Trinity or of the Virgin Mary to be taken away and defaced, along with images and pictures of saints; and superstitious inscriptions to be taken away and defaced, ‘and none of the like hereafter [to be] permitted’.45 The new ordinance listed once again the items originally proscribed by the September 1641 order, not only as a reminder to those who still had not addressed the removal of such items but also to give further clarity to the legislation, its legal validity having been questioned. Certain things were defined more carefully, no doubt to avoid leaving loopholes. Altars and tables of stone, for instance, were specifically named, although these items must have been rare especially in parish churches. Chancels steps belonging to the period of the ‘late innovations’ were more strictly defined as being those of twenty years age or less. The clause against communion rails was widened so that all types of rails ‘near to or before the Communion Table’ were to be removed. There was also a widening-out of the definition of what constituted a ‘monument of idolatry’, with new items added to the original list. Not only crucifixes but now plain crosses were to be demolished (reflecting the recent campaign against them in London); images and pictures of saints were forbidden alongside those of the Trinity and the Virgin Mary; and superstitious inscriptions were required to be removed. Offending objects were not merely to be ‘taken away and abolished’, as in 1641, but were specifically required to be defaced. This is significant because the act of defacing such objects was a symbolic gesture making a bolder statement than merely removing them could. The increased radicalism of the legislation was particularly illustrated in the inclusion of superstitious inscriptions. Not only were these not mentioned in the earlier order but Michael Herring, churchwarden of St Mary Woolchurch 44

For members of the committee which drew up the 1641 order, see CJ, ii, 84; Private Journals, i, 137. 45 For the full text of the ordinance see Appendix I.

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in the City of London, had actually been reprimanded for defacing them. In 1641 the Commons had specifically stated that tombs must not be touched and D’Ewes was horrified at the ‘great scandall’ Herring’s indiscretion had brought upon the House, ‘as if we meant to deface all antiquities’. Herring had gone further and defaced statues on tombs simply because they were in the act of kneeling at prayer. Even in 1643, when inscriptions became legitimate targets, parliament was careful to legislate against such excess (and worse vandalism committed since the outbreak of war), adding clauses to ensure that the ordinance was not carried out in an uncontrolled way. Those responsible were obliged to make good any structural work damaged in the process of reformation, and to carry out necessary repairs. Protection was given to monuments, including coats of arms, commemorating ‘any King, Prince, or Nobleman, or other dead Person which hath not been commonly reputed or taken for a Saint’. Nonetheless the final decision on the interpretation of the legislation remained in the hands of local officials and not parliamentary appointed commissioners as D’Ewes and others would have preferred. Secular monuments, including royal ones, would continue to come under attack from time to time, generally at the hands of soldiers.46 The 1643 ordinance was broad in its application, which extended beyond the interior of ‘places of public worship’ to include not only ‘churchyards’ and ‘other places . . . belonging to churches and chapels’ but also ‘any other open place’. The attack on religious imagery in non-religious sites was a controversial move – many opponents of images were happy to accept those kept outside of churches. This more radical agenda reflects the activities of the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry and its campaign against public crosses. The deadline for compliance with the ordinance was 1 November 1643, with a fine being imposed for neglect, and local justices required to enforce the legislation by 1 December. It is doubtful if these deadlines were met in the majority of parishes. Even the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry had to be reminded, on 20 December, to push on with enforcement. At the same time the Commons also ordered Colonel Venn, commander of the garrison at Windsor, to put the ordinance into execution at Windsor and Eton. A brass statue from Windsor Castle, along with other defaced images and ‘broken pieces of brass’, was later sold off.47 The following year, on 9 May 1644, the final piece of iconoclastic legislation was put into place. This continued the progression towards a more thorough reformation, the aim being ‘the further demolishing of Monuments of . . . Idolatry’ (my emphasis). The sense of forward movement can be seen in the preamble to the ordinance where its purpose was stated as ‘to accomplish 46

Coates, 6; Acts and Ordinances, i, 256–7. CJ, iii, 347, 348; ibid., iv, 350 (21 November 1645). The activities of Michael Herring at St Mary Woolchurch are discussed in detail in ch. 5 below.

47

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the blessed Reformation so happily begun, and to remove all offences and things illegal in the worship of God’ (my emphasis). The inspiration for this renewed iconoclastic drive seems to have come out of moves made earlier in the year to reform the chapels in the royal palaces. On 5 February 1644, the Commons had decided that the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry should view the chapel at Whitehall and take into custody vestments and ‘other Chapel-stuff’. This proposal met with a cautious response from the House of Lords which, two days later, repeated an order of 1643 protecting the property of the King – both at Whitehall and in other royal residences – from ‘meddling’ or pilfering. The fact that any reformation of the royal chapels would certainly involve meddling with, as well as the confiscation of, royal property made it desirable that any such action be given legal validity.48 On 9 March the Commons ordered a conference with the Lords regarding the proposed reformation and the disposal of vestments and other utensils belonging to the king, although it was not until over a month later, on 17 April, that the Lords agreed to the sale of these items, and on 25 April an ordinance for the defacing of copes and other items was mooted. That this was being considered directly in response to the problem of the confiscation of the royal copes can be inferred from the fact that such items had been removed from Lambeth Palace, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral the previous year without the need for specific legislation. The resulting Ordinance for the taking away and demolishing all superstitious and illegal matters in the worship of God was read twice in the Commons on 27 April and put to a committee which included Sir Robert Harley and D’Ewes. It was to become the Ordinance for the further demolishing of Monuments of Idolatry and Superstition on 9 May 1644, and on 21 May the Commons ordered that the new legislation be put into execution at Whitehall.49 The May 1644 ordinance contained no reprise of previous orders, although the ordinance was to be printed alongside that of 1643. It required representations of persons of the Trinity, angels or saints to be ‘taken away, defaced and utterly demolished’; all raised chancels to be levelled, regardless of age; copes, surplices and other vestments to be taken out of use and ‘utterly defaced’; roods, roodlofts, holy water fonts, organs and organ frames or cases also to be taken out of use and ‘utterly defaced’; and, finally, the removal of crosses, crucifixes, pictures or representations of the Trinity, 48

CJ, iii, 486, 503. For the full text of the ordinance see Appendix I; CJ, iii, 389; LJ, vi, 415. As early as 11 September 1643, the Commons had planned to search Whitehall and confiscate the goods of ‘malignants’ (i.e., royalists) who had lived there. It was this which had prompted the original Lords’ order for the protection of royal property dated 13 September (see CJ, iii, 236 and 243; LJ, vi, 215). 49 CJ, iii, 422, 463, 470, 485, 486, 503; LJ, vi, 523. The copes from Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s and Lambeth Palace were ordered ‘to be burnt and converted to the relief of the poor in Ireland’ on 31 May 1643 (CJ, iii, 110).

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angels or saints from church plate ‘or any other thing used in the worship of God’. Again, as with the 1643 ordinance, there was an attempt to define offensive items more carefully and strictly, whilst at the same time the scope of the legislation was broadened. Not only were angels now added to the list of religious characters not to be depicted, but the prohibition against images was widened dramatically to include even representations, that is symbolic images such as, for instance, Christ depicted as a lamb or the signs of the four evangelists.50 Such representations, along with all other pictures, were to be removed from any utensil or piece of plate used in worship. Organs and vestments, which had in many places long ceased to be used, were now specifically banned, while chancels raised at any time, even those which had survived the Reformation, were to be levelled. The inclusion of roods and roodlofts in the ordinance is something of a curiosity, given that one would have expected these to have long been removed from ordinary churches. Ronald Hutton, however, has pointed out that a number of roodlofts did survive the Reformation, through sheer luck and the determination of local parishioners. This clause may have been a tightening up of legal loopholes so that in cases where such things still existed it could not be argued that they were beyond the remit of the legislation. It could also be that these items were included now to cover specific cases: it has already been suggested that the May 1644 ordinance came out of moves to reform the royal chapels, and this kind of object may have survived there. The clause for the defacing of vestments was clearly linked to the recent confiscation of copes and surplices from the royal chapels. In most other places these items would no longer have been in use, although there was probably also a desire to see that they were not simply put away but actually destroyed.51 The prohibition of holy-water fonts probably refers to stoups, which in places had survived the Reformation, rather than to baptismal fonts.52 Undoubtedly, however, for the zealous this could be open to interpretation. Calvinists were suspicious of private baptism, and the font was seen by some as an object of popish superstition, placed by the door of the church to symbolize the child’s entrance into the ‘church mystical’. Whilst the Continental Reformed churches tended to use shallow basins, sited near the pulpit, the post-Reformation Church of England, like the Lutheran churches, had been content to retain fonts. In October 1561 a royal order had been issued directing that ‘the font be not removed from the accustomed place’ and 50

For examples of the destruction of symbolic images see chs 4 and 5. R. Hutton, ‘The local impact of the Tudor Reformation’, in The English Reformation Revised, ed. C. Haigh (Cambridge, 1987), 136. 52 This is also the opinion of Margaret Aston (private communication) and John Morrill (J. Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm in the Puritan revolution’, in The Journal of William Dowsing, 15).

51

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prohibiting the use of basins. The same line had been followed in the 1604 canons which required there to be a stone font in every church, in the ‘ancient usual place’. This position came under attack in the Directory of Public Worship, published in January 1645, which required that baptism be administered ‘in the face of the congregation where the people may most conveniently see and hear; and not in the places where fonts in the time of Popery were unfitly and superstitiously placed’. It seems to have been as a result of this, rather than the May 1644 ordinance, that many baptismal fonts were removed and destroyed.53 The final feature of the May 1644 ordinance which highlights the zeal behind it was its emphatic language. Whilst in 1641 offensive items were to be ‘taken away and abolished’, and in 1643 they were also to be ‘defaced’, in 1644 they were to be either ‘utterly defaced’ or ‘taken away, defaced and utterly demolished’. This was clearly meant to be a final statement on the subject – the vehemence of the language, as well as the range of idolatrous objects included, supporting the idea set out in the preamble that the aim was to ‘accomplish’ or to complete a reformation which former legislation had only begun. There was to be no more large-scale legislation on the subject of images, furnishings or utensils in churches. On 27 May 1648 an order from the House of Lords provided the visitors of Oxford University with the authority to ‘take away and destroy all such pictures, relics, crucifixes and images as shall be found in Oxford, and be judged by them to be superstitious or idolatrous’. This aimed to bring the former royalist stronghold into line with the parliamentary regulations on imagery. In August 1645, with the first civil war effectively over and control of most of the country coming into parliament’s hands, the Commons gave an order to ensure the enforcement of previous legislation. The next month the regulations for the Triers – proposed judges to oversee the election of Presbyterian elders – included articles concerning suspension from the sacrament. These granted the power to exclude both worshippers of ‘images, crosses, crucifixes or reliques . . . saints, angels, or any mere creatures’ and the makers of such images. Subsequent attempts at legislation were designed primarily with a view to settlement with the king and came to nothing – as, for instance a proposed bill for the demolition of Monuments of Superstition on 20 November 1645; the proposed ‘Act for the Suppression of divers Innovations . . . and for the utter Demolition of all Monuments of Idolatry or Superstition’ of 20 January 1646; and the propositions on religion debated 5–7 November 1647.54

53 J. G. Davies, The Architectural Setting of Baptism (1962), 93–5, 96, 98–9; Acts and Ordinances, i, 594. On this see also D. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), esp. 173–80. 54 LJ, x, 286; CJ, iv, 246, 288–9, 349, 412; v, 351; see also LJ, vii, 54; ix, 513.

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Despite its commitment to the suppressing of idolatry in churches, parliament was wary of the dangers of giving too free a rein to individuals and of the potentially anti-authoritarian aspect of iconoclasm. Hence an ordinance was passed in February 1648 which required the good repair and maintenance of all churches. The Directory of Public Worship was careful to make it clear that although churches may have been the scenes of past errors of idolatry they were not in themselves idolatrous. Whilst they were not places of special holiness neither were they ‘subject to such pollution by any superstition formerly used and now laid aside’. This shows the increasing fear of radical sectarians, some of whom, as has been seen, were arguing for the demolition of the churches themselves.55 The 1650s saw little further concern with the issue of images in churches, although some attempts were made to have cathedrals demolished as useless, inherently idolatrous buildings. Nevertheless, after the execution of the king and the establishment of a Commonwealth in 1649, Stuart symbols – in the form of arms, statues and inscriptions – were ordered removed from churches and elsewhere, and were treated in a similar way to religious images: they were not only to be removed but to be defaced. The statues of James and Charles at the west end of St Paul’s Cathedral were demolished and the inscriptions defaced. Another of Charles at the Royal Exchange was beheaded, its sceptre removed, and the legend inscribed: ‘Exit tyrannus Regum ultimus, anno primo restitutoe libertatis Angliæ 1648’. The subject of the defacing of royal symbols, including ‘pictures of the late King’, was touched upon again in December 1650 in a report primarily concerned with the continuing observation of the feast of Christmas and the performance of ‘idolatrous masses’. The entire report was referred to the Committee for Plundered Ministers.56 While the removal of royal images and monuments was clearly a primarily political move, there were some parallels with attitudes towards religious imagery. In suppressing a traditional ideology – whether religious or political, papal or monarchical – it was not enough merely to remove from sight the objects which defined that ideology, but they must also be seen to be destroyed. In many ways the defacing of such artefacts was a stronger comment and a clearer statement of victory – it was a symbolic act, demonstrating the power of the new regime. On yet another level there was a link between anti-Stuart iconoclasm and religious iconoclasm. After his death, Charles I had been set up as a martyr and an icon, most notably in Eikon Basilike, a book purportedly written by the king himself. The symbolism of this was not lost on Milton, who called his answer to this idolizing of the king Eikonoclastes. In this tract, Milton systematically smashed not only the 55

CJ, iv, 714; Acts and Ordinances, i, 1065–70, 607. On cathedrals see ch. 7 below; see Appendix II for anti-Stuart legislation. For the defacing of the royal statues see CSPD 1650, 261.

56

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king’s political and religious arguments, but the exalted notion of kingship itself, reshaping the royal martyr into a royal tyrant. Whilst an exploration of the metaphorically iconoclastic aspects of the English Revolution is beyond the scope and theme of this book, the links between anti-royal and religious iconoclasm is noteworthy and is touched upon in the following chapters when looking at the actions of ordinary soldiers, which occasionally fused the two.57 The sale of the late king’s paintings demonstrates how in the 1650s the government took a less zealous view of religious imagery, the heat perhaps taken out of the issue by the relative success of earlier iconoclastic legislation. In 1645, when the duke of Buckingham’s art collection was sold off, parliament, swayed by the intervention of Robert Harley, had ordered that only those pictures ‘as are without any superstition’ were to be sold. Those which depicted persons of the Trinity or the Virgin Mary were ordered to be burnt. There was to be no debate over the need to deface religious pictures from the king’s collection. In 1651 the Spanish ambassador, for instance, purchased among other things once belonging to the king, ‘one exquisite set of hangings, of incomparable design and delicacy, representing the acts of the apostles, which were sold as cheaply as if they had been of plain cloth’. John Hutchinson, himself a good solid Puritan and as far as images in churches were concerned also an iconoclast, purchased many of the king’s paintings including one of ‘Mary, Christ, St Mark and a genious kneelinge’.58 The Lord Protector, no matter what his reputation during the war years, was no Harley when it came to religious imagery, and had no objections to its secular use. A list of former royal paintings and hangings assigned to Cromwell at Whitehall and Hampton Court Palace included several depictions of religious subjects (such as a Madonna with angels, the story of Jacob, and the prophet Elijah). At some point in the 1650s Cromwell was the recipient of a letter from a godly woman, Mary Netheway, concerned about the heathenish statues of Venus, Adonis, Apollo and others in the gardens of Hampton Court. She warned of the dangers of ‘thos monstres’, for whils they stand, thought you se noe evel in them, [y]it thar is much evel in it, for wils the grofes and altars of the idels remayn’d untaken away in Jerusalem, the routh of God continued agaynst Israel.59

57

John Milton, Eikonoclastes (1649). CJ, iv, 216. These orders do not appear to have been carried out but the controversy surrounding the sale illustrates the point. See also J. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: the Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), 184; CSPV, 1647–52, 174–5; Aston, ‘Puritans and iconoclasm’, 120–1. For Hutchinson’s iconoclasm, see Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, 54. 59 R. Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell (1977), 27–8; Original Letters and Papers addressed to Oliver Cromwell, 115. 58

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There is no evidence that Cromwell acted upon this warning and it is unlikely that he did so. This is not to say that Puritans ceased to be concerned about idolatry in general and images in particular. In June 1657, for instance, in an act for the better observation of the Lord’s day it was instructed that all maypoles – ’a Heathenist vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’ – were to be taken down.60 However, for the majority of the godly in government the main work of the iconoclastic reformation was achieved in the 1640s, with the legislation passed then laying down the foundations for a purer church. Puritan iconoclasm was, it would appear, largely a phenomenon of the 1640s, linked closely to the religious, political and military situation of those years. The Commons’ order against innovations of September 1641 and the two parliamentary ordinances of August 1643 and May 1644 were the most important pieces of legislation in this respect and set the agenda of the official iconoclasts, showing a progression whereby more radical measures were adopted. This radical progression is illustrated in the way in which the iconoclasts’ targets were widened. Between September 1641 and May 1644 there was a move from the original emphasis on recent innovations to a drive for further reformation. By 1644 objects which had been a legitimate part of the preLaudian church – for instance, organs, fonts and ceremonial vestments – were outlawed. The agenda had become a strictly Puritan one rather than an antiLaudian reaction to the changes of the Caroline church. One of the key moves in this progression was the setting up of the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry some four months before the August 1643 ordinance. The work of this committee, which tackled idolatry in parliament’s own backyard, London and the surrounding environs, would have had a great influence on the direction taken by subsequent legislative moves which sought to impose a similarly thorough reformation at a national level. Headed by one of parliament’s most iconoclastic members, Sir Robert Harley, and supported in the City by another, Isaac Pennington, the committee was a driving force in the struggle against ‘monuments of idolatry’.

The Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry The Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry (hereafter, the Harley Committee) was officially created on 24 April 1643. Its remit was to receive information, from time to time, of any Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry in the Abbey Church at Westminster, or the Windows thereof, or in any other Church or Chapel, in or about 60

Acts and Ordinances, ii, 1163.

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London: and . . . to demolish the same, where any such superstitious or idolatrous monuments are informed to be: and all churchwardens, and other officers, are hereby required to be aiding and assisting in the Execution of this order.61

Four days later, on 28 April, these powers were extended to allow the demolition of any similar monuments in ‘any open Place, in or about the Cities of London & Westminster, as well as such as they shall find in or about any Church or Chapel’.62 The committee consisted originally of nine members of parliament, with another six, including the burgesses for the City of Westminster, added on 25 April.63 Sir Robert Harley as chairman seems to have taken most of the responsibility and to have been the driving force behind the committee’s activities. Harley, member of parliament for Herefordshire, was a notable Puritan of Presbyterian leanings who took a personal interest in the subject of images. In 1626 he had supported a motion in parliament for the demolition of Cheapside Cross ‘for fear of idolatry’ and in 1639 had confiscated and destroyed a picture of God found by one of his tenants in Buckton. Having been a member of the committee which drew up the order against innovations in September 1641, Harley used the parliamentary recess which followed to ensure that it was carried out in the parishes neighbouring his estate at Brampton Bryan. This involved the removal of the church cross at Wigmore, and the breaking of windows at Leintwardine. He also wrote a letter to the churchwardens of Leominster enclosing a copy of the order and ‘requiring’ them to abolish two stone crucifixes along with windows containing crucifixes and ‘other scandalous pictures of persons of the Trinity’.64 The style of Harley’s reformation expressed the zeal of the man. The cross at Wigmore was not simply removed but ‘caused to be beaten in pieces, even to dust with a sledge, and then laid . . . in the footpath to be trodden on in the churchyard’. At Leintwardine the offensive windows were first demolished, then the glass ‘broke small with a hammer’ and thrown into the River Teme, allegedly ‘in imitation of King Asa 2 Chronicles 15:16: who threw the 61

CJ, iii, 57. Ibid., 63. 63 Ibid., 57, 60. The committee members were: Robert Harley, Francis Rous, Gilbert Gerrard, John Gurdon, Denis Bond, John White, Myles Corbett, ‘Mr Moore’ (John, Poynings or Thomas?), and ‘Mr Brown’ (John, Richard or Samuel?). Additional members were: John Glynne and William Bell (burgesses for the City of Westminster), Humphrey Salloway, John Blakeston, William Wheeler, and William Cawley. Apart from Harley, I have found no evidence of any of these individuals being actively and consistently involved in enforcing iconoclasm, although Gurdon and Bond were involved in the reformation of Somerset House chapel in March 1643 and Gurdon was a member of the committee set up to take charge of the royal coronation regalia which allegedly desecrated Westminster Abbey in June 1643 (CJ, ii, 1005, iii, 8, 114). 64 BL, Add. MS 70002, fols 206r, 213r; Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 47, 115–16; BL, Add. MS 70003, fol. 162r. See Eales for details of Harley’s life, career, and religious and political beliefs. 62

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images into the brook Kidron’. Another story tells how Harley took the painted glass from the demolished window at the New Chapel, laid it in heaps upon the ground and trod it to pieces, saying that he was ‘dancing a jig to Laud’. Whilst these accounts reflect the hostility of the reporters, they ring true in the light of Harley’s later activities, and it was his own daughter, Brilliana, who described how her father had broken the scandalous picture at Buckton with his own hands and ‘flung the dust of it upon the water’.65 Indeed, if the church cross at Wigmore was, as it appears, a plain cross and possibly in the churchyard rather than inside the church, then in destroying it Harley was exceeding the remit of the 1641 order. Such an action would have been an anticipation of the campaign against crosses in London during 1643 and their inclusion in the August 1643 ordinance, both of which Harley was undoubtedly influential in initiating. The work of the committee started immediately. On 25 April, according to Mercurius Aulicus, its members, guarded by a band of soldiers, went to Westminster Abbey and St Margaret’s Church in Westminster and purged them of ‘all the scandalous pictures (that is to say all the painted glass), and the statues or images in the tombs and monuments’.66 This included the defacing of glass ‘with any imagery or show of painting’, the removal of a cross from the top of the Abbey and ‘many other horrible outrages’. Aulicus’s report on the extent of the destruction at this point was probably something of an exaggeration. Bills and receipts among Harley’s papers show a more orderly, less frantic approach, with iconoclastic work being carried out by professional workmen over a long period of time (the last receipt being dated 8 August 1645).67 The committee also quickly became involved in a broad campaign of reform in the City of London centred upon Cheapside Cross and extended to include church and steeple crosses throughout London. The initiative for this widespread campaign came apparently from the City authorities at the Guildhall. On 23 March 1643, less than a month before the creation of the Harley Committee, a group of London ministers had been appointed to view the windows of the Guildhall and its chapel. The report they produced, on 27 April 1643, expressed concern not only with the Guildhall windows and other images in the City but in particular with Cheapside Cross. The mayoral court decided that parliament should be consulted about its removal and a petition was drawn up. It may well have been in response to 65

Ibid., 47, 115–16; BL, Add. MS 70002, fols 206r, 213r. The story of Harley ‘dancing a jig’ on the New Chapel glass is given in M. E. C. Wallcott, Westminster: Memorials of the City, St Peter’s College, the Parish Churches, Palaces, Streets and Worthies (1849), 288. I have not been able to trace the source, although it sounds like a classic piece of royalist propaganda. 66 Mercurius Aulicus, 30 April–6 May 1643 (Oxford), 228, 130–1 (misprinted, should be 230–1). 67 Ibid.; bills and receipts pertaining to the work of the Harley Committee at Westminster Abbey, St Margaret’s, Whitehall, Greenwich and Hampton Court are in BL Add. MS 70005. They are calendared in HMC, 14th Report, appendix, pt 2, The MSS of His Grace the Duke of Portland preserved at Welbeck Abbey (10 vols, 1891–1931), iii, 132–4, and are discussed in detail below.

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this petition that the powers of the Harley Committee were increased on 28 April to give it jurisdiction over monuments in open spaces.68 At the beginning of May the demolition of Cheapside Cross was finally carried out, with much ceremony (see plate 5).69 On 10 May the committee followed up this move with the issue of a new order to be sent to churchwardens, which was printed on 17 May. This order appears to have been based on the abortive bill passed by parliament in November 1642. Whether the new order was sent out beyond London – technically the limit of the committee’s jurisdiction – is not clear, but it was the basis for action in the capital, being recorded as received in many parish accounts. The requirements of the order were largely a repeat of those of 1641, with some additions: the taking away and demolishing of altars or tables of stone; the removal of the communion table from the east end into the body of the church; the removal of tapers, candlesticks and basins from the communion table; and the taking away and demolishing of all crucifixes, crosses and images and pictures of persons of the Trinity, or of the Virgin Mary.70 The proscription of plain crosses was new, sparking off a campaign against them, particularly in public places. The order went on to require the removal and demolition of crucifixes, crosses and images ‘upon the outside of your said Church or Chappel, or in any open place within your parish’. The London parishes were expected to give the committee an account of the work done by 20 May – a very short space of time indeed. No evidence of such reports to the committee survive, although many of the London parishes removed steeple and other outdoor crosses at around this time.71 The widespread impact of this campaign can be seen in the records of the City parish churches (described fully in chapter five below). Westminster parishes were also included, although the poor survival rate of parish accounts and the absence of any records of the court of burgesses for the period means that detailed evidence is rather thin on the ground. There is an unsubstantiated story that sometime around April 1643 the sign of the Golden Cross Tavern at Charing Cross was pulled down ‘by order of the 68

Wallington, Historical Notices, ii, 7; CLRO, Repertory 56, fols 140r, 160v–161r; see also Journal 40, fol. 58v; CJ, iii, 63. Mercurius Aulicus saw the widening of the committee’s powers as ‘a preamble to the pulling downe of Cheapside Crosse’ (Oxford Royalist Newsbooks, i, 252). On the Guildhall Report and for more on the demolition of the cross, see ch. 5 below. 69 Reports vary as to the exact date of the demolition: John Evelyn, who witnessed the event, Sir Humphrey Mildmay and William Laud all record the date as 2 May; The Last Will and Testament of Charing Cross gives 3 May. Both may be right – the Venetian ambassador reported that the work took three days to complete. Vicars, however, gives 9 May (The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. De Beer (6 vols, Oxford, 1955), ii, 81; BL, Harl. MS 454, fol. 59; Laud, Works, iv, 21; CSPV, 1642–3, 272; Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 2, 326–7). 70 Foure Orders of Great Consequence of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament (1643). An account of this order is also given in Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 2, 329. For the full text, see Appendix I. 71 See ch. 5.

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Commission or Committee appointed by the House’. Charing Cross itself, which was in a state of much disrepair and without religious images, was allowed to stand until 1647.72 At around the same time there was a report that parliament meant not only to demolish all church crosses in the City, but also to ‘make most careful search into all the houses to destroy these idolls, as they call them’. There is no other evidence to corroborate this, although houses of papists and royalists were being searched at this time by the Sequestration Committee, and any ‘idolatrous’ objects found were defaced or destroyed, often in large-scale public bonfires. The Harley Committee seems to have been responsible for defacing any confiscated items deemed to be idolatrous. On 16 January 1644, a large volume of such goods were being gathered together to be burnt during a celebration of parliament’s recent escape from a conspiracy against it. The Commons ordered that the committee was ‘to take care to deface such superstitious Images Pictures and Monuments as are seized on and brought into Camden House [headquarters of the Sequestration Committee] . . . and likewise . . . in any other part within and about the City’.73 As well as issuing its own iconoclastic order of May 1643, the Harley Committee was also responsible for overseeing the execution of the August 1643 ordinance in the London parishes. As mentioned earlier, it had to be reminded of its duty on 20 December with a Commons order urging the enforcement of the ordinance. The inference is that it was the committee’s role to chase up defaulting churchwardens (a task which elsewhere was the responsibility of local justices). The committee was no doubt also expected to enforce the final piece of iconoclastic legislation, the May 1644 ordinance. There exists little evidence to illustrate how systematic such enforcement was after the initial May 1643 campaign. Given the pressure of its other work during that time – the reform of Westminster Abbey and the royal chapels – it is likely that the committee worked in an irregular way, probably acting upon information received and sporadic reminders from parliament to chase up cases of neglect (as on 20 December 1643 and again on 19 August 1645). On 1 March 1644, the churchwardens of St Mary le Strand were called to appear before Harley on the matter of some ‘pictures in the church’, which were subsequently removed. An entry from the vestry minutes of St Michael Cornhill shows a meeting of the Harley Committee held on 20 October 1645 where pressure was applied to the parish officials to comply with the parliamentary ordinances. This may have been a case of the committee chasing up an individual parish or may have been part of a more general initiative aimed at reminding parishes of their duty. It does 72

J. Timbs, Curiosities of London (1867 edn), 84–5. No reference is given and I have been unable to find the source of Timbs’ information; The Last Will and Testament of Charing Cross (1646). 73 CSPV, 1642–3, 272; CJ, iii, 368 and see ch. 4.

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however confirm the committee’s continuing role in overseeing iconoclastic legislation in the city churches.74 As well as overseeing the reformation of London’s churches, one of the primary duties of the Harley Committee, indeed one of the main reasons for its creation, was the ‘cleansing’ of Westminster Abbey. While this work started immediately it was to be a long, continuing process, as can be seen by the workers’ bills and receipts, dated from throughout 1644 and 1645, which have survived among Harley’s papers. The Abbey may also have suffered from two instances of unofficial or semi-official iconoclasm during June and July 1643. On 3 June the Commons ordered a committee headed by Henry Marten to break open the doors to the room where the coronation regalia was kept in order to take an inventory. This was carried out on 7 June, Marten being accompanied by a number of troops. Accounts of this incident by Mercurius Aulicus and the Venetian ambassador reported that the troops once in the Abbey ‘made spoyle upon the utensils and ornaments of the church’ and broke organs and choir stalls.75 In July, according to Mercurius Rusticus, two companies of parliamentary soldiers quartered at the Abbey committed further outrages. The men allegedly burnt communion rails, destroyed the organ, played at ‘hare and hounds’ dressed in surplices, and sat around the communion table drinking and playing cards.76 Such iconoclastic or ‘blasphemous’ behaviour among soldiers was commonplace in cathedrals at this time, although this hostile account was probably an exaggeration. What actual official iconoclasm took place in 1643 is not documented. It is not until 1644 that surviving bills and receipts give us some indication of the type of work which was undertaken – both at Westminster Abbey and at the church of St Margaret’s. Most of the work appears to have happened between 1644 and 1645, although it should be remembered that the dates given are those on which the bill or receipt was drawn up, the work itself having already been carried out. To illustrate this, reports in Mercurius Aulicus of the defacing of pictures at Whitehall Palace were dated as 19 June 1644, although a receipt for payment for the work is dated exactly one month later. Payment for a bill of 24 July 1644 for work at the Abbey was 74 CJ, iii, 347; iv, 246. WCA, MF 1900, St Mary le Strand churchwardens’ accounts, vol. 22, fol. 400v. Two entries show payments made ‘when wee attended Sr Robt Harlowe concerning the takeing downe of the pictures in the church’, and ‘to ye messenger that warned us to attend Sr Robert Harlowe’. The pictures were removed by 22 March but were not destroyed. For St Michael Cornhill see GL MS 4072/1, fol. 176. Both of these instances are discussed in ch. 5 below. 75 CJ, iii, 114; Mercurius Aulicus, 2–8 June, 1644, 301; CSPV, 1642–3, 286–7. Marten was unsuccessful in his attempt to seize the regalia at this time but returned on 13 June when he allegedly took away plate and money. On 8 May 1644, the Commons ordered the melting down of Westminster Abbey plate then in the possession of Harley. After the Restoration the dean and chapter offered a reward for the return of missing utensils and goods belonging to the church (CJ, iii, 486; Westminster Abbey Archives, Chapter Act Book, 1660–2, fol. 15, 10 October 1660). 76 Angliae Ruina, 235–8.

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not received until 30 September, although the bills themselves could come in quickly: Robert Reynolds, a carman who carried copes from Whitehall to Westminster, presented his bill on 25 May, only four days after parliament had ordered the confiscation of the copes.77 A regular team of workers seems to have been employed by the committee, some of whom were already employees at the Abbey. The most prominent was joiner Adam Browne, who had been appointed surveyor at the Abbey in 1639, and who had done a good deal of work for Archbishop Laud. Indeed he appeared at Laud’s trial, along with the glass painter Baptista Sutton, to give evidence concerning the restoration of a crucifix in a window at Croyden Palace chapel, and another idolatrous window at the New Chapel, a chapel of ease belonging to St Margaret’s Westminster. This window, erected in 1640, had contained ‘the picture of the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove with the images of the Virgin Mary, Christ, Angels and Seraphim’. Browne and Sutton seem to have been reluctant witnesses against their former employer, taking pains to point out that the order for the window at the chapel had been given not by Laud but by Robert Newell, sub-dean of Westminster Abbey. However, no doubt motivated by pragmatism, Browne carried out work for the Harley Committee and remained in his post until his death in 1655.78 Of the two glaziers used by Harley, John Rutland appears to have been in charge and worked peripatetically, going from the Abbey to St Margaret’s and then onto the various royal chapels. The other, Robert Hickes, had been on a regular quarterly wage at St Margaret’s from at least 1640. Carpenter Thomas Gassaway had also worked for the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey.79 A good deal of the work done by the Harley Committee was focused on the chapel of Henry VII. The windows here had been highly decorative, and at Henry’s request had contained ‘storyes, ymages, armes [and] badgies’.80 These windows were now extensively reglazed with plain white glass: altogether the bills total over £64 for reglazing in the chapel and are dated between 9 June and 18 October 1645. One bill of 8 August recorded £48 9s due for the replacement of 498 feet of glass in the west window, 360 feet of

77

Mercurius Aulicus, 16–22 June 1644, 1040; BL, Add. MS 70005 (unfoliated), Receipt of Thomas Stevens, 19 July 1644; bill and receipt of Adam Browne, 24 July/30 September 1644; bill of Robert Reynolds, 25 May 1644. 78 H. M. Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840 (3rd edn, 1995), 170; P. Guillery, ‘The Broadway Chapel, Westminster: a forgotten exemplar’, London Topographical Record, 26 (1990), 97–133, at 112; PRO, SP 16/499/71, and Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 61, 93. Sutton also found himself in the position of having to undertake work removing painted windows, some of which it might be conjectured may have been his own work (see ch. 5 and n. 57 below). 79 WCA, E 23 (microfilm), St Margaret’s churchwardens’ accounts; Westminster Abbey Archives, Fabric Accounts 41995, agreement between the dean and chapter and Thomas Gassaway, 1639. 80 W. R. Lethaby, Westminster Abbey Re-examined (1925), 157; H. Dow, The Sculptural Decoration of the Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey (Edinburgh, 1992), 19; L. E. Tanner, Unknown Westminster Abbey (1948), 22.

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Plate 3. The high altar in the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey, erected by Pietro Torregiano. The altar was destroyed by the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry, probably around December 1643. BL, 195.f.2, Francis Sandford, A Genealogical History of the Kings of England and Monarchs of Great Britain (1677), 471 90

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glass in three east windows, and another 1100 feet of glass elsewhere. The removal of the glass was probably done much earlier – the receipts largely record the work of restoration rather than destruction and it is likely that the painted windows had been broken down previously and left in a state of disrepair.81 The chapel’s famous high altar – the work of Pietro Torregiano, completed in 1522 – was removed and the steps levelled. This altar was of ornate Renaissance design with some obviously offensive features. A free-standing screen contained bronze reliefs showing the Resurrection to the front and the Nativity to the back. Above the whole was a canopy on which kneeling angels supported a cross on one side and a pillar bearing a cockerel (representing St Peter) on the other (see plate 3).82 On 14 May 1644 a payment of 10s was made to one Peter Petley for ‘taking down the High Altar’. A later receipt dated 12 June 1645 shows £2 9s paid for ‘altering ye alter steps’, a large-scale repair which required the use of fifty-eight feet of Purbeck marble. It is likely, however, that the most offensive parts of the altar were removed or defaced earlier than this. John Vicars recorded that the altar, along with crucifixes in the chapel, was demolished by order of parliament ‘in the presence of the Committee for innovations [the Harley Committee]’ on 30 December 1643. This dating is more or less corroborated by Mercurius Belgicus which reported that on 29 December ‘the stately Screene of copper richly gilt, set up by King Henry the Seventh in his Chappell at Westminster, was by order of the Houses reformed, That is, broken downe and sold to Tinkers’.83 Interestingly, Vicars tells us that this ‘pious act’ was carried out at the request of ‘Mr Hinderson’, probably Alexander Henderson, a Scottish minister who had preached at the Abbey the day before, perhaps illustrating parliament’s desire to impress its new allies with its zeal for reformation.84 Elsewhere in the Abbey, pictures and images – either in statuary, carved wood, painting or glass – were removed. It is not always easy to tell exactly what the object is that was being demolished, although some indication can be taken from the trade of the workman named in the accounts. The first of the receipts, dated 19 April 1644, recorded a sum of 6s paid to the carpenter Thomas Gassaway for three days work in ‘planing out some pictures and carrying away scaffolding and stuffe’. During May, payments were made to the mason Thomas Stevens for taking down ‘ye angels in the abbey and 81

BL, Add. MS 70005, receipts of John Rutland for 9 June 1645 (£10), 12 July 1645 (£16); 8 August 1645 (£15 received of a bill of £48 9s), 11 September 1645 (£5) and 18 October 1645 (£5). 82 Dow, Sculptural Decoration, 54. See also J. Perkins, Westminster Abbey: its Worship and Ornaments (3 vols, 1952), ii, 160ff. 83 BL, Add. MS 70005, receipts of Peter Petley, 14 May 1644 and of Thomas Stevens, 12 July 1645. Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 3, 113; Mercurius Belgicus, A Brief Chronologie of the Battails, Sieges, Conflicts and other most remarkable passages from the beginning of the Rebellion to 25 March 1646 (1646), 29 December 1643 (unpaginated). 84 Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 3, 113. On Henderson see Paul, Assembly of the Lord, passim.

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clensinge out of pictures’, and for ‘taking out a crucifix at the North end of the Abbey and ye pictures at ye conduit leading to the new palace’.85 Adam Browne received payment of £2 19s for ‘cutting down pictures over the Records’ and taking down what was left of the organ loft. He and his workmen also removed three pictures from Queen Elizabeth’s chapel and another of ‘God ye father and ch[rist] in his bosom’ from the duke of Richmond’s chapel. Unfortunately it has not been possible to identify any of these paintings, to ascertain their date or content. The ‘pictures over the Records’ may have been located in the old chapter house, which had since the reign of Edward VI been given over to use as a record office.86 The carpenter, Gassaway, was involved in planing out another seven pictures before the end of the year (the receipt is dated 26 November), and it has been suggested that these were full length medieval paintings of saints which decorated the wooden sedilia by the high altar. Similar paintings depicting two kings were allowed to remain, and do so still. A scaffold was erected in order to ‘cut out’ a Resurrection ‘where the Kings and Queens stand in the Abbey’, possibly, as W. R. Letheby has suggested, a Doom or Last Judgement which may have occupied the central tympanum of the north porch (like that at the cathedral of Amiens).87 A good deal of work was carried out on the northern exterior of the Abbey, recorded in two receipts dated 13 May 1645. Gassaway was paid for erecting scaffolding, and Stevens, the mason, cut down statues of the Virgin Mary and other saints. Letheby believes that these were the medieval statues which had been mentioned in the sacrists’ rolls of 1338, 1363–5, and 1428 and which included depictions of St Peter and Edward the Confessor. The removal of the statues was clearly a large-scale piece of work – damage was done to the neighbouring house of Dr Stanton ‘which was broken by the taking downe of those statues’ and had to be repaired. Stevens also removed a cross from the top of the door to the alms house.88 How many stained glass windows were defaced or demolished in the Abbey, other than those of the Henry VII chapel, is unknown. There is only one receipt for new glass not specifically stated to be in the chapel – that of 12 January, which records forty feet of glass installed in a window next to the ‘Redd doore’.89 It may be that windows in the main body of the church

85

BL, Add. MS 70005, receipt of Thomas Gassaway, 19 April 1644; bills of Thomas Stevens, May 1644. 86 Ibid., bills and receipts of Adam Browne, July/September 1644; G. G. Scott, Gleanings from Westminster Abbey (Oxford, 1863), 39. 87 BL, Add. MS 70005, receipt of Thomas Gassaway, 26 November 1644; Tanner, Unknown Westminster Abbey, 21–2; Royal Commission for Historical Monuments, Westminster Abbey, i, 87; Lethaby, Westminster Abbey Re-examined, 70–2. 88 BL, Add. MS 70005, receipt of Thomas Gassaway, 13 May 1645; receipt of Thomas Stevens, 13 May 1645; Lethaby, Westminster Abbey Re-examined, 70. 89 BL, Add. MS 70005, receipt of John Rutland, 12 January 1646.

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were broken down at an earlier date and were either left in disrepair or accounts of their reglazing have been lost. As well as work at Westminster Abbey, the Harley Committee was also directly involved in overseeing the reformation of St Margaret’s, Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral, and the chapels of the royal palaces at Whitehall, Greenwich and Hampton Court. St Margaret’s was the church used by the House of Commons, and at the very beginning of the Long Parliament members had refused to receive the sacrament there until the communion table, which had stood altar-wise, was repositioned (a motion put forward by Harley among others).90 According to Mercurius Aulicus the defacing of ‘images in tombs and monuments’ had begun at St Margaret’s during April 1643, soon after the setting up of the committee. The vestry minutes for the church show that brass taken up from ‘tombs and otherwise’ was sold around December 1644, along with the screen and organ loft, the organ pipes being sold the next year.91 The Harley Committee was overseeing the reformation of the church’s windows at around the same time, with receipts from Rutland and Hickes dated between 4 January and 10 June 1645. Payments were made of £3 5s for the installation of 131 feet of new glass in January 1645; of £7 2s for 284 feet in March; and of £5 1s 13d for another 202 feet for the south side of the church in May.92 The most interesting receipt, dated 10 June 1645, gives us a clue to the sort of imagery which was being removed. Some thirty-five feet of new glass was installed in the north side of the chancel ‘where the holy lames were’. This is probably a reference to some symbolic imagery – the lamb as a symbol of Christ could take several forms representing the Crucifixion, the Resurrection or the book of Apocalypse. Twelve lambs together could represent the twelve apostles, or more the Christian ‘flock’. Another forty feet of glass was replaced at the east end of the gallery ‘where the Virgin Mary was’. More new glass was installed in a window by the gallery stairs and at the south side of the church, the total bill costing £5 19s 8d. A later receipt, dated 12 January 1646, records the ‘spending’ (probably the defacing or destroying) of old glass in several windows.93 The Harley Committee collaborated with the City of London authorities in the reformation of St Paul’s Cathedral. The cathedral had suffered from 90

Denzil Holles, John Wray and Gilbert Gerrard made the same motion. It had been decided that the whole House should take the sacrament as a way of weeding out any papists amongst them (Notestein, 43, 46, 48 (19 and 20 November); CJ, ii, 32, 20 November; BL, Add. MS 6521, fol. 9, 22 November). 91 Mercurius Aulicus, 30 April–6 May 1643, 228; WCA, E 25, St Margaret’s churchwardens’ accounts, 6 June 1644–14 May 1646. 92 BL, Add. MS 70005, receipt of John Rutland and Robert Hickes, 4 January 1645; receipts of John Rutland, 1 March and 7 May 1645. 93 Ibid., receipt of Robert Hickes, 10 June 1645; receipt of John Rutland, 12 January 1646. On the use of the lamb in Christian imagery see G. G. Sill, A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art (1975), 22.

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neglect after its near destruction by fire in 1561, but from 1632 an extensive programme of repair and restoration was started (which included the erection of a classical portico at the west front of the cathedral, designed by Inigo Jones). This restoration ground to a halt with the beginning of the civil war and the money raised was to be ‘borrowed’ by parliament for the war effort.94 After the passage of the Commons’ order against innovations in September 1641, a riotous crowd had descended upon the cathedral during a Sunday sermon, to see if the order had been carried out there. According to reports, their intention was to remove the rails from the communion table, which was still set altar-wise, and to ‘overthrow [the] organs and deface divers other ornaments’. Unable to carry out this ‘reformation’ due to the presence of the marshall of the City and his men, threats were made to return the following week. The dean, however, saw to it that the rails were removed and the altar re-positioned. A further riot occurred in October 1642, when an attempt to destroy the organ was stalled.95 By 14 December 1643 the court of aldermen decided to act, putting forward a motion to parliament ‘that all things offensive in Paules church may be removed’ and that the church should be made fit for the mayor and aldermen to hear Sunday sermons in. This must have been acted on immediately because a parliamentary order was made the next day instructing the Harley Committee to ‘remove out of the said Church all such matters as are offensive to godly Men’. On 16 December the City authorities created their own committee to assist Harley, consisting of alderman Sir George Garrett, the sheriffs and deputies of the City and ministers Edmund Calamy, Joseph Caryl and Lazarus Seaman.96 Offensive items were removed from St Paul’s, including a mitre, crossier staff and ‘other sup[er]stitious things’, and the organ was sold to be melted down, according to Mercurius Aulicus. On 24 April 1644 parliament ordered that the confiscated items were to be sold, along with brass and iron taken from the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey, and Harley was due to report back on the sale the following Saturday, 27 April. Whilst there is no record of him doing so, the items were disposed of at some point: receipts among Harley’s papers note a bill dated 30 September 1644 for £1 1s due to Jane Bagley for cutting the pearls off the mitre as well as other work done on copes (probably those from Whitehall). A later receipt shows that the pearls from the St Paul’s mitre were sold to one Henry Cogan for £19 on 23 January 1645.97 It would 94

G. H. Cook, The English Cathedral through the Centuries (1957), 320–1; CJ, iii, 421, 570. HMC, Salisbury (Cecil) MSS, xxii (1971), 364; Ibid., Cowper MSS, 12th Report, appendix, pt 2 (1888), 291; BL Sloane MS 3317, fol. 27; CSPV, 1642–3, 182; A Perfect Diurnall of the Passages in Parliament, 24–31 October 1642, 3. 96 CLRO, Repertory 57, pt 1, fols 27r, 28r; CJ, iii, 341. For Garrett see V. Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1961), 299. 97 CLRO, Repertory 57, pt 2, fol. 50v, 4 February 1645; Mercurius Aulicus, 21–27 April, 1644, 953. CJ, iii, 468, 470; BL Add. MS 70005, bill for Jane Bagley, 30 September 1644; memorandum in Harley’s handwriting for receipt of £19 from Henry Cogan, 23 January 1645. 95

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certainly be in character if the delay in the disposal of these items was down to Harley’s desire to make sure that they were defaced before being sold. Building work was undertaken to make the chancel at the cathedral fit for the mayor and aldermen. Exactly what iconoclastic action this involved remains unknown. One of the men who carried out the work was carpenter Peter Petley, who, on 4 February 1645, petitioned the court of aldermen for the payment of £24 for outstanding labour costs. Petley had already appeared among Harley’s team of workmen, being responsible for the removal of the high altar in the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey in May 1644.98 In 1644 the Harley Committee was brought in to deal with the chapels in the royal palaces. When a committee was appointed to oversee the sale of furnishings and other items from the palace of Whitehall, on 5 February, the matter of the chapel was referred to the ‘committee for superstitious pictures’ under Harley, who was to Take into . . . custody the Copes, Surplices, & other Chapelstuff . . . and to report what they are: and they are likewise to view all the Plate in Sir Henry Mildmay’s Custody; and to search and view other things in Whitehall as they shall think fit.99

By 9 March 1644 it was being proposed that the Harley Committee should set to work on the demolition of ‘superstitious Pictures and Monuments’ both in Whitehall and ‘all other Places of the King’s Houses and chapels’. This was to include disposing of copes, surplices, and ‘other superstitious utensils’. By 22 April, Harley had charged MP Cornelius Holland (not a member of the original committee) with the reformation of the chapels at St James’s Palace, which appear to have escaped the earlier order of November 1642 which had called for them to be dealt with along with the queen’s chapel at Somerset House. Harley must have viewed the chapels himself as he drew up very specific orders. These called for the removal of communion rails and the levelling of steps to the altar in the new chapel – the Roman Catholic chapel built in 1623 at the time of the proposed marriage between Charles and the Spanish Infanta. In the ‘lesser chapel’, the removal of rails, the taking away and defacing of hangings depicting the Virgin Mary and the whitewashing over of wall paintings of the Virgin and saints was ordered. Wooden sculptures of ‘hands and feet’ on both sides of the chapel were to be demolished along with a ‘heart within a wreath’, possibly representations of the sacred wounds.100 98

CLRO, Repertory 57, pt 1, fols. 55r–55v (15 February 1644); pt 2, fol. 50v. CJ, iii, 389. The plate was that ‘belonging to his Majesty’, presumably confiscated from Whitehall. 100 CJ, ii, 847 (10 November, 1642). The reformation of the chapels at St James, and Harley’s orders, are recorded in Mercurius Aulicus, 21–27 April 1644, 952–3, and in Mercurius Britanicus, 6–13 May 1644, 272–3. On the building of the new chapel see The History of the King’s Works, ed. H. M. Colvin (6 vols, 1963–82), iii, 248. For an example of a depiction of the sacred wounds (from the parish church of North Cadbury, Somerset), see M. D. Anderson, Imagery of British Churches (1955), 61 and plate 12. 99

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The reformation of other royal palaces including Whitehall was not actually carried out until after the passage of the new ordinance on 9 May 1644, which, as noted, seems to have been at least in part created to give a sense of legal validity to the actions of parliament in this matter. The day before the passage of this ordinance the Harley Committee had been officially ‘revived’, and on 21 May they were ordered to repair to Whitehall to put the new ordinance into execution and to take into custody copes, surplices and ‘superstitious vestments’. These were carried up to Westminster from Whitehall within the next few days and subsequently defaced, although there is no record of when they were actually sold.101 The reformation of the chapel itself followed quickly afterwards. By 23 May the committee was billed for the reglazing of the east window, with the installation of some 241 feet of white glass at a cost of £7. Other work, payments for which were made between May and July 1644, included removing ‘the pictures at the conduit leading to the new palace . . . taking down the cross . . . and . . . colouring the boards where the carpenter had planed of the pictures’. The chapel cross was replaced with ‘a lion with a shield having his Majesty’s arms cut in it’. Other pictures were defaced and the chapel walls replastered. On 6 July, £4 10s was paid for the delivery of a communion table ‘similar to the one at the Abbey’, and on 7 September Thomas Gassaway received £1 14s for taking down the organ.102 The work at Whitehall Palace was reported in Mercurius Aulicus, where Harley was depicted as being personally involved in the destruction. He allegedly climbed onto a ladder to put out windows and smashed to pieces the old communion table and rails. He was then said to have visited the king’s gallery where ‘he reformed . . . all such pictures as displeased his eye under pretence that they did favour too much of superstitious vanities’. These included pictures of ‘Kings and Queens as well as apostles, fathers, martyrs [and] confessors’. How far Harley was actually personally involved in the reformation of the chapel is not known, and Aulicus is clearly too biased a source to take at face value. It is hard to believe that he destroyed pictures of kings and queens – parliament strove hard not to be seen as antimonarchical and Harley was no republican. It is notable that the cross removed from the chapel was replaced by the royal arms. However, given his known objection to religious paintings even outside of places of worship it is not inconceivable that Harley visited and reformed the gallery at

101 CJ, iii, 422, 485, 486, 503; BL, Add. MS 70005, bill from Robert Reynolds for carrying copes from Whitehall to Westminster, 25 May 1644. The Whitehall copes were probably among those altered by Jane Bagley (see her bill of 30 September 1644). 102 BL, Add. MS 70005, receipt of John Rutland, 23 May 1644; receipts of Thomas Stevens for work at Westminster Abbey and Whitehall, May 1644, 15 June and 19 July 1644; receipt of Adam Browne for delivery of a communion table, 6 July 1644; receipt of Thomas Gassaway, 7 September 1644.

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Whitehall, and the original order for the reform, of 9 March, had given him jurisdiction over ‘all other Places of the King’s Houses & Chapels’.103 Having reformed Whitehall, Harley’s team of workers appear to have moved on to Greenwich, where by the end of November 1644 the chapel had been stripped of its organ and case and reglazed with 140 feet of plain glass. Similar work was carried out at Hampton Court, although not until over a year later. On 16 December 1645 John Rutland was paid £9 16s for ‘pulling downe & glasseing upp w[i]th new glasse’ the east window of the chapel. By the end of January 1646 the chapel’s organ along with the organ case had been pulled down. The delay at Hampton Court may have been due to its distance from London, and the fact that the committee was busily involved in the reformation of the Abbey and St Margaret’s. On the other hand the iconoclastic reformation may have lost some of its impetus – on 19 August 1645, as mentioned, the committee had to be issued with a reminder to ‘ensure the execution of ordinances’.104 The evidence for the activities of the Harley Committee tails off by the beginning of 1646, with the last receipt for the payment of workmen dated 25 January (for work at Hampton Court). The committee meeting mentioned in the vestry minutes of the City church of St Michael Cornhill took place on 20 October 1645, although it was not recorded by the vestry until February 1646 suggesting that the committee was still active at that date. However, there is no further mention of the committee in the parliamentary journals and it does not seem to have been involved in later reforming activities, as, for instance, those at Oxford. It is possible that, with the end of the first civil war, the issue of iconoclastic reform lost its sense of urgency – the search for a political settlement and the ensuing intra-parliamentary power struggle was preoccupying the minds and activities of most MPs at this point. Certainly, if the committee relied, as seems likely, on the driving force of Harley for its continued zeal, then it is not surprising that it disappears without trace. Harley was extremely busy on other matters after 1645: he was chair of the Committee for Elections which organized the ‘recruiter elections’ and was also drawn into alliance with the political Presbyterians in parliament, headed by Denzil Holles. He was eventually to be expelled from parliament during Pride’s Purge in December 1648.105 There can be no doubt of Harley’s personal importance in the parliamentary campaign against ‘monuments of idolatry’. Mercurius Britanicus, countering royalist criticism, described him as sitting in the chair of reformation.

103

Mercurius Aulicus, 16–22 June 1644, 1040; CJ, iii, 422. BL, Add. MS 70005, receipt of Thomas Gassaway, 26 November 1644; receipts of John Rutland, 30 November 1644 and 16 December 1645; receipt of Thomas Pullyen, 14 February 1645; receipt of Thomas Gassaway, 25 January 1646; CJ, iv, 246, 350. 105 Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 180–1.

104

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This was a difficult but necessary role: ‘there is no cushion in it, it is no chaire of ease, nore a chaire of state, as the Bishops and Prelates sate in’. When Harley knocked down painted windows at Whitehall he replaced them with good ‘Protestant glass’ and when he broke the altar there into pieces he did well ‘for it hath broken the Kingdom into too many pieces’.106 To John Vicars, an ardent advocate of iconoclastic reform, Harley was the ‘most worthy and most deservedly ever to be honoured religious and zealous Nehemiah of our dayes’. Vicars reported approvingly how Harley’s personal intervention had led to the destruction of a crucifix which had stood for some hundred or more years painted upon boards at the upper end of the great hall at Christ’s Hospital. This ‘blasphemous’ crucifix, still resplendent in ‘marvelous fair and fresh oyl colours’, had not been defaced but merely hidden behind another large framed picture. According to Vicars, ‘no one had durst . . . deface it, King Charles himself having . . . commanded the contrary’. No one, that is, until Harley. Visiting the hospital on 17 July 1644, he had the painting pulled down ‘and broken . . . into 1000 pieces’.107 The work of Harley as the head of the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry was at least as important in driving forward official iconoclasm as the three main pieces of legislation passed in parliament. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the committee’s work helped to set a more radical agenda – probably inspiring the 1643 and 1644 ordinances. How far this legislation was generally enforced and its impact on the country as a whole is explored in the following chapter. What is certain is that, whatever the actual impact, parliament’s aim was clear: an increasingly thorough campaign against images and other objects associated with an unreformed or only partially reformed church, as defined by Puritan values.

106 107

Mercurius Britanicus, 1–8 July 1644, 334. Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 3, 290.

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4 The Enforcement of Iconoclastic Legislation in the Localities

This chapter looks at the ways in which parliamentary legislation against images was enforced – the forms and organization taken by such enforcement, both official and semi-official. The main problem, in posing the questions ‘how’ and ‘how far’ was the legislation enforced, is the scarcity of evidence. Parish records, the main source for evidence of iconoclasm, are notoriously thin on the ground for the years of the civil war, and those which do survive were often poorly kept, giving little detailed information. It has not been possible to look at all the extant churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for the period, and although a comprehensive survey would no doubt turn up more interesting examples of iconoclasm, it is likely that this would not necessarily bring us nearer to a full picture, but simply increase the collection of fragments from which probabilities could be extrapolated. More manageable sample areas have been chosen for this study: the five counties of Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, and eight cathedral towns: Canterbury, Exeter, Gloucester, Norwich, Peterborough, Winchester, Worcester and York.1 Use is also made here of the work of Trevor Cooper and others in the recent edition of the journal of iconoclast William Dowsing, which reproduces not only the entire journal but the surviving churchwardens’ accounts for Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Lincoln, Norfolk, and Suffolk. A further twenty-one sets of printed churchwardens’ accounts from various parts of the country have also been consulted, as have other printed sources such as borough and quarter sessions records.2 John Morrill, who has looked extensively at parish records of this period, has drawn the conclusion that whereas the Commons’ order for the removal

1

These areas were chosen on the basis of record survival and/or because there were other indications of iconoclastic activity there. I have relied on the invaluable lists of churchwardens’ accounts given in the appendix to R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994). Iconoclasm in the cathedrals themselves is discussed in ch. 5, below. 2 The Journal of William Dowsing. See bibliography for the printed sources used.

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of altars and other Laudian innovations in 1641 was obeyed fairly promptly, later legislation against images was largely neglected.3 This may well be the case, especially in country parishes or towns where no enforcement initiatives were undertaken, and the further one moves away from parliamentary strongholds the more likely such negligence might be expected to occur. The evidence for the areas considered here would tend slightly to confirm Morrill’s opinion, although it is so patchy for both periods that no absolute conclusions can be drawn. The poverty of sources means that lack of evidence cannot be taken necessarily to mean lack of iconoclasm. Still, if one accepts as a thesis that there was a greater and more spontaneous response to early moves against innovations than to the more radical iconoclastic legislation of 1643 and 1644, it is very interesting to notice that those instances in which local agencies attempted to enforce the legislation were mainly for the later period. Perhaps that fact in itself reflects the relative disregard of the later ordinances – hence the need for enforcement from above – and it may also be indicative of the widening gulf between mainstream anti-Laudian feeling and the increasingly purist agenda of the godly. There is some indication of a fairly prompt response to the Commons’ order of 1641 in the parishes looked at here. Communion rails appear to be the most common indicator. At South Warnborough, Hampshire, the communion rails were taken up before the order in 1640–1, as seems to have happened elsewhere. The early unofficial removal of rails may account for the fact that so many parishes do not mention them at all.4 Other parishes removed their rails in response to the 1641 order: in Exeter two out of the three surviving churchwardens’ accounts show communion rails being removed in 1641–2, as do two out of the five extant accounts for York, and two of the nine accounts for Oxford (although none of the seventeen accounts which survive for the rest of that county).5 In godly Norwich, of the eight parishes with surviving accounts, two show signs of an early compliance with the Commons’ order, rails being recorded as removed from St Benedict’s in 1641–2 and St Stephen’s in 1642–3, where the chancel was also levelled.6 3

Morrill, ‘The Church in England’, 95. Morrill has examined parish records for Bristol, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Norfolk, Shropshire, Suffolk, Wiltshire and Worcestershire. 4 HRO, 70M76/PW1, South Warnborough churchwardens’ accounts, 1640–1 (unfoliated). For rails removed before the Commons’ order, see ch. 5 below, and see, for example, The Diary of John Rous, 99. 5 DRO, MS 4780A add 99/PW4, St Kerrian, Exeter, churchwardens’ accounts, 1641–2; MS 2946A add 99/PW1, St Petrock’s, Exeter, churchwarden’s accounts, 1641–2; Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York, PR/Y/MG/19, St Martin-cum-Gregory churchwardens’ accounts, 1641–2, fol. 237; PR/Y/MS/5, St Michael Spurriergate, 1641–2; ORO, PAR 213/4/F1/3, St Peter in the East, Oxford, churchwardens’ accounts, 1641–2; PAR/211/4/F1/3, St Michael’s, Oxford, churchwardens’ accounts, 1641–2. Of the seventeen sets of accounts for Oxfordshire very few had detailed accounts. 6 NRO, PD 191/23, St Benedict’s churchwardens’ accounts, 1641–2, fol. 50; ‘Account Books of St Stephen’s Parish, Norwich’, East Anglian Notes and Queries, new ser., 8 (1899–1901), 378.

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There is further evidence for the removal of communion rails, in 1641–2, at Aylsham, Norfolk; Peasenhall, Suffolk; St Mary the Great, Cambridge; St Lawrence, Reading; and the following year in Great Houghton and Marston Trussel, Northamptonshire.7 At St Kerrian’s, Exeter, the payment for the removal of rails was lumped together with that for glazing work (a total of 10s 4d), which suggests that this may also have been a response to the Commons’ order. At Peasenhall, the organ was also removed at this early date, and in 1642, at Stonham Aspal, Suffolk, images were taken down. The Norwich records for 1642–3 show images removed from the font at St Peter Mancroft and glazing work at St Gregory’s which may represent partial reformation of the windows there.8 The church officials at All Saints, Derby, were quick to respond to the September 1641 order. On 24 November it was ordered that the chancel should be levelled and seats placed there as they had been previously, although a payment made in 1643 for work on the steps indicates that the order was not necessarily acted upon immediately. This was clearly, however, a Puritan parish. Sometime before October 1641 Henry Fisher, a member of the congregation, removed the two surplices belonging to the church, despite the fact that these were not yet included in parliamentary legislation. The vestry ordered that he was liable to pay for a single replacement, but only because the minister was ‘enjoyned’ to wear one. If the parish was not compelled to buy one before Easter then the money could be given instead for binding a poor person as an apprentice. Obviously the parish was covering itself but was hardly desperate to have the surplice replaced.9 Elsewhere ‘superstitious’ stained glass windows were removed. In 1641, at Ashwell, Hertfordshire, 4s was paid for ‘takinge out of glass and puttinge in new in the room of it’, which is highly suggestive of reform, although typically obscure. At Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, windows were taken down ‘by command’ in both 1641–2 and 1642–3. The accounts are more specific at Weybread, Suffolk, recording the ‘takeinge downe [of] scandalous pictures in the church windowes’ (1641–2). Ralph Josselin, incumbent of Earls Colne in Essex, recorded how ‘this Michaelmas [1641] upon an order of the House of Commons to that purpose wee took down all [images] and pictures and such like glasses’.10

7 Journal of William Dowsing, 363, 376, 353; BRO, D/P 97/5/3, St Lawrence, Reading, churchwardens’ accounts, 1641–2; Northamptonshire Record Office, 175P/28, Great Houghton churchwardens’ accounts, expenses for 1642; 206P/64, Marston Trussel churchwardens’ accounts, 1642–3. 8 DRO, MS 4780A add 99/PW4, St Kerrian’s, Exeter, churchwardens’ accounts, 1641–2; Journal of William Dowsing, 376, 377; NRO, PD 26/71 (S), St Peter Mancroft churchwardens’ accounts, 1642–3, fol. 26; PD 59/54, St Gregory’s churchwardens’ accounts, 1642–3, fol. 95v (see 111 below). 9 J. C. Cox and W. H. St John Hope, The Chronicles of the Collegiate Church or Free Chapel of All Saints, Derby (1881), 190, 59, 179. 10 Journal of William Dowsing, 358, 380; The Diary of Ralph Josselin, ed. A. MacFarlane (1976), entry for 1641, cited in Journal of William Dowsing, 355.

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By contrast, responses to the 1643 and 1644 ordinances are harder to come by in parish accounts.11 There are late instances of communion rails being removed at Chawton, Hampshire, and Charing, Kent (both 1643–4), and a very late levelling of chancel steps, at Newbury, Berkshire, in 1656–7. At New Windsor, in the same county, 8d was spent on mending chancel steps in 1651–2, suggesting that legislation requiring their removal had been ignored.12 Parishes record the sale of prohibited objects which may have been removed at an earlier date: communion rails at Upham, Hampshire (between 1648 and 1650), organ pipes at Alton in the same county (1646–7) and at Wrington, Somerset (1653–4), surplices at Newbury (1645–6), and the communion and pulpit cloths at Childrey, Berkshire (1646–7).13 At St Lawrence, Reading, old brass was sold in 1648–9, which may have been that removed by soldiers at an earlier date. Another incident which may have been down to soldiers is recorded at Biddenden, Kent, where 2s 6d was paid, in 1646–7, ‘for laying up the Tombe att the North side of the church which was throwen down and defaced’.14 In some places action may have been taken to avoid soldiers’ iconoclasm as, for instance, at the parish church in Newark, Nottinghamshire, where the organ was removed on 4 May 1646 shortly before the town surrendered to parliament, and the pulpit carried from the church to the castle suggesting that it may have been in some way ‘offensive’ (an ordinary pulpit without ornament or image would not have been a target of parliamentary soldiers). Interestingly, it has been suggested that the organ was restored before the end of the 1640s: an organist and song-school master was appointed by the mayor and aldermen in April 1649. It is possible, however, that the organ was being put to secular use, or that the post was a nominal one.15 It is notable that churchwardens’ accounts for this period often show unusual amounts of money spent on glazing, but rarely are specific reasons for this activity recorded. At St Michael, Gloucester, for instance, the large amount of £10 9s was spent on glazing in 1643–4. Sometimes there are 11

The parishes of the Eastern Association counties are not included here as it is impossible to distinguish iconoclasm willingly undertaken by the parish from that imposed by Dowsing within the same period. 12 HRO, 1M70/PW1, Chawton churchwardens’ accounts, 1643–4; CKS, P78/5/1, Charing churchwardens’ accounts, 1643–5; BRO, microfiche 97112/A, St Nicholas, Newbury, churchwardens’ accounts, 1656–7; DP 149/5/1, New Windsor churchwardens’ accounts, 1651–2. 13 HRO, 74M78/PW1, Upham churchwardens’ accounts, receipts between 1648 and 1650 (no date, unfoliated); 29M84/PW1, Alton churchwardens’ accounts, 1646–7, fol. 23; H. M. Scarth, Extracts from the Ancient Register and Churchwardens’ Accounts of Wrington Parish (Bath, 1873), 17; BRO, microfiche 97112/A, St Nicholas, Newbury, churchwardens’ accounts, inventory at end of 1645–6; D/P 35/5/1, Childrey churchwardens’ accounts, 1646–7, fol. 83 (pulpit and communion table cloth crossed out of inventory). 14 Ibid., D/P 97/5/3, St Lawrence, Reading, churchwardens’ accounts, 1648–9; CKS, P26/5/1, Biddenden churchwardens’ accounts, 1646–7. 15 Newark Churchwardens’ Accounts. Extracted from the Account Book of the Churchwardens of Newark, 1626–1756, ed. R. F. B. Hodgkinson (Newark, 1922), 17–18.

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stronger hints of iconoclastic reform: at St Peter Chesil, Winchester, major work was undertaken on the windows in 1643. One of the entries reads ‘paid for takeing down the window w[hi]ch Mr Alcocke gave to the parish’. It is hard to think of any other reason for such a removal except that it contained images now felt to be unacceptable.16 At All Saints, Derby, over £16 16s was spent on glazing in 1646. Cox and St John Hope have commented that ‘we have little or no doubt that the very extensive glazing of all the windows of this church that took place about this time . . . was rendered necessary by the destruction of stained glass by the iconoclasts under the plea of being superstitious’. Such conclusions are tempting and are likely to be correct on occasion, but they remain supposition and it is wise to be cautious. Another possible cause of damage to church windows at this time was military action – soldiers were often stationed in churches and the buildings could be targeted during sieges. There are a number of instances in churchwardens’ accounts where windows were damaged by storms, not to mention the ever-present possibility of straight-forward vandalism or accidental destruction.17 In 1646–7, at Alton, Hampshire, for example, ‘litell Richard Searll’ was fined 2s for breaking a window in the church – the case of a short iconoclast, or a boy playing football in the churchyard?18 There are a few instances of definite iconoclastic activity recorded in the church records for the mid 1640s. In 1644–5 at St Lawrence, Reading, a mason was paid for removing a stone cross from the west end of the church, and at Brookland, Kent, a crucifix was taken down and pictures in the windows altered. At Lowick in Northamptonshire, around July 1644, a roodloft was removed and ‘Crucifixes & scandalous picturs’ taken from the windows. The wood from the roodloft was then sold along with rails possibly from the communion table. Later, in August 1646, workmen were recorded as ‘levelling and takeing away ye altar’.19 The most interesting case is that of Chatham St Mary, in Kent, where local feeling seems to have prompted iconoclastic action two months before parliament’s August 1643 ordinance. Entries in the vestry minute book

16

GRO, P154/14/2/2, St Michael’s, Gloucester, churchwardens’ accounts, 1643–4; HRO, 3M82W/PW2, St Peter Chesil, Winchester, churchwarden’s accounts, 1643. 17 Cox and St John Hope, The Chronicles of All Saints, Derby, 60. For just one example of military damage see Hodgkinson, Extracts from the Account Book of the Churchwardens of Newark, 28. On the damage suffered by churches (and other buildings) generally see Porter, Destruction in the English Civil Wars. 18 HRO, 29M84/PW1, Alton churchwardens’ accounts, 1646–7, fol. 23. Yet the church windows at Alton were clearly undergoing some kind of large-scale repair work at the time: in 1645–6, fifty-one and a half feet of glass were replaced at a cost of £1 10s, with 9s paid for a further fifteen feet later that year, and £2 4s for work in new and old glass the following year (fols 22, 23). 19 BRO, D/P 97/5/3, St Lawrence, Reading, churchwardens’ accounts, 1644–5; CKS, P49/4/1, Brookland churchwardens’ accounts, 1644–5; Northamptonshire Record Office, 199P/77/1–33 and 199P/78/1–16, Lowick churchwardens’ accounts (loose sheets), accounts for 1644, receipts for 1644 and 1645, and accounts for 1646. For the survival of roodlofts see 79 above.

