5
Words against King James

Queen Elizabeth’s laws against treason and sedition expired with her death. But though there was no fresh legislation, Jacobean lawyers made sure that their king was protected against malicious and disloyal tongues. A West Country magistrate assured the Privy Council in 1606 ‘that no syllable escaping the mouth of any disloyal subject, or information touching my king and sovereign coming to my knowledge, should be passed or permitted without speedy certification to your lordships’.¹

The statute of Edward III still prevailed, and could be interpreted to cover treasonable words. To drive home the point, Lord Chancellor Egerton declared in 1605 that ‘maintainers and movers of sedition… deserve the greatest punishment next to treason’.² Star Chamber judges in 1608 declared that libelling the king or the state was treason.³ Treason could be ‘in the heart, in the hand, in the mouth, in consummation’, declared the prosecutors of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1618.⁴

Jacobean jurists had good cause to reflect on treason, especially after the unfolding of the Gunpowder Plot. But there was no consensus on the consequence of disloyal language. Sir Edward Coke seemed to contradict himself, over a long career, while some of Coke’s fellow judges took a much harder line against treason by words.

It was treason, wrote Sir Edward Coke, ‘to make the king a subject and to despoil him of his kingly office of royal government’. But could this be accomplished simply by speaking? There had been laws in England by which ‘bare words or sayings should be high treason’, including various Tudor statutes, but these were now repealed or expired. Treason, Coke insisted, required an overt act. ‘It is commonly said’, he asserted, ‘that bare words may make an heretic, but not a traitor without an overt act.’ In Rex versus Owen in 1616 Coke laid down that ‘merely speaking scandalous words of the king was not treason’, though ‘words which incited to his murder were an overt act which proved the compassing of his death’. So it was clearly treason to say that ‘the king, being excommunicate by the pope, may lawfully be deposed and killed by any whatsoever, which killing is not murder’.⁵ To disparage his majesty otherwise was merely seditious, a high misdemeanour but no capital felony.

About the worst that anyone said of James I was that he was foreign, and that a Scot should not wear the crown of England. One or two people called the king a fool, perhaps echoing the remark attributed to Henry IV of France, that King James was ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’. A few suggested that the king was unreliable in religion. One or two imagined his death. But scandalous and treasonable remarks, of the kind that dogged the Tudors, seemed to quieten down or move to a lower register. Perhaps there was general relief that the kingdom at last had a king, and a king with male heirs; that the long war with Spain was over; and that the Church of England seemed to be secure. Nobody, so far as we know, commented aloud on that aspect of King James that most fascinates modern scholars—his homosexuality. There was a surfeit of gossip about Jacobean courtiers and politicians, but surprisingly little dangerous talk about the king. Although there were executions for treason in James I’s reign, and even burning for heresy, no one went to their death just for treasonable words.⁶

He is no King

Amidst the celebrations for the new king’s accession a few subjects spoke rashly against the intrusion of a Scottish monarch. It would take several months before the new dynasty secured full acceptance, and more than a few Englishmen were unwilling to give their allegiance until King James was actually crowned. There was enough uncertainty and dissatisfaction in 1603 for the claims of alternative candidates to be aired. Exceptionally detailed assize records allow us to recover some of these spoken expressions.

On hearing the proclamation of the new reign on 25 March 1603, William Fletcher, a saddler of Lewes, Sussex, protested ‘that we ought rather to mourn for the death of her majesty, and ought not to rejoice for that any foreign prince should reign over us… and that if any foreign prince did inherit the crown the nobles were perjured, and that he would never take him for his king until he was crowned’. Found guilty at the assize of speaking these seditious words, Fletcher was sentenced to be pilloried for two hours with a paper above his head describing his offence, and then to be remanded in gaol.⁷

Likewise indicted for seditious words, Thomas Brown, a Hertfordshire yeoman, was said to have declared at Royston within days of Elizabeth’s death in March 1603 ‘that we who looked for the queen’s death these twenty years will not be made fools now… and that whilst he lived a Scot should not wear the crown of England, and that although all the men of England would join with the king, yet he would be against him’. Brown also spread the rumour ‘that the Earl of Hertford was ready in the West Country with thirty thousand men to withstand the king’s coming into England… and that he, the said Thomas, with his policy would procure one thousand men more to join with the earl against the king’. Unable to contain himself, Brown further offered to ‘drum to encourage the king’s enemies against him; and that when the king should come into the country, he, the said Thomas Brown, would tell him that he was come into a place whereof he was not worthy’. Found guilty of sedition at the Hertford assize, Brown had no opportunity to offer this speech to his new monarch, but was remanded in gaol pending sentence.⁸

A Kentish weaver, John Dawley of Lewisham, spread similar reports that the new king ‘would hardly be crowned because the Lord Beauchamp was up with fifty thousand men’.⁹ A Kentish blacksmith, Robert Vincerst, declared on 31 March 1603 that the Spanish Infanta was coming ‘with a great troop of men to be queen of England, and that the king should not live to be crowned’.¹⁰

Richard Hartropp, a labourer of Maidstone, Kent, complained in 1603, ‘what rogues are these of the late queen’s council that would not suffer her to marry while she was young that by her we might have had an heir to have been our king, whereas now we must have a strange king come out of another land with a company of spaniels following him’. Speaking in company in June 1603, Hartropp predicted that the new king was ‘in danger to be killed before Michaelmas day next’. Asked how the king should be killed, Hartropp suggested, ‘with an arrow or a gun out of a cellar’, and predicted that ‘after his death by the space of four years there shall be no king in England’. Hartropp’s words had more than a whiff of treason, but the Jacobean jury found him guilty only of sedition. His sentence was to stand in the pillory for two hours and then to be remanded in gaol until he could enter security for his future good behaviour. Gaol fever evidently did the work of the executioner, for Hartropp died unreleased before the following February.¹¹

In Essex too the new reign was greeted with outbursts of hostility, along with some remarkable interpretations of constitutional law. ‘It was pity the king came so peaceably to this place,’ declared Henry Mullynax, gentleman of Ingatestone, who wished that the English and Scots ‘had gone together by the ears’. ‘What if I did speak such words, I will justify what I have said,’ protested Mullynax before being remanded in prison.¹² Bartholomew Ward, a tailor of Littlebury, remarked in April 1603 ‘that the king that was proclaimed was not king of England till he was crowned, and that it were pity that a foreign king should be king except it were his right… and that there was no law till our king’s majesty hath enacted a parliament but God’s laws, and that there were as wise men in England to have been king as the king of Scots’.¹³ John Sileto, a butcher of Earl’s Colne, similarly said of King James: ‘he is no king; he is no king till he be crowned.’ John Walden, a blacksmith of Pleshey, declared in May 1603 ‘that we neither had a prince nor laws’. Edmund Hall, a labourer of Aldham, asserted that ‘King James is not our lawful king, nor ought not by the word of God to be received by us as our king because he is come in as a false Christ’. Henry Collyn, husbandman of Writtle, announced publicly, ‘by God, I do not care a turd neither for the king nor his laws’. Each of these speakers was judged guilty of speaking sedition, and each was remanded to gaol until they could negotiate their release.¹⁴ Their humble artisan status in no way inhibited their voicing of political opinions.

