7
Dangerous Words, 1625–1642

Hugh Pyne’s notorious words were not the only disgraceful, undutiful, or apparently treasonous utterances to trouble the Caroline regime. Nor was Pyne alone in judging King Charles to be childlike and easily led. Dozens of Charles I’s subjects scorned him with contemptuous and dishonourable remarks. A recurrent refrain depicted the king as weak or deficient, unable to assert himself against such dominant characters as the Duke of Buckingham, Queen Henrietta Maria, or Archbishop Laud. The government responded vigorously to verbal disrespect against his majesty, but few of these episodes have been noted by historians. Their traces can be found in state papers, Privy Council correspondence, and in records of county assizes.

Pyne’s case would seem to have resolved the legal question of treason by words. But, despite the key judgment that ‘words alone make not treason’, there were ‘allays and exceptions’, according to Sir Matthew Hale, who was called to the Bar in 1637.¹ Caroline Privy Councillors did not necessarily concur with advanced legal opinion, and popular culture remained convinced that certain kinds of expression were ‘hanging words’. Witnesses to dangerous conversations commonly reacted by protesting ‘have care’ or ‘take heed what you say’, ‘thou speakest treason’ or ‘men have died for less matters than this’, at least so they told examining magistrates. And magistrates themselves could report words they thought ‘very seditious, or rather treasonable’ that others would dismiss as merely ‘presumptuous’.²

Between 1625 and 1642 the Privy Council heard repeated reports of subjects who disparaged their monarch, who impugned his character, or who even compassed his death. Despite the courtly conceit that King Charles was the best of all rulers, an undercurrent of contempt flowed through casual conversation. The king’s alleged inadequacy was a recurrent motif in popular parlance, even if it was scrupulously excised from high politics. The national conversation could be crude and irreverent, with scant regard for proprieties of discourse. It certainly made up in energy what it lacked in sophistication. This chapter shows the domain of political discourse in early Stuart England to have been wider, and sometimes nastier, than historians have often imagined. It shows the cherished arcana imperii, notionally the preserve of statesmen, to have been constantly eroding at the edges. It shows too a rain of dangerous remarks against a monarch who was ‘more jealous of his honour, or more sensible of any neglect and contempt’ than any other ruler of England.³ The material is considered here topically, and within each topic in approximate chronological order.

Light Reports

Caroline Privy Councillors avowed that they were ‘not easily credulous of light reports nor apt to take impression from the vain speeches or ejaculations of some mean and contemptible persons’. Nonetheless, their ‘care and providence’ for the state required them to instruct local justices to hold and examine all suspected evil-speakers.⁴ False news could cause panic, and commentary upon it could lead people to speak sedition. Reporters of false rumour ‘are worthy to have their tongues cut out’, wrote the news writer John Pory in 1625, though they were more likely to be corrected by the pillory or a whipping.⁵ By the thirteenth-century Statute of Westminster, still extant, any spreader of’false news or tales’ could be imprisoned until the originator of the rumour had been discovered.⁶

A flurry of rumours spread through the fenland market town of Wisbech in the summer of 1625, to the effect that King Charles was dead, or, even more chilling, that the monarch was about to be killed. The old King James had barely been buried when rumour spoke of another royal passing. Local magistrates worked diligently to contain this misinformation and to ascertain its source. For, without a firm foundation of allegiance, deference, and order, the royal regime was in jeopardy. Within days of the rumour’s first appearance at Wisbech a trio of justices relayed reports to the central authorities in London.

Wisbech was a regional commercial centre on the river Nene, 100 miles north of London. Its population in the early seventeenth century approached 1,500. News travelled slowly in this watery world beyond Cambridge, but Wisbech was by no means cut off from the affairs of the kingdom. In October 1623 the town celebrated with bonfires and bells ‘in joy for the prince’s coming home from Spain’, ten days after Prince Charles had reached London. In April 1625 there was more public festivity at Wisbech with ‘beer, bread, cakes, pitch barrels, coals and faggots spent on the bonfires… when King Charles was proclaimed’, a week after the new king’s accession.⁷ Two months later the town heard mistaken reports of their monarch’s demise.

Something of the flow of this news, and how it made its way around Wisbech, can be recovered from the written examinations. There can be no certainty who was telling the truth, but the reports seemed generally plausible and coherent.⁸

The stir began around 8 June 1625 when ‘a stranger came on the back side of the town of Wisbech’ and told James Thompson, labourer, ‘that the king was dead’. Thompson shared this news with his wife Ellen, who passed it to Henry Denny, a cordwainer of Wisbech, who spread it in turn among local shopkeepers and tradesmen. Peter Thompson, also a cordwainer, testified that Denny came to his shop ‘and told him, saying that our king was dead and that he was made away within these three days’. Thompson then took this news to the nearby apothecary’s shop of John Stanion and shared it with startled customers. One of them, Richard Tylney of Wisbech, gentleman, recalled Thompson saying, ‘that he could tell me news… of the king, and that he should be made away with in three days’. Apothecary Stanion testified much the same.

Robert Birback, another cordwainer, recalled that he was working in William Eaton’s shop when Denny entered, ‘saying to him that he could tell him news’. Asked ‘what news?’, Denny replied: ‘King Charles is dead, and I will warrant you now the world will mend, we shall be jovial boys, we shall have old cuffing and fighting, and old men shall be regarded, for rich men have gotten all the goods into their hands, and will be glad to give good recompense whereby they may be aided.’ This, if true, was a remarkable speech, for Denny did not just report the death of the king but appeared to delight in his passing. The death of the king seemed to intimate the death of kingship and the institution of a golden age for the populace, with joviality, benign fisticuffs, and a more equitable distribution of wealth. It suggested a dispensation, like the space between accession and coronation, in which the old laws did not apply.

Denny, not surprisingly, disputed this version of events. He admitted visiting Thompson’s shop, ‘but being examined what speech he had with the said Peter Thompson concerning the king’s death, saith he had not any’. Taking every precaution, the magistrates committed both Henry Denny and Peter Thompson ‘close prisoners to the gaol in Wisbech’ until advised by the Council in London with ‘directions in this behalf’. London’s response was prompt and level headed. The Privy Council thanked the Isle of Ely magistrates for their ‘care in a business which soundeth to so great consequence’, but noted ‘it doth not yet appear upon what root those words did spring’. They decided that Thompson should be released, with sureties for his good behaviour, but Denny would remained imprisoned, ‘to be proceeded with by the judges’ at the next assize.⁹ The ultimate determination of the case remains uncertain.

These Wisbech stirs partook of a recurrent rumour that the king was dead or dying, or was likely soon to be killed. Similar rumours had spread about previous monarchs, including Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. In this case reports imagining the death of King Charles anticipated his actual demise by more than twenty years. They were associated, perhaps, with the uncertainty that so often accompanied a change of regime, and with the liminal period before the new king was crowned.

In Essex, too, Joseph Mead informed Sir Martin Stuteville in September 1625: ‘it was added in all the country over, that our king (whom God bless) was dead, the women crying and howling as if Tilbury Camp were to come again.’ The prosecution of John Orris for treasonous words and William Burling for seditious speech at the Essex assize in March 1626 may be related to this scare.¹⁰

Another politically destabilizing rumour surfaced in the Oxfordshire town of Woodstock in the autumn of 1625, when James Hall, a tailor from Oxford, announced to the company in Thomas Godfrey’s victualling house on 12 September ‘that the king was gone to Scotland, and that there was a new king proclaimed there’. ‘Divers people’ heard this report, and some of them informed the authorities. Judging ‘the same words to be very dangerous’, the mayor and justices of Woodstock held Hall in custody, so they informed the Council, ‘until we shall hear your lordship’s pleasure therein’. It took more than a month for the Privy Council to respond to James Hall’s ‘lewd and pernicious words’. Their letter to the mayor of 18 October commended him for his ‘care’ and ordered Hall to stay in the county gaol until tried at the next assizes.¹¹ The rumour may have been related to comments heard in Nottinghamshire in October 1625, ‘that King Charles was not the king of England but of Scotland only, because he was born there’.¹² Another ‘wondrous rumour’ in the autumn of 1625 was that ‘his majesty was sick of the plague, and had a sore’, which turned out not to be true.¹³ More rumour spread from Norfolk to Yorkshire in November 1625 that the Duke of Buckingham was imprisoned ‘for giving the king’s majesty poison… but yet by God’s grace he was preserved’.¹⁴

In January 1626 a Captain Walker heard talk ‘that the king should not live to be crowned, that he is married to the Infanta of Spain’, and he attempted to report these words to the royal court. A footman brought him to Secretary Conway, who apparently dismissed the report as mere wind and noise. Without specific words and witnesses, there was nothing to examine.¹⁵ King Charles, in fact, had married Henrietta Maria of France the previous summer, and their coronation was scheduled for 2 February 1626. Not for the last time, a commoner had latched on to misinformation, and construed it in an alarming and alarmist manner.

False reports repeatedly recurred that King Charles was dead, or would die shortly. One Hopkins of the London parish of St Sepulchre told neighbours in 1628 that King Charles would not long be their king.¹⁶ Perhaps he heard the reports spread across the Bristol Channel from Swansea to Cornwall in July 1628 that King Charles was already dead, ‘slain by the cruel hands of the… Duke of Buckingham’. The Cornish magistrate Edward Cosoorth was so shaken by this report, fearing ‘terrible distractions’ in his locality, that he attempted to keep it secret until better informed by the assize judges or the Privy Council.¹⁷ Who could tell at the time if such news was reliable?