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record how between 3 and 5 June 1643 the communion table was moved from the chancel into the body of the church, images in the porch ‘tending to superstition’ were broken down and inscriptions and other paintwork were whitewashed and plastered over. This last action was taken in response to the objections of some parishioners at ‘ye manner of the sentences upon ye pillars, and . . . ye severall anticke painted worke about them’, and the vestry had sought the consent of ‘some knowing men in the parish’, before white-washing over them. Other ‘sentences’ sited in the chancel and ‘having reference to ye sacram[en]t of ye lords supp[er]’ were also covered over. The reformation, however, was not quite complete according to one ‘ancient parishioner’ who wrote to the churchwardens on 12 June complaining about ‘popish reliqs remaining in ye church’. These consisted of ‘seates in ye chancell, formerly used for ye fryars’, which the letter-writer alleged that a former godly minister of the parish, John Pyham (incumbent from 1627), had also found ‘very offensive’. They were duly demolished. The churchwardens’ accounts for the same year show that this work, along with the demolishing of other images around the church, necessitated large scale repairs. It was also recorded as being done ‘by order of parliament’, suggesting that those who had pushed for the reform of the church had cited the order of 1641.20 The last parliamentary ordinance of May 1644 required parish churches to deface and take out of use ‘holy water fonts’. It seems likely that this was not a demand for the removal of baptismal fonts, although it may well have been used by zealots to justify such action. There is little material in the churchwardens’ records concerning fonts and none which suggests that they were taken down this early (at least outside of London and the Eastern Association counties). The Directory of Public Worship issued the following year actively discouraged the use of traditional baptismal fonts, and some parishes (again particularly in London) replaced them with basons set on iron frames.21 In the godly town of Leicester, St Martin’s church acquired a bason in 1645, in accordance with the Directory, and their old font was sold to George Smith for 7s. It was later to be restored, having been bought back in 1662 from Smith’s widow for the original price. At All Saints, Derby, a Directory was purchased in 1646, and the next year an alabaster bason on an iron frame was installed. St Mary’s, Leicester, was very late in getting rid of a holy water font, clearly an old stoup, which they sold for 8d in 1658–9, the same year that they also paid for cleaning the (baptismal) font.22 20

Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre, Strood, P85/8/1, Chatham St Mary’s vestry minutes, fol. 14, entries for 3, 4, 5 and 12 June 1643; P85/5/1, Chatham St Mary’s churchwardens’ accounts, 1643–4. 21 On fonts see 79–80 above and 169 below. 22 The Accounts of the Churchwardens St Martin’s Leicester, 1489–1844, ed. T. North (Leicester, 1884), 199, 203, 206; Cox and St John Hope, The Chronicles of All Saints, Derby, 184. The font at St Martin’s was not sold until 1651 even though the bason had been purchased as early as 1645. This highlights the fact that the late sale of objects such as rails, fonts, organ pipes etc., probably

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Other parishes responded so late that the implication is that they did not take action until forced to do so. At Newark, a bason was not purchased until February 1650. Four years earlier the original font had allegedly been destroyed by soldiers, although an entry in the accounts for 1653 shows repairs to ‘the font’, and in 1660 a font stone was brought into the church and subsequently restored indicating that at least part of the original had survived. At Elland in Yorkshire the font stone was taken up in 1651 at the same time as the king’s arms were (belatedly) defaced, once again suggesting some kind of enforcement. In other parishes (such as Masham in Yorkshire and Stanford in the Vale, Berkshire) fonts were set up after the Restoration, suggesting that the originals had been removed at some point. In 1663 it was reported that the font at Rous Lench, Worcestershire, had been ‘by some disorderly persons formerly demolished’. On this subject, as on responses to other parliamentary legislation, the evidence remains too thin to draw any firm conclusions.23 The difficulty of gaining a broad, and accurate, picture of how far parishes responded to iconoclastic legislation has been demonstrated. What is perhaps a more interesting, and more fruitful, endeavour is to look at those cases where attempts were made, by godly groups or individuals, to impose reform from above. The official and semi-official enforcement of legislation appears to have been channelled through various organizational forms. In some places small committees were set up by local city governors specifically for the task, being made up of aldermen and sometimes ministers (for example, at Norwich and Canterbury). County committees also became involved either through the setting up of similar committees (as in the case of post-royalist York) or through the enthusiasm of individual members (such as William Springett in Kent). Another way in which both city authorities and county committees, as well as the military, could pursue an iconoclastic agenda was through the search of the private houses of ‘papists’ and ‘malignants’, and this, too, is examined. Unofficial army iconoclasm – largely carried out in a spontaneous and unorganized fashion by ordinary soldiers – was an important phenomenon and one that paralleled official action. However, the army also played a more formal role in enforcing iconoclastic legislation. The most obvious example of this was William Dowsing who was working under the auspices

reflects their removal at a much earlier date even where no evidence survives to confirm this. The Vestry Book and Accounts of the Churchwardens of St Mary’s Leicester, 1652–1729, ed. J. R. Abney (Leicester, 1912). 23 Newark Churchwardens’ Accounts, 14; The Parish Registers of Elland County Yorkshire, 1640–70, and Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1648–70, ed. H. Ormerod (Oxford, 1918); ‘Extracts from the Churchwardens’ accounts’, in J. Fisher, The History and Antiquities of Masham and Mashamshire (1865), 585; BRO, D/P 118/5/1, Stanford in the Vale churchwardens’ accounts, 1662; Churchwardens’ Presentments in the Diocese of Worcester c.1660–1760, ed. J. S. Leatherbarrow (Worcester Historical Society Occasional Publications, 1, Halesowen, 1977), 7.

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of the Eastern Association Army with a specific commission backed by the personal authority of the earl of Manchester. This large-scale operation was apparently unique in its organization and extent. In a sense, it can be seen as a formal, organized version of the army iconoclasm which occurred elsewhere in a more scattered and undirected way. It can also, in the absence of any surviving evidence to the contrary, be said to have been the largest operation of this kind. As such it will be examined in some detail and the impact of the resultant iconoclasm compared to that elsewhere. All of the reforming initiatives dealt with here originated with local persons or institutions. There does not at any point seem to have been a serious attempt at centralized control, even in parliamentary strongholds. The exception to this was, of course, the capital itself which was the responsibility of the Harley Committee. In September 1641 parliament had required that certificates be returned confirming the performance, or reporting the neglect, of their order against innovations but no time was set aside to receive such certificates and no similar response was required for the later ordinances.24 Technically, for ordinary parish churches the responsibility for carrying out parliamentary legislation, from 1641 through to 1644, was in the hands of local clergy and churchwardens. In cases of neglect it was then down to Justices of the Peace to take information and enforce compliance. In the September 1641 order this role was also to be performed by mayors or ‘other head officers’. An example of a mayor sending a certificate confirming compliance with the order survives for the city of Chester. On 26 March 1642, mayor Thomas Cowper wrote to the members of parliament for Chester, Thomas Smith and Francis Gamul, to certifie you that the declaracon of the Com[m]ons in Parliament made the 9th of September 1641 for the taking and removeing of scandalous pictures out of all churches hath (for ought I have heard) bin punctually observed within this Citty.

The only exception to this was the cathedral where a number of scandalous windows remained. The mayor had unsuccessfully tried to get the subdean to remove these, and was now referring the matter to parliament.25 The August 1643 ordinance was unique in that it conferred a fine on those who failed to carry out the legislation. The fine came into effect after 1 November 1643 and consisted of 40s to be paid for every twenty days during which the work remained undone (the proceeds to go to the use of the poor of the parish concerned). Parishes still in default by 1 December were to be forced to act by the local justice. By 1644 responsibility for

24 25

Coates, 73. Cheshire Record Office, DCC 14/68. This is discussed in ch. 6 below.

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overseeing the legislation was extended to include deputy lieutenants as well as justices.26 Whether Justices of the Peace actually did carry out their responsibility to enforce the ordinances was probably down to their personal temperament and beliefs. A good deal of the work of justices remained at a local level and went unrecorded, so it is not impossible that some godly JPs were taking their iconoclastic duties seriously. Unless disputes in the parishes became very prolonged or heated it is unlikely that they would make their way into court records. Two example of cases which turned up in the quarter sessions records both date, rather surprisingly, from the 1650s. In 1654 the minister of Newtown in Hampshire was prosecuted by one of his churchwardens for placing the communion table altar-wise. This must have involved more than the simple repositioning of the table as the parish had to raise a rate to pay the cost of restoring the table to its accustomed place.27 In the Warwick session of Easter 1657 churchwarden Thomas Waldron brought a claim for compensation from the parish of Alcester for a sum of £8 paid out ‘in beautifying and painting’ the church. Whether the restoration work was of recent date, or whether this was an old, drawn-out dispute, is not clear. The court noted that ‘exception is taken to the work done and the uselessness thereof’, and in consequence £1 of the money due to Waldron was to be held back. Furthermore, the local justice Major Bridges was to view the ‘Rood loft and all superstitious paints’ which were then to be ‘demolished and defaced’.28 Another possible example of a local justice taking responsibility for church decoration might be that of Houghton le Spring, in County Durham, again at a late date. Thomas Delaval was a local JP, who had taken a lead in parochial affairs, after the collapse of episcopacy in particular. He regularly signed entries in the churchwardens’ book, and in March 1658 had three parliamentary ordinances copied into the back of the volume under the heading ‘Touching the Office of Churchwardens’. These were the ordinance of February 1648 requiring the good repair and maintenance of churches, and the August 1643 and the May 1644 ordinances against monuments of superstition and idolatry. At a vestry meeting of 30 March, it was agreed that the church should be repaired and a rate was set – it may be that 26

No instances of fines being levied or paid have been found during the course of this research. However, William Dowsing is known to have imposed fines (see, for example, J. Blatchly, ‘Dowsing’s Deputies in Suffolk’, in The Journal of William Dowsing, 82, and plate 58). 27 J. S. Furley, Quarter Session Government in Hampshire in the Seventeenth Century (Winchester, 1937). Unfortunately the accounts for the parish of Newtown do not survive. 28 Sessions Order Books, ed. S. C. Ratcliff and H. C. Johnson (5 vols, Warwick County Records, 1935–9), iv, 6. The parish accounts for Alcester do not survive so it is impossible to find out exactly what was going on there. I have looked at printed quarter sessions material for the following areas: Chester, Devon, Derbyshire, Essex, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, North Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Portsmouth, Somerset, Surrey, Sussex, Warwickshire, Wiltshire and Worcestershire, plus constables’ presentments for Banbury (see bibliography).

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the ordinances were being set down as a reminder and as guidance for the forthcoming restoration.29 The main responsibility for carrying out iconoclastic directives, however, appears to have remained largely with churchwardens – either acting on their own or under pressure from the incumbent or influential locals. The evidence of London parishes, discussed in the following chapter, shows that there were often disputes between individuals over the carrying out of the legislation, and this is likely to have been the case elsewhere. Such personal authority at this level was unprecedented and meant that the enthusiastic could use local office to act upon their consciences. It must have been hard for the zealous to relinquish this power after the Restoration: William Abbott, churchwarden of Allhallows Colchester, for instance, stalwartly refused to hand over a communion cloth, ‘asserting that hee will suffer noe Idolls in the . . . church’. Furthermore, he refused to accept the positioning of the communion table at the east end of the chancel, until the rector Edmund Hickeringill had him presented as a nuisance at the bishop of London’s visitation of 1664.30 Those churchwardens who did act were working within the authority vested in them by parliament. Other institutions also seem to have made attempts to follow the procedure set out in the ordinances: some cathedral chapters made efforts at compliance, and the same is true of the university colleges. Although Dowsing took the initiative out of the hands of those at Cambridge, at Oxford after the war it appears that the heads of the colleges were the initial moving forces behind iconoclasm. It has been seen that mayors and ‘other head officers’ were given responsibility for enforcing the September 1641 order, and although this was not repeated with the later ordinances, some corporations do seem to have taken the role upon themselves. The mayor and aldermen of the City of London worked closely with the Harley Committee in reforming London, and in Canterbury, Norwich, and Gloucester the local authorities intervened in the running of the cathedrals even before the abolition of deans and chapters in 1649. At Norwich the intervention was specifically connected to the carrying out of iconoclastic legislation. It was on 24 January 1644 – five months after the passage of the first parliamentary ordinance against images – that the mayor’s court at Norwich set up its own committee for the removal of idolatrous monuments both in the cathedral and in the city parish churches. This move seems to have been independent of William Dowsing, whose commission from Manchester technically gave him jurisdiction over the area and required local officials to

29 Churchwardens’ Accounts of Pittington and other Parishes in the Diocese of Durham, 1580–1700, ed. Mr Barmby (Surtees Society, 84, 1888), 312–13, 321–2, 323, and see 305, n. 1. 30 GL, MS 9583/2, Diocesan visitation records: churchwardens’ presentments 1664, pt 3, fol. 130.

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aid him in his enforcement of the ordinance. The work of Dowsing, which began in Cambridge on 21 December 1643, may, however, have inspired the Norwich authorities to act. The Norwich committee consisted of thirteen men. These included the then Sheriff, Thomas Toft, Matthew Lindsey, a former sheriff who would become mayor in 1650, and John Greenwell, a future sheriff. Lindsey, along with Livewell Sherwood, another committee member, was among those who became aldermen after the parliamentary purge of the corporation in March 1643. He also acted as one of the earl of Manchester’s assistants in the examination of delinquent clergy. Sherwood (as ‘Major’ Sherwood) and another committeeman, Lieutenant Hammond Craske, were captains of the local volunteers and were later named as desecraters of the cathedral.31 This committee or any three or four of them were required to From time to time meet together & repayre to the several churches in this Citty & view the same & take notice of all such scandalous pictures cruceyfixes & images as are yet remayning in ye same churches & demolishe or cause the same to be demolished.32

Parish churches seem to have been searched and large-scale iconoclasm was undertaken at the cathedral. The result was the confiscation of popishe pictures . . . taken from S Swethins the fower Evangelists taken att S Peter & Moses & Aron & fower Evangelists that came from the cathedral & and some other sup[er]stitious pictures.

These items were ordered burnt in the market place on 10 March 1644.33 Looking at the impact of this committee on the town’s churches is not an easy task because so few of the churchwardens’ accounts have survived. Out of thirty-five parishes there are records for only eight and few of these are informative. One very interesting case is that of St Peter Mancroft where a good deal of medieval religious glass has survived in the great east window. The forty-two panels of the window contain stories of the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary, St John the Evangelist and others, all in extremely good condition, although not all in their original positions.34 The survival of this glass has led to the argument that the iconoclasm of the 1640s was not embraced absolutely, even in godly Norwich.35 However, the evidence of the 31 R. W. Ketton Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War (1969), 174; J. T. Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich: Politics, Religion and Government, 1620–90 (Oxford, 1979), ch. 4; CJ, ii, 868–9; NRO, DCN 177/3, ‘Captain Lalmons account of the difacing of ye Cathedral by ye Rebells’. 32 NRO, Mayor’s Court Book, MF628/2, fol. 411r. 33 Ibid., fol. 415r. 34 C. Woodforde, The Norwich School of Glass Painting in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1950), 16–42. Woodforde notes that glass from different windows had been collected and installed in the east window at some unknown date, possibly during restoration work in 1741. 35 Ketton Cremer, for instance, thinks it unlikely that the glass could have been removed and hidden in the largest church in Puritan Norfolk (Norfolk in the Civil War, 256).

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churchwardens’ accounts, when looked at closely, strongly suggests that it must have been removed and possibly hidden away. Furthermore, the fact of such removal might actually have saved the glass from destruction, when the church was badly hit by an explosion of gunpowder in 1648. In 1642–3 there seems to have been an attempt to respond to the Commons’ order at St Peter’s, with 1s paid ‘for takeing downe images at the font’. The following year – the year of the first ordinance – a good deal of glazing work was carried out. The churchwardens spent £1 15s 4d for ‘a case of glasse to mend the window’, and paid glazier’s bills of £3 18s (dated 14 December 1643) and £1 13s 6d. At the same time 6s was received from the plumber for lead ‘taken out of the old glasse’.36 This clearly shows the removal of quite a substantial amount of glass. However, the much greater figures spent in the next year, 1644–5, suggest that the earlier work was a partial reform. One of the churchwardens in 1643–4 was John Utting, a royalist who as mayor in 1647 would provoke petitions and a riot, until finally removed by parliament. It is possible that under the direction of Utting only the minimum required reformation was undertaken.37 In 1644–5 the churchwardens’ accounts show a much greater sum, over £36, being paid to a different glazier, William Rutter, whilst an entry tucked away in the back of the volume confirms that this work was indeed connected to the enforcement of iconoclastic legislation. Dated 21 January 1645, this entry records the agreement for a special rate to be levied towards repaire of glasse windowes according To an ordynance of parl[iament]. Made for the demolishing of all sup[er]stitious pictures in glasse winders & other popish trash ther.38

This would certainly have involved the removal of the famous east window, which must have been hidden and later restored. In the early 1660s Rutter was again employed for glazing about the church – being paid £1 10s in 1660–1, and another £4 12s in 1663–4. Either of these payments could represent the restoration of some or all of the glass, although there is no conclusive evidence.39 This theory is given added credence by the fact that St Peter Mancroft suffered substantial damage in an explosion of 24 April 1648. Following a Puritan petition accusing Mayor Utting of being in league with ‘malignants’, a parliamentary messenger had been sent to escort Utting to London. A large mob of the mayor’s supporters assembled in the market place and a 36

NRO, PD 26/71 (S), St Peter Mancroft churchwardens’ accounts, fols 26, 277, 274. On Utting see Ketton Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War, 332–7. 38 NRO, PD26/71 (S), St Peter Mancroft churchwardens’ accounts, fols 318, 157 (from back of volume). This does not seem to have been noticed before. In the main body of the accounts there is a list of names noted for ‘arerrages [arrears] upon the Rate for glaseing made the 21 January 1644[5]’ (see fol. 320). 39 Ibid., MF/RO 339, St Peter Mancroft churchwardens’ accounts, 1660–1 and 1661–2.

37

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riot broke out, with violent fighting between the rioters and parliamentary troops, centred around the Committee House – a building which also served as the town’s arsenal. In the struggle caskets of gunpowder were broken open and the powder scattered, finally resulting in a huge explosion. Many lives were lost and major damage caused to the surrounding buildings – one of which was St Peter Mancroft.40 The following year’s accounts show large-scale restoration work at St Peter’s, including masonry and glazing. Of most relevance to our purpose was the work carried out on the east window. This consisted not only of glazing but of major work to the tracery which needed to be shored up at one point and at another was actually taken down, the window itself being boarded up. This large amount of work suggests serious damage and had the medieval glass of the present day east window still been in place it would surely not have survived so well.41 Other churches in the city show iconoclastic work being done in 1643–4, which may have been in direct response to the ordinance of August 1643 or may have been due to pressure from the committee of aldermen in early 1644. Small amounts of glazing work were undertaken in 1643–4 at St Benedict’s and at St Mary Coslany, where £2 10s 6d and £2 1s were spent respectively. Compared to money paid for the repair of windows in other years – for instance, at St Mary’s 9s in 1645–6 or 3s 6d in 1647–8 – these relatively high figures may indicate a response to the enforcement of iconoclastic legislation. At St Gregory’s a large amount of glazing work was undertaken in 1643–4 with the installation of nine panes of new glass, fortythree new quarrels of glass and new lead, plus the repair of twenty-one panes containing 189 feet of glass. The total cost was £6 3s 3d, which included a payment for ‘mending holes with the old painted glass’. The previous year, 101 feet of glass had been replaced, at a cost of £2 14s 5d, and it is possible that a partial reform was attempted, with a more thorough one being imposed by the committee the following year.42 A more certain case was that of St Laurence’s where, in 1643–4, the chancel was levelled, superstitious inscriptions were removed from the windows and crucifixes pulled down. The attitude of the minister here, Charles Davill, can be seen in information later given against him. Davill, who also held the incumbency of St Mary Coslany, was said to have preached a sermon on the fast day in January 1644 during which he ‘rayled on them that were the executioners of p[ar]liament ordinances in demolishing scandalous pictures’. This date ties in with the setting up of the committee of aldermen to view churches and enforce the ordinance, and

40 41 42

Ketton Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War, 336–7; Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich, 174–6. NRO, MF/RO 339, St Peter Mancroft churchwardens’ accounts, 1648–9 and 1649–50, fols 368–93. Ibid., PD 59/54, St Gregory’s churchwardens’ accounts, fols 95v, 97v.

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Davill’s outburst may have been inspired by reform imposed upon his church, or the threat of such an imposition.43 One other, rather late, piece of reform occurred at St Stephen’s church where, in 1656, churchwardens sold off a brass eagle (probably an eagle lecturn) which had been bought in 1615. Even at the time of its purchase the eagle had caused controversy – it was noted that ‘some of the worthiest men did not account it an ornament’ and refused to contribute to the cost.44 No doubt the eagle, possibly part of a lecturn, had been stored away at a much earlier date. On the whole it seems that the committee did make its presence felt, although the truly zealous were not easily satisfied. In June 1644 John Carter, minister at St Peter Mancroft, was urging the local authorities to do more: a sermon preached in the green-yard, outside of the cathedral, called upon the city leaders to do their reforming duty, which included using their power, to purge the Church of Idolatry, Popery, Superstition, and all false worship and gross errors, to advance the pure and sincere worship of God, and the power of godliness.45

The text of this sermon was printed in 1647, in response to the move towards a more moderate, less Puritan, leadership of the corporation. Around the beginning of April 1648 a petition signed by 150 godly inhabitants of the city was sent to Mayor Utting. This petition (recorded by Blomefield but now apparently lost) called for a ‘speedy and thorough reformation’, which they felt had been neglected. It complained of the preferment of ejected ministers and the continued use of old ceremonies and the prayer book. Furthermore, it requested greater enforcement of the parliamentary ordinance against superstition and idolatry, with the demand that remaining pictures in several churches be demolished. Specific mention was made of a crucifix on the gate of the cathedral near the west door, another on the free school and an image of Christ on the parish house of St George Tombland.46 This prompting of the authorities took place at a time when conservative forces had come to the fore. However, on the whole, as their earlier actions show, the aldermen of Norwich had taken their responsibility seriously and organized the enforcement of parliamentary legislation accordingly. In a way 43

Ibid., PD 191/23, St Benedict’s churchwardens’ accounts, 1643–44; COL 3/4 T13O/A, St Mary Coslany churchwardens’ accounts, 1643–4; PD 58/38 (S), St Laurence’s churchwardens’ accounts, fol. 66; BL, Add. MS 15903, fol. 75. 44 ‘Account Books of St Stephen’s Parish, Norwich’, vol. 8, 284, and vol. 9, 25. 45 J. Carter, ‘The Nail hit on the head: and driven into the City and Cathedral of Norwich’, in The Nail and the Wheel, Sermons in the Green-Yard at Norwich (1647). 46 The contents of the petition were recorded by Blomefield, An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, iii, 398. Evans has suggested that Blomefield had access to a mayoral court book now lost (Seventeenth Century Norwich, 174, n. 1, 178, n. 6).

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this might have been expected from a town with such a strong Puritan tradition. Another city where reformers exploited their positions of local power in office was Canterbury. Richard Culmer’s iconoclastic purge of Christ Church Cathedral, beginning on 13 December 1643, was authorized by the city authorities, with Culmer apparently acting as one of a committee of ministers created for that purpose. The warrant of the mayor and recorder, under which the work was carried out, was a response to the refusal of the dean and chapter to comply with parliamentary ordinances.47 In fact, some of the Puritan aldermen had been pushing for reformation of the cathedral from at least early 1643, but had been restrained by the opposition of the chapter, backed up by the then mayor Daniel Masterson and by the House of Lords.48 Once the balance of power in the corporation had shifted to favour supporters of reform, Culmer’s work could begin. From Culmer’s account his personal involvement appears to have been confined to the cathedral (for which see chapter six below) and there is no evidence in the corporation records, or in what few of the parish records survive, to suggest that his committee was also responsible for enforcing legislation in the parish churches. The important point is, however, that here was a willingness amongst city officials to undertake iconoclastic action. A further illustration of this is the case of an offensive picture confiscated, in May 1645, from the recusant Lady Margaret Wotton, widow of Lord Edward Wotton of Marley. Described as a ‘great Picture 3 yards high’ depicting ‘Christ upon ye Cros’, this was ordered to be burnt by Mayor John Pollen.49 The parliamentary legislation against images was designed to operate through the normal channels of local government. Technically, the only radical aspect of this set-up was that it took a religious matter out of the hands of the traditional church hierarchy and put it into local and secular ones. It was the ordinary officers of local authority who were named as responsible for the enforcement of the legislation – from churchwardens through to justices, with potential for the involvement of town corporations. These were not ordinary times, however, and the circumstances of war allowed the zealous to find other power bases from which to pursue reform. Although the ordinances did not officially give jurisdiction in this matter to

47

It is possible that the setting up of the committee was done under a direct order from parliament, but the mayor and aldermen were clearly instrumental (see ch. 6 below). 48 Richard Culmer, Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury (1644), 20; Richard Culmer Jnr., A Parish Looking Glasse for Persecutors of Ministers (1657), 5; LJ, v, 677, petition of the dean and chapter to the House of Lords, 28 March 1643. For the mayors of Canterbury see W. Urry, The Chief Citizens of Canterbury (Canterbury, 1978). 49 PRO, SP 28/217A, pt 1, fol. 150. The Wottons were an ancient Kentish family (see J. Simson, Eminent Men of Kent (1893), 132, and G. E. Cokoyane, The Complete Peerage, xii, ed. G. H. White, (1956), 865–7, and Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding, ed. M. A. E. Green (6 vols, 1889–92), iii, 2309–10).

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military authorities, in practice the military did often take responsibility for reformation. To a degree this military involvement was inevitable because of the overlap between old civic structures and the new local command structures which were created as part of the war effort and to control the counties. The parliamentary county committees were made up on the whole of men who had a history of involvement in local government – although the war tended to bring to the fore men of a more puritanical temperament. Often the same men could be found on the county committees (and various other local committees) and as holders of traditional office, for instance as aldermen or deputy lieutenants. There is occasional evidence that the county committees could concern themselves with the reformation of churches in their locale. The clearest case is that of York after the fall of the city as a royalist stronghold in July 1644. The committee for the city and county of York, set up in June 1645, involved itself in the reformation of the Minster and also in the parish churches of the city. On 30 March 1646, Mayor John Gelderd, Mr Herring (possibly Theodore Herring, one of the four ministers hired to preach in the cathedral) and Captain Taylor were appointed to view the windows in Walmgate ward, with churchwardens and one or two of the best parishioners and where there are any supersticious pictures in glasse therin they [shall] take order the same be taken downe and broken in peces.50

They were to do the same in Bootham, Micklegate and Muncke wards, and another alderman, Henry Thompson, and Thomas Taylor (one of the sheriffs and perhaps the same as Captain Taylor) were similarly appointed to view the fifteenth-century Thursday Market cross, along with two ministers, to see if anie pictures be fitt to be taken downe therin and take order that such as are superstitious be taken away, and they be alsoe desired to view the chappell in the Bether and see if anie superstitious images be herein and take order the same to be taken away.51

On 29 May, no doubt as a result of this viewing, the committee ordered ‘superstitious pictures sett in glasse in St Martins in Cunistreit [Coney Street]’ to be ‘taken away or defaced’ by churchwardens, along with ‘the guilded heads’. These were probably the ‘four kings of ye fermament’ which 50

YCA, York Committee Book E63, fol. 47v. A transcript of this volume has been published as ‘The Proceedings of the Commonwealth Committee for York’, ed. A. Raine in York Archaeological Society Rec. Ser., Miscellanea, iv (1953), 1–22. Some of those aldermen involved were to be ejected from office after the Restoration (see A List, or Catalogue of All the Mayors, & Bayliffs of York (1664)). For the committee’s reformation of the Minster see ch. 6. 51 YCA, York Committee Book E63, fol. 47v.

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are recorded as being gilded in the churchwardens’ accounts of 1556–7. The church’s font was also to be removed.52 On 17 August 1646 churchwardens ‘of every parish’ were required ‘to remove fonts and to pull downe all crucifixes and other scandalous pictures forthwith’. Perhaps this general order, issued nearly five months after the viewing of the churches began, illustrates a reluctance to comply. On 8 December a further order was made concerning St Dennis’s. The churchwardens, who were in the middle of making repairs to the windows, were instructed to sell ‘all organ pipes and other materials belonging to the organs’ to cover the costs. Unfortunately very few churchwardens’ accounts survive for the city for this period to ascertain the response elsewhere.53 At Salisbury there is some indication that the county committee involved itself in enforcing the removal of fonts throughout the city’s churches. In April 1647, the vestry of St Edmund’s recorded ‘an order fr[om] ye Committee . . . Concerning the taking down of ye ffontes in all the Parish churches in this Cittie & Close of Saru[m]’. They duly demolished their font and purchased a frame for a bason to be sited near the minister’s seat. The space where the old font had stood, near the west door, was utilized for portable seats for the congregation. The parish of St Thomas, Salisbury, also removed its font in 1647, probably in response to the same order although its receipt is not recorded here.54 It is notable that both at York and Salisbury the parliamentary ordinances are interpreted as requiring the removal of what are clearly baptismal fonts rather than holy water stoups, although this also reflects an attempt to enforcement the requirements of the Directory. There is no indication of other iconoclasm at St Edmund’s or St Thomas’s before or after this date, with the exception of the removal of the organ at the latter in 1644–5. St Edmund’s had famously lost its most ‘offensive’ stained glass window (containing pictures of God creating the world) at the hands of Henry Sherfield in 1632.55 Although there is less direct evidence of an intervention in the parish churches of Kent, the county committee there, based in Maidstone, does seem to have carried out some enforcement of iconoclastic legislation. On 31 October 1644 four members of the committee – Edward Boys, Thomas Blount, Ralph Weldon and William Kenwricke – signed an order

52

Ibid., fol. 58v. On the gilded heads, see Raine’s editorial note, ‘The Proceedings of the Commonwealth Committee for York’, 14. 53 YCA, York Committee Book E63, fols 68v; 76v. Only five of the city parish churches have surviving accounts, most in a very poor state (All Saints, North Street; St Martin-cum-Gregory; St Michael Ousegate; St Michael le Belfry; and St John’s). 54 Churchwardens’ Accounts of S. Edmund and S. Thomas Sarum, 1443–1702, ed. H. J .F. Swayne (Wiltshire Record Society, Salisbury, 1896), 217, 325, 323. At both churches the font was returned to its original place after the Restoration (see ibid., 238, 333). 55 For the Sherfield case see ch. 1.

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authorizing the reformation of the king’s chapel at Eltham Palace. It was required that the High alter of stone the organs the pictures of christ upon the crosse and all other scandalous popish & superstitious pictures and crosses in & about the chappell . . . be forthwith taken down and defaced & distroyed.56

The Kent committee were also involved with Rochester Cathedral, taking charge of its goods and plate sometime in 1644. Whether they also oversaw any iconoclasm there is not clear, although some members of the committee are known to have taken an active interest in such duties.57 The individual about whose iconoclastic activities most is known was William Springett who was both a committee member and one of the deputy lieutenants of the county. Springett is an interesting character, a radical religious Independent and stalwart parliamentarian who died at the age of twenty-three from an illness contracted shortly after the siege of Arundel Castle in January 1644. The information that we have about him comes from a short autobiography by his wife Mary Springett, later Mary Pennington (wife of Isaac Pennington Junior, and mother-in-law to William Penn).58 According to Mary, Springett expressed a great zeal against superstition, encouraging his soldiers and requiring of them to break down idolatrous pictures and crosses, and going into steeple houses [churches] [he] would take the surplices and distribute them to big bellied women. When he was upon the service of searching popish houses, whatever crucifixes, beads, and such like trumpery, he found, if they were never so rich, he destroyed them, and reserved not one of them for its comelines or costly workmanship, nor saved anything for his own use.59

Springett expected the same sort of purity and zeal from his colleagues. Mary tells us of an incident concerning a fellow deputy lieutenant, himself a Puritan, who assisted Springett in the searching of popish houses and the destruction of superstitious items. Visiting the unnamed colleague’s house one day, Springett noticed in the hall several superstitious pictures, as of the crucifixion of Christ, and of his resurrection, and of such like, very large, that were of great ornament to the hall, and were removed out of their parlour to 56

PRO, SP 28/235 (unnumbered loose papers). There are inventories in PRO, SP 28/235. Two date from 1646 and one from 1644. ‘An Original Account of the Springett Family’, ed. H. Dixon, The Gentleman’s Magazine, new ser., 36 (October, 1851), 365–74. Mary Springett’s original papers are in Pennington MS iv, and Row MS vi, both at the Quakers Library, Friends House, London. They have also been published as Experiences in the Life of Mary Pennington (written by herself), ed. N. Penney (1911). 59 Ibid., p. 372. Mary’s use of the phrase ‘steeple house’ to describe a church reflects her Quaker beliefs at the time of writing. 57 58

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manifest a kind of neglect of them, but he [Springett] looked upon it as a very unequal thing to destroy such things in the popish houses and leave them in their opposers. He drew out his sword and cut them all out of the frames, and spitting them upon his sword’s point, went into the parlour with them, and the woman of the house being there, he said to her, ‘What a shame it is that thy husband should be so zealous a prosecutor of the papists, and spare such things in his own house; but (saith he) I have acted impartial judgement, and have destroyed them here.’60

William Springett appears to have been an earnest young man who took his religious beliefs seriously. He firmly backed the parliamentary cause, which he directly identified with the fight against popery and popish innovations, backing his convictions with both his money and his life. When he raised his own troop of men most of them were, according to Mary, similarly inclined ‘professors and professor’s sons’.61 Springett was brought up in Sussex in a traditionally godly family. His grandfather was described as ‘zealous against popery’, whilst both his late father, Herbert, and his mother, Katherine, were Puritans. Even the servants were godly: the young William and Mary (who resided with them) were read the sermons of Henry Smith and John Preston by a Puritan maid. Both William and his brother Herbert attended St Catharine’s, Cambridge, a college with a tradition of puritanism. Springett, who with his wife was later to become a follower of the radical Thomas Wilson of Otham, ‘declined bishops and the common prayer very early’, and was also sensible of . . . blind superstition concerning that they call their church as he would give disdaining words about it, and speak about [putting] their church timber to very common uses, to shew his abhorence to their placing holiness in it.62

Mary also records her husband’s many qualities describing him as ‘eminently exemplary’ not just for his religious zeal but for his generosity, compassion, justice, industry and courage. He has been described by Norman Penney as a ‘gallant young Puritan’ – an interesting contrast to the common perception of the fanatical iconoclast as the type of a Zeal of the Land Busy or the austere bureaucrat Dowsing.63 In his assault on idolatrous images, Springett may have been acting on the orders of the committee or in his role of deputy lieutenant, although these 60

Ibid., 372. Ibid., 367. Ibid., 366; ‘Autobiography of Lady Springett’, ed. H. Dixon, The Gentleman’s Magazine, new ser., 36 (December, 1851), 585; ‘An Original Account of the Springett Family’, 367; Alumni Cantabrigienses, ed. J. and J. A. Venn (4 vols, 1922–7), iv, 138. 63 ‘An Original Account of the Springett Family’, 367, 371; Penney, Experiences in the Life of Mary Pennington, introduction, 9. Mary’s love for her first husband is palpable, particularly in the moving account of his death at Arundel (ibid., 84ff.). 61

62

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officers were not listed amongst those responsible for enforcing the legislation until May 1644, by which time Springett was dead. He may simply have been using the power that he held to follow a personal religious agenda. Subsequent deputy lieutenants in Kent continued the tradition of enforcing religious legislation, as demonstrated by a warrant requiring the parish of St Mary’s Chatham to purchase a Directory of Public Worship in 1645–6.64 Parliamentary commanders were often accused of encouraging or even of instigating the iconoclasm of ordinary soldiers, and Springett seems to have used his troops in this way. Another such case was that of William Purefoy, colonel in Lord Brook’s army and governor of Coventry. A veteran Puritan campaigner, then some sixty years old, Purefoy gained some notoriety as an iconoclast, commanding his soldiers, in June 1643, to deface monuments at St Mary’s Warwick and to demolish the market cross. On 18 August 1643 he ordered his men to break windows and cut the cross from the church steeple at Maids Moreton in Buckinghamshire. A note in the parish register recorded this incident, adding that ‘a costly desk in the form of a spread eagle gilt, on which we used to lay Bishop Jewel’s work [was] domed to perish as an abominable idle’.65 Although such actions were not official they were (where not taken to excess) in line with the tenets of parliamentary legislation in removing monuments of idolatry from places of worship. When William Springett attacked and destroyed his colleague’s religious pictures, however, he was outside the bounds of even the most radical of the ordinances. These had been extended over time to include secular buildings and public places, but private houses were not mentioned and many otherwise zealously iconoclastic Puritans were comfortable with religious paintings in their own homes. The searching of Catholic houses and the confiscation of goods, as undertaken by Springett and his colleagues, was official policy under parliament’s sequestration ordinances of 27 March and 18 August 1643. Suspected papists were required to take an oath renouncing papal supremacy, transubstantiation and purgatory, and to deny the belief that ‘the consecrated hoast, Crucifixes, or Images, ought to be worshipped, or that any worship is due unto any of them’. Searches by, or on behalf of, sequestration committees, whilst aimed principally at the financial disabling of those perceived as enemies to parliament, were also used to extend the reach of iconoclasts.66 Even before the sequestration ordinances, the houses of suspected Catholics had been subject to unofficial or semi-official searches at the hands of soldiers. This began as early as summer 1642, as, for instance, 64

Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre, Stroud, P85/5/1, Chatham St Mary’s churchwardens’ accounts, 1645–6. 65 P. E. Tennant, Edgehill and Beyond: the People’s War in the South Midlands 1642–5 (Stroud, 1992), 42–5, 9, 39. 66 Acts and Ordinances, i, 106, 254–5.

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with the escapades of the volunteers of Essex’s army who felt justified in ransacking the houses of alleged papists even of ‘meate and money’. At Oxford in September 1642, Lord Saye and Sele’s forces undertook a search of the surrounding areas, bringing in popish artefacts, while three months later, at Winchester, books, pictures and crucifixes were taken, and in both cases the confiscated items were publicly burned. Springett and his fellow deputy lieutenant seem to have been conducting similar searches.67 The public destruction of such objects was an exercise in propaganda, with parliamentarian authorities aiming to stir up anti-Catholicism and to promote the godly cause. Both in London and elsewhere bonfires were staged. John Vicars described how a huge bonfire was made following the destruction of Cheapside Cross, in May 1643, ‘whereunto the leaden gods, saints, & Popes [from the cross] were cast & there melted’.68 Such spectacles served to emphasize the links between the war and the wider battle against popery and by extension against Antichrist. The foiling of a plot against parliament was the occasion for one such celebration on 18 January 1644. A thanksgiving sermon given at Christ Church, in Newgate Street, was followed by a banquet laid on for the Lords and Commons by the corporation of London. The procession from Christ Church to the Merchant Tailors’ Hall, where the banquet was to be held, was highly ceremonial, culminating in an ‘entertainment’ at Cheapside. This consisted of a huge bonfire where the public hangman burnt ‘many images of the Madonna and Saints with offices and other Catholic books found in private houses’.69 In a sense, the confiscation and destruction of private goods considered to be idolatrous was a form of organized iconoclasm. The Harley Committee was required to deface goods confiscated by the Sequestration Committee. On 12 May 1644, popish pictures which were recorded among the sequestered possessions of Dr Anderson of Whitefriars in London were ordered burnt, and on 6 September 1644 the Committee for the Advance of Money ordered the seizure of ‘a trunk of Popish trinkets’ from the house of Sir Thomas Reynolds. Vicars recorded, in July 1645, the seizure of twentynine or thirty cartloads of ‘Papists and pernicious Malignants goods’. These were found during the search of a house in Longacre belonging to a Mr Catesby, where the papal nuncio had once stayed and where dangerous persons were now believed to be harboured. The goods included ‘much Popish apish trumpery, as Crucifixes, Images and many Popish Books’ and

67

See chs 6 and 7. Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 2, 327, 328. 69 CSPV, 1643–7, 68; see also Occurrences of Certain Special and Remarkable Passages in Parliament, 13–19 January 1644; The Scottish Dove, 12–19 January 1644. On the plot against parliament see B. M. Gardiner, A Secret Negotiation with Charles I (Camden Miscellany, 8, 1883). See plate 1 for the depiction of a bonfire lit to celebrate the abolition of episcopacy. 68

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were sent off to Haberdashers’ Hall or to Camden House ‘till a due time to bee reduced into ashes by the fire’.70 Springett’s personal reformation of his colleague’s hallway seems to have been unique, no other cases are known of private houses being searched or pictures being confiscated other than where the owners were suspected royalists or Catholics, or, on occasion, members of colleges or cathedral chapters. Public places, however, were by the August 1643 ordinance made open to reformation, and among the sequestered goods at Camden House, in November 1644, were two ‘popish pictures’ taken from the Old Bailey.71 The seizure of papists’ goods and their use as propaganda, both in the campaign against idolatry and in the fight against the king, illustrate how the distinction between the religious, reforming aims of parliament and its military aims overlapped. The extirpation of idolatry was widely considered to be the duty of the godly, and, as a godly army, parliament’s forces were no exception. Military involvement could come, as seen above, through the local command structure – the intervention of county committees to enforce parliamentary legislation – or through the input of individual commanders like Springett and Purefoy. It could take the form of an organized official committee at county committee level, or be expressed through searches for papists’ goods, or in the spontaneous reformation of churches and cathedrals by soldiers. The most dramatic instance of military involvement in the enforcement of legislation against images, and the most famous, was the organized campaign of iconoclasm undertaken by William Dowsing. There is no evidence of any similar operation of this scale in any other area of the country or under any other parliamentary commander. The extent of the reformation of East Anglian churches is well known because of the journal kept by Dowsing recording his visits. Indeed the latest major study suggests that the damage done by Dowsing and his deputies was actually far more extensive than the journal suggests, the text which has survived providing only a partial picture.72 Why the Eastern Association initiated such a major iconoclastic campaign is not entirely clear. The most obvious answer is that it was largely down to the personality and beliefs of those involved. The earl of Manchester, Commander in Chief of the Association, was related by marriage to the Puritan earl of Warwick and inclined towards Presbyterianism. He was closely involved in related aspects of reform – the pursuit of scandalous ministers in the area, for instance, and the reform of Cambridge University.

70 CJ, iii, 368; PRO, SP 28/217B, pt 1, 112; Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for the Advance of Money, 1642–56, ed. M. A. E. Green (3 vols, 1888), i, 36; Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 4, 183. 71 PRO, SP28/217B, pt 2, 217. 72 The Journal of William Dowsing, passim.

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He was also known to be one of those in the House of Lords who supported the Commons’ order against images in 1641, and the issue may have been one he considered important.73 Interestingly, Manchester’s father, the first earl, was a member of the court of Star Chamber during the trial of Henry Sherfield. Although not himself a Puritan, he argued for only the most lenient of punishments (an acknowledgement to the bishop for acting without authority), and called Sherfield’s act of iconoclasm ‘a pardonable fault’, going on to say that he, too, would have been offended at such a picture.74 Without Manchester’s keen support it is unlikely that Dowsing would have been given the wide powers that he seems to have had. While Manchester’s role in initiating the campaign must have been an important one, it is hard to believe that Dowsing himself did not take a very active part in promoting the idea and in putting himself forward as the man for the job. A staunch Puritan from Stratford St Mary in Suffolk, Dowsing has been described as a typical yeoman with ‘hints of a godly background’. He was an avid reader, collector and annotator of the fast sermons given to parliament and other texts and, in analysing the marginal notes in his large collection of pamphlets, Morrill has highlighted Dowsing’s interest in the issue of images and idolatry.75 On 6 March 1643 Dowsing wrote a letter to his friend Matthew Newcomen, lecturer of the neighbouring parish, urging reform: if you have anie interest in parliament men, now we have an army at Cambridge it might be a fitt tyme to write to ye Vice Chancellor of Cambridge & Mayor to pull down all ther blasphemous crucifixes, all superstitious pictures and reliques of popery according to the ordinances o’ parliament. I only refere you to yt famous story in Ed[ward VI’s reign] how the English got the victory against the Scots in Museleborough field the same day . . . the reformation was wrought in London and images burnt.76

Soon afterwards Dowsing was appointed provost-marshall for the Eastern Association Army, and by 19 December 1643 he was in possession of a commission from the earl of Manchester empowering him to oversee the enforcement of parliament’s reforming legislation.77 The remit of Dowsing’s commission was specifically to put into execution the ordinance against images of August 1643, wherever that had been neglected. The entire Eastern Association, consisting of the counties of 73

LJ, iv, 395. Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, iii, 556. The first earl further argued that ‘how long so ever pictures and images have been in the church, I hold it a very offensive thing to make such a picture, or representation of God’, and that ‘the painted picture inticeth the ignorant to Idolatry’. See also DNB (Henry Montagu, 1st earl of Manchester). 75 Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm’, 3–4ff. 76 Letter from Dowsing to Newcomen quoted from ibid., 11. 77 The original commission has not survived but there is a copy in the Suffolk Committee Book. It is given in full in Appendix III. 74

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Essex, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Hertfordshire, was within Dowsing’s jurisdiction, and local officers were required to lend their assistance. Ten days later a second commission was drawn up under Manchester’s hand, further asserting Dowsing’s authority and putting a particular emphasis on the levelling of chancel steps. This no doubt reflects resistance met by Dowsing, as for instance at Pembroke College where the legality of his orders had been questioned. The new commission made provision for dealing with those who refused to co-operate, and also extended the area covered to include Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire.78 Dowsing’s activities at the university and in the city of Cambridge are described in chapter seven below. According to the evidence of the journal, between 3 January and 28 September 1644, 234 parish churches and four private chapels were visited throughout south Cambridgeshire and Suffolk.79 It is likely that visits to other areas went unrecorded or that the parts of the journal which covered them have not survived. Both John Morrill and Robert Walker have argued that Dowsing probably visited the north of Cambridgeshire: the survival rate for objects outlawed by parliament there being comparable to that for the south of the county. Morrill suggests that a gap in the journal between 6 and 20 February may represent the period during which Dowsing covered the missing parishes of the north. The much higher survival rate of monuments in the parishes of the Isle of Ely suggests that this area may have escaped visitation.80 The work of Trevor Cooper and others in the new edition of Dowsing’s journal uses evidence gathered from surviving churchwardens’ accounts to show that counties which do not appear in Dowsing’s text were also visited. Parts of Norfolk, for instance, were visited by a Captain Clement Gilley who is described as viewing church windows ‘by the Earle of Manchesters warrant’, and as ‘being imployed by Parl[iamen]t’. He may be the same ‘captaine’ who came to view the windows and brasses in the Knyvett’s local church in Ashwellthorpe. Katherine Knyvett wrote to her husband, Sir Thomas, on 16 May 1644, describing how our superstitious glas in the church windows and the brase upon the graves are going up most vehemently, the visiting captaine said he never came into a church wher he saw so much.81

In two Norfolk parishes the churchwardens’ accounts make no reference to a visitor, but do mention ‘diverse gen[er]all articles’ sent by Manchester. 78

PRO, SP 16/486/87 (see Appendix III). The dispute at Pembroke is discussed in ch. 7. Of 273 entries in the journal, 30 refer to university chapels and the parish churches of the city of Cambridge. Five entries are duplicated. 80 See Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm’, and R. Walker, ‘William Dowsing in Cambridgeshire’, in The Journal of William Dowsing, 34–46. 81 See J. Blatchly, ‘In search of bells: iconoclasm in Norfolk, 1644’, in The Journal of William Dowsing, 107–22; Swaffham and Banham churchwardens’ accounts, 1643–4, transcribed in The Journal of William Dowsing, 363, 369; the letter from Katherine Knyvett is quoted from ibid., 363. 79

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Answers to these articles were taken up to ‘the Lord of Manchester’s Committee’ at Norwich.82 Visitors also seem to have made an appearance in Essex, where they are mentioned in four out of the seven surviving churchwardens’ accounts. At Saffron Waldon, 10s was paid to ‘the man that came to viwe the Church from the parliament’; at Chelmsford a payment of 6s 8d was made to ‘the Lord of Manchesters Serv[an]t’; and at Neveden ‘Visitors of the Presbyterian Long Parliament’ were said to have broken windows. One William Aymes, who is described as having a commission from Manchester, visited the church of Waltham Cross. In a fifth parish, that of Hornchurch, no visitor was mentioned but the steeple cross, brasses and inscriptions were removed ‘by command from the earl of Manchester’.83 Yet more visitors make an appearance in two of the four surviving churchwardens’ accounts for Hertfordshire: an officer of Manchester’s at Bishop’s Stortford, and at St Peter’s, St Albans, a ‘man that came to take up the popish sentences from of the graves and windows’. A third set of accounts, for Baldock, show glass being pulled down ‘by Manchesters command’. Only for Huntingdonshire is the evidence inconclusive, with no mention of visitors in the three surviving accounts although two show evidence of iconoclasm.84 The visitors mentioned here may have been Dowsing appointees – he is known to have employed men to view churches in Suffolk. Two of these, John Crow (‘Mr Crow’), and Alexander Ouldis (‘Mr Oales’), are mentioned in the text of the journal itself, while another seven are named in a list which prefaces the earliest known transcript. Captain Gilley, the Norfolk visitor, is not mentioned in the journal or additional text. However, as John Blatchly points out, it may be no coincidence that despite working in Norfolk, Gilley was, like Dowsing, a Suffolk man.85 What is clear is that this campaign of iconoclasm was extensive in scale, as far as we can tell from available evidence, the largest of its kind. Indeed, it was in many ways the only one of its kind – the ad hoc measures of county committees and individual military commanders hardly match up in terms of organization or impact. Even the work of the Harley Committee, confined as it was to London and the immediate surrounding areas, cannot really 82

Besthorpe and Fritton churchwardens’ accounts, 1643–4, in The Journal of William Dowsing, 363, 365. The evidence for the northern part of the county is sketchier than the south and Blatchly suspects that iconoclasm there was ‘patchy or non-existent’ (Blatchly, ‘In search of bells: iconoclasm in Norfolk’, 107). 83 See churchwardens’ accounts for Saffron Waldon, Chelmsford, Neveden, Waltham Cross and Hornchurch, The Journal of William Dowsing, 356, 354, 356, 357, 355; and see also Cooper, ‘Iconoclasm in other counties of the Eastern Association’, in ibid., 123–37. 84 See churchwardens’ accounts for Bishop’s Stortford, St Peter’s, St Albans, and Baldock in The Journal of William Dowsing, 358, 359; see also Cooper, ‘Iconoclasm in other counties of the Eastern Association’, esp. 130. 85 See Blatchly, 67–88. The list of Dowsing appointees is given at the end of the journal; ‘Crow’ and ‘Oales’ appear in entries 252 and 267 (ibid., 321, 308, 315).

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compare. So what, if anything, does the Eastern Association’s atypical campaign of reformation tell us about the organization and enforcement of parliamentary legislation more generally? The most important point is that it was atypical only in the size of the areas covered and in the scale of organization involved. The intervention of military authorities in this matter, as has been shown throughout this chapter, was not unusual. At Pembroke College one of the fellows, Robert Mapletoft, challenged the legality of Dowsing’s commission from Manchester, arguing that it was not ‘according to the Ordinance’.86 Technically, Mapletoft was in the right, but his argument was irrelevant. This was a time of war and, given the serious interference in local governance which was a consequence of that war, it is not surprising that the military command structure should take upon itself such tasks, especially given that religious zeal was a prime motivating force for many parliamentarians. If such means were beyond the letter of parliamentary legislation, which relied upon the old civilian structures for enforcement, they were not too far beyond its spirit. Parliament itself used troops to carry out iconoclastic reform – as for instance in Westminster Abbey, or in the demolition of Cheapside Cross. The inclusion of deputy lieutenants as responsible authorities for overseeing the May 1644 ordinance lent the involvement of the military a certain legitimacy. In general the godly used whatever channels of power they could in order to gain their reforming ends. The evidence gathered here shows that civilian authorities were not always neglectful of their legal and spiritual duty in the matter of images. However, where there was neglect, the circumstances of war lent the more zealous an extremely powerful instrument of enforcement, in the form of a godly army and its military might. Another point to consider when examining the enforcement of iconoclastic legislation is how that legislation was interpreted. More often than not it was individuals who were responsible for translating the letter of the law into action: where regulating bodies were set up these were generally driven by a small number of zealous persons, whilst in other places local parish clergy or officials were left to act as they themselves judged fit. What evidence there is suggests that interpretation of the ordinances varied widely – sometimes erring on the side of caution and sometimes on that of excess. Symbolic representations perhaps presented the most difficult problems. The May 1644 ordinance did specifically prohibit ‘Representations of any of the Persons of the Trinity, or of any Angel or Saint’ [my emphasis], but even before this there were many instances of the removal of doves, symbolizing 86

The Journal of William Dowsing, entry 2 (Mapletof is here called Maplethorpe). See also Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm’, 14; and S. L. Sadler, ‘Dowsing’s argument with the Fellows of Pembroke’, in The Journal of William Dowsing, 56–66.

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the Holy Ghost, lambs representing Christ, and the symbols of the evangelists. Dowsing was removing symbolic images both before and after the 1644 ordinance. These included five instances each of images of lambs and of the Trinity represented by a triangle, and in one place ‘an eagle and a lion, with wings, for two of the Evangelists’. Perhaps surprisingly, Dowsing was only concerned with the removal of an ‘orate pro anima’ on the brass eagle at Christ’s College, and does not seem to have objected to the eagle itself, despite the fact that elsewhere these were seen as idolatrous (representing St John the Evangelist) and sold off or melted down.87 Some of the godly were more demanding in their zeal against idolatry than others. A complaint made in 1644 against Rector John Ferror of Trimbly St Mary in Suffolk contained an objection to the fact that the Ten Commandments had been removed from the north wall of the church and set up at the east end of the chancel. It is not clear whether it was the position of the decalogue at the east end which caused offence – although this was where they were required to be set up by the 1604 canons – or whether the work had been done in an elaborate way and was seen as an unnecessary adornment. Churchwardens at St Edmund’s in Salisbury had to replace a new pulpit cloth in 1653 because ‘the Color is offensive in the sight of some of the parish’. What the ungodly colour was is not stated.88 In contrast to these cases, legislation was interpreted rather loosely at Lowick in Northamptonshire. Here, Old Testament figures were left in the church windows when they were reformed as these were not felt to be offensive. The churchwardens at Brookland in Kent were satisfied with the sort of compromise which had been used throughout the sixteenth century, removing only the heads of figures in the windows.89 Dowsing’s journal provides interesting evidence of his own interpretation of the ordinances. It has been argued that Dowsing followed the parliamentary regulations almost to the letter. This accounts for his concentration on images, mainly in windows, on the removal of superstitious inscriptions and crosses, and on the levelling of chancels.90 This is, on the whole, a fair assessment, although there are one or two surprises which suggest that Dowsing took a more radical view. The evidence is not conclusive because the journal is not always specific in either its descriptions of offensive objects or the number of items removed. There are many generalized references to ‘superstitious’ or ‘popish’ pictures, and where figures are given – as at Queens’ 87

The Journal of William Dowsing, entries 43, 51, 70, 179, 188 (lambs); 234, 247, 248, 257, 261 (triangles); 243 (eagle and lion). ibid., entry 16. The Suffolk Committees for Scandalous Ministers 1644–6, ed. C. Holmes (Suffolk Record Office, 13, 1970), 71; Bray, Anglican Canons, 376–7 (canon 82); Swayne, Churchwardens’ Accounts of S. Edmund and S. Thomas Sarum, 227. 89 Northamptonshire Record Office, 199P/78/1–16, Lowick churchwardens’ accounts, anonymous notes filed with accounts; CKS, P49/4/1, Brookland churchwardens’ accounts, 1644–5. 90 See Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm’, 17, 24–7.

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College where ‘about 110 superstitious pictures’ were beaten down – they are undoubtedly approximations. Unlike the officials at Lowick church, Dowsing did not find Old Testament figures acceptable. He removed, for instance, Moses and Aaron from the church at Otley, Suffolk, Adam and Eve from Helmingham, Suffolk and pictures of six prophets – ‘Malachi, Daniel, Ezekil, and Sophany and two more’ – at Horseheath, Cambridgeshire. However, the majority of images of which he chose to detail the destruction were pictures of Christ or crucifixes. The journal notes more than fifty-one pictures of Christ at thirtyfour churches, and over seventy-two crucifixes spread among forty-nine churches. Images of God the father are mentioned twenty-three times for eighteen churches, with a further six images of the Trinity, in glass and in stone, at four churches.91 The priority given to these particular images is witnessed not by the numbers destroyed – the journal records a far greater number of unspecified ‘superstitious pictures’ – but rather by the fact that they were thought worthy of particular note. All of this, along with the removal of rails, levelling of chancels and the many references to inscriptions and crosses, was well within the guidelines of the legislation and might be expected to be found prioritized here. Symbolic representations can perhaps be taken as illustrating a more personal interpretation of what constituted an idolatrous image, at least before the 1644 ordinance. Lambs representing Christ and doves representing the Holy Ghost make up the majority of the instances of symbolic images removed early, and these were similarly targeted elsewhere (at St Margaret’s Westminster, for example, and in other London parishes). Dowsing also ordered the removal of a triangle representing the Trinity, in April 1643, and images of the instruments of the passion – for instance, ‘the spunge and nayles’, the crown of thorn, and the whip – at four different churches in January and April 1643.92 The most surprising entries, however, are those ordering the removal of pictures of suns, moons and stars, which occur in four places. The four suns removed from the church of Teversham, Cambridgeshire, are clearly offensive by the standards of the time. They were to the side of the altar and contained idolatrous writing: within the first . . . God the Father; and in the second, the Son; and in the third, the Holy Ghost; and in the 4th, Three Persons and one God.93 91

The figures are mine, counted from the text of the journal. They are given as a minimum as in several places Dowsing records ‘many’ or ‘divers’ pictures of God, Christ etc. There is a very useful index to objects and images in The Journal of William Dowsing, 521–2. 92 The Journal of William Dowsing, for example, entries 43, 51, 70, 179, 188, 76, 79, 214, 234 (for the Trinity and whips). For many symbolic representations removed after the 1644 ordinance see the index in The Journal of William Dowsing, 521–2. 93 Ibid., entry 206.

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At Ufford, Suffolk, where there was a great deal of reforming work to be done, Dowsing’s objection to ‘above 20 stars on the roof’ may have been merely an objection to lavish decoration in a church. A similar feature was reported by the compilers of the 1641 report on Cambridge colleges, where it was noted that the ceiling of St John’s chapel was ‘painted in a skie collour & set full of gilt starrs’. At St John’s, however, these were directly connected to superstitious lettering: ‘at just distances are fastened in golden letters through the whole roof Jesus Christus Dominus Noster short writ’. The ‘sun and moon’ ordered by Dowsing to be removed from the church at Ringsfield, Suffolk, and from the east window at Clare, Suffolk, had apparently no links with other more obviously idolatrous images or inscriptions. Indeed, those at Clare, which have survived in spite of the order for their destruction, are part of a series of arms belonging to secular benefactors of the church and dating from 1617.94 These last three instances, where there is no clear link with a more obviously offensive image or inscription, are interesting. They beg the question of what it is that Dowsing finds so unacceptable in these objects – was it just a matter of inappropriate ornamentation in a place of worship, or did he actually consider them to be idolatrous, that is, potentially liable to be worshipped? The Quaker Henry Clark included in his extensive list of ‘idolatrous’ pictures still remaining in the churches of the 1650s ‘the likeness of . . . the Sun, Moon and Stars and Firmament’. He cited in support of his argument Deuteronomy 4:16–19, a text which warns against the making of figures of any creatures at all, and against the worship of the heavens: lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them.95

It is not suggested that Dowsing held such extreme views as Clark but he does seem to have occasionally interpreted parliamentary legislation broadly according to his own personal standards. It is notable also that the journal records orders to remove pictures of ‘two Archbishops with mitres’ at Polstead and, elsewhere, superstitious pictures ‘with crosier staves [and] with mitres’. Images of archbishops, like the pictures of bishops often attacked by soldiers, were not included in parliamentary legislation against superstitious monuments, and that they did come under attack illustrates the link between episcopacy and idolatry in the minds of mid seventeenth-century iconoclasts.96 94

For these four churches see ibid., entries 43, 206, 221 and 247. For St John’s chapel see BL, Harl. MS 7019, fol. 75. 95 Clark, A Rod Discovered, 18. 96 The Journal of William Dowsing, entries 240, 247 and 249. On the association between mitres and popery see M. Aston, ‘Bishops, seals, mitres’, in Life and Thought in the Northern Church c.1100–1700. Essays in Honour of Claire Cross, ed. D. Wood (Studies in Church History, Subsidia 12, Woodbridge, 1999), 183–226, esp. 206–26.

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The amount of destruction wrought by Dowsing and his colleagues cannot have failed to have an impact on local communities. Although there is little indication in the journal as to the general response to this reformation, it is easy to imagine that it was not always a welcome one. The fact that so much work remained for Dowsing to do implies that either the parishes involved were unenthusiastic about the parliamentary ordinances or else had reformed themselves as far as they considered necessary – with perhaps the removal of rails and recent Laudian additions, but stopping short of dismantling the ancient fabric and ornaments of their churches. They had, after all, lived with such items for generations. In the whole journal only four churches are reported as having ‘nothing to reform’, and only half-a-dozen are specifically recorded as having made recent attempts to comply (possibly inspired by the threat of Dowsing’s approach or by an earlier unrecorded visit by one of his deputies). At St Clement’s, Ipswich, inscriptions had been removed ‘four days afore’, and superstitious pictures had been broken down before Dowsing’s arrival at Cheveley, Cambridgeshire, and the Suffolk parishes of Barking, Eye, Rishangles and Haverhill – some ‘200’ in the latter case. Of these parishes, only at St Clement’s did Dowsing fail to find remaining offensive objects to destroy.97 The journal does record some instances where local officials resisted reformation. At Covehithe, Suffolk, churchwardens refused to help Dowsing and his men to raise ladders to reach the windows, whilst those at Ufford kept first his deputies and then Dowsing himself locked out of the church. A great deal of work remained to be done in this parish, including the removal of rails, an organ case, chancel steps, inscriptions and windows. At Barton church, Cambridgeshire, glass from the windows had been hidden before Dowsing’s arrival. At Mickfield, Suffolk, a fine for neglect was imposed on the parish, and at the chapel of Tendring Hall, in Stoke by Nayland, and the churches of Great Cornard and Little Cornard (all in Suffolk), Dowsing met with refusals to pay his fee (a regular charge of 6s 8d). John Pain, churchwarden of Great Cornard, was taken up before the earl of Manchester ‘for not paying, and doing his duty injoyned by the Ordinance’. Trevor Cooper has suggested that the entries at the end of the journal ‘give the impression of being . . . places which had failed to comply, perhaps parishes which had previously been visited by a deputy’. Even so, this makes a total of twentytwo cases of known resistance or possible failure to comply in 238 visits.98 For both the parishes covered by Dowsing’s journal and those elsewhere, lack of evidence makes it hard, if not impossible, to assess absolutely the 97

The four parishes with nothing to reform were Chattisham, St Helen’s, Ipswich, Great Wenham and St Clement’s, Ipswich (The Journal of William Dowsing, entries 71, 86, 97 and 85); ibid., entries 85, 203, 254, 266, 268 and 42. 98 Ibid., entries 226, 247, 176, 258, 118 (and 273), 113 and 114; see Cooper’s note after entry 256. There are seventeen remaining entries, but 273 is a duplicate of that at 118. In Cambridge itself, the only recorded resistance was the dispute at Pembroke College.

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impact of official iconoclasm. Even harder to ascertain is what attitudes to the consequent changes were among the majority of ordinary people. Before the calling of the Long Parliament and during its early months, the spontaneous pulling down of communion rails and other acts of iconoclasm, and the petitions against ministers which mentioned the subject of rails or images, show that these were matters of popular concern. There were to be instances of riots both in support of and against iconoclastic reformation. At Chelmsford in 1641 a stained glass window was smashed by a mob celebrating Guy Fawkes day, despite the fact that the figure of Christ it contained had already been blotted out in plain glass. According to Mercurius Rusticus the crowd had been ‘ill-satisfied with this partial reformation’. When the rector of the church, a moderate Puritan named Michelson, took his opportunity the following Sunday to preach against such ‘popular, tumultuous reformations’, he provoked another fracas. Led by a young clothier, a crowd tried to rip the surplice from Michelson’s back, calling him ‘Baal’s priest and popish priest for wearing the rags of Rome’.99 In other areas, local people defended images. Richard Baxter recorded how at Kidderminster, Worcestershire, around 1641–2 he attempted to put into action the Commons’ order, ‘thinking it came from just authority’, but he left it to his churchwardens to settle on what work should actually be done. He was away from the church out walking when a crew of the drunken, riotous party of the town (poor journeymen and servants) took the alarm, and run altogether with weapons to defend the crucifix and the church images of which there were divers left since the time of popery.

The mob failed to find either the churchwardens or Baxter, but went ‘raving about the streets to seek us’. Baxter publicly offered his resignation when preaching the following Sunday, but reported that the perpetrators of the riot ‘were so amazed and ashamed, that they took on sorrily and were loth to part with me’.100 In Canterbury in December 1643, during Richard Culmer’s reformation of the cathedral, local people had also tried to defend images. Culmer had been fearful for his life to the extent that he was afraid to leave the cathedral and had to be provided with an armed guard. The hostility he provoked lasted several years – long enough for his life to be threatened during the Christmas riots in 1647. He met similar resistance to reformation at his own parish church at Minister-in-Thanet.101 It is dangerous to generalize from such little evidence, but it is possible that popular support for iconoclasm (notable in the early days of the Long 99 100 101

Hunt, The Puritan Moment, 292–3, 299. The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, ed. J. H. Thomas (1925), 38–9. See ch. 6 below.

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Parliament, but apparently afterwards confined to soldiers and the godly) tended to reflect the political feeling of the time. In 1640 and 1641 the popular tide tended to be with parliament against the perceived evil councillors of the king, including the bishops. Hence, those things associated with Laudians and by extension with popery – communion rails and other ‘innovations’ – were easy and obvious targets for the expression of such feelings. By the time of the first ordinance against images in August 1643 a feeling of war-weariness and disenchantment with parliament had set in in many places. At a time already beset by social, economic and political turmoil an attack on church images, especially those of long standing, might be seen as an attack on tradition and the fabric of local society. The years 1643 and 1644, however, were also the crucial years of the struggle between parliament and the king and it is no coincidence that these were the highpoints of the official and military iconoclastic drive. It is likely that the question of iconoclastic reformation sparked off controversy in many places, with disagreement on the subject between the zealous and the moderate, between individual parishioners, and between parish officials. Tension and hostility provoked by the issue could last a long time, as disputes revived at the Restoration illustrate. Isolated cases hint at a desire to seek out and to name those responsible for what was now redefined as the despoiling of the local church. Churchwardens at St Thomas, Salisbury, were eager to find those responsible for the removal of the organs, the pulpit and other church goods. At a parish meeting in 1662, the churchwardens of All Saints, Derby, were ordered to ‘demand of Edward Daft and William Chamberlin the Railes latelie belongeing to the Communion Table, and also the Railes lately belongeing to the font of William Moore, and the late Surplices of Henry Fisher, and the late font of Mr Tho: Burne’. Those at Stow Maris, in Chelmsford, informed the bishop of London, in 1664, that the church font had been broken ‘by a person (for ought we know) sufficient to repair it, if the act of indempnity [sic] give us leave to name here’. Others at Brickhill Parva in Buckingham were also keen to name names: at the 1661 episcopal visitation it was reported that ‘the rayles formerly enrayling the communion table were in the late unhappy times of distraccon taken downe and are now made use of by Richard Martin at the George in our towne for his private house’.102 Such attitudes were influenced by those of the returning episcopate: postRestoration visitation articles were careful to emphasize the state of repair of the church, and many made enquiry into whether material of the church fabric had been dismantled or embezzled. The articles of Matthew Wren and 102 Swayne, Churchwardens’ Accounts of S. Edmund and S. Thomas Sarum, 334; Cox and St John Hope, The Chronicles of All Saints, Derby, 184. GL, MS MJ 9583/2, Diocesan records: churchwardens’ presentments, pt 3, 1664, fol. 59; Episcopal Visitation Book for the Archdeaconry of Buckingham, 1662, ed. E. Brinkworth (Bedford, 1947), 69.

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John Cosin, bishops of Ely and Durham, went further. Wren’s 1662 articles of enquiry demanded to know if any in your Parish defaced, or caused to be defaced, or purloyned any Monuments or Ornaments in your Church, or any Inscriptions of Brass, any lead or stone there, or any part of the glass windows, or the Organs? When was it done, & by whom?