A legalistic antinomian current recurs in these outbursts, suggesting a popular constitutional literacy that confused the king’s rights by accession with the legitimacy afforded by his coronation. It was as if the death of Elizabeth created an interregnum, in which the royal writ did not run. A few people ventured the notion that the new king’s reign did not begin until a parliament gave it validation. Some of the conspirators promoting the cause of Lady Arbella Stuart also considered James Stuart no king until his coronation on 25 July 1603.¹⁵

Henry Glascocke, a husbandman of High Easter, Essex (apparently a Roman Catholic), took advantage of this liminal moment—between the death of one monarch and the coronation of the next—to declare his violent hatred of Protestant clerics. He concluded a diatribe on 31 March 1603 by saying, ‘if I might have the blood of one of these priests I think it would be the means whereby I should enjoy heaven’. Cautioned by his neighbour Hugh Osborne to be careful what he said, Glascocke retorted: ‘I care not what I say, there was no law now.’¹⁶

A similar notion prevailed in the Lincolnshire fenland, where commoners took advantage of the change of regime to resist ‘the drying and laying dry of the said fens and wastes’. A riot against invasive drainage broke out at Deeping St James on 1 April 1603, less than a week after King James’s accession, when William Smith, labourer, and Roger Horner, a fisherman, made ‘lewd and seditious speeches’ and threatened to kill some of the drainage workmen, ‘openly saying that there was no danger… for until [King James] was crowned there was no law, wherefore they might do what they would, for that the parliament could clear all’. Another labourer, Thomas Wells, justified his violence against the fen enclosures ‘as one greatly moved with the wrong done to our sovereign lord the king in his soil’. He even bid the workmen to depart ‘in the king’s name’ because he had previously petitioned ‘that the common in the fens might not be taken away from [him] and other poor people thereabout’. Though their cause was doomed and retribution swift, these poor commoners were ready to argue constitutional principles. One appealed to the authority of the crown, while another asserted that the kingdom’s laws were currently suspended. Their theory was naive and muddled, but their voices were assertive and robust.¹⁷

Elsewhere in Lincolnshire a few months later, John Hacket, gentleman, ‘not having the fear of God before his eyes, but out of his turbulent and disloyal heart… spread abroad and published many slanderous and scandalous speeches’ against the new monarch, so the indictment against him declared. Hacket claimed that King James was a papist because a popish book was dedicated to him, and he warned a gathering of gentlemen and clergy ‘that the king of France shall come with a backwing and murder them all, and that when the land were weakened he would alter our religion and bring up popery again’. Witnesses for Hacket allowed that he had spoken unwisely, being ‘much terrified with the boasts of the papists’, and one of them concealed these speeches, ‘in regard that he did love and wish well unto the said Hacket, who at that time was his landlord’. But eventually these words reached the ears of the constable, and thence to crown prosecutors, who pressed charges against Hackett in Star Chamber.¹⁸

He Shall not Long be King

More seditious tongues wagged after King James was firmly established on his throne. In March 1605 Robert Ashby, cooper, of Rye, Sussex, was found guilty of saying, ‘I would the king had never come into this country’.¹⁹ The Cornish yeoman John Penrose predicted in February 1606 that James Stuart ‘shall not long be king’.²⁰ Henry Crompton of St Giles in the Fields appeared before magistrates in 1611 for saying, among other excesses, that the king ‘would have his crown pulled about his head’. But after confessing in open court ‘that he was drunk when he spake these words’, Crompton was allowed to go free, only paying five shillings to the churchwardens for the poor of the parish.²¹

Several people threatened to kill the king, or wished him dead, though none of them was condemned for treason. In Wales in 1614, describing Llanidloes as ‘a town of bad government’, Evan David Thomas of Radnorshire said it ‘ought to be burned, and if our king were here, he should be burnt too’.²² In Somerset in 1617, in the course of a village quarrel, William Lavor of South Petherton struck a neighbour, ‘saying he would kill him if he were King James’. These were dangerous words, but Lavor insisted that he was misquoted, he had actually raised his voice against James King, not King James. The matter might have ended there, had not one of the villagers charged the constable with concealing Lavor’s treasonable words. The case went to the assizes in 1618 and was discharged ‘ignoramus’, but suits and counter suits between the parties were still active five years later.²³ Much more serious was the case of William Goodridge, who was awaiting trial in Newgate in 1619 ‘for using of traitorous speeches against our sovereign lord the king, saying if the king use us not well, we will cut his throat’.²⁴

In September 1621 Norwich magistrates imprisoned ‘two gentlemen who mishandled themselves’ by speaking ‘dangerous words concerning his majesty’ after an evening at the Dove tavern. Staggering into Dove Lane, John and Thomas Woodhouse, the sons of Sir Henry Woodhouse, fell into a midnight brawl with the watch and made ‘unfitting speeches’ against the constable who tried to restrain them. When one of the officers attempted to confiscate their swords, Thomas Woodhouse protested ‘that if the king should offer him such wrongs… he would kill him’. This was treasonous speech, which brought the Woodhouses before the sheriff and the mayor. After a few days in gaol the young men were released on bond while local authorities asked the Council for ‘direction’. The only mitigating factor was that the Woodhouse brothers were ‘overgone in drink’, though this, the mayor noted, ‘is not to be a privilege to them’. Friendly witnesses claimed that ‘the said gentlemen at the time of speaking had with overmuch drinking bereft themselves of the true use of discretion and understanding’. They had, to be sure, no ‘disloyalty or evil mind toward his majesty’, but were so incapacitated at the time that they were ‘likely to have fallen down the stairs’ or ‘to have fallen down in the gutter’. By Council instruction the matter was referred to the next Norwich sessions, where the powerful Sir Henry Woodhouse no doubt had some sway.²⁵

Yet another alehouse conversation at Wormley, Hertfordshire, gave rise to ‘vile words of the king’ in April 1623. When the evening conversation turned to a recent incident of poaching at Theobalds Park (the king’s estate), Christopher Chandler, a painter from Barnet, froze the room by saying: ‘I would that his deer were hanged, and he too.’ Edward Bashe, gentleman, the highest ranking of the drinkers, remonstrated: ‘thou rogue, meanest thou to be hanged, or knowest thou what thou speakest?’ Everyone construed Chandler to be speaking of the king, and by next day his words had reached the local justices. Under examination, the offender claimed to remember none of the conversation, but witnesses offered extenuating circumstances. His defence was not drunkenness but weakness of mind. Chandler, it was said, had served long before with the Earl of Essex, then became a painter, ‘where by overstudying of himself he became distracted’. Twice a year for the past seven years he was said to be ‘mad for the space of three weeks together’, and he had once been committed to prison at St Albans ‘lest he should have made away himself, his wife and children’. Allowing that Chandler was ‘a kind of brainsick fellow and of so abject and mean condition’, the Council decided he was ‘not a subject worthy to be made an example in so high a nature as his offence deserves’, and released him with a whipping.²⁶

Though their words were vile and undutiful, none of these speakers threatened serious harm, and none paid the ultimate price. Their folly, their drunkenness, or their weakness of mind provided sufficient excuse. In another age, in the 1530s, such words might have cost them their lives, but, though these sins of the tongue demeaned his sacred majesty, they did not endanger the Jacobean regime.

