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SOVEREIGNTY, SUPREMACY AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR
Sovereignty, Supremacy and the Origins of
the English Civil War
D. ALAN ORR
Ottawa, Ontario
Abstract
This article integrates the concept of sovereignty with religious perceptions of misrule in
the years leading up to the English Civil War. Existing revisionist narratives have emphasized the consensual nature of early Stuart political culture, especially the central role
of the ‘common law mind’ in determining the proper place of potentially rival political
vocabularies of natural law, civil law and absolutism. This article argues alternatively that
the concept of sovereignty and in particular the contested relationship of sovereignty to
ecclesiastical governance stood at the centre of the emerging conflict. The primary mode
of ‘opposition’ to the policies of Charles I’s personal rule (1629–40) was erastian: it presumed that control over the doctrine and discipline of the established church was for all
intents and purposes a mark or right of sovereignty in the same manner as power of war
and peace, power of appointing magistrates, or coinage. Seen in this light the ecclesiastical innovations of the personal rule constituted a treasonable attempt on the part of
the Laudian episcopate to erect an ecclesiastical state within a state. The English Civil
War was a war of religion in the sense that a significant number of those who waged it
operated under the assumption that religion was the rightful provenance of the civil
magistracy of king in parliament.
I
T
he concept of sovereignty has fallen into considerable disrepute among historians of the English Civil War. With some very
notable exceptions, historians of the last two decades have portrayed the concept as alien, ‘un-English’ and even anachronistic. Under
the predominant revisionist scheme early Stuart political life constituted
itself in terms of a ‘common-law mind’ or mentality that privileged historically derived, customary forms of argument above those flowing from
natural law and the direct appeal to reason unmediated by custom. A
common law based consensus kept potentially rival political vocabularies
of civil law, natural law and absolutism in their rightful and limited places
where they posed no threat to landed property. This set of circumstances
I am grateful for the input of Charles W. A. Prior, Richard Bailey, Phil Withington, Glenn Burgess,
Jason Peacey, John Morrill, and the anonymous manuscript reviewers.
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D. ALAN ORR
475
prevailed until the abuses of Charles I’s personal rule (1629– 40) eroded
it to the point where hostilities became imaginable. The English Civil War
was less an ideologically-driven ‘outbreak’, a struggle for sovereign power
in the state, than a ‘breakdown’ of a broad procedural consensus resulting from the abuses of an increasingly distant and mistrustful monarch.1
This article integrates the concept of sovereignty with religious perceptions of misrule in the years 1640– 4. The aim is to reposition the
concept of sovereignty at the centre of discussion on the origins of the
English Civil War. Without making any allusions to babies and bath
water, the argument will retain certain features of the revisionist account
outlined above. The English Civil War was, indeed, a struggle for sovereignty in the state, but it was not a struggle driven by rival accounts of
the origins and location of the law-making power – the classic Whig
position often associated with J. H. Hexter and more currently Johann
Sommerville.2 The issue was less the location of sovereignty than its practical definition as a cluster of positive or ‘state’ powers. This struggle was
as much for the definition as for the actual control of these powers. Its
nature was, of necessity, ideological: individual actors trotted out an array
of concepts aimed at persuading the fence-sitters and the undecided that
one particular set of political actions and arrangements was more attractive than another. The struggle, however, was not carried out from ideological poles.3 Participants drew on a range of inter-subjectively shared
1
This interpretation derives with subsequent refinements from J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge, 1987; first published, 1957), chs. 2 and 3. For the ‘master language’ argument see Glenn
Burgess, ‘Common Law and Political Theory in Early Stuart England’, Political Science, xl (1988),
5–17; and his study, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political
Thought, 1603–1642 (1992); Paul Christianson, ‘Royalist and Parliamentary Voices on the Ancient
Constitution’, The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge, 1991),
pp. 71–95; ‘Young John Selden and the Ancient Constitution, ca.1610–1618’, Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society, cxxviii (1984), 271–315. Under the category of ‘notable exceptions’:
J. P. Sommerville, ‘History and Theory: The Norman Conquest in Early Stuart Political Thought’,
Political Studies, xxxiv (1986), 249–61; J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (1999; first published 1986) [hereafter Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots]; J. P. Sommerville, ‘The Ancient Constitution Reassessed: The Common Law, the Court and
the Languages of Politics in Early Modern England’, The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 39–64; J. B. Sanderson, ‘But
the People’s Creatures’: The Philosophical Basis of the English Civil War (Manchester, 1989); Hans
S. Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge,
1985); ‘Sir John Davies, the Ancient Constitution and the Civil Law’, Historical Journal, xxiii (1980),
689–702; Geoff Baldwin, ‘Revisionism and the Ancient Historicism’, ibid., xl (1997), 519–25.
Sommerville has argued that absolutist theories were far more prevalent among groups such as the
clergy and civil lawyers before the Civil War than the revisionist account allows and that early Stuart
political life was in fact deeply polarized. Sanderson has argued that the war had its ideological origins
in the conflict between ascending and descending conceptions of political power. Pawlisch has very
persuasively argued that Davies, one of Pocock’s exemplars of the ‘Common Law Mind’, was in
fact steeped in the civil and Roman laws and made frequent recourse to them in his Irish Reports.
2 J. H. Hexter, ‘The Early Stuarts and Parliaments: Old Hat and the Nouvelle Vague’, Parliamentary History, i (1982), 207; Justin A. I. Champion, ‘Philosophy, State, and Religion: Languages of
Political Theory in Early Modern England’, ibid., xiv (1995), 189.
3 Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England: Essays and Studies (1989), pp. 286–7.