Cosin, by contrast, merely required that anyone guilty of purloining linen or plate be named.103 The restoration of episcopacy meant in many places the refurbishment of often-neglected churches and the reintroduction of utensils, furnishings and vestments outlawed by the Long Parliament.104 Communion rails, images and windows removed and hidden away during the Interregnum were now restored. However, this did not mean that the conflict of ideas about images and ornamentation in churches ceased. The ‘great carved gilded image’ of St Michael placed on top of the tower of Allhallows Barking in 1660 did not cause major controversy until brought inside the church in 1675. It then sparked off a conflict between the churchwarden and lecturer responsible for moving it and the parishioners, leading to the case being heard at the Old Bailey. When this case was abandoned by the prosecution due to the expense, another churchwarden, Edmund Shearman, took it upon himself to destroy the image in 1681. There followed a furious war of words between Shearman and lecturer Jonathan Saunders over the issue.105 The subject was no more clear-cut among the higher clergy: in 1679, Gloucester Cathedral prebendary, Edward Fowler, was so offended by a window depicting God, which had somehow survived, that he was moved to break it down himself.106 What emerges in this chapter – and what will become one of the recurring themes of this book – is the paramount importance of personal religious belief in influencing attitudes towards the question of images and the iconoclastic reformation of the church. These beliefs dictated not only whether such reformation was perceived as a good or a bad thing, but also the sense of priority accorded to the issue and the degree to which it was felt that it should (or could) be pursued. It is probably fair to say that the ‘driven’ 103

Articles of Enquiry for the Diocese of Ely (1662), ch. 3, article 18; Articles of Visitation and Enquiry within the Diocese of Durham (1662). Note, however, that Wren’s articles for Ely were largely taken from his earlier set of 1638. I owe this point to Kenneth Fincham (personal communication). 104 For the neglected state of churches see, for example, GL, MS MJ 9583/2 Diocesan records, churchwardens’ presentments, Parts 1–6. 105 J. Maskell, Berkyngechirche juxta Turrim: Collections in Illustration of the Parochial History and Antiquities of the Ancient Parish of Allhallows, Barking, in the City of London (1864), 26. See also E. Shearman, The Birth and Burning of an Image called S. Michael (1681), and J. Saunders, A Narrative of a Strange and Sudden Apparition of an Arch-Angel at the Old Bailey (1681). 106 The incident at Gloucester Cathedral is discussed in ch. 6. See also D. Welander, The Stained Glass of Gloucester Cathedral (1985), 49.

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minority, the enthusiastically godly, pushed the reformation beyond the point at which it might have expected to command a certain broad support, that is at the initial rejection of recent ‘innovations’ brought into the church during the Laudian regime. This minority was crucial in overseeing the enforcement of iconoclastic legislation, and was both numerically substantial and well-placed enough to have an impact. Increasingly radical parliamentary legislation against images was enforced, in some places at least, and where it was so enforced must have had a definite impact in the form of a practical, visible effect on the state of parish churches.

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5 The Response in London

Whilst the effectiveness of the parliamentary drive against images in the country at large remains difficult to ascertain exactly, it might be imagined that in the capital itself there would be evidence of both an active response to, and a more thorough enforcement of, iconoclastic legislation. It is fortunate that a large number of records have survived for the period: there are extant churchwardens’ accounts and/or vestry minutes for 80 of the 110 City parishes (including thirteen outside of the wall but within the jurisdiction of the City), plus four surviving sets of records for Westminster (from a total of ten parishes) and important records for St Giles in the Field (Holborn).1 The problems inherent in using parish records have already been discussed. On the whole those for the City tend to be much better kept and more informative than those of country parishes, reflecting no doubt the better standard of literacy and more sophisticated concept of record keeping that might be expected in the capital. The records for only some twenty parishes were devoid of any reference to the removal of rails, imagery or other ‘monuments of superstition’ at some point during the period, and it is noticeable that these are almost invariably parishes where only vestry minutes survive, or where the crucial years are missing from the churchwardens’ accounts. Nonetheless, some accounts are sparse and lack detail. At Allhallows Honey Lane in 1641, for example, an entry reads: ‘Glazier paid for taking downe and putting up glass’.2 Given the date it is very likely that ‘superstitious’ stained glass was being taken down and plain glass put up, but it is impossible to be certain. The following account should therefore not be taken as representing the total amount of London iconoclasm, but only of known London iconoclasm. 1

See Liu, Puritan London, 16–19. I have also looked at the parishes records held at the London Metropolitan Archives for those areas now part of Greater London, but there are no survivals of interest. 2 GL, MS 5026/1, 1641–2. (In order to avoid repetition, City parish records are cited here by MS reference and not by name, except where that is not clearly identifiable from the text. A full list of parishes is given in the bibliography. Where records are unfoliated, reference will be given by specific date, if possible, or by the year of the accounts).

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Tension between London parishes, their ministers and the church authorities had reached a high point by the time parliament met in November 1640. One of the principal issues of conflict was that of innovations – both in terms of ceremony and of church decor. The state of London’s churches had been of concern for some years: a good deal of building and restoration work had been going on from as early as 1605, a process initiated by the bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, and encouraged by his successors. The sheer scale of some of the repairs undertaken suggests that they were generally inspired by structural necessity rather than devotion, although there were also clear attempts to ‘beautify’ churches in a way which reflected parochial pride. The form this took reflected the ideological position of the ministers and leading parishioners who were instrumental in driving it forward. Non-Laudian ‘beautification’ could involve the erection of galleries, new pulpits, whitewashing and scriptural decoration. Popular monuments, acceptable even in Puritan parishes, included images of monarchs (particularly Queen Elizabeth) and those commemorating important events such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder plot.3 However, it has been noted that a large number of the churches surveyed by William Dyson between 1605 and 1633 already showed signs of the kind of aesthetic refurbishment associated with the Laudians.4 In the 1630s this trend would be pursued more aggressively. Physical changes not only impacted upon the appearance of churches, but expressed ideology and subtly altered the function of the church. The re-siting, railing in, and decorating of communion tables – undertaken by at least fifteen parishes before 1637 – emphasized the sacredness of the space, the role of ritual and ceremony in worship and the beauty of holiness generally, all key principles of Laudianism. Some churches installed chancel windows above the new ‘altars’, as at St Mary Magdalen Milk Street (1619) and St Peter Westcheap (1633), whilst others restored old stained glass, as at St Martin in the Fields (1629) and St Lawrence Jewry (1618–19). In 1637 Laud began actively to pursue a policy of enforced conformity on the subject of communion tables, and in that year the visitation articles of the bishop of London, William Juxon, required ‘the communion table to be railed’.5 Although it is clear that there were some parishioners who supported the idea of beautifying churches, donating money and gifts to that end, changes 3

On this see Merritt, ‘Puritans, Laudians, and the phenomenon of church-building’. She calculates that at least 63 London parish churches were rebuilt or substantially repaired during the reign of James I (ibid., 940). For examples of Protestant secular monuments erected in London churches during this period, see ibid., 952–3. 4 J. Galloway, ‘English Arminianism and the parish clergy: a study of London and its environs c.1620–40’, University of Adelaide Ph.D. thesis (1995), esp. 194, and ch. 6 generally. Dyson’s survey is included in the 1633 edition of Stow. 5 Galloway, 198–200, 213 (Table 20), 214 (Table 21), 212; for St Lawrence Jewry see below. For more examples, see Galloway, ch. 6. He suggests that less than 50% of London churches had railed their communion table by 1637 (see 224).

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to the traditional appearance of the parish church remained highly controversial. In 1633 inhabitants of St Gregory by St Paul’s had appealed to Henry Marten, dean of arches, protesting against the altar-wise position of the communion table, stained glass windows and the use of a bible ‘with a crucifix and the resurrection and divers other pictures set upon the book which induced several persons to bow to it as they passed’.6 Whilst some fifty-three members of the parish of St Christopher le Stocks had funded work at their church in 1633, six years later others petitioned Juxon for permission to return their communion table, which had been converted into an altar by rector Samuel Baker, to its original position. Failing to find support from the bishop, they took the opportunity presented by the calling of the Short Parliament to draw up a further petition protesting against Laudian innovations.7 At Allhallows Barking tension had arisen over the resiting of the communion table and other work done to the church in the late 1630s under minister Edward Layfield (a nephew of Archbishop Laud). In January 1640, a number of parishioners drew up a petition to the bishop of London protesting that, as part of the recent beautification of the church, a new font had been erected over which were set ‘certaine carved Images, the picture of the Holy Ghost, and a Crosse’. Furthermore not only had the communion table been removed from its ‘antient and authorised place’, but more images had been placed on the rail around it. All of this, the parishioners argued, ‘tends much to the dishonour of God, and is very offensive to us.8 This is a very unusual case, because the clerical authorities seem to have been prepared to compromise to settle this clearly prolonged and troublesome dispute. It was handled by Juxon’s chancellor, Dr Arthur Ducke, the bishop himself being busy with the king’s ‘weightie affaires’ (as Charles’s treasurer). Ducke had been sent to the church to view the objects complained of, and he had brought together Layfield, some of the vestry and a number of the complainants in an attempt to get them to settle their differences. The attempt failed, as did others: the account of the affair in the vicar general’s book records how ‘at several times the said parties . . . meeting before him he treated with them to agree the busines and return the parish to peace’. Finally, there came a breakthrough, when some of the more moderate members of the opposing parties proposed ‘by way of mediation that some of the things complained of might be removed and some continue’. Acceptance of this solution was confirmed at a vestry meeting ordered by 6

PRO, SP 16/499/42. GL, MS 4423/1, fol. 159, 18 December 1639 and 5 May 1640 (note at bottom edge of folio). On 25 November 1637 a joiner had been paid £2 for altering the communion table (probably adding rails) ‘by Mr Bakers only direction without the privity or consent of the parishioners’ (fol. 150). Notestein, 38. 8 London Metropolitan Archives, DL/C/344, Vicar General’s book for the London diocese, fols 68–9v. The copy of the petition among the State Papers (PRO, SP 16/375/99) is undated and has been wrongly calendared as 1637 (CSPD 1637–8, 67). I owe this reference to Kenneth Fincham.

7

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Ducke and attended by representatives from both sides including Layfield. Ducke then ordered, as had been agreed, that the pictures on and about the canopy of the font should be removed along with the images (‘pictures’) on the rails.9 Why had such a compromise been allowed at the height of Laudian intransigence on such matters generally? Ducke’s overriding aim seems to have been to end what was clearly a disruptive, perhaps violent, local conflict. He is described as having been ‘studious to preserve the peace and quiet of the parish’, whilst the parishioners on both sides had to promise that, should he consent to their solution, they would ‘rest satisfied’, ‘be quiet’, and ‘not further pursue the other Complaints mencioned in the petition’ – no doubt this last was particularly aimed at the protests over the positioning of the communion table. It is notable that the chancellor required that the alterations to the church be done with care: it was ordered that ‘in the ffower corners of the said Canopie in the roome or place where the said pictures at the corners stood should be sett up in Wainscott work Globes or Pylathers [pilasters?] or some other worke for ornament as by workmen skillfull in that Art shall be advised’.10 In fact, it is not clear whether Ducke’s orders were actually carried out. The work was supposed to be done by Ladyday (25 March), but at the beginning of the Long Parliament further complaints were made against Layfield, and on 21 November the images from the rails were brought into the Commons as evidence. Perhaps, Layfield and his supporters had obstructed their removal and parishioners had now taken matters into their own hands. Certainly the dispute was far from over. The petition against the minister claimed that ‘since the images were taken down’ he had continued to bow at the rails, and that he had charged those who had removed them with sacrilege, refusing to administer sacrament to them unless they came up to the ‘altar’. The compromise had not settled matters, and now the godly parishioners were pushing for a more thorough purge, sensing that the times were changing in their favour. The intensity of this dispute can be seen by the fact that it was still quietly smouldering long after the Restoration, resurfacing during the controversy surrounding an image of St Michael in the 1680s. Lecturer Jonathan Saunders observed that in the ‘Late Times’ the parish was the first to cause trouble over such matters ‘upon the account of some little Images in the work of the cover of the Font, which the Factious people of that time reproachfully called The Gods of Barkin’.11 Those complaining against Laudian innovations in their churches could expect a sympathetic reception from the new parliament. Parishioners of 9

London Metropolitan Archives, DL/C/344, fols 68v–69. Ibid., fol. 69. BL, Add. MS 6521, fols 8v–9; CJ, ii, 35; Saunders, A Narrative of a Strange and Sudden Apparition, 2.

10 11

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St Christopher le Stocks revived their protest against innovations in a petition to the Commons read on 16 November.12 Other parishes followed suit. William Quelch of St Benet Gracechurch was accused not only of introducing innovations but of keeping a ‘picture of a crucifix’ in his house. Edward Finch, vicar of Christ Church, had offended parishioners by moving the communion table and bowing to the altar, as well as being rather too attached to his surplice (he allegedly wore it at the perambulation of the parish).13 Complaints were made against Bryan Walton of St Martin Orgar who, having failed to coerce the churchwarden, took it upon himself to re-site the communion table under the east window where he had it ‘raised up with severall ascents and degrees in the fashion of an altar’. At St Dionis Backchurch parishioners objected to the refurbishment of the church by former rector John Warner, which included the building of chancel steps in black and white marble and the purchase of a new font ‘with sculptured images thereon’.14 William Graunt, minister of Isleworth, in Middlesex, was accused of supporting images and pictures both in theory and in practice – teaching that they were acceptable as ‘laymen’s books’ and attempting to set up a picture of a saint in the chancel, as well as using an illustrated bible. It has been calculated that the Committee for Scandalous Ministers, set up on 19 December 1640 to deal with such complaints, received at least twenty petitions from London parishes in the first year of its existance, with another eight following in subsequent years. The most frequent charge against ministers was that of supporting Laudian innovations and ceremonies, or, in later petitions, their opposition to the Commons’ order for the removal of such innovations.15 In other parts of the country the opening of parliament had been greeted with the spontaneous pulling down of communion rails and it is very likely that this was happening in London too, although the parish accounts give only one recorded example of rails being taken down at such an early date. The vestry of St Botolph Billingsgate met on the 10 December 1640 and agreed that ‘ye rayels of ye Communion Table should be taken away; and soo not to be sett upe againe about the Communion Table’.16 This was 12

Notestein, 38. HLRO, House of Lords Main Papers, 23 December 1641, petition of the parishioners of St Benet Gracechurch in London; Edward Finch, An Answer to the Articles Prefered against Edward Finch, Vicar of Christ-Church by some of the Parishioners of the same (1641), 1–3. Finch denied responsibility concerning the communion table, arguing that it was done by ‘command from Authority at a public visitation’ (ibid., 10). 14 The Articles and charge Proved in Parliament against Dr Walton, Minister of St Martin’s Orgar in Cannon Street (1641), 2–3. Walton was apparently aided in his action by other controversial ministers – John Warner of St Dionis Backchurch, William Brough of St Michael Cornhill, and Samuel Baker of St Christopher le Stocks; PRO, SP 16/493/28 (December 1642). 15 The Petition of the Inhabitants of Isleworth in the County of Middlesex against William Graunt (1641), 3–4; Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 52. 16 GL, MS 943/1, fol. 57r. 13

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probably not an isolated case. There are several instances in the parish accounts of rails being taken up in 1640 or 1641, but it is generally not possible to ascertain an exact date – as, for instance, at St Alphage where rails were removed, and possibly at St Botolph Aldgate where the communion table was ‘altered’. Except in rare cases the churchwardens only recorded the dates for which their accounts began and ended (usually, but not exclusively, from Lady Day or Easter). Communion rails disappeared from the church inventories at St Benet Gracechurch and St Martin in the Fields some time before May 1641.17 At St Margaret Pattens and St Stephen Walbrook rails were being set up or repaired in 1640–1, suggesting that they may have been unofficially broken down and were being restored by the incumbents or church officials. St Stephen Walbrook was a strongly Puritan parish at odds with its minister, Thomas Howell, who would be forced to resign later that year when the parish threatened to petition against him.18 There were clearly differences of opinion, too, in the parish of St Anne and St Agnes, Aldersgate where there are several entries concerning the communion table and rails. In the accounts for 1640–1, the table was moved and pew’s set up ‘as before’ (that is, at the east end of the church); a payment was also made for ‘6 trayes of morter to mend the ground where the Communion Table stoode’. However, the first of two relevant entries for 1641–2 records the mending of the communion rails indicating that the table had been moved back to a railed off position at the east end. Later the same year the rails were removed altogether probably in response to the Commons’ order.19 In June 1641 ‘rail riots’ broke out at a number of churches. This was a time of high tension following the trial of the earl of Strafford, and rumours of army and popish plots were rife. On 7 June at St Saviour, Southwark, the rails were torn down by eight of ‘the meaner sort of parishioners’, none of whom were church officials. At St Olave, Southwark, riots followed the action of the churchwardens, Cornelius Cooke, John Rose and Robert Houghton, who had removed the rails on 4 June, ‘quietly . . . for the benefit of the parish to avoid disorder’. Rose and Houghton claimed that they had done this only after having ‘in vain sought the parson Dr Turner for a remedy for the prevention of the disorder which might have arisen by the tumultuous taking down of the rails’.20 However, they were clearly acting 17

Ibid., MS 1432/4, 1640–1, and see also the inventory preceding the accounts, where the communion table is recorded with the following words crossed out: ‘with the rayles about’; MS 9235/2, fol. 433; MS 1568, fols 618, 624; WCA, F3 (microfilm), St Martin in the Fields churchwarden’s accounts (the disappearance of rails can be seen by a comparison of the inventories before and after the 1640–1 accounts). 18 GL, MS 4570/2, fol. 332; MS 593/4, 1640–1. On Howell see Liu, Puritan London, 60. 19 GL, MS 587/1, fols 34, 38, 40. 20 HLRO, House of Lords Main Papers, 10 June 1641, petition of certain parishioners of St Olave and St Saviour, Southwark, and St Magnus, London; ibid., 15 June, petition of Cornelius Cooke, John Rose and Robert Houghton, churchwardens of St Olave, Southwark.

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on personal beliefs: they argued that the rails had been erected without sufficient warrant and that hundreds of parishioners had refused to attend communion while they remained in place, and they believed ‘none in the parish to be so popishly affected as to have the rails stand’. Yet, the removal of the rails did not prevent more trouble at the church. The following Sunday a violent dispute arose when a small group of men began haranguing the majority of parishioners for kneeling to receive communion. A waterman in the gallery was alleged to have shouted ‘why do you suffer Baal’s priest to give you the communion and serve you so? Kick him out of the church; kneel to a pope, hang him . . . ’. Two other men insisted on receiving the sacrament seated and, when curate Oliver Whitbie refused, threatened to ‘drag him about the church by his ears’.21 The Protestation Oath, with its pledge to defend the true religion ‘against all Popery and popish innovation’, seems to have been a potent trigger for these riots. Those which occurred in the City at St Magnus the Martyr and St Thomas the Apostle were both linked to the taking of the oath. At St Magnus, parishioners ‘tender (as they say) of their consciences’, demanded the removal of the rails as popish innovations which the Protestation had bound them to reform. The minister arranged a meeting between those for and against the pulling down of the rails, but was unsuccessful in reaching a compromise and it was feared that they would be demolished by force.22 At St Thomas the Apostle, on 11 June, the parish gathered to take the Protestation and a leading parishioner, John Blackwell, was said to have addressed those present saying ‘gentlemen, we have here made a protestation before Almighty God against all popery and popish innovations, and these rails (laying his hand upon the rails about the communion table) are popish innovations, and therefore it is fit they be pulled down, and shall be pulled down’. When the majority of parishioners had gone home, Blackwell and others remained in the church debating the issue until a violent dispute broke out with one of the churchwardens and his supporters who defended the rails. Blackwell’s faction ‘with great violence pulled down the altar rails’, afterwards breaking and burning them in the churchyard. They then threatened the parson, offering to ‘burn him and his surplice too’.23 In most of these cases it seems that there was conflict within the local community and even between church officials. Whilst one churchwarden

21

Ibid., 10 June 1641, petition of certain parishioners of St Olave and St Saviour, Southwark, and St Magnus, London; ibid., 15 June 1641, petition of Oliver Whitbie, curate of St Olave, Southwark (and see ibid., Braye MS 19, 17 June 1641). For the Protestation see Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 155. 22 HLRO, House of Lords Main Papers, 10 June 1641, petition of certain parishioners of St Olave and St Saviour, Southwark, and St Magnus, London. 23 Ibid., House of Lords Main Papers, 30 June 1641, petition of the parson, churchwarden and inhabitants of St Thomas the Apostle; see also ibid., 30 June 1641, petition of one churchwarden and others of St Thomas the Apostle, and warrant for the arrest of John Blackwell.

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had petitioned against the rioters at St Thomas the Apostle, the other defended them, commenting that the rails around the communion table had been there for only three years in which time they had given ‘great offense to many of the parishioners’, and been ‘a cause of very much trouble, griefe, and dissention in the whole parish’. Moreover, those who had pulled the rails down seemed to have greater support: forty parishioners added their names to a petition in their defence, compared to only eight who had petitioned against them. Significantly, whilst the accusers took their petition to the House of Lords, the defendants addressed theirs to the Commons. Blackwell was ordered to pay £10 to the overseers of the poor of the parish, but the rails were not ordered to be restored. In the case of St Saviour, Southwark, the Lords ordered that the broken rails be restored only as they had stood for the last fifty years rather than in the last four to five years (when they were clearly more elaborate in appearance), and even this condition was remitted when the defendants pleaded poverty.24 The accounts of St George Botolph Lane and St Mary Magdalen Milk Street show that rails were taken down there, apparently in a peaceful manner, on 12 and 23 June respectively. However, the disorders in Southwark and the City show that this was still a potentially controversial issue and must have made the need for firm, clear regulations on the issue of innovations seem yet more urgent. The Commons responded on 8 August issuing a declaration authorizing the removal of rails by churchwardens. This was repeated at the end of the month when the Commons committee dealing with the matter reported back with what was to become the September 1641 order for the suppression of innovations.25 The Commons’ order involved the moving of communion tables from the east end of churches, the removal of rails and the levelling of recently erected chancel steps. Crucifixes and pictures of members of the Trinity were to be ‘taken away and abolished’, and tapers, candlesticks and basins were to be removed from the communion table. Given that it were issued by the Commons alone and was strictly speaking not enforceable by law, the degree to which the order was carried out very much depended on the temperament of the individual parish and the balance of local feeling. This could lead to conflict. At St Giles Cripplegate, where there was strong resistance to the order, the parish seemed split, with one of the two churchwardens and ‘some others’ siding with the minister and curate in their refusal to take down 24

Ibid.; HLRO, Main Papers, 1 July 1641, petition of John Blackwell, Francis Webb and others of St Thomas Apostle, London; HLRO, Braye MS 20, 1 July 1641. On the riots, see D. Cressy, ‘The battle of the altars: turning the tables and breaking the rails’, in Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension (Oxford, 2000), 187–8, and Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 39–41; LJ, iv, 277, 321. As Lindley points out, it was only those involved in the violent offence against curate Oliver Whitbie of St Olave who were harshly punished (see ibid., 41). 25 GL, MS 951/1, fol. 107r; ibid., MS 2597/1, fol. 61, 23 June 1641.

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the rails, whilst other parishioners petitioned parliament against them. Parishioners at St George, Southwark, petitioned against a churchwarden and other inhabitants for disturbing the pulling down of the rails and then setting them back up.26 The attitude of the minister was naturally influential and often conflicted with the desires of the parishioners, as for instance at St Botolph Aldersgate where a petition was drawn up against Thomas Booth in October 1641 for refusing to allow the communion rails to be pulled down. At the same time complaints were made against William Heywood of St Giles in the Fields: although he had ‘yielded’ to the taking down of the rails and the repositioning of the communion table, ‘some scandalous pictures . . . remained’. These may have been the twelve apostles painted on the organ loft which were not removed until 1642.27 Another dispute occurred at St Lawrence Jewry where a prompt decision to comply with the September order was taken by the vestry on 19 October 1641. However, they faced opposition from vicar Thomas Crane and his supporters.28 Crane, described by opponents as ‘an earnest maintainer of superstitious innovations’, refused to read the Commons’ order in the church or to administer communion to those that would not come up to the communion rails. The rails were removed but immediately restored, with a payment of 6d made for ‘[re]placinge of the rails broken down that daye’. At the election of church officials the following Easter, Crane attempted to block the transition from junior to senior churchwarden of Hugh Nettleship, the man responsible for breaking down the rails and other iconoclastic work. A petition to the House of Lords complained that those of Crane’s party left the vestry during Nettleship’s election, but came back later the same day and made their own choice – two men, neither of whom it was noted had taken the Protestation. The communion rail was finally taken up, under Nettleship’s tenure as senior churchwarden, sometime after June 1642.29 There are several other cases of the removal of communion rails and the moving of communion tables from the east end. Rails are recorded as having been removed in nine of the City churches at some point during the year 1641–2.30 At another – St Michael Crooked Lane – £15 6s was spent on 26

Coates, 7, 17, 3. For a full account of the case of St Giles Cripplegate see ch. 3 above. The Heads of Several Petitions and Complaints (1641). See also Walker Revised, ed. A. G. Matthews (Oxford, 1948), 42; Coates, 5. 28 GL, MS 2590/1, fol. 331. Crane’s supporters were no doubt the same as those who at a vestry of August 1640 voted to beautify the church (GL, MS 2590/1, 13 August 1640). 29 GL, MS 2590/1, fol. 331. Details of the dispute are given in HLRO, House of Lords Main Papers, petitions of St Lawrence Jewry, n.d. 1645. This petition and another against Crane (n.d. 1644) are wrongly calendared and actually date from 1642 (see Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 44, n. 24, 60, n. 104). GL, MS 2593/2, fols 30, 47. No note of the disputed election is made in the vestry minute book (MS 2590/1, fol. 332, 14 April 1642). 30 The nine parishes are St Anne and St Agnes, St Benet Paul’s Wharf, St Giles in the Fields, St Helen Bishopsgate, St Margaret New Fish Street, St Mary Aldermary, St Michael Cornhill, St Olave Jewry and St Olave Silver Street.

27

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erecting pews in the east end of the chancel, which indicates that the rails must have been removed, although they are not directly mentioned. A further three churches show evidence of the ‘removal’ (that is, repositioning) or the ‘altering’ of the communion table: Allhallows Barking, where it is not clear if the rails were taken away although they were certainly altered; St Martin Orgar, where the entry reads ‘paid for taking downe the communion table’; and St Bride, Fleet Street, where a mason was paid for taking down ‘the stoones’ about the communion table, perhaps indicating a levelling of steps, and where a chancel screen may also have been removed. More chancel steps were levelled at Allhallows Lombard Street, and at the Savoy Chapel, which had been used for worship by the parish of St Mary le Strand since the demolition of their church in 1549. The accounts of St Mary’s also record receipt of the order ‘for takeing down of rales about ye Communion Table’, although there is no direct reference to this being done.31 It is difficult to ascertain how many cases of rail removal were in direct response to the Commons’ order, although in three cases the position of the entry in the accounts does imply a date after September 1641: at St Mary Aldermary the entry comes shortly before a payment for the bell ringers on 5 November; at St Martin Orgar and St Michael Cornhill the entries come with or shortly after others ordering the taking down of superstitious windows, work which is unlikely to have been undertaken before the Commons’ order allowing it.32 The majority of parish accounts do not mention the taking down of rails although it is unlikely that any would have remained standing long into the 1640s. There are few recorded cases of the late taking down of rails – those at St Alban Wood Street were removed along with the chancel steps in 1643–4, whilst the vestry of St Bartholomew Exchange ordered the removal of their communion rails on 26 February 1643. This late date is curious given the controversy there had been when the rails were first installed in June 1633. Then, certain parish officials had refused to audit the accounts of churchwarden Jeremy Jones who had been responsible for this ‘extraordinary expense’ against the inclinations of the parish.33 The high altar with its marble steps at St Dionis Backchurch appears to have been dismantled in late 1642 or early 1643 (soon after the petition against Warner). The only later reference in any of the parish accounts to communion rails is the sale of the ‘old rales w[hi]ch were formerly about the Sacrament Table’ at St Mary Aldermanbury in 1647–8. This was the church of Edmund Calamy, 31

GL, MS 1188/1, fol. 264. Allhallows by the Tower, churchwardens’ accounts, reel 11 (microfilm), 1641–2; GL, MS 959/1, fol. 199; MS 6552/1, fol. 73; MS 4051/1, fol. 103; WCA, MF 1900, St Mary le Strand churchwardens’ accounts, vol. 22, fol. 376v. 32 GL, MS 6574, fols 175r and v; MS 959/1, fol. 199; MS 4071/2, fol. 137r. 33 GL, MS 7673/2, fol. 13r (note this is misnumbered coming between fols 14 and 15); MS 4384/1, fol. 565v (and see MS 4383/1, fol. 426). For the dispute over the putting up of rails see The Vestry Minute Books of the Parish of St Bartholomew Exchange 1567–1675, ed. E. Freshfield (1890), xvii.

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patronized by the earl of Warwick, and it is unlikely that the rails were still in situ at this date.34 In all, fourteen parishes recorded the removal of communion rails or some kind of alteration to the communion table in the accounting year 1641–2. Eight of these same parishes took further action in response to the Commons’ order – against images, stained glass windows, inscriptions etc. – along with another fourteen parishes. This makes a total of twenty-nine parishes recording some kind of response in 1641–2, thirty-four per cent of the eighty-five studied (see Table One).35 Even allowing for the fact that some of those removing rails may have been pre-empting rather than responding to the September 1641 order, this is a significant number, especially given the generally unyielding nature of the source material. In addition it is known from the journal of the artisan Nehemiah Wallington that a good deal of reform was undertaken at his parish church of St Leonard Eastcheap, although the records do not survive to confirm this. Here the Commons’ order was responded to promptly, at the beginning of October 1641, when the idol in the wall was cut down and the superstitious pictures in the glass was broken in pieces, and the superstitious things and prayers for the dead in brass were picked up and broken, and the picture of the Virgin Mary on the branches of the candlesticks was broken.36

Wallington also witnessed iconoclasm at St Margaret New Fish Street, where scandalous pictures in the glass windows were broken to pieces, and the pictures on the pew-doors were cut off, and the idolatrous, superstitious brass was taken off the stones.37

Further evidence for this can be seen in the surviving churchwardens’ accounts which record some £2 18s spent on glazing that year and the receipt of £1 8s 11d for the sale of ‘divers sup[er]stitious Imag[e]s of ye three p[er]sons in ye Trinity, Mary [and] J[oh]n [the] Baptist in brass’. It is interesting to note that the entry concerning the reglazing of the church windows gives no indication that ‘superstitious’ stained glass had been removed. This illustrates just how cryptic these accounts can be and the fact that there were undoubtedly more instances of iconoclasm than are recorded. Another point of interest is that Wallington dates the reformation at St Margaret’s to ‘the latter end of August’. If this is an accurate dating (rather than an approximation) then this 34

GL, MS 4215/1, fol. 69 (churchwardens’ accounts for 1642–3), and see also fols 72 and 73 (receipts for 1643–4), where quantities of marble from the demolished steps in the chancel and around the font are recorded as being sold; MS 3556/2, 1647–8. 35 St Mary le Strand has been included among the fourteen although the entry refers to the receipt of an order for the removal of the rails rather than their actual removal (WCA, MF 1900, St Mary le Strand churchwardens’ accounts, vol. 22. fol. 376v). 36 Wallington, Historical Notices, i, 259. 37 Ibid.

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Table One Responses of London parishes to the September 1641 order, 1641–2 Action Taken Parish No. Communion rails removed and/or communion tables moved.

Allhallows Barking, St Anne and St Agnes, 15 St Benet Paul’s Wharf, St Bride Fleet Street, St Giles in the Fields, St Helen Bishopsgate, St Lawrence Jewry, St Margaret New Fish Street, St Martin Orgar, St Mary Aldermary, St Mary le Strand, St Michael Cornhill, St Michael Crooked Lane, St Olave Jewry, St Olave Silver Street.1

Chancels levelled.

Allhallows Lombard Street, St Bride, St Mary le Strand, St Dionis Backchurch.2

4

Inscriptions St Mary Woolchurch, St Michael Wood Street, removed or defaced. St Pancras Soper Lane, St Leonard Eastcheap.3

4

Crosses (walls and windows).

St Michael Cornhill, St Pancras Soper Lane.

2

Organs removed.

St Michael Crooked Lane.

1

Images (paintings, stained glass, statuary, etc.) removed or defaced.

Allhallows Barking, Allhallows Honey Lane, St Andrew by the Wardrobe, St Clement Danes, St Dionis Backchurch, St Giles in the Fields, St Lawrence Jewry, St Magnus the Martyr, St Margaret New Fish Street, St Martin Orgar, St Martin Outwich, St Mary le Strand, St Mary Somerset, St Mary Woolchurch, St Michael Cornhill, St Pancras Soper Lane, St Stephen Walbrook, St Swithin London Stone.4

18

No. of individual parishes taking action ⫽ 29 1

The lack of specific dates in most churchwardens’ accounts means that there is no way of knowing whether rails were removed before or in response to the Commons’ order. The total number of parishes is, therefore, a maximum rather than an absolute figure. St Lawrence Jewry is included because this was clearly a response to the order even though prolonged dispute meant that the rails were not taken down until after June 1642. 2 At St Bride a mason was paid for taking down ‘the stoones’ about the communion table probably indicating a levelling of steps. The levelling of the chancel at St Dionis Backchurch was rather late – between Easter 1642 and Easter 1643. 3 Evidence for St Leonard Eastcheap comes from Wallington, Historical Notices, i, 159. 4 It should be noted that the entries for Allhallows Barking, Allhallows Honey Lane, St Andrew by the Wardrobe, St Clement Danes and St Martin Orgar show strong suggestions of iconoclasm rather than any definite action. At St Dionis Backchurch, St Giles in the Fields, St Mary Somerset and St Mary Woolchurch expenditure on iconoclastic work was recorded in the accounts for 1642–3 rather than those of 1641–2. However, we know from D’Ewes that St Mary Woolchurch was extremely prompt in obeying the September 1641 order and it is likely that the others were also responding to these (see Coates, 6).

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parish actually anticipated the Commons’ order of 8 September. Whilst rails had been torn up spontaneously in many places and there were probably other isolated acts of iconoclasm, it is hard to imagine such a full scale reformation being undertaken without authorization.38 The iconoclasm recorded in other parish accounts could take the form of a dramatic and sweeping purge, as in the cases of St Pancras Soper Lane and St Mary Woolchurch, or a one-off gesture such as the sale of an embroidered hearse cloth at St Mary Somerset in 1642. Some of these parishes, notably St Lawrence Jewry and St Giles in the Fields, had undergone extensive ‘beautification’ in recent years and Laudian fittings and furnishings were now being removed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or reluctance depending on the number and influence of the anti-Laudians in the parish. Others, like St Mary Woolchurch or St Stephen Walbrook, were traditionally Puritan parishes eagerly welcoming the long-awaited opportunity for reform.39 This reform could involve acts which came within the scope of the recent Commons’ order, such as the removal of superstitious ‘pictures’ (in paintings, statuary or glass windows) and the levelling of chancels, or pre-emptive strikes against crosses and superstitious inscriptions – neither of which were officially required to be removed until 1643. At Christ Church, in 1641, there was allegedly an attack on the organ (anticipating their abolition in May 1644) when churchwarden Peter Mills filled the pipes with brickbats. Mills was a staunch Puritan who had been involved in iconoclasm at St Paul’s Cathedral.40 On 19 October 1641 the vestry of St Lawrence Jewry decided to demolish an image of St Lawrence ‘lattely putt upp in the owtsyde of our church’. This seems to have been a carved stone or wooden statue, which, as three dimensional images were thought to be particularly dangerous, would have been a prime target. However, symbolic images were also targeted, particularly when they involved persons of the Trinity – as, for example, a dove representing the Holy Spirit taken down from above the pulpit at St Martin Outwich. In other accounts it is not always obvious whether the universal terms ‘picture’ or ‘image’ refer to windows, wall paintings or freehanging paintings – as at St Swithin London Stone, for instance, where a payment was made for ‘taking downe ye Pictures in ye church and making good their places’. At St Michael Cornhill both ‘a painters man and a Glassiers man’ were paid for ‘putting out the crosses in chancel and church’, suggesting that these may have been on both walls and in windows.41 38

Ibid.; GL, MS 1176/1, 1641–2. Ibid., MS 5714/1, fol. 137r and see fol. 131r for a description of the hearse cloth in an inventory of April 1641; MS 2590/1, 28 May and 13 August 1640, and MS 2593/1, fol. 258; G. Clinch, Bloomsbury and St Giles’s: Past and Present (1890), 11; Liu, Puritan London, 59–60. 40 Reported in Mercurius Aulicus, 13 December 1643 (see Oxford Royalist Newsbooks, ii, 264); Liu, Puritan London, 127–8. 41 GL, MS 2590/1, fol. 331, and for the statues’ removal see MS 2593/2, fol. 30; MS 11394/1, fol. 44v; MS 559/1, fol. 43r; MS 4071/2, fol. 137r. 39

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If the crosses at St Michael Cornhill were simple crosses – rather than crucifixes – then the parish was ahead of its time. Crucifixes were abolished under the 1641 order but plain crosses did not come under attack until at the earliest May 1643. This apparent eagerness is curious given the fact that this same church had to be given a reminder to enforce parliamentary ordinances as late as October 1645. However, as the rector of the parish William Brough had been a Laudian it is likely that these crosses were recent and possibly excessive additions. An example of such Laudian excess was the church of Allhallows Barking, where, according to offended Puritan parishioners, the letters IHS had been painted in no less than forty places.42 Church officials at St Pancras Soper Lane also removed crosses, although this is less surprising given the general zeal with which the 1641 order was interpreted here. The parish had Presbyterian leanings from the early 1640s and was later to become strongly Independent. As early as 15 October 1641 the vestry set out a list of reforming work to be done. It was ordered that the picture over the ffont the inscriptions on grave-stones tending to superstition and all the crosses set upon the walls and upon the candlestick by the pulpit & IHS & CHST by the Commandments to be all demolished the images over the church porch shalbe taken downe and demolished And also the Silver flagon for the markes on it being Superstitious and Jesuiticall and that the said markes shall hereafter be take[n] off and in the mean tyme [it] shall not be used.43

Given that this was a medieval church it is possible that the images over the porch and perhaps some of the other items were structural and of long standing, but the IHS and CHST were probably recent additions (and, therefore, examples of ‘new popery’). The accounts for 1635–6 show substantial amounts spent on plastering and painting, as well as money spent on glazing and upholstery. The silver flagon was certainly a recent acquisition. It had been donated by a Mrs Wightman in lieu of a sum of £10 left to the church in her husband’s will, and first appears in an inventory at the end of the year 1639–40. The mark on the flagon was copied into the margins of both the 1641–2 inventory in the churchwardens’ accounts and the vestry minute book, ‘as a note of the superstition of it’ (see plate 4). It consisted of a circle containing the letters IHS and a cross, around the inside perimeter of which was inscribed the caption ‘nomen domini laudabile’. There may have been some reluctance to deface the cup as a further order was required on 15 April 1642, although it had clearly been taken out of service – the vestry instructed that the mark should be ‘taken off and the flagon brought [back] into use’. This had been done by end of the 1641–2 accounts. However, the 42 43

CJ, ii, 35. Liu, Puritan London, 117, 87; GL, MS 5019/1, fol. 76.

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Plate 4. A drawing of the ‘Superstitious and Jesuitical’ mark from the communion cup of St Pancras Soper Lane, entered into the vestry minutes book, 15 April 1642. Underneath is written ‘The silver flagon to be defaced as to the above & brought into use’. Guildhall Library, MS 5019/1, fol. 80 147

PURITAN ICONOCLASM

story of the ‘Superstitious and Jesuiticall and idolatrous’ mark and its removal was subsequently written up beside every entry for the flagon in every yearly inventory right up until 1668, presumably as a warning against idolatry.44 Technically it was not until the May 1644 ordinance that the removal of crosses or images on plate was enforced by parliamentary legislation. However, the clear association of the kind of inscriptions described above with popery meant they were often under attack earlier with the tacit approval of parliament. Superstitious inscriptions on graves, of which there is evidence for removal at St Pancras, St Michael Wood Street, St Leonard Eastcheap and St Mary Woolchurch, were a different matter. As these concerned secular monuments, often belonging to noble families, parliament was at first reluctant to see them tampered with, and they were only included in the official regulations in August 1643.45 It has already been seen that Michael Herring, churchwarden of St Mary Woolchurch, was reprimanded by parliament for defacing brass inscriptions on secular monuments.46 On 16 October 1641 the case was brought before the Commons, with both Herring and a number of parishioners present. Whilst the parishioners had accused him of acting ‘without warrant’, Herring defended himself with his own petition reporting how he had carried out the order of 8 September. He had ‘taken upp divers brasse Inscriptions which tended to idolatrie and . . . defaced some statues on tombs which were in the posture of praying and the like’. In the following debate D’Ewes commented on the ‘scandal’ of the attack on tombs, but nonetheless acknowledged the ‘good intent’ behind it. The Commons then formally declared their disapproval of Herring’s ‘indiscreete act’ and ordered that the inscriptions should be put back and the damage made good.47 The order to put back the brasses was not, however, strictly obeyed. An entry in the churchwardens’ accounts for the year 1642–3 records one Robert Wiles, a mason, ‘filling upp the places where the superstitious images of brass were taken upp and not fitt to be put downe againe’ (my emphasis). That this unfitness was due to their superstitious nature rather than to any damage incurred is made clear by another entry, in which a carver is paid for taking up and laying down with brass pins the monuments and defacing the superstitious inscriptions and cutting others in their stead that are not offensive (my emphasis).48 44

Ibid., MS 5018/1, fol. 28v; inventories for 1639–40 (fol. 37v) and 1641–2 (fol. 39r); MS 5019/1, fol. 80. Ibid., fol. 76; MS 5018/1, 1641–2; MS 524/1, fol. 124; MS 1013/1, fol. 184r. For St Leonard Eastcheap see Wallington, Historical Notices, i, 259. Brasses bearing images were also taken up at this time from St Margaret New Fish Street, although inscriptions were not ‘karved out’ of the gravestones here until 1643–4 (see ibid., and GL, MS 1176/1, 1641–2 and 1643–4). 46 See ch. 3 above. 47 Coates, 6; The Heads of Several Petitions and Complaints (1641), 2. 48 GL, MS 1013/1, fol. 184r. The iconoclasm at St Mary’s actually appears in the churchwardens’ accounts for 1642–3, although as the case came before parliament on 16 October 1641, it is clear that it began almost immediately after the issue of the September 1641 order (see Coates, 6). 45

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Other iconoclastic acts at St Mary Woolchurch involved the defacing of images of the Virgin and attendant angels, with payments made to a mason for ‘framing them into another different shape’, and a carver for work ‘done . . . in the like kinde in altering of images’. This was described by those who petitioned against Herring as an attack on ‘emblems of antiquity’, implying that those items being defaced were not all recent additions but older – possibly pre-Reformation – survivals. This early iconoclasm cost the parish in total some £22 or more, including the ‘care and relief’ of a workman hurt in a fall from scaffolding. The brass taken from the monuments was later melted down and exchanged in part for a twelve-branch candlestick.49 Herring was also responsible for selling some items of church plate at this time. One item, a gift from a parishioner made only the previous year, was described as an ‘offering bason with the image of a Bull engraven in the middle of it’ – a bull or ox in Christian symbolism being traditionally associated with sacrifice.50 The 1641 order did require the removal of basins from the communion table, but there were no regulations concerning symbolic images or ‘representations’ until May 1644. It is highly likely, given Herring’s zeal, that he found the image offensive. Other evidence concerning St Mary’s suggests that the parish also anticipated legislation regarding crosses, notably steeple crosses, which were not required to be removed in London until May 1643. Commenting on the death at the first battle of Newbury of Captain Richard Hunt – a member of the City of London’s ‘red regiment’, and a prominent St Mary Woolchurch parishioner – Mercurius Aulicus described how he had been the first that committed Sacriledge on his owne Parish Church (after John Pym’s Order for defacing of Churches) pulling downe the Crosse from off the Steeple, the Crosse from off the King’s Crowne over the Font, lopping off the hands and pulling out the eyes from the Tombes and Monuments, cutting off the Cherubims wings placed upon the Arches, and (which both Christians and Jews will abhorre) blotting out the dreadful name of GOD as it stood over the Commandements in Hebrew, Greek and Latine.51

The dating of Hunt’s iconoclasm is not certain. This account was written in October 1643, so the events described could well have occurred as part of the May 1643 campaign against crosses. However, there is no evidence in the church’s accounts for any iconoclasm after the enthusiastic bout of 1641–2, which, as seen, included attacks on tombs such as those described here. 49

GL, MS 1013/1, fol. 183v–184r; The Heads of Several Petitions and Complaints, 2. GL, MS 1013/1, fol. 183v. On images in Christian art see Sill, A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art, 24. 51 Oxford Royalist Newsbooks, ii, 96. On Richard Hunt see Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 208, 209, n. 52 and passim. 50

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The implication is that Hunt was one of the very first iconoclasts in London, whilst the term ‘John Pym’s Order’ suggests that of September 1641 which he promoted during the parliamentary recess. What is certain is that both Richard Hunt and Michael Herring were important civic leaders who took the reformation of their parish church into their own hands. Both were wealthy merchants, committed parliamentarians and religious activists. Hunt was a ‘fervent Root and Brancher’ who had links with leading separatists, whilst Herring was a political and religious Presbyterian. The more prominent of the two, Herring was a common councillor from 1641, and sat on various City and parliamentary committees, including the Committee for the Advance of Money, and the City’s Committee for Scandalous Ministers (created in December 1642). The personal role these men took in driving forward the iconoclastic reformation of their church illustrates the importance of the attitudes and beliefs of influential local officials.52 The reformers at St Mary Woolchurch were also reported to have destroyed ‘a very faire windowe’. Stained glass windows occupied a good deal of the time of iconoclasts. There are several entries in the churchwardens’ accounts of 1641 and 1642 recording repairs to windows which are frustratingly nonspecific. A likely candidate for iconoclastic action was the work undertaken at St Andrew by the Wardrobe where an entry immediately after a payment for the 5 November bell ringing (and therefore suggestive of a date not too long after the September 1641 order) reads ‘paid for taking downe of old glasse and setting upp of new’.53 At St Stephen Walbrook over £57 was spent reglazing church windows and corroborative evidence shows this expenditure to be down to iconoclastic action. A newsletter of 22 September 1641 described how parishioner John Warner (an alderman and prominent religious radical) was quick to enforce the Commons’ legislation: [he] pulled down all the painted glass in the windows of his parish church, which some value at £1000; they were so ‘artificially’ painted. It is said a painter offered £40 for the picture of Lazarus whom Christ raised from the dead, it was so very well done.54

The picture of Lazarus may have been one of those installed in 1613, when the windows were extensively reglazed. One chancel window erected at this time contained a depiction of the martyrdom of St Stephen and this would undoubtedly have met the same fate.55 52 On Hunt and Herring, see ibid., 67 and n. 153, 231, 72, 143, 73, n. 195, 222, 265–7 and passim. See also Liu, Puritan London, 144 n. 13, 59. 53 The Heads of Several Petitions and Complaints, 2. St Mary’s accounts for 1642–3 show payments of £1 11s 8d for glazing which could represent the removal and replacement of stained glass windows, although this is not specified (GL, MS 1013/1, fol. 184 ). Ibid., MS 2088/1, 1641–2. 54 HMC, Salisbury (Cecil) MSS, xxii, 364. For the expenditure, see GL, MS 593/4, 1641–2. For Warner, see Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, passim. 55 GL, MS 593/2, fol. 124r–125r.

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The records of St Lawrence Jewry are far more forthcoming concerning the issue of image windows in the church, particularly the great east window which contained ‘superstitious storyes and pictures’. The case of this window and its piecemeal demolition is enlightening. It was one of several windows extensively repaired or replaced in 1618–19, largely at the expense of local patrons. The east window had originally been the gift of Sir William Estfield, probably the knight of that name who was a great patron of the Mercers’ Company in the early fifteenth century, as it was the Mercers who donated between £30 and £40 for its repair in the early seventeenth century. The churchwardens’ accounts do not go back far enough to ascertain what, if any, damage was done to this window in the early Reformation, although obscured and worn away entries for 1580 refer to new glass being put into the church windows suggesting the possibility of partial iconoclasm at that point. Further repair work was undertaken in 1592. Perhaps individual faces and figures had been knocked out – common practice at the time to save the expense of replacing whole windows, especially large ones like this. It may then have been felt acceptable to restore the biblical stories to their former glory in the more tolerant atmosphere of the late Jacobean period. The cost of the repair suggests that a good deal of work was done on the window, but the implication in the records is that the ‘stories of the great window . . . set up first by William Estfield’ were still at least in part extant and were being restored, not replaced. This is an important point given the subsequent fate of the window, which illuminates the increasingly thorough attitude of church reformers.56 The vestry at St Lawrence’s decided on 19 October 1641, that the churchwardens myght and ought to follow the order of the house of Commons . . . in the removinge [and] abollyshinge of the superstishous storyes and pictures in the East window of the churches chauncell set upp by the Company of Mercers.57

The need to reform the windows appears to have sparked off a dispute with the Mercers’ Company over who was responsible for the financial implications of the necessary work. At the vestry meeting it was reported that the churchwardens had visited the Mercers’ Company and requested that they ‘amend the window themselfs and they did refuse to doe it’. The churchwarden’s accounts show payments made to a Mr Sutton for viewing the window, and for trips to both the Mercers’ Company and to parliament ‘to speake with Mr Pym’. This Mr Sutton may well be the glass painter

56

Ibid., MS 2590/1, fol. 331, and see fol. 226 for the vestry decision to repair the window in 1617; MS 2593/1, fol. 258, and see accounts 1579–80 and 1592 for earlier work. On William Estfield see J. Watney, The Mercers’ Company (1914), 163. 57 GL, MS 2590/1, fol. 331.

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Baptista Sutton whose name crops up in several of the church records. He would no doubt have viewed the windows to assess the work required and the cost, and his visit to parliament may have been an attempt to force the Mercers’ Company to pay up (although it may also have been part of the ongoing dispute with the vicar Thomas Crane, who was opposed to the reformation of the church.). Despite its efforts the parish ended up paying for the erection of scaffolding and the replacement of about twenty feet of glass.58 This was not, however, the end of the story. Less than a year and a half later at a vestry meeting of 17 May 1643 it was again decided that the churchwardens should go to the Mercers’ Company ‘concerning the greate windowe’ to request them to ‘take downe the cullered glas and put in white glas . . . if not we must do it ourselves’. This renewed concern over the window may have been prompted by the formation, three weeks earlier, of the Harley Committee, which was to oversee the enforcement of iconoclastic legislation in London. It may also reflect pressure from the City authorities at the nearby Guildhall who had recently commissioned a report on superstitious images in the vicinity. Once again, however, the Mercers refused to pay to replace the window and the parish was forced to spend over £19 on replacing 386 feet of glass (excluding labour costs), and a further £2 10s for the erection of the king’s arms in the window.59 It is not clear if the dispute between the Mercers and the St Lawrence vestry was simply about money or whether there was an element of principal

58

Ibid.; GL, MS 2593/2, fol. 30. Baptista Sutton was a glass painter of some note. His signature appears on the Jacob window made for St Leonard Shoreditch (1634, now in the chapel at Greenwich Hospital). Other work attributed to him includes the east window at Peterhouse Chapel, Cambridge (1632), another at St Leonard Apelthorpe, Northamptonshire (1621), and the windows of the church of Little Easton, Essex (1621). He may have been responsible for the east window set up by Laud in the New Chapel at St Margaret’s Westminster: although it has been suggested that this was the work of Richard Butler, it was Sutton who was called to give information against Laud at his trial (see J. A. Knowles, ‘Notes on the history of the Glaziers’ Company’, Antiquaries Journal, 7 (1927), 287–9, 290; M. Archer, ‘Seventeenth century painted glass at Little Easton’, Essex Journal, 12 (1977), 4–5, 9; PRO, SP 16/499/71). The name Sutton appears in four other London accounts: ‘Baptist’ Sutton was involved in the removal of stained glass windows (perhaps his own?) at St Magnus Martyr (see below); in 1640–2 he was paid £28 for a window containing the king’s arms at St Mary Colechurch (see 172, n. 116 below); in 1645, he was commissioned to make a window depicting Queen Elizabeth for the vestry of St Dunstan in the West (GL, MS. 3016/1, fol. 689r); and in 1654 to put up another containing the Commonwealth arms at Allhallows Barking (Maskell, Berkyngechirche juxta Turrim, 127). If the ‘Mr Sutton’ involved with the viewing and partial reformation of the great east window at St Lawrence Jewry was Baptista Sutton, then it is possible that he worked on the original restoration of the window in 1619 (another glazier was used when it was demolished altogether in 1643–4). Sutton was also in the regular employ of the City authorities and possibly involved in the removal of stained glass from the Guildhall and its chapel (CLRO, City cash accounts, 1642–3, fols 138r, 213r; 1644–5, fol. 50v ). It is possible that the use of such a prestigious glass painter indicates a parish wishing to reform windows carefully or to replace them with good quality secular painted glass. One can only speculate about the feelings of glaziers and glass painters called upon to destroy their own work or the work of others. 59 See below on the Guildhall and the City report; GL, MS 2590/1, fol. 338; MS 2593/2, fol. 69.

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involved – the company had ordered ‘offensive pictures to be taken away and defaced’ from their own chapel on 31 March 1642.60 However, what is important about the iconoclasm here is that it illustrates the way in which the progress of reformation placed increasingly stringent demands on what was required of the parish regarding the great window. Clearly in the first instance, in 1641–2, the churchwardens saw to the taking out of only the most obviously offensive features of the window (only some twenty feet of glass). Over time this simply wasn’t good enough. A similar story can be seen at St Magnus the Martyr where stained glass windows were also reformed in two stages. Both this parish and that of St Lawrence had a history of opposition to Laudianism: during Dr Ducke’s visitation to enforce the new canons and the oath, on 30 September and 1 October 1640, violent protests had broken out and Ducke and his officials were forced to beat a hasty retreat.61 St Magnus had also been one of the scenes of rail riots in June 1641. The churchwardens, again as at St Lawrence’s, were quick to follow up the Commons’ order – on 4 October 1641 a glazier was paid to view the windows for superstitious images and a workman to do the same in the chancel. The following January work was done on the plasterwork around the windows and the glazier Baptista Sutton replaced 93 feet of glass. Yet on 28 June 1644 Sutton was brought in again to take down ‘painted imagery glass’ and is described as ‘rectifying’ and new-glazing ‘many’ of the church windows. The timing of this second work is telling – just a few weeks after the May 1644 ordinance for ‘further demolition’. The fact that this was a Puritan parish would seem to suggest a church keeping up with the more rigorous demands of official iconoclasm rather than late compliance or lack of commitment.62 In parishes where there had been extensive adornment of the church undertaken by Laudian incumbents, such as at St Giles in the Fields and Allhallows Barking, those parishioners who had objected were now able to take advantage of the changing political situation to strip away ‘offensive’ additions. The church of St Giles in the Fields had been rebuilt between 1627 and 1630 and lavishly refurbished, largely owing to the patronage of Lady Alice Dudley. An altar had been built, with steps and rails and hung with rich silk curtains. The altar screen donated by Lady Dudley was carved with statues of on the one side . . . St Paul, with his sword; on the other St Barnabas, with his book; and over them Peter with his Keyes . . . all set above with winged cherubims, and beneath supported with lions.63 60

Mercers Company Archives, Acts of Court 1641–5, fol. 25v. There is, rather surprisingly, no reference to the dispute with the vestry of St Lawrence in the company’s acts of court. 61 HMC, De L’Isle and Dudley MSS, vi (1966), 333, and BL, Add. MS 11045, fols 122–3. See also Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 11, 37, 40. 62 GL, MS 1179/1, fols 27, 42; Liu, Puritan London, 144, n. 10. 63 Petition and Articles Exhibited in Parliament against Dr Heywood (1641), 5.

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The windows of the new church, which had been paid for by individual parishioners, were also very elaborate. That on the east side of the chancel contained four compartments depicting Isaac with an angel, Moses, David playing the harp, and Solomon praying. Another at the west end of the south aisle contained an effigy of the Saviour.64 The parishioners of the church petitioned to parliament against their rector, William Heywood, in 1640 and he was referred to the Committee for Religion which had been set up shortly after the opening of the Long Parliament to proceed against Laudian incumbents. The churchwardens’ accounts at St Giles in the Field for 1641–2 contain an entry for expenses incurred ‘about the attendance on the Committee for one whole week about removing the communion table and regulating the church’, and another for a payment made to a messenger ‘for bringing ye order from the Committee . . . for takeing downe the communion table and rails’. This was not an easy task and involved retiling the chancel, levelling the ground and repairing and repainting the wainscotting around the upper chancel, at a cost of over £8. All this must have been done before 12 October 1641 when the parishioners gave information to parliament confirming the removal of rails but complaining about Heywood’s resistance to other reforms.65 Also in this year a glazier was paid 13s for new glazing in the church – a rather small amount considering the extent of potentially objectionable stained glass involved. It may be that the worst areas were being ‘blotted’ out (the picture of Christ would be the most offensive and probably the first to go). By comparison the first twenty feet of new glass put up in the great east window at St Lawrence Jewry cost 10s 6d. The following year’s accounts at St Giles show painted glass being taken down in ‘chancell and church’ and new glass set up at the cost of £1 9s, with a further glazier’s bill for £3 17s dated 19 March 1644. The total amount of glazing work over the three years could have paid for up to 238 feet of new plain glass (making no allowance for labour costs).66 The reformation at St Giles did not happen all at once, and Dr Heywood may well have put up some resistance – indeed there may have been mixed feelings in the parish. The fact that individual parishioners had paid for much of the glass may account for a certain reluctance to see it broken down. The organ loft, painted with the twelve apostles, had been donated by Lady Dudley and was not painted over until 1642, and her altar screen was 64

Clinch, Bloomsbury and St Giles, 11. Petition against Dr Heywood; Camden Library Studies Centre, Camden reel 10 (microfilm), St Giles in the Fields churchwardens’ accounts, 1641–2. See also Coates, 5. 66 Camden Library, Camden reel 10, St Giles in the Fields churchwardens’ accounts, 1641–2, 1642–3, 1644–5 (19 March). This estimate of costs has been based on the bills of John Rutland for putting up plain glass at Westminster Abbey, where the price is given at 6d per foot (see BL, Add. MS 70005, bill dated 15 July 1645). By contrast at St Lawrence Jewry the east window was replaced in Normandy glass at a cost of 12d per foot (see GL, MS 2593/2, fol. 69). 65

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not taken down until after Christmas Eve 1644, the money for its sale being donated to the poor. It is hard to believe, however, that it could have continued so long undefaced and it likely that the statues of the saints were removed earlier. Two books with embroidered covers depicting Christ and the Virgin Mary with Christ in her arms, which had sat on the communion table, were not sold until 8 April 1645 along with the silk and taffeta hangings, although undoubtedly these would all have been out of use for some time.67 It has already been seen how the inhabitants of Allhallows Barking had petitioned in 1640 against superstitious ornaments brought in by their minister, Edward Layfield. The offensive items included ‘little wooden angels’ on the communion rails, ten statues of saints placed in the chancel, and the letters IHS painted in gold letters on the communion table and in a further forty places around the church. Layfield was also accused of bowing to the communion table and of refusing to give sacrament unless it was received at the altar. He was reported to have likened those who opposed ceremony in the church to ‘black Toads, spotted Toads, and venomous Toads, like Jack Straw and Wat Tyler’, and he taught that such people were ‘in the State of Damnation’. In November 1640, the case was brought before parliament and referred to the Committee for Religion. When the head of the Committee, John White, reported back to the Commons on 25 November it was decided that Layfield should be sent for as a delinquent. He was jailed until obtaining bail on 19 January 1641, and was eventually sequestered in February 1643 after a spell as a chaplain in the royalist army.68 The protests against Layfield were not, however, representative of the feelings of the whole parish. In April 1641 a counter-petition defending the vicar was drawn up by over thirty vestrymen and ‘chief inhabitants’, including the two serving churchwardens. It claimed that the earlier petitioners had acted ‘without consent, knowledge or approbation of ours’; that Layfield was innocent of accusations of having spent poor money on ornaments for the church; and that the communion rails which had been complained of as ‘innovations’ had been in the church ‘time out of mind’, the angels placed upon them ‘before Dr Layfield was vicar’. This may well have been correct as there seems to have been a move towards beautifying the church from as early as 1613.69

67

Camden Library, Camden reel 10, St Giles in the Fields churchwardens’ accounts, 1642–3 and 1644–5; Utah reel 8 (microfilm), St Giles in the Fields’ vestry minutes, fol. 47. 68 PRO, SP 16/375/99, and London Metropolitan Archives, DL/C/344, fos 68v–9v; CJ, ii, 35; Notestein, 65; Matthews, Walker Revised, 53. 69 PRO, SP 16/503/111. This has been wrongly calendared as 1644 (CSPD, 1644–5, 213), but a copy has been made in the Allhallows’ vestry minute book under the date 11 April 1641 (Allhallows by the Tower, vestry minutes, reel 6, 11 April 1641). For the ‘beautifying’ of the church before Layfield’s time, see London County Council Survey of London, xii, pt 1, The Parish of Allhallows Barking, ed. L. J. Redstone (1929), 41–2.

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More iconoclastic work was undertaken at Allhallows after the Commons’ order of September 1641. The churchwardens’ accounts of May 1641 to April 1642 record a payment of £3 made to a joiner ‘for work upon the rails and other worke in the church’ (whether they were removed altogether is unclear, although highly likely); and £3 11s was spent for ‘two glasse lights’ for the east and west ends of the church, which may represent work on ‘superstitious’ windows (the amount is fairly large). Later, in 1643, pictures of Moses and Aaron were painted over, gold was picked out of an embroidered pulpit cloth, the steeple cross was sawn down and ‘superstitious letters’ were cut out of brasses in the church.70 Not everyone who objected to the ‘adornments’ of Laudian ministers such as Layfield did so from zealous iconophobia. John Squire, vicar of St Leonard Shoreditch, had offended his parishioners by erecting ‘Pictures of the Virgin Mary, of Christ, and his 12 Apostles at his last supper in Glasse’. However, in a petition to parliament, dated 7 August 1641, the same parishioners explained how they had ‘desired rather that . . . a Crucifixe might be erected’. Crucifixes were, of course, equally offensive to iconoclasts and were specifically abolished by the 1641 order. This inconsistency allowed Squire to retort that he had committed no offence in overriding the parishioners’ wishes ‘because the Crucifixe had bin adored in the time of Popery’. Perhaps, in this case, the issue was less an objection to images than some kind of parochial power struggle, or part of a broader objection to an overbearing minister.71 Keith Lindley has noted a tendency after 1640 for parochial affairs to be carried on in a more ‘open and participatory’ manner, with officials increasingly chosen at general meetings rather than vestries. He comments that ‘the enlarging of opportunities for householders and ratepayers to participate in the conduct of parish affairs after 1640 allowed zealous minorities to assert or extend their influence at parish level’.72 It has certainly been noted that the commitment of individuals or small groups was crucial to the reinforcement of iconoclastic legislation, as was the ability to sieze power at whatever level, and in whatever form, it was offered. Where the sympathy of the majority lay, however, is difficult (if not impossible) to ascertain – with each party in each petition and counter-petition claiming themselves to be most representative of the parish as a whole. No doubt the real majority remained silent. What is clear is that there was a good deal of conflict of feeling, 70

Allhallows by the Tower, churchwardens’ accounts, reel 11, 1641–2 and 1643–4. Articles exhibited in Parliament against Mr John Squire, Vicar of St Leonard Shoreditch (1641), 5; J. Squire, An Answer to a printed paper entitled Articles Exhibited in Parliament against Mr John Squire, Vicar of St Leonard Shoreditch (1641), 5. 72 Lindley, Popular Politics and Relgion, 59–60. At Easter 1642 there were a number of contested elections for the office of churchwarden like that which took place at St Lawrence Jewry, described above. See, for example, the cases of St Giles Cripplegate and St Olave, Southwark (ibid., and see further BL, Harl. MS 163, fol. 84). 71

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but that those whose godly inclinations drove them to iconoclasm found their position strengthened by official support from the Commons and later from the City authorities. The attitudes of individual ministers, church officials and leading parishioners remained the most important factor in the observance of the 1641 order, there being no central body to enforce it. The Committee for Religion and, after December 1640, the Committee for Scandalous Ministers appear to have had some power to demand compliance in individual cases – as at St Giles in the Fields where the committee ordered the removal of rails and the moving of the communion table in 1640–1 – but this was not their primary function. Official regulation was finally provided in London on 24 April 1643 with the formation of the Harley Committee, specifically created to oversee the ‘demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry’ in the City and surrounding environs.73 Within the jurisdiction of the City, the Harley Committee worked alongside the mayor and aldermen. The report by a group of ministers, ordered by the City authorities on 23 March 1643 and produced on 27 April, appears to have influenced parliament to widen the powers of the Harley Committee to include public spaces. According to John Vicars, the mayor and Common Council, after hearing the findings of this report, presented a unanimous petition that both [Cheapside Cross] . . . and all other Monuments of Romish idolatry and superstition shd be utterly defaced, and quite taken away from the places and stations where they had been both in the Citie of London and liberties thereof, as well in Churches as elsewhere in any places whatsoever.74

The four men who drew up the report were well-known London ministers, strongly Presbyterian, fast preachers, and members of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. They were William Gouge of St Anne Blackfriars, Thomas Case of St Mary Magdalen Milk Street, Lazarus Seaman of Allhallows Bread Street, and Edmund Calamy of St Mary Aldermanbury – although Calamy’s name was not to appear on the final report. Their original remit had been to view the windows of the Guildhall and its chapel and ‘what they finde or conceive to be sup[er]stitious and Idolatrous the same to bee forthwith pulld downe’. The report, which went beyond this remit, is informative and worth quoting in full: wee having met together and diligently viewed the p[re]mises, doe finde that the auntient painted windowes doe retayne the pictures of the three p[er]sons in Trinity, of Christ and the Virgin Mary in 73

Camden Library, Camden reel 10, St Giles in the Fields churchwardens’ accounts, 1641–2; CJ, iii, 63. 74 CLRO, Repertory 56, fols 140r, 160v–161r; see also Journal 40, fol. 58v; Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 2, 320–1.

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severall formes, of the prophets, Apostles, p[re]tended s[ain]ts Popes Cardinalls Monkes ffryers Nuunes & suchlike, besides sundry inscriptions upon To[m]bes Gravestones and windows as, orate pro anima, & orate pro animatus &c. All w[hi]ch wee conceave to be Monum[en]ts of Idolatry and Sup[er]stition And therefore that it is necessary they shold bee removed and utterly destroyed Nott only in the places before menconed [the Guildhall and its chapel] butt in all other places w[i]thin the jurisdicion of the Cittie And in especiall manner the Cheapside Crosse (by w[hi]ch wee meane not only the Cross itselfe butt the whole ffabricke w[hi]ch comonly goes under that name) for all w[hi]ch wee are ready to tender this Court some of those reasons amongst many w[hi]ch wee conceave doe iustifie and make good this our iudgement and resolution.75

Unfortunately there is no record of the ‘reasons’ the ministers were ready to tender, although it is not likely that the mayor and aldermen needed too much convincing on this issue. A move to reform the Guildhall had already been made immediately after the 1641 order, when, on 15 October, the aldermen instructed the sheriffs to view the chapel windows and to report back.76 Some glazing work appears to have followed, although no specific details are given in the City cash accounts for 1642–3. Clearly, as the report of 1643 testifies, much was left to be done and more work was undertaken on the windows in the following year, 1644–5. The Guildhall chapel, which had been founded in 1299, was demolished in 1822 but drawings dating from the eighteenth century show the windows apparently filled with plain glass, suggesting that they had been thoroughly cleansed.77 It is not surprising that there was a greater drive for reformation in the City in 1643, as the mayor in that year was Isaac Pennington, a religious Independent and member of the congregation at St Stephen Coleman Street, whose commitment to iconoclastic reform has already been seen.78 His zeal was shared by the ministers involved in drawing up the Guildhall report as made clear by their broad definition of what constituted a monument of superstition and idolatry. This went beyond both that outlined in the 1641 order and that of the order to churchwardens which would be issued by the Harley Committee in May 1643, less than a fortnight after the ministers’ report. The report listed not only images of the Trinity but other figures which had not been legislated against at this point, such as prophets, apostles, saints and so on, as well as inscriptions. Neither images 75

CLRO, Repertory 56, fols 160v–161r. Ibid., Repertory 55, fol. 199r. Ibid., City cash accounts, 1642–3, fols 138r and 213r; 1644–5, fol. 50v. These two years specifically mention glazing in the Guildhall and the chapel although no separate amounts are given. See the many prints of the Guildhall chapel from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Guildhall Library Prints Department. 78 A. B. Beavan, Aldermen of the City of London (2 vols, 1908–13) and DNB. For Pennington, see also Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, passim. 76 77

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of saints nor inscriptions were outlawed until August 1643 and it is tempting to see the reforming campaign in London as an experiment that helped to define the terms of that parliamentary ordinance, which was to be applied countrywide. The immediate response to this initiative by the City authorities, working in conjunction with the Harley Committee, was a campaign of iconoclasm beginning with the demolition of Cheapside Cross in May 1643. The cross had long been controversial and had recently been the focus of some conflict. An attack in the early hours of 25 January 1642 had sparked off a new round of public debate over the issue. Sir John Coke reported that feelings were running high and that there was ‘a great schism among apprentices concerning the cross in Cheap, whether it should be pulled down; it is often in danger and some hurt is done upon it’. These conflicts broke into riot on 2 February when a small group of apprentices attempted to pull the cross down and many more (reportedly one hundred) came to its defence. The then mayor, Richard Gurney, a royalist in sympathy who was impeached in July 1642, was accused of having ‘suffered those that called themselves Defenders of the Cross to commit Tumults without any punishment’, although it was more likely that he was simply trying to keep the peace.79 There continued to be spontaneous attacks on the cross – it was allegedly defaced ‘several times’ in the first few months of 1643.80 When its official end finally came the authorities made sure it was turned into a great public spectacle (see plate 5). Vicars described how ‘many thousands’ came to watch the demolition of the cross, which was guarded and solemnized with Bands of Souldiers, Sounding their Trumpets, and shooting off their peeces, as well as shouting-out with their voices, and ecchoing out their joyfull acclamations at the happie downfal of Antichrist in England.81

However, according to the Venetian ambassador, the large crowd remained divided in its sympathies, with the presence of troopers a precaution against rioting. The images of ‘gods, saints, and Popes’ taken from the cross were melted down in a large public bonfire, the lead then used to make bullets. Shortly afterwards ‘all other crosses and images on Churches and Church Steeples in London’ were demolished. Vicars described ‘very many’ being broken down including three crosses recently erected at St Paul’s Cathedral. It was parliament’s purpose ‘by God’s blessing to ruinate all the rest in all other places and partes of the Kingdome’.82 79 For the pamphlet debate surrounding the cross, see ch. 2. HMC, Cowper MSS, 12th Report, appendix, pt ii, 304; LJ, v, 230 (and also 239, 247, 256–7, 404). On Cheapside Cross generally see Cressy, ‘The downfall of Cheapside Cross’, in idem, Travesties and Transgressions, ch. 14. 80 See The Last Will and Testament of Charing Cross (1646). 81 Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 2, 326–7. 82 CSPV, 1642–3, 272; Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 2, 328.

