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Toby Terrar, “Social Ideas among Post-Reformation Catholic
Laboring People: The Evidence from Civil War England in the 1640s.” This
article originally appeared in History of European Ideas (ISSN:
0191-6599), vol. 14, no. 5
(September 1992), pp. 665-694. (DM06.01.02; 18c-art8.doc).
This
article looks at several related social ideas among the post-Reformation
English Catholic laboring people. The period of analysis is the Civil War of
the 1640s. This is a favored period for historians because divisions were sometimes
sharp. The abundant court cases, legislation, pamphlets, and letters generated
to justify various interests give the student an opportunity to bring into
clearer focus ideas which in other periods might be misinterpreted or missed
entirely. This is particularly the case for laboring Catholics who did not
leave an abundance of written records about their social ideas. The laboring
Catholics were a relatively large but, until the advent of the county studies
starting in the 1950s, almost invisible sector in the community's history.[1]
The
discussion of the Catholics' social ideas is relevant to several
historiographical points. One point concerns the question, do laboring people
have idées or do they merely possess a mentalité. It has been argued that the thought of
laboring people, unlike that of the educated classes, does not advance beyond
the level of "operative" cognition to that of formal thought.[2]
In this view, one must be free from concrete imagery and the constraints of the
real world in order to have ideas. This article does not attempt to measure the
relative concreteness of the Catholics' imagery. But the article does suggest,
based on their behavior and documentary evidence, that many Catholic laboring
people had social ideas which were distinct from but which they took just as
seriously as those of the gentry.[3]
Another
historiographic point addressed concerns the on-going revision in
post-Reformation English Catholic history. The article draws upon and seeks to
contribute to the revision by isolating and analyzing several social ideas that
emerge in the county studies. The county studies brought an interpretive
revision about the composition of the post-reformation English Catholic
community. This article raises the possibility of extending the revision to the
community's ideas.
The
picture of the Catholics that is reflected in the county studies is of a
community of mainly laboring people living in the north and west of England and
in the five major towns and cities of London, Norwich, Bristol, Newcastle, and
York. Catholicism did best in poor areas where Anglican parishes were large,
offered little income for the established clergy, and consequently the needs of
laboring people were ignored. John Bossy estimates the Catholic population doubled
between 1603 and 1641 because a sector of the Catholic clergy were willing to
live and serve at the lower standard of living available in the poorer areas.[4]
As
reflected in the county studies, anti-Catholic persecution was not significant.
Most were not convicted recusants. Not only were they too poor to prosecute for
recusancy, a significant if indeterminate number were church Catholics, meaning
they partially or occasionally conformed to the established church.[5]
One might conclude from the social ideas they manifested during the war that
the persecution in their lives was not so much religious as economic and it
came from Protestant and Catholic landlords. During the Civil War, the
community followed its own independent interests, which often coincided with
those of the Protestant Independents. This picture of mainly laboring people
turns on its head the view that prevailed in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century about the community being predominantly gentry, Royalist, and dominated
by anti-Catholic persecution.
The
social ideas that are of interest in this article are antinomianism, meaning
literally those "against the law," and the labor theory of value.
These two ideas were related. The seventeenth-century antinomians, it will be
argued, rejected both the spiritual and material basis of the established
order. Antinomian levelers and their Catholic counterparts tended to view
religious, economic, and political value in terms of labor. In the Catholic
pamphlets and activities, one finds the idea that it was God's plan that since
laboring people produced wealth, they should enjoy it, not landlords and
monopolists.
It
should be noted that the Catholics' social ideas, like those of the levelers,
did not generally mean the abolition of property rights. Some of the Protestant
levelers even complained that they were "levelers, falsely so
called."[6] One pamphlet
stated, "We profess we never had it in our thoughts to level men's
estates, it being the utmost of our aim that the commonwealth be reduced to such
a pass that every man may, with as much security as may be, enjoy his
property."[7] A. L. Morton
points out that the seventeenth-century laboring people saw the small property
of the small man menaced "not by the poor but by the rich--by monopolists,
greedy entrepreneurs, and enclosing landlords."[8]
It was against these that security was needed. The levelers represented and
appealed in the main to the small and medium producers.
The
Catholics' social ideas contrasted with those of the gentry. The gentry taught
that God wanted obedience to the established order with any redistribution of
wealth toward its producers to come in the next life. In the gentry's doctrine
God had a special love for their class, not for laboring people.[9]
Antinomianism.
The antinomian aspect of the Catholic community will be taken up first.
Outlined will be its manifestation in the community's ecclesiastical and
political policies. Four preliminary points need observation. First,
antinomianism did not mean anarchism, despite the contentions of those who
opposed them. The antinomians did not intend to remove the essence of the
Mosaic law, that is, its political and moral content, but rather to clear the
way for its realization. Second, the antinomians of the period did not generally
use the term "antinomian" to describe their ideas. It was a term of
abuse used by their enemies. But scholars now use it to designate them.
Third,
not all historians would agree that antinomianism was a material, that is, a political
and economic, as well as a spiritual idea. But there is no lack of authority
for the materialist interpretation and it seems to best describe the
developments within the Catholic community.[10]
Illustrative of those who give antinomianism a materialist interpretation is
Christopher Hill. He points out that the term meant the repudiation of
"all human laws, not just Mosaic law."[11]
The Presbyterian-dominated Parliament in 1646 called treasonous the teaching of
antinomianism and enacted capital punishment against it.[12]
The Presbyterian gentry did not fear antinomianism because of otherworldly
considerations, but because, as occurred in Pride's purge in 1648, the
antinomian Independents were seeking political power at the expense of the
Presbyterians. Just a few years earlier the Presbyterian gentry in Parliament
had themselves professed the antinomian doctrine in their battle with the
crown. But once they achieved victory in 1646, they sought to exclude its
further use to, among others, the laboring people who opposed not only the
crown but the landlord order as well.
In
using the term antinomian to describe an aspect of their social ideas, this
article is not suggesting that the community was concerned with any precise
doctrinal meanings that the term has for academics. Rather it is used loosely
to describe a general attitude among many Catholics and Protestants who
believed in and acted upon their own authority and interests. This sometimes
put them in opposition to the crown or parliament or gentry or ecclesiastical
hierarchy. In using the term to describe a general attitude, the article
follows Gertrude Huehns, who summed up her study, "Antinomianism is to
some extend independent of its precise doctrinal meaning. In short there seems
to be an `antinomian attitude' to general issues just as there is a Puritan
attitude to them."[13]
For the same attitude the established order sometimes used the term
"criminal." Criminal, however, as used here, would be those who were
indiscriminate in their leveling, those laboring people who stole from their
laboring neighbors and shared the gentry's belief that it was legitimate to
live off the labor of others.
A
fourth and last preliminary point is that the term antinomian is most
frequently used to describe Protestants, but scholars do use it for Catholics.
For example, Jodi Bilinkoff in her study of religious reform in
sixteenth-century Spain calls "antinomian" the teachings of Maria
Vela y Cueto.[14] James
Gaffney labels the program of the English Benedictine priest Augustine Baker
(d. 1641) "a virtual antinomianism predicated on the belief that nothing
is finally normative for human behavior but the personal experience of what is
taken to be a divine inspiration."[15]
This
article argues that the concept of antinomianism can also be fruitfully used in
connection with Catholic laboring people. Some of the political, economic, and
religious programs promoted by the community at the local and national level
did not differ from those of the levelers. The evidence for this comes from the
Catholics' pamphlets, court cases, and political-economic activities, as
uncovered in the county studies. One of the sources for information about
antinomian ideas are pamphlets. There were not as many Catholic antinomian
pamphlets as there were Protestant, but such pamphlets nevertheless had a
presence in the community. The Catholic antinomian pamphlets were written by
the educated, but the writers were said at the time to embody the ideas of the
laboring people.
At
the top of a list of perhaps 5 or 10 Catholics who wrote such pamphlets was the
secular priest, Thomas White.[16]
With some 40 titles to his credit, White did well in terms of being published
and reprinted. This was evidently because he articulated what many people
believed and patronized. According to John Bossy, White was the intellectual
leader of the 450 secular clergy in England during the period.[17]
That he was representative of the thinking of laboring people was testified to
at the time by the Royalist, Robert Pugh. Pugh complained that White took the
side of the "meanest of the commons, against the just rights of the king,
the nobility, and a great part of the gentry."[18]
Similarly Roger Coke was upset because White was a tool of those with
"plough-holding" hands.[19]
White served the Catholic community in London and lived in a rented a room. He
does not seem to have been employed as a domestic chaplain for the gentry.[20]
One
of the themes in White's pamphlets was that obedience to the established order
in church and state was not God's will. The Protestant antinomian Thomas
Collier wrote in 1646 that "believers are a law unto themselves."[21]
White taught in like manner, "It is a fallacious principle, though
maintained by many, that obedience is one of the most eminent virtues and that
it is the greatest sacrifice we can offer to God, to renounce our own wills,
because our will is the chiefest good we have."[22]
Besides questioning the connection between God and obedience, other antinomian
ideas prominent in White's pamphlets included universal grace, an emphasis on
the Holy Spirit, and eschatology.[23]
Each idea had political-economic ramifications that were detrimental to the
landlord order. For example, the gentry denied the universal grace doctrine
because the doctrine meant they and their institutions were not God's conduit
of grace; they were not "all things to all men."[24]
White's
pamphlets, it appears, reflected an antinomianism that was born of and
characteristic of the community. Two significant examples of where the general
community gave concrete form to antinomianism need mention and will constitute
the evidence offered here for the community's antinomian social ideas. These
examples involve the community's ecclesiastical and political policies.
Ecclesiastical policy will be covered first. As noted earlier, the county
studies picture the relative unimportance within the community of
anti-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism and the continuing existence of church
Catholicism. When the king was in power, church Catholics lied in taking the
oath of supremacy, which acknowledged the king as head of the church. Then the
Catholics lied in taking Parliament's oath of abjuration when that oath was
imposed after 1642.[25]
Church Catholicism was a continuing aspect of the community in England and its
existence was illegal in the eyes of both the established church and Rome.
Blaise Pascal in his Provincial Letters of 1656
blamed Rome and the Jesuits for teaching the doctrine of equivocation, that is,
that it was licit to lie under oath. But Rome and the Jesuits were teaching
just the opposite. Pope Innocent X in 1649 denounced equivocation because it
was "ecclesiastically subversive."[26]
If the pope had had his way, Catholics would not have taken the oaths or
attended Anglican services. They would have shed their blood for what they
believed was Roman clericalism.
The
tendency of the Catholics to be a law unto themselves in ecclesiastical policy
extended to their clergy. The 450 secular clergy in England governed themselves
through their dean and chapter, which was a body of elected representatives.