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SOVEREIGNTY, SUPREMACY AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR
assumptions about the nature of both the lawful and political. Indeed,
the finite resources with which early Stuart polemicists fashioned their
arguments meant that an imperfect conceptual consensus inevitably
underpinned the ideological conflicts leading up to 1642. Furthermore,
in continuity with existing revisionist accounts of early Stuart political
culture, the goal of political thought and action remained the achievement of consensus. The personal rule of the 1630s and the civil wars that
followed were not the product of an ideologically polarized Jacobean
polity. These events were themselves the cause of the deeper ideological
polarities that emerged later in the seventeenth century. In the early 1640s
events drove ideas and not the other way around.4
II
‘Sovereignty’ was, in the lexicon of the period, not necessarily a particular
theory or body of theories, but a commonplace concept that formed an
integral part of a shared stock of assumptions about politics and political life; it possessed no precise definition. Perhaps the closest to a ‘standard’ definition of sovereignty was that offered by the French jurist, Jean
Bodin, whose principal work appeared in English in 1606 as Six Bookes
of a Commonweale. Bodin envisioned nine ‘marks’ of sovereignty including most notably power to ‘give law’, power of war and peace and the
making of foreign alliances, power of taxation, appointing magistrates,
and coinage.5 However, English civil lawyers also arrived at varying conceptions of the rights and marks of sovereignty independently of Bodin
through a direct engagement with Roman law sources. Brian Levack has
noted a greater willingness among English civil lawyers than common
lawyers to attempt a systematic, practical definition of sovereignty, but
there is ample evidence that common lawyers were very much privy to
this sort of thinking as well.6 In fact, the exposure of leading common
lawyers of the time to Roman law sources is indisputable. Individuals such
as Sir Edward Coke, John Selden and Sir John Davies were certainly
familiar with Roman law and, in the case of Davies, Hans Pawlisch has
suggested that the myth of common-law insularity and distinctiveness was
just that – a myth, albeit a powerful one. When the royalist judge David
Jenkins, a common lawyer of Grey’s Inn, writing in the 1640s, offered a
definition of sovereignty as ‘the power of the Militia, of coyning Money,
of making leagues with forraigne Princes, the power of Pardoning, of
making Officers etc.’ he was simply repeating a commonplace.7 Indeed,
4 The argument presented here is in this sense fundamentally opposed to that of Sommerville.
See Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots, p. 225.
5 Jean Bodin, The Six Books of a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles and ed. Kenneth D. McRae
(Cambridge, Mass., 1962), ch. 10.
6 Brian P. Levack, The Civil Lawyers in England, 1603–1641: A Political Study (Oxford, 1973),
pp. 99–100.
7 David Jenkins, Lex Terrae in The Works of that Grave and Learned Lawyer Iudge Ienkins, Prisoner
in Newgate upon Divers Statutes Concerning the Liberty and Freedome of the Subiect (1648), p. 8.
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Thomas Hobbes, while undeniably original in his marriage of the new
mechanistic science and classical humanist rhetoric in Leviathan, also
operated within an accepted conceptual framework in laying out his
twelve rights of sovereignty.8
Like most hard-working concepts in political life, sovereignty was
frayed at the edges – sometimes with dire consequences. For example, the
distinction between legislative and judicial powers was obscure. This situation was rendered even murkier by the revival of parliamentary judicature in 1621. When parliament impeached Giles Mompesson it opened
a Pandora’s box of jurisdictional conundrums. Parliament was at once
court, council and legislature with none of these roles and functions
clearly differentiated. The practices of the personal rule of 1629– 40 – a
period in which parliament did not sit – confused rather than clarified
the issue. Parliament was effectively excluded from all governing functions and the judicial functions of the Privy Council became blurred with
its role in issuing executive orders. In the absence of new statute, the
proclamations and orders of king in council became de facto legislation.
Nowhere was this confusion more marked, however, than with respect
to religion – an issue that Bodin, writing during the French Wars of
Religion of the later sixteenth century, may have judiciously neglected at
times. The English, as usual, proved to be less judicious. For example, as
early as the 1530s the common lawyer, Christopher St German, envisioned
a parliamentary conception of the Royal Supremacy in which control of
the doctrine and discipline of the established church fell to the king in
parliament.9 The act for submission of the clergy of 1534 (25 Henry VIII,
c. 19) had only specified that canons of the church could not be made,
promulgated or executed ‘unless the King’s most royal assent and license’
be given.10 However, subsequent generations of English jurists revealed
a pronounced tendency to interpret ‘king’ as a legal expression as ‘king
in parliament’. Sir Thomas Smith, writing in the 1560s, included among
parliament’s powers the authority to ‘establisheth forms of Religion’.11
That Smith was a civil lawyer by training suggests that common lawyers
did not hold a monopoly on this view.12
The spread of a new, more militant Counter-Reformation Catholicism
during the final decades of the sixteenth century and the subsequent
discovery of the Gunpowder Plot early in the reign of James I contributed
8 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 121–9; for Hobbes’s
relationship to humanism see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes
(Cambridge, 1996).
9 John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988) [hereafter Guy, Tudor England ], p. 374.
10 G. R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1982) [hereafter
Elton, Tudor Constitution], p. 348.
11 Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), p. 78; Elton,
Tudor Constitution, p. 241.
12 Conrad Russell has traced the development of the debate on the Royal Supremacy in two important articles. See Conrad Russell, ‘Whose Supremacy? King, Parliament and the Church, 1530–1640’,
Lambeth Palace Library Annual Review (1995), 53–64, and ‘Parliament, the Royal Supremacy and
the Church’, Parliamentary History, xix (2000), 27–37.