Queen Elizabeth of Infamous Memory

A contentious strain of discourse under James I affected the king’s honour by dishonouring his royal predecessors. Foul and scandalous remarks about Queen Elizabeth did not cease with the virgin queen’s death, nor were the misdeeds of the earlier Tudors fully forgotten. Dynastic histories as well as arcana imperii were exposed to public comment in the most egregious scandalum magnatum.

A Norfolk gentleman, Henry Wayte of King’s Lynn, was sentenced at the Norwich assizes in July 1605 ‘for sundry scandalous and opprobrious speeches’ and ‘unreverent and contemptuous words’ against the late Queen Elizabeth, though his actual remarks are not recorded. The offender was made to stand in the pillory for an hour, to pay a fine of a hundred marks, and to be confined to Norwich castle for half a year. Eight years later Wayte’s fine was still outstanding, and the king ordered the Exchequer to allocate it to a former yeoman of the guard in lieu of a pension, thereby reviving memories of the case.²⁷

In addition to repeated tales of Queen Elizabeth’s sexual misadventures there were also rumours that Lady Arbella Stuart, King James’s cousin and a plausible claimant to his throne, had borne a bastard child. In 1618 the rumour was said to be ‘voiced but not believed, hissed at by the common sort, slighted by the greater, listened to as a fable, till at last it landed at the ears’ of the venomous countess of Shrewsbury, who spread it abroad. As the Star Chamber judges remarked, ‘in state there is no greater error than addition to blood royal by fiction’. This was as true under James I as under his Tudor predecessors and Stuart successors. If such a child existed, ‘great dishonour were it to have the royal blood concealed, but if counterfeit, no greater blemish to a state’.²⁸ From Henry VIII to Charles II, a king’s bastards might be openly acknowledged, but there was no countenancing a by-blow from a queen.

A ‘damnable libel’ against the king was carried from the Midlands to the North early in 1606 and spread among tailors, drapers, and tradesmen. Some people allegedly copied it or recited it from memory. Writing to Secretary Cecil in February 1606, the incensed dean of Durham described the text as ‘full of treasons’ and historical errors. A Durham cleric who heard the libel read aloud declared it ‘most abominable false and treasonable matter’. Purporting to be a letter from Jesus Christ, ‘but indeed from the devil and his imps’, the libel derided the royal supremacy, slandered Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, reminded readers that the new King James was ‘a stranger’, claimed he was ruled by ‘ungodly counsel’, and predicted the overthrow of the ‘proud and mighty’ persecutors of the Roman Catholic church. There was little the authorities could do except to be watchful and to attempt to trace the distributors of these ‘seditious and scandalous’ words.²⁹

A dinner conversation at a gentleman’s house in Huntingdonshire in July 1610 led to a complaint in Star Chamber about words ‘tending to the dishonour of the late Queen Elizabeth’. A ‘private, familiar and friendly conference’ degenerated into a daggers-drawn brawl when the table talk turned to recent writings by the Jesuit Robert Parsons (1546–1610), and their refutation by the bishop of Lincoln, William Barlow (c.1565–1613). The diners disagreed whether these works were ‘invectively written’ or ‘wittily and learnedly done’, and began to raise their voices and reach for their weapons. They had evidently been reading William Barlow, An answer to a Catholike English-man (1609), which attacked Robert Parsons, The judgment of a Catholicke English-man living in banishment for his religion (1608). When John Brudnel accused Parsons of ‘railing against his sovereign’, Thomas Belley observed that the Jesuit, in conscience, ‘did not hold the said Queen Elizabeth for his sovereign’. ‘No more does the rest of them, meaning Jesuits and papists, that rail against our sovereign,’ responded Thomas Bedell, to which Brudnel, ‘in great heat and choler’, told Bedell ‘that he did lie’. These were fighting words, which led to challenges and bloodshed, and disgraced the household of the host Sir Robert Payne. The incident shows not only how readers could respond to text, and how text could spark debate, but also how speech could transform a situation.³⁰

Later in King James’s reign a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, Thomas Shepherd, made ‘unreverent and undutiful speeches… touching the honour of the late Queen Elizabeth of famous memory, and of the Queen Anne Boleyn her mother’. Shepherd was confined to the Marshalsea for his offence, because King James found ‘it touched the honour of his immediate predecessor, whereof his majesty of his princely wisdom hath been ever careful’.³¹

None, however, was so outspoken as the Jacobean Catholic Henry More, whose verbal assault on the king’s predecessors is recorded in Star Chamber depositions. A recusant gentleman from the north of England, More had previously been questioned by the Council at York ‘for drawing and persuading people to popery’. By 1623 he was an inmate of the Sheriff of Middlesex’s prison in London. There his ‘audacious’ chamber talk with fellow inmates and his table talk at the prison keeper’s house in Holborn brought ‘scandal, dishonour and depravity’ to both church and state. According to the Attorney General, Sir Thomas Coventry, More’s words were ‘lavish and licentious’ as well as ‘opprobrious, insolent and malicious’. Several witnesses reported that they heard him ‘many times at dinner and supper’ with ‘occasion of speech and discourse’, when More ‘would always be talking of religion’. Most outrageously, More said that ‘Henry VIII was a tyrant, a most vicious king, a sacrileger, and that the Protestant religion now professed within this realm did spring out of King Henry’s codpiece, and that… King Henry was a very devil in hell’. He also said ‘that Queen Elizabeth was a bastard, a tyrant, an usurper of the throne, a parallel with Pope Joan [who was a whore and had a bastard], and a pisskitchen, and… was in hell with her father’.³² Each of these insults against the reforming Tudors served to scandalize their Stuart successor.