They maintained a fraternal, not paternal or inferior relation to Rome that had
probably always been characteristic of English Catholicism.[27]
George Leyburn described the chapters 28 elected members some years after the
Civil War. One was John Medcalf, who was archdean of Northumberland and
Cumberland. He maintained that if he headed the English government, he would
proscribe all priests who refused to take the oath of allegiance.[28]
Rome asked Humphrey Waring, who was dean or head of the chapter, why he was
unwilling to comply with "the decrees of His Holiness, for the keeping of
which decrees one hundred and forty martyrs had shed their blood, and undergone
a glorious death." He responded that he and the other clergy had made up
their minds "to live for the future according to the customs of the
Gallican church."[29]
Chapter member and archdeacon Henry Turbervill was said by Rome to
"constitute himself defender of the oath, commonly known as the oath of
allegiance, in which are contained many things contrary to Catholic faith and
the authority of the Roman church."[30]
Thomas Carr another member of the chapter "to the best of his power
promoted Jansenism."[31]
Chapter member John Leyburn was a "`neopoliticus Gallus,' looking after
his own rather than the public good," [the "public" being Rome].[32]
The non-sectarian bent of some secular priests, such as Thomas Carter and
William Johnson included attending services in the established church.
It
was not the crown, the Parliament, or the pope, that such Catholics saw as
supreme, but themselves. Where Catholicism did best in England it was not
because of obedience to clerical doctrines promoted by Rome or the established
church, but because the Catholic clergy served the pastoral needs of those who
were neglected by the Protestant clergy. This is not to say that Catholics had
any lack of doctrines. But, as will be seen, their doctrines centered on the
value of labor.
In
the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the existence of the extensive
controversial literature between the seventeenth-century Catholic and
Protestant clergy was taken to signify that the Catholics were more subservient
to Rome than their church Catholicism would appear. But the controversial
literature, especially the most sectarian examples, did not arise from the
ranks of the laboring Catholics or from the clergy who were engaged in the
pastoral and congregational ministry. Rather it came from those who lived abroad
and to a lesser degree from those who were employed as domestic chaplains by
the gentry.[33] Not a small
portion of Rome's "anti-Protestantism" was directed against the
Catholics and their clergy rather than at the Protestants. For example, Thomas
Sanchez, S.J. and Robert Persons, S.J. taught that partial conformers and the
clergy who served them were apostates, schismatics, and excommunicate.[34]
In
addition to ecclesiastical policy, a second example of where the Catholic
community gave concrete form to antinomianism was in their political program.
During the Civil War, as noted, they generally took an independent position
that best protected their economic, political, and religious interests.
Independency did not mean neutrality. Their independency like that of the
Protestant Independents, including the levelers, sometimes put them in
opposition to the royalist order and sometimes in opposition to the
parliamentary order. The Catholics voiced the same antinomian justifications
for their opposition that were used by the Protestants.
There
are two parts to the discussion of the Catholics antinomian political activity.
The first part concerns the Catholics' politics at the national level; the
second is about the local level. The scholarly understanding of the Catholics
as independents is a recent development, one of the results of the county
studies.[35]
As noted earlier, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Catholics were
pictured as having been among the crown's most obedient subjects. And it was
true that the Catholic gentry were often Royalists. But they were a small part
(perhaps 5 percent) of the community. Keith Lindley's comments are typical of
the more nuanced view that derives from the county studies:
When Catholic
royalism is related to Catholics generally in the counties, it is apparent that
the Royalists managed to raise only a minority of Catholic support for their
body. . . Catholics were not a unified group in this period, but were divided
by status and interest, and to some extent they appear to have reacted to the
formation of the parties in the same way as their Protestant counterparts.[36]
The
laboring Catholics, as depicted in the county studies saw themselves as having
nothing to gain in 1639 by having Scotland reduced to an English colony and by
imposing a system of bishops on the Scottish church.[37]
Nor did they believe there was any advantage to them in the first Civil War in
helping the king to overthrow Parliament. Derek Hirst is among those who have
shown that Parliament was often responsive to laboring people.[38]
Yeomen, including church Catholics, through the ballot exercised considerable
influence over public policy.[39]
Among
the national policies that made Catholics reluctant to see the crown overthrow
Parliament was the tax system. During the 1630s when it ruled without
Parliament, the crown imposed a "ship money" tax to fund itself. Many
believed this tax and the rule of the crown without Parliament to be illegal.
The tax fell heavily on the laboring people, both rural and urban, and was
resented, especially by the poor.[40]
The playwright Philip Massinger (d. 1640), who bibliographer Joseph Gillow
maintains was a Catholic, was popular with laboring people. He was typical of
those who protested against the tax.[41]
In his play The King and the Subject (1636), which
the crown called "insolent" and refused to license, Massinger put the
following lines into the tyrannical king's mouth:
Money? We'le raise
supplies what way we please,
And force you to subscribe to the blanks, in which
We'le mulct you as we shall think fit. The Caesars
In Rome were wise, acknowledging no laws
But what their swords did ratify.[42]
In her writings the English Benedictine
nun Gertrude More (d. 1633) remarked on the "unjust taxes" inflicted
on the people.[43] In 1639
there was a mass refusal among Catholics and Protestants to pay "ship
money."[44] Derek Hirst
describes the nation-wide opposition to "ship money" taxation that
was manifested in the parliamentary elections of 1640:
The likelihood is
that the open challenges to aspects of government policy which took place at
many of the 1640 elections were not wholly manufactured by the gentry. Unlike
ordinary parliamentary taxation, which left the bulk of the population
untroubled, ship money hit the pockets of a very extensive social group, and
was correspondingly resented.[45]
Not
long after Parliament took over, it abolished the "ship money" tax.
Beginning in 1643 an assessment tax explicitly on landowners was established as
one of Parliament's main sources of revenue.[46]
Tenants who paid what was due on account of their farms were entitled to deduct
it from the rent. While laboring people had no objections, both the royalist
and parliamentary gentry disliked the assessment, which was collected on a
weekly and then a monthly basis and which equaled from 15 to 70 percent of the
gentry's rent receipts.[47]
It was only the New Model Army's threat of rebellion that kept Parliament from
repealing the assessment after 1646.[48]
The Catholic recusant gentry such as Arthur Tyrer and his wife Margaret in the
parish of West Derbie (Liverpool) had a double reason to resent the tax, as it
was doubled against them.[49]
That
the Catholic tenantry were inclined toward the assessment tax and the
parliamentary government which the tax supported can be seen in cases such as
that involving the manor of Sowerby Thirsk in Yorkshire. Sowerby Thirsk had
enough Catholics that it had its own Catholic school.[50]
The manor was owned by the Catholic Thomas Meynell, a "radical
encloser" who had been censured by the quarter sessions court as a
depopulator. His tenants were probably all Catholic.[51]
These included the families of Lawrence Brown and Christopher Hawe, who stopped
paying rent to him all together during the Civil War period. His other tenants
turned over their rent to the county committee instead of to Meynell. Meynell
disliked this. His income was about £500 per year but was normally understated
as £40 per year for tax purposes.[52]
Meynell was unable to dodge his taxes when his tenants handed over their rent
directly to the county committee. In 1647 he called his tenants "vulgar
plebeians" because they "presumed to assess the true landlord. . . as
thought he had been one of their coridons. . . The lord's rent at Sowerby was
never assessed or questioned until these late new times. The bushhopper tenants
were never so unkind or foolish to access their lords' rent."[53]
The
support which the Catholic tenants at the Sowerby Thirsk manor showed for the
Parliamentary tax system, including rejection of landlord rights, was no different
from that of many Protestants. Manors were governed by assemblies of tenants,
which as David Allen points out in his study of the Puritans at Rowley in
Yorkshire, required wide participation, not deference in government.[54]
Manors dominated in areas of open field production, such as the north and west
of England, where Catholics had their greatest strength. The independence which
these manor governments maintained in relation to the landlord order seems to
have been antinomian in the sense that the term was used of Protestants during
the war. Of course there were also those with social ideas deferential to the
gentry. There is a continuing debate about this concerning the Protestants.[55]
Certitude about what percentage of Protestants were deferential or independent,
or for how long or under what circumstances is not settled. This article cannot
expect to establish any better certitudes concerning the Catholics. But it does
suggest that evidence from the county studies examined and to be examined here
requires a revision in the interpretation that the only social ideas held by
laboring Catholics were those of the gentry.
The
tithe was another part of the crown's tax system and was no more popular than
ship money. It likewise helps account for the Catholics reluctance to see the
crown overthrow Parliament in 1642. Both Catholic and Protestant Independents
supported the establishment of a voluntary system for maintaining the clergy
and the abolition of the tithe. Such a measure was enacted by the Barebones Parliament
in November 1653. But the Presbyterian and Anglican minority went to Cromwell
and got him to overturn the act.[56]
However, Cromwell was not able to prevent the people on their own from
substantially reducing the income of the established clergy.[57]
Besides
taxation, a national policy that made laboring Catholics unenthusiastic for the
royal side in 1642 was the crown's drafting and billeting of troops for the
Northern War beginning in 1639.[58]
Laboring people, especially the Catholics who lived in the North, were targets
of the troop levies and they resented it. The wide-spread refusal to fight
among the crown's conscript rank-and-file Catholic troops, which Charles I
marched to the Scottish borders, brought him to quick defeat.[59]
Edward Varney commented in May 1639, "I dearsay there was never so
unwilling an army brought to fight."[60]
On
the other hand, as set forth in the county studies, Parliament sometimes found
favor with laboring people because as it gained increasing power in the early
1640s, it abolished many crown monopolies and patents, eliminated a number of
rotten boroughs to improve Parliament's representativeness, abolished the Star
Chamber, which had been used by the crown to control the county justice of the
peace network, eliminated the House of Lords in 1647, which was a landlord
institution, outlawed slavery (servitude) and the incidents of post-conquest
feudal tenures in 1646, released poor debtors from prison, and in some cases
allowed the landless to take over royal and common land.[61]
Because the peerage was abolished Catholic nobles like Henry Arundell were
denied trials in the house of peers. They had to appear in the local courts,
which were more accessible and at times more receptive to the needs of laboring
Catholic tenants.[62]
Because
of such considerations it is not surprising to see in the county studies a not
infrequent reference to laboring Catholics who served in the parliamentary army
or held offices such as assessor, collector, or magistrate under the
parliamentary government.[63]
John Hippon was even a member of Cromwell's own regiment in the New Model Army.[64]
Hippon referred to himself as a "Catholic and a Parliamentarian."