Thomas Ematt and Nicholas Browne, two seamen responsible for spreading this ‘false and dangerous rumour’, were held in custody until the next assize. The Council advised the Cornish magistrates that ‘his majesty, taking notice of the strange licentious liberty now taken for irreverent and undutiful speeches and false scandalous reports’, required punishment of these offenders that ‘may serve for a fit correction to them and a warning to others’. It was the king’s pleasure, they continued, that the judges ‘apply the severity of the law’ in this and any ‘offences of the like kind’. The central authorities particularly wanted to identify ‘the author of that report’ as well as its ‘relators’, to discover its source as well as its distribution, as the Statute of Westminster required.¹⁸

Nicholas Browne said that shortly before sailing from Swansea on 8 July 1628 the news was all over the market, port, and town that King Charles had been poisoned by the Duke of Buckingham. There was, he said, ‘general lamentation of the whole people, who gave out that they feared that the papists would rise up in arms and kill them in their beds’. The Portreeve of Swansea had received the news, said Browne, by dispatch from the Council of Wales, and the town began to ready its defences.¹⁹

Now the investigation switched to South Wales, to the source of these ‘wicked’ and ‘dangerous’ reports. It appeared that the rumour spread from Carmarthenshire to Glamorgan in the wake of a hue and cry, perhaps started to divert attention from a robbery. The Welsh reports were sent up to London on 28 August 1628.²⁰ But by this time it mattered relatively little whether ignorant people in the south-west believed that the king had been poisoned, for the Duke of Buckingham, the alleged murderer of the monarch, had himself been killed at Portsmouth five days earlier.

That news, too, spread like wildfire, alarming or delighting people everywhere. ‘Talk of the Duke of Buckingham’s death doth take up all men’s minds and tongues, so that nothing else is spoken of,’ Sir Gilbert Gerard told Lady Barrington.²¹ It joined the rumour, fanned by a Captain Tendring, ‘that there is now a far more villainous, mischievous, treacherous plot intended by the priests, Jesuits and sectaries of the Romish religion, for the subversion and utter overthrow of the reformed religion, king and state, than the papist powder treason.’²²

At Christmas 1629 the Newark tapster James Levett broadcast ‘scandalous words’ that he had heard from the lawyer Thomas Buller, to the effect ‘that the king himself was no divine, and that most of his majesty’s council were Arminians or papists’. Both men were ‘reprehended. . .for meddling in matters of that nature’, and bound over to the next assizes. The words were ‘much published in those parts’, and Lord Keeper Coventry sent reports to the Council in case they required ‘any further satisfaction therein’.²³

Another spreader of false news, James Priest, ‘a very miserable poor man who … can neither read nor write’, was held half a year in Taunton gaol in 1629 ‘for speaking of words concerning his majesty’s person and the state’. The Somerset judges, Sir John Walter and Sir John Denham, did their duty in sending up to London a written account of the matter. The speaker, by his own account, came from Warwickshire and had served several years as a Protestant soldier in the Low Countries. Set ashore in Cornwall after the ship on which he was embarked was taken by Dunkirkers, he was travelling overland to Coventry and had a pass for that purpose. Journeying through Somerset, he ‘fell into the house of one John Hooper’, a minister, whom he hoped would give him some apparel, and began to brag of his knowledge of world affairs. It was Hooper, it seems, who alerted the authorities when Priest apparently said that he knew something ‘touching the hurt of the king’s person’, adding ‘that he knew more than was fit for him to acquaint him with, then being a stranger, but hereafter he might tell him more’. When the minister pressed for details, the traveller said that he heard ‘that if the Duke [of Buckingham] had lived there would have been an alteration of religion… that the Irish men that were about Bristol were there for a purpose to have assisted some that were prepared to invade the kingdom… the king of Spain was in readiness with a fleet to invade’, and that the names of all Catholics of note in England ‘were recorded in the king of Spain’s books’. In fact this illiterate adventurer knew nothing apart from common fantasy and gossip. James Priest’s revelations tapped into a climate of fear, and it was not unreasonable to hold him until his story could be evaluated.²⁴

More rumours circulated in the next decade, some alarmist, some incredible. Another glimpse of the process comes from examinations before Buckinghamshire magistrates in April 1633. Henry Sawyer, mole-taker, told Sir Thomas Tyringham that he fell into company with Cornelius Sympkins, a tailor, and Christopher Coorsey, a husbandman, while walking across Lathbury fields, returning from nearby Gayhurst. Coorsey apparently opened the conversation in the conventional way by asking, ‘what news he did hear abroad?’ Sawyer replied ‘that the king was to go into Scotland the 5th of May next, and then the papists after the king’s going would rise against the protestants’, predicting ‘that men should go over their shoe-tops in blood before Whitsuntide next’. Sympkins’s immediate response to this dire prediction, so he told the authorities, was to say ‘God forbid’. One of those present asked Sawyer how he came by this knowledge, to which he answered ‘that they were no small birds that did say so, but rather great ones’. Brought before Sir Thomas Tyringham, Sawyer said that all he knew on the topic he learned from his father while they were catching moles, and his father had warned him ‘that he should not speak of it to any body’.²⁵

Henry Sawyer was one of the king’s lowliest subjects (described in some reports as a ‘boy’), yet he appeared to be well informed about the king’s planned travels, and dangerously knowledgeable about a possible popish insurrection. (King Charles eventually left London on 11 May 1633 and arrived in Edinburgh on 14 June.) The tailor Cornelius Sympkins had asked Sawyer if he was of the same religion as Mrs Digby, who had hired him to clear moles from her grounds, and he responded, ‘what is that to you?’ Though not explicit in the surviving testimony, it seems probable that Sawyer and his father, like their employer, were Roman Catholics. Lady Mary Digby of Gayhurst, Buckinghamshire, was the widow of Sir Everard Digby, who was executed in 1606 for involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. Her son Sir Kenelm Digby was a famous Catholic courtier (and sometime church papist conformist). Her presence in the neighbourhood, and her presence in the story, lent a frisson of plausibility, if not credibility, to these rumours of popish plotting.

Fearful lest the villagers had stumbled onto a dangerous conspiracy, the magistrate dutifully reported the matter to his superiors in London. Someone associated with the Digby household warned Sawyer’s father that his son had been taken into custody after speaking ‘that which was not fit to be spoken of, whereof note were taken’. Richard Sawyer, the father, examined a week later about his own involvement, said he heard from Robert Johnson, blacksmith, about ‘the amending of the highways against his majesty’s going’ to Scotland, and Johnson predicted ‘much hurlyburly in England…before his return’. When it came Robert Johnson’s turn to be examined, he simply denied ‘that he spake any at all about such troublesome matter, to his now remembrance’. Another crucial witness proved equally forgetful, and for a while no further light fell on these dangerous conversations.²⁶

Meanwhile, rumours of impending tumults spread across several Midland counties. The prospect of blood up to the shoe-tops was an irresistible topic of discourse. A traveller from Buckinghamshire recited Henry Sawyer’s words over dinner with a minister in Northamptonshire in May 1633, adding the sinister detail that Mrs Digby was stockpiling gunpowder and armour. Another carrier of the rumour identified Sawyer as being ‘of the old religion’, and claimed that the weaponry was sent up from London by Sir Kenelm Digby, though under examination he acknowledged only having heard that second hand.²⁷

The prime perpetrators of the rumour, Richard Sawyer and Robert Johnson, were committed to London’s Fleet prison and this led to a loosening of their tongues. Petitioning for release, Johnson now acknowledged his dangerous words, but said he heard them ‘spoken by an ostler dwelling at the Angel inn in Stilton’, who in turn was told by a Scotsman that if the king went to the Scots they would keep him, and that the English ‘should not have him back again unless they won him with the sword’. Johnson had predicted that, in such an event, ‘there would be much hurlyburly and many a fatherless child’, although the imagined conflict was now between England and Scotland rather than Protestants and Catholics.²⁸

What do you Lack?

Hugh Pyne notoriously likened King Charles to a child with an apple, and said he was no more fit to be king than his simple shepherd. Others scandalously remarked on the king’s inadequacy, calling him a boy or a fool. Contemporary authorities took these comments very seriously, so it behoves the historian to subject them to scrutiny. They stand in marked contrast to the loyal protestations more commonly heard in mainstream political culture. The fact that they never appeared in print has tended to render them invisible.

A remarkable conversation among inmates of the King’s Bench prison in the spring of 1626 led to the airing of dangerous and seditious words that directly affected his majesty. William Wraxall, William Elworthy, and Samuel Littlewood were held in the forced intimacy of three prisoners to a room when Wraxall, aged 55, began ranting about the crown and the kingdom. His chamber-mates apparently took offence, but they also took note, and reported Wraxall’s words to the authorities. Lying in his bed, at nine at night on Sunday, 5 March, they said, Wraxall declared: ‘The king had need to look to himself. His grandfather was hanged on a pear tree. His grandmother was beheaded. His father indeed died a natural death. His elder brother, ‘twas thought he was poisoned. His sister, she is driven out of her country. There is a curse laid upon him or the kingdom.’²⁹ Only missing from this was the claim that James I too had been poisoned, most likely by the Duke of Buckingham.

The prisoner William Elworthy, by his own report, remonstrated with Wraxall and told him, ‘he meant not well by speaking such words’, adding, ‘it is not fit for us to meddle with such matters’. Undeterred, Wraxall responded, ‘with a bigger voice than before, is not all this true that I have spoken?’ and turned his attention to the king. King Charles, he thought, ‘had need take a course amongst them and to sit in justice himself to look to things, having many upstarts about him… He is a young gentleman that hath much to look into in the world… It’s a disgrace to the kingdom that they do not take a course to help the king’s sister,’ with more words ‘very unfitting to be spoken’ to the effect that ‘God doth not bless the king or kingdom’. The recent return of the plague and reverses at war would seem to be signs of God’s vengeance.