A Turd to the King

As in other ages, a background murmur of seditious speech echoed through Jacobean England, rising in intensity with changing political circumstances. Country magistrates wrote regularly to London citing ‘words against the king’s sacred majesty’, enclosing copies of examinations, and acknowledging their ‘duty to acquaint one of his majesty’s honorable council with it’, and ‘to acquaint the king with it’ himself.³³ The assize courts heard dozens of cases of this kind, and their records preserve scraps of remarks against royal authority. The Council generally pounced upon every hint of sedition, and attempted to distinguish disloyal language from ill-considered badinage. Seditious utterances were often rooted in local and petty grievances, fuelled by alcohol and fury, as well as religious and political frustrations. The words could be reckless, scatological, and undutiful, though the speakers often pleaded mitigating circumstances.

Thomas Huddeswell, labourer of Bonnington, Kent, allegedly declared to a neighbour in 1605, ‘a turd for thee and the king’, but the assize jury found him not guilty.³⁴ Another man, Daniel Taylor, appeared before the Middlesex sessions in May 1606 ‘for speaking certain scandalous and traitorous speeches against his majesty’, though the offending words are not recorded.³⁵ Thomas Gibson, a sailor of Erith, Kent, spoke seditiously in 1607, claiming ‘that the king’s majesty was an ass, and that he, Thomas, would make a fool and an ass of him’.³⁶

In Jacobean Wales in 1613, when the mayor and sergeant of Machynlleth attempted to arrest Humphrey Thomas, explaining that they were the king’s officers, Thomas replied, ‘turd to thee, turd to thy master, and turd to the king for appointing such officers as you to poll the town’.³⁷ In January 1615 one Scroggs of Cambridge was committed to prison for ‘lewd speeches… touching the King of Denmark [King James’s father-in-law] … his majesty our sovereign hath taken notice thereof’.³⁸ Later that year Francis Rea of Billingsley, Shropshire, became a fugitive after making ‘undutiful and strange speeches… against the king’s most excellent majesty’.³⁹ James Howeton was indicted at the Middlesex sessions in 1617 for speaking ‘traitorous words against his majesty’.⁴⁰ In December that year, ‘being distract and mad’, the anabaptist William Ellis was confined to Bedlam for his ‘lewd and scandalous words against his majesty’s sacred person’.⁴¹

In May 1618 a London tailor, Passwater Sexbie of St Sepulchre’s, committed ‘an audacious villany’ of wordless speech when he threw his hat at the king’s face when his majesty was passing through Holborn in his coach. The Council determined that ‘he was much distempered with drink at that time, which may save him from that severe punishment which otherwise he might deserve’. Sexbie was whipped at Bridewell and ‘in the place where the insolency was acted’, and released after three months of detention.⁴² The incident reveals how close a commoner could get to King James.

Another young Londoner, the apprentice Matthew Mason, was examined in April 1619 ‘for divulging by letters certain false, scandalous and seditious news concerning the sacred majesty of the king and the state of the realm’. Mason’s crime was to include in a letter to his family in Lancashire news of a prophecy ‘that there is like to be great change in England’, and reports that an apparition of ‘a hand and a sword risen out of the ground’ had so frightened the king that he had taken to his bed. The letter was read aloud in the streets of Wigan, and a copy was plastered on a chest, so the words passed into public parlance. For his part in this scandal, Mason was whipped and held at Bridewell by order of the Privy Council.⁴³

Also in 1619, a Lincolnshire clergyman, Avery Partridge of North Scarle, came under scrutiny ‘for speaking of certain scandalous and seditious words against his majesty’. There was no apparent religious edge to these words, but they were dangerous nonetheless. While he walked in the fields with George Thompson, discussing the tithing of Thompson’s hay, conversation turned to ‘the cheapness of corn and the scarcity of money, and the reason thereof’. Partridge allegedly asked, ‘how can money be plentiful, seeing that the king hath given leave for the transportation of gold out of England? … We dare not say that the king is a traitor to our land, but we may say he is a traitor to our purses and a robber unto our country.’ These were dangerous words, which farmer Thompson was quick to report. Local justices took up the matter, and held the minister in Lincoln castle without bail until the Privy Council could make its determination. Partridge, for his part, denied the offensive words and said that he and Thompson spoke ‘mere matters of husbandry’. Evidence emerged that the accusation had been ‘devised and forged in malice’, after an argument between Thompson’s and Partridge’s wives about seating in church. Claiming to be ‘like sheep without a shepherd’, parishioners loyal to Partridge sought their minister’s reinstatement. They also testified that his accuser, George Thompson, ‘hath always been a very troublesome fellow, and malicious, daily living in so many contentions, quarrels and suits with his neighbours, and so full of dissembling, crafty devices, flatteries, scoffings, backbitings, lies, railings and such kind of bad actions’. Parson Partridge, on the other hand, always prayed for the king and exhorted his people ‘to all obedience and reverence unto his majesty and his laws’. Each man was guilty of sins of the tongue, but it could not be proven that anyone had spoken treason or sedition, and the matter was allowed to rest.⁴⁴

In October 1620, ‘falling in talk of the wars in Bohemia’, the butcher Hugh Drayton made offensive remarks that incurred the wrath of the Jacobean regime. A former soldier aggrieved about his lack of pension, Drayton allegedly said that, ‘if the king commanded him to go to the wars, God confound him body and soul if he would not go; and further said, in respect he had not his pension, that he [the king] was a villain and that the king of Spain would prove a better man’. This scandalous and unpatriotic outburst led to Drayton’s imprisonment at Warwick, and then to a series of letters and petitions as his family and friends tried to get him released. Nobody denied that he had offended, but instead they used the common excuse that he was ‘so far in drink’ that he knew not what he said. A petition subscribed with seventy-seven names declared Drayton ‘inoffensive to us his neighbours’. However, they explained, ‘he hath a weak brain, by reason of many wounds given him in wars and otherwise on his head, whereby it comes to pass that a little drink doth distemper his brain, and makes him to speak and do at those times such things as he is sorry for afterwards’. Another certificate declared Drayton ‘a man non compos mentis’ who ‘cannot bear his drink’, who had been ‘provoked by the devil’ into speaking against the king. His punishment, after six weeks in prison, was to be chastised by whipping, ‘in some such sort as may not be too open and public’.⁴⁵

Dennis Mannings of Bingham, Nottinghamshire, was reported in June 1621 for ‘dangerous and seditious words… which both concern matter of state and reflect particularly upon his royal majesty’. The offensive words are not recorded, but they precipitated a flurry of administrative activity. Magistrates at Mansfield referred them to the Privy Council, who referred them back to the justices of assize, with instructions ‘to take the cause and the merits of it seriously into your consideration, and thereupon to proceed according to law and justice’.⁴⁶ Later that year one Whitby was held in gaol at Chester for his ‘scandalous speeches against the king.⁴⁷ Also in 1621, when Devonshire magistrates advised the Privy Council of William Sharpe of Tiverton’s ‘unseemly speeches delivered of his majesty… to us much odious’, the Council thanked them for their diligence, but referred the case to the Devonshire assizes because they were preoccupied with ‘many other matters of greater importance for his majesty’s service’.⁴⁸ Amidst a worsening international situation, with English reluctance to back the Protestant cause, the Council became aware of a spate of seditious speech, including the claim that King James favoured Spain and the Scots while putting down England and the Welsh.⁴⁹ It was about this time that the French ambassador in England reported to his masters, how strange was ‘the hatred in which this king is held, in free speaking, cartoons, defamatory libels—the ordinary precursors of civil war’.⁵⁰ Officials judged some of this speech to be treasonable, but no speaker is known to have suffered a traitor’s death.