Allen Prickett was a church papist who served first in the trained band for
"part of St. Sepulchers parish and other parts adjacent to the city of
London" and on March 8, 1642, he joined the parliamentary army.[65]
Another was a weaver, who was mentioned by Richard Baxter in his account of the
war. Baxter was a chaplain in the same unit with this follower of "Thomas More":
When I came to the
Army, among Cromwell's soldiers, I found a new face of things, which I never
dreamed of. I heard the plotting heads very hot upon that which intimated their
intention to subvert church and state. Independency and anabaptistry were most
prevalent; antinomianism and arminianism were equally distributed; and Thomas
More's followers (a weaver of Wisbech and Lynn, of excellent parts) had made
some shifts to join these two extremes together. . . I perceived that they took
the king for a tyrant and an enemy and really intended absolutely to master him
or ruin him; They said, what were the Lords of England but William the
Conqueror's colonels, or the barons but his majors, or the knights but his
captains?[66]
Thomas
Clancy, S.J. suggests that after the crown's defeat in 1646, Catholics
"overwhelmingly" supported the Independent party within Parliament.[67]
This included the Catholic gentry who wished to benefit from the religious
toleration offered by the Independents. Charles II complained in 1657 about the
support which the Catholics had given Parliament:
It is necessary to
take notice of the general temper of the kingdom and of the fact that the
majority of the king's friends have an aversion for Catholics. This aversion is
a natural consequence of the Catholics having "more than an ordinary zeal
for Cromwell."[68]
The
community's clergy were not least in using antinomian arguments in resisting
the crown. For example, the secular priests William Rushworth and Henry Holden
wrote that it was wrong to look to the law and scripture like the pharisee,
"We should look to our own hearts: Christ's law is written in a
Christian's heart."[69]
In justifying the overthrow of the crown, Holden remarked that the royalist
"sycophants" did "basely flatter all supreme power and act as if
we ought to look upon them as to be worshiped and adored as Gods."[70]
One even sees in their pamphlets millennialist ideas about the imminent rule of
the saints on earth during which wealth would be redistributed to producers,
social injustice would be eradicated for a thousand years prior to the final
judgment day and a "third age of the church" would be established.[71]
The
laboring Catholics took an independent position because they had little to gain
by the crown overthrowing Parliament and because parliamentary programs in some
measure served their needs. But most of the community also had nothing to gain
by the abolition of the monarchy in 1649. This was the other half of their
national policy, besides independency from the crown, where the Catholics
followed their own light, which was not unlike the antinomians.
The
crown was sometimes seen by laboring people as an asset. The existence and
aggression of the crown forced the gentry in Parliament to seek the aid of and
make concessions to the working people, especially those in the army, in order
to gain their support against the threats of the crown. Some of the concessions
that were won by laboring people from Parliament and that can be attributed at
least in part to their playing the crown off against the Parliament included
toleration of opinion, expanding voting rights, and elimination of taxes that
hurt the poor, not the least of which was the excise.[72]
The
opposition of laboring people against the excise tax illustrates how they used
the crown against Parliament and why some at least took a stand independent of
Parliament concerning the king's execution. The excise was a tax on consumer
goods and, unlike the assessment, had a direct impact on laboring people in
raising prices. It was often protested by the Moderate,
which was the newspaper of the leveler movement, although sustained opposition
to the tax also came from overseas traders and merchants. Rioting in 1646 and
1647, the opposition of the soldiers in the New Model Army who opposed its
application to the poor and their necessities, and the threat that the
population would join with the recently defeated Royalists forced Parliament to
remove the excise tax on salt and meat in June 1647. The widespread refusal to
pay it on other items thereafter lessened its usefulness as a revenue measure.[73]
Because
it eliminated some of their leverage against the gentry, opposition to the
king's execution came especially from the levelers and artisans, including
weavers, painters, and journeymen in the city companies.[74]
The Catholics' independent strategy of playing the crown off against Parliament
was illustrated when they, including the Catholic gentry, joined the
Independents in 1647 in winning increased religious toleration against the
wishes of the Presbyterian gentry within the parliamentary party. The
Protestant Independents welcomed the Catholics as allies against the
Presbyterian sector in Parliament who wished to unify with the recently
defeated Royalists. The effectiveness of the Catholics' tactics was reflected
in the animosity shown by the Presbyterian gentry who baited Cromwell and the
Independents for their neglect to enforce the anti-Catholic laws:
Is not this like the
practice of Garnet the Jesuit who did lay his commands on the papists to obey
their king and keep themselves quiet, and all in order that the plot might not
be suspected? If Cromwell follows Garnet's steps, I would have him take heed of
Garnet's end.[75]
Cromwell took pride in stating that
citizens of all creeds enjoyed liberty of conscience under his rule, provided
they did not use religion as a cloak for rebellion.[76]
There
is evidence that Catholics took an independent political position at the local
as well as at the national level. The other part of this discussion of the
community's political activity concerns the local level. Like the levelers, a
sector of the Catholic community turned the Civil War into a war of economic
leveling against landlords, monopolists, and enclosers. Illustrative were the
troubles which Cecil Calvert and his Arundell in-laws had with their tenants,
which seem not to have been unusual. Calvert and the Arundells were Catholics
and lived in southwest Wiltshire. Some and probably most of Arundell's tenants
were Catholic.[77] The records
are silent about the religious denomination of Calvert's tenants, but it was
common for a Catholic landlord to have Catholic tenants.[78]
Both
Arundell and Calvert identified with the crown and were in large measure
leveled during the war. Their tenants took part in the leveling. Derek Hirst
finds that assaults on the gentry's houses in the early part of the war were
often a pretext for forays against the manorial records.[79]
Tenants took the war as an opportunity to settle economic grievances. The
leveling in May 1643 of Wardour castle, which was the Arundell's residence, was
precipitated by the siege there of Edward Hungerford, Edmund Ludlow, and their
parliamentary troops. The Catholic tenants and neighbors took a hand when it
came to confiscating from the castle and its surrounding lands some £100,000
worth of cattle, farm animals, tools, furniture, cartloads of fish from ponds
that were drained dry, and oak and elms worth £5 per tree that were felled and
sold at 4d per tree.[80]
Likewise, Cecil Calvert's tenants turned the Civil War into a rebellion against
him.[81]
The same thing happened in Maryland, where Calvert was the proprietor. In 1645
the Catholic and Protestant laboring people there overthrew Calvert's governor
and leveled the landlords. The Maryland Catholics were all born and raised in
the English Catholic community. They left an extensive record in their
legislation and court cases of the antinomian independent ideas which motivated
the leveling.[82]
During
the war thousands of gentry houses, woods, and parks in England were plundered
and at least 200 houses "of major importance" were reduced to ruins.[83]
This looting was directed at both royalist and parliamentary, Catholic and
Protestant gentry, and it was natural that the levelers sometimes included
Catholic tenantry and laborers. Copyholders and tenants-at-will refused to pay
rent or paid less than was customary. They ploughed up the landlord's pastures,
put in improper crops, and neglected normal manuring and repairs. Christopher
Clay comments, "Tenants threw up their farms, pressed for reductions in
rent, ignored husbandry covenants, and encroached on their landlord's rights in
other ways."[84] J. P.
Cooper documents the "irrecoverable rent arrears piling up."[85]
David Underdown quotes as not unusual the complaint by a landlord at seeing the
"massive arrears" in rents being run up:
Now men are are
lawless, trees and hedges are carried away without controlment; tenants use
their landlord how they list for their rents, taking this to be a time of
liberty.[86]
Most large landowners according to one
study were forced to sell land because of lack of rental income in order to pay
their debts and taxes.[87]
Many were bankrupted and in counties such as Lancashire that had many
Catholics, about half the gentry families disappeared permanently as landlords.[88]
Part
of the Catholics' leveling activity at the local level concerned enclosures.
Enclosures and depopulation were long-standing grievances among copyholders and
tenants-at-will in areas with relatively heavy Catholic concentrations, such as
the northern and western part of England. Landlord-dominated courts and
parliamentary legislation had allowed land to be confiscated by landlords and
turned into pasture on which to raise sheep. In these areas there was more
profit for the landlord in wool production than in the income that could be
gained by a tenant's production of grain crops.[89]
The tenantry's complaint against enclosures was part of the Grand Remonstrance
to Parliament in 1641.[90]
According to R. C. Richardson, "the central agrarian issue in the English
Revolution was whether the landlords or the small farmers should control and
develop the wastes."[91]
During
the war independent Catholic tenants along with their Protestant counterparts
tore down many of the enclosures and retook their land.[92]
One of the examples of this involved the Catholic landlords John Wintour and
Basil Brooks in Gloucestershire's Forest of Dean. Their tenants in 28 parishes
and 24 manors leveled the enclosurers and reoccupied the common land that had
been taken from them over the previous quarter century. Many of the levelers
were no doubt Catholic.[93]
The
community's activity in leveling at the local level extended to the relation of
master and servant. During the war servants found opportunities to make use of
the political system which had traditionally been unsympathetic to their
rights. The masters' world was so turned up-side-down that they sometimes
complained of being slaves of their servants. An illustration of a Catholic
servant who turned the tables on his master is given in the following account:
There were obvious
dangers in sending away discontented servants at a time of national tension.
One Lancashire servant "was required to go, as did his master and
mistress, to hear a Jesuit preach. He did not go." He was presumably
dismissed as a consequence. Naturally enough he turned informer. "As these
times go," one lord was told by his son in similar circumstances,
"all servants are masters, and we their slaves."[94]
To
the claim made by some masters that the master-servant relation was
God-ordained, unchangeable, and not subject to contractual rights by laboring
people, Thomas White voiced the belief of the laborer, "None think a
husbandman, who is hired to till or fence a piece of ground, obeys the hirer
more than he that sells a piece of cloth obeys the buyer, because he takes his
money; but they are said to contract and perform their part of the
bargain."[95] White
praised those who stood up to undue market domination, as he put it,
"seeing their labors disposed on to people, of whom they have opinion that
they are idle, vicious and unworthy, therefore desire freedom from such a yoke
and become masters of their own goods and labors."[96]
He pointed out:
What are people
better than a herd of sheep or oxen, if they be owned, like them, by masters?
What difference is there between their masters selling them to the butcher, and
obliging them to venture their lives and livelihoods for his private interest?[97]
The
community's leveling also extended to the support of market regulations against
monopolists and landlords. During the period Catholics no less than Protestants
supported legislation and, when necessary, rioting and armed struggle to make
the market more responsive to their needs.[98]
Their achievements extended to the termination of foreign and domestic trade
monopolies in cloth, and the public regulation of dealers in grain, cattle,
cheese, candles, beer, port, and sheepskin.[99]
They helped increase through their parish governments the provision of jobs for
the unemployed and job training in industries such as the spinning and weaving
of wool, fisheries, municipal brewhouses, draining of fens, and working up of
flax.[100]
Catholic coalminers, apprentices, and field workers helped gain legislation
that limited the amount of time they worked.[101]
Thomas
White was one of those who echoed the laboring Catholic antinomians in
articulating the community's reasons for supporting the measures taken against
private interests that subordinated the market at the expense of the public:
When I see the same
person work for a commonwealth, in a free way doing it good, and again for a
private person, I see a vast distance between his pretended ends. There is an
eminent generosity in one over the other. Whence, I believe it comes that
heroes and heroical virtues are chiefly taken in respect of doing good to the
whole society.