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to a hardening of English views on the Royal Supremacy. The 1570 Papal Bull against Elizabeth, Regnans in excelsis, was the key catalyst. This
bull had, first, excommunicated the English queen; secondly, declared ‘her
to be deprived of her pretended title . . . and of all lordship, dignity and
privilege whatsoever’; and thirdly, absolved her subjects from their oaths
of ‘fealty and obedience’.13 Subsequently the 1570s, 1580s and 1590s saw
a growth in Jesuit and seminary priest activity on English and Irish soil,
rebellion in Ireland (1579–83, 1594–1603), and Armada (1588). From
1570 onwards the Tudor polity and the Tudor church were under siege
from without from the forces of Counter-Reformation. With Elizabeth
beyond childbearing years, and the religious views of her heir, James VI
of Scotland, uncertain, the role of parliament as a bulwark against the
Counter-Reformation increased. For example, in 1571 parliament confirmed the 39 Articles of the Church passed by the Convocation of 1563
and required that all clergy subscribe to them. Parliament also passed
additional treason statutes that included provisions making it treasonable
to bring in or attempt to promulgate papal bulls.14 Additional treason
statutes followed in 1581 and 1585, the latter aimed specifically at Jesuits,
seminary priests, and those that harboured them.15 After a brief respite
early in the reign of James I the revelation of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605
and the assassination of Henry IV of France in 1610 saw old tensions
re-emerge with a vengeance. Unsurprisingly, in 1606 the civil lawyer and
historian, John Hayward, defended the Royal Supremacy as a mark of
sovereignty in language clearly evocative of Bodin.16
Nevertheless, controversies concerning the supremacy persisted
throughout the seventeenth century. The canons of 1604, which among
other things stipulated the wearing of copes (Canon 24), significantly
did not receive parliamentary approval. As a result their authority was
subject to dispute throughout the first half of the century. For example,
early in the Long Parliament Robert Holborne cited numerous precedents
for the making of canons without parliamentary approval from before
the Reformation as well as those made ‘King James his time’. He argued
that ‘such canons as weere directly against law were void; but such as constitute indifferent things are not against law but ought to binde’.17 For
critics such as John Pym, Oliver St John and their ally Sir John Maynard,
13
Elton, Tudor Constitution, p. 427.
Guy, Tudor England, pp. 298, 303; Claire Cross, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church
(1969), pp. 75–6; Elton, Tudor Constitution, pp. 428–31.
15 Elton, Tudor Constitution, pp. 431–7. See also D. Alan Orr, Treason and the State: Law, Politics,
and Ideology in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 2002) [hereafter Orr, Treason and the State], ch. 1.
16 [John Hayward], A Reporte of a Discourse Concerning Svpreme Power in Affaires of Religion (1606)
[hereafter Hayward, A Reporte].
17 The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes from the Beginning of the Long Parliament to the Opening of
the Trial of the Earl of Strafford, ed. Wallace Notestein (New Haven, 1923) [hereafter Notestein,
D’Ewes], p. 152; Holborne’s position was similar to that of civil lawyers during the sixteenth century who held that canons had the force of law provided they did not conflict with statute. See
R. H. Helmholz, Roman Canon Law in Reformation England (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 169–70.
14
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D. ALAN ORR
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however, this was tantamount to popery. Maynard countered Holborne,
arguing that ‘those who would bind us by the Canons of the clergie doe
use the verie arguments the Pope did to raise his own power’.18 That the
king was supreme in religious affairs was generally accepted. The institutional mode through which the king exercised his supremacy, convocation or parliament, remained subject to heated debate.
If the sixteenth century marked a decline in clerical and episcopal
influence and prestige in the English polity, the Laudian ascendancy of
the 1630s marked a clear attempt at reversing that trend through the
restoration of church property, the renovation of cathedrals, and the
‘beautification’ of worship. The long-term objective of the Laudian programme was not the restoration of the Catholic faith in England, but the
reform of the Roman church after the episcopal pattern of the English
church. While Laud and his circle carried out these changes under the
rubric of ‘reforming’ rather than ‘re-catholicizing’ the established Church,
to those who envisioned a more Genevan church settlement, the ‘Laudian
Style’ was tantamount to popery.19 It was, in the words of John Pym, ‘an
Applying of us towards a conversion to Rome’.20 ‘Godly Bishop’ meant
popish bishop.21 In the years 1640–2 men like John Pym, Oliver St John,
John Hampden, Sir John Maynard, and the future royalist, Edward
Bagshawe, looked not to presbyter or sectary but to the civil magistracy
of king in parliament to advance and defend the true reformed religion.22
Erastianism became the key.
III
The term ‘erastianism’ is a somewhat nebulous concept pertaining to
a particular ideological position on the relationship of church and state.
It is clear that, on the eve of the English Civil War, the power to alter
and determine the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England constituted, in the eyes of many English civil and common lawyers, a mark
of sovereignty. Like most marks of sovereignty in the seventeenth century the nature of the supremacy was subject to dispute. For example,
the ideological position of Laud’s accusers at the start of the Long Parliament was erastian. Erastianism, according to William Lamont, ‘is now
understood as the claim of the secular power to control belief; it carries
with it pejorative connotations of a cynical indifference to moral questions’. Unsurprisingly, it is an ideological position usually associated with
18
Notestein, D’Ewes, p. 155.
Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian Style’, The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham
(1993), pp. 161–85.
20 Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640, ed. Esther S. Cope and W. H. Coates (Camden 4th
series, ixx, 1977) [hereafter Proceedings], p. 151.
21 William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–1660 (1969) [hereafter Lamont, Godly
Rule], ch. 3.
22 Edward Bagshawe, Two Arguments in Parliament, the First Concerning the Cannons, the Second
Concerning the Praemvnire vpon those Cannons (1641).