Wraxall’s bedtime observations became a matter for judicial investigation the next day, when his cellmates reported them to the marshal, Sir George Reynell. Three Surrey magistrates—Sir Edmond Bowyer, Sir George Paule, and Sir Thomas Grimes—were called in to conduct examinations, and the offensive words about the king were written down. William Elworthy declared it his duty as ‘a true and loyal subject’ to give his information, but the other prisoners may have sensed an advantage in rendering Wraxall’s words to the authorities.

When the two informers returned to their chamber, we learn, Wraxall greeted them with ‘two or three great farts, and with a flearing look said, I can fart for all this, deriding at Elworthy that he did certify the justices’, and warning him he ‘should smart for it’. The atmosphere was highly charged, not just by Wraxall’s flatulence, for he allegedly came out with ‘worse words’ than he had spoken the night before, such words, by Littlewood’s report, ‘that if he had been a man of worth he might have had his head chopped off, had it been revealed’. Unfortunately for history, though perhaps fortunately for Wraxall, these additional words are not recorded. Considering that the offender was already in prison, and there were questions about the trustworthiness of the witnesses, the investigation went no further.³⁰

William Wraxall may have spoken aloud what others secretly thought about the king and kingdom. It was, however, common ‘vulgar opinion’ in the late 1620s that the duke had led King Charles into catastrophic military courses.³¹ Dozens of people claimed, in private, that ‘the king was too much ruled by the Duke’³² or implied that his majesty was a weakling. One such speaker, the London Scot Robert Melville (or Melvin), was under guard in June 1628 for his ‘foul and undutiful’ aspersions, that the duke and the king had a plot against parliament, and ‘with a great army of horse and foot would war against the commonwealth’. He allegedly said ‘that the Duke had a stronger council than the king, of which were certain Jesuits and Scottish-men … that when the king had a purpose to do anything, of what consequence soever, the Duke would alter it’.³³ This built on other contemporary libels, that the king was ruled by the duke, and that the ship of state was ‘not guided by the master but his mate’.³⁴

When Secretary Conway heard the report he seemed half persuaded by Melville’s protestations of innocence. However, he informed Buckingham, there was no alternative but to commit him, ‘because that denial is nothing against two witnesses, I neither dare discharge him or advise it. But with the best judgment I have, do think that such scandalous things as these are should be silenced with contempt, or punished exemplarily.’³⁵

It may be that Melville had fallen victim to a malicious prosecution. Conway’s letter to Buckingham is instructive on the government’s response to such matters. A single accusation might initiate an investigation, but short of a confession two witnesses were required to sustain a conviction for treasonous or seditious speech. The state could, at any time, discharge its prisoner and let the matter drop, or remand him for further examination. As always, it was a political calculation whether to bring the case to trial or smother it in silence. On this occasion, when Melville was ‘brought to the King’s Bench bar to be indicted upon treason, the jury would not indict him but found an ignoramus’.³⁶

Several weeks later in July 1628, still languishing in the Gatehouse, Robert Melville petitioned the Duke of Buckingham for release. (Significantly, his appeal was to the duke, not the king.) He was, he apologised, ‘drawn by the report of the common people … into the vulgar error of the time, and… was moved inadvisedly to utter some injurious speeches conditionally touching your grace’s honour’. But never, he insisted, did he mean any harm. Offering as fulsome an apology as possible, and betraying a hopeful understanding of the workings of law and government, Melville asked the duke ‘to intercede with his majesty for my enlargement, which I am persuaded your grace may procure from my most gracious sovereign at a motion’.³⁷

In another month the Duke of Buckingham was dead, but scandalous talk about the ruler and the favourite did not cease. On hearing the news of Buckingham’s assassination in August 1628, James Farrell, a servant to Lady Wotton at Canterbury, recklessly remarked ‘that he thought there was ten thousand in England who had as lief the king should be dead as the Duke’. Hauled before Isaac Bargrave (Dean of Canterbury, Justice of the Peace, and a royal chaplain), Farrell protested that he meant only ‘that hearing many people rejoice at the death of the Duke he thought they would not be much grieved at the death of the king himself’, which was hardly better. Bargrave dutifully reported the matter to London on 3 September 1628, noting that, despite Farrell being a papist, his intentions were not necessarily ‘malicious’. However, because they concerned ‘so precious a point as the life of our gracious master, the light of all our eyes’, the dean thought these words demanded the Council’s attention.³⁸

Responding on 9 September, Secretary Conway declared that a speaker of such ‘scandalous and undutiful’ words should be punished ‘according to the strictures of the law provided against offences of that nature’. There could be no excuse, he told Bargrave, for any ‘speaking rashly of the sacred person or life of the king’. Dean Bargrave, who had preached on that very subject a year earlier, did not need persuading.³⁹

The Oxford-educated schoolmaster Alexander Gill, bachelor of divinity, usher, and son of the high master of St Paul’s school, was another who rejoiced in the death of the Duke of Buckingham. But Gill brought serious problems on himself by also expressing contempt for the king. One evening late in August 1628 Gill and some companions were carousing in the buttery cellar at Trinity College, Oxford, when Gill drank a health to Buckingham’s assassin, ‘saying he was sorry Felton had deprived him of the honour of doing that brave act’. This, he confessed, ‘is a common thing done both in London and other places’. Gill embellished these ‘lewd’ remarks by saying that, ‘if there were a hell or a devil in hell, the Duke was with him’. But he might not have been in such deep trouble if he had not also spoken unadvisedly of his majesty. Disparaging King Charles for being ‘led so long by the Duke’, he continued: ‘we have a fine wise king, he has wit enough to be a shopkeeper to ask “what do you lack?” and that is all’. William Chillingworth, a newly appointed fellow of Trinity (already a religious controversialist), reported this speech to his godfather, William Laud, and an aggressive investigation was launched. Gill’s contemptuous remarks were widely circulated in the early Caroline news culture, despite attempts by the Privy Council to keep them quiet.⁴⁰ Chillingworth’s subsequent turn to Catholicism made some observers suspect that his accusation had been shaped ‘not… for love of the king but for hatred of Gill, because he is so great an antipapist’.⁴¹

Several sources relayed the story of Gill’s words with minor variations. The Trinity tutor Thomas Atkinson, writing to Thomas Smyth at Bristol, reported Gill’s ‘unchristianlike railing, indeed unmanlike speeches’, describing him as ‘one of a strange, hare-brained, bitter disposition’. Gill’s drinking companions, Atkinson suggested, had egged him on and ‘vouchsafed him audience only for their mirth’s sake’. At the peak of his folly the young man ‘burst out at last into these speeches of the king, I am sure they are somewhat near, I think verbatim: that he was a very weak man and fitter to stand in a shop with a white apron before him than to be a king of England’.⁴² Another correspondent reported Gill saying that ‘the king was a weak man, and did ill in following the Duke so long’.⁴³ Writing from Cambridge, Joseph Mead had Gill saying ‘that our king was fitter to stand in a Cheapside shop with an apron before him, and say “what lack ye?” than to govern a kingdom’. Reporting this patently seditious speech to Sir Martin Stuteville, Mead cautiously requested, ‘do pray strike out these words afore you let anybody read the letter’, a favour that Stuteville fortunately neglected to perform.⁴⁴

Since Gill made his remarks in an Oxford college, they might have fallen within the purview of the university.⁴⁵ But the Privy Council entrusted the investigation to Attorney General Heath and to Laud, who as bishop of London had jurisdiction over St Paul’s. Pursuivants plucked Gill from his classroom early in September 1628 and took him to the Gatehouse, then to the Tower.⁴⁶ Pyne’s case the previous year had shown that words by themselves could not be treason, but some still thought they were lèse majesté. To liken the king of England to a humble shopkeeper, or to comment on his majesty’s weakness, was deeply scandalous. The use of the huckster’s phrase ‘what do you lack’ also echoed and parodied King Charles’s speech to parliament of 4 April 1628, that now ‘he could not lack, since he had [the people’s] loves’.⁴⁷ Gill might have been excused if he had blamed the drink and expressed remorse; but instead, under examination, he said ‘that he was not glad he had spoken the words, but he was then as sober as now, and spoke it not without deliberation’.⁴⁸

The case expanded when a search of Gill’s papers turned up his correspondence with William Pickering MA of Trinity College, Oxford. On 10 September the Council ordered Pickering’s study to be searched for any passages between him and Alexander Gill, and any notes or papers concerning the king, the state, the duke, or members of the Privy Council. In addition to manuscript newsletters, ‘sauced with invectives against great men’, the search produced a copy of one of the most widely circulated verse libels against the Duke of Buckingham, apparently transcribed in Alexander Gill’s hand. It contained scandalous lines that had originally been directed at James I but now seemed equally applicable to his son. The libel rehearsed the familiar motif that the king was blind and needed to be helped to better vision.