When I see it
thought that good is the same, I find it an intricate labyrinth of equivocation
wherein we endless err. To cry the common good is a mere deceit and flattery of
words unless we can show that the common good is as great to us as we make it
sound.[102]
White's
defense of market regulation was part of what Hirst calls the philosophy of the
"ordered, inter-dependent commonwealth," which had favor among the
Independents.[103]
Most of the community were laboring
people. As noted there were some that were characterized by a servile deference
and who acted against their own economic interests or found it in their
interests to hold that the established landlord order in church and state was
God's design, and that obedience to it was a sacred duty.[104]
This was not the doctrine that Rome was teaching at the time, so far as England
was concerned, but versions of this doctrine were voiced by the royalist
Catholic gentry.[105]
If it is not surprising to find some who identified with the gentry, it should
also not be surprising to find that many resisted ship money taxes, tithes,
enclosurers, rent, and market monopoly. That they would have been attracted to
the antinomian ideas that were part of resistance should be no less surprising.
Labor Value.
The labor theory of value is the other aspect of the Catholic's social ideas,
besides antinomianism, about which the Civil War period seems to offer some
evidence. Arguably, the community's antinomianism was itself testimony to their
positive ideas about labor. Behind the defense of their independence during the
Civil War, the Catholics at Sowerby Thirsk, or the Forest of Dean, or Wardour
Castle had class interests: a defense of their labor. They made the war an
opportunity to distribute back to themselves some of the wealth which their
labor had created. One should probably expect that in class-divided societies,
the social ideas of laboring people will generally have the two elements of
interest in this article. That is, resistance, which in seventeenth-century
terms included antinomianism and the labor theory of value: labor creates value
and it is God's plan for the universe that labor should enjoy its fruit. St.
Paul (2Th. 3:10) put it negatively: those who do not work, which in the
seventeenth-century were the gentry, should not eat.
It was the classical political economists
who defined labor value in a scientific manner.[106]
The seventeenth-century Catholic community was not generally concerned about
formulating a scientific theory of economic activity, but as Ronald Meek points
out, throughout the period the "habit of thinking of `value' in terms of
producers' cost remained firmly rooted in the consciousness of the direct
producers themselves."[107]
Not only direct producers but employers and merchants generally held the idea
that their income derived solely from their own labor. Meek writes:
It very often
happened at this time that the employers of labor had risen from the ranks of
the direct producers and still participated more or less actively in the actual
process of production. Therefore they naturally persisted in regarding the
differences between their paid-out costs and the price they received for their
commodities as a sort of superior "wage" for their own personal
efforts rather than as a "profit" on the capital, often very meager,
which they had supplied. Even when such employers came to confine themselves to
merely supervisory functions, it might still seem plausible to speak of their
net reward, as so many economists at this time actually did of it, as the
"wages of superintendence."[108]
It
was because the earnings of merchants who profited from stock investments were
commonly associated with labor, that Adam Smith in the eighteenth century went
to considerable lengths to show that the profits of stock were not "the
wages of a particular sort of labor, the labor of inspection or
direction," but were "all together different," being
"regulated by quite different principles."[109]
It might appear that ideas affirming
the value of labor were so commonplace that it deserves little comment. But in
the context of the seventeenth-century English Catholic community, the value of
labor was often contested by the landlord class. In their educational,
political, and cultural institutions, the gentry devoted considerable resources
toward minimizing the role of labor in society and toward glorifying themselves
and their life of "living idle and without labor."[110]
The negative ideas about labor promoted by the Catholic gentry probably
accounts for the notion which still echoes of the "Protestant work
ethic."[111]
Protestants, not Catholics, had positive ideas about labor.
Just as the county studies have
turned on its head the perception of the Catholic community as being gentry, so
one can find in these same studies evidence for revising the notion that the
community held gentry ideas about labor. As reflected in their work-lives, in
their political and religious activity, and in their pamphlet literature, most
Catholics had positive ideas about labor, both as a means to an end and as a
way of life. The "Protestant ethic" was also the "Catholic
ethic." But as Laura O'Connell and Paul Seaver point out concerning the
Puritans, the work ethic was not necessarily the capitalist ethic.[112]
Despite Max Weber, the capitalist ethic was too often that of the privileged
monopoly companies, which achieved wealth, as the Catholic and Protestant
laboring people complained, through unjust wages and prices, and through
excessive profits. The capitalist ethic, as the pamphlet literature put it,
involved robbing laboring people of the fruit of their labor.[113]
The
community's ideas about labor are perhaps best seen in their pamphlet
literature, songs, cultic activities, patron saints, feast days, street
pageants, pilgrimages, and prayers, which celebrated labor.[114]
In the rural areas the Catholics many symbolic rituals were generally related
to the productive cycle, that is the harvest year. These rituals glorified
labor and productivity.[115]
For example, Lady Day (March 25) marked the initiation of sowing and was the first
day of the year in the old calendar. Michaelmas (September 29) was the
beginning of reaping.[116]
Martinmas (November 11) was the original harvest and thanksgiving day
celebrating the filled barns and stocked larders. On Martinmas the farming
people went to mass and observed the rest of the day with games, dances,
parades, and a festive dinner, the main feature of which was the traditional
roasted goose (Martin's goose).[117]
The rituals of the Catholic laboring
people included a cycle of eight feast-days, distributed throughout the year at
intervals of about six weeks: Christmas, the first Sunday of lent, Easter,
Whitsun, St. Peter and Paul (June 29), the Assumption (August 15), Michaelmas
(September 29), and All Saints (November 1).[118]
Rural
religion among both Catholics and Protestants was characterized by work-related
songs, ballads, and jigs, which were sung while laboring. These songs concerned
among other things, cultivated crops set in straight rows, well-kept
homesteads, and satisfaction with the completion of the days' labor.[119]
Perhaps also in the category of celebrating productivity were the Whitsun Ales,
may-poles, morris dancing, village pipers, plays and drama, and pilgrimages.[120]
The May festival commemorated full spring and nature's triumph, when the crops
were beginning to come up and trees stood in their early foliage and flowers
blossomed in abundance. Cottages were adorned with flowers and the branches of
pale-green tender leaves. A "May Queen" was chosen by vote of the
young men, who led a procession to the place of the spring festival, where she
presided over the celebration. She was often crowned with a wreath of flowers
and held a wooden scepter adorned with flowers in her hand.[121]
These customs in seventeenth-century
England were strong in Catholic areas, such as Lancashire and North Riding and
were led by among others, Catholic laboring people.[122]
Frederich Blundell remarks that both Catholic adults and their children enjoyed
dancing around the maypole and flowering the marl (fertilizer) pits.[123]
Part of the festival included children burning their puppets with great
solemnity.
In
urban areas also, Catholic artisans celebrated their craft skills and labors on
religious feast days in the common hall of their companies.[124]
Every profession of men and women had its own patron saint whose productive
virtues were held up for emulation.[125]
Pride in labor was manifested in coats of arms: cloth workers had a coat of
arms with a tezel on it, merchant taylors had one with a robe, grocers a clove,
merchant-adventurers an anchor.[126]
Such religion dated back to the pre-Reformation era, the guild system, and
confraternities.[127]
Guild priests were those who were employed by the guild and looked to the needs
of laboring people.[128]
The relative strength of Catholicism within some of the northern coal-mining
communities was due to traditional habits like the observance of saints' days
by coal miners.[129]
Besides
their feast days, rituals, customs, and saints, the value in which Catholics
held their labor was reflected in the apparently widely held idea that labor
accounted for progress and civilization. It was taught within the community
that without those like Tubal Cain, the iron worker, hammer-smith, and founder
of the guild of metal-workers, described in Genesis 4:22 and Ecclesiasticus,
"there can be no civilization."[130]
Labor was an honor wrote a Catholic pamphleteer:
Some say London is a
place of vice and should be reduced to servility. But they are wrong. Industry
and civil virtue are the lawful things of this life. Their nearest object is
honor and honest wealth. It is a foul note to brand them as associated with
bondage, or give them any the least disparagement at all. The ancient excellent
policy of England did and does constitute corporations of artisans and adorns
companies with banners of arms.[131]
One
sees a positive view of labor in the community's catechism, written by Thomas
White in 1637 and published several times during the Civil War period. White
pictured God as a producer, the maker of the universe.[132]
The same image was used elsewhere about Jesus and his followers, "Each in
scripture has a trade and exercises it daily," Paul the tentmaker, Peter
the fisherman, Joseph the carpenter.[133]
Kings, bishops, and popes claimed their positions were God's charism. The
community claimed their own skills were God's charism:
The virtuous
industrious are to be cherished, yea, God himself (the only best pattern of
governors) has made it known, that mechanical qualities are his special gifts
and his infused, as it were charismata.[134]
Genealogy,
a favorite theme used by the the gentry to justify itself, was made to honor
labor: "Scripture not only makes the skill of laboring people immortally
famous, but puts down their parentage, and birth places in contrast to that of
many princes. Thus in Hiram's case (1 Kings 7:13-47; 2 Chronicles 2:14), the
brass-founder's family is recorded."[135]
According to the London Catholic lawyer Edward Bolton, Solomon was satisfied
with nothing less than the best in building the temple. This was because there
was a religious quality in work well done. Thus Hiram, who was not even a Jew,
but was an artisan of great skill, was asked to come from Tyre to make the
bronze pillars for the temple.
Scripture
that was quoted within the community included that about Noah, the ark builder,
and Genesis 4:20, which honored Jabel (Iabel), the father of agricultural
husbandry: "Moses put into eternal monuments that Jabel was pater pastorum, the most ancient of increase."[136]
At one point Edward Bolton compiled a list of various "secondary"
trades given praise in the bible, such as iron workers, hammer-smiths,
engravers, furniture makers, and metal founders. He remarked that if these
non-essentials were delighted in by God, how much more were the essential
trades to be honored:
If then such honor
be done by God not only to those which are necessary hand-crafts, but to those
also which are but the handmaid of magnificence and outward splendor, as
engravers, metal founders and the like, he shall be very hardy who shall
embrace honest industry with disgraceful censures, and too unjust who shall not
cherish, or encourage it with praise and worship.[137]
Protestant
and Catholic laboring people shared these ideas about labor. This was despite
efforts at times to outlaw such ideas by both the established church and the
Roman establishment.[138]
One of the objections raised by some Protestant clergy to these traditions was
that the religion of laboring people was based more on popular
"Catholic" devotions than on scripture, that is, as the leveler Gerard
Winstanley pointed out, upon scripture as interpreted by the established clergy
who had little regard for labor.[139]
Christopher Haigh maintains that the hierarchy and landlords attempted without
much success to replace "socially-minded" religion with an easily
manipulated type of personal devotion.[140]
As a substitute for laboring saints, the seventeenth-century Catholic hierarchy
offered a list of Roman ecclesiastical saints, such as popes, bishops, and
members of religious orders. But these were not popular.[141]
From
the perspective offered by the county studies, it is just about impossible to
distinguish the Catholics from the Protestants concerning their ideas about
labor. John Bossy summarizes his study by stating that Catholic opinions were
"perfectly compatible with an entrepreneurial approach to agriculture or
anything else."[142]
In his study of the Yorkshire community, Hugh Aveling finds the Catholics were
prospering in every part of the county because of their love for labor and
skills at husbandry, crafts, estate management, trade, or the professions.