19
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SOVEREIGNTY, SUPREMACY AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR
that well-known seventeenth-century monster, Thomas Hobbes. Lamont,
following J. N. Figgis, has argued that this was in fact an inaccurate
representation of Erastus’s views and that the central concern of Erastus
and his followers was ‘with the question of how to enforce ecclesiastical
discipline in a state that was uniform in religion’.23 Erastus, writing in
the mid-sixteenth century, did not presume that the secular magistrate
had any power to define belief or doctrine.24
Figgis, however, allowed that the term ‘erastian’ meant something more
expansive in the context of seventeenth-century England, encompassing
the right to define and determine doctrine as well as the enforcement of
ecclesiastical discipline.25 Thus, the working definition of erastianism is
simply the view that power to determine doctrine and exercise discipline
within the Church of England rested ultimately with the civil magistrate,
whether that be king, parliament or king-in-parliament, rather than with
any ecclesiastical body, whether episcopal or Presbyterian. To a parliamentary erastian such as William Prynne this meant in practice that
acts of the convocation were subject to parliamentary judgement and
approval. Furthermore, questions of doctrine, as well as discipline, were
the proper jurisdiction of the civil authority of king in parliament. This
position opposed that which was essentially clerical: Laud at his trial
appears to have been willing to grant to the civil authority of king in
parliament powers of discipline but reserved doctrinal questions to the
clergy of the church assembled together in convocation.26 Indeed, erastianism in this sense stood against both the pretensions of the Laudian
episcopate to hold and exercise the powers of their offices iure divino,
directly from God by apostolic descent, and against the similar iure divino
claims of Scottish Presbyterianism on behalf of the assembly of the kirk
for a very different, yet also very clerical, form of church government.27
For an erastian such as John Selden the view that religious affairs were
ultimately the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate did not derive from any
sort of eschatological vision predicting the defeat of the Anti-Christ and
the establishment of what Lamont has called ‘Godly Rule’. However, for
the younger more ‘Puritan’ erastians such as William Prynne, with whom
Selden allied himself in the Long Parliament against the Westminster
Assembly in 1643–6, this was not so. Lamont has argued that both
23 William M. Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 1600–1669 (1963) [hereafter Lamont, Prynne], p. 155, and
also his study of millenarianism, Godly Rule, pp. 113–15. An important recent contribution to
Hobbes’s views on church and state is Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘Christian Ecclesiology and the Composition of Leviathan: A Newly Discovered Letter to Thomas Hobbes’, Historical Journal, xliii (2000),
217–31.
24 J. N. Figgis, ‘Erastus and Erastianism’, The Divine Right of Kings, ed. with intro. by G. R. Elton
(reprint edn., New York, 1965) [hereafter Figgis, Divine Right], p. 268.
25 Figgis, Divine Right, p. 291.
26 The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God William Laud, D. D. Sometime Lord Archbishop
of Canterbury, ed. J. Bliss and W. Scott (7 vols., Oxford, 1847–60) [hereafter Bliss and Scott, Works],
iv. 351–2. For this episcopal or clericalist position see Lamont, Godly Rule, ch. 3.
27 Lamont, Prynne, ch. 7; J. P. Sommerville, ‘The Royal Supremacy and Episcopacy “Jure Divino”,
1603–1640’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxxiv (1983), 548–58; Bliss and Scott, Works, vi. 43.
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erastian and clerical positions in the 1630s and 1640s were united by a
common set of eschatological expectations but were divided on the means
of achieving ‘Godly Rule’. The former sought to achieve the defeat of
the Anti-Christ and the millennium through the agency of the civil magistrate while the latter sought the same end through clerical rule.28
Erastianism did not necessarily entail that the civil magistrates be left
to their own devices in making judgments concerning doctrine. A printed
speech of Oliver St John dated 17 January 1642 suggested that the erastian
position was sensitive to the complications that could arise in the determination of doctrinal issues.29 Speaking to the impeachment of the twelve
bishops on charges of misdemeanour and treason, St John argued that
the bishops should not have votes ‘concerning Religion, or any wayes to
intermeddle or give advise touching temporall affaires’.30 He objected
vigorously to bishops issuing writs and warrants in the ecclesiastical
courts in their own names and not in that of the king.31 Nevertheless,
St John qualified his remarks, suggesting ‘that it may be necessary for
Bishops to sit in Parliament to give their advise in points of Divinity concerning Religion’ in much the same way that the learned judges of the
law were summoned to deliver opinions on points of law during impeachments and other instances of parliamentary judicature.32 Episcopacy was
of humane rather than divine institution and the bishops would serve in
a merely advisory role to the civil magistrate.
Late in the nineteenth century Figgis argued that the idea of the divine right of kings acted in the wake of the Reformation and CounterReformation as a bulwark protecting the British monarchies against the
growing pretensions of the papacy to power held iure divino and later on
to rebut the similar iure divino claims of Presbyterianism.33 In particular,
western European monarchs directed the theory towards claims that the
popes possessed a power to depose princes and absolve subjects from their
allegiance.34 Because kings held their powers directly from God and not
28
Lamont, Godly Rule, chs. 3 and 5.
Interestingly, this speech was in fact made against Laud’s rival, Archbishop John Williams, one
of the twelve bishops impeached by the Long Parliament in 1641 and a man characterized by
Nicholas Tyacke as a ‘Calvinist in doctrine’. The Laudians did not have a monopoly on the idea of
a separate clerical sphere of influence nor were they the sole targets of the anticlerical sentiment in
the early Long Parliament: Nicholas Tyacke, Anti Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism 1590–
1640 (Oxford, 1986), p. 209; Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism, and Counter Revolution’,
The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (1973), pp. 119– 43.
30 Master St. John His Speech in Parliament on Munday January the 17th An. Dom. 1641. Concerning
the Charge of Treason then Exhibited to the Bishops, Formerly Accused by the House of Commons
(1642), sig. A3v [hereafter Master St. John His Speech]; I would like to thank John Morrill for drawing
my attention to this tract; for St. John and erastianism see Valerie Pearl, ‘Oliver St. John and the
“Middle Group” in the Long Parliament: August 1643–May 1644’, English Historical Review, lxxxi
(1966), 500–1.
31 Master St. John His Speech, sig. A3r.
32 Master St. John His Speech, sig. A3v.
33 Figgis, Divine Right, ch. 8; for a more recent discussion of the divine right of kings see Glenn
Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (1996), ch. 4.
34 Elton, Tudor Constitution, p. 427.
29
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through the mediation of the papacy, there could be no power in the pope
to deprive kings of their crowns. To subject the powers of the king in
church and state to those of the pope was not merely a praemunire but
treasonable. It was treason according to both Roman and English law
because it raised an earthly power above that of the king. The derogation of the king’s sovereignty in ecclesiastical affairs was every bit as treasonable as levying war in his name without his commission.