And now just God I humbly pray
That though wilt take that slime away
That keeps my sovereign’s eyes from viewing
The things that will be our undoing.⁴⁹

When William Pickering was examined on 26 September 1628, he was able to confirm the gist of Gill’s ‘unfitting words’, though none that directly touched the king. Gill, he explained, used these words in ‘a mad-brained railing humour’, and was far from sober when he said them. William Grinkin of Jesus College was also examined for transcribing some of Gill’s verses, for which he fully apologized. Preferring not to allow the most dangerous words to be aired in open court, Laud conducted Gill’s examination ‘as privately as I might because the speeches are so foul’, and referred the matter to the king, ‘to your majesty’s wisdom’. When the case came to Star Chamber two months later, we learn, ‘the words concerning his majesty were not read in open court, but only those concerning the Duke and Felton’. In State Papers too the report of Gill’s offensive words is partially obliterated, with the marginal notation ‘read this no more’.⁵⁰

Although the Star Chamber record of Gill’s case is missing, details of his punishment are preserved in other sources. The episode was widely discussed, and letter-writers could not restrain from comment. Early in November 1628 Gill was censured to be degraded from his degree and his ministry, to lose one ear in the pillory at Oxford, the other in London, and to be fined £2,000. Observers thought that ‘being a minister and a bachelor of divinity [he] will… for his coat’s sake, escape that disgraceful punishment’, at least the mutilation. And sure enough, we learn, ‘upon old Mr Gill’s’ petition and Laud’s benevolence, the fine was mitigated and his ears were left intact.⁵¹ Referring to this case, the diarist John Rous noted this Michaelmas term a scholar ‘fined and sore punished… for speaking words against the king’.⁵² Gill spent two years under restraint before being pardoned in November 1630, and eventually succeeded his father as high master of St Paul’s. His verses ‘to his majesty on his birthday’ in 1630 implored the royal mercy, and sought pardon for ‘this much repented folly’.⁵³

Other sources reveal Alexander Gill to have been a friend and correspondent of John Milton, a poet in his own right who wrote verses commending the international Protestant cause.⁵⁴ Alexander Gill had another brief moment of celebrity in 1632 when he attacked Ben Jonson’s new play, The Magnetic Lady, the opening lines of which ask that resonant question, ‘What do you lack?’ Gill said the play ‘stinks’, but friends of the playwright retaliated by recalling the censure in Star Chamber of ‘so disgraced a quill’.⁵⁵ ‘Thy name it is a proverb still’, recalled schoolboy verses from the 1630s, lampooning Gill’s vigour with the lash, ‘but now remains the vilest thing, | The alehouse barking ‘gainst the king’.⁵⁶ Gill’s late-night excesses were hard to live down.

Few cases are as well documented as those of Pyne and Gill, but a scatter of remarks testifies to lack of respect for King Charles. Some of this was foul-mouthed obstreperousness, which might have been directed at any monarch, but much of it was specific to the shortcomings of Charles I. Not a year went by without mutterings demeaning or attacking his sacred majesty. Many of these words had wings of their own, and were ‘much spoken of or ‘often repeated’, and their subsequent retelling compounded the scandal of their initial iteration.⁵⁷

At Colchester at midsummer 1626 Robert Freeborne, ‘one of Sir Henry Audley’s men’, engaged in a noisy argument with the watchman, ‘bad a turd in his teeth’, laid violent hands upon him, ‘and took him by the throat’. When the watchman ordered him ‘in the king’s name to go with him’, Freeborne answered, ‘in the king of Spain’s name?’ To which the watchman replied, ‘you shall know that you shall obey King Charles… there are too many such as you are’. Everyone knew that Charles and Buckingham had recently returned from Spain, and were now waging war against that kingdom. The watchman’s invocation of royal authority raised the stakes, and Freeborne’s rash response turned an instance of disorderly conduct into a political offence that could be construed as sedition. The incident also had a religious dimension, since Audley was head of a Catholic family, but Colchester justices decided to take it no further.⁵⁸

Among other episodes, Anthony Spittle of Basingstoke declared to his neighbours in 1627 that he cared for the government in London, ‘not so much as for his wife’s turd’, and no more ‘than for one hair of his arse’—a fairly comprehensive denigration of public authority. Nottinghamshire labourer Thomas Haughton of Gunthorpe faced gaol in 1628 for saying ‘he cared not for the king’.⁵⁹

The Somerset gentleman Sir Robert Phelips was too cautious to speak so disloyally, but he was heard to say at the time of the general fast in 1628 that, ‘there being so many plagues of the commonwealth about his majesty’s person, we had never more need of such a humiliation than now’. ‘The general voice is, all is nought… we can see no way of deliverance’, wrote Joseph Mead at the height of the controversy over the Petition of Right. Opinion surfaced among the courts of Europe regarding King Charles of England’s ‘want of skill to govern of himself’. Intercepted Hapsburg correspondence from late 1627 referred to ‘the weakness of his Council, and their want of courage in not daring to tell him the truth nor advise him for the best’.⁶⁰

In August 1629 the Council took note of’some disgraceful words against his majesty’ spoken by one William Brookings, but seems to have taken no further action. John Williams, a man of greater worth, was held at Ilchester gaol that year ‘for speaking of high and heinous words against the king’s majesty’.⁶¹ Hearing in March 1630 of ‘certain fearfully ill-advised words concerning our most gracious king’ spoken by ‘one Hall, a tailor’, the magistrate George Cotton observed that ‘the first raisers of this report’ were ‘persons of the very lowest and basest rank and conversation’. But, finding them supported by some of ‘mine honest well known neighbours’, at least one of them a gentleman, he felt more confident in reporting them to Lord Keeper Coventry. Another foul speaker, John Broad, was held in Chelmsford gaol that autumn for his seditious utterance concerning ‘the state of the kingdom’.⁶²

Participating in ‘an arbitration of debt’ at the King’s Head in New Fish Street, London, in July 1631, Richard Crouch gave his opinion ‘that the king was indebted, and if he would pay all his debts he should be as poor a man as any then was there, and would not be worth twopence’. Warned by others present ‘not to speak against his sovereign’, Crouch persisted ‘in the like speeches’, so they reported him to the Privy Council.⁶³

In August 1631, when Somerset magistrates were readjusting common rights on Alder moor in favour of the crown, a villager named Edmund Callow declared that ‘the king went about to undo his kingdom’. When a neighbour ‘sharply rebuked’ him for these scandalous words, Callow persisted, ‘so he doth’. Alarmed justices charged the offender ‘with speaking of undutiful and unjust words of his majesty’, and committed him to Glastonbury gaol ‘till further directions might be obtained’. Sir Robert Phelips explained to the Earl of Holland that they were holding Callow as ‘an example of some use to men who are too apt with liberty to traduce public actions and persons’. Callow himself was ‘old, of hasty and ignorant disposition, a mere clown, and unconsiderable in every respect, more fit for contempt than indignation, yet to keep others in obedience and duty it will not… be amiss to have him bound to the next assizes’.⁶⁴ What happened to Callow is not known, but it is likely he was released after a pillorying or a whipping. The case allowed Phelips, whose own support for the crown had been questioned, to display his loyalty and respect while advancing his local ambitions.

A London butcher, Philip Tummey, was among those said to have uttered ‘base and scandalous speeches against his majesty’ in 1632.⁶⁵ George Weare of Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire, likewise made ‘vile, impious, malicious and seditious speeches against his majesty’ in 1632, which eventually came to official attention.⁶⁶ The treasonous remarks by John Stephens in 1632 are considered later.⁶⁷

Scandalous remarks in 1633 included those of Margery Gardiner of Clerkenwell, who declared that ‘the king is a bastard’.⁶⁸ A Worcestershire servant proclaimed ‘that my sovereign lord King Charles was a fool’. And a London physician was charged that year with ‘vain fancies’ against ‘sovereignty itself for saying ‘it was all one to be under the king and under the Turk’.⁶⁹

In January 1634 the Privy Council became exercised about reports from Kent of ‘wicked and malicious speeches uttered against his majesty by one Robert Wood, a vagrant rogue, which are so heinous as he justly deserveth to have severe punishment inflicted upon him’. When Wood was arrested on the Isle of Thanet and charged in the king’s name, he said that the king was a knave. Earlier he had been gaoled at Canterbury for saying ‘it were no matter if the king were hanged’. The mayor of Dover described Wood as ‘a silly man and cracked in his brains’, but he was smart enough to deny using the words alleged against him. The Council instructed the Earl of Suffolk, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, to ‘cause the said Wood upon a market day at the full time of market to be put in the stocks by the neck, and so to continue the space of two hours, and then well and soundly whipped, and afterwards conveyed to the house of correction, there to be whipped and set to labour for his living during the time of his life’. Wood’s wandering days would be over, but first he had to suffer the unusual punishment of having his neck, rather than his feet, set in the stocks, the clean contrary way.⁷⁰

A quarrel over cattle at Somerby, Lincolnshire, in October 1634 led Maurice Bawde, a gentleman, to declare that ‘he neither cared for the king nor the king’s laws’. He was, perhaps, provoked to this by John Dawson, who called him ‘a base, shitten, stinking gentleman’ who ‘could not speak one true word unless it came out of his mouth by chance’. Bawde then called Dawson ‘a rogue, a base rogue, pillory rogue, hog’s face, and brazen face knave’, adding ‘that he would have the cropping of [Dawson’s] ears, and make sauce of them’. When Dawson’s sister Elizabeth joined the argument, Bawde called her ‘base whore and uncivil whore, and said that he would prove her a whore’. When Bawde then attempted to break open the pound and take the cattle by force, Dawson asked him if he would not obey the king’s laws, triggering the outburst about caring not for the king. Bawde’s violent behaviour led to a charge of riot at the Grantham assizes, to which he retaliated by suing Dawson in the High Court of Chivalry. Gentlemen, we have seen, could not always bridle their tongues, and the scandalous exchange in this case is recorded in proceedings of the Chivalry court.⁷¹

Others whose tongues caused them trouble in 1634 included Robert Redferne of Gloucester, who said that he could make better laws than any king or peer, and ‘that the king was no better than another ordinary man’;⁷² Noah Rogers at Cambridge, who said ‘that he hoped to die, and tread King Charles under his feet’;⁷³ and the Kentish gentlemen Edward Boys, who spoke ‘against the king and the quiet of the kingdom’ in opposition to the king’s Book of Sports.⁷⁴

The conversation among villagers and travellers at Barking, Essex, moved onto dangerous ground in July 1634 when the fisherman Richard Deane alias Ottowell mentioned a recent incident in which a coachman struck a gentleman with his whip, and the gentleman retaliated by hitting the coachman with his sword. Deane got himself into trouble by saying ‘that if the king had done as much to him as the coachman did to the gentleman he would have struck the king’. Attempting to get Deane to retract these words, the tavern keeper interjected, ‘what, not the king if you had known him?’ The local constable, Richard Walter, who was drinking with the rest, apparently arrested Deane and reported him to the magistrates, who dutifully examined the offender.