Catholic improvers such as Richard Weston of Surrey and Robert Wintour of
Gloucestershire wrote scientific treatises on how to increase crop productivity
in sandy soil by planting flax, turnips, and clover.[143]
In his 1650 treatise Weston expressed the idea that God wanted and favored
husbandry.[144] In
Wintour's writings, agrarian husbandry was called the root of all riches.[145]
Edward
Bolton's 1629 Cities Advocate, which has already
been quoted, defended those such as himself who worked for a living. He held up
for emulation Martin Calthorpe, who started out as an apprentice, became mayor
of London, and to whose skills even Queen Elizabeth had paid homage:
Queen Elizabeth
acknowledged Martin Calthorpe, the Lord Mayor of London, who started as
apprentice. I pray to resemble the worthies of this city, out of whatever
obscure parentage, than being descended of great nobles, to fall by vice far
beneath the reckoning of the poorest prentiser.[146]
Even
some of the Catholic gentry such as the Winthams at Cliffe, the Yoward,
Crosland, and Wycliffe families, and Thomas Middleton of Stockeld took an
active role in managing and improving their estates.[147]
Bertrum Bulmer of Wilton, who was one of the trustees for the funds of the
secular clergy, started a lead mine at Marrick in the 1630s and the Lawson
family started a coal mine about the same time.[148]
Hugh Smithson of Cowton Grange was a yeoman and tenant of Anthony Cotterick. He
went to London, prospered in the haberdasher trade, returned to the county in
1638, and bought a farm called Stanwick from his former landlord.[149]
Among the Yorkshire professional families were many Catholics: the Applebys of
Clove Lodge, the Swales and Inglebys of Rudby, the Jacksons of Knayton, the
Pudseys and the Metcalfes of Hood, the Tophams, Lawsons, and Pudseys, all of
whom had successive generations of lawyers.[150]
Ambrose Appleby did well enough in the law that he bought farms at Larrington
and Linton on Ouse in 1640.[151]
Two of his sons were ejected from Gray's Inn in London in 1638 for persistent
non-communicating. Solomon Swale of Grinton entered Gray's Inn in 1630 and his
son went there in 1648.[152]
Among the professional Catholic women was Jane Grange who ran a private school
at Bedale and was also a housewife.[153]
Aveling sums up his study by saying that "there was no universal or
necessary connection between Puritanism, the `new gentry' or officials, and
economic progressiveness--and, in fact, comparatively little actual
connection."[154]
Conclusion.
To sum up, this article has looked at the English Civil War period for evidence
about the social ideas among the post-Reformation Catholic laboring people. The
county studies have established the community's laboring nature. This article
has suggested that in the county studies one can find the presence of social
ideas, including antinomianism and the labor theory of value. As noted earlier,
one can also find that ignorance or deferential servility or self-interest or
"conservative cultural localism" persuaded some post-Reformation
laboring people to adopt the gentry's social ideas, which stressed obedience to
the established order and God's special love for the gentry. But this was not
the case for many laboring Catholics such as at Sowerby Thirsk, Wardour Castle,
or the Forest of Dean. They found it in their interest to be in opposition to
their landlords. Their political and ecclesiastical policies along with their
feast days, patron saints, and pamphlet literature hint at the presence of
social ideas that were not derivative from but which taught liberation from the
landlord order.
The
community's social ideas about resistance to the established order were at
significant times not unlike those of the antinomian Independents, especially
the levelers, who believed they were oppressed by taxes, rents, market
relations, and similar burdens. Along with and part of their resistance were
ideas about the value of labor and laboring people. A. L. Morton's remarks
about the levelers might also be said of many Catholics:
A party that held
the center of the stage for three of the most crucial years in our nation's
history, voiced the aspiration of the unprivileged masses, and was able to
express with such force ideas that have been behind every great social advance
since their time, cannot be regarded as wholly a failure or deserve to be
wholly forgotten.[155]
[1]The
following review the historiography and demography of the Catholics in the
Civil War period: Caroline Hibbard, "Early Stuart Catholicism: Revision
and Re-Revision," Journal of Modern History,
52 (1980), 4; Edward Toby Terrar, "Social, Economic, and Religious Beliefs
Among Maryland Catholic Laboring People During the Period of the English Civil
War, 1639-1660," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California
at Los Angeles, 1991, pp. 34-66. Those who have led in revising the picture of
the community include Hugh Aveling, O.S.B., B. G. Blackwood, John Bossy, John
Cliffe, Arthur Fletcher, J. M. Gratton, Christopher Haigh, J. A. Hilton, Keith
Lindley, John Morrill, Peter Newman, C. B. Phillips, J. T. Pickles, David
Underdown, and Anthony Williams.
[2]Christopher
R. Hallpike, The Foundations of Primitive Thought
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 35-36.
[3]Robin
Biggs, "Idées and Mentalités:
The Case of the Catholic Reform Movement in France," History of European Ideas, 7 (1986), 12. While not
rejecting the idées-- mentalités
dichotomy, Biggs argues that it is more complex than it is often presented and
that the assumptions and styles of thought of the educated in seventeenth-century
France were at certain points as much mentalités
as anything attributed to the uneducated.
[4]Those
Anglicans who did serve in the poorer areas were sometimes non-residents or
pluralists, meaning they held incomes and responsibilities for two or more
parishes. John Bossy, The English Catholic Community,
1570-1850 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd), 1975), p. 193, estimates
the English Catholic population increased by one-half, from 40,000 to 60,000,
between 1603 and 1641. A similar growth occurred in Ireland. Two-thirds of the
Catholic clergy lived in the south and east of England and had no relation to
the bulk of the Catholic community. They served as house chaplains and tutors
to the gentry, who were a small percentage of the Catholic population. But the
other third of the clergy exercised an itinerant and congregational ministry
with fruitful results. See Christopher Haigh, "From Monopoly to Minority:
Catholicism in Early Modern England," Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society, 31 (1981), pp. 138, 145.
[5]Terrar,
"Social, Economic, and Religious Beliefs," pp. 15-34, outlines the
treatment of anti-Catholicism in the county histories. The literature on church
Catholicism includes Anne Whiteman, "Introduction," The Compton
Census of 1676: A Critical Edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp.
lxxvi, xxxiii; E. Elliot Rose, Cases of Conscience:
Alternatives Open to Recusants and Protestants Under Elizabeth and James
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 5, 11; Christopher Haigh,
"The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation," The English Reformation Revised (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), p. 207; Christopher Haigh, "The Fall of a Church
or the Rise of a Sect? Post-Reformation Catholicism in England" Historical Journal, 21 (1978), 184-185; D. S. Reid,
"P. R. Newman and the Durham Protestation," Recusant
History, 15 (1979), 371.
[6]A.
L. Morton, "Introduction," Freedom in Arms: A
Selection of Leveler Writings (New York: International Publishers,
1974), p. 23.
[7]Quoted
in ibid., p. 27.
[8]Ibid.
[9]Toby
Terrar, "A `Preferential Option for the Rich': Moral Theology Among
English Roman Catholic Gentry During the Civil War Period of the 1640s," Paradigms: Theological Trends of the Future, 7 (Summer
1991), 1-33.
[10]Among
those who see antinomianism as both a material and a spiritual doctrine are
Christopher Hill, Gertrude Huehns, Charles Francis Adams, and a general
tendency in Civil War antinomian leveler tracts. The leveler Gerald Winstanley
(d. 1652), as quoted in Richard Greaves, "Revolutionary Ideology in Stuart
England: The Essays of Christopher Hill," Church
History, 56 (1987), 97, taught that antinomians were concerned with the
"here and now," that is, rent free land, not merely about the next
life or the Holy Spirit. Charles Francis Adams, Three
Episodes of Massachusetts History (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co.,
1903), pp. 366-367, writes that the antinomian controversy in
seventeenth-century Massachusetts cannot be properly appreciated if it is
approached from a theological point of view. Emery Battis, Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and The Antinomian
Controversy in Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1962), pp. 286, 346, looks at antinomianism from a class and psychological
perspective.
[11]Christopher
Hill, The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill: Religion
and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1986), vol. 2, p. 174.
[12]"Ordinance
against Heresie" (Nov. 20, 1646), in Henry Scobell (ed.), A Collection of Acts and Ordinances of General Use, Made in the
Parliament, 1640-1656 (2 vols., London: Henry Mills, [1648] 1658), pp.
2, 150, cap. 114.
[13]Gertrude
Huehns, Antinomianism in English History with special
reference to the Period, 1640-1660 (London: Cresset Press, 1951), p. 5.
[14]Jodi
Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in
a Sixteenth-Century City (New York: Cornell University Press, 1989), p.
191. Jesuit priests Balthasar Alvarez (d. 1580), Antonio Cordeses (d. 1601),
Louis Lallemant (d. 1635), and Luis de la Puerte (d. 1624) also perhaps belong
with the antinomians. See John O'Malley, "Early Jesuit Spirituality: Spain
and Italy," Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation
and Modern, ed. Louis Dupré and Dom E. Saliers (New York: Crossroad,
1989), vol. 18, pp. 15-16; Luis de la Puente, Vida del V.
P. Baltasar Alvarez de la compañia de Jesus (Madrid: Aguardo, [1615]
1880), pp. 135-144, 441-451 [The Life of Father B.
Alvarez (2 vols., London: 1868)]; Puente, Meditations
upon the Mysteries of our Holie Faith (1605), trans. John Heigham (1619)
reprinted in English Recusant Literature (London:
Scolar Press, 1976) vols. 296-297; abridged trans. Thomas Everard, S.J. (1624)
reprinted in ibid., vol. 295.
[15]James
Gaffney, Augustine Baker's Inner Light: A Study in
English Recusant Spirituality (Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton
Press, 1989), p. 72.