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Plate 5. The demolition of Cheapside Cross, May 1643. Note that Vicars, a propagandist for parliament and iconoclasm, is careful to stress the popular support for this action, and the lack of violence, with ‘no hurt done at all’. This was undoubtedly due to the very prominent presence of the parliamentary troops, as can be seen here. BL, G.4099, John Vicars, True Information of the Beginning and Cause of all our Troubles (1648), 17

On 10 May the Harley Committee sent out its order to churchwardens in London, largely repeating the clauses of the Commons’ order of September 1641, but with the additional proscription of plain crosses and the new instruction that crosses, crucifixes and images or pictures of persons of the Trinity ‘upon the outside of your church or in any open place within your p[ari]sh’ were to be demolished. Churchwardens were given only ten days to perform this work with a deadline set for 20 May.83 The impact of this campaign under the combined forces of the Harley Committee and the City authorities can be clearly seen in the churchwardens’ accounts where during 83 Foure Orders of Great Consequence. See also Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 2, 329. For the full text of the order see Appendix I.

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THE RESPONSE IN LONDON

the year 1643–4 some fourteen churches paid money to messengers bringing copies of the order. Another two churches – St John Zachery and St Ethelburga – received copies the following year, perhaps as reminders of work neglected (see Table Two). Six of the entries in the records state that this order was from parliament, and two are more specific still, describing the order as coming from ‘ye Committee’ and being brought by ‘Sr Robart Harlowes man’. One set, received by St Antholin Budge Row, was sent from the Lord Mayor. Only two of the entries in the accounts concerning the order give specific dates: that at St Dunstan in the East dated 17 May 1643, and that at Allhallows the Less at the rather late date of 14 June 1643.84 At some point in 1643, seven of the parishes which record the receipt of Harley’s order along with another thirteen which do not were involved in the removal of crosses from steeples or other parts of the church roof (see Table Two). In four of the five accounts which give specific dates the crosses were removed around May 1643, soon after the demolition of Cheapside Cross. External evidence shows that a cross was also removed from St Clement Danes at this time. In a case which came before the Middlesex Session of 17 May 1643 (at the instigation of the mayor) one Roland Kelsinge was accused of speaking in a ‘disdainefull and Scornefull manner’ during the removal of the cross, having reportedly shouted ‘round it, round it make it all round’. This, however, was found not to have been contemptuous and Kelsinge was discharged after taking the oath of allegience. Other crosses were recorded removed at later dates: the cross at St Dunstan in the East in February 1644, and that at St Botolph Billingsgate some time between Michaelmas 1643 and Easter 1644, surprisingly late in a church which removed its rails ‘not to be sett upe Agane’ at the very beginning of the Long Parliament. Perhaps this is indicative of a difference in attitude towards the removal of an ‘innovation’ compared to the removal of a traditional piece of church ornamentation. There is evidence for the demolishing of steeple crosses the following year at St Ethelburga and St John Zachery, no doubt in response to their reminders from the committee.85 In all, there is some evidence of iconoclasm in 1643–4 for thirty-six of the parishes for which there are surviving records, representing forty-two per cent of the total studied (see Table Two). This included the removal of 84

See Table Two. Those which specifically mention the committee and Harley’s man are St Andrew by the Wardrobe and St John Zachery (GL, MS 2088/1, 1643–4, and MS 590/1, fol. 191v); ibid., MS 1046/1, fol. 200v; MS 7882/1, fol. 217; MS 823/1, 1643–4. 85 Specific dates for the demolition of crosses are given for St Botolph Bishopsgate (ibid., MS 4524/2, fol. 78v, 2 May 1643), St Michael Bassishaw (ibid., MS 2601/1, pt 1, 1643–3, 20 May 1643), Allhallows Barking (Allhallows by the Tower churchwardens’ accounts, reel 11, 1643–4, 24 May 1643), St Bride (GL, MS 6554/1, fol. 120v, between 4 May and the beginning of June 1643), and St Dunstan in the East (ibid., MS 7882/1, fol. 221, 2 February 1644); London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SBB/33, fol. 33; GL, MS 943/1, fol. 165v, MS 4241/1, fol. 383, and MS 590/1, fol. 191v. See Table Two for the removal of crosses recorded in parish records.

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Table Two Responses of London parishes to the setting up of the Harley Committee and the August 1643 ordinance, 1643–4 Action Taken Parish No. Receipt of order from the Harley Committee.

Allhallows the Great, Allhallows the Less, Holy Trinity, 14 St Andrew by the Wardrobe, St Antholin Budge Row, St Benet Paul’s Wharf, St Dunstan in the East, St John Walbrook, St Lawrence Jewry, St Martin Outwich, St Mary Colechurch, St Mary Somerset, St Mary Woolchurch, St Matthew Friday Street.1

Removal of steeple and other crosses.

Allhallows Barking, Allhallows the Great, Holy Trinity, 20 St Andrew by the Wardrobe, St Benet Gracechurch,2 St Botolph Billingsgate, St Botolph Bishopsgate, St Bride Fleet Street, St Clement Danes, St Dionis Backchurch, St Dunstan in the East, St Helen Bishopsgate, St Lawrence Pountney, St Margaret Pattens, St Martin Outwich, St Mary Abchurch, St Mary Colechurch, St Matthew Friday Street, St Michael Bassishaw, St Pancras Soper Lane.3

Inscriptions removed or defaced.

Allhallows Barking, Allhallows the Less, Allhallows 13 Lombard Street, St Benet Gracechurch, St Christopher le Stocks, St Dionis Backchurch, St Dunstan in the West, St Helen Bishopsgate, St Margaret New Fish Street, St Mary Abchurch, St Mary Aldermanbury, St Michael Cornhill, St Michael Crooked Lane.4

Rails removed & St Alban Wood Street. chancel levelled.

1

Organs removed. St Botolph Bishopsgate, St Dunstan in the East, St Martin in the Fields.

3

Images (paintings, stained glass, statuary, etc.) removed or defaced.

Allhallows Barking, Allhallows Lombard Street, Allhallows the Great, St Bartholomew Exchange, St Benet Gracechurch, St Dunstan in the East, St Lawrence Jewry, St Martin Outwich, St Mary le Strand, St Michael Cornhill, St Michael Crooked Lane, St Michael Queenhithe, St Michael Wood Street, St Peter Cornhill.5

14

No. of individual parishes taking action ⫽ 366 1

An ‘order of parliament’ and a ‘warrant’ entered just before the removal of crosses at St Matthew Friday Street and St Helen Bishopsgate may have been the Harley Committee order. St Ethelburga and St John Zachery received the order in 1644–5. 2 The removal of the cross and defacing of images at St Benet Gracechurch is actually recorded in 1642–3, but since the accounts end in May 1643 it is fairly safe to assume these to be reponses to the Harley Committee order.

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THE RESPONSE IN LONDON

steeple and other crosses and the defacing or removal of superstitious inscriptions in secular monuments and brasses – the second commonest form of iconoclasm, recorded in at least thirteen parishes. The inscriptions being defaced would have survived the Reformation and involved requests for prayers for the soul of the deceased. There were also several instances of pictures and masonry work being removed or altered. At St Martin Outwich a painter was employed ‘for putting out pictures’ and at St Michael Queenhithe payments were made to a painter for ‘wasshinge out offensive things [and] putting other things in their place’ and to a plasterer for ‘cutting down angells in the church’.86 This is the first evidence in the accounts of St Michael Queenhithe for any iconoclastic work, so this may be an example of a church rectifying previous neglect in response to greater external pressure. Harley could clearly put pressure on parish officials, such as those of St Mary le Strand who were obliged to remove pictures from their church in March 1644. The amount of money paid to the painter at St Michael’s (£3 5s compared to 8s at St Martin Outwich) suggests that there may have been a lot of catching up to do here. Alternatively the repairs may have been elaborately done but this is unlikely given that this was a relatively poor parish – indeed its poverty may have been the cause of the neglect.87 On the other hand the ‘altering’ of an image of St Michael at St Michael Wood Street – a Presbyterian parish which had pre-empted orders on inscriptions – may have been a direct response to the new clause in the August 1643 ordinance specifically condemning pictures and images of saints. The image may have been outside of the church, as was a statue of St Dunstan taken down along with the cross from the roof of St Dunstan in the East. External images of saints were a new concern of the August Table Two: notes cont. 3

In 1645–7 St Olave Jewry records the re-use of lead ‘that came off the steeple and the Crosse’ presumably at an earlier date. 4 At Allhallows the Less, St Dionis Backchurch, St Mary Aldermanbury and St Michael Crooked Lane the removal of inscriptions is implied through the sale or storing away of brass, or the altering of graves. Two parishes not included here record the sale of brass in 1645–6 which may have been removed earlier (St Antholin Budge Row and St Swithin London Stone). 5 The removal of a window was discussed at St Katherine Cree, but the outcome is unknown (GL, MS 1196/1, fol. 23v). 6 I have not included those parishes which record the receipt of the order but no apparent iconoclasm.

86

See Table Two; GL, MS 11394/1, fol. 51r; MS 4825/1, fol. 67. WCA, MF 1900, St Mary le Strand churchwardens’ accounts, vol. 22, fol. 400v. GL, MS 11394/1, fol. 51r; MS 4825/1, fol. 67, and on the poverty of St Michael Queenhithe see Liu, Puritan London, 37.

87

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1643 ordinance, the Harley Committee order of May 1643 having only proscribed exterior images of the Trinity, the Virgin Mary or crosses. The increasing range of objects and images condemned by successive legislation must have been confusing. A vestry meeting at St Katherine Cree, dated 14 November 1643, appears to have failed to reach a decision over some stained glass in the church, merely recording that it remained ‘in question whether the Rownd of Abrahem and Izak in the east windo[w] should bee taken downe or noe’. The fate of the window is unknown, as the churchwardens’ accounts do not survive for the period.88 The 1643 drive against images prompted action at St Michael Crooked Lane, and may have brought about a dispute with the Fishmongers’ Company with whom the church had close associations, similar to that between St Lawrence Jewry and the Mercers. St Michael’s had clearly responded to the 1641 Commons’ order: pews had been erected in the east end, indicating a removal of rails and repositioning of the communion table, and the organ case was sold. Other work in the church at the same time – £4 5s worth of work on glazing, and smaller amounts on plastering and painting – may reflect further iconoclasm. On 5 June 1643 the Fishmongers’ court was informed that ‘offence is taken att some pictures in the glasse window att the upper end of the Companye’s Chappell’ in St Michael’s. The warden’s assistants were instructed to take a look at the window on their way home and to ‘report their opinions thereof’. At the next court, on 22 June, it was decided that the parishioners who took offence at the window could take it down, but it was made clear that it should be replaced with ‘other good glasse’ and without any charge to the company.89 How this was taken by officials at St Michael’s is, unfortunately, not recorded – the vestry minutes do not survive and the churchwardens’ accounts shed little light. Only 1s 2d was spent on glazing for that year, which hardly suggests a substantial replacement with the kind of ‘good glasse’ required by the Fishmongers. Other iconoclastic action was recorded for the year, however, with 2s 6d paid for ‘cutting down Michael & other things’ (probably an image in wood or stone), but more was left until later: in 1644–6 a brass eagle was sold, and in 1645–6 a mason was paid £2 15s for ‘cuting down ye Images of Angells and other Pictures in ye church’, and another 18s (a more feasible sum) was spent on glazing.90 What exactly was happening at St Michael’s is not easy to establish, compounded by several entries in the accounts for unspecified work on the

88

GL, MS 524/1, fol. 135; MS 7882/1, fol. 221; MS 1196/1, fol. 23v. St Katherine Cree had been extensively repaired in the late 1620s and ceremoniously consecrated in 1630 by Laud (see Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 113). 89 GL, MS 1188/1, fols 262, 264; MS 5570/3, Fishmongers’ Company court ledger, vol. 3, fols 669, 672. 90 GL, MS 1188/1, fols 275, 281, 283, 290. In 1648–9 the large sum of £7 was spent on glazing (ibid., fol. 318).

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THE RESPONSE IN LONDON

church throughout the period. This gradual ‘reformation’ may have been simply to do with a reluctance to spend large sums of money. There was clearly a desire to comply with the ordinances as testified by the fact that complaints were made to the Fishmongers’ company (the junior churchwarden for 1643, Robert Leadman, was a fishmonger, and it is possible that he conveyed the message). However, this parish does seem to have had conflicting sympathies. Liu describes it as having ‘failed to maintain social or religious cohesion’ with no group ‘powerful enough to sway the religious life of the parish in one direction’. Its minister Joseph Brown was not a Puritan and some parishioners presented articles against him in 1647, although he managed to retain his ministry throughout the period. From 1646 the Independent Thomas Goodwin gave lectures at St Michael’s and used the church for his own gathered congregation (perhaps influencing the removal of more imagery as recorded in the 1645–6 accounts?). This conflict of feeling and lack of direct leadership may account for the belated iconoclasm at the church.91 The first indication of iconoclasm in the records of St Benet Gracechurch comes in 1643, even though parishioners had petitioned in December 1641 against innovations brought in by minister William Quelch. Now, a workman was paid for ‘defacing superstitious things in the church’, superstitious brass pictures were taken up, and the brass taken from gravestones was sold alongside ‘popish altar clothes’.92 At Allhallows Lombard Street brasses were ‘set on’ [attacked?] and a mason hired for ‘the demolition of ye Immages by order of parliament’. It is possible that this iconoclasm may have been influenced by the recent admission to the incumbency of the Independent minister John Cardell, appointed by the Commons on 27 July 1643 after the sequestration of John Weston.93 An entry in the accounts of St Mary Somerset recorded the removal of an old font, shortly after another recording the receipt of a parliamentary order for ‘pulling down images and pictures’. The two may be unconnected, but most churches did not take away or move their fonts until after the introduction of the Directory of Public Worship in January 1645. It is possible that the font was in some way offensive, perhaps containing imagery. Meanwhile at St Alban Wood Street the chancel was levelled in 1643–4 and, surprisingly, the communion rails only then taken down. Both the rails and a quantity of stone removed from

91

Liu, Puritan London, 39, 142, 111, 122, n. 66. GL, MS 1568, pt ii, fols 631, 634, 637, 640. These entries are spread over the 1642–3 and 1643–4 accounts. Although in the case of St Mary Woolchurch it is clear that entries recording work in the year 1642–3 are likely to represent action taken in response to the September 1641 order, at St Benet Gracechurch the position of the entries, combined with the fact that the accounting year ends as late as May 1643, and the particular nature of the iconoclasm (the removal of the steeple cross and monumental brasses) suggest strongly that these are responses to the Harley Committee campaign begun in May 1643. 93 GL, MS 4051/1, fol. 111r; Matthews, Walker Revised, 62.

92

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PURITAN ICONOCLASM

the chancel were then sold off. This delay at St Alban’s might be explained by the presence of the royalist minister William Watts until he joined the king’s army as a chaplain in around September 1642, his sequestration not being officially confirmed until 3 March 1643.94 Other instances of iconoclasm in 1643–4 included the removal of the letters IHS from the pulpit cloth at St Bartholomew Exchange, and the ‘putting out of the Jesuits armes’ (referring to the same letters) at St Michael Cornhill. Exactly what the latter involved is not specified, but the work entailed was clearly not great since it cost the parish only 12d (compared to £1 paid to the embroiderer at St Bartholomew’s). Another entry in the accounts at St Michael Cornhill records the weighing of ‘brasse images’ – which no doubt included the brass falcon which the vestry agreed to sell on 26 May 1643. It is not clear whether the falcon was held to be superstitious in any way, although other animal imagery was coming under attack elsewhere at this time, and ‘representations’ were to be proscribed by the 1644 ordinance. A brass eagle was sold off at St Michael Crooked Lane in 1644–5, possibly part of a lectern – a common use for this image, the symbol of John the Evangelist, which was meant to represent the inspiration of the gospel.95 There is not a great deal of evidence concerning the removal of organs in the parish records. They were not ordered to be removed until May 1644, but had been objects of attack from the early 1640s. The disabling of the organ at Christ Church by Peter Mills in 1641 has already been mentioned. Earlier still, in April 1641, the vestry at St Dunstan in the East petitioned parliament for permission to remove their organ, pleading poverty and complaining of the great cost of maintaining it. However, according to Liu, this was a wealthy parish – in 1642 it would give the second largest contribution to the parliamentarian army of all the City parishes. It was also a traditionally Puritan parish, and this suggests that the motives behind the petition may have been primarily religious rather than financial. The request does not seem to have been granted at this stage as the accounts show payments for the continued use of the organ up to April 1643.96 At St Michael Crooked Lane an organ case was sold in 1641–2, although the pipes were not sold until 1643–4. Not all parish churches would have had organs at this period and only three others record the removal or sale of organs: St Martin in the Fields and St Botolph Bishopsgate in 1643–4, and St Margaret’s

94

GL, MS 5714/1, fol. 137r; MS 7673/2, fol. 13r (misnumbered between fols 14 and 15); Matthews, Walker Revised, 62. 95 GL, MS 4383/1, fol. 431; MS 4071/1, fols 142v, 143; MS 1188/1, fol. 281. On Christian imagery see Sill, A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art, and Anderson, Imagery of British Churches. 96 GL, MS 4887, fol. 255, and for the last payment for blowing organ bellows, see MS 7882/1, fol. 199; on the wealth of the parish see Liu, Puritan London, 39.

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Westminster by the following year.97 At St Botolph, on 19 June 1643, the vestry declared themselves very willing that the Organs now standing in the church shalbe by the appointment of S[i]r Paul Pinder taken down and removed where hee the said S[i]r Paul Pinder shall please to dispose of them.98

Alderman Sir Paul Pindar was one of the great customs farmers under Charles I, and a committed royalist who had only recently been involved in the Waller plot of May 1643.99 He had donated £200 for the maintenance of the parish organ in 1637 and it is possible that he was taking it into his personal custody in order to preserve it – the parish was a poor one and would probably have been grateful to part with it without having the expense of its removal.100 Surplices were another item not finally abolished until 1644 but often disposed of before that date. At St Benet Gracechurch an inventory from the end of 1641–2 records two surplices as having been given away, and at Allhallows Lombard Street the surplice was crossed out of another inventory of the same period. St Andrew by the Wardrobe, St Mary Somerset and St Mary Colechurch all sold surplices during 1642–3, with St Botolph Bishopsgate and St Pancras following suit the next year.101 Five other churches show evidence of the disposal of surplices after the May 1644 ordinance. Accounts record them as given away by order of parliament at St Matthew Friday Street (24 July 1644), St George Botolph Lane (6 November 1644, ‘disposed of for the maymed soldiers’), St Dunstan in the West (1644, delivered to Christ’s Hospital), and St Giles in the Fields (between February 1644 and February 1645). At St Peter’s Westcheap copes were burnt in what appears to have been a ceremonial fashion, with payments made for fagots and coal and the ringing of the church bells.102

97 GL, MS 1188/1, fols 262, 273; For those at St Martin in the Fields, see Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 259, who cites WCA, F 2002, fol. 223 (1643–4). I have not seen these vestry minutes as they are now too fragile to be produced, but an inventory of 1649–50 includes cushions ‘belonging to the Organs when wee had them’ (ibid., F 6, 1649–50). Ibid., E 25 (MF 966), St Margaret’s Westminster churchwardens’ accounts, 1644–6 (first and second year of accounts, receipts). 98 GL, MS 4526/1, fol. 61. 99 Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 93, 96, 265–6. Pindar was alleged to have donated a large sum of money to parliament to avoid punishment (see Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 245). 100 GL, MS 4526/1, fol. 50. The organ remained in place, however, until the end of the year, with payments to the organist up until December (MS 4524/2, fols 79–80). 101 Ibid., MS 1568, pt ii, fol. 629; MS 4051/1, fol. 106; MS 2088/1, 1642–3, and see the marginal note on the register of parish ornaments at the back of this volume, dated 24 March 1642; MS 5714/1, fol. 137r; MS 66, fols 100v, 104r (compare inventories at 20 May 1642 and 10 May 1643); MS 4524/2, fol. 77v; MS 5018/1, 1643–4 and MS 5019/1, fol. 97, 26 April 1644. 102 Ibid., MS 1016/1, fol. 192v; MS 951/1, fols 112v–113; MS 2968/3, fol. 675; Camden Library, Camden reel 10, St Giles in the Fields churchwardens’ accounts, inventory of 27 February 1644; GL, MS 645/2, fol. 82v.

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Table Three Responses of London parishes to the May 1644 ordinance, 1644–5 Action Taken Parish No. Removal of steeple crosses.

St Ethelburga, St John Zachery.1

2

Inscriptions removed or defaced.

St Andrew Hubbard (plate), St Bartholomew Exchange, St Dunstan in the East (plate), St James Garlickhithe, St Margaret’s Westminster.2

5

Images (paintings, stained glass, statuary, etc.) removed or defaced.

St Magnus the Martyr, St Michael Crooked Lane (sale of brass eagle).

2

Other

St Margaret’s Westminster (sale of screen, organ loft and pipes), St Mary Abchurch and St Mary le Strand (Jesuits’ arms).

3

No. of individual parishes taking action ⫽ 113 1

There is no direct reference to the removal of a steeple cross at St John Zachery but alongside the entry recording the receipt of the order from the Harley Committee are others recording work on the steeple vane. 2 The accounts for St Margaret’s Westminster record the sale, in 1644–5, of brass from tombstones, and material from the organ loft and pipes and a screen, but these may have been removed earlier. Windows at St Margaret’s were removed under the direction of the Harley Committee around 1644 (see ch. 3). 3 Later responses were recorded after 1645 at St Andrew by the Wardrobe, St Antholin Budge Row, St Martin Orgar, St Michael Crooked Lane, and St Swithin London Stone.

By the time of the May 1644 ordinance it is likely that a good deal of the additional things now abolished by law at a national level had already in practice been removed from the London churches. The few entries concerned with iconoclastic action for 1644–5 generally give instances of churches ‘catching up’ with earlier regulations (see Table Three) – as for instance with the removal of superstitious inscriptions at St James Garlickhithe and St Bartholomew Exchange, the removal of the steeple cross at St Ethelburga and the taking out of the ‘Jesuits’ arms’ from an old pulpit cloth at St Mary Abchurch. On 30 October 1644 churchwardens of St Mary le Strand paid 4s for alterations to the pulpit cloth ‘and takeing out the [Jesuits] badge’. The latest ordinance required that plate and utensils be checked, and any images or crosses upon them were to be removed. There are only two recorded responses to this – at St Andrew Hubbard where unspecified letters were removed from a communion cup and at St Dunstan in the East where a payment was 168

THE RESPONSE IN LONDON

made in April 1645 for ‘burnishinge ye plate and putting out ye picture of St dunstan’.103 The May 1644 ordinance required that ‘holy water fonts’ be defaced, and no longer used. The ambiguities of this have been discussed, and although it may have been possible for the zealous to interpret the legislation as requiring the removal of baptismal fonts, the church records give little indication that this happened.104 Instead there seems to have been a flurry of activity after the publication of the Directory, which gave clear directives against the traditional positioning and use of fonts. For 1644–5 there are three references to the purchase of new fonts – at St Botolph Bishopsgate, St Michael Wood Street, and St Michael Cornhill – and these probably represent a response to the Directory, rather than to the May 1644 ordinance, as this was published in January 1645, two to three months before the end of the accounting year.105 In 1645–6 some nineteen churchwardens’ accounts show the removal, repositioning or replacing of fonts. Seven of the nine instances which are specifically dated show this work occurring within the first five months of the year.106 At Allhallows Lombard Street, for instance, on 3 May 1645, the vestry recorded their decision to follow the Directory by removing the stone font and replacing it with a basin on an iron stand. A further five churches record similar work on fonts the following year. Uniquely, although perhaps unsurprisingly given the radical nature of the parish, the vestry at St Stephen Coleman had agreed to move their font from its traditional position up to minister John Goodwin’s desk, as early as June 1642, although the move was not actually carried out until after December 1642.107 There are a few more recorded instances of iconoclasm for the years after 1644–5, although none later than 1646–7 (see Table Three). The chancel at

103

GL, MS 4810/2, fol. 109v; MS 4383/1, fol. 436; MS 4241/1, fol. 385; MS 3891/1, 1644–5; WCA, MF 1900, St Mary le Strand churchwardens’ accounts, vol. 22, fol. 410v; GL, MS 1279/3 (microfilm), 1644–5; MS 7882/1, fol. 239. 104 See 79–80, and 104 above. 105 GL, MS 4524/2, fol. 88v; MS 524/1, fol. 140; MS 4071/2, fols 187v, 148. At St Michael Wood Street the payment for a new font stone comes six entries after that recording the purchase of a Directory; at St Michael Cornhill the purchases connected to the new font continue into the next accounting year further suggesting that the work belonged to 1645 rather than 1644 (see fol. 148v). 106 The nine accounts which give specific dates are: St Mary Magdalen Milk Street, 13 January 1645 (GL, MS 2597/1, fol. 80, and MS 2596/2, fol. 92), St Katherine Cree, 18 February 1645 (MS 1196/1, fol. 48), St Mary at Hill, St Dunstan in the West, St Margaret New Fish Street, Allhallows Barking, all April 1645 (MS 1240/1, fol. 48v; MS 3016/1, fol. 225 and MS 2968/3 and 4, fols 688v and 90v; MS 1175/1, 1 April 1645; Allhallows by the Tower, churchwardens’ accounts, reel 11, 4 April 1645), Allhallows Lombard Street, May 1645 (GL, MS 4049/1, fols 24, 27), St Magnus the Martyr, 2 July 1645 (MS 1179/1, fol. 61), and St Martin Orgar, 22 September 1645 (MS 959/2). The other ten were St Bartholomew Exchange, St Botolph Billingsgate, St Dionis Backchurch, St Stephen Walbrook, St John Zachery, St Mary Abchurch, St Mary Aldermary, St Mary Colechurch, St Michael Crooked Lane, St Olave Jewry. 107 Ibid., MS 4049/1, fol. 24; MS 4458/1, pt 1, fol. 122. The five parishes showing alterations to fonts in 1646–7 were St Alphage, St Benet Fink, St Bride Fleet Street, St Lawrence Jewry and St Lawrence Pountney.

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St Martin Orgar was levelled in 1645–6, rather late given that the parish had petitioned in 1641 against minister Bryan Walton for raising the communion table in the fashion of an the altar. As already mentioned, images of angels and other pictures were removed in 1645–6 from St Michael Crooked Lane. At St Antholin Budge Row brass taken from gravestones was sold between 1645 and 1646, although this may well have been removed at an earlier date, especially given that this was a parish with a reputation for Puritanism. Other cases concerned small items which had perhaps been overlooked by otherwise fairly vigilant parishes: at St Swithin London Stone, ‘a superstitious peece of brasse’ was sold in 1645–6, and at St Andrew by the Wardrobe a St Andrew’s cross was cut off a branch candlestick in 1646–7. In this latter case the candlestick concerned may have been one of two given as gifts by parishioners in 1639 and 1640.108 There must have been parishes where there was a certain reluctance to strip away church ornaments and fixtures, especially where these were the gifts of local people or where they had been part of the church for many years, even original features. There is little in the way of hard evidence in the records – only occasional examples of late, possibly reluctant, compliance as in the instances above. One notable case is that of St Michael Cornhill. Its Laudian minister William Brough had deserted the cure sometime in 1642 and the parish made various attempts at reformation: moving the communion table, taking down rails, putting out crosses in the church and so on. It also became a committed Presbyterian church. Yet in 1645 the following order was recorded in the vestry minutes: the ordinances of Lords and Commons of 18th [sic] August 1643 and 9th May 1644 for the demolition of monuments of idolatrie and superstition forthwith to be putt into execution. Further commanded at a Committee for that purpose of 20th October last under the hand of Sir Robert Harley.109

This meeting took place two months after the Commons’ order of 19 August 1645, urging the Harley Committee to make sure that its ordinances were being fully enforced, but, curiously, the entry itself occurs in the minute book under the date 13 February 1646. This clearly suggests a marked reluctance to undertake the work, although it does appear to have been carried out fairly promptly after that: by the end of April 1646 fairly large sums of money had been spent on glazing, painting, masonry and carpentry.110 108

GL, MS 959/1, fol. 202r; The Articles and charge . . . against Dr Walton, 3; GL, MS 1188/1, fol. 290; MS 1046/1, fol. 203r; MS 559/1, fol. 46v; MS 2088/1, 1646–7 and see the register of parish ornaments at the back of the volume. 109 GL, MS 4072/1, fol. 176. 110 Ibid., MS 4072/1, fol. 176; ibid., MS 4071/2, fols 151r–v. Payments for work at St Michael Cornhill in the second half of 1645–6 include £4 3s 2d to a glazier, £3 to a painter, £2 13s to a mason and £4 17s to a carpenter, with smaller amounts paid to a glass painter, a carver and a smith.

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Church inventories occasionally suggest a similar reluctance to comply absolutely with the parliamentary ordinances, with abolished items appearing long after they should have been destroyed. At St Margaret Pattens – a parish which for most of the period was without a settled ministry – ‘the frame which stood around the communion table’ was stored away in the belfry well into the 1650s. The original rails from the communion table of St Martin in the Fields were also kept throughout the period and eventually restored.111 At St Michael le Querne – a Presbyterian parish – not only were the rails kept until at least 1648, along with some marble from tombstones, but the church inventory shows the retention throughout the period of ‘hoods faced with satin’ and a cushion described as ‘gould . . . with 5 pictures of the Ap[ost]les and lyned with white satin’. Perhaps this was a last surviving example of the fifteen cushions made from ‘old cope stuff’ which were recorded in an inventory of 1607 and were probably been older.112 It has already been seen how, in 1644, the parish officers of St Mary le Strand were ordered directly by the Harley Committee to remove pictures from the Savoy Chapel where they worshipped. Attempts had been made to comply with the Commons’ order, with the removal of chancel steps in 1641–2 and what may have been a partial reformation of the offending pictures at the same time, with 13s paid to a painter for ‘colouring the pillore in the lower end of the church, the ffreeze and other bords there putt up’. This suggests that images may have been whitewashed or boarded over. However, some pictures clearly remained in situ at the time of Harley’s intervention and were at this point removed. The entry for 22 March 1644 records 20s paid with the consent of the vestry to John Bond, master of the Savoy, ‘towards the charges of takeing down the pictures in ye church and white washinge the plases’.113 These pictures were not destroyed, as was legally required, but appear to have been stored at Bond’s house, and in 1647–8 the pictures along with a ‘Tabell’ (possibly a commandment table containing images, although this could refer to a communion table) were brought back into the church. It is hard to believe that these objects could have been restored at this date, but if they were it was not for very long: the following year’s accounts show a payment for ‘making clean the lower part of the church, and the pictures, and removing them into the vestry’. Their fate is not known, but there survives in the chapel, as the centre panel of the nineteenth-century reredos, 111

Ibid., MS 4570/2, fol. 370r; MS 4571/1, undated inventory at the beginning of the volume; WCA, F 7 and F 8, St Martin in the Fields churchwardens’ accounts, inventories at the end of the accounts for 1650–1 and 1651–2. An inventory of April 1657, which is partially obscured, includes the rails and a note has been added at some unknown date: ‘now sett up again’ (F 2517, St Martin in the Fields vestry minutes, fol. 182). 112 GL, MS 2895/2, fols 136r, 156v, 122v, and inventory of 1607 at back of volume; Liu, Puritan London, 70–1, 133. 113 WCA, MF 1900, St Mary le Strand churchwardens’ accounts, vol. 22, fols 376v, 377r, 400v.

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an original fourteenth-century Florentine painting of a Madonna, and it could be that this was one of the pictures removed in 1644: an unsubstantiated story holds that this painting was at one point in the master’s lodging. What is interesting is that Bond who seems to have acted to save the paintings was a staunch Puritan and a member of the Westminster Assembly in 1643.114 One can only surmise how other ‘superstitious’ items which survived managed to escape destruction. St Helen Bishopsgate, for instance, still boasts a Jacobean pulpit carved with the symbols of the four evangelists and a door pediment within the south doorway containing the royal Stuart arms supported by twelve reclining angels. This latter dates from the first half of the seventeenth century and is said to have formed part of the old reredos. It may be that for those of moderate opinion angels and symbolic representations were never quite as objectionable as persons of the Trinity or biblical depictions, and these things may have been deliberately overlooked. They may, on the other hand, have been removed and cherished by individuals to be restored at a later date.115 At St Leonard Shoreditch a stained glass window by Baptista Sutton somehow managed to survive and still exists, now at Greenwich hospital. It was put up in 1634, and depicts the Last Supper as well as three illustrations from the life of Jacob, with the figures of the four evangelists in the tracery lights. Clearly this window must have been taken down and carefully stored away. There is direct evidence for the dismantling and hiding away of windows in only two of the parish accounts. One, at St Mary Colechurch, was another Sutton window containing the king’s arms – which churches were obliged to take down in 1650. The other was at St Peter Cornhill where on 10 May 1660 the vestry agreed that Moses and Aron are forthwith to bee set upp by the churchwarden of the parish charges, And whatsoever hee giveth the Glasier for a gratuity for his care in keeping of them all this while.116

It is likely that Moses and Aaron were the ‘superstitious pictures’ taken away from the church in 1643. Something similar must have happened at St Leonard’s, although unfortunately as the parish accounts for this period have not survived there is no hard evidence. 114 Ibid., accounts for 1647–8 and 1648–9 (unfoliated). On the Savoy chapel see R. Somerville, The Savoy: Manor, Hospital, Chapel (1960), esp. 208. On Bond see under the entry for another John Bond, (son of MP Denis Bond), in Calamy Revised, ed. A. G. Matthews (Oxford, 1934), 63. 115 London County Council Survey of London, ix, pt 1, The Parish of St Helen, Bishopsgate, ed. M. Reddan and A. W. Clapham (1924), 43–4. 116 Archer, ‘Seventeenth century painted glass at Little Easton’, 9; for the Sutton window at St Mary Colechurch see GL, MS 66/1, fols 96, 128, 133, 149, 160, 165. These inventories show how the window was hidden in a chest stored first in the vestry and then in the belfry. It was set up again in 1660. For the window at St Peter Cornhill see ibid., MS 4165/1, fol. 339.

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The attitudes of parishes could change over time and occasionally items removed in the 1640s found their way back into churches. At St Margaret’s Westminster a font previously banished to the churchyard at the command of the House of Commons was reported to have been restored in 1653. This may have been that made by Nicholas Stone in 1641 which, although elaborate in black and white marble, does not seem to have contained any images or carvings – if it had it would not have been tolerated even in the churchyard. Similarly Edward Layfield’s marble font had been restored to the middle aisle of Allhallows Barking by 1659. The churchwardens at Allhallows could not even wait for the return of the king before erecting in March 1660, on top of their newly built tower, a ‘great carved gilded image’ of St Michael between the figures of Time and Death. A dramatic illustration of the change in sympathies which could occur over time is the case of St Dionis Backchurch which from a Puritan parish of the early 1640s became a centre for ‘Anglicanism’ in the 1650s, and was one of the first churches to erect a new communion rail at the Restoration.117 A totally systematic analysis of the response of the London parishes to parliamentary iconoclasm is not possible, because of the loss of records in nearly a third of the City parishes, and the non-specific nature of many more which do survive. However, enough information can be extracted from those remaining to reach some general conclusions, especially in conjunction with what is known about the attitudes of parliament and the work of the Harley Committee. The many petitions which greeted the Long Parliament in November and December 1640 illustrate the general hostility to Laudian innovations and it is safe to assume that communion rails were removed from the majority of London churches either before or in response to the September 1641 order. The order appears to have inspired some kind of iconoclasm in at least twenty-nine parishes. After the setting up of the Harley Committee on 24 April 1643 there is evidence of iconoclasm in thirty-six parishes.118 The difference in the kind of work being carried out in these two periods is important. In 1641–2 there were several cases of large-scale iconoclasm: at St Pancras, St Mary Woolchurch and St Giles in the Fields, for instance. Although more churches undertook some kind of iconoclastic work in 1643–4 the scale was generally smaller, principally involving the removal of steeple crosses or of superstitious inscriptions. What was happening was that in 1641 churches which had been extensively ‘beautified’ were being stripped of recent offensive additions, although there is no doubt that for the zealous the 117 P. Holland, St Margaret’s Westminster: the Commons’ Church within a Royal Peculiar (1993), 20, 54; London County Council Survey of London, xii, pt 1, The Parish of Allhallows Barking, 44; Maskell, Berkyngechirche juxta Turrim, 26; Allhallows by the Tower, churchwardens’ accounts, reel 12, 1659–60, ‘Payments for Building the Steeple’, 15 March 1659. See ch. 4 above for the controversy over this image in the 1680s. Liu, Puritan London, 143; GL, MS 4215/1, 1660–1. 118 See Tables One and Two.

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destruction also involved much older objects which had survived the Reformation, as with the ‘ancient’ windows and carved images at St Mary Woolchurch. After 1643, churches – many of whom may have been too poor or too Puritan ever to have indulged in wholesale Laudian refurbishment – were being required to remove not only surviving imagery but items only now deemed idolatrous because the official definition of such things was widening. Again crosses and inscriptions are the obvious cases in point. The radicalism of the campaign against idolatrous monuments from 1643 can be seen in the way it extended beyond religious buildings, as with the demolition of Cheapside Cross, Harley’s destruction of the painted crucifix in the hall at Christ’s Hospital, and the reformation of the windows of the Guildhall.119 Another case of the defacing of religious pictures outside of a religious setting occurred at the Merchant Tailors’ Hall. On 11 July 1643 complaints were made about hangings at the hall which contained ‘some offensive and superstitious Pictures & resemblance of the holy Trinity, and of other superstitious thinges’. The master and wardens of the company decided to inspect the pictures with a view to having them reformed. Nothing, however, seems to have been done until on 10 May 1644, the day after the passage of the ordinance for ‘further reformation’, the matter was considered once again. The defacing of the hangings was then carried out and they remained in situ, in their ‘reformed’ state, until sold in 1720. In a similar case, on 1 July 1644, the court of the Fishmongers’ Company ordered the defacing and removal of ‘representations’ of St Peter and St Dunstan (perhaps paintings or images in glass?) situated at the upper end of the company’s hall, in order to comply with the parliamentary ordinance of the previous May. There was some prevarication with the matter being put off twice whilst it was decided who should carry out the orders and what should be set up in place of the pictures. There seems, however, to have been a reluctance to actually destroy the pictures: on 15 October 1645 the court ordered that ‘St Peter’s picture in the parlor att this Companies Garden in Lyme street bee taken down, & laid wth St Dunstans picture in some by place in the garett’.120 The attack on images in secular places demonstrates the increasing pressure for an ever more thorough reformation, a pressure which also continued to be exerted upon London’s churches. It is interesting to note that only two of the parish accounts which show iconoclasm within the year following the 1641 order offer no clear evidence of further action taken at later stages. One

119

See 98 above. GL, Merchant Tailors’ Company court minute books, vol. 9 (1636–45), MF 330 (microfilm), fols 175, 197; C. M. Clode, London During the Great Rebellion. Being a Memoir of Sir Abraham Reynardson (1892), 32; GL, MS 5570, Fishmongers’ Company court ledger, vol. 3, 1631–46, fols 751, 755, 867. 120

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of these is St Mary Woolchurch, whose early reform was probably thorough enough to be final, and this may also be true of St Stephen Walbrook.121 That the remaining churches all needed to take further action in response to later legislation is illustrative of the increasingly stringent demands of that legislation. Further evidence of this is found in the piecemeal reformation of windows at St Lawrence Jewry and St Magnus the Martyr. In a sense the 1641 order can be seen as permitting rather than enforcing the removal of innovations and other superstitious items – the legal implications of the Commons acting without the Lords’ assent meant that if a church chose to disobey there was little which could be done. However, this permission to act could also allow the zealous to undertake a more thorough reformation than the official order required, as at St Mary Woolchurch – Michael Herring’s reprimand in parliament hardly seemed to deter him, as the parish records show. At least as important as the widening, between 1641 and 1643, of the official definition of what was idolatrous was the decision by parliament to set up a central regulatory body to oversee the reformation of London’s churches. The large number of parishes recording receipt of the order against superstitious monuments and the yet greater number of those undertaking iconoclastic work in 1643–4 indicates that the Harley Committee did have an almost immediate impact. On the other hand, parliament had to issue the committee with reminders to enforce the official regulations, on 20 December 1643 and again on 19 August 1645, perhaps reflecting the scale of the work involved in policing the capital’s churches.122 Some recalcitrant parishes may have continued to drag their feet until forced to act, as seen in the few late instances of parish iconoclasm. These seem, however, to be exceptional cases. The responses of the London parishes to the various iconoclastic requirements of parliament were not always straightforward, and various local factors were influential. Conflicting sympathies within parishes, and the presence (or absence) of strongly influential figures who might enforce or resist parliamentary regulations were important factors. Individuals or small groups could have a disproportionate impact – again Michael Herring and Richard Hunt at St Mary Woolchurch are the most obvious examples. At St Thomas the Apostle, whilst some parishioners blamed youths for the disorder surrounding the riotous pulling-up of rails, others pointed fingers at a small group of men led by John Blackwell. Blackwell was described as

121

The accounts for St Clement Danes, which record £2 spent on work ‘in the coloured window’ in the chancel in 1641–2 (a very likely candidate for iconoclasm), also give no sign of later iconoclasm. However, we know from other sources that a steeple cross was removed from the church in 1643 (see 161 above, and for the 1641–2 entry see WCA, B 11 (microfilm), St Clement Danes churchwardens’ accounts, between 30 January 1641[2] and 15 April 1642). 122 CJ, iii, 347, iv, 246.

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‘His Majesty’s grocer’, which suggests he was not an insignificant figure in the parish.123 At the same time not all Puritans were extreme iconoclasts. Those parishes which occasionally flouted official regulations were not always those where religious sympathies were conservative. It was the strongly Presbyterian parish of St Michael Cornhill that had to be ordered by the Harley Committee to enforce the 1643 and 1644 ordinances long after it should have done so; the similarly inclined parish of St Michael le Querne was apparently harbouring satin hoods and a cushion embroidered with pictures of apostles throughout the 1640s and 1650s; and the Puritan master of the Savoy Hospital, John Bond, acted to save paintings at the chapel there. Despite such instances the reformation of churches in London seems to have been a thorough one, and a fairly prompt one, with few recorded instances of iconoclastic action after 1644 and fewer still after 1645. The setting up of the Harley Committee seems to have had a greater impact than the national parliamentary ordinances of 1643 and 1644, and it is highly likely that the wider definitions of what was considered idolatrous embodied in these ordinances were anticipated in London. In this way, London can be seen as having taken a leading iconoclastic role, setting an example that parliament would have liked to see followed by the rest of the country. This lead was a product of several factors: the tendency of the City to a greater degree of radicalism than the nation at large, the zeal of its mayor and governors, and, of course, the watchful eye of the Harley Committee and the godly members of parliament.

123

HLRO, House of Lords Main Papers, 30 June 1641, petition of the parson, churchwarden and other inhabitants of St Thomas the Apostle.

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6 The Reformation of the Cathedrals

Puritan iconoclasm found its most violent expression in attacks on cathedral churches. This is not surprising – as centre-pieces of the Laudian ideal of the beauty of holiness and as the seats of the bishops they were potent symbols of a religious regime which had alienated many, both Puritans and nonPuritans. The war on cathedrals represented a war on Laudian values and on prelacy in general, now seen by the zealous as irredeemably corrupt. In a wider sense it was also an expression of the fear and hatred of Roman Catholicism with which the Caroline church was becoming associated in the popular imagination. Cathedrals were especially important to Laudians who considered them to be ‘mother churches’ and places of special holiness, and many had been beautified during the 1620s and 1630s. In 1628, Peter Smart had preached against the introduction of superstitious ceremonies, altars and images at Durham Cathedral, accusing fellow prebendary John Cosin, an enthusiastic supporter of Laud, of decking the quire with ‘strange Babylonish ornaments’ and setting up and restoring ‘many gorgeous images and pictures’. Particular offence was taken at a large baptismal font, decorated with images of the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove, and images of Christ and the four evangelists.1 In 1638 at Exeter Cathedral, William Heylar, archdeacon of Barnstaple, made alterations against the wishes of some of the canons, including the erection of a painted reredos depicting Moses and Aaron flanking the table of the Ten Commandments and Saints Peter and Paul. Canterbury Cathedral was given a new font in 1639 by John Warner, bishop of Rochester, which featured images of the four evangelists and the twelve apostles. Many cathedrals also installed new organs during this period, the majority of which were to be destroyed in the subsequent iconoclasm.2 Puritans objected to such moves on several grounds. The beautification of cathedrals along with the emphasis on the sacraments and ceremony in 1

Hoffman, ‘The Arminian and the iconoclast’, 279–301; The humble Petition of Peter Smart, 8–9, 10. 2 A. Erskine et al., Exeter Cathedral: a Short History and Description (Exeter, 1988), 57–8; CCA, DCC/FABRIC/46/1 and 3.

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general was seen as a concentration on the external to the detriment of the spiritual, and with the reintroduction of images and stone altars such worship seemed to become positively idolatrous. Milton complained of a ‘new-vomited Paganisme of sensual Idolatry’ and accused the bishops of having overlaid ‘the plaine and homespun verity of Christ’s Gospell . . . with wanton tresses, and . . . all the gaudy allurements of a whore’. Laudians were also criticised for concentrating on ceremony to the neglect of preaching. When the images were torn from Bishop Warner’s font at Canterbury in February 1642 they were placed in the pulpit – an ironic comment on the preference for ‘dumb images’ over the preaching of God’s word.3 There had been a long tradition of hostility towards cathedrals as institutions (predating the break with Rome) which focused on the perceived laziness and wealth of cathedral prebends and, after the Reformation, the offensiveness of cathedral churches as visual reminders of their unregenerate and idolatrous Catholic origins. Cranmer objected to the ‘sect of prebendaries’ and the ‘superfluous conditions of such persons’, feeling that it would be no great loss if they were to disappear altogether. Cathedrals were ‘dens of thieves’ according to Bishop Jewel, whilst John Scory dubbed Hereford Cathedral ‘a very nursery of blasphemy, whoredom, pride, superstition, and ignorance’. Such attitudes were reflected in the language of seventeenth-century iconoclasts such as Richard Culmer, who described cathedrals as ‘Epicurean colleges of riot and voluptuousness’ and their inhabitants as ‘the prelatical successors of the Idolatrous, proud, lazie, covetous monks’.4 Another tradition of hostility existed between the cathedral chapters and local corporations, usually linked to squabbles over secular matters, such as jurisdiction and precedence. This was in part the inevitable consequence of the presence in one location of two centres of authority, each with their own interests and priorities. Cathedral closes, even where they lay entirely within the boundaries of a city, were liberties whose privileges extended to all who lived there, including laymen. Local rates, regulations and responsibilities could vary inside and outside of the close, leading to frequent disputes. After the Reformation the power of the church tended to wane, a process exacerbated by the granting of royal charters of incorporation which boosted many urban authorities.5 3

Milton, Of Reformation, in Complete Prose Works, i, 520, 557 (original emphasis); Culmer, Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury, 17. 4 S. E. Lehmberg, The Reformation of Cathedrals: Cathedrals in English Society, 1485–1603 (New Jersey, 1988), 267–8, and see ch. 10 generally; Culmer, Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury, 1. On hostility towards cathedrals see C. Cross, ‘ “Dens of Loitering Lubbers”: Protestant protest against cathedral foundations, 1540–1640’, in Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest, ed. D. Baker (Studies in Church History, 9, Cambridge, 1972). 5 See Patterson, ‘Corporations, cathedrals and the crown’, 548–9. For examples of tension between cathedral and secular authorities, see A History of Canterbury Cathedral, ed. P. Collinson et al. (Oxford, 1995), and A History of York Minster, ed. G. E. Aylmer and R. Cant (Oxford, 1977).

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However, Catherine Patterson has identified a change in this trend, with the later years of the reign of James I seeing an increased tendency for the crown to intervene in local power struggles. James seems to have adopted a policy of boosting ecclesiastical authority in an attempt to balance what he feared was a Puritan dominance in some civic governments. Under his son there was an even greater attempt to promote the position of the church. Patterson writes that Charles ‘used royal authority in a consistent way to regulate more uniformly the relations between corporations and cathedrals’. His intervention almost always benefited the cathedrals.6 This resulted, from the early 1630s onwards, in an increased tension in cathedral cities, with civic authorities feeling their privileges and power under direct threat. Charles showed himself ready to revoke and alter existing charters to reflect the new priorities. The collection of Ship Money (levied on inland counties from 1635) sparked off a number of disputes, with cathedral authorities arguing that their privileges gave them exemption from assessment. In every such disputed case investigated by the privy council, as at Chichester, Exeter, Lichfield, Salisbury, Winchester and York, decisions were made in favour of the cathedrals.7 It is little wonder, then, that by 1640 local hostility towards the cathedrals was at a high point. Patterson has emphasized the secular nature of this increased conflict, but it was inextricably linked to ideological developments and could not help but exacerbate religious differences. Common disputes were those over seating and the carrying of civic insignia in the cathedral or its grounds. The Caroline/Laudian policy of tearing down the ‘exorbitant’ seats of mayors and important citizens was part of the general design to beautify cathedrals, but was perceived as an attack on the dignity of local governors. So, too, were the royal interventions that reversed previous policy on the issue of the civic insignia, which, from 1636, was forbidden to be carried upright in the cathedral precincts.8 These decisions were symbolic and real attacks on corporate privileges, and in religious terms were part of a broader attempt to recreate the cathedral as a sacred space, making a sharp distinction between the secular and the divine, and promoting the superior status of the latter. Charles also issued orders that obliged civic corporations to attend cathedral services on Sundays and holy days – something many had stopped doing because they objected to the increased ceremony and the lack of preaching, as well as the changing physical appearance of the building. The religious antagonism between corporation and close was particularly notable where the local leaders were of a godly persuasion as at York, 6

Patterson, ‘Corporations, cathedrals and the crown’, 555–6, 558–9. Ibid., 559, 566, 561–2. Ibid., 559–61, and see P. Collinson, ‘The Protestant cathedral’, in A History of Canterbury Cathedral, 188–90; Patterson, ‘Corporations, cathedrals and the crown’, 564–5. 7 8

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Norwich and Exeter.9 In January 1641, for instance, the city chamber of Worcester drew up a petition to parliament listing its grievances against the dean and chapter. While the petition itself does not seem to have survived it is evident by the answers of the chapter that they were accused among other things of setting up crosses and images (which they denied), and possibly also of neglecting the pulpit: ‘a new faire pulpit was ever intended’ the chapter countered, ‘and shall be forthwith provided’.10 The effect of the renewed interest in ornamentation and ritual under Laud, and the enforcement of these ideas in practice, rekindled hostility to cathedrals generally. Laud’s concern with raising the status of the higher clergy led to a more prominent role for the bishops and strong links with the king’s court and government. This allowed their opponents to cast them as villains involved not only in plots to bring in popery but also in attempts to impose an absolutist government. The further tendency to promote ecclesiastical authority in a way which infringed on the power, prestige and privileges of civic government created widespread local opposition. The result of all of these trends was a widening of hostility to episcopacy – once the domain of a small number of Presbyterians and separatists. In a sense the physical attack on cathedrals in the 1640s embodied this hostility, representing an attack on Laudianism and episcopacy as well as on idolatry. Thus the targets of cathedral iconoclasm, especially that perpetrated by soldiers, were not strictly limited to images or monuments of idolatry but included the whole paraphernalia of Laudian worship and objects which represented or symbolized prelacy. Given the importance of the cathedrals as symbols of Laudianism it is strange that there appears to have been no major central movement to reform them (although they were, of course, included within the remit of the main pieces of legislation against images). This was probably to do with circumstances – parliament was only able to create enforceable legislation against images once it had taken upon itself the power to pass ordinances after the king had left London and war appeared unavoidable. Even then these ordinances were only meaningful in areas over which parliament had control. Thus official reformation of the cathedrals was not always possible and, when it became so, had often been rendered unnecessary by the preemptive iconoclasm of the army. Nonetheless there were cases where some kind of official reformation did take place and these provide an interesting parallel to the unofficial iconoclasm of the parliamentary soldiers. 9 Ibid., 565. For the religious leanings of the civic authorities in York, Norwich and Exeter, see C. Cross, ‘From the Reformation to the Restoration’, in A History of York Minster, 212; Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996, ed. I. Atherton et al. (1996), 541; M. Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter, 1994), 183. 10 The Chamber Book of Worcester 1602–50, ed. S. Bond (Worcester Historical Society, new ser., 8, 1974), 343, 349. The chapter’s answers are printed in J. Noake, The Monastery and Cathedral of Worcester (1866), 558–9.

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The Impact of Official Iconoclasm on Cathedrals Official action to reform the cathedrals was very much left in the hands of local parties, in the form of city authorities, county committees or leading individuals. In the parliamentary regulations against images and innovations, up until the ordinance of 9 May 1644, the responsibility for compliance as far as the cathedrals were concerned rested with deans and subdeans. Not surprisingly there is little evidence to suggest that any large-scale reformation was undertaken. In fact one of the Exeter chapter, Thomas Minstall, preached against the Commons’ order of 1641, warning that ‘the images and railes in the churches cost blood in setting of them upp, and that hee did thinke that they would cost some what adoe before they would be pulled down’.11 The lack of response to the initial Commons’ order is illustrated by the need for the House of Commons to issue a further order in February 1642 specifically aimed at cathedrals which were required to remove all rails and altars and to take down painted glass.12 Some deans and chapters had made small concessions, such as the taking down of communion rails at Canterbury and the stone altar at Worcester. Both of these cases seem to have been direct responses to local pressure. At Worcester the removal of the altar stone around January 1641 was the result of the city’s petition. That same month the Canterbury chapter responded to disturbances in the church on consecutive Sundays. In the first instance a lone voice had interrupted the service with cries of ‘this is idolatry’, and in the second, service was ‘mutinously’ disrupted by ‘the continuance of singing psalmes when prayer should have been concluded at the Altar, & by words heard in the thronge, Downe with the Altar’. This and other ‘further threats’ had persuaded the chapter to try and stem discontent by allowing sermons to be preached in the chapter house, as they had been in the preLaudian era, rather than in the quire – a principal bone of contention.13 The general reluctance of cathedrals to respond to calls for reformation could provoke outbursts of iconoclasm, as at Wells on 8 April 1642 where two local clergymen, Richard Allen and his brother, assisted a visiting Londoner in his attack on a crucifix in the cathedral window. According to one account, there being a very faire crucifixe at the upper end of the south end of the cathedral church . . . behinde the Quier, this Londoner most moliciously threw a stone at it and broke it the . . . two Allens standing at the lower ende of the Ile . . . watching that none came the whiles.14 11

Quoted in Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality, 212. PRO, SP 16/489/38. Culmer, Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury, 20; Noake, The Monastery and Cathedral of Worcester, 558–9; CCA, Letter Book iii, no. 76, 11 January 1640[1]. See also Collinson, ‘The Protestant cathedral’, 190–1. 14 Anonymous note written on the title page of Ludolphus de Saxonia, De Vita Christi (Antwerp, 1618) in Wells Cathedral Library. It is printed in HMC, Calendar of the MSS of the Dean and Chapter of Wells Cathedral (2 vols, 1907–14), ii, 427. 12 13

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The same cathedral came under attack again on the eve of the war, in August 1642, when North Somerset men entered Wells, smashed stained glass windows, plundered the bishop’s palace and paraded a painting of the Virgin Mary stuck on a pike at the head of a derisive procession.15 In most cathedrals reformation was to be carried out forcibly by soldiers. In those where such work was done in an official capacity it had to wait until local governors were able to assert their authority over the dean and chapter. Eight cathedrals (representing over a third of the twenty-two such institutions in mid seventeenth-century England) have been chosen for detailed study here: Canterbury, Exeter, Gloucester, Norwich, Peterborough, Winchester, Worcester and York.16 Of these only Canterbury, Norwich and York provide strong evidence of official iconoclasm. The three towns provide a good contrast. Both Canterbury and Norwich were safely within parliamentary territory throughout the war. At Canterbury the thorough and violent reformation of the cathedral seems to have been driven forward by a committed minority of city officials but with some signs of growing opposition from the local populace. There is no evidence of such strong popular feeling against iconoclasm in Norwich, which does not of course mean that it did not exist, but this was a famously godly city with a history of opposition to innovations, where public bonfires of superstitious objects would incite the ‘zealous joy of onlookers’. York was an entirely different case, being a royalist stronghold until July 1644.17 The official reformation of Canterbury Cathedral began in December 1643, over a year after the building had suffered its first major iconoclastic attack by parliamentary soldiers. Official iconoclasm was organized by the mayor and recorder of the city when the ‘cathedral men’ refused to act on the ordinances of parliament, and the Kentish minister Richard Culmer was put in charge of the operation. Culmer is one of the most notorious iconoclasts of this period, well known largely because he documented his exploits in the 1644 pamphlet Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury. This sparked off a war of words with published attacks by royalists denouncing and satirising Culmer and defences of him by his son, Richard.18 Culmer worked alongside other ‘commissioners’ whom his son tells us were also ministers. Whilst he was appointed by local authorities he was also 15

D. Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion (Oxford, 1985), 178. A list of seventeenth-century cathedrals is given by S. E. Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege: Cathedrals in English Society, 1600–1700 (Exeter, 1996), xxi. These eight cathedrals were chosen because of the relatively good survival rate of archival material or other important evidence (such as Francis Standish’s account of iconoclasm at Peterborough, and Richard Culmer’s published account of his reformation of Canterbury Cathedral). 17 Joseph Hall, Bishop Hall’s Hard Measure, written by himself upon his Impeachment (1710 edn), 16. 18 See Richard Culmer, Dean and Chapter Newes from Canterbury (1649), a reissue of Culmer’s tract by his son, and Culmer Jnr., A Parish Looking Glasse for Persecutors of Ministers. Hostile replies include The Razing of the Record and Antidotum Culmerianum (both London with false Oxford imprints, 1644); Culmer’s Crown Crackt with his own Looking-Glasse (1657). 16

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described as having the authority of parliament and allegedly reported back to a parliamentary committee – presumably the Harley Committee. He certainly had contact with Harley from whom, in June 1645, he received the proceeds of the burning of the gold-embroidered altar cloth known as the Glory cloth, which had been sent up to the Harley Committee by mayor John Lade.19 That some members of the city corporation in Canterbury would have liked to begin the reformation at an even earlier date, is made clear in a petition sent to the House of Lords by the dean and chapter in March 1643. This petition centred on a dispute over the removal of the cathedral gates, which the chapter objected to not only because the gates were ‘ancient and usual’ but because of the threat of violence to themselves and the cathedral. The mayor of this time, Daniel Masterson, and some ‘other gentlemen’ ultimately prevented the removal of the gates, but some of the aldermen had argued for them to be taken down, ‘intimating withal, by many Passages in their Discourse, that their Design was at the Spoiling of the Church and Windows thereof’.20 At this point there seems to have been at least some popular support for reformation, reflecting hostility towards the cathedral and chapter. When the building was ransacked by Colonel Sandys’s soldiers in August 1642 local inhabitants appear to have taken part. The House of Lords, enquiring into the affair, ordered that ‘such persons that are Townsmen that were actors in this fact, shall be referred to the Mayor of Canterbury who shall proceed against them’. These included ‘men of quality’. That there was a threat from zealous locals is also indicated by the acts of iconoclasm committed upon the font in February 1642, and by the fact that the chapter felt it necessary to put a guard upon the windows at around the same time.21 Once Culmer began his work under a warrant from Mayor Lade, he proceeded with great fervour and relative speed – his account of the reformation was written and published by 24 June 1644, only six months later. Culmer’s main targets were the many medieval windows where pictures of God, Christ, the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary, along with others of saints, angels, and Thomas Becket in ‘all his pontificalibus’ were demolished. Culmer also saw to the destruction of ‘many Idolls of stone’ and ‘many huge crosses . . . without the cathedral’. ‘Mitred saints’ and several crucifixes were demolished in the cloisters, and a crucifix which had been hidden by the 19

Culmer Jnr., A Parish Looking Glasse, 5; Antidotum Culmerianum, 9; BL, Add. MS 70005, receipt dated 14 June 1645. Prynne refers to the reformation of the cathedral as being done by order of parliament, although he may simply be referring to the parliamentary ordinances (see Canterburies Doome, 79). 20 LJ, v, 677. 21 Ibid., 360; Culmer, Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury, 17; CCA, DCC/TA/47, Treasurer’s Accounts, 1641–2, fol. 3. The ransacking of the cathedral by soldiers is discussed below.

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prebends in the chapter house was uncovered and destroyed.22 It has been suggested that Culmer exaggerated the amount of glass destroyed given the survival of medieval glass in the present-day cathedral. However, it is on record that more than thirteen chests containing some 3,913 feet of glass were stored away in the workshops of local glaziers to be restored in 1660–1.23 The extremity of Culmer’s attack on the cathedral, which went far beyond the removal of recent Laudian innovations, provoked hostility from many in the town. On one occasion there was a disturbance centred around the demolition of a window containing a picture of Jesus in the manger. The labourers had refused to smash the window forcing Culmer to climb a ladder to do the deed himself, whereupon some stirres began, a Prebends wife cried out, Save the Childe . . . and M. Culmers bloud was then threatened by some that stood without the iron grates in the body of the church.24

The mayor had to provide musketeers to convey Culmer safely home and also put out warrants to apprehend those who were involved in this or a similar incident. One of them, William Cooke, who petitioned for compensation after the Restoration, alleged that he had been violently beaten by ‘Culmer and his company’, and forced to flee the city. It seems to have been policy after this to keep the church doors shut to avoid such incidents. Defending his father from accusations of sacrilege because he was alleged to have urinated in the cathedral, Culmer junior explained, he was necessitated thereunto, at the time of the demolishing of the idolls, when all the doors were shut, and those without were ready to knock out his brains, if he had gone forth to make water.25

Culmer later became caught up in the Christmas riots of 1647 and was almost lynched by a riotous crowd who clearly remembered his exploits at the cathedral and threatened to hang him up over the cathedral gate from where he had pulled down a large image of Christ.26 Culmer was accused by his detractors of going beyond the parliamentary remit. The author of Antidotum Culmerianum claimed that Culmer

22

Culmer, Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury, 21–3. Collinson writes: ‘Culmer exaggerated the harm done to the stained glass (as anyone can now see)’ (Collinson, ‘The Protestant cathedral’, 197); CCA, DDC/TB1, Treasurer’s Book 1660–1, fols 148–9. The two glaziers who stored the glass, Richard Hornsby and John Raylton, were involved in its restoration. Whilst it is not specified that this is stained glass there is one reference, in a bill of 12 December 1661, to the ‘taking downe [of] three whitt roundalls of glasse in the Monument and putting ye painted in there romes of them’ (DCC/TV 9, Treasurers’ Vouchers, and see DCC/TV 8 for Hornsby’s accounts). 24 Culmer Jnr., A Parish Looking Glasse, 5–6. 25 Ibid., 6; CCA, DDC/Petition no. 232, William Cooke to the dean and chapter c.1660; Culmer Jnr., A Parish Looking Glasse, 20. 26 Ibid., 30. 23

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had lied to the parliamentary committee about a carved, gold-painted screen in the quire representing it as part of a Becket ‘shrine’ and using that as an excuse to destroy it. The screen had already been stripped of its imagery by earlier reformers who having cleansed it ‘thought [it] fit to be left standing’. Culmer also allegedly exceeded his commission from the committee, falsely reporting to locals that they had been instructed to leave ‘no jot of painted glasse’ in the cathedral, and going on to destroy windows without distinguishing ‘kings from saints, or military men from martyrs, so contrary to his Commission, the Ordinance of parliament’.27 It should, of course, be borne in mind that this was an extremely hostile account and similar claims were made against others, sometimes spuriously. However, the degree of enthusiasm with which Culmer undertook his work and the broadness of his interpretation of the parliamentary ordinances is not in doubt. Culmer was a staunch Puritan who, as minister of Goodnestone, Kent, in 1634, had been deprived by Laud for refusing to read the Book of Sports. As assistant to the minister of Harbledown, Kent, in 1643, he was ‘persecuted for acting against drunkenness and crickett playing on the Sabbath’ and at Minster-in-Thanet, where he was incumbent from 1644, his attempts to enforce parliamentary legislation against superstitious monuments were stoutly resisted. A man of zeal, Culmer was prepared to take things, quite literally, into his own hands. At Minster, he laid out his own money to demolish ‘monuments of superstition and idolatry’ when churchwardens and others refused to co-operate. He personally employed workmen, and unable to get them to climb up onto the spire did so himself fixing a ladder and ropes so that the crosses there could be removed.28 Given this level of enthusiasm it is easy to imagine that Culmer, like William Dowsing, volunteered himself for his iconoclastic work at the cathedral, and his tireless zeal made him many enemies. His misadventures have an air of the farcical: he was locked out of his church at Minster, and prevented from preaching by parishioners who even removed the clappers from the bells so that he could not call worshippers to the church. Finally he was forced to escape the Kent rising by swimming fully clothed across a river.29 While the reformation of Canterbury was put under the charge of ministers answering to the mayor, at Norwich secular authorities took the task directly upon themselves with local aldermen and members of the county committee responsible for iconoclasm at the cathedral and the parish churches. As in many cathedral towns there was a history of tension between the dean and chapter and the city governors, and by February 1642 27 28 29

Antidotum Culmerianum, 9, 26, 9–10. Culmer Jnr., A Parish Looking Glasse, 24, 25. Ibid., 3, 4, 25–6, 31–2.

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the cathedral inhabitants felt threatened enough by local animosity to make preparations to fend off a rumoured attack by apprentices.30 Shortly after the outbreak of war, the cathedral seems to have been taken over for the training of troops: the receivers’ and treasurers’ accounts for 1642–3 mention training and marching going on between December 1642 and spring 1643. One undated (but probably post-Restoration) account of the ‘difacing of ye Cathedral’ describes how soldiers were exercised there on Christmas day and on Sundays. A company of volunteers demonstrated their lack of respect for the cathedral in a show of mockery against bowing to the altar: going up to the place where it had stood, they ‘turned their backe upon it in great derision lifting of their bumbs and houlding downe their heads against it in a deriding manner’.31 On 23 May 1643 the cathedral accounts show the sum of £1 1s paid for taking down the organ in the church, no doubt under pressure from the mayor and aldermen. The organ pipes were later to be publicly burnt.32 On 1 November 1643 the House of Commons granted to the mayor and aldermen authority over the cathedral. They were to nominate preachers and regained their right to sit at the east end of the church ‘as in former times they were accustomed’; they were responsible for the repair of seats in the quire and were to have the use ‘for their Retire both before and after Sermon, of a void Chapel or Place, called Jesus’ Chapel which heretofore they usually had’. This was the cue for a rearrangement of the quire in a way more suitable for Puritan worship. The pulpit was placed against a south column adjacent to Bishop Overall’s monument, and the aldermen’s seats ranged along the east end within the sanctuary, with the mayor’s seat erected where the high altar had stood. To accommodate this move the table-top tomb of the Norman bishop and founder of the cathedral, Herbert de Losinga, was lowered to a mere slab so as not to interfere with the aldermen’s view.33 Further measures were taken by the mayor and aldermen with the setting up of a committee to ‘view the churches for Pictures and Crucifixes’ on 24 January 1644. That this remit also included the cathedral can be seen from the confiscation of ‘popishe pictures’, depicting Moses and Aaron and the four evangelists, which had belonged to it. The committee was also to take information concerning scandalous ministers, and it may have been at this point that the mayor, alderman and sheriffs paid a visit to Bishop Joseph Hall taking him to task over the issue of his continuing to ordain. Later,

30

True Newes from Norwich (1642). NRO, DCN 10/2/11, Receivers’ and Treasurers’ Accounts 1642–3 (these are misplaced in the volume and have no folio numbers); DCN 107/3, ‘Captain Lalmons account of the difacing of ye Cathedral by ye Rebells’. 32 Ibid., DCN 10/2/11, Receivers’ and Treasurers’ Accounts 1642–3, 25 May 1643. 33 CJ, iii, 298; The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. G. Keynes (4 vols, 1964), iii, 128. 31

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according to Hall, they returned with ‘many zealous followers’ to reform his chapel, where they found the windows full of Images, which were very offensive, and must be demolished: I told them they were the Pictures of some ancient and worthy Bishops . . . [but] it was answer’d me, that they were so many Popes.