Richard Deane, in his defence, denied speaking any such words. Rather, he claimed, he had said ‘that being the coachman had struck the gentleman with his whip, the gentleman, if he had been a king, could have done no less than to strike the coachman from his box’. In this completely different account the king could be imagined as doing the striking, rather than justifiably being struck. It was a lesson, perhaps, not to speak lightly of kings. In this case the authorities seemed satisfied that Deane had merely mis-spoken himself, or had been mis-heard, and let the matter drop.⁷⁵

In July 1635 the painter James Priest declared after church at Cambridge that ‘the king…is overruled by his servants, a company of knaves’, with ‘many more unfitting speeches’ against Sunday sports, altars, and church organs. Examined some weeks later, Priest tried to talk himself out of trouble. He said that he could not remember the alleged words, ‘and protested that he never held them in his heart’. On the Sunday in question, he recalled, he ‘was much afflicted in mind’ about his debts, and drank half a pint of sack at the Falcon tavern, and then another pint and a half more on coming home, which left him ‘much weakened in his mind’. The alcohol, he implied, possessed a voice of its own, for which the tongue was not responsible.⁷⁶ Others investigated for ‘undutiful and unsufferable speeches’ or ‘opprobrious and scandalous words’ against King Charles in 1635 included Ralph Blackhall, a prisoner in the Fleet, Edward Loggin in Worcestershire, and Walter Gould in Dorset. Details of their offences have not survived, but their participation in popular political discourse brought them under surveillance.⁷⁷ A gentleman, Sir Nicholas Stoddard, was referred to Star Chamber in 1635 for saying ‘most maliciously and in high contempt of the king… that our kingdom of England never prospered since a Scot governed’.⁷⁸ Year by year the flow of disparagement continued unstaunched.

John Lewes, a petty chapman of King’s Cliff, Northamptonshire, was examined in 1636 for saying that ‘the king was no better than the beggar’, but he was judged to be mad.⁷⁹ In another case from 1636, Victor Johnson, ‘a poor distressed stranger’, was imprisoned at Plymouth for ‘uttering some words to the dishonour of his majesty, but claimed he was falsely accused.⁸⁰ Anticipating the judgement of some modern historians, a Pembrokeshire man, Gerard Wright, declared in 1636 that ‘King James was a wise and learned king, but King Charles wants a good head piece’. When his minister protested, ‘Nay, its not so, for the king is generous and wise’, Wright replied, ‘Yea, in faith but it is so, and I tell you therein but the truth; for he giveth too much credit and belief to his nobility, and believeth anything they speak to him.’ The minister, Edward Provard, made note of these scandalous words, and intended to relay them to the authorities. But ‘living nine score miles distant from London’ and temporarily mislaying his note among a trunk full of books, Provard delayed until 1639 before reporting the matter to the Council, ‘who thereupon granted forth a warrant for the apprehension of the said Wright’.⁸¹ The minister might reasonably have been worried, for just a few years earlier a man had been arrested because ‘hearing of… vile, impious, malicious and seditious speeches against his majesty he did conceal them for the space of two years and did not reveal the same unto authority’.⁸² The reliability of Provard’s recollections were impugned, however, by testimony about ‘a plot to disgrace’ the alleged speaker, who was locked in dispute with the minister about fishing rights and leases.⁸³

Another case in 1636 involved John Osborne of Scotswood, Northumberland, who told a gathering of gentlemen, colliers, and civic officials ‘that every man was a king, and he was a king in his own house’. When Thomas Milbourne protested, ‘take heed what you say of kings, for it cannot be so’, Osborne pressed on, claiming ‘that kings were murderers, and that King Edward the sixth did murder three wives and one of their brothers’. Another neighbour warned him, ‘take heed what you say, I doubt you speak treason, and I will make report what you have said in discharge of my duty’. Osborne responded, ‘what can the king do, he can but take my life’, although he might also have recommended a more accurate reading of history. The conversation apparently started with Ship Money but rapidly descended into sedition. Asked by the examining magistrate, ‘what occasion he had to speak discourses of any such things’, Osborne answered that he recalled the matter from his study of the chronicle, but had no ‘disloyal thoughts of his majesty’.⁸⁴ More ‘treasonous words against his majesty’ in 1636 came from John Pettit, a labourer of Saffron Walden, Essex, who, being told that King Charles was king of three kingdoms commented, ‘the more is the pity’.⁸⁵

Early in 1637, deep in drink at the Lion and the Greyhound at Lavenham, Suffolk, Thomas Skinner spoke ‘dangerous and treasonable words’ against the king. Quite what these words were, no one could say, for Skinner had apparently whispered them to Thomas Dandy when both men were very drunk. Dandy cried out, ‘there is one in this room that speaks nothing but treason’, to which Skinner responded, ‘Mr Dandy had undone him, his wife and children’. Another drinker advised Dandy that ‘if he were sure that the words were treasonable words he must then go charge the master of the house for the safekeeping of Mr Skinner till he did procure the constable to come’. In this case, although we do not know the actual words, we are allowed a remarkable insight into the chain of reportage that brought the matter to light. On the king’s instructions the Attorney General conducted ‘a full and thorough search … for discovery of the truth herein’.⁸⁶

In another report to Attorney General Bankes about this time, a gentleman drinking at the Three Horseshoes in London’s Fetter Lane ‘said that his majesty held what he had in England by way of bastardy’.⁸⁷ Other ‘desperate and treasonable speeches’ in 1637 included those of Philip Stanley of Chichester, who was found to be ‘distracted in his wits’,⁸⁸ Ralph Whalley of Leicestershire, who said that ‘the king was a dishonest man and the Lord Keeper a knave’, and Lawrence Hall of Kilsby, Northamptonshire, who told his vicar ‘that he owed the king nothing’.⁸⁹ Grievances against Ship Money led Thomas Chaloner to say in 1637 ‘that he hoped to be in the head of an army in this kingdom… to suppress the new levies of money now raised and to punish the inventers’. Some thought these ‘desperate words would have cost him his life had he come to trial’, but instead he escaped into exile.⁹⁰

In 1638 the silkweaver Thomas Sandiford was charged ‘with having uttered some dangerous speeches which, if true, ought not to go unpunished’.⁹¹ George Pasfield, master of the Patience, allegedly declared that year that he cared ‘a fart’ for the royal warrant, and spoke ‘contemptuous words against his majesty’s seal manual’.⁹² Alexander Jennings was held in the Fleet prison in 1638 for his ‘scandalous speeches in derogation and disparagement of his majesty’s government’.⁹³ William Walker, a Northamptonshire opponent of Ship Money, reminded neighbours in July 1638 that ‘the king was under a law, as much as any subject, and that he could do nothing of himself without his subjects’. A full report of these words went to the Privy Council.⁹⁴ So too did the file on John Napier, a Scottish gentleman in London, who spoke approvingly of the Covenant and said ‘that the king is deluded, seduced, and made a baby… quos Jupiter perdere vult, hos dementat’.⁹⁵

Robert Jason, esquire, was held in prison in April 1638 ‘for undutiful speaking and uttering scandalous words against’ the king and Privy Council. He was eventually pardoned after claiming that the offensive speeches ‘were far from his tongue or thought’, and that the accusation sprang from ‘the plots and combinations of a brother in law and other persons of mean quality’.⁹⁶ There were also proceedings in Warwickshire in 1638 against Richard Dixon for his ‘scandalous and unbefitting speeches of his majesty and his government’,⁹⁷ and examinations at Cambridge for ‘some factious and mutinous words uttered by one John Howell’.⁹⁸ Magistrates even investigated John Bullock, a yeoman of Fledborough, Nottinghamshire, who said rather foolishly in 1638 ‘that King Charles was not king of England’ but rather ‘of Great Britain’.⁹⁹

The torrent of words continued in 1639, energized by the crisis in the north. John Glascock of Bedfordshire was charged in Star Chamber for ‘contemptuous, scandalous and undutiful speeches’ against the king, including the assertion ‘that he had as good blood in him’ as King Charles, that he did not love the king, and that ‘he had read kings had been deposed’.¹⁰⁰ A Somerset man was indicted at the 1639 Lent assizes ‘for speaking treason against the king’, saying, ‘we have a boy that governs’, and allegedly wishing that the Duke of Buckingham ‘had put down the king with that army (that he took into France), and set up somebody else that would have governed us better’. In the event the witnesses proved insufficient, and the offence was acknowledged to be ‘less than treason’.¹⁰¹

Also in 1639, complaining about the undue influence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the projector Francis Harris said ‘that if the king were not a fool it would not be so. But when the land is governed by a fool or a child it must always groan under the burden of oppression.’¹⁰² The words of Thomas Kerver in 1444 and Hugh Pyne in 1625 had found another echo. By this time the king was middle aged, and had ruled for fourteen years, though not everyone thought him mature.