The State Trials are replete with evidence supporting the contention
that this view was nothing new in the years leading up to civil war. In
the case of Sir William Talbot (1613), his accusers charged that the Irish
lawyer then Recorder of Dublin, had treasonably adhered to the doctrines
of the Jesuit resistance theorist Suarez, ‘that he maintaineth . . . a power
in the pope for the disposing and murdering of kings’.35 The veracity of
the charges against Talbot is irrelevant here. What is important is that
‘popish power’, by its very definition, meant the power to absolve subjects
from their lawful allegiance to their sovereign and depose them; furthermore, deposition meant death.36 This was clear: Sir Francis Bacon’s
argument in Peacham’s Case (1615) equated compassing the king’s deposition with compassing his death and William Prynne, writing in opposition
to the king’s trial in early 1649, reaffirmed this construction.37 Thus, the
papal usurpation of sovereignty suggested a particularly heinous meaning and necessarily fell under the first head of the statute of treasons of
25 Edward III as a constructive compassing of the king’s death.
IV
John Morrill has identified ‘three quite distinct and separable perceptions
of misgovernment or modes of opposition’ to Charles I’s personal rule:
the localist, the legal-constitutional, and, most importantly, the religious.
According to Morrill, only the religious had the momentum and aroused
sufficient passion to carry through to a civil war. Offences against property – ship money, coat and conduct, and forced loans – may have heightened tensions but they were not in and of themselves able to ignite the
flames of revolt. ‘Popish’ innovations and idolatry in a parish church were
a far graver matter altogether.38 Bagshawe aside, religious stances would
35
A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. W. Cobbett and T. B. Howell et al. (33 vols., London,
1809–26) [hereafter State Trials], ii. 779.
36 This was certainly James I’s understanding of ‘popish’ power: James VI and I, Triplici Nodo, Triplex
Cuneus. Or an Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, in James I and VI: Political Writings, ed. J. P.
Sommerville (Cambridge, 1994), p. 104; Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I’, The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (1992)
[hereafter, Fincham and Lake, ‘Ecclesiastical Policies’], p. 28.
37 State trials, ii. 873–74; William Prynne, A Briefe Memento to the Present Un Parliamentary Iunto
Touching their Present Intentions and Proceedings to Depose and Execute, Charles Steward, their
Lawfull King (1649), pp. 3–4.
38 J. S. Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, The English Civil War, ed. Richard
Cust and Ann Hughes (1997) [hereafter Morrill, ‘Religious Context’], pp. 159–81; first published in
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, xxxiv (1984), 155–78.
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prove the most reliable indicator of allegiance in the years immediately
after 1642. The royalist Sir Robert Holborne, who had acted as John
Hampden’s counsel in the Ship Money Case, was probably more representative of how religious convictions factored into allegiance. Holborne
vehemently opposed the king’s right to collect the extra-parliamentary
levy of ship money as well as other fiscal expediencies of the personal
rule such as tonnage and poundage. However, in December 1640 he
defended with equal vigour the legislative autonomy of convocation in
passing the canons of 1640 without parliamentary approval and the following November 1641 he staunchly defended the embattled episcopate
during the Long Parliament’s proceedings against the twelve bishops.39
To the Godly, however, religious ‘innovations’ and the reassertion of the
clergy’s legislative independence posed a threat not only to material wellbeing but also to spiritual well-being. The spiritual health of the English
polity was at stake along with the souls of every Englishman and woman.
The Morrill thesis has received pointed criticism from a number of
historians including Ann Hughes, Johann Sommerville, and, more
recently, David Cressy and Glenn Burgess. Hughes has emphasized the
need for an ‘integrationist’ approach emphasizing, ‘framework of intimate integration and interaction between the centre and localities’.40
Sommerville has argued that resistance to the ecclesiastical policies of the
1630s was necessarily grounded in constitutional theory and more explicitly that ‘Religious resistance was constitutional resistance.’41 Cressy has
suggested that the localist and religious perceptions of misgovernment
were in fact often one and the same. The progress of the reformation in
England as on the continent was uneven and, as a result, at the parish
level this left significant regional variations in the practice of worship.
Local custom pertained as much to religious as political and other cultural practices. As a result, the Laudian episcopate’s attempts to impose
uniformity and ‘beautification’ aroused widespread resentment in the
localities because they displaced long-cherished local practices and
customs.42 Similarly, Burgess has argued that many English saw the Protestant religion as part of a heritable birthright guaranteed to them
by the fundamental law of the land – the common law of England. The
subversion of the law was also the subversion of the reformed religion
that it protected from the forces of popery and Counter-Reformation.43
The result of these contributions has been a gradual collapsing of
39 Mary Frear Keeler, The Long Parliament: A Biographical Study of its Members (Philadelphia,
1954), pp. 134 –5; Notestein, D’Ewes, pp. 152–3.
40 Ann Hughes, ‘King, Parliament, and Localities in the English Civil War’, The English Civil War,
ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (1997), p. 263. The article was first published in the Journal of
British Studies, xxiv (1985), 236–63.
41 Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots, p. 214.
42 David Cressy, ‘Conflict, Consensus, and the Willingness to Wink: The Erosion of Community in
Charles I’s England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, lxi (2000), 131– 49.
43 Glenn Burgess, ‘Was the English Civil War a War of Religion? The Evidence of Political Propaganda’, ibid., lxi (2000), 173–201.
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Morrill’s tripartite division between localist and religious perceptions of
misgovernment on the one hand and religious and legal-constitutional
perceptions on the other.
This picture, however, is incomplete. Opposition could only harden and
move into the practical sphere of political action when legal-constitutional
issues became inextricably fused with the religious. The locus of this
fusion was parliament. When the Short Parliament convened in the spring
of 1640, parliament became the forum in which the grievances of the
personal rule aired themselves.44 Pym’s famous speech to the House of
Commons on 17 April 1640 outlined the grievances stemming from the
personal rule under three heads: first, ‘Grievances against the priviledges
and liberties of parliament’; secondly, grievances concerning ‘innovations
in matters of religion’; and thirdly, ‘against the free propriety of our
goods’.45 The first set of grievances flowed from the abrupt dissolution
of parliament in 1629 before the redress of grievances, the subsequent
imprisonment of several leading members including Sir John Eliot, and
the ensuing exclusion of parliament from the governance of the realm
for over a decade. The second referred to the ‘popish’ practices instituted
during the Laudian ascendancy. These included, for example, the practice of bowing at the altar, the wearing of copes, and the placing of the
communion table railed-in at the east end of the church.46 It also, however, significantly included the aggrandizement of the jurisdiction of the
ecclesiastical courts and in particular that of High Commission.47 The
third category encompassed such extra-parliamentary levies as ship
money, tonnage and poundage, coat and conduct money, and the like.