There is no telling what Thomas Keppins, husbandman, of Kingswood, Hampshire, said that caused him to be gaoled at Winchester in January 1622, but his speech included ‘vile and treasonable words… touching the sacred person of the king’. Found guilty at the spring assize, he was reprieved from execution ‘till his majesty’s further pleasure be known’. Keppins was still imprisoned in March 1622, but his ultimate fate is uncertain.⁵¹

A Surrey man, Robert Blinckerne, was accused in March 1622 of uttering ‘treasonable speeches touching his majesty’. In the course of an argument the previous August over the sequestration of some hay and corn, when the sheriff’s deputy displayed his royal warrant Blinckerne ‘bid the pox take [the king] with divers other railing speeches against his majesty’. He insisted he would keep his corn ‘in despite of the king’, and then said ‘that the king was an unjust king, an usurper, and not worthy to wear his crown’, and ‘that he would be revenged of his majesty’. Blinkerne’s principal accuser was Timothy Pinckney, a gentleman with an interest in the disputed corn, who presented his information half a year after these ‘lewd and disloyal speeches’ had been spoken. However, Southwark magistrates advised the Council, ‘well knowing that malice may inform a truth, in a case of so dangerous a consequence we offer nothing by way of excuse to extenuate the offence of the said Blinkerne, in uttering any disloyal or undutiful speeches concerning the sacred person of his most excellent majesty’. Ordering a full examination, the Council observed that ‘the words are of so high a nature as they are in no wise to be slighted nor passed over’. Blinkerne himself claimed not to remember his words, but used the common excuse that he had ‘taken too much drink, whereby he was much distempered and knew not what he said’. Witnesses described him as ‘drunk and mad’, his outburst fuelled by alcohol and anger. This was not the most honourable excuse, but it evidently achieved his discharge, ‘to be corrected with the whip’ at Bridewell and then released.⁵² Another offender, Thomas Russell, went to the Gatehouse in July 1623 for ‘words spoken against the king’s majesty’, and was still in prison three months later.⁵³

Finally, in August 1624, an argument between two gentlemen inmates of the Marshalsea prison grew into words of treason. According to Robert Mortlock, his cell-mate John Bailey used ‘uncivil language’, threatening to ‘kick him about the yard’, adding ‘that he would kick him that wore the crown of England if he talked so to him’. Mortlock ‘advised him to forbear such speech, and not to meddle with or mention the king or lords of the council’, but this only triggered another outburst: ‘Bailey grew hereupon more outrageous and swore God damn him, he would kick the king himself Mortlock, ‘according to his duty, knowing such speeches were not to be concealed’ (and no doubt imagining that his own penal circumstances might be improved), reported them to the prison authorities next morning, who relayed the information to the Council.⁵⁴ There was little chance of prosecution with only one witness, but the government persisted in examining these incidents of disloyalty and disaffection.

Catholic Disgraces

In the contested religious culture of early modern England it was hardly surprising that religious passions should lead to seditious language. Religious enthusiasts of all persuasions, godly Puritans as much as Catholic recusants, could readily talk themselves into trouble. Most Jacobean Catholics stayed quiet or avoided trouble for as long as possible, but a few, like the prisoner Henry More, more than made up for the general passivity.

The Cornish yeoman John Penrose, who predicted in 1606 that King James ‘shall not long be king’, was ‘a recusant, a man of mean estate and condition, and yet an intelligencer to and from London to recusants’ in the West Country, according to justice Nicholas Prideaux. As a matter of ‘duty and loyalty’, concerning the safety of the realm, he was someone to be watched. But magistrates also discovered an enmity between Penrose and his brother’s family, who may well have accused him out of malice. When Penrose’s sister-in-law told him late in 1605 ‘that his cattle would be driven for the king… he replied, let him drive them quickly for he shall not be long king’. When she related these words to the authorities, it was, Penrose claimed, ‘to abridge him of his life, because after his death a tenement… will be profitable for her’.⁵⁵ The Privy Council, like the historian, could only guess whether Penrose was part of a Catholic threat, the victim of family jealousy, or simply someone troubled that his cattle were about to be distrained.

One of the most notorious cases concerned the lawyer Edward Floyd, whose ‘disgraceful speeches… derogatory to his majesty and his royal blood’ exercised both houses of parliament in 1621. Floyd, an Inner Temple lawyer of Welsh gentry origin and by report a crypto-papist, served as steward to two aristocrats, the late Lord Chancellor Ellesmere and the Earl of Suffolk. For complex reasons involving land and politics in Wales, and ‘abuses offered to Sir Francis Eure’, Floyd found himself a relatively privileged prisoner in the Fleet prison; it was a parliamentary investigation of the warden of the Fleet that brought his verbal indiscretions to light.⁵⁶

Sometime around Christmas 1620 Floyd heard news of the battle of the White Mountain near Prague and the collapse of the Protestant cause in Bohemia. Conversing in the Fleet with Dr Pennington, another elite prisoner, he remarked ‘he heard that Prague was taken, and that goodwife Palsgrave [Princess Elizabeth] and goodman Palsgrave [Prince Frederick] have taken their heels and were run away… What would now become of the lad, Bess must come home again to her father.’ When Floyd said this, according to Pennington, ‘he garnished his face with laughter and made himself merry at it’. Pennington staunchly proclaimed it the duty of every Englishman to redeem the Stuart princess, to which Floyd responded, ‘go to, I see thou art a fool’. He then offered to ‘drink a health to the confusion of the king of Bohemia, who had as much right to that kingdom as he [Floyd] had to be king of Wales’, to which Pennington replied (with reference to the Gunpowder Plot) that he was ‘fit only to blow up parliament houses and to murder kings’. Report soon spread of this scandalous exchange, and the speakers and witnesses were called to answer before the House of Commons. For almost a month, from 28 April to 26 May 1621, parliament concerned itself with an episode of dangerous speech of the sort normally handled by the Privy Council, local magistrates, and justices of assize.