[16]Among
the other antinomian writers were William Rushworth (d. 1636), Rushworth's Dialogue, or, the Judgment of Common Sense in the Choice
of Religion (Paris: n.p., 1640), pp. 555-556; John Austin (1613-1669), The Christian Moderator (first part), or Persecution for
religion condemned by the light of Nature, Law of God, Evidence of our own
principles, with the explanation of the Roman Catholic belief, concerning these
four points: their church, worship, justification and civil government
(London: printed for J. J., published twice in 1651, twice in 1652 and three
times in 1653), p. 73; Henry Holden, The Analysis of
Divine Faith: or two Treatises of the resolution of Christian Belief (Paris: n.
p., [1652, 1655], 1658), p. 358.
[17]White
was "in control" of the chapter, as Bossy, English Catholic
Community, p. 67, puts it, though the nominal leader was John Sergeant.
Robert Bradley, S.J., "Blacklo and the Counter-Reformation: An Inquiry
into the Strange Death of Catholic England," From
the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly,
ed. Charles Carter (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 349-350, states,
"Few English Catholics of that century had such an impact on their
contemporaries as Thomas White had." The Catholic priest George Leyburn,
"A List of the More Noteworthy Priests who are to be Found at Present
among the English Secular Clergy," in The Douay
College Diaries, 1598-1654, ed. Edwin Burton (London: Catholic Record
Society, 1911), vol. 11, pp. 547-548, 550, remarked at the time on the
"zeal" which Catholics had for White, his "wonderful
influence," and his being looked to as an "oracle." See also, T.
A. Birrell, "English Catholics without a Bishop, 1655-1676," Recusant History, 4 (1958), 142, 161.
[18]Robert
Pugh (1610-1679), (ed.), "Introduction," Blacklo's
Cabal Discovered in Several of their Letters, ed. re-edited, T. A.
Birrell (Farnborough, Eng.: Gregg International Publishers, [1680], 1970), p.
3.
[19]Roger
Coke, Justice Vindicated from the False Fusus put upon it
by Thomas White (London: Thomas Newcomb, 1660), section 2, p. 53.
[20]Joseph
Gillow (ed.), "Thomas White," A Literary and
Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics
from the Breach with Rome in 1534 to the Present Time (5 vols., London: Burns
and Oates, 1885-1902), vol. 5, p. 578-581.
[21]Thomas
Collier, The Morrow of Christianity (London:
1646), pp. 60-61.
[22]Thomas
White, The Grounds of Obedience and Government: Being the
Best Account to All that has been Lately Written in Defense of Passive
Obedience and Non-Resistance (Farnsborough, Eng.: Gregg International
Publishers, [1649, 1655, 1659, 1685], 1968), pp. 22, 25. Augustine Baker, Holy Wisdom or Directions for the Prayer of Contemplation,
ed. G. Sitwell (London: Burns and Oates, [1656] 1964), pp. 40-41, 475-476, was
antinomian in teaching that it was necessary to look to the "inner
light," the "inward voice," "the illumination of God's Holy
Spirit," "the liberty of the Spirit," and "in preferring
interior divine guidance to the counsel of spiritual directors." See also,
Gaffney, Augustine Baker's Inner Light, pp. 22, 31-32, 44, 50-51, 93, 158; Augustine
Baker, The Inner Life and Writings of Dame Gertrude More, ed. B. Weld-Blundell
(London: R. and T. Washbourne, 1937); Gertrude More (d. 1633), The Holy
Practice of a Divine Lover or the Saint's Idiot's Devotion, ed. H. Lane Fox
(London: Sands and Co., 1909).
[23]Thomas
White, Apology for Rushworth's Dialogues, wherein the
Exceptions of the Lords Falkland and Digby are Answered and the Arts of their
commended Daille discovered (Paris: Chez Jean Billain, 1654), pp. 64-66.
[24]Albert
R. Jonsen, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral
Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 236.
[25]Hugh
Aveling, O.S.B., Northern Catholics: The Catholic
Recusants of the North Riding, Yorkshire, 1558-1790 (London: Geoffrey
Chapman, 1966), pp. 303, 317.
[26]John
McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1951), p. 291.
[27]Terrar,
"Social, Economic, and Religious Beliefs," pp. 135-139, outlines the
literature dealing with England's relation to Rome.
[28]Leyburn,
"A List of the More Noteworthy Priests," vol. 11, p. 549.
[29]Ibid., p. 547.
[30]Ibid.
[31]Ibid.
[32]Ibid., p. 548.
[33]Christopher
Haigh, The English Reformation Revised (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 195. The training for clergy at Catholic
seminaries such as Douai was not for conversion but for ministering to
pre-existing Catholics.
[34]Thomas
Sanchez, S.J., Opus Morale in Praecepta Decalogi
(2 vol., Paris: n.p., 1615); Robert Persons, S.J., A
Brief Discourse containing certain reasons why Catholics refuse to go to church
(Douai: John Lyon, 1580).
[35]Terrar,
"Social, Economic, and Religious Beliefs," pp. 82-124, discusses the
recent literature concerning the community's politics.
[36]Keith
Lindley, "The Lay Catholics of England in the Reign of Charles I," Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 22 (1971), 220.
[37]Joan
Wake, The Brudenells of Deene (London: Casell,
1954), p. 126, states:
There was no sympathy with the king's
determination to inflict a prayer-book of his and Laud's devising and a bench
of bishops into the bargain on the Scottish church.
[38]Derek
Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters in
England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975), pp. 7, 19, 29, 32-33.
[39]Ibid., pp. 30-34, 153,
157.
[40]Cyrus
Karraker, The Seventeenth-Century Sheriff: A Comparative
Study of the Sheriff in England and the Chesapeake Colonies, 1607-1689
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1930), p. 57; Stephen Dowell,
A History of Taxation and Taxes in England From the
Earliest Times to the Present Day (4 vols., London: Longmans, Green,
[1884] 1888), vol. 1, pp. 217-222.
[41]Gillow
"Philip Massinger," A Literary and Biographical
History, vol. 5, p. 525, discusses Massinger's alleged Catholicism.
Doris Adler, Philip Massinger (Boston: Twayne
Pub., 1987), p. 74, discusses Massinger's popularity with laboring people. His
plays were put on at London's Red Bull and Phoenix. His popular acceptance
contrasted with the dislike of the plays by William Davenant, a royalist
Catholic. Davenant's plays, which were put on at Blackfriars, flattered the
crown.
[42]Philip
Massinger, The King and the Subject, later called The
Bashful Lover, in Three New Plays: The Bashful Lover, etc. (London:
Humphrey Moseley, 1655); see also, Doris Adler, Philip
Massinger, p. 115; Kevin Sharp, Criticism and
Compliment: the Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 247.
[43]Gaffney,
Augustine Baker's Inner Light, p. 104.
[44]G.
E. Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution: England from Civil
War to Restoration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 6.
George Harrison, "Royalist Organization in Wiltshire, 1642-1646,"
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1963, p. 137, gives
examples of even Catholic royalist gentry who did not pay the tax.
[45]Hirst,
Representative of the People, p. 150; see also,
pp. 157-158, 173-174.
[46]Christopher
Clay," Landlords and Estate Management in England," The Agrarian History of England and Wales: 1640-1750,
ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1985), vol. 5, pt.
2, p. 120; Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution, p. 20.
[47]Clay,"
Landlords and Estate Management," pp. 122-123; Clive Holmes, The Eastern Association in the Civil War (Cambridge:
University Press, 1974), p. 271, note 46.
[48]Ann
Hughes, "Militancy and Localism: Warwickshire Politics and Westminster
Politics, 1643-1647," Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, 3 (1981), 67.
[49]Aveling,
Northern Catholics, p. 303; Frederick Blundell, Old Catholic Lancashire (3 vols., London: Burns and
Oates, 1941), vol. 1, p. 55.
[50]Aveling,
Northern Catholics, p. 296.
[51]Thomas
Meynell, "The Recusancy Papers of the Meynell Family," Miscellanea, ed. Hugh Aveling (Newport, Eng.: Catholic
Record Society, 1964), vol. 56, pp. xiv, xxxvii, 84-85; Aveling, Northern Catholics, pp. 212, 234, 274, 316-317.
[52]Aveling,
Northern Catholics, pp. 215, 220.
[53]Meynell,
"Recusancy Papers," vol. 56, pp. 78-79; Aveling, "Introduction
to the Recusancy Papers," in Meynell, "The Recusancy Papers," p.
xxxvii.
[54]David
Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the
Transferal of English Local Law and Customs to Massachusetts Bay in the
Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press,
1981), p. 38.
[55]Underdown,
Revel, Riot and Rebellion, pp. 9-10, 107, focuses
on deference among Protestant laboring people. Hughes, "Militancy and
Localism: Warwickshire Politics and Westminster Politics," p. 58, on the
other hand, studies, among others, laboring people who had their own social
ideas and used military force at the local level to defend their ideas against
the gentry. Likewise Harrison, "Royalist Organization in Wiltshire,"
pp. 371, 389-392, 409-411, 430, shows that in Wiltshire the gentry were unable
to prevent great numbers of desertions from both armies. The clubmen were a
significant force in the county after 1644. Some of the clubmen were royalist
landlords, but they were unable to persuade laboring clubmen to fight for the
Royalists. The best they could do was to prevent both royalist and parliamentary
garrisons from plundering.
[56]Christopher
Hill, God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English
Revolution (London: 1970), pp. 133-135; Eric Evans, "Tithes" The Agrarian History of England and Wales: 1640-1750,
ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1985), vol. 5, pt.
2, p. 394; Margaret James, "The Political Importance of the Tithes
Controversy in the English Revolution, 1640-1660," History,
26 (1941), 11; A. D. Wright, "Catholic History, North and South,
Revisited," Northern History, 25 (1989), 127;
Rosemary O'Day and Anne Hughes, "Augmentation and Amalgamation: was there
a Systematic Approach to the Reform of Parochial Finance, 1640-1660," Princes and Paupers in the English Church, 1500-1800,
ed. Rosemary O'Day and F. Heal (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981),
pp. 169-193. The demands of Catholic laboring people for the abolition of
tithes went back at least several hundred years and was one of the complaints
raised by the Lollards. See Margaret Aston, "Lollardy and Sedition,
1381-1431," Past and Present, no. 17 (1960),
9, 16.
[57]Rosemary
O'Day, "The Anatomy of a Profession: The Clergy of the Church of
England," The Professions in Early Modern England,
ed. Wilfrid Prest (London: Crown Helm, 1987), p. 54.
[58]Hirst,
Representative of the People, p. 151; William
Habington, History of Edward the Fourth, King of England
(London: Thomas Cotes, 1640), pp. 1, 8.
[59]G.
H. Tupling, "Causes of the Civil War in Lancashire," Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society,
65 (1955), 16, 29-30.
[60]Edward
Varney, quoted in Charles H. Firth, Cromwell's Army: A
History of the English Soldier During the Civil War, Commonwealth and the
Protectorate (London: Meuthen, [1902] 1962), p. 13.