By 1640, amidst war with Scotland and the prospect of a parliament, more people were caught up in the national conversation. The quickening crisis accelerated the flow of news and stimulated the exchange of opinion. ‘Rumour and noise in the country was great, and the fear of the people far greater,’ a Kentish magistrate reported in May 1640.¹⁰³ Drinking at Tam-worth, Staffordshire, around that time, John Sheppard declared that he ‘did not care for the king nor his laws neither’. When fellow drinkers remarked on ‘the heinousness of the said words’ and threatened to call a bailiff, Sheppard apparently ‘wept, and said he had but a life to lose, and he could but lose it, and that his life lay in their hands’.¹⁰⁴ Others spoke up for the Scottish rebels who intended ‘the good of this land, for they stood for a parliament here’. On ‘the king’s proceedings with Scotland’, the London wax chandler Robert Warner declared, ‘what a shame it was that our king should be so misinformed by his council’, and asked, ‘do you think that the king knows of this proclamation?’ that had been issued in his name. The war was ‘unjust’, he insisted, and it was ‘great pity that the king was so misled’.¹⁰⁵

Respect for King Charles disintegrated further in 1641 amid more dangerous expressions of sedition. In January 1641, when the minister of Horsted Parva, Sussex, proposed prayers for the king, one parishioner queried, ‘of what religion is he? I know not of what religion he is, or whether he be of any.’ The churchwarden Thomas Prowle added, ‘what care we for his majesty’s laws and statutes?’ This prompted the shocked minister to ask, ‘what, do you not care for his majesty’s laws and statutes?’, to which Prowle answered succinctly, ‘no, not we’.¹⁰⁶ Told by a justice in September 1641 to respect the king’s authority, the alehouse-keeper Joan Allen of Pleshey, Essex, responded that ‘she knew not the king, nor cared not for him … nor would not obey his authority’. Forced to pay a price for her ‘malice and odium’, she was held for a month in prison, then whipped and sent home to her husband.¹⁰⁷ Matthew Scott of Resdon was likewise indicted at Chester in 1641 ‘for giving out speeches tending to rebellion’.¹⁰⁸

By spring 1642 the country was in uproar, and royal authority was palpably faltering. The Yorkshire tanner Thomas Godsey declared openly in church in March 1642: ‘I care not for the king (meaning our lord King Charles) nor his laws.’¹⁰⁹ John Bassett of Stepney, Middlesex, said similarly at Easter ‘that he did not care for the king, and that he was as good a man as the king’.¹¹⁰ The Glamorganshire tailor Matthew Williams of Penmark went even further in March 1642, uttering ‘certain treasonable words against the king’s majesty, viz: that the king is but a private gentleman during the pleasure of the parliament’. Parliament, he insisted, ‘hath power to make another king if the king will not comply and agree with the parliament’. Though voiced by a South Wales artisan with a slender grasp of constitutional theory, these ‘seditious and treasonable words’ were far more radical than advanced opinion at Westminster. Though local justices issued warrants for Williams to ‘be brought into safe custody if he be to be found within this county’, he remained at large, and could not be made to account for his words.¹¹¹

In another alcohol-fuelled conversation on the brink of civil war, the Yorkshire squire Francis Gifford asked in June 1642 what should befall ‘if the king did not keep the laws and his oath?’ The reply of Knaresborough gentleman John Troutbeck was that ‘he might be deposed for aught he knew’, adding ‘that he could live as well without a king as with a king’. His only excuse was that ‘he was so overtaken by drunkenness’ that he could not stay on his horse.¹¹²

The Archbishop and the Queen

Recurrent rumours in the 1630s commented on the king’s dependence on his wife and his archbishop, both of whom allegedly pushed him towards Rome. The belief that King Charles or William Laud had abandoned Protestantism was unfounded, but it had popular adherents. Edward Parsons of Aldermaston, Berkshire, for example, declared in 1635 that Laud ‘was turned papist… and that he was not fit for the place’.¹¹³ Other artisans spoke ‘lewd words’ against the archbishop,¹¹⁴ or ‘scandalous and opprobrious words against my lord’s grace of Canterbury’,¹¹⁵ calling him ‘base fellow’, ‘an unsanctified rascal’, a ‘knave’, a ‘papist’, and ‘the pope of Lambeth’.¹¹⁶ It was common comment in London taverns that ‘my lord of Canterbury is a monk, a rogue, and a traitor to this kingdom’.¹¹⁷

After being led so long by the Duke of Buckingham, the king was now thought to be dominated by his archbishop. ‘The lord of Canterbury has possessed the king with I know not what… He uses the king, labours with the king,’ said a Mr Shepherd in 1637.¹¹⁸ ‘The pope of Lambeth… doth pluck the royal crown off his majesty’s head and trample it under his feet, and did whip his majesty’s arse with his own rod,’ declared a drinker in Southwark in 1639. Others expressed the opinion ‘that the king was overruled’ by Laud and his allies, who ‘would persuade the king whatever they list’.¹¹⁹ Some longed for ‘another Felton’ to bring an end to ‘the little miniken bishop’.¹²⁰ ‘I must have this bishop’s head… the head of the little man’, declared the Surrey clothworker Anthony Bothway in April 1639.¹²¹‘It had been happier for England and Scotland if the archbishop had been made a sacrifice when he was made a bishop,’ observed another drinker at Westminster earlier that year.¹²²

These words were scandalous and seditious, but they could not be stopped. Laud himself prayed to ‘deliver my soul from them that hate me without a cause’.¹²³ The archbishop’s own papers include notes on the Buckinghamshire woman who said in 1634 that ‘she did not care a pin nor a fart for my lord’s grace of Canterbury’ and wished to see him hanged, and the Surrey yeoman who declared in 1639 that ‘if nobody would cut off the lord of Canterbury’s head he would do it himself’.¹²⁴

A similar line of commentary smeared Henrietta Maria. The memoirist Lucy Hutchinson remarked that ‘a French queen never brought any happiness to England’,¹²⁵ and this view was shared by many subjects. ‘Villainous words against the queen’¹²⁶ touched on her foreignness, her popery, and her dangerous influence over King Charles.

Some blamed the queen for the collapse of the parliament in March 1629. Over dinner in Northamptonshire one servant asked another, ‘what was the news?’ Christian Cowper reported ‘that the king was overnight well inclined to the parliament, but lying with the queen all night, the next morning his mind was changed. And she said further, that she wished the queen were ducked in the midst of the sea.’ Her kinsman John Cowper added the suggestion ‘with a millstone about her neck’, to which Christian commented: ‘you do well to put me in mind of it.’ Here were household servants bantering about the high political affairs of the kingdom, remarking on the king’s change of course, his intimacy with his wife, and the desirability of drowning her majesty.¹²⁷

Under examination a month later, Christian Cowper gave the names of others who were present at the dinner, and reported that one of them said of the breaking of the parliament that ‘it was thought it was long of [because of] the queen’. She acknowledged her own scandalous words about ducking Henrietta Maria, but said they were uttered ‘very foolishly but without any evil intent’. Ducking was the punishment reserved for scolding women, so it was perhaps appropriate for a woman to mention it, though not to extend it to the queen. As to the further remarks about the millstone, which moved the discussion from splashing to drowning, Christian vehemently denied saying such words, although she did say that she wished the queen aboard a ‘ship of the seas’. She authenticated her testimony with a mark, suggesting that she did not know how to write.¹²⁸

Other scandalous remarks, different in content but no less offensive, were reported in November 1629. The Londoner Samuel Liston ‘bravingly said’ that he was ‘a companion to King Charles’, and then, standing up, ‘laid his hands upon either side of his codpiece and said he would warm his codpiece to the queen’. The report to the Council describes this action as ‘unreverent’, but it was dishonourable and disgraceful, close to imagining the queen as a whore.¹²⁹ In 1630, when Henrietta Maria gave birth to Prince Charles, another Londoner named Perkins was ‘like to be hanged, drawn and quartered’ for calling the child a bastard.¹³⁰ The rumour would persist, to haunt later Stuarts, that the queen was unnaturally close to her counsellor Henry Jermyn, who some thought had fathered her children.¹³¹

The French queen was the subject of another conversation among servants in 1638 when the Londoner Rachel Thorne asked her companions ‘if they knew that the queen’s mother was dead’. She then used ‘malicious, seditious and slanderous’ words, declaring ‘that the queen’s mother was a whore and a cutpurse whore, and that the queen was a whore’. Another servant reported this to her mistress, who in turn sent for the constable, and Rachel was carried to Bridewell. Examined by magistrates the next day, she could not remember ‘any speeches that passed in their discourse’, but ‘utterly denied’ any words against the queen.¹³² When Marie de Medici, the queen mother, came to London in November 1638, there was reported ‘much dislike of her for daintiness and costliness’.¹³³ One minor servant at court shared his opinion ‘that the queen mother was a witch’.¹³⁴

Remarks more sympathetic to Henrietta Maria, though no less dangerous to the state, were aired in Essex around Shrovetide 1638. Thomas Porter told the authorities that, ‘being in the tide boat discoursing’ about the recent trial of a recusant who had championed the Gunpowder Plot, Mary Cole, a Catholic convert, declared ‘that if she were as the queen she would quickly make away King Charles for dealing so hardly with that religion’. Mary Cole was a servant to the Petres of Cranham Hall, a branch of a distinguished recusant family, so her comments could be construed to be connected to Catholic plotting. Summoned before Attorney General Bankes, Mary denied the words imputed to her but claimed rather to have told Thomas Porter more innocently ‘that if she were a queen and he a king she would hang him if she could’.¹³⁵

Other witnesses offered other versions. Thomas Poulter, another servant to Mr Petre, quoted Mary to have said that ‘if she were a queen she would hang the king, the keeper she meant, God save the king’. According to another witness, when Mary declared, ‘if I were the queen I would have the king hanged’, her son-in-law Roger Hepthrow, a labourer, interjected: ‘mother take heed what you say, I have known men hanged for a less word.’ To this Mary Cole answered: ‘Christ save me, I meant the keeper, I pray God bless me, and sweet Jesus bless the king.’¹³⁶ The thoroughness with which these depositions were collected testifies to the importance the regime attached to uncovering such dangerous words.