Hall was obliged to have the figures defaced, although he managed to persuade the reformers to allow him to have the work undertaken carefully ‘with the least los and defacing of the windows’. He had the heads removed from the figures of several bishops arguing that ‘the bodies could not offend’.34 Such care was not to be taken over the cathedral, the ransacking of which Hall called a ‘carnage . . . of furious sacrilege’. He famously described the violent triumphalism with which this was undertaken and it is worth giving the account in full. He wrote: Lord, what work was here, what clattering of Glasses, what beating down of Walls, what tearing up of manuscripts, what pulling down of Seats, what resting out of Irons and Brass from the Windows and Graves, what defacing of Arms, what demolishing of curious Stonework, that had not any representation in the World, but only the Cost of the Founder and Skill of the Mason, what Tooting and Piping upon the destroyed Organ Pipes, and what a hideous Triumph on the Market-day before all the Country, when in a kind of Sacrilegious and prophane Procession, all the Organ Pipes, Vestments, both Copes and Surplices, together with the Leaden Cross, which had been newly sawn down over the Green-Yard Pulpit, and the Service Books and Singing Books that could be had, were carried to the Fire in the publick Market-Place; a lewd Wretch Walking before the Train, in his Cope trailing in the Dirt, with two Service Books in his Hand, imitating in an impious Scorn the Tune, and usurping the Words of the Littany used formerly in the Church: Neer the publick Cross, all these Monuments of Idolatry must be Sacrificed to the Fire, not without much Ostentation of a Zealous Joy in discharging Ordinance to the Cost of Some who professed how much they had long’d to see that Day.35

This description is interesting because it is a rare example of an eyewitness account to particularly violent iconoclasm perpetrated by civil authority rather than by troops. Soldiers were probably involved in carrying out the work – perhaps the musketeers who were later stationed in the cathedral – but Hall is clear that the whole process took place under the ‘authority and presence’ of the sheriff Thomas Tofts and aldermen Matthew Lindsey and John Greenwood.36 34 NRO, MF 628/2, Mayor’s Court Book 1634–46, fols 411, 415; Hall, Bishop Hall’s Hard Measure, 13–15. 35 Ibid., 15–16. 36 Ibid., 15.

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Thomas Browne, a friend of Hall’s, was also a witness to the desecration of the cathedral and wrote of pieces of organ and five or six old but ‘richly embroidered’ copes belonging to the church being ‘formally carryed into the market place . . . and . . . cast into a fire provided for that purpose, with showting and Rejoyceing’. Browne also noted the destruction of Bishop Edmund Scambler’s tomb, dating from 1594, of which ‘the statua [was] broken, and the free stone pulled downe as far as the inward brick-work’; the pulling down of a monument representing two people kneeling in prayer; and the removal of ‘above a hundred brass Inscriptions’. While there is evidence that brasses were removed the number given here has been questioned. Jonathan Finch, having examined earlier sources, has pointed out that probably only some 15 brasses were extant at the beginning of the seventeenth century, of which six were already defaced.37 The sacking of the cathedral and the sacrilegious bonfire which followed probably occurred in spring 1644. Hall described the events as happening shortly after the taking of the Solemn League and Covenant, which parliament ordered to be taken by all men over eighteen on 5 February 1644. It may be that this was the same public bonfire as that ordered for 10 March for the popish pictures confiscated by the committee of aldermen, although neither Hall nor Browne mentions the burning of pictures and it is not unlikely that there were a number of such public spectacles, as in London. The taking of the Covenant, however, would have undoubtedly helped spark the iconoclasts’ zeal committing the subscribers, as it did, to the extirpation of popery, prelacy and superstition.38 Cathedral chapters were not actually abolished until April 1649, and the dean and chapter of Norwich seem to have remained in residence. On 1 March 1645, a year or so after the initial iconoclasm at the cathedral, a letter was sent from the mayor’s court to the dean and prebends requiring them to pull down all pictures & crucifixes yet undemolishd in the Cathedral Church & to repair & make up the windowes already taken out & such as are to be taken out according to the se[cond] ordinance of p[ar]liam[en]t in that behalfe.39

The chapter were clearly reluctant to comply with the wishes of the city governor. As late as 1647 zealous citizens could still complain about a crucifix which remained on one of the cathedral gates, and felt the need to demand the strict enforcement of the parliamentary ordinances.40 37 Works of Sir Thomas Browne, iii, 123, 124, 128, 140–1; J. Finch, ‘The Monuments’, in Norwich Cathedral, ed. Atherton et al., 476. 38 Hall, Bishop Hall’s Hard Measure, 13; Acts and Ordinances, i, 376; NRO, COL 5/19; Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 268–9. 39 NRO, MF 628/2, Mayor’s Court Book 1634–46, fol. 445v. 40 Blomefield, History of the County of Norfolk, iii, 398. See ch. 3 above.

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That there were mixed feelings among the inhabitants of Norwich can be seen in the conflict over the use of the cathedral in the 1650s. There is evidence that there was something of a struggle between those who would have liked to see the cathedral demolished and those who wanted it preserved. One member of the corporation, Christopher Jay – a not inconsequential figure who was sheriff in 1653 and mayor in 1657 – claimed that he had spent his own money in basic repairs for the cathedral. The bishops of Lincoln and Exeter, looking into his claim for compensation from the restored dean and chapter, ordered that he should be paid in full. They commented that the said Mr Jay in the late disordered times, when endeavours were used to demolish the Cathedral Church of Norwich, had not only prevented the same, but disbursed considerable sums of money in the needful repairs of that Church, which would otherwise have fallen into very great decay, if not utter ruin.41

There is also among the dean and chapter papers at Norwich a list of repairs done between 1652 and 1659, made presumably by Jay and recording the sum of £14, payd & layd out about p[re]sentinge of the pet[it]ion to the late usurper for the takeing of any free gifts for the repaire of the church, and followinge of it & did gaine a grant from him, & afterwards it was stoped, & likewise there was two pet[it]ions p[re]sented to him to have it pulled downe, wch I did use the best meanes I could to hinder this, with all charges attendinge at London.42

The mayor and aldermen had already in 1650 drawn up a petition to parliament requesting that the cathedral ‘may be given to the Citty for a Stocke for the poore’, and a similar petition had come from Great Yarmouth at around the same time.43 The City Assembly Book records another being drawn up in 1653, for which depositions from witnesses were collected, although what its demands were is unknown. It is likely that the petition for the taking of ‘free gifts’ for repair, mentioned by Jay, is the same as that which appears among the State Papers dated 22 April 1658, and this is notably directed from the ‘inhabitants of the close’ (my emphasis), rather than from the inhabitants of the city.44 Despite the changes made to the quire in the 1640s to accommodate the preferred style of worship of the mayor and aldermen, it is not clear whether

41

Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 134, fol. 140. NRO, DCN 12/28. 43 NRO, Assembly Book 1642–68, fols 94 (19 March 1659), 98 (3 May 1650); HMC, 9th Report, appendix, pt 1, Records of the Corporation of Great Yarmouth (1881), 320 (31 May 1650). 44 NRO, Assembly Book 1642–68, fols 134 (15 January 1653), 136 (24 February 1653); CSPD, 1657–8, 372. 42

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religious services continued in the cathedral through the 1650s.45 The pulpit in the so-called Green Yard, an open space between the cathedral and bishop’s palace used for preaching, had been stripped of its cross and moved to a new position outside St Andrew’s Hall. It was from here, according to Browne, that public sermons were preached during the summer ‘and elsewhere in the winter’. At the Restoration the pulpit and seats set up by the city chamber were removed and it was ordered that the Major & Aldermen shall continue their going to the cathedral to the forenoone service on the Lords Daie & other daies as in times before 1642 they did.46

While there were some in Norwich who would have liked to see the cathedral completely demolished, these were clearly frustrated by the determination of Jay and others to preserve it. Although little is known about who the defenders of the cathedral might have been, it should not automatically be assumed that they were royalist or ‘Anglican’ in temperament. The case of York Minster is a good illustration of the fact that not all Puritans were zealots in this respect and that cathedrals could be cherished and cared for even while being made suitable for godly worship. York had been a royalist stronghold until its surrender after the battle of Marston Moor in July 1644. The articles of surrender made between the city and the besieging parliamentarian forces contained a clause ‘that neither churches nor other buildings be defaced’, and certainly there are no reports of riotous attacks on the Minster such as there had been elsewhere. However, towards the end of 1645 the building was described as being in need of repair, while the deanery had suffered ‘much waste and spoyle . . . of late committed and done’.47 There is no record of what was happening to the Minster between the surrender of July 1644 and the setting up of a Committee for the City and County of York on 20 June 1645. The records of this committee, which survive in a single volume from July 1645, show it beginning to take control of the Minster. On 2 August an inventory was ordered to be taken of ‘plate and other moveables belonging to the cathedral’, and on 11 August several goods remaining in the hands of Dr Hodson, a former canon, including books, copes, surplices and ‘p[ar]cels of the organs’ were ordered to be turned over. This Hodson refused to do, replying to the committee on 27 October with a ‘dilatory and unfitting answer’. Sequestrators were ordered to repair to his house and seize the items ‘with the assistance of musketeers if necessary’.48 45

The cathedral was still being used in 1648 when a thanksgiving sermon was preached there for deliverance from the pro-royalist riot of 23 April (Ketton Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War, 347). 46 Works of Sir Thomas Browne, iii, 141; NRO, Assembly Book 1642–68, fol. 218v (9 April 1660). 47 YCA, Corporation House Books Class B, vol. 36, fol. 106; ibid., York Committee Book E63, fols 19, 27v. 48 Ibid., fols 5v, 20. On Phineas Hodson, see Matthews, Walker Revised, 394.

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At the time of the post-Restoration visitation of the Minster in 1662, James Scrutton, a former verger, compiled a list of plate and other items which were sold ‘during the Great Rebellion’. This included: 2 guilt candlesticks and 3 little plates . . . sold by Mr Dossey, by order from the Lord Maior . . . three copes taken away by order of the Committee, by the sequestratours . . . The organ pipes, & the brasse deske, in the quire, and a statue of brasse . . . and all the brasse which was taken off the grave stones.49

Francis Drake, a York historian writing in the early eighteenth century, also described ‘depredations on gravestones’ which were ‘stripped and pillaged . . . to the minutest piece of metal’, an act which he ascribed to motives of ‘poor lucre’ rather than a genuine objection to popery. However, what neither he nor Scrutton point out is that the profits from the sale of these items, ordered on 30 October 1645, were earmarked for the use of the Minster to help with the repair of the fabric and bells. Nor indeed were all of the plate or other treasures sold – when John Evelyn visited York in 1654 he was shown ‘as a great rarity in these dayes, and at this time’ a richly covered bible and prayer book, gilt plate and ‘gorgeous’ coverings for the altar and pulpit, all ‘carefully preserv’d in the Vestrie’.50 These presumably had been hidden away out of a desire to preserve some of the Minster’s historical treasures, although how and by whom is not known. In March 1646 the committee was petitioned by the ‘officers of the cathedral’, those who had responsibility for the Minster and who described themselves as ‘well affected to the state’. They called for any dean and chapter revenues which remained after the deductions for the maintenance of preachers to be used to make necessary repairs to the building’s fabric. The committee agreed and it was decided that the petition should be forwarded to the House of Commons. While there is no record of the receipt of such a petition among the parliamentary journals or state papers, the answer was clearly a positive one as the repairs were begun, and a clerk of works, Richard Dossey, appointed.51 At around this time, no doubt as part of the necessary repairs, an apparently moderate reformation of the Minster was undertaken. The ‘shrine’ of Thomas Becket had already been dismantled as part of the wholesale taking-up of brasses. On 22 June 1646 two aldermen, ex-mayor John Gelderd and committee man Leonard Thompson, were sent into the Minster to view the ‘organ loftes and canopie in the severall clossitts that were over the litle altars in the side quere, and give order for taking downe 49

York Minster Library, M2 (2) M, ‘Things taken from York Minster During the Great Rebellion’. Francis Drake, Eboracum, or The History and Antiquities of the City of York (1st edn, 1736; repr. Wakefield, 1978), 488; YCA, York Committee Book E63, fol. 20; Diary of John Evelyn, ed. De Beer, iii, 128–9. 51 YCA, York Committee Book E63, fol. 44; PRO, SP 16/511/105 (1645).

50

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the same’. A week later these were ordered to be pulled down along with the font.52 There is no evidence for the removal of images from the Minster, but circumstantial evidence suggests that the windows were reformed. Thomas Fairfax was alleged to have saved the medieval windows by taking them down for safekeeping, and if this is true, it may have happened in the period between the surrender of the City (July 1644) and the first records of the York Committee (July 1645), which would explain the lack of evidence. Alternatively it may have occurred alongside the alterations and repairs mentioned above. In 1690, James Torre made notes on the stained glass in the Minster, and recorded one window in the north aisle as ‘being all of New-White-glass, [which] hath nothing observable in it for the old painted Glass was taken down and sold in the time of the late Troubles’.53 Peter Gibson, writing recently, has noted that prior to the removal and subsequent restoration of the windows during and after World War II some of those in the nave had been in need of extensive rearrangement. Twelfthcentury figure panels in a clerestory window, depicting the Miraculous Draught of Fishes and The Supper at Emmaus, were ‘disordered and very fragmented’. Another window in the same area, containing five scenes portraying tormented souls in purgatory, also required rearrangement as well as the addition of twenty-three newly painted heads. Gibson notes the absence of heads elsewhere, writing of the fourteenth-century great west window: bearing in mind the excellent state of the glass it is surprising that in the lowest row of figures – Primates who succeeded William Melton [Archbishop 1317–40] – not one original face survives.54

Missing faces (in a particularly accessible spot) are less than surprising to a historian of iconoclasm, and it is tempting to see in the fact that the figures are archbishops, rather than pictures of the Trinity or biblical illustrations, a possible seventeenth-century authorship to the damage. If true, this could represent nothing more than an isolated act of destruction or may be evidence of a partial reformation of the windows. The Committee for York was known to be involved in overseeing the defacing and removal of stained glass windows in parish churches during 1646, as described earlier, so it seems unlikely that they would allow similar windows to remain standing in the cathedral, especially given their clear desire to make the building fit for their own use.55

52

YCA, York Committee Book E63, fols 20, 62, 64. York Minster Library, James Torre, ‘Antiquities of York Minster 1690–91’, fol. 20. On Fairfax see T. Gent, The Antient and Modern History of the Ancient City of York (York, 1730), 54–5. 54 P. Gibson, The Stained and Painted Glass of York Minster (Norwich, 1992), 14–15, 20 (see also plates 20 and 21 for The Supper at Emmaus before and after rearrangement). 55 Evelyn in his visit of 1654 makes no mention of damage to the windows but neither does he mention any stained glass which presumably would have been noteworthy if still in situ (Diary of John Evelyn, ed. De Beer, iii, 128–9). 53

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In December 1646 the committee issued a reminder to the officers of the cathedral to be diligent in preventing ‘such abuses as some unruly persons do dayly presume to offer’ to the church fabric.56 This abuse was probably opportunistic pilfering of materials, although it could also indicate an attitude of disrespect and possibly hostility towards the Minster from at least some individuals. On the whole, however, it was treated with care and well maintained as a preaching centre throughout the Interregnum. What is interesting about the limited reformation of York Minster is precisely its restrained, moderate temper. As the action taken in the parish churches shows, this was not simply a case of reluctance to observe legislation or a neglect to do so on the part of the authorities. Claire Cross has pointed out that by the seventeenth century the city government in York was ‘enthusiastically Protestant’, and that in the 1630s ‘at a time when the dean and chapter were making an exceptional effort to beautify the Minster, no member of the corporation made a gift’. Yet by 1649 in a letter to York MPs Sir William Allanson and Thomas Hoyle, requesting that certain rents be set aside for the maintenance of the fabric, the mayor and aldermen could describe the Minster not only as of ‘publique use’ but as an ‘ornament’ to the city. The mayor at this time was Leonard Thompson, who had in 1646 been one of those who had been responsible for demolishing side altars and organ lofts at the Minster, while another signatory was Henry Thompson, who had also been involved in enforcing iconoclastic legislation.57 The involvement of Fairfax is also interesting and, as mentioned, stories of his solicitousness over the welfare of the Minster abound. Yet his care for the church was carried out through the local governors, not in opposition to them. Richard Dossey and other ‘church officers’ were appointed by Fairfax and worked under the command of the committee men.58 The point is that a moderate reformation was possible, and by the same people who would show care for the building when put to a proper godly use. The cases of Canterbury, Norwich and York are the best illustrations of official iconoclasm in the cathedrals. However, it should not be assumed that lack of evidence elsewhere means that there were not more cases of official iconoclasm. Bearing in mind that we may be dealing with lack of surviving evidence rather than lack of iconoclasm, several reasons for the apparent disparities in enforcement suggest themselves. First, and most obvious, is the fact that not all cathedrals were alike in the extent to which they contained or were adorned with monuments of idolatry. Some had survived the Reformation better than others, and some were more thoroughly refurbished than others during the Laudian period. Second, many cathedrals 56

YCA, York Committee Book E63, fol. 76v (8 December 1646). Cross, ‘From the Reformation to the Restoration’, 212; Drake, Eboracum, 534; YCA, York Committee Book E63, fols 62, 47v. 58 YCA, York Committee Book E63, fol. 76v. See also PRO, SP 16/511/105. 57

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suffered great damage during the war either from bombardment or physical attack or from the riotous iconoclasm of soldiers. In many cases these attacks would have made the need for further reformation redundant. A third possible factor linked with this is that the iconoclastic movement or drive seemed to reach the peak of its fervour at the height of the war and tended to tail off afterwards. The parliamentary ordinances against images came in August 1643 and May 1644, and it was these two years which saw official iconoclasm in London, at Canterbury, Norwich and in the Eastern Association under the authority of William Dowsing. Most of the army iconoclasm took place between August 1642 and mid 1644. The cathedral towns of Gloucester and Exeter which were traditionally godly in outlook but were either under constant siege or royalist occupation were not in a position to prioritize the enforcement of iconoclastic legislation during these peak years, and seem to have taken no major steps to do so after the war. Indeed in the case of Gloucester an anonymous correspondent of the Leveller and sectarian Samuel Chidley could complain as late as November 1652 that the cathedral had not been thoroughly reformed by the ‘deluded city’ who were ‘wedded to the grand idol of that place’. It should, of course, be remembered that both Chidley and clearly the letter-writer too were radicals – Chidley disapproved of the use of any churches for worship. Some of the things to which they objected at Gloucester would not have come under the remit of either of the parliamentary ordinances. Steps to the altar should have been levelled, but there was no requirement to demolish cloisters, and this was done elsewhere largely for pragmatic or opportunistic reasons. A ‘Table of Commandments’ was said to ‘still remain’ although there is no mention of images on it, and it was further objected that the effigy of Abbot Parker was ‘not at all defaced’. Monuments to dead prelates, although they suffered in many places, were certainly not included in parliamentary legislation.59 The Gloucester city authorities had acted to remove a large cross from the exterior of the cathedral in February 1647 – a task which took the manpower of some eight men for over a week. The cathedral organ was also sold off at some point, and it is possible that any painted windows which were not already destroyed by soldiers may have been taken down. Several hundred feet of ‘old glass’ were restored in 1660, which had presumably been stored away throughout the Interregnum.60 This could explain the presence of the painted window in the west of the tower which so offended prebendary Edward Fowler in 1679 that he was moved to smash it himself. The offensive window – a picture of God as an old man, with a crucifix representing Christ

59

Chidley, Thunder from the Throne of God, postscript. GRO, Common Council Minute Book 1632–56 (GBR B 3/2), fol. 397 (11 February 1647). There is no record of the sale of the Thomas Dallam organ but it was repurchased in poor condition after the Restoration (D. Welander, The History, Art and Architecture of Gloucester Cathedral (Stroud, 1991)); GRO, D936 A1/2, fols 257, 258, 305, D936 A24. 60

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between his knees and the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove – may have been the window ‘between church and quire’ which was restored in December 1660 with both new and old glass.61 It is likely that at Gloucester, as elsewhere, the cathedral was seen as a perfectly acceptable place for continued worship and preaching, with a certain amount of necessary adjustment to the furnishings. One of the first things done after the surrender of Worcester in July 1646 was the removal of the new organs, which Henry Townsend described in his diary: The Organs were this day taken down out of the Cathedral Church. Some parliamenters, hearing the music of the church at service, walking in the Aisle, fell a skipping about and dancing as it were in derision. Others seeing the workmen taking them down said, ‘you might have spared that labour, we would have done it for you’.62

At Peterborough the cathedral was granted to the inhabitants for public worship in August 1651. The church had undergone a good deal of iconoclasm at the hands of soldiers in 1643, including the beating down of the altar ‘to the lowest base of plaine work’. This altar having ‘so stood as a deformed spectacle some eight years’ still had the power to offend for, according to Simon Gunton, a private person disliking it because there was not a thorough enough reformation, it was ordered that the remainder, with the whole mound whereon it was erected, should be levelled with the pavement of the Quire.63

The best illustration of a cathedral being adapted and restructured for Puritan worship is the case of Exeter. The city was naturally parliamentarian but was under siege from 16 May 1643, falling in September of that year and remaining in royalist hands until April 1646. There is some confusion over the extent of iconoclasm carried out by soldiers and citizens both before and after the royalist occupation, but no hard evidence. An account of a visit to the cathedral made by the duke of Tuscany in 1669 ascribed the defacing of 61

A window is thus described among the unnumbered papers in GRO, D936 A24. It was repaired with some eighty-two feet of new, eight and a half feet of old and 18 quarries of glass. This does not completely correspond to the size of the window in the west of the tower which has been estimated at 28 feet ⫻ 18 feet (personal communication from A. J. Norton, clerk of the works at Gloucester). However, it is possible that only the offensive part of the window, that containing the Trinity, would have been removed. 62 The Diary of Henry Townsend of Emley Lovett 1640–63, ed. J. W. Willis Bund (2 vols, Worcester Historical Society, 1920), 191 (20 July 1646). Townsend describes the misfortune which struck the ‘first man . . . that plucked down and spoiled the organs’, confirming Dugdale’s assertion that these were destroyed by soldiers in September 1642. William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum or, The History of the Ancient Abbies, and other Monasteries, Hospitals, Cathedral and Collegiate Churches in England and Wales (1693), 557. 63 Simon Gunton, The History of the Church of Peterborough, ed. S. Patrick (facsimile of 1686 edn, Peterborough, 1990), 113, 97.

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monuments of bishops to Independents – although this may have been a generalized reference to Puritans rather than to the Independent congregation who worshipped in the nave. The single reference in the official records to anything which might be construed as an act of reformation comes in the order of the city chamber, dated 28 November 1648, for defacing an inscription in the wall of the new churchyard ‘purporting the Consecration thereof’. Consecration or ‘putting holinesse’ into churches or other religious objects or sites was dissaproved of by Puritans.64 It was not until the mid 1650s that the restructuring of the cathedral was begun. In 1656 the City took over the cloisters, which were to be converted into a market place, and finally sold the cathedral organs which had apparently been lying there since their removal, presumably after the surrender of the City in 1646. These organs, which had been attacked by soldiers in 1642 and repaired during the royalist occupation, were ordered to be sold on 18 November 1656 and may have found an illustrious new owner – among the state papers is a licence from the customs commissioners ‘to permit an organ to be shipped and brought from Exeter to London by sea for his Highness [the Protector]’.65 Another consequence of the take-over of the cloisters was the unceremonious removal of the monuments there, the families to whom they belonged being given a limited time to claim them, presumably after which they were to be destroyed.66 The real business of altering the cathedral began in August 1657 when the city chamber decided to put up a partition wall to separate the quire from the nave, making two self-contained places of worship for Independent and Presbyterian congregations, known as East Peters and West Peters. To do this required the borrowing by subscription of £800, and in October 1657 the city governors decided to raise the money to pay this back by selling off ‘useless’ churches (those made redundant by the uniting of parishes). The dividing of the cathedral also involved the removal and reuse of wainscoting from the Holy Ghost chapel, and the taking down of choir stalls and of the bishop’s seat. These last two were neither destroyed nor sold, but stored

64 Erskine et al., Exeter Cathedral, 67–8; DRO, City Chamber Act Book 1647–52, vol. ix, fol. 52. (The folio numbers given for the City Chamber Book are those corresponding to E. Chick’s Index to Act Books, B14/12a). For objections to the act of consecration, see, for instance, the London Root and Branch Petition of 1640, in Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 141. See also J. Wickham Legg, English Orders for Consecrating Churches (1911). 65 DRO, Exeter Cathedral Archives, MS 3780, Chapter Act Book 1643–60, fol. 15 (27 April 1644), and MS 3783, Extraordinary Payments 1639–46 (not foliated), ‘Item pd to Mr Hamlyn for mending organs . . . £20 (no date); City Chamber Act Book 1652–63, vol. x, fol. 159. That Cromwell may have been the new owner of the Exeter organ is suggested by Morris, ‘Exeter Cathedral: two studies. Pt 2, the cathedral during the Reformation and the Interregnum’ (typescript in Exeter Cathedral Library, 1940), 207; see also CSPD, 1655–6, 117 (16 January 1656). 66 DRO, City Chamber Act Book 1652–63, vol. x, fol. 163 (6 January 1657). Relatives were given until Lady Day (25 March) to claim the tombstones. For the purchase of the cloisters by the city, see ibid., 157.

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away intact until 1683.67 These were not wholly popular alterations – at the Restoration petitioners complained of the damage done to the cathedral, as well as objecting to the sale of thirteen of the city’s seventeen parish churches. The wall set up in the cathedral was later described as a ‘monstrous Babylonish wall’, a symbol of the ‘church-rending schisms and confusions of those times’. It was pulled down by a royal order of October 1660.68 Like Exeter and the others described above, many cathedrals were repaired (of war damage or soldiers’ overzealous iconoclasm) and came to be used as preaching houses or parish churches. There does not seem to have been much objection to using buildings associated with superstitious and idolatrous worship. The attitudes of radicals such as Henry Clark and Samuel Chidley, who opposed the use of churches because of the taint of idolatry, seem to have been exceptional. Puritan preachers were happy to preach in the buildings – as, for instance, Hugh Peters at Worcester, Cornelius Burgess at Wells and Cromwell’s own chaplain Lewis Stukeley who served the Independent congregation at Exeter.69 Nevertheless, there were certainly some in parliament who were not sentimental about the cathedrals and there were proposals that they should be demolished. As early as 3 March 1648 it had been referred to the Committee for Sick and Wounded Soldiers that the cathedral of Ely should be examined ‘in relation to the ruinous Condition of the same’. Providing that there were other sufficient churches for public worship, the committee were to bring in an ordinance to sell the materials of the cathedral, the proceeds going to make provision for the relief of sick and maimed soldiers, widows and orphans.70 Nothing further seems to have come of this idea. Cathedrals buildings were not generally included in the parliamentary surveys of the abolished dean and chapter lands carried out in 1649 and 1650. The single exception, according to Stanford Lehmberg, was Lichfield – a cathedral which had suffered severely from war damage. The Lichfield survey noted: The whole ffabrick of it is exceedingly ruinated; much Leade and iron was taken away whilst it was a Garrison. And much lead and other materials is taken away since . . . If some course be not taken to preserve it, within a little time the leade wilbe all gone and the whole ffabrick fall to the Ground.71

67

Ibid., fols 180, 186, 227–8, 204, 205; Erskine et al., Exeter Cathedral, 61. G. B. Tatham, The Puritans in Power: a Study in the History of the English Church from 1640 to 1660 (Cambridge, 1913), 259–60; from a sermon of John Reynolds delivered in the cathedral on 27 July 1684, quoted in Erskine et al., Exeter Cathedral, 61; PRO, SP 29/19/57 (26 October 1660). 69 Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege, 48, 50. 70 CJ, v, 478. 71 Quoted from Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege, 43.

68

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Lehmberg suggests that the cathedrals were not included in the surveys generally because there was no intention of demolishing them. This may have been true at that point. However, on 18 February 1651 a parliamentary committee set up the previous October to find ways ‘for setting the poor on work’ recommended that all Cathedral Churches, where there are other Churches or Chapels sufficient for the People to meet in for the Worship of God, be surveyed, pulled down, and sold, and be employed for a Stock for the Use of the Poor.72

The following April it was decided in parliament that Lichfield should be the first to be demolished, and this seems to have happened at least in part. Other cathedrals were saved by the responses of inhabitants, city authorities or other leading local figures who petitioned parliament – as, for instance, in the case of Gloucester in December 1651, and Winchester in 1652. Peterborough was saved due to the intervention of Oliver St John, Lord Chief Justice, who brought in a bill to that effect in August 1651.73 The idea of general demolition kept resurfacing – the Winchester petition to parliament of 1652 mentioned ‘frequent’ reports concerning the pulling down of the cathedral. On 9 July 1652 plans were made for a survey of cathedrals, ‘to consider what . . . were fit to stand, or what to be pulled down . . . or what Part thereof’. This time the money was required to pay parliament’s debt to those who had contributed to the Dutch war, and the idea allegedly came from the Council of the Army. According to the Venetian ambassador a start was about to be made on Canterbury Cathedral, an offer of £15,000 having been made for it. Why this was not carried through is unknown. The proposal to demolish cathedrals to pay off the Public Faith was brought up once again on 11 January 1653 when Colonel Marten was ordered by the Commons to bring in the relevant bill ‘on Friday next, and nothing to intervene’. This suggests that there had been previous ‘interventions’ – either opposition to, or postponement of, the bill – indicating perhaps a general lack of support. Nothing further seems to have happened, although the scheme was mentioned in an intercepted royalist letter of 29 July 1653.74 Despite these attempts, large-scale demolition of cathedral churches did not happen, with the exception of the partial demolition of Lichfield. Most

72

Ibid.; CJ, vi, 535, and see 481 (for the setting up of the committee). CJ, vi, 556 (and see PRO, SP 25/75, fol. 121 (17 Feb. 1654), concerning the proceeds of demolition); HMC, 12th Report, appendix, pt 9, Records of the Corporation of Gloucester (1891), 507; Winchester Cathedral Documents ii, 1635–83, ed. W. R. W. Stephens and F. T. Madge (Hampshire, 1897), 97; CJ, vii, 1, 2. 74 CJ, vii, 152; Calendar of Clarendon State Papers in the Bodleian Library, ed. W. Dunn Macray (5 vols, Oxford, 1869–1932), ii, 140–1; CSPV, 1647–52, 276; CJ, vii, 245; A Collection of the State Papers of John Turloe, ed. T. Birch (7 vols, 1742), i, 387. 73

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cathedral towns seem to have been keen to keep their cathedrals – the zealous petitioning of the governors of Norwich for the destruction of their own cathedral seems to have been exceptional. The corporation of Great Yarmouth had also staked a claim on Norwich, hoping to use part of the lead and other materials from ‘that vast and altogether useles Cathedral’ to build a workhouse or help to repair their piers. Similarly the governors of the Chatham Chest ‘begged for the ruinous cathedral of Rochester’ in 1657 and again in 1658 in order to pay off arrears. Their petitions were not granted.75 Ultimately, a good many of the cathedrals were kept to some degree for religious use. York Minster became a preaching centre, Exeter and Worcester were both shared by Presbyterian and Independent congregations, the chapter house at Canterbury was used for sermons and the south transept of Chester as a parish church. There is also evidence for preaching at Bristol, Gloucester, Hereford, Lincoln, Norwich, Peterborough, Wells and Carlisle. This and the fact that there were many cases of repair and maintenance work on the cathedrals during the period balance the popular image of the Puritan misuse of cathedrals as stables and barracks. Cathedrals were sometimes used for housing soldiers and as stables but this tended to be on a temporary basis during the war. St Paul’s was used as a barracks until quite late – at least 1651.76 Other cathedral buildings were used for a variety of more mundane purposes. Canterbury and Salisbury cathedrals became prisons for captives taken during the Dutch War in 1653, whilst Peterborough doubled as a workhouse as well as a centre for preaching, according to Simon Gunton. Gloucester Cathedral was used as a public meeting place where assizes and quarter sessions were held, and there were plans, approved by the Protector but ultimately unsuccessful, for part of Durham Cathedral to become a new university.77 This is not to say that there was no neglect of the buildings, as witnessed by the many descriptions of cathedrals as ruinous, and the numerous postRestoration accounts of fabric repairs. There had been opportunistic pilfering of lead and other materials even where the greatest care was taken

75

NRO, Assembly Book 1642–68, fols 94 (19 March 1659), 98 (3 May 1650); HMC, 9th Report, appendix, pt 1, Records of the Corporation of Great Yarmouth (1881), 320 (31 May 1650); PRO, SP 18/158/11 (7 October 1657), SP 18/180/143 (8 April 1658). 76 There are records of repairs at Bristol, Carlisle, Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, Norwich, Peterborough, Wells, Winchester and York (see the various cathedral archives given in bibliography, and also Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege, ch. 3); Documents Illustrating the History of St Paul’s Cathedral, ed. W. Sparrow-Simpson (Camden Society, 2nd ser., 26, 1880), 150. 77 CSPD, 1653–4, 178–9, 195; Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 113; HMC, 12th Report, appendix, pt 9, Records of the Corporation of Gloucester, 507; CSPD, 1655–6, 156 (1 February 1656). The cathedral close at Salisbury was turned into a ‘meat market, rubbish dump and playground’ for the city (see C. Estabrook, ‘In the mist of ceremony: cathedral and community in seventeenth-century Wells’, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, ed. S. D. Amussen and M. A. Kishlansky (Manchester, 1995), 163).

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over the structure. Wells Cathedral, for instance, was described by preacher Cornelius Burgess in 1658 as having been ‘much spoiled lately by some of the town’. This kind of spoil was clearly mercenary in its motives and petitions such as that from the ‘pious people’ of Wells, in July 1656, show that such ransacking was not generally approved.78 In general the Puritan approach to the reformed cathedrals, particularly that of the central authorities, was a pragmatic one. In a way having been purged and cleansed of their idols and images, the cathedrals were now also de-sanctified and, perhaps more than if they had been demolished, they thus became symbols of the victory (albeit a temporary one) of a more rigorous and less material form of worship.

Army Iconoclasm and its Meaning The major part of the iconoclastic damage suffered by cathedrals in the mid seventeenth century was the responsibility of parliamentary soldiers. Around this fact many myths and stories have been woven, both at the time and during the ensuing centuries. The kind of evidence which would enable a more exact historical picture to be drawn is thin on the ground – chapter act books and other cathedral records more often than not cease long before the formal abolition of deans and chapters in April 1649, or else have not survived. Historians of iconoclasm or of cathedrals are forced to turn to sources such as Bruno Ryves’s famous royalist newsbook, Mercurius Rusticus, for details of the soldiers’ desecration of churches, despite the difficulties of using such blatant propaganda. As an illustration of the problems in the use of such a source, P. Morris has produced a detailed analysis of the alleged iconoclasm at Exeter Cathedral. While there is evidence in the cathedral accounts that some damage was done to the cathedral before it came under royalist control in September 1643, Morris dismisses many of Rusticus’s larger claims. He points out that in royalist Richard Symonds’s record of his visit to Exeter, on 20 September 1644, no mention is made of large-scale destruction of the windows or of the west front image screen. If any further iconoclasm was committed after the fall of the city in April 1646 this would not have been included in the newsbook, which was published that year and described events only up until March 1646.79 On the other hand, the account given in Mercurius Rusticus of iconoclasm in Peterborough Cathedral during 1643 ties in fairly well with an eye-witness account written after the Restoration by Francis Standish. Moreover, 78 On the state of cathedrals at the Restoration see Lehmberg, Cathedrals Under Siege, ch. 3; PRO, SP 18/180/167 (29 April 1658), and see also SP 18/129/44 (17 July 1656). Burgess and the people of Wells were in dispute over the cathedral (Tatham, Puritans in Power, 258–9). For the neglected condition of Wells at the Restoration, see Estabrook, ‘In the mist of ceremony’, 433–4. 79 Morris, ‘Exeter Cathedral: two studies. Pt 2’, 228–9.

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Standish has clearly read Rusticus’s account and is happy to pull the author up on one inaccuracy: parliamentary soldiers did not steal the clappers from the cathedral bells, they were actually hidden away by local inhabitants tired of the soldiers’ perpetual ‘jangling and ringing’ of them.80 The point is that Mercurius Rusticus is a guide, but one which should be used carefully. In the following analysis of events corroborative evidence, such as eyewitness accounts and cathedral and parliamentary records, has been used wherever possible to substantiate Rusticus’s claims.81 The numerous assaults made on cathedrals by parliamentary soldiers constitute an extremely interesting and important phenomenon in the history of seventeenth-century iconoclasm. This can be variously interpreted: as mindless vandalism and the inevitable plunder and pillage of war; as an almost ritualistic destruction of symbols representative of the enemy; or even as the Puritan theology-in-action of a godly and reforming army. From the very beginning of the war the army considered itself to be doing God’s work, and was urged on by zealous Puritan ministers in such terms. John Vicars describes how at the battle of Edgehill divers . . . eminently pious and learned Pastours rode up and down the Army, through the thickest dangers, and in much personall hazzard, most faithfully and courageously exhorting, and encouraging the Souldiers to fight valiantly and not to flye, but now if ever to stand to it, and to fight for their Religion, Lawes, and Christian Liberties, according to the deep Protestation taken by them.82

Nehemiah Wharton joined Essex’s army along with many other London volunteers to fight ‘the Lord’s battaile’ and wrote of his experience in terms of ‘the passages of my pilgrimage’. William Whitfield, invalided out of the army, dedicated his tract against idolatry, published in January 1645, to the ‘Faithfull soldiers, which Fight under the Banner of the Lord Jesus’.83 Parliamentary propaganda also played on the fear of Roman Catholicism, which had been exacerbated by the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in late

80

Compare Angliae Ruina, 248, with ‘A Short and True Narrative of the Rifling and Defacing of the Cathedral Church of Peterborough’, in Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 333–9. Standish was precentor at the cathedral in the 1680s. He was born and bred in Peterborough and is described by Dean Patrick (original editor of Gunton’s history) as ‘a spectator of most things that he relates’ (see J. Higham’s introduction to the 1990 edn, xii). I have assumed that Standish is a fairly reliable source but care must be taken – it is always possible that he was reading Rusticus to help jog his memory of events which happened some forty years earlier. One is particularly suspicious of stories concerning Cromwell such as that given on 337. 81 Rochester and Chichester are the only cases discussed here for which I have found no corroborating evidence. 82 Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 1, 200. 83 ‘Letters from a Subaltern Officer of the Earl of Essex’s Army’, ed. H. Ellis, Archeologia, 35 (1835), 311, 317 (the original letters are among the state papers at the PRO); Whitfield, Idolators Ruine and Englands Triumph, 11. For the idea that the religious element in parliamentary propaganda was stepped up in 1643, see Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 347–50.

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October 1641. The petition accompanying the Grand Remonstrance of December 1641 had spoken of the ‘increase of popery’ and the ‘subtile practice of the Jesuits and other engineers and factors for Rome . . . to the great danger of this kingdom’. The Militia Ordinance, of March 1642, was preceded by the dramatic and inflammatory assertion that the recent ‘dangerous and desperate design upon the House of Commons’ (the king’s attempt to arrest the five members) was ‘an effect of the bloody counsels of Papists and other ill-affected persons, who have already raised a rebellion in the kingdom of Ireland’ and who parliament feared would ‘proceed not only to stir up the like rebellion and insurrections in . . . England, but also to back them with forces from abroad’. Similar fears were expressed both in the popular press and in the numerous petitions which were to flood into parliament over the following months.84 While it would be absurd to argue that all of parliament’s soldiers were of the godly sort, it is not far-fetched to assume that the majority were aware of the terms in which the differences between parliament and the king were being played out, and acted accordingly. If it was only for the minority of the soldiery that the idea of a godly army had any real meaning, the idea of an anti-papist army would have been easily understood by all. This is illustrated by parliamentary songs such as ‘The Zealous Soldier’, allegedly played on the organ by one soldier during the ransacking of Canterbury Cathedral: For God and His cause I’ll count it gain To lose my life. I can none happier die Than to fall in battle to maintain God’s worship, truth, extirpate Papacy.85

The parliamentary soldiers expressed such feelings both violently and in almost ritualistic acts mocking their enemies’ beliefs. As well as iconoclastic attacks on not just images but a broad range of objects which represented the tainted Laudian church, soldiers targeted the property or person of anyone vaguely suspected of Catholicism (and the definition was liberally applied). Nehemiah Wharton wrote that ‘every day our soldiers by stealth doe visit papists’ houses, and constrained from them both meate and money’, and this seems to have continued despite the efforts of the commanders.86 Wharton’s fellow soldiers also indulged in the kind of ritualistic displays intended to debunk the religious practices and structures of which they

84

Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 203, 245; Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, ch. 6. C. Carlton, Going to the Wars: the Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–51 (1992), 276, 277. 86 ‘Letters from a Subaltern Officer’, 314; Lord Brooke threatened martial law against pillagers of ‘malignants’ at Coventry, on 26 August 1642, and Essex was forced to issue a proclamation that neither churches nor private houses should be plundered upon pain of death (ibid., 317, 323).

85

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disapproved. One Friday morning in September some of the troops ‘sallyed out about the cuntrey, and returned in state clothed with a surplisse, hood and cap, representing the Bishop of Canterbury’. According to Dugdale, ‘dragooners’ at Worcester rode about in surplices and other vestments, as did those at Winchester. Another common sport among the soldiers was to break into mocking dances whenever they heard organs playing. Henry Townsend witnessed this at Worcester, while at Hereford Wharton visited the cathedral on the Sabbath where ‘the pipes played and the puppets sange so sweetly that some of our soldiers could not forbear dauncinge in the holie quire; whereat the Baalists were sore displeased’.87 Religious ceremonies were also mocked – bowing to the altar at Norwich, and even baptism, which was allegedly parodied at Lichfield, where soldiers baptised a calf, and at Yaxley in Huntingdonshire, where a horse was given the same treatment. These latter instances may have been simply aimed at deriding the use of the cross in baptism or they may indicate more radical ideas among the soldiers, perhaps instigated by Anabaptists for whom baptism itself was a target.88 These mock ceremonies and general displays of derision were more than just the high jinks of war-hardened soldiers. Like the sacrilegious debasing of churches – drinking, smoking and urinating in them, of which there were frequent tales – such antics de-sanctified the objects and rituals associated with a certain style of worship. They were defiant and dramatic illustrations of the rejection of the idea that holiness could reside in any particular place, object or ceremony. In this way such behaviour was linked to the more direct attack on churches, in terms of imagery, furnishings and utensils of worship. Iconoclasm by parliamentary soldiers began almost as soon as bodies of men were brought together – in a sense picking up where the soldiers of the Bishops’ Wars had left off, with the added incentive that now such iconoclasm was not a protest at war but part of the reforming drive which spurred it on. The first week of Essex’s march from London was filled with iconoclastic attacks: troopers at Acton church ‘defaced the auntient and sacred glased picturs, and burned the holy railes’; rails were broken down and burned at Chiswick, Uxbridge and Wendover; and at Hillingdon, where the rails had already been removed, the soldiers vented their zeal on surplices which were torn up for handkerchiefs. At Uxbridge, service books were thrown on the fire along with the rails.89

87

Ibid., 320; Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, 557; Angliae Ruina, 234; Diary of Henry Townsend, 191; ‘Letters from a Subaltern Officer’, 332. NRO, DCN 107/3, ‘Captain Lalmons account of the difacing of ye Cathedral by ye Rebells’; Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, 550; Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 335. The incident at Yaxley was also recorded by Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (Ilkley, 1977), pt 3, 17–18. On this subject generally see Cressy, ‘Baptized beasts and other travesties: affronts to rites of passage’, in idem, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England, 171–85. 89 ‘Letters from a Subaltern Officer’, 312–14. 88

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Most of the iconoclastic attacks on cathedrals came within the first two years of war – between August 1642 and early 1644. This probably reflects the early enthusiasm of the troops before the unexpected dragging-out of the war, but also, as C. H. Firth has pointed out, the slow progress towards the establishment of a more thorough military discipline. The proclamations on the subject of discipline issued by parliament during the first few months of the war are testimony to the problems encountered. The first large-scale iconoclastic attack was on Canterbury Cathedral in August 1642, when Colonel Edwin Sandys was sent into Kent with a small force in order to secure strong points and disarm prominent recusants. A sergeant-major named Cockaine obtained the keys to the cathedral, where arms and gunpowder were being stored. The next day the troops entered and, in Dean Paske’s famous words, ‘began a fight with God himself’.90 The soldiers chose many obvious targets, such as the altar rails – recently removed but re-erected, according to Richard Culmer, for a royal visit. Organs were smashed and an arras depicting ‘the whole story of the Saviour’ ripped and slashed with swords. Another image of Christ on top of the cathedral gate was shot at. These objects were all among the type censured by the Commons in the September 1641 order against innovations. However, the soldiers took a much broader view in defining what they deemed to be offensive. Monuments of the dead, which had been specifically protected under the 1641 order, were attacked, alongside vestments, a brass eagle lectern, service books and prayer books. Only six months earlier members of parliament had been expressing concerns over such mistreatment of the prayer book.91 It is curious that no windows seem to have been broken down at this point, but perhaps this was because Sandys and others finally stepped in to restrain the men when the fabric of the cathedral became ‘threatened with ruin’. Despite Sandys’s intervention and his offer to the dean to inform the House of Commons about the incident, Mercurius Rusticus branded him the ‘ringleader of that Rebellious Rout’, and called his subsequent death near Worcester a judgement of God.92 The attitude of parliament to this incident appears somewhat ambivalent at this point. Thomas Paske was brought up before the House of Lords on 17 September 1642 to answer for the publication of a letter he had written to the earl of Holland describing the iconoclasm. The House was obviously keen that such material should not be allowed to get into print and be used

90

Firth, Cromwell’s Army, 279, 331; Dean Paske’s letter to the Earl of Holland (30 August 1642), printed in Angliae Ruina, 205–7. 91 Culmer, Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury, 20. The king was in Canterbury on 12 February 1642, en route to Dover where the queen was leaving for France. Details of the attack are from Paske’s letter, Angliae Ruina, 205–7; Private Journals, i, 138. 92 Angliae Ruina, 207; 208.

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as propaganda against them. However, they also ordered an enquiry into the attack on the cathedral and the possible involvement of local townsmen and issued an order protecting the cathedral and its inhabitants from further violence.93 Meanwhile the soldiers continued to take it upon themselves to reform any churches and cathedrals they came across. In September soldiers visited Rochester Cathedral, where they showed more restraint than at Canterbury, leaving monuments of the dead untouched and targeting only the altar rails and organs – ‘those things which were wont to stuffe up parliament petitions’ as Rusticus put it. Before the end of the year there had been further attacks on Worcester, Chichester and Winchester cathedrals, while Hereford seems to have escaped any destruction despite a visit from Wharton and his comrades. Curiously, although Dugdale alleged that soldiers smashed windows, organs and other objects at Worcester Cathedral, this was not mentioned by Wharton in his account of the visit. Indeed he described the cathedral as ‘very stately’ with ‘many stately monuments’ citing those of King John and Prince Arthur. He was not so sympathetic towards the city itself which was ‘so base, papisticall, and atheisticall and abominable, that it resembles Sodam’.94 Chichester and Winchester cathedrals were ransacked by William Waller’s men in December 1642. In both places plate and other valuables were seized: Rusticus described how this ‘covetous part of Sacrilege’ was carried out by the officers, leaving the common soldiers to enact the general destruction. This took the by now usual pattern of attacks on altars, rails, organs and images. At Chichester pictures of Moses and Aaron decorating the table of Commandments were ‘broken to small shivers’, and at Winchester stories from the Old and New Testaments carved on the choir stalls were destroyed. Again, according at least to hostile reports, monuments to the dead were attacked, as well as prayer books and vestments. At Chichester a soldier allegedly picked out the eyes of a portrait of Edward VI, ‘saying “that all the mischief came from him when he established the Book of Common Prayer” ’. It was alleged that at Winchester windows were destroyed although they contained no religious images, but simply because they ‘were of painted coloured glass’.95 Winchester also saw the kind of triumphal processioning of which the soldiers, and indeed iconoclasts in general, were so fond. Vicars recorded how the houses of papists and the officers of the cathedral were plundered, revealing

93

LJ, v, 360. The reference to a protective order issued 17 September is in a petition of the Christ Church prebendaries in LJ, v, 476 (28 March 1643). 94 Angliae Ruina, 220–1, 223–7, 230–4; Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, 557; ‘Letters from a Subaltern Officer’, 328, 329. 95 See Angliae Ruina, 223–5, 230.

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great store of popish-bookes, pictures, and crucifixes, which the souldiers carried up and down the streets and Market-place in triumph, to make themselves merry; yea they . . . piped before them with the Organ-pipes . . . and then afterwards cast them all into the fire.96

The next cathedral to be attacked was Lichfield, in March 1643, where the lower row of images on the great west front was removed with ropes, those higher up shot at with guns, and an estimated 12,000 feet of glass broken down. The church was so badly damaged that it was later reported that ‘there is not now remaining the least piece of Brass, Glass, Iron, Armes, &c, but what appears to have been put up since 1661’.97 Wells Cathedral was the target of attack in April and again in May as witnessed by an anonymous inhabitant of the cathedral who recorded the occasions opposite the title page of a copy of ‘De Vita Christi’ by Ludolphus de Saxonia, belonging to the cathedral library. On Saturday 15 April it was recorded that troops broke down divers pictures and crucifixes in the church and our Lady Chaple, likewise did plunder the bishop’s pallace, and broke all such monuments or pictures they espied, either of religion, antiquity, or the Kings of England, and made havock.

On Wednesday 10 May more soldiers, under the command of Colonel Alexander Popham, rusht into the church, broke down the windows, organs, fonte, seats in the quire, the bishop’s see[t], besides many other villanies.98

At around the same time, in April 1643, Colonel Hubbart’s regiment, joined two days later by that of Cromwell, were quartered in Peterborough en route to besiege the royalist garrison of Crowland. The troops soon set about a violent reformation of the cathedral which was to be completed by the regiments of Captains Barton and Hope which passed through three months later. In the first incident soldiers again targeted communion rails, altars and organs which were thrown down upon the ground, and there stamped and trampled on, and broke in pieces, with such a strange furious and frantick zeal, as can’t be well conceived but by those that saw it.99

96

Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 2, 239. Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege, 38; Thomas Abingdon, ‘Some Short Account of the Cathedral Church of Lichfield’ in Lichfield Cathedral Library (MS 22), quoted in Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege, 38. 98 HMC, Calendar of the MSS of the Dean and Chapter of Wells Cathedral, ii, 427. 99 Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 333. 97

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In the quire they broke down stalls, seats and wainscoting which was adorned with Old and New Testament stories. Behind this wainscoting was found a medieval parchment volume, the Swaffham Cartulary, which had been hidden there in February 1642 by one of the chapter, Humphrey Austin. Austin recovered the book from Henry Topclyffe, the soldier who had gained possession of it, by pretending that it was an old Latin bible, and offering him 10s for it. The soldiers also tried to steal plate, an altar cloth and ‘two fair books in velvet covers’ but these were restored by Hubbart – only to be confiscated by Barton and Hope in July.100 The July purge of the cathedral was far more extreme. Virtually all of the windows were broken, not only those containing religious stories but the histories of the founders and even ‘the Kings of England’. A ceiling painting over the east end depicting Christ surrounded by saints and the four evangelists was shot at with muskets, and a stone reredos behind the altar that ‘now had no imagery work upon it, or anything else that might justly give offence’, was pulled down simply because it ‘bore the name of High Altar’. The men then went on to ‘rob and rifle’ the tombs of the dead, tearing off brass inscriptions and engravings. Again the very word ‘altar’ gave such offence that it led to the destruction of the recently erected monument of the royalist Sir Humphrey Orme, which contained no religious images but only statues of Orme and his family. It was the epitaph to Orme’s daughter-in-law which provoked the soldiers: Mistake not, Reader, I thee crave, This is an Altar, not a Grave, Where Fire rak’t up in Ashes lies, And Harts are made the sacrifice.101

The monument was broken down and Orme’s effigy carried to the market place and ‘sported with . . . a Crew of Soldiers going before in Procession, some with Surplices, some with Organ Pipes, to make up the solemnity’. By the time the soldiers had finished in the cathedral it was quite stript of all its ornamental Beauty and made a ruthful spectacle, a very Chaos of Desolation and Confusion, nothing scarce remaining but only bare walls, broken seats, and shatter’d windows on every side.102

The army of Manchester, including Cromwell’s regiment, were responsible for the attack on Lincoln Cathedral in May 1644, of which no detailed

100

HMC, 12th Report, appendix, pt 9, MSS of the Dean and Chapter of Peterborough, 580; Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 334. Ibid., 334–7, 98–99. 102 Ibid., 336; 337–8. 101

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account exists. John Evelyn records a story told him of soldiers tearing off brasses ‘till they had rent & torne of[f] some barges full of Mettal; not sparing the monuments of the dead, so hellish an averice possess’d them’.103 This seems to be the last major iconoclastic attack, although other cathedrals were to suffer structural damage, for example Carlisle, where the west front and six bays of the Norman nave were pulled down by the Scots to repair the castle in 1646. Scottish soldiers allegedly broke windows in Gloucester Cathedral while passing through the town in 1645, while Winchester Cathedral library suffered a second ransacking in October 1646. Other cities which fell to parliament attempted to protect their cathedrals and churches by having clauses to that effect written into the articles of surrender – as was the case at York in July 1644, Worcester in July 1646, and Exeter in April 1645. These clauses seem, on the whole, to have been observed.104 The pattern of the soldiers’ iconoclasm does not appear to have changed between 1642 and 1644 despite the fact that parliamentary legislation had broadened considerably over the period. Being unofficial, the soldiers’ reformations could be more sweeping and more crudely symbolic. From the very beginning soldiers struck at objects which were identified with the bishops. Bishops’ seats were damaged at Worcester in September 1642 and Wells in May 1643; and at Winchester chests containing the remains of Saxon bishops were broken open and the bones scattered, some being used as missiles in attempts to break windows.105 At Chichester historical paintings of kings and bishops were defaced. These depicted the Saxon King Caedwalla with Bishop Wilfred of Selsey and Henry VIII with Bishop Sherburne, who was responsible for setting the paintings up in the early sixteenth century.106 There are several instances of bishops’ tombs or monuments being attacked even where, like that of Bishop Dove at Peterborough, the monuments were fairly plain and not idolatrous. Standish attributed the destruction of Dove’s tomb to the fact that the soldiers were ‘such Enemies to the name and office of a Bishop’. A similar attitude was exhibited by a young man named Townsend who was amongst those who went to oversee the 103

Diary of John Evelyn, ed. De Beer, iii, 132. Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege, 35; Welander, Gloucester Cathedral, 364; Winchester Cathedral Library, John Chase’s Memoranda 1623–50, fol. 84. For articles of surrender see: YCA Corporation House Book Class B, vol. 36, fol. 106; CSPD 1645–7, 416–17; W. J. Harte, ‘Ecclesiastical and religious affairs in Exeter 1640–62’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 69 (1937), 23. 105 Worcester Cathedral Library, A 26, Treasurer’s Book for 1642 (unfoliated). The extraordinary expenses for December 1642 record the mending of ‘his Lordship’s seat in ye cathedral abused by ye rebells’. This must have been broken during iconoclasm at the cathedral when the city was under parliamentary control in September 1642. HMC, Calendar of the MSS of the Dean and Chapter of Wells Cathedral, ii, 427; Angliae Ruina, 231–3. 106 Ibid., 224–5; T. Tatton-Brown, ‘Destruction, repair and restoration’, in M. Hobbs, Chichester Cathedral: a Historical Survey (Chichester, 1994), 82–3. 104

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reformation of Bishop Hall’s chapel in Norwich. When Hall tried to save the glass images of bishops in the windows Townsend ‘[took] upon him to defend that every Diocesan bishop was a Pope’.107 Soldiers also frequently included books and muniments in their destruction. This happened, for instance, at Peterborough, Lichfield and twice at Winchester, in 1642 and 1646, where there were divers of the writings and Charters burnt, divers throwen into the River, divers larg[e] p[ar]chm[e]nts . . . made Kytes w[i]thall to flie in the Ayre and many other old books lost.108

Such activities would clearly not be approved by parliamentary authorities, and indeed at Winchester the local parliamentary committee appears to have authorized John Chase’s effort to retrieve the collection in 1650. Yet while the attack on cathedral records can be seen as a destructive frenzy, the soldiers’ high-spirits getting out of hand and going beyond officially acceptable bounds, still it cannot be dismissed as so much mindless vandalism. There are always reasons why certain objects are deemed offensive and worthy of attack. The soldiers’ destruction of ‘writings’ was part of a tradition of such attacks where written documents were seen by the illiterate or semi-literate as a means of oppression (as, for instance, the burning of manorial records during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381). Destroying such documents was often believed to be a literal, not just a symbolic, seizing of freedom, and to ‘cancell charters’ and other documents belonging to the bishops, deans and chapters might be seen as an attempt to nullify the oppressive power of the church hierarchy. The suspicion of the written records of the church can be seen at Peterborough, where the soldiers believed the records they destroyed to be papal bulls. Similarly, at Ashover in Derbyshire, soldiers burnt an old parish register because it was written in Latin, and they believed it, therefore, to be ‘full of popery and treason’.109 Another area into which the soldiers’ enthusiasm occasionally spilled, and which would have found very few defenders among parliamentary leaders, was that of royal monuments or images. Mercurius Rusticus reported the attack on a portrait of the king at the house of Sir Richard Minshull in Buckinghamshire, which soldiers slashed with their swords, whilst uttering

107

Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 335. Gunton describes the tomb as ‘a fair table of black marble with a portraiture of the bishop in his Episcopal habit’, 82–3. There is an engraving of it in Northamptonshire in the Early Eighteenth Century: the Drawings of Peter Tillemans and Others, ed. B. A. Bailey (Northampton, 1996), 172. For other attacks on bishops’ tombs see, for example, Exeter, where several such monuments were restored after 1660 (Morris, ‘Exeter Cathedral: two studies. Pt 2’, 200); and Bishop Goldwell’s tomb at Norwich Cathedral which still has a musket ball embedded in it. Hall, Bishop Hall’s Hard Measure, 15. 108 Winchester Cathedral Library, John Chase’s Memoranda, 1623–50, fol. 84. 109 Ibid., at end of index (unfoliated); Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 337; quoted from G. Turbutt, A History of Derbyshire (4 vols, Cardiff, 1999), iii, 1084.

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‘Traiterous and scornfull language’ (see plate 1). At Chichester Cathedral, in December 1642, a picture of Edward VI had been defaced as well as other pictures of kings. At around the same time in Winchester Cathedral soldiers had to be restrained from defiling the bones of Saxon kings, and were alleged to have attacked statues of James I and Charles I which stood at the entrance to the quire. The kings’ swords were broken off and a cross from the globe in Charles’s hand was severed and his crown hacked at. Soldiers at Wells ‘broke all such monuments and pictures as they espied, either of religion, antiquity or the Kings of England’. All of these accounts are of course from hostile sources and it suited royalist propaganda to depict parliamentarians abusing images of royalty.110 At Peterborough the arms and tombs of the Catholic queens Mary Stuart and Catherine of Aragon were assaulted. Mary Stuart’s body had been removed to Westminster by James I, but her arms and escutcheons hanging near where she had been interred were torn down, while rails were torn from Catherine of Aragon’s tomb and her gravestone was displaced. There is also physical evidence of some damage to the effigy of Robert of Normandy at Gloucester Cathedral which was allegedly torn apart by soldiers. Sir Humphrey Tracey of Stanway was said to have bought the pieces, stored them away until after the Restoration and then had the monument repaired at his own cost. At Worcester the tomb of King John and other kings came under attack.111 It is not surprising that soldiers sometimes targeted royal images along with religious icons. While parliament insisted that they fought for the king, rather than against him – against the malignants and papists whom he had misguidedly allowed to sway him – nonetheless the undeniable fact remained that parliamentary soldiers were lined up opposite the king and the king’s army. Parliamentary leaders were reluctant directly to ascribe to the king the sin of idolatry: Sir Ralph Hopton had been sent to the Tower in March 1642 for offending parliament by suggesting that they had accused the king of ‘endeavouring to bring his People to . . . Idolatry’.112 Still they could hardly prevent such an interpretation given the emphasis in their propaganda on alleged connections between royalists and papists and on the idolatry of the Laudian church (which was, after all, also the Caroline church). The excesses to which soldiers went in their reforming activities and their crude interpretation of what types of object were offensive constituted the main difference between the impact of army iconoclasm and official 110 Angliae Ruina, 32, 224–5, 231–3, 233; HMC, Calendar of the MSS of the Dean and Chapter of Wells Cathedral, ii, 427. The statues of James and Charles at Winchester were rescued and sold back to the cathedral in 1660 (Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege, 65). 111 Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 335; Welander, Gloucester Cathedral, 364; GRO Treasurers’ Accounts 1634–64, fol. 255; Thomas Carte, A Collection of Original Letters and Papers concerning the Affairs of England 1641–60 found among the Duke of Ormande’s Papers (2 vols, 1739), i, 15. 112 CJ, ii, 467 (4 March 1642).

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iconoclasm – apart, of course, from the obviously greater violence involved in the former. In attacks on images of, or objects connected to, bishops, on secular monuments, prayer books, bibles, cathedral libraries and muniments and, on occasion, royal images or monuments, soldiers stretched the ordinary limits of iconoclasm even by Puritan standards. Official iconoclasts could be overly zealous in carrying out their godly duties, and parliamentary soldiers were no less passionate, although their passions undoubtedly sprang from complex motives. The war itself must have had a great impact. Experience of victory and of defeat would both have been strong motivating factors. Soldiers who ransacked Lichfield Cathedral in March 1643, for instance, had been involved in bitter fighting during which prisoners had been executed and their own commander, Lord Brooke, lost in action.113 Even so, it cannot be doubted that there was both a symbolic meaning and a religious motivation behind the soldiers’ choice of targets. One small example of soldiers apparently making a selective choice in their iconoclasm comes from Peterborough in April 1643. Standish tells us how, while soldiers were tearing up prayer books, ‘the great Bible . . . that lay upon a Brass Eagle for reading the lessons, had the good hap to escape with the loss only of the Apocrypha’. This was obviously not ‘good hap’ as the soldiers had clearly made the choice to edit the bible in this way removing only the offensive ‘additions’. Interestingly the eagle lectern was given similar treatment. Such lecterns elsewhere were destroyed as idolatrous, but here it was allowed to remain, with only the removal of a double-branched candlestick attached to its breast. The use of candlesticks before an image (even a symbolic one) would have been considered popish. Thus in a sense this fifteenth-century lectern was ‘reformed’, and it still stands in the quire at Peterborough intact and undefaced except for a small neat hole in its breast where the candlestick was removed.114 A late incident of iconoclasm at the parish church of Ashover, in Derbyshire, further suggests that the piety of at least some common soldiers was in earnest, if somewhat crude. Rector, Immanuel Bourne, recorded how in June 1646 troops involved in destroying former royalist strongholds in the area (including his own house, Eastwood Hall) having finished their work marched off to church singing a psalm. At the church the scout-master, named Smedley, took to the pulpit to deliver a two hour sermon on ‘Popery, Priestcraft and Kingcraft’. When he had finished the soldiers sang another psalm and began to attack stained glass windows depicting the Crucifixion, 113 Carlton, Going to the Wars, 227, and see Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege, 38. Laud linked Brookes death to his ‘having ever beene fierce against Bishops and Cathedralls’. Brooke had allegedly said ‘hee hoped to live to see at Saint Pauls, not one stone left upon another’ (William Prynne, A Breviate of the Life of William Laud (1644), 27, and see Laud, Works, ii, 241, 249). 114 This point was made to me by Canon Librarian Jack Higham who was kind enough to give me a very informative guided tour of the cathedral. For Standish’s comments see Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 333, 334.

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saying that it was ‘rank popery and must be destroyed’. They used mattocks and iron bars to destroy the glass and stonework, and afterwards made a bonfire in the market-place to dispose of a prayer book, a surplice and the old parish register, which they had found in the vestry. They then mounted their horses and rode away, singing yet another psalm.115 Whilst the soldiers’ reformation of the cathedrals was unofficial there is some evidence that it was encouraged and condoned by both ministers and army commanders. It has already been noted how many zealous ministers joined the army as chaplains and spurred the troops on to ‘fight for their religion’ at Edgehill. The role of the ministers was important, at least in the early days of the war. Nehemiah Wharton’s letters are full of reports of ‘famous’ or ‘worthy’ sermons he had heard. When Obadiah Sedgewick preached in September 1642, Wharton wrote, ‘my company in particular marched to hear him’. When the same minister preached in Taunton church in January 1643, he was so passionate that he roused the troops, who seized prayer books and ripped out the prayers for the bishops, the clergy and the royal family, and went on to smash the newly installed organ.116 The tacit encouragement given to army iconoclasm by publications such as Robert Ram’s The Soldier’s Catechism and the newsbook Mercurius Britanicus has already been discussed. Vicars clearly approved of the actions of Waller’s men at Winchester, even though he noted that the ‘common soldiers’ could barely be restrained from plundering the whole town, firing on their own officers when they tried to stop them. They plundered the houses of ‘cathedralists’ and papists, and the cathedral itself, burning books, pictures, crucifixes and organ pipes.117 Vicars also wrote approvingly of the soldiers’ behaviour at Lichfield in March 1643, where, though . . . mercifull to the men, yet were they void of all pitty toward the Organ-pipes, Copes, Surplices, and such like Popish trumperies found in the Minster, affording these no quarter, excepte quartering and mangling them in peeces.

This was contrasted to the cavaliers, ‘who use to kill and spoil the living Images of Christ, but save and preserve the dumb and dead ones of their Dagon, the Romish Antichrist’.118

115 Quoted from Turbutt, A History of Derbyshire, iii, 1084; for the full letter, dated 26 August 1646, see J. Pendleton, A History of Derbyshire (1886), 270–8. Pendleton, however, gives no reference for the letter and, according to Turbutt, some doubts have been cast on its authenticity (ibid., 1382, n. 169). 116 ‘Letters from a Subaltern Officer’, 317; Carlton, Going to the Wars, 87. 117 Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 2, 320–1, 239. Nathaniel Fiennes describes how the soldiers at Winchester ‘were in such a state of mutiny . . . some . . . actually shot at their own officers who tried to prevent this violence’ (HMC, 5th Report, House of Lords MSS, 60). 118 Vicars, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle, pt 2, 273.

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The soldiers’ own commanders often permitted or even encouraged iconoclastic acts. The exploits of William Springett in Kent and William Purefoy in the Midlands have already been described. Purefoy, whose men were involved in the desecration of Worcester and Lichfield cathedrals, allegedly stood by while his men demolished Warwick market cross, ‘animating and encouraging them’. William Waller looked on alongside fellow commanders as his men ransacked Chichester Cathedral. According to Standish, at Peterborough Cathedral in April 1643, when someone asked an officer to restrain the men, he answered ‘see how these poor People are concerned to see their Idols pulled down’, while Rusticus quoted Cromwell as saying that his soldiers ‘did God good action in that service’. Standish also tells a story of Cromwell climbing a ladder himself to knock out a small crucifix in the great west window at Peterborough which the soldiers had given up on as too high to reach.119 Whether or not Cromwell actually lent his hand to acts of iconoclasm, he did make clear his feelings on the subject. In January 1643 Cromwell wrote to Dr William Hitch at Ely warning him to stop the ‘unedifying and offensive’ choir service, ‘lest the soldiers should in any tumultuary or disorderly way attempt the reformation of your Cathedral church’. While Geoffrey Nuttall has seen this letter as an instance of Cromwell trying to spare the cathedral from desecration, it reads to me rather more like a thinly veiled threat. An unsubstantiated story tells of Cromwell subsequently forcing his way into the cathedral with a ‘rabble at his heels’.120 Other leading parliamentarians acquired a reputation for iconoclasm, from a variety of motives. After the Restoration a pamphlet was published entitled The Character of Sir Arthur Haselrig, the Church-thief. It accused Haslerigg of ‘breaking up Sepulchres and searching the Dormitories of the dead for hidden Treasure’ at Wells, and authorizing the defacing and plundering of the cathedral at Bristol. Rusticus told a similar story of Haslerigg at Chichester, in December 1642, where he allegedly ordered his men to break down wainscoting in the chapter house in search of hidden plate.121 The implication, at least in the pamphlet attacking Haslerigg, is that he was stealing the plate for his own personal benefit. It is more likely, however, that if there was any truth in the accusations the plate and treasure were being confiscated for the parliamentary cause. On 27 May 1643 it had been ordered in the Commons that an ordinance be brought in ‘for the borrowing of all the Plate in all Cathedrals superstitiously used upon their Altars’. At some unknown date the plate of Winchester was ordered confiscated ‘by a Committee’, 119

William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire (1730), i, 445; Tennant, Edgehill and Beyond, 9, 39, 110–11; Angliae Ruina, 225; Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 336; Angliae Ruina, 245; Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 337. 120 Thomas Carlyle, The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. S. C. Lomas (3 vols, 1904), i, 167 (10 January 1643), and see Nuttall, ‘Was Cromwell an Iconoclast?’. 121 The Character of Sir Arthur Haselrig the Church-thief (1661); Angliae Ruina, 225.