Floyd’s reported comments touched a spray of raw nerves. ‘I hear the honour of two incomparably noble princes called in question by a fellow as base as they are worthy,’ quoth Sir Francis Kinistone. To call the king’s daughter ‘goodwife’ and his son-in-law ‘goodman’, and to refer to them familiarly as ‘the lad and Bess’, was insulting and demeaning, reducing the blood royal to the level of commoners. To laugh at this tragedy for the house of Stuart, this disaster for international Protestantism, was to reveal a diabolical heart. The worst suspicions were confirmed when search of Floyd’s quarters yielded rosary beads, an agnus dei, a friar’s girdle, a crucifix, and varied relics, including’ a piece of our Lady’s petticoat and of the cross’. This cache of Catholic devotional material was almost too good to be true, and some might wonder whether it was planted. Sir Edward Coke observed, ‘he is a very pernicious fellow and hath a popish heart, though outwardly he conform’.

Though Floyd denied the alleged speeches, the Commons found the accusation convincing. His words, they agreed, were ‘disgraceful… false, malicious and despiteful… contumelious and derogatory… lewd and dangerous’. They were clearly scandalous and undutiful, even if they could not be construed as treason. The question was what to do about them. In an extraordinary debate on May Day 1621, members of the House of Commons vied with each other to propose the most severe punishment. ‘If we do not punish such in time, we may cry oh Lord it is too late,’ warned Sir Robert Phelips. Others suggested ways to ‘make this incomparably wicked man an example to all others’. Several proposed that he be whipped, and one, Mr Whittson, suggested the refinement of ‘hot bacon dropped on him at every six lashes’. Others thought Floyd’s tongue should be slit, or bored through, and that he should be branded in the face. Sir George Goring thought he deserved to be hung. ‘Ill words merit blows, ergo, stripes, pillory,’ said Sir John Strangeways, to which Mr Angel added, ‘gag in his mouth that he may not cry to have any man pity him’. Members were at risk of making intemperate speeches themselves until Sir Edwin Sandys cooled the frenzy. ‘He is a gentleman, let him not be whipped till degraded… let us not be so overcarried with affection as that we punish illegally and irregularly. And because his words are not slander but contempt, lay all contempt on him, pillory, papers, prison, fine.’ The house concluded that Floyd should pay a fine of £1,000, stand in the pillory at Westminster for two hours, ride backwards on a horse to the Old Exchange to be pilloried again, then return to harsher incarceration in the Fleet.

In their urgency to punish Floyd the Commons had not fully considered their jurisdiction in the matter. It was unprecedented for the lower house to pass sentence of that kind. The king thanked the Commons for their ‘zeal to punish such as would cast a blot of dishonour upon his blood’, but Floyd, he reminded them, was his prisoner. John Chamberlain reported what ‘most say… that the king thinks better to suppress such scandalous speeches than by [Floyd’s] punishment to blaze them further abroad’. The Lords, meanwhile, asserted their privilege as a court of record with jurisdiction over servants of the nobility. Committees and subcommittees conferred, and the Commons yielded judgment. Sentenced more severely by the upper house on 26 May, Floyd was now ‘to pay five thousand pounds, to be ungentlified (or to bear no arms), to ride with his face to the horse tail (and the tail in his hand) to the pillory in Cheapside, there to have the letter K branded in his forehead with a hot iron’. (Prince Charles, who was learning statecraft, rejected the planned S for slander, and ‘would have it a K’ for knave.) A few days later Floyd was to be pilloried in like manner at Westminster, then whipped to Newgate, and there to lie in the dungeon during life’. All this was carried out, Chamberlain wrote on 2 June, except the whipping, ‘which was remitted in regard of his age, being about three score’.

Writing to Dudley Carleton, Chamberlain remarked that ‘the sentence is by all or most thought hard and severe enough for any words how malicious soever (except blasphemy), and the censure given by the lower house was commended as more reasonable, whereupon much speech and dispute hath grown’. Joseph Mead’s letters also tell Floyd’s story. The news networks of Jacobean London were abuzz with commentary upon this punishment for dangerous talk. If anyone remarked on the irony of a parliament obsessed with its own privileges punishing the speech acts of others, it is not preserved in the record.⁵⁷

In the end Floyd’s fate was not so bad as it might have been. He escaped the whipping, though not the disfigurement and the ordeal in the pillory. The fine was crippling but unpayable, and it may have been remitted. The horror of perpetual imprisonment ended after six weeks when the king exercised his prerogative of mercy, and Floyd returned to obscurity. Floyd’s wife even recovered the trunks and writings that had been seized from his prison chambers, once the ‘popish beads and popish books’ had been removed.

Another Catholic prisoner, the priest Edmund Cannon, faced examination in March 1622 for his allegedly dangerous words the previous summer. A privileged prisoner in the Clink, Cannon enjoyed dining in the prison governor’s house at Upminster. On one occasion, when conversation turned to the whipping of some London apprentices, Cannon allegedly said ‘that we were all base in respect of the Spaniards, and the king of England in respect of the king of Spain was base’. This led to the prison-keeper’s wife, Mrs Davison, rebuking him, ‘that he durst not speak those words, if any magistrate or person in authority should examine it’. The servant Sybil Brusse, who was waiting at the table, reported this exchange to a justice. Cannon, however, denied the incriminating words, claiming that the informer had ‘inveterate malice’ against him, he having reproved her for being drunk. The Privy Council evidently took Cannon’s part, for it was the servant, not the priest, who was whipped and held at Bridewell.⁵⁸

Henry More, too, was in prison in London in 1623 when he made his scandalous remarks about Queen Elizabeth and Henry VIII. He also said that ‘all the bishops in England are rebels to the pope’, declared that King James ‘did the pope great wrong’, for ‘the pope was supreme head over all the churches in England’, and prophesied that ‘a Roman bishop’ should replace the present Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘to decide matters spiritual and temporal’. As for English Protestants, they ‘should all have fire and faggots’.⁵⁹

Not surprisingly, More also praised the Gunpowder plotters of 1605 and wished they had been successful. It was, he said, ‘a pity that he who undertook to blow up the parliament house was not hanged up presently, not so much for attempting the deed as for that he did it not’. He bragged that ‘he was once indicted at York for high treason, saying that if he had been hanged for it he had been a saint in heaven’. And, when conversation turned to the crisis in Bohemia and the loss of the Palatinate, More said ‘it was pity and not fit that the Lady Elizabeth and her children should come over’ to England, and ‘he would not have them have any maintenance nor means from our king’. Sharing Edward Floyd’s opinion, More declared that King James’s daughter and grandchildren could go begging. Warned by fellow prisoners not to speak so against the king and state, More answered, ‘the devil’s turd in his teeth if he spared him’. This was a seditious tirade, no less actionable because the speaker was already in prison.

Henry More’s defence was that, as a Catholic, he had been misrepresented by his Protestant accusers, and was prosecuted out of malice. One witness, Robert Blofield, a Suffolk attorney, had apparently made ‘libels or songs in scorn of the Roman religion, to stir or provoke the defendant to anger’, including ‘a song of a bald-pated friar’. Another, the cleric Nicholas Lounds, took offence when More said he was no graduate. A third, the yeoman Gregory Church, hated More for calling him ‘dogbolt’ and for accusing him of picking another prisoner’s pocket. There were ‘bitter words’ aplenty among these Holborn inmates, though none could pin down precisely the day, time, or circumstances of More’s verbal indiscretions. Nonetheless he was found guilty, and sentenced to a spectacular (though not capital) punishment.