Pym put forward his own tripartite division of the forms of misgovernment based on parliament, religion, and property or ‘Civill Goverment’.48
The events of the Short Parliament reveal that Pym’s tripartite division was more formal than substantive. From the start Pym recognized
the interdependence of parliamentary privilege and the spiritual wellbeing of the commonwealth:
The Parliament is as the soule of the common wealth, that only is able to
apprehend and understand the sumptomes of all such diseases which
threaten the body politique. It behooves us therefore to keepe the facultyes
of that Soule from distemper. And although Religion is in truth the greatest greivance to bee lookt into, after and alsoe should claime the precedence
in that respect before either of the other Generalls. Yett insomuch [as] that
44
Esther S. Cope, ‘The Short Parliament of 1640 and Convocation’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xxv (1974) [hereafter Cope, ‘Short Parliament’], 167–84; Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity
of the Church, Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism (Oxford, 1992), ch. 7.
45 Proceedings, p. 254; The Short Parliament (1640) Diary of Sir Thomas Aston, ed. Judith Maltby
(Camden 4th series, xxxv, 1988) [hereafter Aston], p. 8; J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1986) [hereafter Kenyon, Stuart Constitution], p. 184.
46 Proceedings, p. 151; Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 185–6.
47 Proceedings, pp. 151–2; Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 186.
48 The accounts have certain nuances with the term ‘civil government’ reappearing in connection
with property-related issues: Proceedings, pp. 149, 256; Aston, pp. 8–9.
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verity in Religion receives an influence from the free Debates in Parliament
and consequently from the priviledges in Parliament without which men
will bee afraid to speake I thinke it fitt in order to priviledges in parliament to have prioritye.49
The role of parliament in ecclesiastical governance was central because
without free parliamentary debate on religious issues the true reformed
religion could not flourish. An assault on the privileges of parliament
represented not merely a threat to that body’s individual members but
to the Protestant religion in England.
It was not long before parliament’s role as the Godly commonwealth’s
guardian of the true reformed religion against ‘popish’ innovations came
to the forefront. News of a commission from the king to the convocation
house for the making of new canons on 22 April 1640 drew strong responses from both St John and Pym, who remarked upon hearing of the
commission’s issuing, ‘that noe such commission may be executed till the
house adiudged of it’ and that neither could any canons made in such a
manner bind the laity.50 Parliamentary inspection of the commission on
24 April did nothing to quiet fears. John Hampden expressed concern
over the extent and scope of the commission to make canons binding on
the laity and argued that the commission constituted an ‘Inducement to
Innovation’.51 Pym argued further that the canons of 1604 made without
parliamentary approval ‘had produced ill effects[.] And therefore the
Howse should nowe be more vigilant’.52 The issue was not simply innovations in religion or grievances against parliament flowing from the acrimonious dissolution of 1629 but parliament’s continued role in ecclesiastical
governance and the maintenance of the Protestant religion in England.
Power over the doctrine and discipline of the established church came
of age as a mark of sovereignty in the years 1640–2. As a result, Archbishop Laud’s actions in continuing the convocation of 1640 after the
dismissal of the Short Parliament and the subsequent making of canons
and the voting of ecclesiastical subsidy were not merely illegal but potentially treasonable. A century earlier Cardinal Wolsey had faced a mere
praemunire for his subversions of the fundamental law. However, when
the Long Parliament convened in the autumn of 1640, Laud for his
‘subversions’ faced not only charges of ‘divers High Crimes and Misdemeanours’ but also high treason.53 That Laud acted with the king’s leave,
complicity, and even approval was conveniently overlooked. The king
could do no wrong; therefore, Laud and other ‘evil counsellors’ such as
49
Proceedings, p. 149.
Aston, p. 31.
51 Aston, p. 51; see also Proceedings, p. 175.
52 Proceedings, p. 175; interestingly it was Canon 24 of 1604 that called for the wearing of copes.
53 Coke 12 Rep. 40; 77 Eng. Rep. 1322 (KB); praemunire is a largely technical term relating to a type
of legal action categorically distinct from misdemeanour, felony and treason that involved the usurpation of the king’s jurisdiction by either the convocation of the church or the ecclesiastical courts. I
have dealt with these issues in detail in chs. 2 and 4 of Orr, Treason and the State; see also Elton,
Tudor Constitution, p. 339.
50
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Wentworth and Finch became fully accountable for their records during
the personal rule.54 Although the 1604 canons provided a potential precedent for the 1640 canons, Pym, William Prynne, and the prosecution in
Laud’s trial all discounted them for lack of parliamentary confirmation.55
Religion stood at the centre of the unfolding struggle for sovereignty and
the specifically erastian context of the English Civil War took precedence.
V
Viewed in conjunction with these developments, the ramifications for the
increasingly contested relationship of episcopate and civil magistrate
become manifest. For example, the sixth of the original set of fourteen
articles against Archbishop Laud drawn up well before the outbreak of
hostilities in 1642 acquires a new significance. It charged that the prelate
had:
traitorously assumed to himself a Papal and tyrannical power, both in
Ecclesiastical and temporal matters, over his Majesty’s subjects in this realm
of England, and other places; to the disinhersion of the Crown, dishonour of his Majesty, and derogation of his supreme authority in ecclesiastical matters. And the said Archbishop claims the King’s ecclesiastical
jurisdiction, as incident to his episcopal and archiepiscopal office in this
kingdom; and doth deny the same to be derived from the Crown of England; which he had accordingly exercised, to the high contempt of his royal
majesty, and to the destruction of divers of the King’s liege people in their
persons and estates.56
The assumption of papal power was necessarily treasonable. It presumed
the erection of an autonomous sphere of clerical action over and above
that of the crown – a rival pole of sovereignty. Laud’s treason was that
he created an ecclesiastical state within a state.