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according to John Dalsh, who was being harassed by the dean over its return in 1660.122 The motives for such acts on the part of parliament could be mercenary rather than religious, but the search for and confiscation of plate was often tied in with iconoclasm, occurring as it often did alongside iconoclastic attacks. One case where valuables were confiscated apparently because of their superstitious nature rather than for lucre is recorded in the Commons Journal on 7 August 1644. Items taken from Salisbury Cathedral by soldiers under Lieutenant-General Thomas Middleton’s command were displayed before the House where it was decided that plate and a pulpit cloth were to be restored to the cathedral, the ‘superstitious Representations upon them being first defaced’. Additional items taken at the same time were to be returned to William Waller, in whose regiment Middleton served, ‘the superstitious Representations upon them to be defaced and destroyed’. It was further ordered that, having been defaced, ‘the said Copes, Hangings, and Cushion shall be sold: and the Proceeds of them employed and disposed among the Soldiers that took them, and brought them up’.123 What is interesting about this is that the soldiers were effectively being rewarded for their vigilance in confiscating these idolatrous items. Degrees of iconoclastic zeal varied widely depending on the temperament of individuals and certainly not all parliamentarians were iconoclasts. Sir Michael Livesey, in charge of the men who ransacked Canterbury Cathedral in August 1642, later apologised to Dean Paske and declared himself ‘readie to faint’ when he saw what damage had been done. There were others who went out of their way to protect churches – for instance, Thomas Fairfax at York Minster and Colonel Anthony Martyn who locked the doors of Ewelme Church in Oxfordshire to save the famous medieval brasses there.124 Yet the sentiments expressed by the actions of iconoclastic soldiers – a loathing of idolatry and a suspicion of an episcopacy tainted by it – paralleled those of many in parliament, and it is, therefore, not surprising that troops do seem to have been given a certain amount of free rein at least in the early years of the war. In the eyes of those who did not understand the godly drive for a physical cleansing of churches, the actions of zealous soldiers and a zealous parliament appeared one and the same. Standish commented on the iconoclasm at Peterborough that

122 CJ, iii, 106; Winchester Cathedral Library, T4/3/7/3, Correspondence: Letter to Dean Hide from the Duke of Albemarle, 22 November 1660. Albemarle had clearly been requested by Dalsh to intercede on his behalf with the dean and chapter. Dalsh claimed to have restored all the plate left in his custody. 123 CJ, iii, 583, and see CSPD, 1644, 408. On the iconoclasm of Middleton’s men elsewhere see Carte, Original Letters and Papers, i, 32–3. 124 LJ, v, 360; Second letter from Dean Paske to the earl of Holland, quoted in A History of Canterbury Cathedral, 196; Nuttall, ‘Was Cromwell an Iconoclast?’, 61.

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these things . . . were indeed the Acts of private persons only, men of wild intemperate zeal, and who had no commission for what they did, but what was owing to the Swords by their sides, Yet notwithstanding all these things seemed afterwards to be own’d and approved by the Powers then in being.125

The circumstances of war permitted the pre-emptive, unofficial and violent reformation of many cathedrals. The phenomenon of army iconoclasm is important and revealing both in the fact that it gained a degree of approval from some in positions of authority and in that it represented a kind of popular front in the fight against idolatry. Although there was by no means a universal approval of the soldiers’ iconoclasm on the parliamentary side, that it was partly condoned illustrates how far attitudes had changed from the tradition of earlier periods when such reformation was the responsibility of magistrates or of clerical authorities only. To the godly, such authorities were seen as having neglected their duty in this respect, thus failing to protect the church from an increase in idolatry, while the Laudian bishops were seen as having actively participated in that increase. The fact that soldiers chose to wage a war on idolatry in this way demonstrates how far the rhetoric of parliamentary leaders and zealous ministers had been taken on board. Buchanan Sharpe has seen anti-Catholicism as a kind of crude nationalism with which the ordinary soldier could easily identify. He has also, rightly, pointed out that anti-Catholicism was not the same thing as Puritanism.126 However, it is clear from the wide range of objects targeted by army, and to a lesser extent civilian, iconoclasts that theirs was more than an anti-Catholic, anti-idolatry agenda – or rather that such an agenda had been broadened to include the kind of things previously accepted as part of a reformed Protestant church and only offensive to the Puritan conscience. The trappings of episcopacy and episcopal worship are the most obvious case in point. Army iconoclasm was part and parcel of the iconoclastic movement as a whole, and although somewhat broader in its targets it was inspired by the same motivating forces. Indeed, if soldiers believed, as many of the godly did, that God rewarded such zeal with success in battle, it would have been all the more important to them to make sure that the cathedrals and churches were suitably reformed. The precipitate actions of the soldiers meant that very little organized official reformation seems to have been required in the cathedrals as far as surviving records show. Where such reformation was undertaken the importance of local individuals and groups once again becomes clear, as at Canterbury, Norwich and York.

125 126

Gunton, History of the Church of Peterborough, 338. B. Sharpe, ‘The place of the people in the English Revolution’, Theory and Society, 14 (1985), 101.

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The final fate of the cathedrals was not as grim as it might have been. Logically a church without bishops had no need of cathedrals and parliament several times decided that they should be pulled down. Yet this did not happen. The reason seems to have been a genuine local pride in, or affection for, these grand structures. This led, as has been seen, to a number of petitions against demolition and to the intervention of influential men like St John at Peterborough and Fairfax at York. There may also have been a certain ambiguity in parliament which frustrated attempts to get a bill passed. Nonetheless petitioners had to tread warily – it would not do to be seen as defending cathedrals for the wrong reasons. Thus while those at Winchester desired to save their ‘auntient and [bea]ufitul structure’ they were keen to point out that their motives for doing so were godly: ‘out of our zeal for the propagation of the Gospel and not out of any superstitious conceite of holiness in the walls [my emphasis].127

127

CJ, vii, 245 (11 January 1653), order to bring in a bill to demolish cathedrals; Winchester Cathedral Documents 1636–83, ii, 97.

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7 Iconoclasm at the Universities

By the time the Long Parliament met, the universities, like the cathedral churches, were closely associated in the minds of anti-Laudians with the religious policies and beliefs of the Caroline regime. They were seen as the headquarters of Arminian ideas and practices, and of the ‘new popery’ generally, and consequently their reformation was high on the parliamentary agenda – although ultimately a thorough-going purge was to be delayed by the pressure of other business and then, as far as Oxford was concerned, by the war. While a broad reformation of the universities was seen to be needed to prevent the spread of dangerous religious ideas (such as those that challenged Calvinist tenets), it was important, too, that the chapels and churches be physically cleansed. Both Oxford and Cambridge1 had undertaken a good deal of building work and refurbishment in the early decades of the seventeenth century, including the ‘beautifying’ of college chapels. This was not simply a product of the new Laudian-Arminian ideas. While the phenomenon gained its greatest momentum in the 1630s, under Laud’s chancellorship of Oxford, the trend towards a less austere approach to church decoration began earlier. At Wadham chapel the erection of the great east window Crucifixion and side windows depicting apostles and saints was started in 1613. Laud, as president of St John’s College, introduced rich altar furnishings and a costly organ into the chapel and in 1619 installed a picture of St John the Baptist in the east window. Other colleges followed suit: major schemes of painted glass were installed at Lincoln (1629–30), Queen’s (1635–7), Magdalen (1637–40) and Christ Church (1638). At New College, windows were restored in 1628 and 1634 when Bernard Van Linge was commissioned to replace twenty-one missing faces – no doubt victims of previous iconoclasm. Abraham Van Linge designed four new windows for Balliol in 1636–7, and a whole series of

1

For this chapter a detailed study has been made of the records of a selected number of Oxford Colleges (see bibliography). The archives of Cambridge colleges have not been studied in detail, as this is ground which has been recently and extensively covered by Trevor Cooper in his edition of The Journal of William Dowsing.

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windows for University College. These latter were not finished until 1641 and could not be erected until after the Restoration. Organs were also reintroduced into the college chapels: Thomas Dallam organs were purchased, for instance, by Christ Church in 1624–5 and by Magdalen in 1635.2 It was not only Arminians who were interested in such adornment: Lincoln college chapel, refurbished by Bishop Williams, with windows depicting scenes from the life of Christ, has been described as representing the ‘beau ideal of a Laudian chapel’, despite Williams’s hostility to Laudian ideas.3 Nonetheless in the 1640s it was Laud who was called to answer for the idolatry perceived as having infected the universities. Laud was to be accused of setting up crucifixes and statues, such as that of the Virgin Mary and child at the university church of St Mary (although actually erected by his chaplain Morgan Owen).4 At Cambridge, vice-chancellor John Cosin was to be accused of similar ‘errors’ and of disbursing ‘greate summes of mony . . . vainely and for superstitious purposes’. The newly built chapel at Peterhouse (1628–32) had been lavishly decorated by Matthew Wren and by Cosin himself, as successive heads of the college. The chapel was paved with polished marble and had a raised altar covered with bright silk, over which hung a dove representing the Holy Ghost with cherubim. Behind the altar were hangings depicting angels, and over the exterior of the chapel door was a statue of St Peter in carved wood.5 Cambridge, like Oxford, had been largely unable to resist the forward march of Laudianism. Some colleges had shown an initial reluctance to comply with the Laudian requirements concerning chapel furnishings: Trinity, Christ’s and Caius held out until the mid 1630s, whilst those with a reputation for Puritanism – Emmanuel, Sidney Sussex, Corpus Christi and St Catharine’s – tended to stick to their old ways. It is noticeable that St Catharine’s did not even rate a mention in the parliamentary report on innovations at Cambridge drawn up in 1641. Nonetheless most colleges did undertake refurbishment of some sort as the rest of that report makes clear.6 The Long Parliament acted almost immediately against the universities. When the Grand Committee for Religion met on 28 November 1640 a

2

See Tyacke, ‘Religious controversy’ and P. M. Gouk, ‘Music’, in The History of Oxford University, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 582, 628; C. Woodforde, The Stained Glass of New College Oxford (Oxford, 1951), 11, 12–13. 3 J. Newman, ‘Architectural setting’, in The History of Oxford University, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 165. See also Tyacke, ‘Religious controversy’, 586. 4 Anthony Wood, The History and Antiquities of the Colleges and Halls in the University of Oxford, ed. J. Gutch (2 vols, 1786), ii, pt 1, 435. 5 BL, Harl. MS 7019, ‘Innovations in Religion and abuses in government in ye University of Cambridge’, fols 69, 71; J. G. Hoffman, ‘The Puritan Revolution and the “Beauty of Holiness” at Cambridge: the case of John Cosin’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 72 (1982–3), 94–105, 97–8. 6 J. Twigg, The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution 1625–88 (Woodbridge, 1990), 37; BL, Harl. MS 7019.

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sub-committee was appointed with the specific remit of investigating abuses at Magdalen College, Oxford, ‘and other abuses in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge’. This sub-committee, headed by Sir Robert Harley, was to consider the condition of both universities concerning matters of religion and what innovations and superstitions is crept [in] . . . and to enquire what new statutes and oaths are made in the said universities concerning religion.

On 22 December the sub-committee was granted full powers to investigate abuses in both the religious and the civil government of the universities.7 A decision made in January 1641 to halt the work of lesser committees due to the pressure of business seems to have resulted in the temporary suspension of the sub-committee, but on 25 February it was revived to investigate a petition against the ‘wicked courses’ of Dr Sterne, master of Jesus College, Cambridge. It appears to have already been investigating the statutes of Emmanuel college, and by March impeachment proceedings were underway against Cosin.8 Perhaps as a consequence of the investigations into the state of Jesus and Emmanuel colleges, parliament decided that a full enquiry should be launched into the condition of Cambridge University. On 22 April Harley, as chair of the universities committee, was authorized to send out warrants for ‘parties and witnesses’. He wrote to James Tabor, registrar of Cambridge, instructing him to appear before the committee on 12 May, ‘to answer such questions as by the said Committee shall be demanded of you’, and Tabor duly journeyed to London taking the university records with him. In the weeks following this visit a report was prepared recording ‘innovations in religion and abuses in government in the University of Cambridge’.9 Following the Cambridge report the Commons revived the universities committee on 4 June, it having been suspended again days earlier due to pressure of business. It was now instructed to prepare a bill for ‘Regulating the Universities’, and on 24 June its powers were confirmed. Referring to its original order of 22 December 1640, the Commons declared ‘that their intention was, and now is, that the Power of that Committee should extend to Consideration and Examining of the Abuses in Matters of Religion and Civil Government, in any of the Colleges or Halls in either of the Universities’.10 It is not clear why such a confirmation of the committee’s powers was needed

7

Notestein, 82, n. 11; Twigg, The University of Cambridge, 47; CJ, ii, 55. CJ, ii, 66; Notestein, 399. On these investigations see Twigg, The University of Cambridge, 54–6. 9 CJ, ii, 126. See also D. Hoyle, ‘A Commons investigation of Arminianism and popery in Cambridge on the eve of the Civil War’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), 419–25, 420. 10 CJ, ii, 162–3; CJ, ii, 167. By 1 June 1641 the pressure of parliamentary business was so great that the Commons were forced to create a ‘committee for lessening committees’ (CJ, ii, 184). See also Twigg, The University of Cambridge, 48. 8

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at this point – it suggests perhaps some resistance at the universities or maybe just a desire from the committee itself to have the limits of its work more clearly defined. On 28 June 1641 the Commons ordered that the university chapels and churches should no longer be subject to the Laudian injunction ‘of doing reverence to the Communion-table . . . by which they understand Bowing . . . unto it, and Offering at it’. By 1 August the bill for the regulation of the universities had its first reading, but then seems to have been abandoned and the university committee did not meet again until early 1642. While the idea of a broad and thorough reform of the universities fell victim to the immense pressure of parliamentary business, innovations, in the form of superstitious and idolatrous additions to the college chapels and churches, clearly continued to be a concern. The parliamentary report on Cambridge devoted a good deal of its time to a college-by-college description of offensive furnishings and ornamentation in the chapels, and the universities were specifically included in the September 1641 order against innovations, where the vice-chancellors and heads of colleges were made responsible for its enforcement. There are indications that some attempts at reform were made at both Cambridge and Oxford before the outbreak of war, and Oxford was to experience a reforming visitation by the parliamentarian forces of Lord Saye and Sele on the very eve of the fighting.11 Both universities were to undergo a second and more thorough bout of iconoclastic reform, although the experience of each was to be very different. John Twigg has commented on the ‘regulation’ of the universities generally that, under the earl of Manchester in 1644, Cambridge was subjected to a purge of fellows which was ‘swift and brutal’ compared to the ‘hesitant and dilatory’ fashion of that at Oxford.12 A factor in this was the urgent need at Cambridge for Manchester to be finished in time for the start of the campaigning season. By the time Oxford was brought under parliamentary control the war was over. Political divisions in parliament, prolonged unsuccessful negotiations to find a settlement with Charles and the second outbreak of fighting in 1648 were all major distractions which only seemed to slow down reform. The same is true of the reformation of images – William Dowsing under Manchester’s commission was ruthless and business-like in his work at Cambridge. Oxford, as far as we can tell from the little evidence which survives, was a different matter, where the war against images seems to have been fought in an ad hoc and drawn-out manner. Indeed the survival rate of stained glass at Oxford has tended to give the impression that iconoclastic legislation was never rigorously or seriously pursued there at all. Taken as a whole, however, the evidence suggests that, 11

CJ, ii, 191, 233; Twigg, The University of Cambridge, 48; I. Roy and D. Reinhart, ‘Oxford and the civil wars’, in The History of Oxford University, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 689. 12 Twigg, The University of Cambridge, 92.

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while there may not have been a centralized blitz systematically carried out and documented as in the case of Cambridge, Oxford certainly did not escape unscathed.

The Experience of Iconoclastic Reform at Cambridge The parliamentary report on ‘innovations and abuses’ at Cambridge was probably written in May or June 1641, possibly by agents of the university committee.13 Coming some four months before the issuing of the first national order against innovations, it is of great interest because it records the small-scale attempts at reform which had already been made by some of the colleges and details the offensive items which still remained in situ. It also highlights those things which were of most concern to parliament at this stage, and because the later purge of the college chapels by Dowsing is also well documented it can be seen how the attack on images and innovations became broader and more thorough. Much of the report concentrates on theological issues – it opens with a section on scandalous sermons which had been given at Cambridge and the dangerous ideas being espoused. The topics of such sermons included free will, justification through works and private confession, as well as the importance of ceremony and the special holiness of churches and the altar. Peter Hausted of Queens’, for example, had in November 1634 defended the practice of bowing and the legality of pictures in churches. There are also pages of complaints against named individuals for their use of ceremony and other offensive ‘popish’ practices, plus tales of the harassment of godly fellows. David Hoyle has pointed out that while the report shows theological concerns it was also in effect ‘a quest for delinquents’.14 The middle section of the report – making up roughly a third of the whole – describes the ‘scandalous’ alterations and additions made to the college chapels. Those things highlighted as offensive tell us something about the priorities of parliament at this stage, and there was certainly a definite if not unexpected theme: the main targets of criticism were richly adorned altars or altar-wise tables. These crop up in the case of twelve of the fifteen chapels which appear in the report. Only Emmanuel, Sidney Sussex and Corpus Christi escape condemnation for this (or any ‘physical’ offence), while St Catharine’s does not feature in the report at all. This is hardly a surprise as these were all colleges which had been resistant to Laudian changes. Magdalene College was criticised only for having the communion table in an altar-wise position, ‘close to yea wall’.15 13

Hoyle, ‘A Commons investigation of Arminianism and popery in Cambridge’, 420. Ibid., 423. BL, Harl. MS 7019. Accounts of the college chapels are on fols 69–85, making up 16 pages of the 41 page report; fol. 83.

14 15

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The richness of the altar at Peterhouse was notorious, and both here and elsewhere an abundance of elaborate altar hangings and coverings was reported, along with altar steps or ‘ascents’, rails or ‘frames’. Trinity chapel, for instance, was described as having a ‘High Altar with many steps, enclosed by carved rails on three sides’. The pavement was of black and white marble and the whole was surrounded on three sides by ‘rich hangings . . . [of] coloured silk of the same kind as cover the altar’. The chapel at King’s boasted a high altar with ‘steps erected of late years at great cost . . . a hanging canopy of wood over the altar . . . [and] red and blew taffety hanging behind’. Altar plate and other utensils also gave offence, especially candlesticks, tapers, basins and richly covered books, like those at St John’s of red velvet embossed with silver. The communion cup at the university church of Great St Mary’s merited particular mention for bearing ‘the full portraiture of Christ’, a cross upon the cover, and the words ‘this is my body indeed’.16 ‘Pictures’ were condemned at many chapels – those described being mainly images of Christ, especially prevalent on hangings. At St John’s the altar cloth depicted Christ taken from the cross, and at Trinity the whole East end of ye chappell . . . is taken up w[i]th the history of Christ drawn upon blew kersey, this stayned cloth being raised very high and flagging three sides of ye chappell.

Authorities at Trinity were accused of having spent ‘a thousand pounds’ on such pictures, including images of Christ, the Virgin, St Elizabeth and John the Baptist in what appear to be wall paintings, ‘between [the] windows . . . drawn . . . and richly guilt’. Framed pictures of ‘ye history of Christ’ are mentioned at Peterhouse and St John’s.17 Crucifixes were another recurring feature. At St John’s a ‘high erected frame wch archeth over ye table’ contained a ‘Crucifix between ye two thieves’ and at Peterhouse another was set in the east window. A crucifix, again ‘between the two thieves’ hung on a ‘peece of arras’ over the altar at Clare College. Wooden crosses on the end of the seats at Peterhouse were also targeted for censure. This is somewhat unusual given the fact that simple crosses were not banned by parliament until at least May 1643 (and not included in national legislation until August 1643). Here, however, it may be the sheer number of crosses ‘at ye end of every seate’ which turned them into an example of Laudian excess.18 The painted letters of Christ’s name were also noted with disapproval, as at Clare where ‘a circle full of light beames with . . . [the] . . . superscription JNRJ’ was drawn over the head of a crucifix; or at Jesus College 16 17 18

Ibid., fols 77, 76, 74, 73. Ibid., fols 74, 77, 71. Ibid., fols 75, 71, 84.

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where the letters IHS were gilded on the body of the organ. The chapel ceiling at St John’s was a particularly elaborate example: ‘the roof is painted in a skie collour & set full of gilt starrs, at just distances are fastened in golden letters through the whole roof Jesus Christus Dominusnoster short writ’.19 The fact that the main emphasis of the report was on altars and Christcentred images and symbols suggests that visitors stuck to their remit, concentrating at this point on ‘innovations’, the most recent additions to the chapels or what might be seen as the ‘new popery’. There was no mention of imagery in windows with the exception of the new east window containing a crucifix at Peterhouse. Nor do many other images appear – there was a wooden carving of St Peter over the door of Peterhouse chapel and a framed picture of St Michael at St John’s. However, niches for statues at St John’s and Caius did not escape suspicion. That at St John’s consisted of a ‘hollow place capacious enough for an image’ in the wainscot of a newly built organ. At Caius it was noted that the east end of the chapel contained ‘two hollow places for images which now at ye reedifying of that part of the chappell are again fitted for any the like purpose’. Angels and cherubim were occasionally brought to attention but only apparently when they were placed around the altar, as at Peterhouse, St John’s and Jesus, and at Christ’s where there were ‘pictures of Angels above ye altar’.20 Throughout the report the fear of popery emerges. One accusation against Cosin was that, as vice-chancellor, he had neglected the apprehending of a Franciscan friar who sold beads and crucifixes to several scholars. Fellows of Caius are described as ‘ill-affected to the Church of England and Popish . . . some of them having crucifixes in their chambers, and being suspected to use beads and crossings’. It was also ‘creditably reported’ about Peterhouse that there were ‘divers private oratories and Altars in ye College w[i]th Crucifixes and several other popish pictures’. None of this is more than hearsay and so tells us more about what the visitors were looking for than the real state of affairs at Cambridge.21 In some of the college chapels action seems to have been taken against offending objects even before the report was finished. It is likely that colleges which had been reluctant to accept Laudian changes would have been quick to reverse those which had been forced upon them. The single criticism the report could level against Emmanuel, for instance, was that of bowing towards the ‘communion table’ (note, not ‘altar’ as elsewhere), and even this practice had been recently stopped. Laudian colleges had also made concessions. At Caius the communion table had been ‘lately turned again tablewise’ and Dr Collins of King’s had ‘removed the Altar and placed it tablewise 19 20 21

Ibid., fols 84, 80, 75. Ibid., fols 71–2, 74, 75, 79, 71, 74, 80, 83. Ibid., fols 70, 79, 73.

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within the rayles’. Candlesticks and a basin had also been removed and adoration to the east prohibited. Rails, hangings, candlesticks and a basin had all been removed at Christ’s and the table placed ‘according to Rubrick’.22 How far other matters highlighted by the report were addressed at this stage is not absolutely clear. The vice-chancellors of the universities along with the heads and governors of individual colleges were made responsible for overseeing the Commons’ order against innovations of September 1641. However, only Corpus Christi and St Catherine’s are known to have returned certificates confirming that the ‘order . . . was obeied and noe innovations practised in ther chappels’.23 The college accounts generally give the impression of a rather late and reluctant compliance with the regulations, most of the offensive items being removed in the first half of 1643, only months before the arrival of Dowsing in December that year.24 In March 1642 the king had visited Trinity College and expressed his approval of their chapel ‘ornaments’. It was not until the following year that the college accounts show the whitewashing of painted figures and the taking down of organs, rails and hangings. At St John’s the audit book for 1642–3 shows the ‘whiting’ of walls and the removal of ‘pictures’ and organs, while at Peterhouse in the spring of 1643 organs and hangings were removed and work in ‘altering’ angels undertaken. What this work involved is not known – angels as such were only officially proscribed under the May 1644 ordinance. Some of the hangings at Peterhouse were sold off in 1644, but others along with the organ pipes were hidden in the Perne library not to be found until June 1650, after which they were sold. Organs were removed from both Jesus College chapel, in March or April 1643, and King’s College during the first quarter of 1643. The official ban on organs was not to come until May 1644, but they had largely been taken down before this time. Those at Jesus had been specifically mentioned in the 1641 report because of the letters IHS on the casing.25 The timing of these attempts at reform is no coincidence. In January and February of 1643 parliamentary troops were present in the city and were allegedly involved in iconoclastic activities at Great St Mary’s. According to John Barwick, author of Querela Cantabrigiensis, soldiers tore up prayer books in the church and went on to deface the quire screen. Barwick complained that this ‘beautiful carved structure . . . had not one jot of Imagery or statue work about it’.26 However, the elaborate screen, erected by 22

Ibid., fols 82, 79, 76, 83. Coates, 49, 59. Trinity Church, Cambridge, also returned a certificate on 30 October claiming no work needed to be done. 24 See T. Cooper, ‘Dowsing at Cambridge University’, in The Journal of William Dowsing, 47–55, esp. 51–5, and the various college accounts quoted in the commentaries on individual colleges in the Journal, entries 1–17. 25 The Journal of William Dowsing, 174–6, 177, 157–9, 170, 180; BL, Harl. MS 7019, fol. 80. 26 John Barwick, Querela Cantabrigiensis, printed in Angliae Ruina (1647 [1648] edn), 11. 23

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Cosin in October 1640, had already attracted criticism in the 1641 report on innovations. The description given there shows how it was perceived to be offensive because of the presence of a number of crosses and because it was seen as being a potential setting for an image: The coronis [cornice] . . . on both sides is full of Crosses cut through the wainscot, from ye middle of w[i]ch skreene ascends a great hollowe pile of wainscot cast into ye forme of a Pyramis and capacious enough for the receiving of an image.27

Trevor Cooper and Robert Walker have suggested that this pyramid may have been some kind of gothic canopy possibly in three stages – later Puritan lampoons referred to it as Cosin’s ‘triple crown’.28 The activities of the soldiers at St Mary’s may have been enough to convince the colleges to reform their chapels before the matter was taken out of their hands in a more violent manner. This would account for the removal of hangings and the whitewashing of walls at some of the colleges. There may even have been more direct threats from the soldiers. Barwick, albeit a far from objective source, described how a warrant issued on 23 February 1643 by Lord Gray of Warke (major-general of the Eastern Association until July 1643) authorized the searching of the houses of malignants and papists in Cambridge. This, he claims, was used as an excuse to plunder colleges, chapels and libraries. Both the House of Lords and the earl of Essex were forced to issue orders to protect both persons and buildings belonging to the university.29 Whatever attempts at reformation were made at this point they were not enough to satisfy the zealous. It was the desire to see Cambridge properly reformed which prompted William Dowsing to suggest that the vice-chancellor and the mayor be made ‘to pull down all ther blasphemous crucifixes, all superstitious pictures and reliques of popery’. Dowsing’s reforming activities in the Eastern Association counties, backed by the authority of the earl of Manchester, have already been described. The city and university of Cambridge came within his remit and would have been seen as a priority.30 Dowsing’s work in Cambridge began on 21 December 1643, two days after receiving his commission from Manchester, and by 3 January 1644 he had visited all of the colleges and the parish churches in the city. His physical cleansing of the chapels was a precursor to the broader reform of the university by Manchester, under the ordinance of 22 January ‘for Regulating the University of Cambridge, and for removing . . . Scandalous Ministers in the Seven Associated Counties’. Dowsing had to deal with heads and fellows of 27

BL, Harl. MS 7019, fol. 69. The Journal of William Dowsing, 199. 29 Barwick, Querela Cantabrigiensis, preface, A3; LJ, v, 636. The order of the Lords was issued on 4 March 1643, and that of Essex on the 7 March. 30 Letter from Dowsing to Newcomen quoted from Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm’, 11. See ch. 4 above. 28

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the colleges before Manchester’s purge and in doing so met with some resistance. When visiting Pembroke College on 26 December, several of the fellows there challenged Dowsing’s authority. In an attempt to save the decoration of the chapel from destruction, Thomas Weeden cited the university statutes to claim exemption from the parliamentary order and Edward Boldero argued that church matters were the business of the clergy not of magistrates or parliament. Such ideas held little sway with Dowsing who launched a battery of biblical citations to prove that ‘the people had to doe as well as the clergie’ in such important matters. In a final effort to save the chapel Robert Mapletoft pointed out that ‘my Lords Covenant’ (that is Manchester’s commission to Dowsing) was not ‘according to the Ordinance’ – enforcement of the August 1643 ordinance at the universities was officially the responsibility of ‘the several heads and governors’ of the colleges and halls. Dowsing does not record his reply to this (although he might have said that the governors had clearly neglected their duty in the matter), but simply carried on undaunted to break down images and cherubim at the college chapel.31 This challenge to Dowsing’s authority may have led him to seek confirmation from Manchester, leading to his second commission of 29 December. This authorized Dowsing to bring before the earl such persons as shall oppose or contemne you or your assignes in the execuco[n] of the ordinance of parliament made in that behalf or that shall utter disgracefull speches against any of the members in parliament.32

The implication is that Dowsing had met resistance elsewhere, or that he expected to do so and was forearming himself. Heads of colleges were among those at risk of being brought up before Manchester for refusing to co-operate, along with deans of cathedrals and churchwardens. The second commission specifically mentions the levelling of chancel steps. Such steps were listed in the 1641 report for many of the colleges and seem to have been largely of recent origin. Yet they remained to be dealt with by Dowsing at Queens’, Jesus, Trinity, King’s and Clare, and also at Christ’s despite the otherwise prompt reform there in 1641. This perhaps reflects a reluctance to undertake major structural alterations, and it is possible that defenders of the steps were using the ambiguities of the parliamentary regulations on this issue to avoid their destruction. The September 1641 order had required that steps be levelled ‘as heretofore they were before the late innovations’, which was redefined more precisely in the August 1643 ordinance as those raised within the last twenty years. Any continuing controversy was pushed aside in May 1644 when all chancels were to be levelled. The levelling of 31

The Journal of William Dowsing, entry 2. On the argument see Sadler, ‘Dowsing’s argument with the fellows of Pembroke’. 32 See Appendix III.

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chancels was to be one of Dowsing’s main priorities throughout the Eastern Associated counties. Looking at the journal of 1643–4 alongside the parliamentary report on innovations at Cambridge of May 1641, it can be seen that Dowsing was targeting both objects noted in 1641 but not removed and others which had not concerned the earlier visitors. The main thrust of the university committee’s report, as has been seen, was against altars and altar furnishings, focusing on recent and largely moveable items: hangings, rails, framed pictures, utensils and so forth. In contrast, Dowsing concerned himself with more permanent structural items, particularly windows and chancel steps. It is likely that Dowsing was often dealing with older, even pre-reformation, items and making no distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ popery. It should be noted, however, that he still felt it necessary to prioritize those chapels which had been notorious centres of Laudian refurbishment: his itinerary started with Peterhouse on 12 December, followed by Caius and Jesus the next day, and then Pembroke and Queens’.33 One of the problems in trying to analyse the iconoclasm of Dowsing is that he does not always describe exactly what it is that is being destroyed. The general term ‘picture’ is used with no indication of whether the picture is a painting, three-dimensional image or an image in glass. In the majority of cases, based on the way the term is used in other contemporary sources, it is probably safe to assume that the term generally refers to images in windows. Robert Walker has also drawn this conclusion, citing evidence in churchwardens’ accounts as consistently confirming ‘that Dowsing was normally referring to images in glass’.34 This is important because images in windows seem to have been primary targets for Dowsing and this is in itself a shift as far as the university chapels were concerned. The 1641 report, as noted, mentioned no chapel windows other than the recently erected crucifix in the east window at Peterhouse. The many windows which Dowsing found to remove at the university had been overlooked by the 1641 visitors either because most of the windows were ancient or because the images they contained were not considered to be dangerously idolatrous, at least not in comparison to the Christ-centred images on hangings and in paintings which had been a priority in the report. Some images of saints were criticised in 1641: the carving of St Peter at Peterhouse being a three-dimensional image would have been considered particularly dangerous; the picture of St Michael at St John’s chapel was probably of recent origin, and was part of a large series of hangings the others of which depicted the ‘story of Christ from his conception to his ascention’.35 33

Cooper suggests that St John’s was left out of the initial sweep of colleges because it had removed the most offensive items at an earlier stage (‘Dowsing at Cambridge University’, 53–5). 34 Walker, ‘William Dowsing in Cambridgeshire’, 38. 35 BL, Harl. MS 7019, fol. 74.

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In 1643 Dowsing broke down ‘superstitious pictures’ in windows at Pembroke, Queens’ and Jesus chapels, all of which may have contained the original pre-reformation glass depicting saints. The ‘divers pictures’ pulled down at Christ’s may have been the ‘glass with imagery’ set up in 1510, which included a picture of St Christopher. At Peterhouse Dowsing recorded ‘six angells on the windowe’, and at Clare ‘twelve apostles and six Fathers’ were pinpointed for destruction. These seem to have been subject to a partial reformation as William Cole, the antiquarian, noted in the mid eighteenth century that, while the windows had been broken, ‘the lowermost half of them remain’. Would Dowsing have been satisfied with partially reforming the glass in this way? Perhaps he left the work to the college, as the wording of the entry implies: ‘Ther are steps to be made up, 3 cherubims, 12 apostles, and 6 of the fathers in the windowes and a crosse’ (my emphasis). In a similar way the great east window at King’s College was not destroyed during Dowsing’s visit, but ordered to be removed by the college, and has famously survived.36 The King’s College window illustrates further the point that old glass images do not seem to have unduly perturbed the 1641 visitors. This medieval window was ‘idolatrous’ even by 1641 standards containing as it did (and does) a Crucifixion scene depicting Christ ascending the cross. Yet it is not even mentioned in the report. When Dowsing came to view the chapel he noted ‘superstitious pictures, the ladder of Christ, and theves to go upon, many crosses, and Jesus writ on them’. The fact that Dowsing mentions the ladder of Christ but not the figure of Christ himself in my opinion strongly supports the theory that there was a partial reformation of the glass before Dowsing’s arrival and that the glass must have been hidden away.37 Even colleges where there was nothing to report in 1641 did not escape the more thorough attention of Dowsing. At Magdalene ‘40 superstitious pictures’ were broken down, including a depiction of ‘Joseph and Mary waiting to be espoused’, probably in glass. At St Catharine’s, which was not only not included in the 1641 report but had promptly returned a certificate confirming obedience to the September 1641 order, Dowsing found and pulled down ‘St George and the Dragon, and popish Katherine’. These were probably images in stained glass or items old or obscure enough to have been overlooked previously. Dowsing also broke down a window at St Catharine’s 36

The figures Dowsing gives – of 80 at Pembroke, 110 at Queens’ and 120 at Jesus – should not be taken as exact. The Journal of William Dowsing, entries 2, 4, 8, 16, 1, 9, and for Christ’s and Clare, see Cooper’s commentary at 189, 171–2. 37 The Journal of William Dowsing, entry 13. Cooper discusses the case of King’s College window in detail, in his commentary at 180–4. The college accounts, which he quotes, show that some work was definitely going on in the east window, both before and after Dowsing’s visit. Graham Chainey, commenting on the tendency of historians to dismiss the possibility of its removal, writes: ‘It has been the trend not so much to try and explain this miraculous survival of one of the most celebrated stained glass sequences in England or Europe, as to try and explain it away’ (‘The lost stained glass of Cambridge’, Cambridge Antiquarian Society Proceedings, 79 (1992), 72). For the opposite view see Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm’, 14 and nn. 112 and 113.

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containing John the Baptist and the words ‘Orate pro anima, qui fecit hanc fenestram; Pray for the soul of him that made this window’.38 There is only one recorded instance of Dowsing attacking images in places other than the chapels. At Queens’ College hall, ‘saints pictures’ were broken down. These may have been in the windows or possibly, as Trevor Cooper suggests, in a painted canvas hanging dating from the early sixteenth century. Querela Cantabrigiensis accused Dowsing of visiting other college halls, along with schools and libraries, ‘contrary to order’. There is, however, no evidence to confirm this.39 Aside from windows and chancel steps Dowsing targeted other items which were part of the fabric of the chapels. These were mainly angels and cherubim, often set in ornate ceilings, which may have been either overlooked medieval survivals or part of the recent refurbishment. Such things seem to have been condemned in the 1641 report only where they were connected to or placed around the altar, although the Laudian enrichment of chapels generally did earn the earlier visitors’ disapproval. Of Caius chapel it was remarked that it ‘hath had much Cost bestowed upon it in wainscotting and gilding to the expense of some hundreds of pounds’, yet there was no specific mention made of the cherubim with gilded letters upon the ceiling which were to be taken down by Dowsing. Nor was there mention of those which Dowsing later recorded at Pembroke, Clare or Queen’s.40 At Peterhouse Dowsing ordered the removal of ‘2 mighty great angells with wings, and divers other angels’ plus ‘about a hundred chirubims and angells, and divers superstitious letters in gold’. The 1641 report had mentioned only cherubim above the altar and painted angels upon a hanging behind it. Hangings, including some depicting scenes from the life of Christ, and other moveables had been removed and hidden away several months before Dowsing’s arrival. Payments had also been made in spring 1643 for ‘altering of the Angells at the East end’, most probably the large wooden angels which dated from 1631. If this was an attempt at a partial reformation, however, it clearly was not enough to suit Dowsing: he pulled down a ‘hundred chirubims and angells’, probably from the ceiling panels, and also removed statues of the four evangelists, which had been purchased in 1638, and which were probably located in the four large exterior niches on the east and west façades of the chapel (now empty). Interestingly, these images had not been mentioned in the report of 1641, despite their obvious size and prominent positions. This again may reflect one new and radical aspect of the 1643 legislation, the inclusion of external objects.41

38

The Journal of William Dowsing, entries 15, 5. Ibid., entry 4 and Cooper’s commentary at 16; Barwick, Querela Cantabrigiensis, 17. 40 The Journal of William Dowsing, entries 3, 2, 9, 4; BL, Harl. MS 7019, fol. 79. 41 The Journal of William Dowsing, entry 1, and Cooper’s commentary at 159–60. The suggestion that the statues were located in the chapel’s external niches is Cooper’s (ibid.). 39

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It has been discussed throughout how the definition of that which constituted a monument of idolatry was broadened between 1641 and 1643 in the official legislation. Dowsing, on the whole, followed the parliamentary regulations and in doing so included in his reform new items added to the August 1643 ordinance.42 The principle additions to the legislation were superstitious inscriptions, plain crosses and images of saints. The inclusion of saints may account for the number of windows and other pictures targeted by Dowsing, which had not been included in the 1641 report. The earlier emphasis on ‘new popery’ and the general exclusion of windows from consideration in 1641 would also help to account for these discrepancies. Superstitious inscriptions were removed by Dowsing in several chapels, for instance at Queens’ where the damaged brasses still survive. An ‘Orate pro anima, on a grave stone’ was recorded at Trinity Hall, and another ‘44 with Cujus animae propitietur deus, and one with Orata [sic] pro anima’ at St John’s. There were inscriptions in gold letters at Caius and others written ‘on some of the images’ (presumably in windows) at Peterhouse.43 Crosses were frequently removed by Dowsing from churches throughout Cambridgeshire and Suffolk but only one is mentioned in connection with the colleges, that among the list of items to be dealt with at Clare. However, there is evidence in the college accounts that a cross was removed at St John’s in March 1644. Dowsing may also have been involved in the later taking down of organ cases at St John’s and King’s.44 When Dowsing visited the city’s churches his targets for reform were the same as those in the college chapels. Many ‘pictures’ were removed, along with inscriptions and chancels were levelled at St Botolph’s, St Edward’s, St Michael’s and St Peter’s. The communion rails remained for Dowsing to remove and burn at St Peter’s, while at St Giles’s ‘a dove for the high loft of the font, and a holy water fonte at the porch dore’ were removed. The latter was probably a stoup. Some of these churches may have already made attempts at reform, as at St Botolph’s where money was spent on ‘all the glass windowes’ in 1642. At Great St Mary’s the churchwardens had been keen to follow the 1641 order of parliament and take away the communion rails, but had been prevented from doing so by Dr Rowe of Trinity College which held the advowson. The largest amount of work left to be done in any

42

For my argument that Dowsing does occasionally take a more radical stance see ch. 4. The Journal of William Dowsing, entries 4, 7, 10, 12, 3, 1, and see Cooper’s commentary on Queens’ College at 165. 44 Ibid., entry 9, and Cooper’s commentaries at 178, 169, 189. Cooper cites an entry in the college accounts at King’s showing a payment of 8s made to Dowsing in the second quarter of 1644 (25 March to Midsummer’s Day). He suggests that Dowsing made a second visit to King’s and that he may have then ordered the removal of the organ. This was recorded as being removed the following quarter. 43

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of the city churches, according to Dowsing’s journal, was at Little St Mary’s, a church which had been extensively refurbished by the university.45 Dowsing’s reformation of Cambridge University was a thorough one, although, as everywhere, there are anomalous survivals – King’s College window being the most dramatic example. Another was the east window of Peterhouse which, according to Blomefield, was taken down and stored away throughout the period.46 On the whole the parliamentary report of 1641 had concerned itself with recent innovations, and it was first and foremost a report for parliament on the state of affairs at Cambridge, not a list of work to be done. It is not too surprising, then, that some of the objects highlighted in the report remained for Dowsing to remove, especially given the apparent reluctance of college authorities to act. This can be seen at the colleges which failed to attempt any kind of reformation until early 1643, and probably did so then only as a response to the threat from parliamentary soldiers. The resistance that Dowsing met at Pembroke, and possibly elsewhere, further illustrates this attitude. The overall impression in comparing the journal of 1643–4 to the report of 1641 is that Dowsing found considerably more work to do because he was working to stricter regulations. While Dowsing’s personal beliefs and undoubted zeal were contributory factors, his more comprehensive approach to the task of reformation reflects the changing climate nationally. Idolatry and the need for a thorough physical reform had become much more urgent issues, with 1643–4 being peak years for both official and unofficial iconoclasm.

The Experience of Iconoclastic Reform at Oxford While there is no equivalent to the Cambridge report for Oxford University, and no known returns to the 1641 order, yet some Oxford chapels do seem to have been reformed to some degree in 1641. Thomas Gorges, a fellow of All Souls and later a prominent royalist, wrote to his cousin Thomas Smyth on 7 April 1641: We are all here in Oxford thorowly reformed, our painted chappells are quite defaced and our Communion Tables fixed in the body of the Quire, and curiously set about with Albu Gracu [whitewash]; this is trew I assure you. It hath binne seene lately in Magdalen’s by many as I am informed, and in Queen’s college.47

45

Ibid., entries 21, 22, 18 and 19, 20; and Cooper’s commentaries at 198–9. Francis Blomefield, Collectanea Cantabrigiensia (Norwich, 1750), 157. For other survivals, see Cooper’s commentaries on the individual colleges in The Journal of William Dowsing, 155–91. 47 Calendar of the Correspondence of the Smyth Family of Ashton Court, 1548–1642, ed. J. Bettey (Bristol Record Society, 35, 1982), 172.

46

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The same year there were clashes in Oxford, when disorderly assemblies of citizens, gathering to hear news from London, attacked passing scholars and spread rumours and alarms about popish subversion in the city. Puritan students interrupted the service of Giles Widdowes, Laudian rector of St Martin Carfax, and attacked the local maypole. The churchwardens’ accounts for the city churches for 1641 survive in only six cases but two of these do indicate some response to the Commons’ order. Communion rails were taken down at St Peter in the East and at St Michael’s, where the chancel was also levelled. At St Martin Carfax relatively large sums were spent on painting and glazing in the church (£5 and £1 10s respectively). These may represent some iconoclastic work given that this had been a particularly Laudian church.48 How much of a reformation Oxford had undergone at this point is not clear, although it was certainly not a comprehensive one – as illustrated by the amount of ‘superstitious’ material which remained either to be destroyed later or to survive. At the beginning of the war the city was visited by Lord Saye and Sele, newly appointed parliamentary lord lieutenant for the county, accompanied by a body of troopers. Saye’s remit was to destroy recently erected fortifications, search for arms in the colleges and also for any remaining plate. This latter was a response to the donation of college plate to the royalist cause which parliament had been too late to prevent. At the same time Saye inspected the college chapels and possibly also the surrounding churches for images and other prohibited things. John Aubrey implies that this was part of the purpose of Saye’s visit, recalling that the viscount came ‘(by order of the parliament) to visit the colleges to see what of new Popery they could discover’.49 During the first week of the parliamentary occupation, between 14 and 17 September, soldiers looking for arms and plate visited New College, Corpus Christi, Merton, Exeter, Jesus, Lincoln, Brasenose, St John’s, Magdalen and Christ Church.50 The lodgings of fellows and heads of houses were also searched and hidden plate belonging to Christ Church was found and confiscated.51 It is likely that the college chapels were visited at the same

48 Wood, History and Antiquities, ii, pt 1, 427–8, 428; ORO, PAR/213/4/F1/3, St Peter in the East, Oxford churchwardens’ accounts (1641–2); PAR/211/4/F1/3, St Michael, Oxford churchwardens’ accounts (1641–2) and PAR/207/4/F1/1, St Martin’s, Oxford churchwardens’ accounts (1641–2). 49 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clarke (2 vols, Oxford, 1898), i, 23. 50 A perfect and true Relation of the daily Passages and Proceedings of the souldiers which are under the Lord Sayes Command in Oxford (1642), 2–3. See also The Cavaliers Advice to his Majestie with his Majesties Answer to their desire (1642); A True Relation of the Late Proceedings of the London Dragoneers sent down to Oxford (1642); Anthony Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. A. Clarke (Oxford, 1891), i, 60–4; and Wood, History and Antiquities, ii, pt 1, 449–52. 51 A perfect and true Relation of the . . . souldiers which are under the Lord Sayes Command in Oxford, 2; see also PRO, SP 28/145, fols 242–60, Saye’s accounts, which contain an inventory of the plate found at Christ Church; W. G. Hiscock, A Christ Church Miscellany (Oxford, 1946), 137–8; and the various tracts cited in n. 50. See plate 1 for a depiction of troops at Christ Church.

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time. At Magdalen, according to one source, when fellows refused to open the gate, Souldiers began to batter the Chappell windowes, whereof one windowe being at the East end of the chappell of Darke worke which was valued at an hundred pound . . . was beaten downe to peeces with many other windowes of thirty pound price.52

This alleged incident is something of a mystery. There is no east window at Magdalen chapel, although the west window contained a large Last Judgement executed in black and white, which could fit the description ‘darke worke’. This, however, according to Anthony Wood was removed by fellows of the college at a later date (as discussed below). There were several other black and white windows of saints situated in the antechapel but these to all appearances have survived intact. It may be that this is an example of a rumour being reported as fact, or simply misinformation – the incident may have taken place elsewhere or perhaps at the church of St Mary Magdalen.53 On Sunday 18 September the soldiers attempted to take surplices and the prayer book from St Michael’s church, ‘but were kept off by the women and others’. It is not clear whether the soldiers were acting on instructions or spontaneously, although the fact that they entered the church during the service and tried to take the prayer book (not yet officially condemned by parliament) suggests they were acting on their own initiative. According to the same source, ‘Divers Country Churches about’ had also been ‘entered into, and the Surplices taken away’.54 At other places the troopers did not cause trouble, despite the temptations. Wood described their response to the stained glass in Christ Church, which they visited the previous Tuesday (13 September): Many of them came . . . to view the church and paynted windows, much admiringe at the idolatry thereof; and a certain Scot being amongst them, saide that he marvayled how the schollars could goe to their bukes for those painted idolatrous wyndowes’: but at that time there was no violence offered to any thinge.55

Note that the soldiers were not admiring the windows, but ‘admiringe at the idolatry thereof ’, meaning that they were shocked at it.56 52

The Cavalliers Advice to his Majestie, 6. Thanks to Dr Robin Darwall-Smith, archivist at Magdalen College, for these suggestions (personal communication). The tract which printed the story was parliamentarian so this is not a case of propaganda against the parliamentary troops. 54 A perfect and true Relation of the . . . souldiers which are under the Lord Sayes Command in Oxford, 3. 55 Wood, Life and Times, 60. 56 See M. Archer et al., English Heritage in Stained Glass: Oxford (Oxford and New York, 1988), 26–8. 53

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Some kind of official or semi-official visitation of churches in the surrounding areas also seems to have taken place. On Monday 19 September, Saye caused diverse popish bookes and pictures, whych had byn taken out of churches and papists houses here and abroad, to be burned in the street over against the signe of the Starre where his lordship laye.

The contents of this bonfire no doubt included the ‘Rhemish testament’ allegedly found in a house in the city by Captain Wilson’s men.57 The troopers left Oxford the following day – but not without a passing attack on some remaining monuments. Wood tells how passinge by St Marie’s church, one of them discharged a brace of bullets at the stone image of our lady over the Church porch, and one shott strooke of her hed and the hed of her child which she held in her right arme; another discharged at the image of our Saviour over All Soules gate, and would have defaced all the worke there, had it not byn for some townesmen . . . who entreated them to forbeare.58

One of those involved in stopping the soldiers was Alderman John Nixon, who, ironically, would give evidence against Laud in connection with the erection of this same image of the Virgin, and, having been disenfranchised at the king’s request in 1643, would return to Oxford as parliamentarian mayor in 1646. Nixon may have disliked images, but clearly did not relish a violent and destructive reformation. In a different (and more colourful) version of the story the troopers shooting at the image of Christ were ‘set upon by two or three hundred men and women, who with stones beare them all off, and hissed them all along the street as farre as East-Gate’.59 The exit of the troopers was swiftly followed by the arrival of parliamentary foot soldiers, and more searching of colleges. Balliol, Trinity and Wadham were visited on Friday 23 September. New College seems to have been searched a second time, during which an interesting incident of anti-royal iconoclasm occurred, according to Wood. When Saye searched Dr Pinke’s study, ‘one of my lord’s men brake down the kinge’s picture that stood there, made of alabaster and gilt over; for which my lord was much displeased’.60

57 Wood, Life and Times, 62–3; A True Relation of the Late Proceedings of the London Dragoneers sent down to Oxford, 7–8, 6. 58 VCH, Oxfordshire, iii: the University of Oxford, ed. H. E. Salter and M. D. Lobel (1954), 122; and see Wood, Life and Times, 435. 59 Ibid.; A perfect and true Relation of the . . . souldiers which are under the Lord Sayes Command in Oxford, 3. 60 Ibid., 3; Wood, Life and Times, 64.

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Parliamentary soldiers continued passing through Oxford until 6 October. Soon after the battle of Edgehill, on 23 October, the city became the royalist headquarters, and thus was out of the reformers’ reaches until after the war. The information we have about the visit of Lord Saye and his soldiers to Oxford at this time – at least as far as it concerns the reformation of the churches and chapels there – is sketchy. The impression given is of a mix of spontaneous army iconoclasm, as in the attack on the images outside St Mary’s church and All Souls College, and an official or semi-official visitation, which involved visits to the college chapels, as well as the destruction of ‘popish’ objects confiscated from private houses. This seems to have been a limited reformation, concentrating on recent innovations. Aubrey described how two examples of ‘old popery’ were allowed to remain undefaced at Trinity College chapel: on the backside of the screen, had been 2 altars (of painting well enough for those times, and the colours were admirably fresh and lively). That on the right hand as you enter the chapel, was dedicated to St Katharine, that on the left was of the taking of our Saviour off from the cross. My Lord Say saw that this was done of old time, and Dr Kettel told his lordship ‘truly, my lord, we regard them no more than a dirty dish-cloth’: so they remained untouched.61

The distinction between ‘new’ and ‘old’ popery was common in the early years of parliament’s drive against images and innovations – the report on Cambridge University, fourteen months earlier, took a similar stance criticising mainly recent additions to the chapels. However, one would expect a depiction of Christ sited in a chapel, especially one of ‘fresh and lively’ colours, to have been a prime target for reformation. That Saye, who was a notable Puritan, allowed these pictures to remain illustrates that this visitation was not primarily concerned with reforming the chapels, but with the business of war and the fast-approaching conflict between parliamentary and royalist armies. Nonetheless it has been stressed throughout that the cleansing of images was no side issue to Puritans and was perceived by them as directly connected to military success or failure. Thus this eleventh-hour removal and public burning of popish books and pictures can be seen as a ritualistic act, as well as a parliamentary propaganda statement. There would not be a chance for parliament to institute further reform at the university until after the defeat of the king and the surrender of Oxford in June 1646. The articles of surrender, drawn up on 24 June, included a clause to protect the city against desecration: ‘that all churches, chapels, colleges, &c shall be preserved from defacing and spoil’. The university itself was initially treated with moderation, parliament sending a forward party of predominantly Presbyterian preachers to prepare the ground for reformation. 61

Aubrey, Brief Lives, i, 23.

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The official visitation of the university was not established until May 1647, but moves against some ‘relics of popery’ – mainly portable valuables like vestments and plate – were made some months earlier.62 After the Restoration, Magdalen College would bring a case before parliament to try to recover some £2000 worth of goods described as ‘the venerable remains of their Founder’.63 These goods, consisting of a mitre, crosier staff and ‘other things’, had been confiscated by order of the House of Lords in February or March 1647 and appear to have gone missing, possibly ending up in private hands. Information about the case comes from a deposition made by Michael Baker, the man in charge of searching the Oxford colleges for ‘popish reliques’, who is described as a ‘messenger of the Exchequer attending on the Lords’. According to Baker, he was sent to Oxford, upon an order of January 1647, to pursue the rumour that a ‘bishop’s mitre’ and other proscribed religious objects were being concealed in the colleges. He was initially sent to search ‘two colledges’ – Corpus Christi and Christ’s (Christ Church). Baker’s search yielded a hundred and twenty richly embroidered pieces of copes ‘not made up’ and a velvet pulpit cloth with a crucifix embroidered on it, as well as two candlesticks, a cup for the altar and part of a crosier staff, all of which were required to be taken up to the House of Lords on 26 January.64 It is not clear whether these items were confiscated from Corpus Christi or the cathedral, or possibly both. Having failed to find the mitre, Baker was sent back to Oxford to make a yet wider search with a warrant, granted on 6 February, which covered all of the colleges as well as ‘other suspicious places’. This he interpreted as giving him authority to search throughout the city. Within a month, this second search had turned up the mitre and crosier staff from Magdalen and twelve new copes belonging to Trinity College. The copes were in the possession of two parliamentary soldiers – Lieutenant Colonel Grymes and his son Captain Grymes who had seized them as delinquents’ goods. Whether or not the Grymeses had intended to keep the copes for themselves, it was noted by the Lords that they had acted ‘without warrant or authority’.65 It is not known what happened to any of these confiscated items. The president and fellows of Magdalen College, who initiated the case, were

62 Article 14 of the articles of surrender, cited in Register of the Visitors of the University of Oxford, 1647–1658, ed. M. Burrows (Camden Society, new series, 29, 1881), introduction, lvi; Roy and Reinhart, ‘Oxford and the civil wars’, 719. 63 The case was initiated in 1661 by a petition to the House of Lords from the president and fellows of Magdalen College. See J. R. Bloxham, A Register of the Presidents, Fellows . . . and other members of St Mary Magdalen College in the University of Oxford (2 vols, Oxford, 1857), ii, Appendix XIX. Bloxham gives an account of the proceedings taken from a manuscript in the Bodleian Library (MS Tanner 338, 234). 64 BL, Add. MS 32094, deposition of Michael Baker, fol. 3; LJ, viii, 690. 65 BL, Add. MS 32094, fol. 3; LJ, viii, 710.

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acting on information that the mitre and staff had been purloined by Anthony Thaine, Usher of the Black Rod at the time, along with a ‘goldsmith named Wheeler, since deceased’. In February 1662, the House of Lords dismissed the case deciding that the incident came within the Act of Oblivion. Further proceedings were scotched by the intervention of several bishops (including the archbishop of York, Accepted Frewen, and bishop of London, Gilbert Sheldon) who thought it best not to stir up old controversies.66 A formal visitation of the university was instituted by the House of Lords on 1 May 1647, with the remit that visitors were to ‘enquire of, and hear and determine, all and every Crimes, offences, Abuses, disorders, and all other Matters whatsoever’. The main business of the visitors would be to eject those heads and fellows who were either notorious Laudians or royalists or who would not submit to parliamentary authority. The visitation did not actually begin until September 1647, due to political events in London (largely the consequences of the Independents’ seizure of the king) and also due to resistance from within the university. By the end of the year the defiant proctors had been summoned to parliament, but resistance continued. Force had to be used to admit the new heads, as at Wadham, Magdalen and All Souls where the doors were broken down. It was not until March 1648 that the visitors’ register of orders (originally started in September 1647) became continuous and by mid-May fellows were being forced either to submit or face ejection. In fact, many of those who refused to submit were not ultimately ejected, but, from June, intrusions of new men began – some fifteen heads and 128 fellows within a few months.67 This last fact is important because of the influence of these intruded men on the policies of the colleges and subsequent action taken against images. The House of Lords continued to concern itself with the issue of ‘superstition’ at both universities. On 10 May 1648 an order was proposed for ‘rectifying many Superstitious Habits and Customs in the Universities’ which was to be committed to the consideration of a committee of lords. This was no doubt a reaction to a petition of 10 March from Thomas Hill, Master of Trinity, Cambridge, which complained that the college statutes contained ‘divers absurd Things, savouring of the Darkness of those Popish Times wherein the . . . college was founded’. Nothing further seems to have come of this initiative.68 On 27 May the Lords turned their attention once more to Oxford. They debated the fact that ‘divers’ doctors and others in the university were still in contempt of the authority of parliament, and fears were expressed that such continued defiance would lead to ‘sedition and 66

Bloxham, Register of St Mary Magdalen College, ii, Appendix XIX, 342–5. LJ, ix, 169; Roy and Reinhart, ‘Oxford and the civil wars’, 726, 730. See also the introduction to Register of the Visitors of the University of Oxford. 68 LJ, x, 106, 250.

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Tumults’. Consequently the visitors were given the power to arrest and imprison any such persons. The Lords then went on to confirm upon the visitors another power: ‘to take away and to destroy all such Pictures, Relics, Crucifixes, and Images, as shall be found in Oxford, and be judged by them to be superstitious or idolatrous’.69 That this order concerning images should be moved alongside measures to stem defiance and possible sedition is indicative of the continuing importance placed on the issue of idolatry. It suggests that the idolatrous objects were seen as a possible focus of dissent or even as somehow provocative. Their removal would be a sign of parliamentary authority and an assertion of parliamentary values. In spite of this direct order from the Lords there is no evidence that the parliamentary visitors took upon themselves the physical reformation of the university chapels or gave orders to that effect. The visitors’ register contains no relevant entries and there is no indication among the university or college archives that there was any systematic attempt at reform. Thomas Reinhart, writing on the visitation of the university, has made the point that ‘the visitors . . . did very little directly to promote religious reform’, either in terms of the removal of images or in a broader context. Instead it was the fellows of individual colleges, Reinhart argues, who introduced such reforms as they thought necessary – including iconoclastic ones. Blair Worden has commented that the little evidence that exists suggests that Puritan reforms – against imagery as well as on issues such as the use of holy names and feast days – were ‘widely observed’, at least in those colleges whose heads were in sympathy with the drive for reformation.70 That the impetus for reform did initially come from the heads and fellows of the colleges on an individual basis is further suggested by the timing of the acts of iconoclasm which are recorded. Idolatrous windows at Christ Church, for example, were ordered removed within three months of John Owen’s appointment as dean there in March 1651. Wood states that it was ‘the new president and fellows’ who were responsible for taking down a stained glass image of Christ at Magdalen in 1649, while the old painted screen which Lord Saye and Sele had left untouched at Trinity was removed by the intruded president Robert Harris in 1648.71 Iconoclastic reform was, however, to be forced upon the university and city in 1651 when a large-scale campaign against Stuart, royalist and religious monuments occurred at the hands of local Puritans and parliamentarian soldiers. This was recorded by Anthony Wood, who described, shortly after the battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, 69

LJ, x, 250; 286. T. Reinhart, ‘The parliamentary visitation of Oxford University, 1646–1652’, Brown University Ph.D. thesis (1984), 442, 440. B. Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, in The History of Oxford University, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 757. 71 Christ Church Archives, D&C i.b.3, Chapter Act Book, fol. 40 (9 July 1651); Wood, Life and Times, i, 161; Aubrey, Brief Lives, i, 23. 70

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the defacing of all tokens of Monarchy in the University and City; as the King’s Arms in public places, his Arms and Head on common Signs belonging to Inns or Alehouses, his name in glass windows and the like. The defacing also of all Monuments of Superstition as they were pleased to stile them, namely postures of Prophets, Apostles and Saints painted in College Chappels both on Stalls and in Windows. The picture of Christ in our Lady’s Arms, or other postures, whether cut in stone, wood, or painted. As also Scripture History in Glass, Crosses etc. in the defacing of which Christ Church were great losers through the violent zeal of Henry Wilkinson . . . Canon of that place; who, when they were taken down, was so far from having them laid up and preserved, that he furiously stampt upon many parts of it, and utterly defaced them. But that which was most of all remarkable is this, the execution of some of these matters being committed to ignorant people the Ten Commandments and certain Verses of Scripture that were painted on Walls and in Tables in some Parish Churches, were sometimes defaced, instead of the Kings Arms, or else as matters superstitious.72

Wood does not state specifically who is responsible for initiating this iconoclasm, although the implication is that it was officially directed. The fact that in the parish churches ‘ignorant people’ were carrying out the ‘execution of . . . these matters [my emphasis]’ suggests some kind of directive aimed at enforcing parliamentary legislation and passed on to local church officials. It may be that parliamentary legislation against images, from the 1640s, was being enforced alongside orders for the removal of royal arms which were issued by the Commons in April 1650 and again in February 1651. No evidence survives to confirm this theory – church wardens’ accounts survive for only nine of the Oxford parishes (often with the crucial years missing) and none give any indication of post-war iconoclasm. However, one entry, in the accounts of St Peter in the East for the year 1651–2, does record whitewashing over the king’s arms ‘by order from the Committee’. This suggests an overseeing body – possibly the county committee or a committee set up by local authorities specifically for this purpose.73 Wood also wrote of the destruction of cavaliers’ monuments, naming that of Captain Edward Fielding sited in St Mary’s church. It is not clear whether the monuments so defaced were superstitious or simply anti-parliamentarian in sentiment. On 15 April 1647 the House of Commons had ordered the defacing and demolition of the Christ Church monuments of Sir William Pennyman and Sir Henry Gage and any other monuments erected in the

72

Wood, History and Antiquities, ii, pt 2, 649. ORO, PAR/213/4/F1/3, St Peter in the East, Oxford churchwardens’ accounts, 1651–2 (not foliated, two separate entries). I have also looked at the records of the country parishes to see if the campaign extended into greater Oxfordshire. However, these are too sparse to be of any help. For legislation ordering the removal of royal arms, see Appendix II. 73

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university or the city that were ‘in any way scandalous or reproachful to the parliament or the proceedings thereof’. Wood named Captain Billiers, commander of a parliamentary foot company and deputy governor, as ‘most active and zealous in these matters’, again suggesting that this was an official agenda being carried out.74 It is probably no coincidence that most of the few instances of iconoclasm recorded in the college accounts also date from around 1651. Further confirmation comes from an order of the dean and chapter for the removal of windows in the cathedral, although this was dated 2 June, three months before the battle of Worcester. It was required that all Pictures rep[pr]esenting god, good or bad Angells or saints shall be forthwith taken downe out of our church windowes and shall be disposed for the mending of the Glasse that is out of repaire in any part of the Colledg.75

Wood, however, tells us at another point in his history of the university that the recently erected Abraham Van Linge windows at Christ Church ‘continued no longer than 1648’ when they were, as anti-christian, diabolical, and popish, at first broken; and, to prevent their utter ruin by the restless and never to be satisfied Presbyterians, all taken down.76

Perhaps there was some kind of assault or partial reformation of the windows in 1648, with the greater part remaining to be removed in 1651. It may be that the windows which still remain in the cathedral – such as the Jonah Window by Van Linge and the fourteenth-century glass in the chapel of St Lucy – were in fact removed and put away until after the Restoration, thus surviving the destruction of 1651.77 Wood gives us other information about iconoclasm at individual Oxford colleges. In 1649, at Magdalen chapel, a depiction of the Last Judgement in black and white glass in the west window, dating from the 1630s, was ‘caused to be taken down by the new president and fellowes’. The figure of Christ was removed from the window but that of the devil left standing, wherupon a countryman seeing what had been done said: ‘Blez us! What a revormation is here! What! pluck downe god and set up the devill!’78

74

Wood, History and Antiquities, ii, pt 2, 649; CJ, v, 143. Christ Church Archives, D&C i.b.3, Chapter Act Book, fol. 40. 76 Wood, History and Antiquities, iii, pt 1, 463. 77 For a description of the windows at Christ Church, see Archer et al., English Heritage in Stained Glass: Oxford, 67. 78 Wood, Life and Times, i, 161. 75

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Looking at the restored window today it is clear that the most likely course of action for the reformers would have been to take out the central of the three main panels. This would have removed the figure of Christ and a large angel in the foreground, leaving only the figures of the damned or saved on either side, and the devil in the bottom right-hand corner. Wood tells us that the window was restored in 1675, and this is confirmed by an entry in the college domestic accounts for that year: Eidem pro effigie D. Salvatoris in fenestra occientali .......... £25.0.0.

The large amount of money suggests that a new panel was being made rather than the old one put back in place.79 The windows at Magdalen were also said to have been attacked by soldiers in 1649, when on 19 May Cromwell and Fairfax dined at the college hall shortly after having crushed the mutiny at Burford. ‘Great outrages’ were allegedly committed in the chapel, despite an attempt to save the most valuable of the painted windows by concealing them.80 Fragmentary remains of medieval glass do survive at Magdalen, now in a window outside the chapel entrance. It is not clear when they were moved there or when destroyed but it is possible that these are the remains of the glass allegedly broken by soldiers in 1649. The large amount of £23 13s was paid out for new windows in the chapel in 1651, which may represent major, if rather belated, repair work as a consequence of this violence, or which may indicate yet another iconoclastic attack. The date coincides with that of the city-wide iconoclasm described by Wood. There are eight further surviving windows in the west end of the chapel which, like the Last Judgement, date from the 1630s and are probably attributable to Richard Greenbury. These windows contain figures of saints and do not seem to have been touched. They may have been considered fairly inoffensive being executed in black and white, or perhaps were taken down and stored away at this point.81 Another college mentioned by Wood is Merton where, in ‘about 1651’, pictures of prophets, apostles and saints on the back of choir stalls, which dated back to the fifteenth century, were painted over. This was done ‘by the command of the usurpers . . . [and] . . . to the sorrow of curious men who were admirers of antient painting’. We can assume that by ‘usurpers’ Wood meant the parliamentary rather than intruded college authorities, as Merton was one of the colleges least affected by the visitors with only three fellows ejected.82 If so, the date is significant, bearing out the idea of a general drive

79

The fair copy of the Liber Computi for 1675 is lost, but the paper draft survives. A transcript is given by Bloxham, Register of St Mary Magdalen College, ii, Appendix III, 258. 80 Ibid., ii, cvii. 81 Archer et al., English Heritage in Stained Glass: Oxford, 71; Magdalen College Archives, Liber Computi, 1651 (unfoliated). 82 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 730.

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against superstitious and royal monuments at this time. The college accounts confirm that a reformation of the chapel was undertaken in 1651 recording a payment of 5s 4d made to a stonecutter for defacing unlawful images. A college inventory of the same date shows pieces of organ stored in the vestry as well as a font of black marble.83 According to Wood the paint used to cover up the pictures on the choir stalls in 1651 began to wear away after ‘two or three years’, until finally in 1659 they were covered over again, this time permanently, in ‘oyle-colours’. In 1659 brass inscriptions on gravestones were ‘most sacrilegiously toren up, and taken away, eyther by some of the paynters, or other workmen then working in the chappell’. This episode is curious – it is a very late date to find iconoclasm still on the agenda – but also Wood implies that the workmen were taking the brasses on their own initiative. He describes how he complained of their action to the fellows of the college, but ‘not one of them did resent the matter, or enquire after the sacrilegists, such were their degenerated and poor spirits’.84 Perhaps the workmen were taking the brasses for profit but their excuse, if not necessarily their motive, was undoubtedly a religious one – Wood calls them ‘sacrilegists’ not thieves. Accounts of iconoclasm at Trinity College come from the writings of John Aubrey. As we have seen, Aubrey recorded Lord Saye and Sele’s visit to the college in August 1642 to inspect the chapel for ‘new popery’. At this point Saye had been willing to overlook the two old altar paintings on the back of a screen. The pictures, depicting St Katherine and Christ being removed from the cross, remained in situ, untouched, until the appointment as president of the Presbyterian Robert Harris in April 1648. At some point after that date they were ‘coloured over with green’. Saye apparently did not have time or the inclination to address the question of images in windows. The windows at Trinity, like the screen paintings, remained unaltered until after 1648. Aubrey described the chapel windows as ‘good Gothic painting, in every column a figure:- e.g. St Cuthbert, St Leonard, St Oswald’. These were taken down ‘in the time of the Presbiter Government’ and replaced with plain glass.85 It has been suggested by Richard Gameson that some of the unidentified figures now in the windows of the library at Trinity may have come from the old chapel. One of the figures, two heads and an inscription were noted in 1765 to have come from the vestry and may once have belonged to the chapel.86 The original library windows themselves suffered damage: according to Aubrey, they were ‘much injured [both] at the Reformation and 83

Wood, Life and Times, i, 309; Merton College Archives, Bursars’ Accounts, ii, fol. 119; College Register 1567–1730, fols 387–91. 84 Wood, Life and Times, i, 309. 85 Aubrey, Brief Lives, i, 23; quoted in R. Gameson and A. Coates, The Old Library Trinity College, Oxford (Oxford, 1988), 16. 86 Ibid., 16–18. Notes on the windows were made by William Huddesford, fellow of the college and keeper of the Ashmolean, in 1765. These are now in the college archives.