News of Henry More’s extravagant denunciations of the English Protestant crown rapidly entered the national conversation. People were talking about his words. The young diarist Simonds D’Ewes noted on 11 February 1624 that ‘in the Star Chamber one master More was deeply censured for having spoken most unworthy and scandalous words of Queen Elizabeth, saying that the Lady Anne her mother was a whore and she herself was illegitimate’.⁶⁰ The Dorset diarist William Whiteway recorded that ‘a popish lawyer about London was censured at the Star Chamber for saying that King Henry VIII did piss the protestant religion out of his codpiece’, and noted More’s sentence, ‘to have his ears cut off, his nose slit, his forehead marked with B for blasphemy, whipped about London, and fined twelve thousand pounds to the king’.⁶¹ John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton about More’s censure ‘for speaking very lewdly and scandalously of Queen Elizabeth and Henry VIII’, adding ‘he laughed all the while’ in the course of his punishment at Cheapside.⁶² The Catholic news writer Thomas More (no relation) recounted Henry More’s notorious expressions:

that Queen Mary of Scotland was a martyr and the true heir to this crown; that Queen Elizabeth was a bastard, and wrongfully withheld the right from Queen Mary and her issue; and lastly, that the religion now professed came out of King Henry VIII his codpiece. This last was urged most against him as disgraceful to one that was so worthy a prince, and the foundation of the religion now professed.

Despite his claim that ‘he had said nor more but was extant in print in… statute laws and such other books as were set forth by public authority and approbation’, the offender suffered disfigurement and stricter incarceration.⁶³

Another overheard dinner conversation led to the imprisonment of a young Catholic gentleman. John Chamberlain told Dudley Carleton in May 1623 that ‘Sir William Monson’s eldest son is committed to the Gatehouse for arguing in favour of popery at the Earl of Nottingham’s table’. John Monson was charged with making ‘unfit and undecent speeches’ touching religion and the king. Petitioning the Privy Council for release, he claimed not to remember the offensive words, but expressed sorrow that any speech of his should cause their lordships displeasure.⁶⁴ Unfortunately we do not know what he said that was so dishonourable to King James and the Protestant religion.

The words of Thomas Rogers, however, are rendered in detail. A defiant lay Catholic, Rogers was gaoled at Northampton in February 1624 for his ‘divers speeches tending to the dishonour of God, of the king’s majesty, the prince’s highness, and the prince Palatine’. He taunted his Protestant gaolers by saying ‘that he respected the English bible no more than a ballad, for it is false throughout [with] not five true words in it’. But this paled beside his remarks about the house of Stuart. Witnesses alleged that he bragged that ‘most of the servants to the king and prince were papists, and that papists were most favoured by them; that the Infanta was married to the prince and with child by him; that the Palgrave was a rascally base fellow… a rascally beggarly slave’ and ‘that he hoped when the Infanta came to see fire and faggots amongst us’.⁶⁵ Here was another Catholic subject who would be deeply frustrated by the failure of the Spanish match or any stiffening of English Protestantism.

Puritan Seditions

Godly activists of the opposite persuasion, some clerics, others laymen, also spoke rashly and seditiously. Some were outspoken against the king’s declaration of sports, which permitted lawful recreations on the Sabbath. Many were troubled by foreign policy, the proposed Spanish match, and the king’s rapprochement with the Catholic powers. Puritan grievances ranged from complaints about the Book of Common Prayer to England’s failure to support the Palatinate. Zealous outbursts on these topics lent support to the king’s opinion that Puritans were inherently disloyal. One godly activist, John Williams of Brentwood, Essex, went so far as to declare King James antichrist, his kingdom Babylon. He appeared before Middlesex magistrates in 1618 for these scandalous words, but the outcome of his case is unknown.⁶⁶

Eavesdropping servants in January 1619 reported the incriminating words of another godly Protestant, the London haberdasher Thomas Ashton, who, ‘talking of the scriptures’ in the hallway of a house in the Old Bailey, allegedly said ‘that the king had more mind of swearing and hunting than of the church’. Ashton vowed ‘that there should be neither lord bishops nor archbishops in this kingdom’. And he also said that ‘Mr (William) Gouge of the Blackfriars was a better preacher than Doctor (Lancelot) Andrews, bishop of Ely, for that doctor Andrews leaned towards the pope’. Thomas Ashton, under examination, denied these words, which identified him as a seditious Puritan. The accusation, he claimed, was malicious, for Henry Awdy and Thomas Swanne, the young men who reported him, resented Ashton’s discovery of their ‘falsehood’ and theft. They had, he said, stolen wax from their mistress and spent the proceeds on ‘evil company’.⁶⁷

Later in 1619 Gerard Prior, the vicar of Elderfield, Worcestershire, was investigated for speaking ‘very lewd and ignominious words’ against the king. Preaching the previous year about St Peter’s day (29 June), Prior had denounced ‘playing and dancing on the sabbath day’ and then ‘prayed to God to turn the king’s heart from profaneness’. Another report had him praying ‘to keep the king’s heart from vanity and popery’. Some of Prior’s parishioners claimed to have been ‘much discontented’ with their minister’s speech, with ‘much muttering’ after the service. One of them, Michael Besley, turning to William Nutte in the churchyard, asked, ‘is the king’s heart so full of profaneness that Mr Prior had need to pray God to turn his heart from it, saying afterward it was a strange manner of doctrine’. Eventually these parishioners reported their concern to a magistrate, who reported the affair to the Privy Council and bound the minister to appear at the next assize or quarter sessions. The bishop of Worcester added to Gerard Prior’s troubles by suspending him ‘ab officio et beneficio’.⁶⁸

The parish of Elderfield, however, like many others, was deeply divided, and some of Prior’s flock counter-petitioned on his behalf. Neighbouring ministers also rallied to their colleague’s support. It became evident that Prior had presented certain parishioners for defamation, incontinency, and drunkenness, and that their accusation against him was by way of retaliation. The minister had endured a spate of libels and threats, and his cattle had been wounded, before his enemies denounced his ‘ignominious words’. Hearing all this, the Council decided to pursue the matter no further, and after some anxious weeks the vicar was reinstated. The Council then initiated action against Prior’s malicious accusers.

Another Puritan minister, William Clough, vicar of Bramham, Yorkshire, talked himself into trouble in 1619 through a series of ill-advised public remarks. A few years earlier on Whit Sunday 1616 he had declared from the pulpit

for the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, he cared not for them all three a rye or brown bread toast; and if my lord’s grace of York did stop his mouth, a better man than he should open it, knocking and clicking his fingers divers times in most undutiful and unseemly manner, to the scandal of the whole congregation.