Laudian attempts to alter the symbolic representation of civil and
ecclesiastical power both in London and in the provincial centres also
demonstrate the integral relationship between religious, localist and legalconstitutional perceptions of misrule. Notable among the particular
proofs offered for Laud’s assumption of papal power were his attempts
to alter the form of civic procession in St Paul’s London and a number
of other provincial centres, most notably York. The issue was the hitherto
accepted practice of bearing up the temporal sword in church during the
Lord Mayor’s procession – something to which Laud vigorously objected
and ordered to be stopped first in St Paul’s and then in the provincial
centres.57 In the case of York the testimony of Alderman Thomas Hoyle
54
Joyce Lee Malcolm, ‘Doing No Wrong: Law, Liberty, and the Constraint of Kings’, Journal of
British Studies, xxviii (1999), 161–86.
55 William Prynne, Canterburies Doome. Or, the First Part of a Compleat History of the Commitment, Charge, Tryall, Condemnation, Execution of William Lavd Late Archbishop of Canterbury (1646),
p. 476.
56 Bliss and Scott, Works, iii. 406.
57 Fincham and Lake, ‘Ecclesiastical Policies’, p. 41.
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was particularly significant. Hoyle recalled that an order of council board
had forbidden the carrying up of the sword in York Minster and claimed
that the order was by Laud’s procurement. He defended the practice of
bearing up the temporal sword, stating that ‘Itt was carried uppe soe in
the time out of minde of Man, and would have carried itt soe still butt
they were over-ruled by the Recorder, and soe itt was carried downe.’58
Sir John Maynard for the prosecution outlined similar incidents in Exeter,
Chichester and most remarkably in Shrewsbury where Laud had withheld
the grant of the city charter subject to the inclusion of a clause stipulating that ‘The sword might not be borne uppe in the Church.’59
Hoyle, a former Lord Mayor of York and an MP for that city in the
Long Parliament, was well known for his predisposition to ‘Godly’ Protestantism.60 He and his circle had been the target of Laudian attempts
to enforce uniformity in the 1630s and his roles as Lord Mayor, Alderman, MP and ultimately ‘Godly’ magistrate gave him a perspective on
the ecclesiastical innovations on the 1630s that was arguably representative of the prosecution’s basic position.61 He made use of the language
of the ancient constitution handed down from time immemorial to defend a customary practice at the level of the locality. The Godly such
as Hoyle cherished this customary practice because it had symbolized
the relationship of church and state in a Godly Commonwealth. Longcherished local practice symbolically represented the legal-constitutional
relationship of church and state. Thus, a single set of incidents reveal that
the perceptions of misgovernment and the languages used in their redescription were far from separable and distinct but closely linked and
highly interdependent.
Unsurprisingly, the canons of 1640, passed after the dissolution of the
Short Parliament, also loomed large in the proceedings against the archbishop and formed the basis of the fifth original and ninth additional
articles. The fifth charged Laud with the composition and execution of
the ‘pretended canons’ in which were contained ‘many matters . . . contrary to the King’s prerogative, to the fundamental laws and statutes of
the realm, to the right of Parliament, to the propriety and liberty of the
subjects, and matters tending to sedition, and of dangerous consequence;
and to the establishment of a vast, unlawful, and presumptuous power
in himself and his successors’.62 The latter part of the article concerned
58 The fullest account of Hoyle’s testimony in Worcester College, Clarke MS lxxi, 16 April 1644 (I
cite the date of entry as this section of the MS is not foliated) [hereafter WC, Clarke MS lxxi]; see
also HMC House of Lords, The Manuscripts of the House of Lords, Addenda 1514–1714, xi, n.s.,
ed. Maurice F. Bond (1962) [hereafter HMC Lords 11], p. 400.
59 WC, Clarke MS lxxi, 16 April 1644; HMC Lords 11, pp. 400–1.
60 Claire Cross, ‘A Man of Conscience in Seventeenth Century Urban Politics: Alderman Hoyle of
York’, Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England: Essays Presented to G.
E. Aylmer, ed. D. R. Woolf, J. S. Morrill and P. Slack (Oxford, 1993), pp. 205–24.
61 Phil Withington, ‘Views from the Bridge: Revolution and Restoration in Seventeenth-Century
York’, Past and Present, clxx (2001), 136.
62 Bliss and Scott, Works, iii. 404–5.
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itself with the oath against popery stipulated in Canon 6 which was to
be administered to all of the clergy and all the members of the universities, whether they be doctors of law, divinity or medicine, as well as
all masters and bachelors of arts.63 This, of course, was a substantial
section of the laity, putting the canons in direct conflict with Pym’s
argument in the Short Parliament. Pym’s parliamentary conception of
the Supremacy had insisted that in order for canons of the church to be
binding on the laity parliament must confirm them.64
The position of the prosecution was that canons in matter of doctrine
should be subject to parliamentary confirmation. The canons of 1640
were essentially a confirmation of the Laudian programme of reforms of
the 1630s.65 For Pym, St John, Prynne and like-minded erastians, they
were nothing short of an attempt to entrench the ‘popish’ innovations
of the personal rule. For example, Canon 7 had confirmed the communion table’s status as an altar, ordered its setting altarwise and the
erection of railings around it.66 The oath against popery decreed in Canon
6, known as the et cetera oath, also stirred controversy. This oath enjoined
the subject to swear that they approved ‘the Doctrine and Discipline, or
Government, established in the Church of England, as containing all
Things necessary to Salvation’ and that they will never give consent ‘to
alter the Government of this Church, by Archdeacons, etc. as it stands
now established, and as by Right it ought to stand’.67 For those opposed
as a matter of conscience to the ecclesiastical innovations of the 1630s,
these passages were more than a mere political setback. They were an
imminent threat to the spiritual well-being of the kingdom.