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by the misguided zeal of the independent soldiers during the rebellion’. However, Aubrey also states that Ralph Bathurst, who would become president of the college in 1664, took the ‘old painted glass’ out of the library.87 Bathhurst was of ‘Anglican’ sympathies and was no doubt trying to preserve the medieval windows, most of which have survived in some form. An example of a piece which didn’t is the figure kneeling in prayer described by Dugdale in 1646. This figure along with its Orate inscription has been lost, and Gameson and Coates note that most of the inscriptions disappeared at this time.88 Other windows in the college contained painted glass. Aubrey records that crucifixes were common in the glass windowes in the studies; and in the chamber windowes were canonized Saints (e.g. in my window St Gregore the great and another, broken) and scutcheons with the pillar, the whip, the dice and the cock.89

These windows were ‘all broken after 1647’, although it has been suggested that some of the miscellaneous painted glass contained in the east-facing window of a first floor pantry, up until the 1950s, may have been the remains of such chamber windows. They included the small figures of a bishop and a haloed queen.90 The crucial years of 1649, 1650 and 1652 are all missing from the Trinity College accounts, so it is not possible to confirm Aubrey’s memories of these events. If his account is accurate the reformation was a thorough one, particularly as windows were removed not merely from the chapel but from secular buildings. This may have been down to the zeal of the Presbyterian president and fellows, although Worden has described them as on the whole working in harmony with the more conservative fellows and more concerned with the running of the college than forcing a Puritan reformation upon it.91 The intervention of Bathurst implies that there may have been pre-emptive action in order to save some of the glass.

87

Aubrey, Brief Lives, i, 23; Gameson and Coates, The Old Library Trinity College, Oxford, 17. Aubrey does not give a date for Bathurst’s removal of the library windows but it was presumably before the reformers had a chance to get their hands on them. The chapel windows, it has been noted, were removed ‘in the time of the Presbiter Government’, possibly in 1648 when President Harris removed the old chapel screen. 88 Gameson and Coates, The Old Library Trinity College, Oxford, 17. Dugdale’s notes on the windows are in the Bodleian Library, MS Dugdale 11, fols 148v and 149r. Beyond the description of this figure he concentrates exclusively on heraldic decoration. 89 Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii, Appendix I, 322. 90 Gameson and Coates, The Old Library Trinity College, Oxford, 18. The window was in the pantry on the first floor of the west range of Durham quad. Gameson and Coates suggest that the glass was placed there in the 19th century, having found its way into the library windows after the Restoration. It was taken down in the 1950s. 91 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 764.

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The incidents recounted by Wood and Aubrey provide the bulk of the evidence for iconoclasm at the university. The college records where they exist are not on the whole very illuminating, with some isolated exceptions. Statues were removed from the exterior of Oriel and another college – probably All Souls – at around the time when Wood tells us there was a large-scale iconoclastic drive. The treasurers’ accounts at Oriel show that a statue of the Virgin Mary was taken down from above the hall door in 1650–1, and this must have been hidden away as it was erected again in 1673–4. The removal of an image of Christ by fellows of an unidentified college was recorded in a letter to Jeremy Stephens from ‘M:A’ (possibly Martin Aylworth an excluded fellow). It described how ye picture of Christ above ye colledg gate did give great offence and scandall to som weak brethren of our own societie [fellows of the college], whereupon they have taken ye same down, but were so exclam’d against by ye neighbours and passengers, that they could not accomplish thir work till ye night time.92

It is very likely that the college in question was All Souls, where Stephens was a fellow and where a statue of Christ had been fired at by parliamentary soldiers in 1642. Although the letter is undated, Blair Worden has projected from internal evidence a probable date of around November 1651.93 College accounts occasionally record the removal of organs. According to Wood those at New College were removed in 1646, but the evidence from the accounts at other colleges tends to point to later removal. Organs at Christ Church were ordered to be taken down on 9 July 1649, those of Merton were in pieces by 1651, while at the university church of St Mary organs were removed sometime between 1650 and 1652.94 The ‘pneumatic organ of great cost’, which had been installed at St John’s in 1618, was pulled down in 1651, although the organist had been ejected in 1649. The double organ built by Thomas Dallam in 1635 for Magdalen chapel was still in place when Evelyn visited the college in 1654, despite the fact that such ‘abominations (as now esteem’d) were almost universally demolished’. It seems to have been used for secular entertainment – Evelyn described hearing it played by Christopher Gibbons – but it was later removed to Hampton Court where it remained until returned to the college in 1660. At Corpus Christi the redundant organist was reemployed in the singing of psalms.95

92 Oriel College, Style Accounts, 1650–1 and 1673–4, quoted in VCH, Oxfordshire, iii: the University of Oxford, 128; Bodleian Library, MS J. Walker C9, fol. 195. 93 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 758. 94 Wood, History and Antiquities, ii, pt 1, 199; Christ Church Archives, D&C i.b.3, Chapter Act Book, fol. 2; Merton College Archives, College Register 1567–1730, fols 387–91; Oxford University Archives, WP␤/21/4, Vice-Chancellors’ Accounts, fol. 277. 95 Gouk, ‘Music’, 628, 629. The ejected organist of St John’s, William Ellis, worked as a victualler and alehouse keeper until reappointed in 1660. Evelyn, Diary, iii, 109; Magdalen College Archives,

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Despite the lack of hard evidence from the college and university records, the overall impression is that there was an iconoclastic reformation in Oxford – and in the case of some colleges, like Trinity, quite a thorough one. Yet the question remains of why so much of the stained glass survives. Puritan reform of Oxford generally seems to have been limited in its scope compared with those places where reformation was carried out at the height of the iconoclastic zeal, as at Cambridge. Worden has pointed out that many of the intruded fellows were Oxford men with Oxford loyalties, often more interested in their studies and careers than in enforcing Puritan reform. He contrasts men like John Wilkins, warden of Wadham, who were concerned with academic priorities and the maintenance of tradition, with reformers like John and Thankful Owen. Resistance to John Owen’s attempts at reform – including in 1655 his attack on the use of caps and hoods as ‘reliques of popery’ – led Owen finally to resign his vice-chancellorship in October 1657, complaining of ‘wrongs and slanders’.96 Worden has also suggested that ‘Puritans connived at the survival of Anglican devotion at Oxford’. Perhaps generally there was a degree of toleration which allowed some colleges to retain stained glass windows – especially where they were out of the view of the general public. At Lincoln College a major series of Abraham Van Linge windows has survived apparently without any interference. The windows, containing scenes from the life of Christ and corresponding stories from the Old Testament, as well as a number of prophets and apostles, were erected between 1629–31. It is notable here that, as Michael Archer puts it, ‘the chapel has a greater sense of privacy than almost any other Oxford college, being situated not in the first, but the second quadrangle’. During the 1650s Lincoln suffered many internal disputes under the headship of Paul Hood, who was admonished for his ‘timorousness’ by sub-rector Thankful Owen and articled against by some of the fellows in 1651. In the later years of the Interregnum the college was increasingly open in its royalist preferences under the influence of a group of fellows led by Nathaniel Crew. It also suffered a greater fall in the number of students than any other college, attracting scarcely more than a quarter of the number of undergraduates admitted in the 1630s. The privacy of its chapel, its depleted number of students and a lack of strong direction in its governance may combine to offer an explanation for the survival of the Van Linge windows.97 Another explanation for survivals here and at other colleges is that the windows were taken down and hidden away throughout the period. If it was

Libri Computi, 1660 (not foliated). The organ was transported back to Oxford at a cost of £16 10s. T. Fowler, The History of Corpus Christi (Oxford Historical Society, 25, 1893), 228. 96 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 736, 738, 744–5. 97 Ibid., 768; Archer et al., English Heritage in Stained Glass: Oxford, 70. On Lincoln see Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 765.

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possible for thirteen chests of medieval stained glass to be saved from the clutches of the notorious Richard Culmer at Canterbury Cathedral, how much more likely is it that the same thing was happening at Oxford – where there was both plenty of time to take action before parliament took control and plenty of sympathetic parties no doubt willing to intervene. The siege of Oxford lasted almost two months after the departure of the king during which time defeat must have looked inevitable. Windows may have been removed at this point or in the run-up to the parliamentary visitation. Certainly other moveable items were hidden away during these periods – as, for example, the various copes, mitre and plate later found by parliament in 1647. We know that there was action taken in Oxford to save stained glass windows. As noted above, those in the old library at Trinity were taken down and have survived, whilst at Balliol the library windows, containing pictures of saints, were saved not by being removed but by being ‘obscured with black paint laid on them’. A whole series of Abraham Van Linge windows survive intact at University College because, having only been completed in 1641, they were not installed but carefully stored away until after the Restoration. Interestingly, in 1651, when a good deal of iconoclasm was taking place, the college accounts record a payment of 2s for a new lock ‘to lock up the new chapell glasse in ye storehouse’. Wood’s comments on the iconoclasm of Christ Church prebend, Henry Wilkinson, illustrate his attitude that windows could and should be saved. Wilkinson, he wrote disapprovingly, ‘was so far from having them laid up and preserved, that he furiously stampt upon . . . and utterly defaced them [my emphasis].98 Apart from those at Lincoln and University colleges, there are two other major series of windows surviving from the early seventeenth century – at Queen’s College and at Wadham. For Queen’s there is little available information, although the college remained royalist in its sympathies. At Wadham the great east window by Bernard Van Linge, depicting scenes from the Old Testament and the Passion, and side windows by Van Linge and other seventeenth-century glass painters, have survived intact. While there is nothing specific in the college accounts to suggest that these windows were taken down, some substantial amounts of money were spent on glazing in 1649. The entry reads, pd the Glazier for work £4 4s more for ye great window in chappell and for bills £15 9s 2d ......... £19 3s 02d.

A further 11s was paid to ‘labourers about the chappel window’. It is possible that plain glass was being set up (as indicated by the general amount ‘for bills’), whilst the painted windows had been removed and hidden away. 98 Wood, History and Antiquities, iii, pt 1, 91; ii, pt 2, 649. The University College accounts are quoted in VCH, Oxfordshire, iii: the University of Oxford, 92, 76.

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Dr Clifford Davies, the college’s most recent historian, has calculated that the amount of coloured glass presently in the chapel measures approximately 633 feet. Using my estimate for the price of plain glass of 6d per square foot (and assuming that the figure of £4 4s covers the cost of labour and the remaining bills of £15 9s 2d the cost of glass) that would suggest the replacement of 618 feet of glass. The closeness of the two figures would seem to confirm my theory that the Van Linge glass was taken down at this point. In 1663, £45 was spent on the chapel windows – a sum too large to be attributed to a straightforward restoration of the original glass, but which might conceivably indicate the repair of substantial damage or a major refurbishment based around its reinstallation.99 At other colleges glass has survived – of both medieval and early seventeenthcentury origin.100 At All Souls there are seven windows containing fifteenthcentury stained glass. Three of these containing bishops, kings and saints were removed from the library to the chapel in 1750. The rest contain almost exclusively saints with the exception of a Virgin and Child in the north-west corner of the antechapel. The college accounts for 1652–3 (not long after the iconoclasm described by Wood of late 1651) show a payment of £8 12s ‘for glasing two Chappell windowes and other worke’ which may indicate that glass was removed and replaced.101 In other chapels where religious imagery survives, the windows show signs of interference. At Balliol the east window contains the ‘disturbed remains’ of an early sixteenth-century Passion and other windows contain ‘composite figures’ such as a Virgin and St John ‘probably from a crucifixion’. The middle window on the north side of the chapel is also made up of composite panels, ‘mostly sixteenth century gathered from a number of different windows’. How much of this damage is attributable to the Victorians during the reglazing of the chapel windows is hard to assess. Two of the three Abraham Van Linge windows have survived intact – not perhaps surprising as the theme of both windows is the famously iconoclastic King Hezekiah! Given what Wood tells us of the painting over of library windows at Balliol, indicative of some attempt to reform (or to avoid destruction), it is hardly likely that the chapel would have escaped and the rest of the windows may have been removed. As mentioned previously, efforts had been made to reform the chapel at Merton, with painted and carved figures being defaced and brass inscriptions removed. However, a good deal of medieval glass remains, although not necessarily in its original position and much restored – for instance, the 99 Wadham College Archives, Bursars’ Accounts, 1648–1659, fol. 11; and see Bursars’ Accounts for 1663. My thanks to Dr Davies for his comments (personal communication). For my estimate of the cost of glass, see above 154, n. 66. 100 Details of the college windows in the following paragraphs are taken from Archer et al., English Heritage in Stained Glass: Oxford, 61–79. 101 Bodleian Library, All Souls Archives, C.296, Computus Rolls, 1652–3.

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choir windows ‘heavily but sensitively restored by Samuel Caldwell in 1931’.102 The tracery lights of the east window are part of the original scheme of glass designed in the thirteenth century for the transepts and include large figures cut down to size. The west crossing window is filled with composite figures dating from the fifteenth century, again originally in the transepts. There is no concrete evidence that windows were defaced or removed in the 1640s or 1650s but it remains a possibility, even a probability given the other iconoclastic moves at the college. New College chapel lost much of its medieval glass during an eighteenthcentury restoration, and other windows were repositioned at that time. We know from the accounts that there was iconoclasm in 1546–7 and 1558–9, and that some restoration was made by Bernard Van Linge between 1628 and 1635. What happened to the windows in the 1640s and 1650s is not documented. Woodforde, commenting on the state of the windows after the Restoration, speculates that ‘the gaps, especially in the figure-work, were probably many and serious both in the choir and ante-chapel’. He believes, however, that most of the damage was done by the eighteenth-century restorers and that at the end of the seventeenth century there would have been ‘considerably more fourteenth century glass than there is now and . . . in its right place’.103 On the whole, there is enough evidence from Oxford to say that the iconoclastic legislation of the 1640s did have an impact there, albeit a belated one. The question of the survival of images in windows and other prohibited items is one which arises for many places – even Cambridge and other wellreformed parts of the Eastern Association.104 Such survivals are no doubt attributable to individual action to save cherished pieces of church furnishing (by pre-emptive removal and storage) or to the oversight or neglect of reformers. While parliamentary legislation attempted to define ever more closely what constituted a monument of superstition and idolatry, clearly interpretations did vary. Vagaries of interpretation could have odd results. For instance, in 1659 at St Martin Carfax in Oxford a tomb monument was recorded by Matthew Hutton which depicted the picture of a man, his wife and four children and ‘above it the popish picture of God with a crown on his head and our saviour crucifyed in his armes’. The picture was apparently undefaced and yet ‘all inscription [was] torn off’.105 Nonetheless, and despite the patchiness of the evidence, there are examples of iconoclasm at Oxford involving most of the items outlawed by parliament. Images in windows, including pictures of Christ and crucifixes (Magdalen 102

Archer et al., English Heritage in Stained Glass: Oxford, 72. Woodforde, The Stained Glass of New College, Oxford, 11–12, 16. 104 See Cooper’s commentaries on the chapels and churches visited by Dowsing in The Journal of William Dowsing, 149–321. 105 Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson B.397, Notes on monuments, inscriptions and arms in Oxfordshire by Dr Matthew Hutton, 1659, fol. 6.

103

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and Trinity), God and angels (Christ Church) and saints (Balliol, Christ Church and Trinity) were destroyed, removed or covered over. Painted pictures of Christ, saints and apostles were obliterated (Merton and Trinity); carved images or imagery removed or defaced (All Souls, Oriel and Merton); and inscriptions removed (Merton). Organs were taken down at various colleges and a marble font may have been removed at Merton. Wood also tells us that crosses were taken down although no direct evidence has been found for this. The lack of evidence for the removal of altars and altar furnishings perhaps confirms the view given by Thomas Gorges in 1641 that, in this respect at least, the chapels were ‘thorowly reformed’ before the war.106 If altars were erected again during the royalist occupation they were no doubt hastily removed before the city’s surrender. It appears that there was some kind of enforced reformation in Oxford in 1651, probably at the hands of local governors with military involvement. Although Wood’s account remains the only direct record of this iconoclastic drive, there are indications that some of the colleges took action at around the same time. The most likely motive for this renewed interest in the reform of churches was the parliamentary order for the removal of royal arms and monuments. If Wood is accurate in his dating of the iconoclasm to shortly after the battle of Worcester, the defeat of Prince Charles may have provoked a triumphalist attack on royal and religious monuments in the former royalist capital. Prior to this campaign the degree to which the university chapels underwent voluntary reform was probably down to the temperament of individual heads and fellows. The most prudent path for those who wished to defy parliamentary legalisation and preserve windows, hangings, plate and so on, would have been to remove the offending items and bide time in the hope of another change of fortune.

106

Merton College Archives, College Register 1567–1730, fol. 370; Wood, History and Antiquities, ii, Pt 2, 649; Calendar of the Correspondence of the Smyth Family, 172.

249

Conclusion The change of fortune hoped for by many at Oxford and elsewhere was to come with the return of the monarchy in May 1660. On the whole the reformation of images and other ‘innovations’ in the churches had already become less of an issue by the 1650s. This may have been because the legislative initiatives of 1641–4, and the action taken during that period, led to a more or less satisfactory purge. If isolated discrepancies remained the legislation was still in force and could be invoked to correct such situations – as at Alcester parish church, where the case of inappropriate decoration and a surviving rood loft came before a justice as late as 1657, or at Merton College, Oxford, where the removal of brass inscriptions from the chapel occurred in 1659.1 Another possible reason for the fading of active interest in iconoclasm may have been that the phenomenon was an oppositional one, one which required a counter-force to react against. With the war won and episcopacy abolished the symbolic meaning attached to iconoclastic gestures lost significance. The Puritan iconoclasm of the 1640s was not, however, only a reactive force, but developed its own positive, forward-moving agenda. Whilst the resurgence of a large-scale iconoclastic movement was initially a response to a more tolerant approach to the use of images in churches, the iconoclasts were not content to dismantle the recent trappings of the Laudian church but used the opportunity to address the ‘neglect’ of previous reformers, and eventually to widen the range of objects targeted. The increasing radicalism of moves against images was made possible by the political developments of the time. The break between parliament and the king after January 1642 had the effect of removing the more conservative members from both houses of parliament, leaving a more radical core who were then free to pursue their reformation of the church. The war itself was an important factor in other ways. The unprecedented bloodshed and political chaos caused the godly to look for spiritual meaning, with the result that the situation was seen as a manifestation of God’s anger at the increase in idolatry and other religious back-sliding. It was also responsible for an escalation in the popular fear of Catholicism, already widespread due to the rise of Arminianism and the religious wars in Europe, which were interpreted in apocalyptic terms. The rebellion in Ireland and parliament’s use of anti-Catholicism as propaganda against the royalist army (who were 1

See chs 4 and 7.

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CONCLUSION

dubbed malignants and papists) further exacerbated this fear. The desire to appease an angry God, and to defeat the threat of popery, helped to drive on the iconoclasts. On a practical level the war gave power to zealous individuals, like Dowsing and Springett, and at the same time brought into being an army whose members were aware of the religious angle of the conflict – even if only at the crudest level of anti-Catholicism – and who would provide willing recruits in the fight against images. Despite the importance of anti-Catholicism as a contributory factor, mid seventeenth-century iconoclasm was primarily aimed at idolatry within Protestantism – and this remained true whether it struck at recent additions or at the tolerated survivals of the pre-Reformation church, symbols of the incompleteness of earlier reform. That the struggle between Laudians and iconoclasts was played out internally, in a reformed church, is what made this different from earlier iconoclastic movements in England. Whilst a Puritan minority had always objected to episcopal government, it was on a broader level that the association now came to be made between the higher clergy and idolatry. This can be seen in the hostility towards the bishops in both learned and popular printed works, but also in the iconoclastic targeting of images of bishops and related objects by ordinary soldiers. Such an association was officially encouraged: the Solemn League and Covenant, which was to be taken by all men over the age of eighteen, required a commitment to extirpate popery, prelacy and superstition.2 A further difference between Puritan iconoclasm and that of earlier generations was the fact that it was led by parliament, not the monarch or the church. Indeed it went against the inclinations of both. The increasingly radical legislation against images and other innovations invested a large degree of responsibility for its enforcement on laymen, mostly local officials. Churchwardens had been involved in iconoclasm throughout the Reformation but this had generally been under the direction of the crown and the church authorities.3 Under the Long Parliament the role of the laity was given added weight – whilst local clergy were expected to oversee the reformation of their churches, where they failed to do so parishioners could petition parliament who ultimately had the power to eject recalcitrant ministers. Another feature of 1640s iconoclasm was that it took place against the background of civil war, one outcome of which was that official action was paralleled by spontaneous unofficial army iconoclasm, often with parliament’s tacit approval. In examining the iconoclasm of the period an attempt has been made to assess how major a phenomenon it was as well as looking at the ways in 2

Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 268–9. There were, of course, always zealots who anticipated and exceeded official directions: in 1547, for instance, churchwardens in London had to be restrained from indiscriminate and over-enthusiastic iconoclasm (see Brigden, London and the Reformation, 429–30). 3

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which it was enacted, how far it was enforced, and who the iconoclasts actually were. Uncovering accurate answers to these questions is a task hampered by the lack of surviving evidence. The violent and spontaneous nature of much of the unofficial iconoclasm means that there is little written record, whilst evidence for official iconoclasm depends largely upon local parish records, which are often lacking in detail and have a poor survival rate. Nor is there much in the way of physical evidence to go on in the churches, chapels and cathedrals themselves – the iconoclasm of the seventeenth century is largely indistinguishable from that of the sixteenth, and often obscured by the subsequent years of neglect, refurbishment and restoration. Dowsing’s systematic campaign of iconoclastic reform would have gone largely unrecorded without the survival of the text of his own personal journal: neither the parish records or the churches themselves would have told the full story. However, Dowsing’s journal and his commissions from Manchester have survived to enlighten us. Can we assume that if another operation on this scale had occurred there would be some similar surviving evidence? Could another Dowsing have existed hidden among the obscurity of the historical record? It is unlikely but not impossible. If there is no evidence of another organized campaign on the scale of that undertaken in the Eastern Association, still in one sense there were many other Dowsings, other godly individuals zealous for the cause of reformation and driven to put themselves forward for the work. As has been stressed throughout, these individuals or small groups of like-minded people used whatever opportunities they could, and operated through whatever power base they could gain control over, to perform a task they saw as their religious duty. At the very top of the governing hierarchy was Sir Robert Harley, who as chairman of the parliamentary Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry oversaw reform throughout London, including the royal chapels and London’s two great cathedrals of Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s. At the most basic level of responsibility were the likes of Michael Herring, churchwarden of St Mary Woolchurch in London, who used his own position as a notable parishioner and a minor church official to push forward the reformation in his own church. There is solid evidence of iconoclastic activity amongst several local governing bodies – with committees formed by corporations at Norwich, Canterbury and in the City of London and by the newly formed county committees at York, Kent, and Oxford. Military commanders and ordinary soldiers used their positions to express their own desire for reformation (at however unsophisticated a level). Interestingly, these are all instances of lay initiatives. Godly ministers preached reformation – in the army, in the parishes and before parliament. They were also involved on the committees for York and for St Paul’s Cathedral, and acted as advisors in the City of London, producing a report on monuments of superstition and idolatry in the Guildhall and surrounding areas. Canterbury, however, stands out as the only 252

CONCLUSION

place where ministers were obviously in charge of the actual iconoclasm – with a committee consisting of ministers headed by Richard Culmer. Even here, the committee itself was set up by the mayor and corporation and appears to have answered to the Harley Committee. This is not to say that ministers were not interested in the iconoclastic reformation – they were instrumental in driving it forward and in promoting it – but to illustrate the importance of Puritan laymen, and their willingness to take on the mantle of reformer. Three major areas where there was large-scale iconoclasm have been looked at here in detail: London parishes, cathedral churches and the universities. A similar pattern emerges, whereby increasingly radical legislation was enforced and driven forward by godly individuals or groups. Furthermore, all of these areas show evidence of a good deal of iconoclasm confirming that this was indeed a major movement. In looking at the reformation of churches in London, the evidence points towards a thorough reformation basically in two stages. In 1641 instances of iconoclasm occurred less frequently in the parish accounts than in 1643, but a number of cases were very dramatic in terms of the type and extent of the action taken. In 1643 a much larger number of churches undertook iconoclastic work but on a smaller scale. It has been suggested that this illustrates both the more radical demands being put upon parishes – the wider definition of what objects were considered offensive – and also the impact of pressure from the Harley Committee. In what way this second spate of reformation represented the feelings of local church officials and parishioners is almost impossible to estimate. Those churches which undertook large-scale reform in 1641 seem to have done so willingly – as suggested by the scale of the reforms and by the fact that other churches could and did refuse to act on the parliamentary orders, which were not centrally enforced. The reforming campaign in London during 1643 undoubtedly inspired further action, such as the radical parliamentary ordinance of 28 August, intended to extend the campaign to the nation as a whole. Various local initiatives were set up within the following year, as at Norwich, Canterbury and in the Eastern Associated counties. These official moves may also have stirred up army iconoclasts, giving their actions a sense of legitimacy: 1643–4 was the peak time for such unofficial iconoclasm, although it had been going on since the eve of the war in 1642. Army iconoclasm hit the cathedral churches hard and may account for the lack of official action against them, with little left to be done. Where there were official moves to reform cathedrals they were taken once again by local agents. It is perhaps curious that there was no centralized reform of the cathedrals given their high profile under the Laudian regime, and their traditional place in Puritan demonology. They were, of course, covered by the parliamentary ordinances, so perhaps it was not felt necessary to have any special legislation or means of enforcement. The possible exception to this may have been Canterbury Cathedral, where reformer Richard Culmer seems to have had links with Harley. As the seat of Archbishop Laud, Canterbury may 253

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have been regarded as having a particular symbolic significance (see 183 above). Parliament may have been happy to see its godly soldiers undertaking the task on its behalf. After the war, the attempts to have cathedrals demolished show that they still retained for some a particular and offensive significance. However, as well as being the recipients of some of the most violent iconoclasm, cathedrals could be moderately, even respectfully, reformed, as seen with York Minster. Not all Puritans were extreme zealots and a thoroughly cleansed cathedral could still be cherished with civic pride, as, for example, at York, Gloucester and Winchester. The two universities both suffered enforced iconoclasm, although in somewhat different ways. Cambridge, safely in parliamentary territory, suffered an onslaught of organized reformation under the military command of the Eastern Association. The developing radicalism of the iconoclastic agenda can be seen clearly here, with the contrast between the initial viewing of the university chapels for innovations and Dowsing’s thorough attack on new and old popery alike. Oxford, on the other hand, has often been assumed not to have suffered major iconoclasm because of the survival of chapel ornaments and stained glass windows. As a royalist stronghold the city and its university were secure from reformers throughout the war, and by the time of its surrender iconoclastic fury had past its zenith. Yet piecing together the evidence, it is clear that Oxford did not escape reformation. There are examples both of army iconoclasm and of the removal of offensive objects by members of individual colleges – either to suit their own beliefs, in the case of intruded fellows, or to preserve them from the threat of destruction. A final bout of violent iconoclastic zeal appears to have occurred in 1651, with the destruction of both religious and royal monuments in the immediate aftermath of the defeat of Prince Charles at Worcester. Whilst there is no doubt that there was a good deal of iconoclasm in many places, it is likely that, in others, parliament’s legislation against images went unheeded. Even where it was obeyed there was still room for interpretation. Zealous iconoclasts could apply the legislation broadly, including items not specifically proscribed, such as images of bishops, stars and moons, or kneeling figures at prayer. Elsewhere parishes might attempt to get away with as minimal a reform as possible, especially where major structural repairs would be required – as with chancel steps or large windows. Whether or not parliamentary legislation was observed, the iconoclastic tenets laid out in the ordinances of 1643 and 1644 constituted a final official line on the subject of images and other idolatrous monuments. The line taken was a radical one. Laudian innovations were a primary target: communion rails, the altar-wise positioning of the communion table, recently erected chancel steps and newly installed images in glass, hangings and statuary. Pre-Reformation survivals were also included in the attack: images in stained glass, images of saints and angels, symbolic images, superstitious inscriptions, surviving chancel steps and rood lofts. Finally objects were encompassed which, even 254

CONCLUSION

if they had been the subject of previous controversy, had never been banned from the church: plain crosses, organs, vestments and fonts. The official intention behind the legislation was a thorough and final reformation. Beyond the official line as defined by parliamentary legislation, attitudes about the extent to which iconoclastic reformation should be taken varied among individual Puritans. Lord Saye and Sele had allowed religious pictures to remain in the chapel at Trinity College, Oxford, happy with a reassurance that they were regarded ‘no more than a dirty dish-cloth’. At the other extreme Samuel Chidley and Henry Clarke would call for the demolition of the very churches themselves. William Springett could not tolerate religious pictures in a colleague’s house, and Harley was to argue for the destruction of similar pictures amongst the art collection of the duke of Buckingham. Both Cromwell and John Hutchinson, on the other hand, had no problem living with religious paintings and tapestries once belonging to the king. Iconoclastic fervour varied in its degree, and iconoclasts could be found amongst any of the various strands of Puritanism: Harley, Vicars, Herring and Dowsing were all Presbyterians, although the latter appears to have had radical sympathies; Springett and Pennington were Independents; Chidley and Clarke were separatists. The one motivating factor for all of these men was a deep-rooted religious conviction. Iconoclasm, whether moderate or extreme, was in a sense part of the Puritan temperament. It was just one physical manifestation of the urge to cleanse, to purge all things ungodly – both from the church and from society at large. Other reforming endeavours included attempts to enforce observation of the Sabbath and to outlaw superstitious festivities such as Christmas and May Day, the banning of stage plays, and efforts to impose social discipline through the control of sexual behaviour, the limiting of alehouses and so forth. At the root of Puritan iconoclasm was the fear and hatred of idolatry. Since the beginning of the Reformation its eradication had been a primary aim. For the Protestant religion, based as it was on faith, the lack of such faith or false faith, which idolatry might be said to represent, was a central concern. Puritans felt this even more keenly. Denunciation of idolatry abounded in the fast sermons preached before parliament, topping the list of the nation’s sins, according to Stephen Marshall. George Salteren considered it ‘the principall crime of mankinde, the greatest guilt of the world, the total cause of judgement’.4 Iconoclasm was the godly weapon against idolatry, and for many Puritans it was no less than a duty. Approved by God, as biblical examples testified, iconoclasm was a positive rather than a negative act, creative rather than destructive – churches were ‘beautified’, for instance, by the removal of dark idolatrous glass allowing the light to flood in. Clearing away the symbols of past errors was an essential first step in the building of a godly future. 4

See Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, 260; Salteren, A Treatise Against Images and Pictures in Churches, 7.

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Appendix I Parliamentary Legislation against Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry Order for the Suppression of Innovations (8 September 1641).1

Whereas divers Innovations, in or about the Worship of God, have lately been practised in this Kingdom, by injoining some Things, and prohibiting others, without Warrant of Law, to the great Grievance and Discontent of his Majesty’s Subjects: For the Suppression of such Innovations, and for Preservation of the publick Peace, it is this Day Ordered by the Commons in Parliament assembled, That the Churchwardens of every Parish Church and Chapel respectively, do forthwith remove the Communion Table from the East-End of the Church, Chapel, or Chancel, into some other convenient Place; and that they take away the Rails, and level the Chancels as heretofore they were before the late Innovations: That all Crucifixes, scandalous Pictures of any One or more Persons of the Trinity, and all Images of the Virgin Mary, shall be taken away and abolished; and that all Tapers, Candlesticks, and Basons, be removed from the Communion-Table: That all corporal Bowing at the Name Jesus, or towards the East End of the Church, Chapel or Chancel, or towards the Communion-Table, be henceforth forborn: That the Orders aforesaid be observed in all the several Cathedral Churches of this Kingdom, and all the collegiate Churches or Chapels in the Two Universities, or any other Part of the Kingdom, and in the Temple Church, and the Chapels of the other Inns of Court, by the Deans of the said Cathedral Churches, by the Vicechancellors of the said Universities, and by the Heads and Governours of the several Colleges and Halls aforesaid, and by the Benchers and Readers in the said Inns of Court respectively.

1

Taken from CJ, ii, 279 (1 September 1641). See also BL, 190.g.13.(4.) for the printed orders of 8 September, and E.171.(13.) where they are reprinted with the Commons’ declaration of 9 September. The declaration is also given in Rushworth, Historical Collections, pt 3, ii, 387.

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That the Lord’s-day shall be duly observed and sanctified; all Dancing, or other Sports, either before or after Divine Service, be forborn and restrained; and that the Preaching of God’s word be permitted in the Afternoon in the several Churches and Chapels of this Kingdom; and that the Ministers and Preachers be encouraged thereunto: That the Vicechancellors of the Universities, Heads and Governors of Colleges, all Parsons, Vicars, Churchwardens, do make Certificates of the Performance of these Orders: And if the same shall not be observed in any of the Places afore-mentioned, upon Complaint thereof made to the two next Justices of Peace, Mayor or Head Officers of Cities, or Towns Corporate; it is Ordered, that the said Justices, Mayor, or Head Officer respectively, shall examine the Truth of all such Complaints, and certify by whose Default the same are committed: All which Certificates are to be delivered in Parliament before the Thirtieth of October next. The Orders of the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry (printed 17 May 1643).2

At the Committee for the Demolishing of Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry. By vertue of an Order of the house of Commons, and agreeable to a Bill passed by both houses of Parliament, for suppressing of divers Innovations in Churches and Chappels; This Committee doth require you and every of you to take away and demolish every altar or Table of stone within your Church or Chappel, and to remove the Communion Table from the East end of the said Church or Chappel, and to place the same in some other convenient place of the body of the said Church or Chappel; And to remove and take away al Tapers, Candlesticks, and Basons from the Communion-Table in the said Church or Chappel; And to take away and demolish all Crucifixes Crosses and all Images and pictures, of any one, or more persons of the Trinity, or of the Virgin Mary in your said Church or Chappel. And this Committee doth further require you to take downe and demolish all Crucifixes, Crosses, Images or pictures of any one or more persons of the Trinity, or of the Virgin Mary upon the outside of your said Church or Chappel, or in any open place within your parish, whereof you are to give an account to this Committee before the Twentieth day of this present month. To the Churchwardens of the Parish Church or Chappel of . . . and to every of them. 2

Foure Orders of Great Consequence of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament (1643).

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The Ordinance of 28 August 16433

An Ordinance for the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry. The Lords and Commons in Parliament taking into their serious considerations how well pleasing it is to God, and conduceable to the blessed Reformation in his Worship, so much desired by both Houses of Parliament, that all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry should be removed and demolished, do Ordain, That in all and every the Churches and Chappels, as well Cathedral and Collegiate, as other Churches and Chappels, and other usual places of publique Prayer, authorized by Law within this Realm of England and Dominion of Wales, all Altars, and Tables of stone, shall before the First day of November in the Year of our Lord God 1643. be utterly taken away and demolished; and also all Communion Tables removed from the East end of every such Church, Chappel, or place of publique Prayer, and Chancel of the same, and shall be placed in some other fit and convenient place, or places of the body of the said Church, Chappel, or other such place of publique Prayer, or of the body of the Chancel of every such Church, Chappel, or other such place of publique Prayer: And that all Rails whatsoever, which have been erected near to, before, or about any Altar or Communion Table, in any of the said Churches or Chappels, or other such place of publique Prayer as aforesaid, shall before the said day be likewise taken away; and the Chancel ground of every such Church or Chappel, or other place of publique Prayer, which hath been within Twenty years last past, raised for any Altar or Communion Table to stand upon, shall before the said day be laid down, and levelled as the same was before the said Twenty years last past, And that all Tapers, Candlesticks and Basons, shall before the said day be removed and taken away from the Communion Table in every such Church, Chappel, or other place of publique Prayer, and neither the same, nor any such like shall be used about the same at any time after the said day: And that all Crucifixes, Crosses, and all Images and Pictures of any one or more Persons of the Trinity, or of the Virgin Mary, and all other Images and Pictures of Saints, or superstitious Inscriptions in or upon all and every the said Churches or Chappels, or other places of publique Prayer, Churchyards, or other places to any the said Churches and Chappels, or other place of publique Prayer, belonging, or in any other open place, shall before the said first day of November be taken away and defaced, and none of the like hereafter permitted in any such Church or Chappel, or other places as aforesaid. And be it further Ordained, That all and every such removal of the said Altars, Tables of stone, Communion Tables, Tapers, Candlesticks and 3

Acts and Ordinances, i, 265–6.

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Basons, Crucifixes and Crosses, Images and Pictures as aforesaid, taking away of the said Rails, levelling of the said Grounds, shall be done and performed, and the Walls, Windows, Grounds, and other places which shall be broken, impaired or altered by any the means aforesaid, shall be made up and repaired in good and sufficient manner, in all and every of the said Parish-Churches or Chappels, or usual places of publique Prayer belonging to any Parish, by the Churchwarden or Churchwardens of every such Parish, for the time being respectively; and in any Cathedral or Collegiate Church or Chappel, by the Dean or Sub-Dean, or other chief Officer of every such Church or Chappel for the time being; and in the Universities, by the several Heads and Governors of every Colledge or Hall respectively; and in the several Innes of Court by the Benchers and Readers of every of the same respectively, at the cost and charges of all and every such Person or Persons, Body Politique or Corporate, or Parishioners of every Parish respectively, to whom the charge of the repair of any such Church, Chappel, Chancel, or place of publique Prayer, or other part of such Church or Chappel, or place of publique Prayer doth or shall belong. And in case default be made in any of the Premises by any of the Person or Persons thereunto appointed by this Ordinance from and after the said first day of November, which shall be in the year of our Lord God 1643. That then every such Person or Persons so making default, shall for every such neglect or default by the space of Twenty days, forfeit and lose Forty Shillings to the use of the Poor of the said Parish wherein such default shall be made; or if it be out of any Parish, then to the use of the Poor of such Parish whose Church is or shall be nearest to the Church or Chappel, or other place of publique Prayer, where such default shall be made; and if default shall be made after the first day of December, which shall be in the said year 1643, then any one Justice of the Peace of the County, City or Town where such default shall be made, upon information thereof to him to be given, shall cause or procure the Premisses to be performed according to the Tenor of this Ordinance at the cost and charges of such Person or Persons, Body Politique or Corporate, or Inhabitants in every Parish, who are appointed by this Ordinance to bear the same. Provided, that this Ordinance, or any thing therein contained, shall not extend to any Image, Picture, or Coat of Arms in Glass, Stone, or otherwise, in any Church, Chappel, Church-yard, or place of publique Prayer as aforesaid, set up or graven onely for a Monument of any King, Prince, or Nobleman, or other dead Person which hath not been commonly reputed or taken for a Saint: But that all such Images, Pictures, and Coats of Arms may stand and continue in like manner and form, as if this Ordinance had never been made.

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PARLIAMENTARY LEGISLATION

The Ordinance of 9 May 16444

An Ordinance for the further demolishing of Monuments of Idolatry and Superstition. The Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament, the better to accomplish the blessed Reformation so happily begun, and to remove all offences and things illegal in the worship of God, do Ordain, That all Representations of any of the Persons of the Trinity, or of any Angel or Saint, in or about any Cathedral, Collegiate or Parish Church, or Chappel, or in any open place within this Kingdome, shall be taken away, defaced, and utterly demolished; And that no such shall hereafter be set up, And that the Chancel-ground of every such Church or Chappel, raised for any Altar or Communion Table to stand upon, shall be laid down and levelled; And that no Copes, Surplisses, superstitious Vestments, Roods, or Roodlofts, or Holy-water Fonts, shall be, or be any more used in any Church or Chappel within this Realm: And that no Cross, Crucifix, Picture, or Representation of any of the Persons of the Trinity, or of any Angel or Saint shall be, or continue upon any Plate, or other thing used, or to be used in or about the worship of God; And that all Organs, and the Frames or Cases wherein they stand in all Churches or Chappels aforesaid, shall be taken away, and utterly defaced, and none other hereafter set up in their places; And that all Copes, Surplisses, superstitious Vestments, Roods, and Fonts aforesaid, be likewise utterly defaced; whereunto all persons within this Kingdome, whom it may concern, are hereby required at their peril to yeild due obedience. Provided, That this Ordinance, or any thing therein contained, shall not extend to any Image, Picture, or Coat of Arms, in Glass, Stone, or otherwise, in any Church, Chapel, Church-yard, or place of publique Prayer, as aforesaid, set up or graven onely for a Monument of any King, Prince or Nobleman, or other dead person which hath not been commonly reputed or taken for a Saint: But that all such Images, Pictures, and Coats of Arms may stand and continue in like manner and form, as if this Ordinance have never been made; And the several Churchwardens or Overseers of the Poor of the several Churches and Chappels respectively, and the next adjoyning Justice of the Peace, or Deputy Lieutenant, are hereby required to see the due performance hereof. And that the repairing of the Walls, Windows, Grounds, and other places which shall be broken or impaired by any the means aforesaid, shall be done and performed by such person and persons as are for the same end and purpose nominated and appointed by a former Ordinance of Parliament of the Eight and twentieth of August, 1643, for the utter demolishing of Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry.

4

Acts and Ordinances, i, 425–6.

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Appendix II Anti-Stuart Iconoclasm The following orders were passed by the House of Commons after the execution of the king concerning the removal and defacing of Stuart arms and monuments. For the link between anti-monarchical and religious iconoclasm see chapter three. 15 February 1649 (CJ, vi, 142) Ordered, That the Arms of the late King, over the Speaker’s Chair, be forthwith taken down: And that the serjeant at Arms attending this House do cause a Carpenter to take down the same accordingly. Ordered, That an Act be brought in for taking down the late King’s Arms out of the several Courts in Westminster, and all other publick Places: And that the Arms of England be set up, in their stead, in the said several Places. Mr. Martyn is to bring in the said Act. 3 August 1649 (CJ, vi, 274) Ordered, That Mr. Martyn, Mr. Garland, and Mr. Robinson, do bring in an Act for taking down and Demolishing the Arms of the late King in all publick Places; and likewise all Statues and Inscriptions. 9 April 1650 (CJ, vi, 394) Resolved &c., That the Arms of the late King be taken down in all Ships of, and belonging to, this Commonwealth; as also of all Merchants, or others, inhabiting within the same: And that the Generals at Sea be required to see the same done accordingly. Resolved, That all Justices of the Peace in the respective Counties, and all other publick Magistrates and Officers, Churchwardens, and Wardens of Companies, be authorized and required to cause the Arms of the late King to be taken down, and defaced, in all Churches, Chapels, and all other publick Places within England, Wales and Town of Berwick. Ordered, that these Votes be forthwith printed and published. 262

ANTI-STUART ICONOCLASM

27 December 1650 (CJ, vi, 516) Sir Henry Mildmay reported from the Council of State concerning wilful observation of the abolished Christmas Day, and idolatrous masses performed in several places. In the same report he commented that there was still remaining the Arms and Pictures of the late King, in several Churches, Halls, upon the Gates, and in other publick Places, of the City of London

and urged that the Parliament be moved to appoint whom they shall think fit, to see the said Arms and Pictures taken down and defaced; and to give an Account of their executing the same, within such time as they shall think fit to allow for that Purpose.

This report was referred to the Committee for Plundered Ministers. 5 February 1651 (CJ, vi, 531) Ordered, That the late King’s Arms be taken down in all publick Places, in all Cities, Boroughs, and Market Towns, throughout the Commonwealth of England: And that the Commonwealth’s Arms be set up in all such Places instead thereof: And that the Charge be defrayed out of the Parish Rates: And the several Sheriffs, Justices of Peace, Constables, Churchwardens, and other Officers and Ministers, be, and are hereby, authorized and required to see this Order duly executed; and give an Account thereof to the Council of State. Ordered, That the Council of State do take care to see the said Order duly executed accordingly.

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Appendix III William Dowsing’s Commissions1 A Commission from the Earle of Manchester Whereas by an Ordinance of the Lords and Com’ons assembled in Parliam’t beareinge date the 28th day of August last it is amongust other thinges ordained th’t all Crucifixes Crosses & all Images of any one or more p’sons of the Trenity or of the Virgin Marye & all other Images & pictures of Saints & supersticious inscriptions in or upon all & every the s’d Churches or Cappeles or other place of publique prayer Churchyards or other places to any the s’d Churches or Chapells or other place of publique praier belonginge / or in any other open place shoulde before November last be taken away & defaced as by the s’d Ordinance more at large appeareth And whereas many such Crosses Crucifixes & other supersticious images & pictures are still continued within the Associated Counties in manifest Contempt of the s’d Ordinance. These are therefore to Will & require you forthw’th to make your repaier to the severall Associated Counties and put the s’d Ordinance in execution in every p[ar]ticular hereby requiring all Mayors Sheriffes, Bayliffes Constables headburoughs & all other his Ma[jest]ties Officers & loveinge subiects to be ayding & assisting unto you whereof they may not faile at there perills. Given under my hand & seale this 19 of December 1643. [Signed] Manchester To Will’m Dowsinge gen. & to such as hee shall appoint.

**** [The second commission] These are to authorise and require you to bring before me all such heads of Colledges Deanes or Subdeanes of Cathedrals Churches or Chapples and Churchwardens as shall refuse upon the sight heerof o’r admonition given 1 Taken from Cooper, The Journal of William Dowsing, 349–50. The original commission of 19 December has not survived but a copy was made in the Suffolk Committee Book (Suffolk Record Office (I), HD 64/6, 77–8). The second commission is among the State Papers (PRO, SP 16/498/87).

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WILLIAM DOWSING’S COMMISSIONS

by you or your assignes under hand & seale To levell the stepps of all Chappels or chancells in the associated Counties of Essex, Norf[olk] Suff[olk] Hertford Cambridge, Huntington & Lincolne according to an ordinance of parlia[men]t in that behalfe, and you are likewise to bring before me all such person or p[er]sons as shall oppose or contemne you or your assignes in the execuco’ of the ordinance of parlia[men]t made in that behalfe or that shall ut[t]er disgracefull words [sic] speches against any of the member[s] in parlia[men]t & for the beter execution heerof require as well all Collonels Captanes & their officers as allso all Cunstables & other his Ma[jes]ties officers and loving subjects to be ayding & assisting unto you wherefore they may not fayle given under my hand & seale this 29th Decemb[e]r 1643. [Signed] Ed Manchester To Will’ Dowsing and such as he shall apoynt.

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Bibliography Note: the bibliography is divided into four sections: manuscripts; contemporary printed works; printed editions of primary sources; and secondary works. Place of publication for printed works is London unless otherwise stated. Manuscripts

Allhallows by the Tower Archives, London (formerly Allhallows Barking) Churchwardens’ accounts – microfilm reels 11–12. Vestry minutes – microfilm reel 6. Berkshire Record Office, Reading Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for Berkshire: Bray churchwardens’ accounts, 1602–1708 – D/P 23/5/1. Brimpton churchwardens’ accounts, 1640–78 – D/P 26/5/1. Childrey churchwardens’ accounts, 1558–87 – D/P 35/5/1. Hampstead Norreys churchwardens’ accounts, 1636–1779 – D/P 62/5/1. Kintbury churchwardens’ accounts, 1583–1844 – D/P 78/5/1. New Windsor churchwardens’ accounts, 1616–1724 – D/P 149/5/1. Newbury St Nicholas churchwardens’ accounts, 1602–1724 – microfiche 97112/A. Reading St Giles churchwardens’ accounts, 1518–1808 – D/P 96/5/1. Reading St Lawrence, churchwardens’ accounts, 1603–1742 – D/P 97/5/3–4. ——— vestry minutes, 1660–1931 – D/P 97/8/1. Reading St Mary churchwardens’ accounts, 1550–1907 – D/P 98/5/1. Stanford in the Vale churchwardens’ accounts, 1551–1705 – D/P 118/5/1. Wantage churchwardens’ accounts, from 1657–1758 – D/P 143/5/1. Warfield churchwardens’ accounts, 1586–1758 – D/P 44/5/2. Winkfield churchwardens’ accounts, 1659–1867 – D/P 151/5/2. Bodleian Library, Oxford MSS D.D. All Souls b.82–4 (bursars’ accounts, 1640–3), and C.296–8 (computus and expense rolls, 1639–69). Oxford University archives, WP␤/21/4, vice-chancellors’ accounts, 1556–1666. MS Clarendon 80. MS Dugdale 11. 267

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

MS Rawlinson B.397. MS J Walker C9. MS Wood F35. Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for parishes in the city of York: All Saints North Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1645–1734 – PR/Y/ ASN/10. St John Ousegate churchwardens’ accounts, 1585–1648 – PR/Y/J/17. St Martin-cum-Gregory churchwardens’ accounts, 1550–1669 – PR/Y/ MG/19. St Michael le Belfrey churchwardens’ accounts, 1636–1729 – PR/Y/MB/17. St Michael Spurriergate churchwardens’ accounts, 1626–1710 – PR/ Y/MS/5. British Library Additional MSS: 6521, Parliamentary Proceedings, 1640–1. 11045, Scudamore Papers, i: Newsletters, 26 March 1640–7 September 1641. 15903, Original letters, 1557–1732. 18597, Report of Proceedings in Parliament, 19 February–29 May 1624. 31116, Lawrence Whitacre, House of Commons’ Proceedings, 1642–7. 32094, Malet Collection: State papers and historical documents, iv, 1660–76. 36937, Strood churchwardens’ accounts, 1555–1763. 70002, Harley Papers, ii, 1630–40. 70003, Harley Papers, iii, 1640–2. 70005, fols 107r–35r, Receipts and bills of the Harley Committee, 1644–5. Harley MSS: 159, A Journal of Parliament, February 1623. 163–4, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Journal of the House of Commons, ii–iii. 454, Diary of Sir Humphrey Mildmay, 1633–51. 7019, fols 52–93, ‘Innovations in Religion and abuses in Government in ye University of Cambridge’ [May 1641]. Sloane MSS: 3317, Proceedings in Parliament, 1640–1. Camden Local Studies Centre, Holborn Library St Giles in the Fields churchwardens’ accounts, 1640–94 – MF Camden reel 10. St Giles in the Fields vestry minutes, 1618–1719 – MF Utah reel 8. 268

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

Canterbury Cathedral Library and Archives Corporation records: CC/AC4 and 5, Burmote minute book, 1630–58 and 1658–72. Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for parishes in the Canterbury Archdeaconry: St Mary Bredman, Canterbury churchwardens’ accounts, 1628–1707 – U3/2/4/1. St Mildred, Canterbury churchwardens’ accounts, 1650–1716 – U3/ 89/4/1. St Mary Northgate, Canterbury churchwardens’ accounts, 1662–1716 – U3/103/4/1. Dean and chapter archives: Add. MS 80, Cash book of Thomas Monins (sequestrator). FABRIC 8/2, Receipt of Thomas Monins for organs, 1653. FABRIC 11/1–9; 12/1, Bundles of bills, 1662 and 1663. FABRIC 46/1 and 3, Erection of Bishop Warner’s font, 1663. Letterbook iii. PET 232, Letter from William Cooke to the dean and chapter, 1660. TB 1–3, Treasurers’ books, 1660–3. TV 6–11, Treasurers’ vouchers, 1642, 1660–1, 1661–2. TA 46 and 47, Treasurers’ accounts, 1640–1 and 1641–2. Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for parishes in the Maidstone Archdeaconry and Rochester diocese: Biddenden churchwardens’ accounts, 1594–1779 – P26/5/1. Brookland churchwardens’ accounts, 1643–90 – P49/4/1. Charing churchwardens’ accounts, 1590–1672 – P78/5/1–2. Chart Sutton churchwardens’ accounts, 1634–86 – P83/5/9. Cranbrook churchwardens’ accounts, 1509–1694 – P100/5/1. Headcorn churchwardens’ accounts, 1638–67 – P81/4/1–2. Hever churchwardens’ accounts, 1645–74 – P184/5/2. Kingsnorth churchwardens’ accounts, 1650–79 – P212/5/1. Leigh churchwardens’ accounts, 1631–83 – P223/5/1. Loose churchwardens’ accounts, 1613–94 – P233/5/1–2. Lympe churchwardens’ accounts, 1640–1969 – P240/6/1. Sandhurst churchwardens’ accounts, 1615–94 – P321/5/1. Speldhurst churchwardens’ accounts, 1601–1703 – P344/5/1. Tenterden churchwardens’ accounts, 1627–1713 – P364/5/1–14. Cheshire Record Office, Chester DCC 14/68, Letter from Thomas Cowper to Thomas Smith and Francis Gamul, MPs, 26 March 1642. 269

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

Corporation of London Records Office City cash accounts 1/4 and 1/5, 1641–3 and 1644–6. Journal 40, Journal of the Common Council, 1640–9. Repertory 55–57, 1641–5. Devon Record Office, Exeter Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for parishes in the city of Exeter: St Kerrian’s churchwardens’ accounts, 1615–69 – MS 4780A add 99/PW4. St Petrock’s churchwardens’ accounts, 1602–1706 – MS 2946A add 99/PW1. Records of the dean and chapter of Exeter Cathedral: MS 3557–9, Chapter act books, 1635–43, 1643–60, 1660–7. MS 3780, Receipts and solutions, 1643–4. MS 3783, Extraordinary payments, 1639–46. MS 3787, Extraordinary solutions, 1635–66. MS 3884, Particular disbursements, 1644–7. Exeter City records: B4/12a, E. Chick, manuscript index to act books. B1/8–11, Act books of the City chamber, 1634–83. Gloucestershire Record Office, Gloucester Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for parishes in the city of Gloucester: St Aldate churchwardens’ accounts, 1620–83 – P154/6/2/7. St Michael churchwardens’ accounts, 1643–81 – P154/14/2/2. City records: GBR B3/2–3, Common Council minute books, 1632–56, 1656–60. GBR H2/3, Lieutenancy orders and letter book, 1640–60. Records of the dean and chapter of Gloucester Cathedral: D936 A1/2, Treasurers’ accounts, 1634–64. D936 A1/3, Treasurers’ accounts, 1664–83. D936 A23, Royal warrant for repairs to the cathedral, 1660. D936 A24, Estimates for repairs, including glazing accounts, 1660–2. D936 A25, Fabric accounts, 1665–8. TRS 140, Details of monies assigned to the repair of the cathedral, 1660. Guildhall Library, London Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for City of London parishes: Allhallows Honey Lane churchwardens’ accounts, 1618–1743 – MS 5026/1. Allhallows Lombard Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1614–1743 – MS 4051/1. 270

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

——— vestry minutes, 1618–53 – MS 4049/1. Allhallows the Great churchwardens’ accounts, 1616–1708 – MS 818/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1574–1684 – MS 819/1. Allhallows the Less churchwardens’ accounts, 1630–51, 1651–86 – MS 823/1–2. ——— vestry minutes, 1644–1830 – MS 824/1. Allhallows London Wall churchwardens’ accounts, 1566–1681 – MS 5090/2. Allhallows Staining churchwardens’ accounts, 1645–1706 – MS 4956/3. Holy Trinity the Less churchwardens’ accounts, 1582–1662 – MS 4835/1. St Alban Wood Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1637–75 – MS 7673/2. St Alphage London Wall churchwardens’ accounts, 1631–77 – MS 1432/4. ——— vestry minutes, 1608–1711 – MS 1431/2. St Andrew by the Wardrobe churchwardens’ accounts, 1570–1668 – MS 2088/1. St Andrew Hubbard churchwardens’ accounts, 1621–1712 – MS 1279/3. ——— vestry minutes, 1600–78 – MS 1278/1. St Anne and St Agnes churchwardens’ accounts, 1636–63 – MS 587/1. St Antholin Budge Row churchwardens’ accounts, 1574–1708 – MS 1046/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1648–1700 – MS 1045/1. St Augustine Watling Street vestry minutes, 1601–1737 – MS 635/1. St Bartholomew by the Exchange churchwardens’ accounts, 1598–1698 – MS 4383/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1567–1643, 1643–76 – MS 4384/1–2. St Bartholomew the Great churchwardens’ accounts, 1625–1865 – MS 3989/1. St Benet Fink churchwardens’ accounts, 1610–1700 – MS 1303/1. St Benet Gracechurch churchwardens’ accounts, 1548–1723 – MS 1568. St Benet Paul’s Wharf churchwardens’ accounts, 1605–56 – MS 878/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1579–1674 – MS 877/1. St Botolph Aldersgate churchwardens’ accounts, 1637–79 – MS 1455/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1601–57, 1651–78 – MS 1453/1–2. St Botolph Aldgate churchwardens’ accounts, 1586–1691 – MS 9235/2. ——— vestry minutes, 1583–1640 – MS 9236. ——— parish clerk’s memoranda book containing vestry minutes 1640–61 – MS 9234/8. St Botolph Billingsgate churchwardens’ accounts, 1603–74 – MS 942/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1592–1673 – MS 943/1. St Botolph Bishopsgate churchwardens’ accounts, 1633–62 – MS 4524/2. ——— vestry minutes, 1617–90 – MS 4526/1. St Bride Fleet Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1639–78 – MS 6552/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1644–65 – MS 6554/1. 271

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

St Christopher le Stocks churchwardens’ accounts, 1575–1661 – MS 4423/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1593–1731 – MS 4424/1. St Clement Eastcheap churchwardens’ accounts, 1636–1740 – MS 977/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1640–1759 – MS 978/1. St Dionis Backchurch churchwardens’ accounts, 1625–1729 – MS 4215/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1647–73 – MS 4216/1. St Dunstan in the East churchwardens’ accounts, 1634–61 – MS 7882/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1537–1651 – MS 4887. St Dunstan in the West churchwardens’ accounts, 1628–45, 1645–66 – MS 2968/3–4. ——— vestry minutes, 1587–1663 – MS 3016/1. St Ethelburga Bishopsgate churchwardens’ accounts, 1569–1681 – MS 4241/1. St George Botolph Lane churchwardens’ accounts, 1590–1676 – MS 951/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1600–85 – MS 952/1. St Giles Cripplegate churchwardens’ accounts, 1648–69 – MS 6047/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1659–1808 – MS 6048/1. St Gregory by St Paul vestry minutes, 1642–1701 – MS 1336/1. St Helen Bishopsgate churchwardens’ accounts, 1565–1654, 1655– 1715 – MS 6836, MS 6844/1. St James Garlickhithe churchwardens’ accounts, 1627–99 – MS 4810/2. ——— vestry minutes, 1615–93 – MS 4813/1. St John Walbrook churchwardens’ accounts, 1595–1679 – MS 577/1. St John Zachary churchwardens’ accounts, 1591–1682 – MS 590/1. St Katherine Coleman churchwardens’ accounts, 1609–71 – MS 1124/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1659–1727 – MS 1123/1. St Katherine Cree churchwardens’ accounts, 1650–91 – MS 1198/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1639–1718 – MS 1196/1. St Lawrence Jewry churchwardens’ accounts, 1579–1640, 1640–98 – MS 2593/1–2. ——— vestry minutes, 1556–1669 – MS 2590/1. St Lawrence Pountney churchwardens’ accounts, 1530–1681 – MS 3907/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1614–73 – MS 3908/1. St Magnus the Martyr churchwardens’ accounts, 1638–1734 – MS 1179/1. St Margaret Lothbury vestry minutes, 1571–1677 – MS 4352/1. St Margaret New Fish Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1576–1678 – MS 1176/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1578–1789 – MS 1175/1. 272

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

St Margaret Pattens churchwardens’ accounts, 1558–1653, 1653–1760 – MS 4570/2–3. ——— vestry minutes, 1640–83 – MS 4571/1. St Martin Ludgate churchwardens’ accounts, 1649–90 – MS 1313/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1576–1715 – MS 1311/1. St Martin Orgar churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes, 1471–1707 – MS 959/1–2. St Martin Outwich churchwardens’ accounts, 1632–1743 – MS 11394/1. St Mary Abchurch churchwardens’ accounts, 1629–92 – MS 3891/1. St Mary Aldermanbury churchwardens’ accounts, 1631–77 – MS 3556/2. ——— vestry minutes, 1610–1763 – MS 3570/2. St Mary Aldermary churchwardens’ accounts, 1597–1665, 1630–1708 – MS 6574, MS 4863/1. St Mary at Hill vestry minutes, 1609–1752 – MS 1240/1. St Mary Colechurch churchwardens’ accounts, 1612–1700 – MS 66. ——— vestry minutes, 1612–1701 – MS 64. St Mary Magdalen Milk Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1606–67 – MS 2569/2. ——— vestry minutes, 1619–68 – MS 2597/1. St Mary Magdalen Old Fish Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1648– 1721 – MS 1341/1. St Mary Somerset churchwardens’ accounts, 1614–1701 – MS 5714/1. St Mary Staining churchwardens’ accounts, 1646–1718 – MS 1542/2. St Mary Woolchurch Haw churchwardens’ accounts, 1560–1672 – MS 1013/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1647–1726 – MS 1012/1. St Mary Woolnoth churchwardens’ accounts, 1539–1641 – MS 1002/1. St Matthew Friday Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1547–1678 – MS 1016/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1576–1743 – MS 3579. St Michael Bassishaw churchwardens’ accounts, 1617–1716 – MS 2601/1. St Michael Cornhill churchwardens’ accounts, 1608–1702 – MS 4071/2. ——— vestry minutes, 1563–1697 – MS 4072/1. St Michael Crooked Lane churchwardens’ accounts, 1617–93 – MS 1188/1. St Michael le Querne churchwardens’ accounts, 1605–1717 – MS 2895/2. St Michael Queenhithe churchwardens’ accounts, 1625–1706 – MS 4825/1. St Michael Wood Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1619–1718 – MS 524/1. St Mildred Bread Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1648–1727 – MS 3470/1. 273

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

St Mildred Poultry vestry minutes, 1641–1713 – MS 62/1. St Nicholas Acons vestry minutes, 1619–1738 – MS 4060/1. St Olave Jewry churchwardens’ accounts, 1586–1643, 1643–1705 – MS 4409/1–2. ——— vestry minutes, 1574–1680 – MS 4415/1. St Olave Silver Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1630–82 – MS 1257/1. St Pancras Soper Lane churchwardens’ accounts, 1616–1740 – MS 5018/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1626–99 – MS 5019/1. St Peter Cornhill vestry minutes, 1574–1717 – MS 4165/1. St Peter Westcheap churchwardens’ accounts, 1601–1702 – MS 645/2. ——— vestry minutes, 1619–53, 1654–1787 – MS 642/1–2. St Sepulchre Holborn churchwardens’ accounts, 1648–64 – MS 3146/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1653–62 – MS 3149/1. St Stephen Coleman Street churchwardens’ accounts, 1586–1640, 1656–85 – MS 4457/2 and 4. ——— vestry minutes, 1622–1726 – MS 4458/1. St Stephen Walbrook churchwardens’ accounts, 1549–1637, 1637– 1748 – MS 593/2–3. ——— vestry minutes, 1648–99 – MS 594/2. St Swithin London Stone churchwardens’ accounts, 1602–1725 – MS 559/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1647–1729 – MS 560/1. St Thomas the Apostle churchwardens’ accounts, 1612–1729 – MS 662/1. ——— vestry minutes, 1659–1738 – MS 663/1. MJ 9583, Parts 1–6, churchwardens’ presentments, 1664. Microfilm 330, Merchant Tailors’ Company court minute books, vol. 9, 1636–54. MS 5570, Fishmongers’ Company court ledger, vol. 3, 1631–46. Records of the dean and chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral: MS 25200, Original in-letters, 1638, 1660–82. MS 25471/16, Audited expenditure accounts, 1663–8. MS 25473/9, Fabric accounts, 1641–2. MS 25475/2, Day books, vol. 2, 1638–44. MS 25575, Vouchers, bills and receipts for building work, 1663–86. MS 25630/8 and 9, Dean’s registers. MS 25738/1, Chapter minute books, 1660–4. MS 25783/419, Documents pertaining to repairs and building work, 1622–99. MS 25795, Memoranda of chapter meetings, 1661–2. Hampshire Record Office, Winchester Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for Hampshire: Alton churchwardens’ accounts, 1625–1826 – 29M84/PW1. Bramley churchwardens’ accounts, 1523–1769 – 63M70/PW1. 274

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

Chawton churchwardens’ accounts, 1622–1813 – 1M70/PW1. East Worldham churchwardens’ accounts, 1623–1816 – 28M79/PW1. Easton churchwardens’ accounts, 1655–1820 – 72M70/PW1. Ellingham churchwardens’ accounts, 1584–1715 – 113M82/PW1. Fawley churchwardens’ accounts, 1661–85 – 25M60/PW1. Fordingbridge churchwardens’ accounts, 1602–49 – 24M82/PW2. Hambledon churchwardens’ accounts, 1608–1712 – 46M69/PW13 and 46M69/PW13 (1647 only). Minstead churchwardens’ accounts, 1641–79 – 90M71/PW1. North Waltham churchwardens’ accounts, 1593–1709 – 41M64/PW1. Odiham churchwardens’ accounts, 1654–95 – 47M81/PW1. Soberton churchwardens’ accounts, 1658–1836 – 50M73/PW1. South Warnborough churchwardens’ accounts, 1611–1700 – 70M76/PW1. Stoke Charity churchwardens’ accounts, from 1657–79 – 77M84/PW1. Upham churchwardens’ accounts, 1640–64 – 74M78/PW1. Weyhill churchwardens’ accounts, 1543–1715 – 59M78/PW1. Winchester St John’s churchwardens’ accounts, 1597–1824 – 88M81/ PW1–2. Winchester St Peter Chesil churchwardens’ accounts, 1566–1681 – 3M82W/PW1–2. Wootton St Lawrence churchwardens’ accounts, 1558–1677 – 75M72/PW1. Winchester City archives: W/B1/4 and 5, Ordinance books of the corporation, 1617–47, 1647–62. W/B2/4, Proposal book, 1662–1704. W/E1/131 and 132, City account rolls, 1648–9 and 1650–1. W/F2/4, Ledger book, 1625–49. Hereford and Worcester Record Office, Worcester A14, Worcester Chamber order book, 1650–78. St Andrew’s, Worcester churchwardens’ accounts, 1636–56, 1656–88 – BA 2335/3b (iii) and (iv). House of Lords Record Office House of Lords Main Papers: 10 June 1641, petition of certain parishioners of St Olave, St Saviour, Southwark and St Magnus, London. 15 June 1641, petition of Cornelius Cooke, John Rose and Robert Houghton, churchwardens of St Olave, Southwark. 15 June 1641, petition of Oliver Whitbie, curate of St Olave, Southwark. 30 June 1641, petition of the parson, churchwarden and inhabitants of St Thomas the Apostle. 30 June 1641, petition of one churchwarden and others of St Thomas the Apostle. 275

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

30 June 1641, warrant for the arrest of John Blackwell. 1 July 1641, petition of John Blackwell, Francis Webb and others of St Thomas Apostle, London. 5 July 1641, affidavit of William Sheppard of Southwark. 22 July 1641, petition of Robert Waineman and George Bonnest of St Olave, Southwark. 23 December 1641, petition of the parishioners of St Benet Gracechurch. n.d. 1644, petition of divers inhabitants of St Lawrence Jury. n.d. 1645, petition of divers inhabitants of St Lawrence in the Jury. Braye MSS 19–20. London Metropolitan Archives DL/C/344 – Vicar General’s book, 1637–42. MJ/SBB/33 – Middlesex sessions book April 1643–January 1644. Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes of parishes now in Greater London: All Saints Laleham churchwardens’ accounts, 1610–90 – DR021/29/1. All Saints Wandsworth churchwardens’ accounts, 1590–1728 – P95/ ALL1/44–5. St Dunstan Stepney vestry minutes, 1579–1662 – P93/DUN/327. St James Clerkenwell churchwardens’ vouchers, 1642–63 – P76/JS1/95–105. St John Hackney vestry minutes, 1613–98 – P79/JN1/137–8. St John Pinner churchwardens’ accounts, 1622–1757 – DR08/B1/1/1. St Mary Staines churchwardens’ accounts, 1611–81 – DR02/B2/1. St Nicholas Deptford churchwardens’ accounts, 1657–9 – P78/NIC/ 62/1–3. ——— vestry minutes, 1628–1797 – P78/NIC/44. St Nicholas Graveney, Tooting churchwardens’ accounts, 1646–87 – P95/NIC/94. St Saviour Southwark (fabric and vestry bills), 1593–1652 – P92/SAV/ 113–125 and P92/SAV/606–23. Medway Archives and Local Studies Centre, Strood Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for parishes in Rochester archdeaconry: Hoo Allhallows churchwardens’ accounts, 1555–1650 – P188/5/1. Chatham St Mary churchwardens’ accounts, 1634–57 – P85/5/1. ——— vestry minutes – P85/8/1. Rainham churchwardens’ accounts, 1634–70 – P296/4/1–2. Shorne churchwardens’ accounts, 1630–81 – P336/5/1. Mercers’ Company Archives, London Acts of Court, 1641–5. 276

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

Norfolk Record Office, Norwich Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for parishes in the City of Norwich: St Benedict churchwardens’ accounts, 1608–1762 – PD 191/23. St Gregory churchwardens’ accounts, 1574–1771 – PD 59/54. St John de Sepulchre churchwardens’ accounts, 1625–1712 – PD 90/69. St Laurence churchwardens’ accounts, 1603–1736 – PD 58/38 (S) St Mary Coslany churchwardens’ accounts, 1586–1697 – COL 3/4 T130/A St Peter Mancroft churchwardens’ accounts, 1580–1652, 1652–1708 – PD 26/71–2 (S). Records of the dean and chapter of Norwich Cathedral: DCN 10/1/81, Treasurers’ accounts. DCN 10/2/2, Receivers’ and treasurers’ accounts, 1661–9. DCN 10/2/1, Receivers’ and treasurers’ accounts, 1619–46. DCN 11/1, Audit book, 1660–9. DCN 12/28, Note of monies laid out in repairs, 1652–9. DCN 12/29, Audit and financial papers, 1660s. DCN 23/13, Abridgement and summary of chapter act books, 1566–1660. DCN 24/2–3, Chapter acts, 1641–9, 1660–91. DCN 29/2/41, Liber miscellaneous, 2. DCN 29/4/21, Liber miscellaneous, ‘Contributions to Repair of Cathedral’. DCN 107/2, Account of repairs. DCN 107/3, Account of the fate of desecraters of the cathedral (n.d.). DCN 107/10, List of repairs, 1662–1762. Norwich City Records: 16 a/20 (microfilm 628/2), Mayor’s court book, 1634–46. 16 b/23 (microfilm RO 81/4), Mayor’s court book, 1654–66. 16 d/6, Assembly book, 1642–68. Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton Borough Records 3/2, Northampton assembly book, 1628–1744. Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for Northamptonshire parishes: Brington churchwardens’ accounts, 1600–79 – 49p/GB/1. Broughton churchwardens’ accounts, 1636–1791 – 52p/176. Burton Latimer churchwardens’ accounts, 1635–45 (loose accounts) – 55p/58–61. Collingtree churchwardens’ accounts, 1638–76 – 73p/31. Cottingham churchwardens’ accounts, 1639–69 – 85p/26. Great Houghton churchwardens’ accounts, 1634–98 – 175p/28. Hinton in the Hedges churchwardens’ accounts, 1634–1770 – 169p/22. 277