This was doubly disgraceful, a heretical attack on the Holy Trinity and an assault on archiepiscopal authority. But it was only a prelude. In August 1619, after some of his parishioners had attended a rushbearing at a neighbouring parish, Clough launched into an impromptu and intemperate sermon against profanity that challenged King James and his declaration of sports. ‘The king of heaven’, he told parishioners,

doth bid you keep his sabbath and reverence his sanctuary. Now the king of England is a mortal man and he bids you break it. Choose whether of them you will follow. Now I will tell you why the king of England makes laws against God’s laws in giving toleration to those May games and rushbearing, the reason is because he durst do no other for plain fear for the safety of his own body in his progress.

These were ‘lewd and undutiful words touching the sacred majesty of the king’, scandalous and seditious in official eyes, and Clough was called to answer for them before the Privy Council in London.⁶⁹

In July 1620 the Council referred the case back to Yorkshire, where Clough’s mouth again generated friction. This time he told Richard Gascoigne of Bramham that ‘profane and irreligious persons’ were responsible for his legal difficulties, and that ‘it was a plot laid against him by the papists’. Describing to Thomas Whetherall ‘how he escaped about his business at London’, he explained, ‘he had to do with none but fools’, adding: ‘the king is a fool, and good for nothing but to catch dotterels, and further said he could make as good a king of clouts, and that the king was unfit to govern his commonwealth.’ Clough announced that he would soon be preaching at Paul’s Cross in London, ‘and there he would tell them all of these things, and how evil the land was governed’. Clough also declared ‘that in former times priests did rule kings, but now kings did rule priests, adding further that there were priests before kings and an altar before a crown’.

Clough’s words challenged the Trinity, denied the royal supremacy, scandalized his majesty, and threatened the security of the realm. No priest or subject could be allowed to say such things, and on 26 October 1620, by order of the Council in the North, Clough returned to gaol at York castle, where he languished all winter. Petitioning for release in March 1621, Clough described himself as ‘preacher of God’s sacred word’ (a standard Puritan formulation), remarked on his ‘woeful distress’, and sought to clear himself of ‘those ignominious and diabolical words supposed to be uttered’ by him, or else ‘to die the death of a traitor’. The ploy apparently worked, and Clough was freed from his ‘long imprisonment’ to answer again before the Privy Council and the Court of High Commission. But his ‘adversaries’, as he called them, had not finished. When neither the Council nor the High Commission would impose sanctions on the vicar, his principal accuser William Oglesthorpe pressed the case in Star Chamber. There Clough’s ‘seditious, indecent and irreverent speeches’ against King James were recapitulated, along with his ‘railing… seditious, irreverent and contemptuous speeches’ against his parishioners, and every other charge that could be found to damage him.⁷⁰

Nicholas Smithson, the Puritan vicar of Fuston, Yorkshire, also came before Star Chamber in 1621 for saying, among other outrages, that King James and Prince Charles ‘were both of them against the commonwealth and set out books contrary to the laws of God’. He had not only preached against but violently disrupted a traditional rushbearing, and ‘in a great rage and fury… did inveigh most contemptuously and irreverently’ against the king’s Book of Sports. Smithson’s principal accuser, the husbandman Thomas Harrison, described the minister’s words as seditious, contemptuous, unlawful, irreverent, unbeseeming, and wicked. Attempting to turn the tables, Smithson presented the disorderly rushbearers as ‘very profane and irreligious’, and himself as an orthodox conformist, protecting the church from their ‘barbarism and rudeness’. Rather than denouncing the king’s declaration, Smithson said he embraced it, and read it aloud to his parishioners; the rushbearers’ festivity, he said, took place BEFORE morning service, ‘contrary to the words and meaning of his majesty’s book’. The case turned on words as much as actions, and each side did its best to discredit the other. According to Smithson, the rushbearers, about forty young men and maids of the parish, entered the church as he was preparing for communion, climbed on the table, ‘and did wilfully overthrow the communion cup … and standing with their feet and shoes upon the said table and cloth did then and there stick and set up … certain things called toppinels, which are pieces of wood adorned and decked with gold rings, silver rings, jewels, scarves, and other such things’.⁷¹ The intrusion led to a shouting match in which all sides spoke somewhat rashly. To resort to Star Chamber was to use a heavy weapon in a local cultural contest. Who came out best is unknown.

Though his enemies described him too as a Puritan, it is hard to gauge the roots of Sir Robert Bindlose’s crimes of the tongue. In August 1621, in the course of King James’s progress to the north, ‘in great contempt and scorn’ of his majesty, Bindlose allegedly ‘swore by God’s heart that the king was of no religion at all’. He was also reported to have argued that ‘they were fools that paid any of the benevolence for the king of Bohemia’. And when he heard that King James had bestowed some pieces of ordinance on the Spanish ambassador, he exploded, ‘is the king gone mad to give them to our enemies, that we may be beaten with our own weapons?’ Bindlose was no alehouse blowhard, but was a substantial property-holder and a justice of the peace for Lancashire. His local opponents delighted to report his venality, hypocrisy, and disloyalty, among other transgressions. The charges against him ranged from ‘usurious dealing and notorious oppression of poor people’ to bigamy, bastardy, and incestuous rape of his own grand daughter. Religious enmity may have underlain some of these allegations, for Bindlose’s principal accuser, Thomas Musgrove, also asserted ‘that under the habit and colour of puritanism [he] doth shroud himself and all his foul misdemeanours, and is the cause of procuring divers private conventicles and meetings of puritans and silenced preachers at his own house’.⁷²

At the other end of England, a dispute in 1624 between two Cornish gentlemen, William Ericke and Ezechiel Grosse of Camborne, spilled over from the assize court to King’s Bench and eventually Star Chamber. On Ericke’s information, the Attorney General charged Grosse with making ‘insolent and audacious speeches… of a most dangerous consequence’. He had allegedly said ‘that the papists in England had more favour showed to them than any protestant could have’; that King James and Prince Charles ‘were rank papists’; and that the king and most of the nobility had subscribed articles ‘concerning the pope his supremacy over the Church of England’. This may have been commonplace anti-Catholic hysteria, sparked by the intended Spanish match, but it was also sedition. Grosse further compromised himself by saying that King James ‘had never done good to England, but had beggared it by giving great gifts… raised by taxes from the poor commonalty of this land’. All he could say in defence was that the charges sprang from Ericke’s malice.⁷³

Grumbles and grievances led dozens of Jacobean subjects to speak themselves into trouble, but their voices were mere irritants to the Stuart regime. James I was secure on his throne, and secure in himself, and chose not to over-exercise himself about minor insults to his honour. The response would be different in the reign of his son.