The greatest danger, in godly opinion, was that Henrietta Maria threatened the Protestant religion. ‘Lord, open her eyes, that she may see her saviour, whom she hath pierced with her superstition and idolatry,’ preached Nathaniel Bernard at Cambridge in 1633.¹³⁷ ‘I pray God convert the queen, confound and utterly destroy those that are [thy] enemies,’ preached Enoch Grey at Maldon in 1638. Witnesses reported Grey’s prayer, ‘that God would turn the king’s heart from the whore of Babel, that he would draw him out of Babylon,’ because the king and queen ‘lie under the plagues of the whore of Babylon’. These too were ‘seditious and factious speeches’, according to Chief Justice Bramston, clearly offensive to both their majesties.¹³⁸

By 1640 report was rife in London that ‘the king goes to mass with the queen’.¹³⁹ Notwithstanding King Charles’s frequent assertion that he would live and die in the Protestant religion, a growing number of subjects suspected him of favouring Catholicism. In June 1640 a Mrs Thoroughgood of Clerkenwell declared to her lodger that ‘the king loveth papists better than puritans’. When the lodger, Alexander West, bid her have care what she said, she replied that ‘she would answer the words before the king and the Council’. She too had heard that ‘the king commonly went to mass, and was turned to be a papist’.¹⁴⁰ Joan Worrall, a spinster of St Martin in the Fields, added the detail that ‘the king’s majesty had one crucifix in his chamber and did bow to it’.¹⁴¹

Villagers at Ruislip, Middlesex, digested a similar rumour in August 1640 while ‘falling into discourse of the danger of the times’. Henry Wheeler, a litterman in the queen’s household, told them ‘that the king did go to mass in Lent last’, and also spoke disparagingly of the queen mother. These were scandalous and seditious remarks, which led to Wheeler’s imprisonment in the Fleet and the forfeit of his position.¹⁴²

Others who spoke similarly included the Yorkshireman Thomas Stafford, who repeated the rumour that ‘the king and queen was at mass together’,¹⁴³ the Kentish glazier Edward Fairbrother, who said that ‘King Charles that now is king of England is a papist’,¹⁴⁴ and the Thameside mariner’s wife Rachael Pollester, who declaimed, ‘the king is a papist and a rank papist’.¹⁴⁵‘We have a sinful king, we have a sinful queen,’ preached ‘one Mr Tutty’ in London in 1641.¹⁴⁶ ‘The king had married a Babylonish woman,’ declared another London lecturer, who warned of ‘the sins of wicked Manassas’ and ‘the scarlet whore of Babylon’.¹⁴⁷ We live ‘now in the time of Ahab and Jezebel’, declared another Puritan preacher in January 1642,¹⁴⁸ referring to the king of Israel and his foreign queen who led the Hebrews into idolatry and sin. Simon Zeager, a fuller from Minehead, Somerset, likewise spoke ‘very seditious and traitorous words of the king’s most excellent majesty’ in the summer of 1642, saying that the king maintained papists against the Protestants and supported the rebels in Ireland.¹⁴⁹ Most of these speakers were called before courts or justices, but in the turmoil of 1641 and 1642 it was hard to secure their punishment. By this time rumours about the royal religion were overlain with tales of Irish atrocities, fears of foreign invasion, and conjectures about Catholic uprisings, threats to English liberties, and the tyrannical overreach of the parliament.

To Kill the King

To speak derisively of King Charles was a grave offence, but compassing or imagining his death could be treason. Although the Caroline regime was remarkably free from serious threats, the authorities responded vigorously to any hint of plots or designs against the monarch. Who could say for sure that no plan existed to dispatch King Charles and replace him with a more robust Protestant or a counter-reformation Catholic? Alehouse brags about wishing the king hanged were by no means as dangerous as actual assassination conspiracies, but loose talk of that nature could not go unpunished.

One of the earliest scares involved the Lancashire Catholic Sir Thomas Gerard, who had allegedly ‘sworn the death of the king’. One of Gerard’s female servants was overheard saying in 1625 that her brother ‘is one of those that must kill the king’. By another report Sir Thomas had threatened to cut the throats of Protestant justices, and said ‘that if God should call for his majesty [that is, if King Charles died], he would draw his sword to keep out the Queen of Bohemia’. A dangerous conspiracy rooted in recusant treachery was apparently revealed by the conspirators’ careless chatter.¹⁵⁰

Sir Thomas Gerard of the Bryn was a prominent Lancashire baronet, rich in lands, mines, and mills. His father had been involved in Elizabethan conspiracies, his uncle, the Jesuit John Gerard, had a part in the Gunpowder Plot, and his younger son Gilbert also joined the Jesuit order.¹⁵¹ Though Gerard’s allegiance to the Stuarts was unquestioned, his Catholicism was unshakeable, and popular Protestant opinion feared the worst. He was the principal landowner in the parish of Wigan, and a thorn in the side of local authorities. He was already subject to proceedings in the Court of High Commission when allegations of his treasonable utterances emerged.¹⁵²

Gerard’s arch enemy, Bishop John Bridgeman of Chester, lord of Wigan, and an active campaigner against Lancastrian recusants, had the baronet arrested on 23 September 1625. Two days later he sent up to London an urgent packet of information denouncing Sir Thomas, with anxious letters to Secretary Conway, Lord Treasurer Ley, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Weston. The matter concerned ‘some traitorous passages against the king’s person and state’, according to Bridgeman, in which ‘Sir Thomas Gerard of the Bryn near Wigan, baronet, had sworn the death of the king (whom God for his mercy’s sake long preserve among us), and that there was a purpose of plot to be sped in Warwickshire or Worcestershire near the place where the old plot or matter was’ (referring to the events of 1605). ‘[Gerard’s] servant Robert Cowley (who is said to reveal it) lies here in prison and all the other parties are committed to several houses in Wigan.’ Sir Thomas himself was lodged on bond with a kinsman until the High Sheriff of Lancashire, Edward Holland, took him into custody for transfer to London. The Council arranged for his committal on 2 October, and Gerard was delivered to the Tower on 8 October 1625.¹⁵³

The immediate threat seemed to be under control, but the bishop wanted ‘directions’ from London how to proceed. The matter was extremely sensitive, and Bridgeman’s own political, financial, and ecclesiastical interests were involved. ‘My good lords,’ he addressed the Council, ‘I conceive this business deserves very diligent enquiry, for the papists of this county have been lately more bold and busy than ever heretofore’. There had been night-time gatherings of recusants and provocations against both church and state.

The last week one Thomas Helmes of Goosnargh said openly in Preston that all protestants were damned, and that the church of Wigan, which the bishop hath lately built, should shortly be broken down with cannons. And this very instant an information was sent to me, that one widow Jaques had said these words: ‘the king holds his lands wrongfully, and that he might know ere long.’

Lancashire seemed to be awash with treasonous plotting, ready to bring down the six-month-old Caroline regime.¹⁵⁴

The Privy Council quite properly took this report into ‘serious consideration’ as a matter of ‘weighty consequence’ touching ‘the safety of his majesty’s royal person and the quiet of the state’. On 17 October they instructed the Lancashire authorities to keep their prisoners in custody and to examine them again in the hope of learning more. Sir Thomas Gerard, befitting his social standing, would be separated from other delinquents. Sir Randolph Crew, Chief Justice of King’s Bench, would deal with the case in the upcoming Michaelmas term. The Council reprimanded High Sheriff Holland for allowing Gerard to be lodged with his brother-in-law Sir Richard Molineux, allegedly to keep him from being pursued for his ‘many and great debts’. They reminded the Sheriff ‘that a prisoner committed for any offence against his majesty, though in a far less degree than matter of treason, may not be troubled nor arrested upon any other cause or action whatsoever during his commitment’. Gerard’s recusancy fines and other forfeitures left him ‘in continual danger to be arrested’ for debt, so perhaps he was better off as the king’s prisoner.¹⁵⁵

By 22 October 1625 news of the affair was widespread among court and country gossips, entering the domain of public information. Joseph Mead wrote from Cambridge to Sir Martin Stuteville in Suffolk with an intimate account of the affair. In this version, two of Sir Thomas Gerard’s maidservants,

washing clothes at a pit, fell a-talking together of the brave times that would be shortly for their religion: when Mr Turner, a busy justice of peace, would be turned out of office; Mr Horne, parson of Winwick, should have horns set upon his head; and the bishop of Chester, that bore himself so high, should be hoisted a peg higher to his little ease. ‘And my brother Robert’ (Sir Thomas’s groom), saith one to the other, ‘is one of those that must kill the king’. This discourse being overheard by a peddler, or some such loose fellow, who was lying sunning behind a hedge, he goes presently to an honest substantial man of the town, one Prescot, and tells him what he heard Sir Thomas Gerard’s maids talking at the pit. He presently informs the parson, Mr Allen. The parson writes to the Bishop of Chester, he to the Lords of the Council. They send a mandate to the sheriff to apprehend him, which he did on Monday was sennight.¹⁵⁶

In this case the Mead—Stuteville correspondence circle was accurately and promptly informed. The chain of transmission went from Sir Thomas Gerard and his groom to the maids at washing, to the eavesdropping peddler, to honest Prescot, to parson Allen, to the Bishop of Chester, to the Privy Council, to High Sheriff Holland, then to a Cambridge tutor, and so to Mead and Stuteville. Other episodes may not have had so many links, but every telling expanded opportunities for mishearing and misremembering. In this case, though willing to relay the report, Joseph Mead remained sceptical. ‘The grounds are so feeble that I think it will prove no great matter,’ he told Sir Martin Stuteville; ‘I tell you this circumstantially because there goes stranger reports abroad, but all false’.¹⁵⁷

Further examination by the authorities shed no fresh light on the matter. Responding to the Council’s letters in late November, Bishop Bridgeman and the Deputy Lieutenants of Lancashire expressed frustration that the evidence of seditious words could not be proven. The recusant community had clammed silent, and testimony was unforthcoming, so that ‘we cannot easily or speedily learn anything worth your lordships’ notice’. Sir Thomas Gerard’s involvement seemed well corroborated, but specific speech offences proved impossible to pin down.