[61]Hirst,
Representative of the People, pp. 3, 7; Margo
Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 258; Charles H. Firth and R.
S. Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum,
1642-1660 (3 vols., London: H. M. Stationary Office, 1911), vol. 2, pp.
240-241, 378-379, 582, 785.
[62]Arundell,
for example, fell victim to the local Wiltshire county court and resented its
jurisdiction over him. See George Cokayne, The Complete
Peerage of England, Scotland, and Ireland, ed. Vicar Gibbs (12 vols.,
New York: St. Martins Press, 1984), vol. 1, p. 264.
[63]Terrar,
"Social, Economic, and Religious Beliefs," pp. 85-95, gives a
description of some of the parliamentary Catholics found in the county studies.
[64]John
Hippon, "Examination before the Westminster Justice of the Peace"
(June 21, 1654), Harleian Miscellany (London:
White Murray, and Harding, 1813), vol. 10, pp. 210-215, as cited in Keith
Lindley, "The Part Played by Catholics in the Civil War," Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, ed. Brian
Manning (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), p. 174.
[65]John
Waite and John Bickers, "Petition" (March 8, 1642), House of Lords Archives, cited in Keith Lindley,
"The Part Played by Catholics in the English Civil War," unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Manchester, 1968, p. 249.
[66]Richard
Baxter (1615-1691), Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696),
reprinted in Charles Blitzer (ed.), The Commonwealth of
England: Documents of the English Civil Wars, The Commonwealth and
Protectorate, 1641-1660 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1963), p. 29. See also
Firth, Cromwell's Army, p. 328.
[67]Thomas
Clancy, S.J. "The Jesuits and the Independents, 1647," Archivium
Historicum Societatis Jesu, 40 (1971), 67-68.
[68]Charles
II, "Letter to Cardinal de Retz" (July 1658), Calendar
of the Clarendon State Papers Preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford
University, ed. F. J. Routledge (4 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1932), vol. 4, p. 56; see also, Charles II, "Four Memorials to Don
Juan" (Dec. 22, 1656), ibid., vol. 3, p. 1,
which criticized the Catholics because many were "corrupted."
[69]William
Rushworth, Rushworth's Dialogue, or, the Judgment of
Common Sense in the Choice of Religion (Paris: n.p., 1640), pp. 555-556;
see also, Austin, Christian Moderator, (first part),
p. 73.
[70]Holden,
The Analysis of Divine Faith, p. 358.
[71]S.
W., A Vindication of the Doctrine in Pope Benedict XII,
his Bull, and the General Councils of Florence Concerning the State of
Dependent Souls, wherein the purposes of Master White's lately maintained
Purgatory is laid open (Paris: n.p., 1659), pp. 140-141, condemned the
millennial doctrine of Thomas White, who denied there was immediate judgment
after death. Judgment would come only with the millennium.
[72]Morton,
"Introduction," Freedom in Arms, p. 52;
Michael Braddick, "Popular Politics and Public Policy: The Excise Riot at
Smithfield in February 1647 and Its Aftermath," The
Historical Journal, 34 (Spring 1991), 604.
[73]Ibid.
[74]Morton,
"Introduction," Freedom in Arms, p. 59;
David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular
Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987), p. 43-44.
[75]Anonymous,
Works of Darkness Brought to Light (July 23,
1647), cited in Samuel Gardiner, History of the Great
Civil War, 1642-1649 (4 vols., London: Longmans, Green, 1891), vol. 3,
p. 148.
[76]Godfrey
Davies, The Early Stuarts: 1603-1660 (2nd ed.,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 208-210; Joseph Lecler, Toleration and Reformation, trans. T. L. Westow (2
vols., New York: Associated Press, 1960), vol. 2, p. 456; Avihu Zakai,
"Religious Toleration and Its Enemies: The Independent Divines and the
Issue of Toleration During the English Civil War," Albion,
21 (Spring 1989), 1-7; Rosemary Bradley, "`Jacob and Esau Struggling in
the Womb': A Study of Presbyterian and Independent Religious Conflicts,
1640-1648," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kent, 1975; J.
K. Graham, "`Independent' and `Presbyterian': A Study of Religious and
Political Language and the Politics of Words during the English Civil War, 1640-1660,"
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University, 1978; Claire Cross,
"The Church in England: 1646-1660," in Aylmer (ed.), Interregnum, p. 113.
[77]J.
Anthony Williams, Catholic Recusancy in Wiltshire,
1660-1791 (Newport, Eng.: Catholic Record Society, 1968), pp. 201-202.
[78]B.
G. Blackwood, "Plebian Catholics in Later Stuart Lancashire," Northern History, 25 (1989), 158; Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New
York: Schocken Books, 1967), p. 44; Bossy, English Catholic
Community, pp. 174-177; Aveling, Northern
Catholics, pp. 217, 231, 286; David Mosler, "Warwickshire Catholics
in the Civil War," Recusant History, 15
(1980), 262; J. A. Hilton, "The Recusant Commons in the Northeast,
1570-1642," Northern Catholic History, no. 12
(Autumn 1980), p. 5.
[79]Hirst,
Representative of the People, p. 110; see also,
Brian Manning, "The Outbreak of the English Civil War," The English Civil War and After, ed. R. H. Parry
(London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 16.
[80]Harrison,
"Royalist Organization in Wiltshire," p. 185; Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow (London: A. Millar, 1751), vol.
1, pp. 57, 70, 449-450. Even the rank and file Catholics in the king's army had
their own independent program. In November 1643, the Royalists attempted to win
Wardour castle back from Parliament by laying siege to it. In the attempt Irish
Catholic soldiers were used under the command of William Vavasour of York.
Because they were not properly paid, the Irish broke off the siege and mutinied
against the Royalists. Henry Arundell, the third baron of Wardour and the
nephew of Calvert's wife came with his royal troops and put down the mutiny by
executing three of the Irish as ringleaders. See Harrison, ibid., p. 221; Ralph Hopton, Bellum
Civile, ed. Charles Healey (London: Harrison and Son, 1902), p. 65;
Peter Newman, "William Vavasour," Royalist
Officers in England and Wales, 1642-1660: A Biographical Dictionary (New
York: Garland Publishers, 1981), p. 388; Geoffrey Smith, Without
Touch of Dishonor: The Life and Death of Sir Henry Slingsby, 1602-1658
(Kineton: Roundwood Press, 1968), p. 67.
[81]Underdown,
Revel, Riot and Rebellion, p. 220. After he was
sequestered in November 1645 by the parliamentary Wiltshire County committee,
Calvert's tenants questioned and refused his right to hold a manor court,
impose the homager's oath, and receive the economic benefits that went along
with such rights.
[82]Terrar,
"Social, Economic, and Religious Beliefs," pp. 287-365.
[83]Clay,
"Landlords and Estate Management in England," vol. 5, pt. 2, pp.
133-134; see also, Arthur R. Bayley, The Great Civil War
in Dorset (Taunton: Barncott and Pearce, 1910), pp. 129, 227-228, 305;
George N. Godwin, The Civil War in Hampshire
(London: J. Bumpus, 1904), pp. 359-361, 366; J. W. Willis Bund, The Civil War in Worcestershire (London: Simpkin
Marshall, 1905), pp. 152, 158-159; Alfred C. Wood, Nottinghamshire
and the Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), pp. 102-103.
[84]Clay,"Landlords
and Estate Management," vol. 5, pt. 2, p. 123. See also, Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-1660
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1966), pp. 169-170; John S. Morrill, Cheshire 1630-1660: County Government and Society During the
"English Revolution" (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974),
pp. 112-117.
[85]J.
P. Cooper, "In Search of Agrarian Capitalism," The
Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T. H. Ashton (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), p. 172.
[86]Oxfordshire
V.C.H. Office, Glympton papers, J. Wheate to William Wheate, 1643-1644,
Hampshire R.O., Catalogue of Kingsmill, MSS (typescript), no. 1362, quoted in
Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, p. 159. See
also, R. C. Richardson, "Metropolitan Counties: Bedfordshire,
Hertfordshire, and Middlesex," The Agrarian History
of England and Wales: 1640-1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: University
of Cambridge Press, 1985), vol. 5, pt. 1, p. 239; Paul Brassley,
"Northumberland and Durham," in ibid.,
vol. 5, pt. 1, p. 44.
[87]H.
J. Habakkuk, "Landowners and the Civil War," Economic
History Review, 18 (1969), 131.
[88]Lawrence
Stone, "The Crisis of Aristocracy," Social
Change and Revolution in England: 1540-1640, ed. Lawrence Stone (London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1965), p. 79; B. G. Blackwood, "The Lancashire
Gentry and the Great Rebellion, 1640-1660," Chetham
Society, 25 (1978), 160. David Underdown, Revel,
Riot and Rebellion, p. 159, observes that rent arrears were not
necessarily the result of social ideas. Some tenants did not pay because of
sheer necessity; they had nothing left. However, the tenants' claims of
inability to pay because of poverty should not necessarily be taken at face
value. The landlords did not. Illustrative was a proclamation in December 1643
by royalist authorities in Wiltshire. It stated that those who deliberately
refused to pay rent to landlords were guilty of treason. The proclamation
recognized and was a response to the voluntary refusal to pay rent. At one
point the Wiltshire government sought to indict 57 tenants for refusal to pay,
but the grand jury of local people was in sympathy with their neighbors and
refused to bring the indictment. See Harrison, "Royalist Organization in
Wiltshire," p. 457.
[89]Joan
Thirsk, "Agricultural Policy: Public Debate and Legislation," The Agrarian History of England and Wales: 1640-1750,
ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1985), vol. 5, pt.
2, p. 318. Because many areas in the north and west lacked good water transport
facilities to London or the coast, they were not attractive for grain
production. Hence the tendency for landlords to enclose and give over to wool
production. See Reginold H. Kiernan, The Story of the
Archdiocese of Birmingham (West Bromwich, Eng.: Joseph Wares, 1951), p.
14, on the relatively high concentrations of Catholic tenants in the west.
[90]John
Rushworth, Historical Collections and Private Passages of
State (8 vols., London: Thomas Newcomb, [1701] 1721), vol. 4, p. 438;
Hill, God's Englishman, pp. 18, 61. Brian Manning,
The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649
(London: Heinemann, 1976), pp. 113-118; Roger Manning, Village
Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbance in England, 1509-1640
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
[91]Richardson,
"Metropolitan Counties," p. 240; see also, Howard Shaw, The Levelers (London: Longmans, 1968), pp. 13, 68.
[92]Terrar,
"Social, Economic, and Religious Beliefs," pp. 116-124, gives
examples of where the Catholic tenantry tore down enclosures.
[93]Ibid.