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

Irchester churchwardens’ accounts, 1613–55 – 177p/Ir/B/1. Lowick churchwardens’ accounts 1640–9 (loose sheets) – 199p/77/1–33, 199p/78/1–16. Marston Trussel churchwardens’ accounts, 1607–1704 – 206p/64. Northampton All Saints vestry minutes, 1620–1735 – 223p/24. Northampton Holy Sepulchre vestry minutes, 1634–74 – 241p/42. Norton churchwardens’ accounts, 1646–62 – 243p/310. M(T) 37e and 61/1, Transcripts of the accounts of the feoffees for Peterborough, 1614–87. Oxford, University Christ Church Library: D&C i.b.2 & 3, Chapter act books. CC Ms. xii.b.102–3, Disbursement books. Exeter College: A.II.10, Rectors’ accounts, 1639–1734. A.IV.10, Bursars’ accounts, 1631–1797. Magdalen College: College register. Day books. Libri computi. Lincoln College: College accounts, 1647–64. Miscellaneous bundle of seventeenth century receipts and memoranda. Merton College: Bursars’ accounts, ii and iii, 1633–52 and 1652–77. College register, 1567–1730. St John’s College: College register. Computus annuus. Computus hebdomadalis. Trinity College: Computus annuus. Wadham College: 16/1–2, Bursars’ accounts, 1648–63. 23/1, College bills, before 1660. 2/1–2, Convention books. Oxfordshire Record Office, Oxford Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for Oxfordshire: Ambrosden churchwardens’ accounts, 1550–1686 – PAR/7/4/F1/1. Bladen churchwardens’ accounts, 1663–1723 – Par/Bladen/c6. Chinnor churchwardens’ accounts, typescript from 1654–66 – Par/ Chinnor/d1. 278

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

Dorchester churchwardens’ accounts, 1653 only – Par/Dorchester/b12. Enstone churchwardens’ accounts, 1660–1700 – PAR 97/4/F1/1. Epwell churchwardens’ accounts, 1594–1716 – PAR 98/4/F1/1. Eynsham churchwardens’ accounts, 1640–65 – Par/Eynsham/b12. Langford churchwardens’ accounts, 1617–1750 – Par/Langford/c2. Leafield churchwardens’ accounts, 1653–1786 – Par/Leafield/c4. Oddington churchwardens’ accounts, 1609–50 – Par/Oddington/e3. Oxford All Saints churchwardens’ papers, 1607–1716 – PAR/189/ 4/F1/3. Oxford St Aldgate vestry minutes, Par/Oxford, St Adgate/d3. Oxford St Clement churchwardens’ accounts, 1661 only – Par/Oxford, St Clements/b22. Oxford St Cross churchwardens’ accounts, 1652–67 – PAR/199/4/F1. Oxford St Martin churchwardens’ accounts, 1639–65 – PAR/207/4/F1/1, fols 179–211. Oxford St Mary Magdalen churchwardens’ accounts, 1639–50 – PAR/ 208/4/F1/63–70. Oxford St Mary the Virgin churchwardens’ accounts, 1642–65 – PAR/ 209/4/F1/33–55. Oxford St Michael churchwardens’ accounts, 1601–1708 – PAR/211/ 4/F1/3–4. Oxford St Michael vestry minutes, 1642–1730 – PAR/211/2/A1/1. Oxford St Peter in the East churchwardens’ accounts, 1613–85 – PAR/ 213/4/F1/3. Oxford St Peter le Bailey churchwardens’ accounts, 1639–65 – PAR/214/ 4/F1/81–100. Pyrton churchwardens’ accounts, 1547–1688 – PAR/Pyrton/c1. South Newington churchwardens’ accounts, 1658–82 – PAR/South Newington/a1. Spelsbury churchwardens’ accounts, 1525–1703 – PAR/246/4/F1/1. Thame churchwardens’ accounts, 1624–65 – PAR/Thame/b2. Witney churchwardens’ accounts, 1569–1718 – PAR/Witney/c9. Woodstock churchwardens’ accounts, 1611–1744 – PAR/Woodstock/ c12. Yarnton churchwardens’ accounts, 1610–1740 – PAR/Yarnton/b7. Peterborough Cathedral Library MS 54, Chapter act book, 1660–1814. Public Record Office SP 16, State papers, domestic, Charles I. SP 18, State papers, domestic, Interregnum. SP 28, Commonwealth exchequer papers. SP 29, State papers, domestic, Charles II. 279

BIBLIOGRAPHY: MANUSCRIPTS

St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives, London St Bartholomew the Less churchwardens’ accounts, 1575–1665 – SBL 21/1–2. Westminster Cathedral Archives Chapter act books, 1609–42, 1660–2. Fabric accounts: 4276 A&B, 42453, 42762, 42927, 43248, 43544, 43677 A-U, 42687, 42691, various bills for work, 1643–59. 44024, Repair costs, 1660–1. 44026 A&B, Restoration of the altar, 1660; Inventory of plate, 1663. 44030 A&B, Accounts of extraordinary disbursements, 1660–2. 44042, Post-Restoration repair of the Abbey, accounts, 1662–7. Westminster City Archives Churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minutes for parishes in the City of Westminster: St Clement Danes churchwardens’ accounts, 1633–56 – B 11. St Margaret’s Westminster churchwardens’ accounts, 1640–9 – E 23–8 (MF 965–6). ——— vestry minutes, 1591–1661 – E 2413. St Martin in the Fields churchwardens’ accounts, 1642–52 – F 3–8. ——— vestry minutes, 1611–1730 – MF 2517. St Mary le Strand churchwardens’ accounts, 1637–50 – MF 1900. Winchester Cathedral Library Accounts of church goods, 1633–42, 1660–9. Ledger books, vols 9–10 and 12, 1660–7, 1621–45. T4/3/7/3, Correspondence, 1608–75. T4/3/7/12/2–6, Accounts of John Woodman, parliamentary receiver, 1650. W39C/29, Fabric book, from 1660. W57B/32, John Chase memoranda, 1623–50. W57B/33, Transcript of John Chase memoranda. W53/7/3, Petition against the destruction of the cathedral, 1652. W/53/5/12, Account for labour, 1654. W/49/5/12/2, Bonds for reparation of the fabric, 1660. W39C/3/4 and 5, Chapter act books, 1622–45, 1660–95. Worcester Cathedral Library A73, Fabric accounts, from 1660. A75 and 76, Chapter act books, 1605–35, and from 1660. A26 and 28, Treasurers’ books, various years. D143, Letter regarding the petition against the dean and chapter, 1641. 280

BIBLIOGRAPHY: CONTEMPORARY PRINTED WORKS

D197, Damages done to the cathedral by the late powers, 1660. D373–86, Accounts earlier than 1660. D424–73, Barnabas Oley, Treasurers’ accounts, 1661–2. D455, D465 and D469, Bills for work, 1661. D603, Letter from Charles I to dean and chapter, 1661. D614, List of subscribers to the repair of the cathedral. York City Archives E63, Order Book of the Committee of the City and Council of York, from July 1645. B36 & 37, Corporation house books, 1644–9 and 1650–63. York Minster Library E2 (22), Disbursements, from 1667. H5, Chapter act book, 1633–41, and from 1660. M2 (2) M, ‘Things taken from York Minster during the Great Rebellion’. James Torre, ‘Antiquities of York Minster’, 1690–1. Contemporary Printed Works

An Account Given to Parliament by the Ministers sent by them to Oxford (1647). An Answer to the Petition sent from the University of Oxford to the Honourable Court of Parliament (1641). Angliae Ruina or England’s Ruine (1647 [1648]). Antidotum Culmerianum: or Animadversions upon a late pamphlet entitled Cathedral Newes from Canterbury (London with false Oxford imprint, 1644). The Arraignment of Superstition or A Discourse between a Protestant, a Glazier and a Separatist (1642). The Articles and charge Proved in Parliament against Dr Walton, Minister of St Martin’s Orgar in Cannon Street (1641). Articles exhibited in Parliament against Mr John Squire, Vicar of St Leonard Shoreditch (1641). Articles of Enquiry for the Diocese of Ely, (1662). Articles of Visitation and Enquiry within the Diocese of Chichester (1662). Articles of Visitation and Enquiry within the Diocese of Durham (1662). Articles of Visitation and Enquiry within the Diocese of Exeter (1662). Articles of Visitation and Enquiry within the Diocese of Gloucestershire (1662). Articles of Visitation and Enquiry within the Diocese of Hereford (1662). Articles of Visitation and Enquiry within the Diocese of Oxford (1662). Articles of Visitation and Enquiry within the Diocese of Peterborough (1662). Articles of Visitation and Enquiry within the Diocese of Rochester (1662). 281

BIBLIOGRAPHY: CONTEMPORARY PRINTED WORKS

Articles of Visitation and Enquiry within the Diocese of Winchester (1662). Articles of Visitation and Enquiry within the Diocese of Worcester (1662). Articles of Visitation and Inquiry within the Diocese of Bath and Wells (1662). Articles to be Ministered, Enquired of, and Answered in the first Episcopal Visitation of the Lord Bishop of Bristol (1662). At the Committee appointed by the Commons House . . . to sit during the Recess, 28 September, 1641 (1641). Babington, Gervase, The Works of Gervase Babington (1615). Baillie, Robert, The Canterburians Self-Conviction, or an evident demonstration of the avowed Arminiamisme, Poperie, and tyrannie of that faction, by their own confession (1641). Barwick, John, Querela Cantabrigiensis, in Angliae Ruina (1647 [1648]). Bishops, Judges, Monopolists (1641). Burton, Henry, For God and the King. The Summe of Two Sermons (1636). Calamy, Edmund, The Noble-mans Patterne of true and reall Thankfulnesse (1643). Carter, John, The Nail and the Wheel. Sermons in the Green-yard at Norwich (1647). The Cavalliers Advice to his Majestie, with his Majesties answer to their desires, together with his intentions for the avoyding of my Lord of Essex his approach neere his Person (1642). Certain Affirmations in Defence of pulling down rails by divers misguided people, judiciously and religiously answered (1641). The Character of Sir Arthur Haselrig, the Church-thief (1661). Chauncy, Charles, The Retractation of Mr Charles Chauncy, formerly Minister of Ware in Harfordshire. Wherein is proved the unlawfulnesse and danger of rayling in altars or communion tables (1641). Cheapside Crosse censured and condemned by A Letter sent from the ViceChancellor and other Learned Men of the famous University of Oxford (1642). Chidley, Samuel, Thunder from the Throne of God against the Temples of Idols (1653). ——— To His Highness the Lord Protector and to Parliament (1656). Clark, Henry, A Rod Discovered, found, and set forth to whip the Idolators till they leave off their Idolatry (1657). The Confession of Faith and Catechisms Agreed upon by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster (1649). A Continuation of the True Diurnall of Passages in Parliament, nos 6, 7, 11, 14–28 February, 21–28 March, 1642. The Crosses Case in Cheapside; whether the setting of it in a posture of defence be according to Law (1642). Culmer, Richard, Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury (1644). ——— Dean and Chapter Newes from Canterbury (1649). Culmer Jnr., Richard, Lawles Tythe-Robbers Discovered (1654). ——— A Parish Looking Glasse for Persecutors of Ministers (1657). 282

BIBLIOGRAPHY: CONTEMPORARY PRINTED WORKS

Culmer’s Crown Crackt with his own Looking-Glass (1657). The Dagonizing of Bartholomew Faire (1647). A Declaration of the House of Commons in Parliament made September 9 1641 (1641). A Discovery of the Jesuits Trumpery, newly packed out of England (1641). Dod, John and Richard Cleaver, A Plain and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments (1606). The Dolefull Lamentation of Cheap-side Crosse: or, old England Sick of the Staggers (1642). The Downfall of Antichrist: the power of preaching to pull down Popery (1641). The Downfall of Dagon or the taking downe of Cheapside Crosse (1642). Dugdale, William, A Short View of the Late Troubles in England (Oxford, 1681). ——— Monasticon Anglicanum or, The History of the Ancient Abbies, and other Monasteries, Hospitals, Cathedral and Collegiate Churches in England and Wales (1693). England’s Glory in Her Royal King and Honourable Assembly in the High Court of parliament, above her former usurped Lordly Bishops (1641). Finch, Edward, An Answer to the Articles Prefered against Edward Finch, Vicar of Christ-Church by some of the Parishioners of the same (1641). Foure Orders of Great Consequence of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament (1643). Gurnay, Edmund, Gurnay Redivivus, or an Appendix Unto the Homily against Images in Churches (1660). ——— Towards a Vindication of the Second Commandment (Cambridge, 1639). Hacket, John, Scrinia reserata: a memorial offer’d to the great deservings of John Williams (1693). Hammond, Henry, Of Idolatry (Oxford, 1646). The Heads of Several Petitions and complaints made against 1. Sir John Connyers Lieutenant Generall of the Horse in the Northern Expedition 2. Dr Heywood of St Gyles in the Fields 3. The Parishioners of St MaryWoolchurch 4. Dr Fuller of St Giles Criplegate 5. Mr Booth of St Botolph Aldersgate (1641). Hinde, William, A Faithful Remonstrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen (1641). The Holy Harmony; or a Plea for the abolishing of Organs (1643). Keepe, Henry, Monumenta Westmonasteriensia: or an Historical Account of the Original, Increase and Present State of St Peter’s or the Abby Church of Westminster (1683 edn). The Last Will and Testament of Charing Crosse (1646). The Last Will and Testament of Superstition, eldest daughter to Antichrist (1642). 283

BIBLIOGRAPHY: CONTEMPORARY PRINTED WORKS

A letter of that most religious and pious Prince Edward VI to Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, for the taking downe of Altars (1641). Lichfield, Leonard, A Whisper in the eare. Or, a Discourse between the Kings Maiesty and the High Court of Parliament. Concerning a pacification and conditions of peace (Oxford, 1642). Little Wits Protestation to defend Popery since the decease of his sister Superstition (1642). Loveday, Samuel, An Answer to the Lamentation of Cheapside Crosse. Together with the Reasons why so many doe desire the downfall of it, and all such Popish Reliques (1642). Marshall, Stephen, The Song of Moses the Servant of God and the Song of the Lambe (1643). Mercurius Aulicus, 30 April–6 May 1643; 21–7 April 1644; 2–8 and 16–22 June 1644 (Oxford). Mercurius Belgicus, A Brief Chronologie of the Battails, Sieges, Conflicts and other most remarkable passages from the beginning of the Rebellion to 25 March 1646 (1646). Mercurius Britanicus, 6–13 May and 1–8 July 1644. Montagu, Richard, A Gagg for the New Gospell? No: A New Gagg for an Old Goose (1624). ——— Appello Caesarum A Just Appeale from Two Unjust Informers (1625). More News from Rome or Magna Charta Discoursed of between a Poor Man and his wife (1666). Occurrences of Certain Speciall and Remarkable Passages in Parliament, no. 3, 12–19 January 1643. An Order from the High Court of Parliament, 19 December 1641. Coppie of a Seditious Paper, delivered in the Pulpit to the Minister of Christ Church (1641). An Order for the removal of the Communion Table, Crucifixes, Pictures etc., from the Churches, 8 September, 1641 (1641). The Orders from the House of Commons for the Abolition of Superstition and Innovations in the Regulating of Church Affairs (1641). The Organs Funeral; or the Quiristers Lamentations for the Abolition of Superstitious Ceremonie (1641). Overton, Richard, Articles of High Treason Exhibited against Cheap-side Crosse, (1642). ——— Lambeth Faire, wherein you have all the Bishops trinkets set to sale (1641). ——— New Lambeth Fayre newly consecrated wherein all Romes Reliques are set at sale (1642). Parker, Henry, Altar Dispute, or a Discourse concerning the several innovations of the Altar (1641). Peacham, Henry, A Dialogue between the Crosse in Cheapside and Charing Cross, fearing their fall in these uncertain times (1641). 284

BIBLIOGRAPHY: CONTEMPORARY PRINTED WORKS

A Perfect and true Relation of the daily Passages and Proceedings of the souldiers which are under the Lord Sayes Command in Oxford, from 9 September to 6 October (1642). A Perfect Diurnal of the Passages in Parliament, 21–28 March, and 24–31 October 1642. Perkins, William, Reformed Catholic: or, A Declaration shewing how neere we may come to the present Church of Rome (Cambridge, 1598). ——— A Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times (Cambridge, 1601). Petition and Articles Exhibited in Parliament against Dr Heywood, late Chaplain to the Bishop of Canterbury (1641). The Petition of the Inhabitants of Isleworth in the County of Middlesex against William Graunt, Minister (1641). Petition of the University of Oxford in behalfe of Episcopacy and Cathedrals (1641). The Petition of the Weamen of Middlesex (1641). The Popes Proclamation . . . whereunto is added six articles against Cheapside Crosse (1641). Proceedings in Parliament by the standing Committee appointed to sit during the Recess of both houses, 28 September & 1 October (1641). Prynne, William, Anti-Arminianisme or The Church of England’s Old Antithesis to New Arminianisme (Amsterdam, 1630). ——— Canterburie’s Doome, or the First Part of a Compleat History of the Commitment, Tryall, Condemnation, Execution of William Laud (1646). ——— A Looking Glasse for all Lordly Prelates (1636). ——— Newes from Ipswich Discovering certain late detestable practices of some domineering Lordly Prelates (1641). The Purchaser’s Pound, or the return to Lambeth Fair of knaves and thieves with all the Sacred Ware (1660). The Razing of the Record or An Order to forbid any Thanksgiving for the Canterbury Newes publisht by Richard Culmer (London with false Oxford imprint, 1644). The Remarkeable Funeral of Cheapside Crosse (1642). Salteren, George, A Treatise against Images and Pictures in Churches (1641). Saunders, Jonathan, A Narrative of a Strange and Sudden Apparition of an Arch-Angel at the Old-Bayly (1680–1). The Scottish Dove, no. 14, 12–19 January 1643. Sherman, Edmund, The Birth and Burning of an Image called S. Michael (1681). Smart, Peter, A Catalogue of superstitious Innovations in the Change of Services and Ceremonies of presumptuous irregularities and transgressions against the Articles of Religion . . . and lastly of sundry pernitious violations of the local Statutes of Durham (1642). 285

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304

Index Abbot, George 12, 21, 42–3, 58 Abbott, William 108 Abraham 154 Act of Uniformity 7 Adam and Eve 126 Adultery: Act xv; linked to idolatry 13–14 Allanson, William 193 Allen, Richard 181 Alsop, Bernard 40 Altars 5, 6, 9, 27, 30, 40, 62, 71, 76, 86, 91, 95, 100, 103, 153–4, 181, 191, 195, 203, 205, 207, 222, 224, 229, 249; furnishings 66, 165, 183, 191, 222, 249; policy xv, 29, 66; see also communion table Amiens 92 Anabaptists 203 Animal imagery 36, 56, 112, 125; bull 149; falcon 166; lamb 79, 93, 125, 126; see eagles separately Anderson, Dr 119 Andrews, Lancelot 20, 24 n. 69 Angels 11, 22, 35, 43, 78–9, 82, 89, 91, 149, 155, 163, 164, 170, 172, 183, 218, 223, 224, 229, 240, 241, 249, 254 Antichrist 44, 48, 51, 119, 159, 212 Apocrypha 211 Apostles 19, 42, 93, 96, 141, 154, 156, 158, 176, 177, 217, 228, 239, 241, 245, 249 Apprentices 69, 159, 186 Aquinas, Thomas 11 Armagh, archbishop of (Ussher, James) 66 Ark of the Covenant 2, 44 Armada, monuments of 27, 28 & n. 81, 134 Arminians 20–22, 25, 27, 28, 32, 38, 46, 217, 218, 250 see also Laudians Arminius, Jacobus 21 Arthur, Prince 205 Articles of Surrender 190, 208, 235 Aston, Margaret xii, 7 Aubrey, John 232, 235, 242–4 passim

Austin, Humphrey 207 Aylworth, Martin 244 Aymes, William 123 Babington, Gervase 11, 12, 14, 16 Bagley, Jane 94 Baillie, Robert 33 Baker, Michael 236 Baker, Samuel 135 Bale, John 18 Ball, Peter 52 Bancroft, Richard 21, 134 Baptism 57, 66, 203 Barker, Robert 67 Barrow, Henry 17–18, 55 Barton, Captain 206–7 Barwick, John 224, 225 Basel xvi n. 10, 3 Bastwick, John 25 Bath and Wells, diocese 29 Bathurst, Robert 243 Baxter, Richard 30, 129 Becket, Thomas 4, 183, 185, 190 Bedford, earl of 67 Bell, William 84 n. 63 Berkshire 99; Childrey 102; New Windsor 102; Newbury 102; Reading St Lawrence 102, 103; Stanford in the Vale 105 Berne 3 Berwick 262 Bible 57, 135, 191, 207, 211 Billiers, Captain 240 Bishops 9, 32–3, 37, 48, 58, 65, 66, 69, 130, 180, 212, 215, 251; images and monuments of 42, 127, 186, 187, 188, 194, 196, 208–9, 215, 247, 254; see also episcopacy Bishops’ Book 4 Bishops’ Wars xi, 29, 203 Blackwell, John 139, 140, 175–6 Blakeston, John 84 n. 63 Blasphemy Act xv Blatchly, John 123

305

INDEX

Blomefield, Francis 112, 231 Blount, Thomas 115–16 Boehme, Jacob 55 Bogh, Thomas 68–9 Boldero, Edward 226 Bond, Denis 84 n. 63 Bond, John 171–2, 176 Bonfires 87, 119, 159, 187, 188, 212, 234, 235 Book of Common Prayer xii n. 4, 5, 16, 17, 30, 66, 70, 191, 204, 205, 212, 224, 233 Book of Sports 64, 185 Books destroyed 209, 235 Booth, Thomas 141 Bourne, Immanuel 211 Bowing 63, 66, 67, 70, 137, 155, 186, 203, 220, 221, 223 Boys, Edward 115–16 Brasses, monumental 76–7, 93, 148, 163, 165, 188, 191, 206, 208, 230, 242, 248, 250 see also inscriptions and orates Brazen serpent 2 Brent, Nathaniel 28 Bridgeman, Orlando 69 Bridges, John 13 Bridges, Major 107 Bristol 199 Brooke, Lord 211 Brough, William 146, 170 Brown, Mr (John, Richard or Samuel) 84 n. 63 Brown, Joseph 165 Browne, Adam 89, 92 Browne, Thomas 188 Bruen, John 19, 41 Bucer, Martin 4, 10 Buckingham, duke of 82, 255 Buckinghamshire 209; Brickhill Parva 130; Eton 77; Maids Morton 118; Wendover 203 Bullinger, Henry 4, 10 Burgess, Cornelius 50, 197, 200 Burgoyne, Roger 68 Burne, Thomas 130 Burton, Henry 25, 26, 30, 58 Byzantine iconoclasm 2 Calamy, Edmund 94, 142, 157 Caldwell, Samuel 248 Calvin, John 2, 10, 11, 12, 24, 49 Calvinism xiv, attacked 20–22, 217

Calvinists 11, 16, 21, 23 n. 64, 25, 79, 217 Cambridge, city of: Great St Mary’s 101, 222, 224–5, 230; Little St Mary’s 231; St Botolph’s 230; St Edward’s 230; St Giles’s 230; St Michael’s 230; St Peter’s 230 Cambridge, University of 245, 248, 254; Bill and ordinance concerning 219, 225; Colleges: Caius 218, 223, 227, 229; Christ’s 125, 218, 223, 224, 226, 228; Clare Hall 222, 226, 228, 229, 230; Corpus Christi 218, 221, 224; Emmanuel 218, 219, 221, 223; Jesus 219, 222–3, 224, 226, 227, 228; King’s 222, 223, 224, 226, 228 & n. 37, 230, 231; Magdalene 221, 228; Pembroke 122, 124, 128 n. 100, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231; Peterhouse 152 n. 58, 218, 222–4, 227–31 passim; Queens’ 125, 221, 226–30 passim; St Catharine’s 117, 218, 221, 224, 228–9; St John’s 222, 223, 224, 227, 230; Sidney Sussex 218, 221; Trinity 218, 222, 224, 226, 230; Trinity Hall 230; Report on innovations 219, 220, 221–4 Cambridgeshire 99, 100 n. 3, 122; Barton 128; Castle Camps 29; Cheveley 128; Ely, Isle of 122; Ely Cathedral 197, 213; Horseheath 126; Teversham 126 Canons (1604) 29, 67, 80, 125; (1640, New) 32, 39, 62 Canterbury 4, 99, 105, 108, 113, 129, 194, 252–3; Cathedral 113, 129, 177, 178, 181, 182–5, 193, 198, 199, 202, 204–5, 214, 215, 246; St George’s 27, 28 Capuchin friars 14, 71–3 Cardell, John 165 Carlisle 199, 208 Carter, John 15, 112 Caryl, Joseph 94 Case, Thomas 157 Catesby, Mr 119 Cathars 2 Cathedrals 29; Commons order for reformation (1642) 181; deans and chapters 108, 181, 188; demolition proposed 81, 189, 197–9, 216; hostility to 17, 18, 26, 32, 49, 55, 178–80; neglected 193, 199–200; plate 75, 191, 213, 214; repaired 189, 191, 199 & n. 76

306

INDEX

Catherine of Aragon 210 Cawley, William 84 n. 63 Chamberlin, William 130 Chambers, John 68 Chancel steps 64–5, 67, 76, 78, 101, 102, 103, 122, 137, 142, 165, 169–70, 222, 226–7, 254 Charing Cross 86, 87 Charles I xi, xv, 15, 25, 28, 51, 98, 167, 179, 220; images of 54, 81, 209, 210, 233; Spanish match 14, 95 Charles, Prince (Charles II) 249, 254 Chatham Chest, governors of 199 Chauncey, Charles 40–1 Cheapside Cross 21, 42–6, 47, 49, 51, 59, 60, 73, 84, 85–6, 119, 124, 159,161, 174, Plate 5 Cherubim 2, 26, 33, 149, 218, 223, 226, 228, 229 Cheshire 19, 67, 100 n. 3; Bunbury 69 n. 26; Chester 69 n. 26, 106, 107 n. 28; Cathedral 199; Tarvin 41 Chichester Cathedral 179, 205, 210, 213 Chidley, Katherine 55 Chidley, Samuel 55–6, 194, 197, 255 Choir stalls 88, 196, 205, 241–2 Christ 1, 18, 51; images of 9, 16, 19, 20–24 passim, 33–5, 42, 46–7, 63, 82, 89, 109, 112, 113, 116, 126, 129, 154, 156, 157, 177, 183, 184, 194, 204, 207, 212, 218, 222, 223, 227, 228, 229, 234, 235, 238, 239, 240–1, 242, 244, 245, 248, 249; as lamb 79, 93, 125, 126; see also Passion, crucifixes Christmas Day xv, 225, 263 Church ceremonies 17, 186, 187, 195, 202–3 Churches; buildings idolatrous 18, 39, 55–6, 81; disorders in 63, 65, 67, 138–40, 153; refurbishment 20, 22, 25–6 Churchwardens 64, 65, 70, 106, 108, 239, 251; accounts 99, 102–3, 133 Churchyards 77, 173, 196 Clare, John 209 Clarke, Henry 56, 127, 197, 255 Cleaver, Richard 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 34 Coates, Alan 243 Cogan, Henry 94 Cokaine, Sergeant-major 204 Coke, Sir John 159 Cole, William 228

Colet, John 3 Collins, Dr 223 Collinson, Patrick xiii–xiv, 9, 184 n. 23 Commissioners to view images 62, 63, 71 Committees: County Committees 105, 114–16, 185, 252, 190–3; set up to organize iconoclasm 105, 108–13, 182–90, 252; see also parliamentary committees Commons, House of: bill for regulating the universities 219, 225; order to deface royalist monuments 239–40; order for the reformation of cathedrals (1642) 181; order for suppressing innovations, September 1641 35, 39–40, 47, 58, 64–5, 67, 68, 76, 83, 101, 104, 106, 129, 140–57 passim, 173, 181, 226, 230, Appendix I; debated in lords 65, 67; validity of 68–9, 70; see also parliament Communion rails xii n. 4, xvi, 29 & n. 83, 30, 32, 39, 40–1, 63–8 passim, 73, 76, 95, 97, 100–2, 129–43 passim, 144, 154–7 passim, 162, 165, 170, 171, 173, 181, 203–6 passim, 223, 224, 230, 232, 254; Elizabethan rails 29 n. 83, 67 n. 19, 68 n. 23 Communion table xvi, 22, 28, 29, 61–6 passim, 73, 76, 88, 93, 94, 96, 97, 103, 104, 107, 108, 134–43 passim, 154, 155, 157, 164, 170, 171, 221, 223, 231, 254; candlesticks, basons and tapers on 65, 66, 76, 86, 223 Consecration 17–18, 196 Constantine, Emperor 2, 49 Cooke, Cornelius 138 Cooke, William 184 Cooper, Trevor xii, 99, 128, 225, 229 Copes 26, 62, 78–9, 89, 94, 96, 167, 188, 190, 214, 236, 246 Corbett, Miles 84 Cork, earl of 27 Coronation regalia 88 & n. 74 Cosin, John 26, 33, 41, 62, 63, 131, 218, 219, 223, 224 Cowper, Thomas 106 Cox, Richard 7, 9 Crane, Thomas 141, 152 Cranmer, Thomas 4, 178 Craske, Hammond 109 Creation, the 22, 23 Crew, Nathaniel 245

307

INDEX

Crofton, Zachery 57 Cromwell, Oliver xi n. 1, 63, 82–3, 196, 197, 199, 206, 207, 213, 241, 255 Cromwell, Thomas 4 Cross, Claire 193 Crosses xvi, 6, 7, 61, 73, 92, 96, 103, 123, 144, 145–6, 149, 156, 159–63, 168, 173, 174, 180, 185, 190, 194, 222, 225, 230, 239, 249, 255; campaign against 86–7, 159–63; Golden Cross inn sign 86; Harley’s destruction of 84–5; legislation against 76, 77, 78; market crosses xiii, 19, 114, 116, 118, 213; sign of 17, 57, 66, 203; steeple crosses 123, 149, 159–63, 168, 173, 185 Crosier staff 236 Crow, John 123 Croyden Palace 24, 89 Crucifixes 3, 6, 23, 65, 66, 67, 71, 76, 78, 103, 112, 126, 156, 181, 183, 188, 194, 213, 217, 222, 223, 227, 243, 248; in private houses 116–17, 137 Culmer, Richard 113, 129, 178, 182–5, 204, 246, 253 Culmer, Richard Jnr 182, 184 Culpeper, John 63, 75 D’Ewes, Simonds 31, 62, 65, 68, 69, 70, 76, 77, 78, 144 n. 4, 148 Daft, Edward 130 Dallam, Thomas 194 n. 60, 218, 244 Dalsh, John 214 Davenant, John 22, 23 & n. 64 Davies, Clifford 247 Davill, Charles 111–12 De Dominis, Antonio 18 De Losinga, Herbert 186 De Saxonia, Ludolphus 206 Deborah 6 Decalogue 3, 10, 13, 36, 125, 177, 194 Delaval, Thomas 107 Dell, William 48 Deputy lieutenants 107, 117–18, 124 Derbyshire 107 n. 28; Ashover 209, 211–12; Derby, All Saints 102, 103, 104, 130 Dering, Edward 34, 69 Devil, the 240, 241 Devon 107 n. 28; Tiverton 52 see also Exeter Directory of Public Worship 80, 81, 104, 115, 118, 165, 169 Dod, John 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 34

Dorset 100 n. 3 Dort, Synod of 21 Dossey, Richard 191, 193 Dove, Bishop 208 Dowsing, William xii, 99, 105, 108, 117, 120–8, 185, 194; at Cambridge 220, 221, 224, 225–31, 251, 252; commissions of 121, 225–6, Appendix III Drake, Francis 191 Drake, Richard 30 Ducke, Arthur 135–6, 153 Dudley, John, earl of Warwick 5 Dudley, Lady Alice 153, 154 Duffy, Eamon 1, 5 Dugdale, William 205, 243 dulia 11, 22, 36 Duppa, Brian 28 Durham Cathedral 7, 26, 41, 62, 63, 177, 199 Dutch War 198, 199 Dyson, William 134 Eagles, brass 112, 125, 166, 204, 211 Eales, Jaqueline xv Eastern Association xii, 106, 120–8, 194, 225, 227, 248, 252, 253, 254 Edgehill, battle of 201, 212, 235 Edward the Confessor 92 Edward VI xi, 4, 23, 92, 205, 210 Eire, Carlos xv Elizabeth I xi, xiii, 6–11 passim, 16, 43; Anjou match 14; chapel at Westminster Abbey 92; chapel ornaments 7, 9; injunctions 23, 29; see also royal injunctions and visitation articles; monuments to 28, 134, 152 n. 58; order concerning fonts (1561) 79–80; proclamation against destruction of church monuments (1560) 8, 65 Eltham Palace 116 Elton, Edward 15 Episcopacy 33, 48, 49, 59, 127, 131, 180, 215, 250, 251 see also bishops Erasmus, Desiderius 3 & n. 5, 4 Essex 29, 57, 99, 122; Chelmsford 123, 129, 130; Colchester Allhallows, 108; Earls Colne 102; Finchingfield 51; Halstead xii n. 4; Hornchurch 123; Little Easton 152 n. 58; Neveden 123; Radwinter 30; Saffron Waldon

308

INDEX

123; Sandon xii n. 4; Waltham Cross 123 Estfield, William 151 Evangelists 79, 109, 125, 172, 177, 186, 207, 229 Evelyn, John 191, 208, 244 Exeter 52, 99, 100, 194–7; Cathedral 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 195–7, 199, 200; St Kerrian’s 101 Fairfax, Thomas 192, 193, 214, 216, 241 Falkland, Lord 63, 75 Fanshawe, Thomas 40 Fast sermons 50–1, 121 Field, John (council of state printer) 57 Field, John (Puritan divine) 15, 17, 49, 58 Fielding, Edward 239 Finch, Edward 137 Finch, Jonathan 188 Firth, C. H. 204 Fisher, Henry 101, 130 Fonts 27, 78, 79–80, 83, 101, 104–5, 115, 130, 135, 136, 137, 165, 169, 173, 177, 178, 183, 192, 230, 242, 249, 255 Fowler, Edward 131, 194–5 Fox, George 48 Frankfurt 6, 7 Frewen, Accepted 28, 237 Friars 104, 158, 223 see also Capuchin friars Funeral monuments 36, 38 see also monuments of the dead Gage, Henry 239–40 Gameson, Richard 242 Gamul, Francis 106 Gardner, Samuel 20 Garland, Mr 262 Garret, George 94 Gassaway, Thomas 89, 91, 92, 96 Gaunt, John of (tomb of) 5 Gelderd, John 114, 191 Geneva 3, 6, 7; Bible 7 Gerrard, Gilbert 84 Geyl, Pieter 1 Gibbons, Christopher 244 Gibson, Peter 192 Gilley, Captain Clement 122, 123 Gloucester 5, 99, 194; Cathedral 56, 131, 182, 194–5, 198, 199, 208, 210, 242; St Michael’s church 102 Gloucestershire 100 n. 3 Glynne, John 84

God 3, 8, 21, 22–4, 35, 36, 38–9, 62, 63, 92, 126, 131, 183, 194, 240, 248, 249, 250, 251 Goodman, Joan 29 Goodman, Thomas 62 Goodwin, John 169 Goodwin, Thomas 165 Gorges, Thomas 231, 249 Goring, Lord 52 Gouge, William 157 Gower, Captain 71 Grafton, Richard 10 Grand Remonstrance 69, 202 Graunt, William 137 Greenbury, Richard 241 Greenhill, William 50 Greenwell, John 109 Greenwich Palace 93, 97 Greenwood, John 187 Grey, Lord 225 Grey, Nicholas 29 Grimston, Harbottle 69 Grindal, Archbishop Edmund 7, 9 Gunpowder Plot 27, 28 n. 81, 134 Gunton, Simon 195, 199 Gurdon, John 84 Gurnay, Edmund xiv n. 8, 34, 35–8, 57, 58 Gurney, Richard 159 Guy Fawkes Day 129 Gymes, Lieutenant-Colonel and Captain 236 Hacket, John 66 Hakewill, George 14 Hall, Joseph 186–7, 209 Hamburg 3 Hammond, Henry 54, 58 Hampshire 99, 107 n. 28; Alton 102, 103; Chawton 102; Newton 107; South Warnborough 100; Upton 102; see also Winchester Hampton Court Palace 82, 93, 97, 244 Harding, Thomas 13 Harley, Brilliana (daughter of Robert) 85 Harley, Lady Brilliana 44 Harley, Robert xiv n. 8, 52, 63, 73, 78, 82, 83–98 passim, 106, 108, 119, 123, 163, 174, 219, 252, 255 see also Harley Committee under parliamentary committees Harris, Robert 238, 242 Harsnett, Samuel 19–20, 28 Haslerigg, Arthur 213

309

INDEX

Hausted, Peter 221 Henderson, Alexander 91 Henrietta Maria, Queen 14 Henry VII’s chapel 90–1 Henry VIII xi, 4, 208 Hereford Cathedral 178, 199, 203, 205 Herefordshire 100 n. 3; Brampton Bryan 84; Buckton 84–5; Leintwardine 84–5; Leominster 84; Wigmore 84–5 Hering, Samuel 55 Herring, Michael 76–7, 148–50, 175, 252 Herring, Theodore 114 Hertfordshire 57, 99, 107 n. 28, 122; Ashwell 102; Bishop’s Stortford 101, 123; Hadham 29; St Peter’s St Albans 123; Ware 40 Heylar, William 177 Heylin, Peter 33 Heywood, William 141, 154 Hezekiah 49, 60, 247 Hickeringill, Edmund 108 Hickes, Robert 89, 93 High Commission 26, 37, 40, 41 Hill, Thomas 237 Hinde, William 41 Hitch, William 213 Hodson, Phineas 190 Holland, earl of 204 Holles, Denzil 93 n. 90, 97 Holy Ghost 8, 34, 42, 89, 124–5, 126, 145, 177, 183, 195, 218, 230 Homily on Idolatry 8–9, 23, 34, 37, 38 Hood, Paul 245 Hooker, Richard 16, 20 Hooper, John 5, 11 Hope, Captain 206–7 Hopton, Ralph 210 Horne, Robert 7 Houghton le Spring 107–8 Howell, Thomas 138 Hoyle, David 221 Hoyle, Thomas 193 Humanists 3 & n. 5 Humphrey, Lawrence 28 Hunt, Richard (churchwarden) 149–50, 175 Hunt, Richard (deacon of Durham Cathedral) 26 Huntingdonshire 99, 122, 123; Buckden 21; Yaxley 203 Hutchinson, John 82, 255 Hutchinson, Lucy xii n. 4, 14 Hutton, Matthew 248

Hyde, Edward, Lord Clarendon 63, 75 Hyperdulia 11 Iconoclasm: anti-monarchical 81–2, 96, 209, 210, 234, 239–40, Appendix II; definition of xvi; linked to military victory 73, 75; opposition to 111–12, 181, 184–5; post-Restoration 131; spontaneous acts of xiii, xv, 3, 4, 6, 61–2, 65, 94, 129, 137; see also soldiers Idolatry xiii, 1, 2, 5, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 32, 37, 39, 40–1, 42, 44, 50, 51, 58, 73, 210, 231, 238, 255 IHS 146, 155, 166, 168, 223, 224 see also supersitious letters Images: in open places 73, 77, 84, 86, 157, 160, 174; increase of 32, 33–4, 58, 62; non-religious use of 16, 24–5, 34, 82–3, 174 Indemnity, Act of 130 see also Oblivion, Act of Independents 55, 116, 146, 158, 165, 196, 197, 199, 237, 243, 255 Inns of Court 64 Inscriptions 76–7, 104, 168, 249, 250 see also brasses and orates Irish Rebellion 47, 58, 201–2, 250 Isaac 154, 164 Islam 2, 16 Jacob 172 James I 19, 21, 23, 28, 179; images of 54, 81, 210 Jessey, Henry 55 n. 69 Jewel, John 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 118, 178 John, King 205, 210 Jones, Inigo 94 Jones, Jeremy 142 Jonson, Ben xii Joseph and Mary 228 Josiah 4, 45 Josselin, Ralph 101 Jud, Leo 10 Justices of the Peace 64, 77, 87, 106–8 Juxon, William 34, 134–6 passim Kelsinge, Roland 161 Kent 99, 105, 115–16, 129, 184, 204, 252; Biddenden 102; Brookland 103, 125; Charing 102; Chatham St Mary 103–4, 118; Goodnestone 185; Harbledown 185; Maidstone 115;

310

INDEX

Minster-in-Thanet 129, 185; see also Rochester and Canterbury Kenwricke, William 115–16 Kettel, Ralph 43, 235 Kings and queens, images of 42, 54, 56, 185, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 247 Kingsley, William 27 Kneeling figures 77, 188, 243, 254 Knight, William 19 Knox, John xv, 7, 12 Knyvett, Katherine 122 Knyvett, Thomas 122 Lade, John 183 Lake, Peter xiv, 16, 26–7 Lambeth Palace 24, 30, 61, 71, 78 Last Judgement 92, 233, 240 Latimer, Hugh 4 Latria 11, 22, 36 Laud, William xvi, 11, 14, 22–30 passim, 37, 48, 61, 89, 134, 135, 180, 185, 217, 218, 234; chapel attacked 71; trial 24–5 Laudians 27–30, 37, 40, 48, 50, 134, 215, 218, 237, 251; innovations xiii, 100, 130, 173, 254; iconoclasm of 27; opposition to 32–3, 57, 100, 134–7, 177–81 passim Layfield, Edmund 29, 135–6, 155–6, 173 Lazarus 150 Leadman, Robert 165 Lehmberg, Stanford 197, 198 Leicester: St Martin’s 104 & n. 22; St Mary’s 104 Leo III, Emperor 2 Ley, John 50 Lichfield Cathedral 179, 197–8, 203, 206, 209, 211, 212, 213 Lilburne, John 55 Lincolshire Crowland 206; Lincoln 99, 122; Cathedral 199, 207–8; Spalding 52 Lindsey, Matthew 109, 187 Lollards 2, 17–18 London (places): Camden House 120; Christ’s Hospital 33, 98, 167, 174; City parishes: Allhallows Barking 131, 135–6, 142, 144, 146, 152 n. 58, 153, 154, 155–6, 161 n. 85, 162, 169 n. 106, 173; Allhallows Bread Street 157; Allhallows Honey Lane 133, 144; Allhallows Lombard Street 142,

311

144, 162, 165, 167, 169; Allhallows the Great 162; Allhallows the Less 161, 162–3; Christ Church 119, 137, 145, 166; Holy Trinity 162; St Alban Wood Street 142, 162, 165; St Alphage London Wall 138, 169 n. 107; St Andrew by the Wardrobe 144, 150, 161 n. 84, 162, 167, 168 n. 3, 170; St Andrew Hubbard 168; St Anne and St Agnes Aldersgate 138, 141 n. 30, 144; St Anne Blackfriars 157; St Antholin Budge Row 28, 161, 162, 168 n. 3, 170; St Bartholomew by the Exchange 142, 162, 166, 168, 169 n. 106; St Benet Fink 169 n. 107; St Benet Gracechurch 137, 138, 162, 165, 167; St Benet Paul’s Wharf 141 n. 30, 144, 162; St Botolph Aldersgate 141; St Botolph Aldgate 138; St Botolph Billingsgate 137, 161, 162, 169 n. 106; St Botolph Bishopsgate 161 n. 85, 162, 166–7, 169; St Bride Fleet Street 142, 144, 162, 169 n. 107; St Christopher le Stocks 135, 137, 162; St Dionis Backchurch 137, 142, 144, 162, 169 n. 106, 173; St Dunstan in the East 161, 162, 164, 166, 168–9; St Dunstan in the West 152 n. 58, 162, 167, 169 n. 106; St Ethelburga Bishopsgate 161, 168; St George Botolph Lane 140, 167; St Giles Cripplegate 68, 140; St Gregory by St Paul 29, 135; St Helen Bishopsgate 141 n. 30, 144, 162, 172; St James Garlickhithe 168; St John Walbrook 162; St John Zachary 161, 168, 169 n. 106; St Katherine Cree 163 n. 5, 164 & n. 88, 169 n. 106; St Lawrence Jewry 134, 141, 144, 145, 151–3, 162, 169 n. 107, 175; St Lawrence Pountney 162, 169 n. 107; St Leonard Eastcheap 143, 144, 148; St Leonard Shoreditch 152 n. 58, 156, 172; St Magnus the Martyr 50, 139, 144, 152 n. 58, 153, 168, 175; St Margaret New Fish Street 141 n. 30, 143, 144, 148, 169 n. 106; St Margaret Pattens 138, 162, 171; St Martin Orgar 137, 142, 144, 168 (Table 3 n. 3), 169 n. 106, 170; St Martin Outwich 144, 162, 163; St Mary Abchurch 162,

INDEX

London (places) (continued) 169 n. 106; St Mary Aldermanbury 142, 157, 162; St Mary Aldermary 141 n. 30, 142, 169 n. 106; St Mary at Hill 50, 169 n. 106; St Mary Colechurch 152 n. 58, 162, 167, 169 n. 106, 172 & n. 116; St Mary Magdalen Milk Street 134, 140, 157, 169 n. 106; St Mary Somerset 144, 145, 162, 165, 167; St Mary Woolchurch Haw 76–7, 144, 145, 148–50, 162, 173, 174, 175, 252; St Matthew Friday Street 162, 167; St Michael Bassishaw 161 n. 85, 162; St Michael Cornhill 87, 97, 141 n. 30, 142, 144, 145–6, 162, 166, 169, 170–1, 176; St Michael Crooked Lane 141, 144, 164–5, 166, 168 & n. 3, 169 n. 106, 170; St Michael le Querne 171, 176; St Michael Queenhithe 162, 163; St Michael Wood Street 144, 148, 162, 163, 169; St Olave Jewry 59, 141 n. 30, 144, 169 n. 106; St Olave Silver Street 141 n. 30, 144; St Pancras Soper Lane 144, 145, 146–8, 162, 167, 173; St Peter Cornhill 162, 172; St Peter Westcheap 134, 167; St Stephen Coleman Street 158, 169; St Stephen Walbrook 138, 144, 145, 150, 169 n. 106, 175; St Swithin London Stone 144, 145, 168 n. 3, 170; St Thomas the Apostle 139, 140; Fishmongers’ Company 164–5, 174; Guildhall 85, 152 & n. 58, 157–8, 174, 252–1; Haberdashers’ Hall 120; Mercers’ Company 151–3; Merchant Tailors’ Company 119, 174; Old Bailey 120, 131; Royal Exchange 87; St Paul’s Cathedral 7, 5, 30, 61, 81, 93–5, 145, 199, 252; Swan Alley 55 n. 69; Whitefriars 119; see also Cheapside Cross and Charing Cross London (subjects): altars abolished in 5; campaign against crosses 85, 160–3; image-breaking 3, 4, 6; May 1643 order 86–7, 158, 160–1; ministers’ committee concerning innovations 85–6, 152, 157–8; petitions 135–8, 140–1, 142, 148, 154, 155–6, 165, 166, 173; Root and Branch 62; refurbishment of churches 25–6,

134–7, 145, 146, 151, 153–6; riots 30, 65, 138–40, 153, 159; see also Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry, under parliamentary committees Lords, House of: committee to consider innovations 65–6; debates on Commons’ 1641 order 67; order concerning divine service 62–3, 65–6, 67, 68, 70; order concerning images at Oxford 80, 237–8; order for the protection of the universities 225; order to protect royal property 78; petitioned for the protection of Canterbury Cathedral 183; search for superstitious items at Oxford 236–7; see also parliament Loveday, Samuel 43–4, 58 Luther, Martin xi, 1, 3 Lutheran churches 79 Magic 17–18 Manchester, 1st earl of (Henry Montagu) 121 & n. 76 Manchester, 2nd earl of (Edward Montagu) 106, 107, 109, 120–1, 122–3, 207, 220, 225–6, 252; as Lord Kymbolton 67 Mapletoft, Robert 124, 226 Marriage ceremony 17, 66 Marshall, Stephen 51, 255 Marshall, William 4, 10 Marston Moor, battle of 190 Marten, Henry 71, 88, 198, 262 Marten, Henry (dean of arches) 135 Martin, Richard 130 Martyn, Anthony 214 Martyr, Peter 8 Mary Tudor xv, 5–6 Mary Stuart xv, 14, 210 Massey, Edward 52 Masterson, Daniel 113, 183 May Day xv, 225 Maypoles 83, 232 Mercurius Aulicus 52, 54, 85, 88, 93, 94, 96, 149 Mercurius Belgicus 91 Mercurius Britanicus 59, 97 Mercurius Rusticus 52–3, 88, 129, 200–1, 204, 205, 209, 213 Merritt, Julia 25 Michalski, Sergiusz xvii

312

INDEX

Michelson, John 129 Middlesex: Acton 203; Chiswick 203; Hillingdon 203; Isleworth 137; St Giles in the Fields 68, 133, 141 & n. 30, 144, 145, 153–5, 157, 167, 173; Stepney Church 50; Uxbridge 203; Whitechapel, St Mary 28; see also Westminster Middleton, Thomas 214 Mildmay, Henry 62, 95, 263 Mildmay, Humphrey xii n. 4, 86 n. 69 Millenarianism 44, 51 Mills, Peter 145, 166 Milton, John 48, 81–2, 178 Ministers: and iconoclasm 50–2, 85–6, 94, 105, 113, 114, 134, 141, 157–8, 182, 185, 201, 212, 215, 251, 252–3; petitions against 62, 129, 137; see also petitions; scandalous 62, 120, 137, 150, 157, 186, 225 Minshull, Richard 209 Minstall, Thomas 181 Mitres 94, 127, 236–7, 246 Montagu, Richard 22, 33, 35, 38 Montague, Walter 15 Monuments of the dead xii, 70, 76–7, 93, 196, 204, 207; royalist 238–9, 248; royal tombs 69 see also funeral monuments Moon, images of the 56, 126–7, 254 Moore, John 70 Moore, Mr (John, Poynings or Thomas) 84 n. 63 Moore, William 130 Morrill, John xii, 99–100 & 100 n. 3, 121, 122 Moses 2, 154; and Aaron 109, 126, 156, 172, 177, 178, 186, 205 Muniments destroyed 235 Nativity 91 Nayler, James 48 Neile, Richard 22, 23 Netherlands 1 Netheway, Mary 82 Nettleship, Hugh 141 New Testament 205, 207 Newark 102, 105 Newbury, battle of 149 Newcomen, Matthew 121 Newell, Robert 89 Nicea, Council of 2, 10 Nicholas, Edward 69

Nineteen Propositions 71 Nixon, John 234 Norfolk 99, 100 n. 3, 122, 194; Ashwellthorpe 122; Aylsham 101; Banham 122 n. 83; Besthorpe 123 n. 84; Fritton 123 n. 84; Great Yarmouth 189, 199; Harpley 35; Swaffham 122 n. 83; see also Norwich Normandy, Robert of 210 Northamptonshire 99, 107 n. 28; Apelthorpe St Leonard’s 152 n. 58; Great Houghton 101; Lowick 103; Marston Trussel 101 Norwich 19–20, 99, 105, 108–13, 252, 253; Cathedral 109, 122, 180, 182, 185–90, 193, 199, 203, 209, 215; committee against images 105, 108–13, 185–90; parishes: St Benedict’s 100, 111; St George Tombland 112; St Gregory’s 101, 111; St Laurence’s 111; St Mary Coslany 111; St Peter Mancroft 20, 28, 101, 109–11, 112; St Stephen’s 100, 112; St Swithin’s 109 Oblivion, Act of 237 see also Indemnity, Act of Old Testament xi, 2, 14, 21, 27, 49, 125, 126, 205, 207, 245, 246 Orates (prayers for the dead) 125, 229, 230, 243 see also inscriptions and brasses Organs 30, 41, 48, 96, 101, 102, 145, 154, 166–7, 177, 186, 188, 190, 194, 195, 196, 203, 204, 205, 207, 212, 223, 224, 242, 244, 249, 255; installed 217–18, 212; legislation against 78; organ lofts 92, 93, 94, 191 Orme, Humphrey 207 Orthodoxy, Council of 2 Ouldis, Alexander (‘Mr Oales’) 123 Overall, Bishop 186 Overton, Richard 33, 45, 59 Owen, John 238, 245 Owen, Morgan 218 Owen, Thankful 245 Oxford, city of 54, 100, 119, 231–9, 250, 252, 254; soldiers in 232–5, 238–43; parishes: St Martin Carfax 232, 248; St Mary Magdalen 218, 233, 234, 235, 239, 244; St Michael 232, 233; St Peter in the East 232

313

INDEX

Oxford, University of 108, 231–49, 250, 254; Colleges: All Souls 231, 234, 235, 237, 244, 247, 249; Balliol 21, 217, 234, 246, 247, 249; Christ Church 28, 217, 218, 232, 233, 236, 238, 239–40, 244, 246, 249; Corpus Christi 232, 236, 244; Exeter 232; Jesus 232; Lincoln 21, 217, 218, 232, 245; Magdalen 28, 54, 217, 218, 219, 231, 232, 233, 236–7, 238, 240–1, 244, 248; Merton 232, 241–2, 247–8, 249, 250; New College 28, 217, 232, 234, 244, 248; Oriel 244, 249; Queen’s 33, 217, 231, 246; St John’s 26, 217, 232, 244; Trinity 234–7 passim, 242–4, 246, 249, 255; University 218, 246; Wadham 26, 217, 234, 237, 246–7; colleges searched 232–3, 234, 236–7; parliamentary visitors 80, 236–8; parliamentary regulation of 219, 225 Oxfordshire 99; Banbury 19, 107 n. 28; Burford 241; Ewelme church 214 Pain, John 128 Paris 3 Parker, Matthew 8, 9 Parliament: Long Parliament xvi, 1, 31, 33, 129, 131, 136, 161, 173, 218, 251; Militia Ordinance 202; orders against royal images and arms 81–2, Appendix II; ordinances against images: August 1643 75–7, 83, 87, 102, 103, 106, 107, 121, 130, 148, 170, 194, 226, 229, 230, 254, Appendix I; May 1644 77–80, 83, 87, 102, 104, 107, 124, 148, 153, 168, 169, 170, 181, 194, 226, 254, Appendix I; ordinance for repair of churches (1648) 81, 107; ordinance for repentance (1643) 73; plans to demolish cathedrals 87, 197–9, 216, 254; regulation of universities 219, 225; report on innovations at Cambridge 219, 220, 221–4; sequestration ordinances 118; Short Parliament 61, 135; see also Commons and Lords, Houses of Parliamentary committees: for the Advance of Money 150; for the bill against innovations 64; for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry

(Harley Committee) 43, 52, 60, 73, 75, 77, 83–98, 152, 157–62, 163, 164, 168, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 183, 252, 253; May 1643 order 86–7, 158, 160–1, Appendix I; members 84 n. 63; for Plundered Ministers 81; for Religion 155, 157, 218; sub-committee 34; for Scandalous Ministers 137, 150, 157; for setting the poor on work 198; for Sick and Wounded Soldiers 197; Recess Committee 68; Sequestration Committee 87, 118, 119; universities committee 219; see also committees Partridge, Nicholas 4 Paske, Thomas 204, 214 Passion, the 246, 247; instruments of 126, 243 Patterson, Catherine 179 Paul’s Cross sermons 4, 13 Peasants’ Revolt 209 Peasants’ War 3 Penn, William 116 Pennington, Isaac 62–3, 64, 69, 158, 255 Pennington, Isaac Jnr 116 Pennington, Mary xii n. 4, 116, 117 Pennyman, William 239–40 Perkins, William 12, 13, 15, 16, 57 Peterborough 99; Cathedral 182, 195, 198, 199, 200–1, 206–7, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214–15, 216 Peters, Hugh 197 Petitions 29, 47, 61, 68, 69, 75, 85–6, 95, 112, 129, 135–8 passim, 140–1, 142, 148, 154, 155–6, 157, 165, 166, 173, 180, 181, 183, 202, 219, 237; concerning cathedrals 189, 191, 198, 199, 200, 216; post-Restoration 184, 197, 236 n. 63; Root and Branch 62 Petley, Peter 91, 95 Phillips, John xi Pindar, Paul 167 Pinke, Dr 234 Plate 20, 75, 79, 88 n. 75, 95, 116, 146, 148, 149, 168, 190–1, 205, 207, 213–14, 222, 232, 246, 249 Plato 2, 13 Pollen, John 114 Pope, the 32, 44, 45, 47–8 Popham, Alexander 206 Preaching 12–13, 18, 22, 43, 48, 50, 56, 62, 131, 178, 179, 193, 195, 197, 199; by soldiers 211

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INDEX

Presbyterians 16, 17, 33, 55, 58, 150, 180, 235, 240, 242, 255; congregations 196, 199; elders 80; parishes 146, 163, 170, 171, 176 Press, censorship 32, 34, 36; underground 57 Preston, John 117 Prideaux, John 66 Prodigies 57 Prophets 126, 241, 245 Protestation Oath 44, 45, 139, 141 Prynne, William 18, 24, 25, 26, 30, 33, 35, 44, 58 Public Faith 73, 198 Pulpit 25, 27, 102, 134, 145, 172, 178, 180, 186, 190, 211; cloths 102, 125, 130, 150, 166, 168, 191, 214, 236 Purefoy, William 118, 213 Puritanism, nature of xii–xiii, xiv–xv; definition 16 Pye, Robert 70 Pyham, John 104 Pym, John 61, 63, 68, 149, 150, 151 Quakers 55, 56, 116 n. 61, 127 Queen’s chapel see Somerset House Quelch, William 157, 165 Querela Cantabrigiensis 224, 229 Ram, Robert 52, 59, 212 Ranters 55 Reformation xi, xvi, 1, 3, 10, 11, 18, 38, 42, 178, 193, 251, 254, 255 Reredoses xiii, 171, 172, 177, 207 Restoration 57, 105, 173, 190, 218, 240, 246, 248, 250; disputes concerning images after 108, 130–1, 136, 184, 194–5, 236 Resurrection, the 91, 92 Revelation 51 Reynolds, Robert 89 Reynolds, Thomas 119 Rich, Robert, earl of Warwick 67 Richmond, duke of (chapel) 92 Ridley, Nicholas 5 Riots 6, 61, 65, 67, 69, 72, 94, 111, 123, 129, 138–40, 153, 159, 194 Roberts, Foulke 27 Robinson, Mr 262 Rochester Cathedral 116, 199, 205 Roman Catholicism 16, 45, 47–8, 58, 68, 71–2, 119, 177, 201–2, 215, 223, 250–1

Roman Catholics 14–15, 37, 68, 72; houses searched 87, 116, 18–20, 202, 225 Rome 3, 10, 13, 30, 33, 45, 59, 178 Roods xiii, 9, 78–9, 103, 107, 250, 254 Rose, John 138 Rothwell, John 34 n. 6 Rous, Francis 62, 84 Rous, John 30 Rowe, Dr 230 Royal chapels 7, 9, 78, 79, 95–7, 252 see royal palaces individually named Royal injunctions xiii, 1, 4, 6, 7–8, 66, 67 Royalists: houses searched 87, 225; monuments attacked 238–9; propaganda 52–4 Rushworth, John 24 Rutland, John 89, 93, 97 Rutter, William 110 Ryves, Bruno 52, 200 Sabbath 50, 185, 203, 255 Sacred wounds, the 95 St James’s Palace 71, 95, Plate 2 St John, Oliver 198, 216 St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin 27 St Paul’s Cathedral see London Saints xiii, 6, 22, 36, 42, 76, 78, 80, 92, 95, 125, 137, 155, 158, 159, 163–4, 183, 185, 207, 217, 227–30 passim, 233, 239, 240, 241, 243, 246, 247, 249, 254; cult of 2; churches named after 17; venerated 3, 4; St Barnabas 153; St Christopher 228; St Cuthbert 242; St Dunstan 163, 169, 174; St Elizabeth 222; St George 22 8; St Gregory 243; St John 249; St John the Baptist 143, 217, 222, 229; St John the Evangelist 109, 125; St Katherine 228, 235, 242; St Lawrence 145; St Leonard 242; St Michael 131, 136, 163, 164, 173, 223, 227; St Oswald 242; St Paul 35, 153, 177; St Peter 91, 92, 109, 174, 177, 218, 223, 227; St Stephen 150 Salisbury 11, 65; Cathedral 179, 199 & n. 77, 214; St Edmund’s 22, 115, 125; St Thomas’s 115, 130 Salloway, Humphrey 84 Salteren, George 38–9, 58, 255 Sampson, Thomas 9, 14 Sanderson, Robert 21

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INDEX

Sandys, Archbishop Edwin 8, 9 Sandys, Colonel Edwin 83, 204 Saunders, Jonathan 131, 136 Savoy, Chapel and Hospital see Westminster Saye and Sele, Lord 220, 232–4, 235, 238, 242, 255 Scambler, Edmund 188 Scory, John 178 Scot, Lady 52 Scrutton, James 191 Seaman, Lazarus 94, 157 Searll, Richard 103 Second Commandment 10, 15, 40 Sedgewick, Obadiah 212 Selsey, Wilfred 208 Separatists 17, 46–7, 48, 55, 150, 180, 255 Service books 59, 203, 204 Sharpe, Buchanan 215 Shearman, Edmund 131 Sheldon, Gilbert 237 Sherfield, Henry 11, 22–4, 65, 115, 121 Sherwood, Livewell 109 Ship Money 179 Shropshire 100 n. 3 Skelton, Richard 24 n. 68 Smart, Peter 26, 41–2, 177 Smedley, Scout-master 211 Smith, George 104 Smith, Henry 117 Smith, Thomas 106 Smyth, John 17 Smyth, Thomas 231 Soldiers: attacks on cathedrals 180, 182–3, 194, 195, 196, 200–16; discipline 204; encouraged to attack images 51–2, 116, 118, 212–15; iconoclasm xiii, 29–30, 61, 71, 77, 88, 102, 105, 224–5, 232–5, 238–43, 251, 252; mocking church ceremonies 186, 187, 195, 202–3; plunder of private houses 118–20, 202, 225; religious motivation of 51–2, 201–2, 211, 253; Scottish 62 n. 1, 208; see also Eastern Association Solemn League and Covenant 188, 251 Solomon 2, 14, 154 Somerset 107 n. 28, 182; Beckington 29; Taunton 212; Wrinton 102 Somerset House 61, 71–3, 95, Plate 2 Somerset, Protector 5

Southwark 65; St George 68, 141; St Olave 138; St Saviour 67, 138, 140 Springett, Mary see Mary Pennington Springett, William xiv n. 8, 105, 116–18, 120, 213, 251, 255 Squire, John 156 Stained glass windows 5, 18–19; erected 21, 22, 26, 27, 217–18; commissioners to view 71; removed 41, 45, 89–91, 92, 94–5, 97, 101, 102–3, 131, 150–3, 154, 156, 164, 183–4, 192, 227–9, 233, 238, 240–3; hidden survived 94–5, 131, 172, 184, 228 & n. 37, 231, 240, 245–8, 246–7 Standish, Francis 200, 208, 214 Stanton, Dr 92 Stars images 56, 126–7, 223, 254 Stephens, Jeremy 244 Sterne, Dr 219 Stevens, Thomas 91, 92 Stone, Nicholas 173 Stoups 79, 104 Strasbourg xvi n.10, 3 Stubbs, John 14 Stukeley, Lewis 197 Suffolk 99, 100 n. 3, 122, 123; Barking 128; Chattisham 128 n. 99; Clare 127; Covehithe 128; Eye 128; Great Cornard 128; Great Wenham 128 n. 99; Haverhill 128; Helmingham 126; Ipswich St Clement’s 128; Ipswich St Helen’s 128 n. 99; Little Cornard 128; Mickfield 128; Otley 126; Peasenhall 101; Ringsfield 127; Rishangles 128; Stoke by Nayland, Tendring Hall 128; Stonham Aspal 101; Stratford St Mary 121; Trimbley St Mary 125; Ufford 127, 128; Weybread 101 Sun images of the 56, 126–7 Superstitious letters 223, 229 see also IHS Surplices 35, 78–9, 96, 101, 102, 167, 190, 203, 212, 233 Surrey 107 n. 28; Guildford 21 Sussex 107 n. 3; Arundel Castle 116 Sutton, Baptista 21, 89, 151–2 & n. 58, 153, 172 Swaffham Cartulary 207

316

INDEX

Symbolic representations 78–9, 124, 125, 126–6, 145, 254 see separately Christ (lambs), eagles, evangelists, Holy Ghost, saints and Trinity Symonds, Richard 200 Tabor, James 219 Taylor, Captain 114 Temple Church 73 Ten Articles, the 3 Ten Commandments, the see decalogue Tertullian 24 & n. 69 Thaine, Anthony 237 Thompson, Henry 193 Thompson, Leonard 191, 193 Toft, Thomas 109, 187 Topclyffe, Henry 207 Torre, James 192 Torregiano, Pietro 91, Plate 3 Townsend, Henry 195, 203 Tracey, Humphrey 210 Triers 80 Trinity 3, 17, 26, 42, 63, 65, 67, 76, 78, 82, 84, 86, 125, 126, 140, 143, 145, 157, 158, 160, 164, 172, 174, 192 Tuscany, duke of 195 Twisse, William 66 Tyacke, Nicholas 27 Universities 48, 108; beautification of chapels 217–18; parliamentary regulation of 219, 225; Lords’ order to protect 225; see separately Oxford and Cambridge Utting, John 110 Van Linge, Abraham 28, 217–18, 240, 245, 246 Van Linge, Bernard 217, 246–7, 248 Venn, Colonel 77 Vestiarian dispute 17 Vestments 30, 78–9, 96, 167, 203, 255 see also copes and surplices Vicars, John 33, 58, 72, 91, 98, 119, 157, 159, 205–6, 212, 255 Virgin Mary 3, 11, 13, 19, 28, 42, 65, 67, 76, 82, 86, 89, 92, 93, 95, 109, 119, 143, 149, 155, 156, 157, 164, 172, 182, 183, 218, 222, 234, 244, 247 Visitation articles 130–1; royal 4, 6, 7–8

Waldron, Thomas 107 Walker, Robert 122, 225, 227 Waller Plot 167 Waller, William 59, 205, 213, 214 Wallington, Nehemiah 45, 143 Walloons 75 Walton, Bryan 137, 170 Ward, Seth 66 Warmestry, Thomas 39, 58 Warner, John 150 Warner, John (bishop of Rochester) 137, 142, 177, 178 Warwickshire 107 n. 28; Alcester 107, 250; Coventry 118; Warwick 118, 213; Whitchurch 39 Watt, Tessa xiv Watts, William 166 Weldon, Ralph 115–16 Wells Cathedral 181, 199, 200, 206, 210 Westminster 262; parishes: St Clement Danes 144, 161, 162; St Margaret’s Westminster 51, 85, 86, 88, 89, 93, 126, 166–7, 168, 173; New Chapel 85, 89, 152 n. 58; St Martin in the Fields 134, 162, 166, 171; St Mary le Strand 87 & n. 74, 142, 143 n. 35, 144, 162, 163, 168, 171; Savoy Chapel 142, 171–2; Savoy Hospital 176 Westminster Abbey 21, 69–70, 73, 78, 85, 87, 124, 210, 252; Harley Committee’s reformation of 88–93 Westminster Assembly of Divines 75, 157 Weston, John 165 Wharton, Nehemiah 201, 202, 203, 205, 212 Wheedon, Thomas 226 Wheeler, William 84 Whitbie, Oliver 139 White, John 34, 84, 156 Whitehall Palace 54, 78, 82, 88, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96–7 Whitfield, William 51, 201 Whittingham, William 17 Widdowes, Giles 232 Wilcox, Thomas 15, 17, 49, 58 Wiles, Robert 148 Wilkins, John 245 Wilkinson, Henry 239, 246 Williams, John 21, 66, 218 Wilson, Thomas 117 Wiltshire 100 n. 3, 107 n. 28

317

INDEX

Winchester 99, 203; Cathedral 54, 179, 182, 198, 205–6, 208, 209, 210, 213–14, 216, 254; St Peter Chesil 103 Windsor Castle 77 Winstanley, Gerard 18, 48 Witchcraft 18 Wood, Anthony 233, 238–40 passim, 244, 246, 247, 249 Worcester 5, 99, 195, 203, 204; Cathedral 180, 181, 195, 199, 203, 205, 208, 210, 213; battle of 238, 240, 249, 254 Worcestershire 100 n. 3, 107 n. 28; Kidderminster 129; Rous Lench 105 Worden, Blair 238, 243, 244, 245 Wotton, Lady Margaret 113 Wray, John 93 n. 90

Wren, Matthew 41, 62, 130–1, 218 Wrightman, Mrs 146 Wycliffe, John 3 Wykes, Thomas 34 & n. 8 York 99; county committee 105, 114–15, 252; Minster 114, 179, 182, 190–3, 199, 208, 214, 215, 216, 254; parishes: St Dennis’s 115; St Martin’s Coney Street 114 Yorke, Peter 21 Yorkshire 107 n. 28; Elland 105; Masham 105 Zurich xvi n. 10, xvii, 3, 5, 6 Zwingli, Huldrych 3, 5

318