A logical objection to the case presented here would be that much
of the evidence is ex post facto – that the blending together of these perspectives on the personal rule occurred after the outbreak of the civil war
and that until that catalyst emerged perceptions of misgovernment did
indeed remain, as Morrill has asserted, separable and distinct. However,
the first set of articles against Laud, including Article 6, his assumption
of papal power, were presented well before the fighting commenced when
the hope for a parliamentary reconciliation between king and people still
held sway. Furthermore, many of the jurisdictional grievances that found
their way into the articles of impeachment against Archbishop Laud were
not new. Pym in his speech on grievances in the Short Parliament had
63
Ibid. 405; Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall; Treated Upon by the Archbishops of Canterbury
and York, Presidents of the Convocations for the Respective Provinces of Canterbury and York, and
the Rest of the Bishops and Clergie of those Provinces; and Agreed Upon with the Kings Majesties
Licence in their Severall Synods Begun at London and York, 1640 (1640) [hereafter Constitutions and
Canons Ecclesiasticall ], sig. E1v–E2v; see also St. John’s speech to the Long Parliament on 15 Dec.
1640 in Notestein, D’Ewes, pp. 153–4.
64 Cope, ‘Short Parliament’, pp. 181–2.
65 Morrill, ‘Religious Context’, p. 166.
66 Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall, sig. E3r–F1r; this was a significant departure from the
1604 canons. See Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 125–6.
67 Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall, sig. E2r; Journals of the House of Lords, vi. 267; italics
added.
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charged that the ecclesiastical courts, particularly the High Commission,
had encroached upon the king’s authority and claimed their jurisdiction
‘immediately from heaven’ by divine right.68
The similarity of the developments of 1640–2 with the events of Laud’s
trial in 1644 is readily apparent. For example, one of the main proofs to
the archbishop’s assumption of papal power was his obtaining of a new
commission for that court with expanded powers of fining and imprisonment and a non obstante clause restricting appeals from that court.69
The charge of denying appeal from the High Commission was potentially
serious. Both the powers to mitigate the severity of the law and the
right of final appeal were marks of sovereignty and the latter by its very
definition could not be imparted to any inferior magistrate. Either the
sovereign held this right or they were unmade as sovereign. There could
not be two final appeals. Sir John Maynard, in summing up his remarks
on 4 May 1644, argued that Laud’s actions during the personal rule were
tantamount to ‘taking royall power out of the Kinge’ and denying the
king’s power to pardon and mitigate against ecclesiastical sanctions.70 The
assumption of a separate forensic jurisdiction over and against that
emanating from the crown constituted the erection of an ecclesiastical
state within a state.
Both Pym and later Laud’s prosecutors were on well-prepared ground.
The jurisdiction of the church courts and in particular that of the High
Commission represented a long-standing controversy. Nicholas Fuller, in
his 1607 Argument, openly questioned the statutory basis from which the
High Commission drew its powers. Fuller argued that the statute of
2 Henry IV, cap.15 made for the suppression of Lollardy had been
‘procured by the Popish prelats’ and parliament had passed the statute
‘in time of darknesse (if not without the full consent of the commons yet
to their great dislike)’.71 Furthermore, the Elizabethan settlement (1 Eliz.
cap.1) had merely restored ‘to the Crowne the ancient Iurisdiction over
Ecclesiastical and Spiritual Estate’ and that ‘the power to imprison subjects, to fine them, or to force them to accuse themselves upon their own
enforced oaths . . . was no part of the ancient Ecclesiastical jurisdiction,
nor used in England by any spirituall Iurisdiction, before the Statute of
2 Hen. 4 cap.15’.72 The High Commission did not enjoy the power to
imprison, fine, or administer an ex officio oath that compelled the accused
to testify against themselves. Significantly, Fuller’s tract was reprinted
in 1641 amid the heightening debate on church government in the
Long Parliament, and the fourth volume of Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes
68
Proceedings, p. 256; see also Aston, p. 8.
Bliss and Scott, Works, iv. 180; HMC Lords 11, pp. 405–6.
70 WC, Clarke MS lxxi, 4 May 1644 (note that this entry is in fact misdated as 30 April in the
actual MS).
71 Nicholas Fuller, The Argument of Nicholas Fuller of Grayes Inne Esquire, in the Case of Tho. Lad,
and Rich. Mansell his Clients (1641) [hereafter Fuller, Argument], sig. A2r, p. 3.
72 Fuller, Argument, sig. A1v–A2r, pp. 2–3; The Statutes at Large (18 vols., 1763–1800), i. 415–18.
69
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published on the order of the Long Parliament in 1644 reiterated much
of its substance.73 The charges against Laud, therefore, constituted not
merely a continuation of the process of redress of grievances begun in
the Short Parliament and continued in the Long Parliament, but also a
new chapter in a series of long-standing controversies between church and
state. Most of these controversies were not new. However, by 1640 and
the recall of parliament the heavy-handed ecclesiastical policies of the
personal rule had given them a sharpness and violence that they had
hitherto lacked.
VI
The English Civil War was a struggle for sovereign power – sovereign
power understood as a cluster of loosely defined positive powers, themselves contested in definition. Many of these powers were relatively mundane and included the making or giving of law, the taxation of estates,
the appointment of magistrates, the declaring of war and the making of
alliances, and coinage. The governance of the Protestant religion in England, however, was most assuredly not among the more mundane of these
powers. It was essential to the spiritual well-being of the commonwealth.
Control of the doctrine and discipline of the established church was, for
all intents and purposes, a right or mark of sovereignty and, more than
mere legal sovereignty, it was the lynchpin of opposition to royal policy
in the early 1640s. Power over souls was more important than power over
lives, goods and estates, and the question of sovereignty and the issue of
ecclesiastical governance flowed together, forming an explosive combination that ultimately led to civil war. The historian, John Hayward,
writing in 1606 stated that: ‘it is necessarilie expedient, that they who
beare the soueraigntie of [the] State, should alwaies manage the affaires
of religion; either by themselves, or by some at their appointment within
the same State; and neuer receiue direction and rule from a foraine
power’.74 William Prynne could not have said it better – arguably he never
did. If the English Civil War was a war of religion, it was only because
a significant number of those who waged it saw religion as the proper
provenance of the state.
73
Sir Edward Coke, The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England Concerning the
Jvrisdiction of Courts (1644), p. 326.
74 Hayward, A Reporte, sig. C1r, p. 11.
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