[94]Bossy, English Catholic Community,
p. 170. For further examples of Catholic servant militancy, see Terrar,
"Social, Economic, and Religious Beliefs," pp. 123-124; Joseph S.
Leatherbarrow, The Lancashire Elizabethan Recusants (New York: Johnson
Reprint Corp., 1968), p 90; Wake, The Brudenells of Deene,
p. 142.
[95]White,
Grounds of Obedience, p. 28.
[96]ibid., p. 169.
[97]Ibid., p. 142.
[98]Terrar,
"Social, Economic, and Religious Beliefs," pp. 154-175, describes the
market relations.
[99]Braddick,
"Popular Politics and Public Policy," p. 618, discusses the leveler
opposition to monopoly in 1647.
[100]Valerie
Pearl, "Puritanism and Poor Relief: The London Workhouse, 1649-1660,"
Puritanism and Revolutionaries, ed. Donald Pennington
and Keith Thomas (Oxford: 1978), p. 230; Todd, Christian
Humanism, pp. 159, 251, 253; A. L. Beier, "Poor Relief in
Warwickshire, 1630-1660," Past and Present,
no. 35 (1966), 78.
[101]Braddick,
"Popular Politics and Public Policy," p. 610, discusses the monthly
holidays and festivals which Parliament enacted for apprentices in June 1647.
[102]White,
Grounds of Obedience, p. 70.
[103]Hirst,
Representative of the People, p. 5.
[104]Harrison,
"Royalist Organization in Wiltshire," p. 185, gives some examples of
tenant deference to landlords.
[105]Terrar,
"A `Preferential Option for the Rich,'" pp. 1-33.
[106]Adam
Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, [1776] 1937], p. 30,
observed, "labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was
paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all
the wealth of the world was originally purchased." In the seventeenth
century John Locke and the Catholic-educated William Petty both gave prominence
to the labor theory of value in their economic writings. See Edmond
Fitzmaurice, Life of William Petty (London: J.
Murray, 1895), p. 3.
[107]Ronald
Meek, Studies in the Labor Theory of Value
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973), p. 14.
[108]Ibid. p. 26.
[109]Smith,
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations, p. 48.
[110]Terrar,
"A `Preferential Option for the Rich,'" pp. 1-33.
[111]Max
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(New York: Charles Scribners and Sons, 1958), pp. 79, 115-116; Richard Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: Harcourt,
Brace, 1926), pp. 229-230.
[112]Paul
Seaver, "The Puritan Work Ethic Revisited," Journal
of British Studies, 19 (Spring 1980), pp. 35-53; Laura O'Connell,
"Anti-Entrepreneurial Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Popular
Literature," Journal of British Studies, 15
(Spring 1976), 20; Timothy Breen, "The Non-Existent Controversy: Puritan
and Anglican Attitudes on Work and Wealth, 1600-1640," Church History, 35 (1966), 281-287.
[113]Illustrative
of those who understood the difference between monopoly and labor was the
Protestant London merchant Nehemiah Wallington (1598-1658). He summed up the
work ethic as it applied to merchants in a list of new years resolutions. As
quoted in Seaver, "The Puritan Work Ethic Revisited," p. 41, he
wrote, "I take not the least pin nor anything else from anyone and if I
do, then I restore fourfold and give one farthing to the poor." He
resolved not to stand "idle at anytime nor negligent in my calling and not
to conceal the faults of my ware nor speak words of deceit" nor to
"take any more for my ware than it is worth."
[114]Peter
Burke, "Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century London," Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed.
Barry Reay (New York: St. Martins Press, 1985), p. 57; Keith Luria, "The
Counter-Reformation and Popular Spirituality," Christian
Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern, ed. Louis Dupré and Don
Saliers (New York: Crossroad, 1989), pp. 93, 106.
[115]Christopher
Haigh, "The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation," The English Reformation Revised (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), p. 25.
[116]Blundell,
Old Catholic Lancashire, vol. 1, p. x.
[117]F.
W. Hackwood, Good Cheer: The Romance of Food and Feasting
(New York: T. F. Unwin, 1911), p. 201; Francis X. Weiser, Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs: The Year of the Lord
in Liturgy and Folklore (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1952), pp.
270-271.
[118]Bossy,
English Catholic Community, p. 118.
[119]Bernard
Capp, "Popular Literature," Popular Culture in
Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Barry Reay (New York: St. Martins
Press, 1985), p. 204; Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry
in Early Modern England (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p.
68; T. G. Crippen, Christmas and Christmas Lore
(Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1923), describes the hundred of Christmas carols
popular among laboring people.
[120]Cecil
Sharp, The Morris Book: A History of Morris Dancing with
a description of Eleven Dances as performed by the Morrismen of England
(London: Novello Co., 1907), pp. 6-7; John Playford, The
English Dancing Master (London: Schott, [1651] 1957); Douglas Kennedy, English Folk Dancing, Today and Yesterday (London: G.
Bell, 1964).
[121]Weiser,
Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs, p. 164.
[122]Christopher
Haigh, "The Continuity of Catholicism," pp. 206-207, 214; Aveling, Northern Catholics, p. 289. Some of the material in the
plays of the Catholic or Catholic-leaning dramatist Philip Massinger appear to
have had roots in beliefs about productivity. Doris Adler, Philip Massinger, p. 78, remarks that his plays were
characterized by "the struggle between those who produce wealth and those
who only consume that wealth in extravagant luxury."
[123]Blundell,
Old Catholic Lancashire, vol. 1, p. xi.
[124]Edward
Bolton, The Cities Advocate, in this case, or a Question
of honor and arms, whether Apprenticeship extinguisheth Gentry? Containing a
clear refutation of the Pernicious common Error affirming it, swallowed by
Erasmus of Roterdam, Sir Thomas Smith in his "Commonweal", Sir John
Ferris in his "Blazon", Ralph Broke York Herald and others. With the
copies or transcripts of three letters which give occasion of this work
(Norwood, N.J.: W. J. Johnson, [1629], 1975), pp. 53, 56.
[125]John
Cosin, The Works of the right Rev. Father in God, John
Cosin, Lord Bishop of Durham, ed. J. Sansom (5 vols., Oxford: John
Parker, 1855), vol. 1, Sermon X, p. 142.
[126]Bolton,
Cities Advocate, p. 49.
[127]Lester
Little, Liberty, Charity, Fraternity: Lay Religious
Confraternities at Bergamo in the Age of the Commune (Northampton,
Mass.: Smith College, 1988), pp. 35-36; John Bossy, "The
Counter-Reformation and the Peoples of Catholic Europe," Past and Present, 47 (1970), 59; A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture (Boston: Rutledge and
Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 265.
[128]Paul
Seaver, The Puritan Lectureship: The Politics of
Religious Dissent, 1560-1662 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1970), p. 74; J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the
English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 24, 43.
[129]Bossy,
English Catholic Community, p. 87; Hill, Society and Puritanism, p. 147.
[130]Bolton,
Cities Advocate, pp. 20-21.
[131]Ibid., pp. 18, 21.
[132]Thomas
White, A Catechism of Christian Doctrine (Paris:
n.p., 1637, 1640, 1659), pp. 4, 15. See also Beverley C. Southgate,
"Thomas White's Grounds of Obedience and Government,
A Note on the Dating of the First Edition," Notes
and Queries (for Readers and Writers) (London), 28 (1981), 208-209.
[133]Bolton,
Cities Advocate, pp. 20-21.
[134]Ibid., p. 19.
[135]Ibid., p. 20.
[136]Bolton,
Cities Advocate, p. 19.
[137]Ibid., p. 21.
[138]Hill,
Society and Puritanism, pp. 164-167.
[139]Gerard
Winstanley is illustrative of the laboring people's reversal of the gentry's scriptural
interpretations. One example is the interpretation of Adam's fall from grace
(Genesis 3:19). In Winstanley's view, labor (usufruct) was the foundation of
Eden, not the result of the fall. Labor was God's original grace and blessing,
and part of the natural law. It was liberating. The cause and result of the
fall was landlordism, the rise of the class system. God's plan called for the
leveling of the landlords. Winstanley, "Fire in the Bush," The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. Geore H. Sabine
(New York: Cornell University Press, 1941), p. 492, see also, pp. 451-455,
wrote:
The existing
[landlord] law is the extremity of the curse, and yet this is the law that
every one now dotes upon; when the plain truth is, the law of property is the
shameful nakedness of mankind, and as far from the law of Christ, as light from
darkness.
See also Gerard Winstanley, "An
Appeal to all Englishmen," Works, pp.
407-409; Winstanley, "The Law of Freedom in a Platform or True Magistracy
Restored," Works, pp. 511, 526-527, 546-548,
550, 564, 577-579, 592-593; Timothy Kenyton, "Labour--Natural,
Property--Artificial: The Radical Insights of Gerrard Winstanley," History of European Ideas, 6 (1985), 106, 108, 113, 116,
120-123; Michael Graham, S.J., "Lord Baltimore's Pious Enterprise:
Toleration and Community in Colonial Maryland," unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Michigan, 1983, p. 13.
[140]Haigh,
"The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation," p. 25.
[141]Luria,
"The Counter-Reformation and Popular Spirituality," p. 110.
[142]Bossy,
English Catholic Community, p. 103; see also,
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, Fifteenth
to Eighteenth Centuries (3 vols., London: Collins, 1984), vol. 2, pp.
566-569.
[143]Richard
Weston (1591-1652), A Discourse of Husbandrie used in
Brabant and Flanders Showing the Wonderful improvement of land there serving as
a pattern for our practice in this Commonwealth (London: William DuGard,
1650), pp. 1-4, 6, 20; Joan Thirsk, "Agricultural Innovations and their
Diffusion," The Agrarian History of England and
Wales: 1640-1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: University of Cambridge
Press, 1985), vol. 5, pt. 2, p. 549; "Richard Weston," in Leslie
Stephen and Sidney Lee (eds.), Dictionary of National
Biography (22 vols., London: Oxford University Press, 1922), vol. 20,
pp. 1278-1280.
[144]Weston,
Discourse, p. 6.
[145]Robert
Wintour, To Live Like Princes: A Short Treatise
concerning the New Plantation Now Erecting in Maryland, ed. John Krugler
(Baltimore: Enoch Pratt Free Library, [1635] 1976), p. 35.
[146]Bolton,
Cities Advocate, pp. 1, 3.
[147]Aveling,
Northern Catholics, pp. 191, 218, 256, 260, 267;
Meynell, "Recusancy Papers," vol. 56, p. xiv.
[148]Aveling,
Northern Catholics, pp. 259, 266, 269.
[149]Ibid., pp. 159, 259, 266.
[150]Ibid., pp. 191, 266.
[151]Ibid., p. 259.
[152]Ibid.
[153]Ibid.
[154]Ibid. p. 205.
[155]Morton,
Freedom in Arms, p. 73.