In the more sedulous enquiry and examination of witnesses, we find them either so blanched by plea of mistaking (as that of Jaques) or so weakened by the distemper of the party accused (as that other of Helmes) or so locked up in silence … as we can yet find nothing therein fit to be presented to your lordships’ view.¹⁵⁸

The original informer still held to his claim about the impending doom of Protestants, ‘but none else of the witnesses do remember those words, and all of them say that the offender was far gone in drink, and had a brother died a lunatic, himself, as we conceive him, being little better’. Regarding widow Jaques, the informer who had originally acknowledged the testimony on oath ‘now falls from it and saith he was mistaken’. Since a prosecution for treasonous words required two witnesses to proceed, the business with these Lancashire recusants was stalled. All that the Council could do was to instruct local authorities to keep ‘an especial eye upon the conversation and intercourse’ of the ‘suspicious persons’, and report anything ‘worthy the knowledge of this Board … with all convenient speed’.¹⁵⁹

Chief Justice Crew scrutinized the written examinations in December 1625 and concluded that ‘I dare not advise any use of them in any court of justice’. One of the principal witnesses against Gerard, John Ashton, now ‘lies in his grave, so as the evidence to convict is only the report of a dead man’. The words of Joan Jaques seemed ‘too dark and ambiguous to ground any crime upon’. Other statements were too unstable or uncertain to present to a jury. It was true, Crew agreed, that ‘Sir Thomas Gerard hath many vehement suspicions upon him, and his house is a seminary of priests and popery’, but without firmer evidence a trial for treason would not stand.¹⁶⁰

Sir Thomas, meanwhile, remained close prisoner in the Tower, facing forfeiture of his estates and the prospect of execution. In February 1626, five months into his imprisonment, he was reported to have become ‘infirm and weak in body’, and was granted the privilege of supervised access to the Tower gardens. He was still incarcerated in March, when his wife was permitted to visit him. (Lady Gerard herself was under scrutiny at this time for associating with Catholic priests at a house in Drury Lane.)¹⁶¹ By July the Council was ready to release Gerard to a kind of house arrest within 5 miles of Peterborough, but Sir Thomas feared that his creditors would follow him there. He petitioned the Council that ‘if he may not be freely delivered that he may be confined to the liberties of the Tower, and that his person be free from all other restraints’. One improvement in his circumstance was the king’s instruction to Bishop Bridgeman, dated 26 July 1626, ‘to surcease your proceedings against [Gerard] for matter of recusancy’.¹⁶²

Gerard’s ordeal finally ended when he was discharged in February 1628 (the same month as Hugh Pyne). Shortly after his release he wrote to his kinsman the Earl of Huntingdon: ‘I thank God and the king I can now go whither I list, his majesty having given me his royal protection for body, lands and goods.’ He was at last free to return to his ‘many businesses’, careful to stay out of trouble in his few remaining years.¹⁶³

Recurrent threats required constant attention. In November 1626 Sir Benjamin Rudyerd offered portentous news to Sir Francis Nethersole:

There is a man of mean quality imprisoned and questioned, who hearing one complain of the times, said he could easily remedy all. Being asked how, he answered, by killing the Duke. The other replied, peradventure it might be as ill after. Then, said he, the king may be made away, and the queen of Bohemia with her children sent for over. The fellow doth not much deny, but says he was drunk.¹⁶⁴

Rudyerd does not identify this speaker of treason, but it was most likely Thomas Brediman, who scandalized guests at a private dinner in London in October 1626. The table talked veered into politically dangerous territory when Brediman gave vent to his opinions. The gathering was in the house of John Brangston, tailor, in Drury Lane (apparently a lodging house for out-of-town visitors), and the company included Henry and Dorothy Manners of Cheswick, county Durham, and their countryman Thomas Brediman of Berwick on Tweed, a soldier, who spoke the offending words. Somebody, perhaps Henry Manners, reported the matter to the authorities, and several of the dinner guests faced examination. Being informed of these ‘desperate and seditious speeches’, the Privy Council on 2 November referred the matter to the Chief Justice and Attorney General for further investigation.¹⁶⁵

According to Dorothy Manners, who was examined on 9 November, Brediman avowed that ‘the king was too much ruled by the Duke’. When Henry Manners pressed Brediman ‘to forbear speaking such things’, he reportedly ‘answered, I have done’. He then ‘took God to witness that he spake not out of malice to the Duke or anybody, but only out of his love that he wished the state, the land, and the people well’.¹⁶⁶ (This was similar to the justification John Felton later gave for murdering the Duke of Buckingham, for the safety of the people and England’s greater good.)

That, however, was not the end of the conversation. Henry Manners, examined along with his wife, recalled Brediman speculating aloud that the recently mustered soldiers in London might do harm to the Duke of Buckingham, and ‘against the king also’. ‘God forbid,’ protested Mrs Brangston, and Dorothy Manners piously responded, according to her husband, ‘that if such unlawful courses were taken God would not prosper them’. Everyone affected to be scandalized by the soldier’s seditious outburst. Brediman, however, was in full flow, lamenting that, ‘now the ancient men’s counsel are refused, and justice had not lawful proceeding, and that papists increased and grew bold, unto whom it is held the Duke of Buckingham is a great patron; and he added further, that if the state stood as it doth it would not continue long’. At this point, rather than attempting to silence him, the hostess encouraged Brediman to continue, asking, ‘what would become of it?’ meaning the kingdom. Brediman answered, ‘it may be it shall be a free state, for perhaps the Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth shall have it’. This was treasonous speech, fishing in deep waters, which could bring trouble to everyone at the table. Compassing or imagining the death of the king was a traitorous felony, and demeaning his ministers was sedition. Positing a change of dynasty was almost unthinkable. ‘If these speeches were known,’ observed Mrs Brangston, ‘it might cost him his ears,’ to which Brediman replied, somewhat opaquely, ‘if it cost his ears it would cost more’. Eventually, Henry Manners recalled, ‘Brediman seemed to be sorry for what he had said’, and the rest of the dinner passed quietly. Manners observed that all the company were ‘sober’, and thought it worth remarking how little wine had lubricated their talk.¹⁶⁷ In this case it was the women, rather than their husbands, who responded most forcefully to Brediman’s outspoken views.

The formal interrogatories administered to Thomas Brediman are preserved in State Papers, though not the defendant’s answers.¹⁶⁸ However, with at least four witnesses against him (the Brangstons and the Manners), Brediman could not deny the charge. A London news writer picked up the story on 10 November.

The bold speakers begin to go to pound. Captain Brodeman [Brediman] was sent to the Gatehouse this last week, for speaking more than his part; and if he be not saved by twelve men, he may have liberty, perhaps, to speak his mind in his last confession. I must not repeat his words, but himself is taught better manners [a pun on the name of the informants], to put a greater difference hereafter betwixt a duke and a king.¹⁶⁹

Thomas Brediman spent the winter in prison. On New Year’s Day 1627, ‘in all humility and penitential submission’, he confessed his fault. But, ‘considering the place, the accuser, the time at supper after many a cup, and I the speaker drunk’, he thought he had been punished enough. Still held close in February, after 100 days’ incarceration, he confessed his offence, asserted his ‘loyalty and obedience’, and begged again to be released. His careless words, he said, were ‘my only offence in my lifetime, it being in drink or in a dream, which is as one being deprived of senses, as I was then’.¹⁷⁰

It might be imagined that Brediman was then allowed to go free, to resume his military duties. But on 4 September 1627 Secretary Conway wrote to Sir John Coke about ‘a poor man in the gatehouse, Thomas Brediman, who was committed by you and me. He hath been long a prisoner. I think it were very good he were released, for in punishing him we punish the king, at whose charge he lies.’ In 1626 a condemned robber, compared to Robin Hood, had been sent to military service instead of execution, and a similar fate seemed likely for the veteran soldier.¹⁷¹ Though never formally tried, Brediman spent almost a year in prison for his imprudent and dangerous remarks.

The suggestion that Elizabeth of Bohemia and her husband the Elector Palatine might replace King Charles on the English throne was, perhaps, not unthinkable at all. While Charles and Henrietta remained childless, the question of the succession was clouded. In 1627 the diarist John Rous wondered what might happen if ‘King Charles should be stabbed, as Henry IV late in France, and then the queen regent might mar all’.¹⁷² In June 1628 Rous noted: ‘a secret whispering of some looking towards the Lady Elizabeth is fearful to be thought of, in regard of both our sovereign and also a wrong to her. Our king’s proceedings have caused men’s minds to be incensed, to rove and project, but as for this, it is likely to be merely the conceit of the multitude.’¹⁷³ What is remarkable here, besides treasonable conjectures about the succession, is the observation that ‘the multitude’ had ‘conceits’, and that popular voices invaded the most reserved arcana imperii.

Casual contempt for authority could easily mutate into loose talk about wishing the king dead, without much thought to its constitutional implications. So too could alehouse bluster. In May 1628 John Haberjohn, a soldier billeted in Hereford, spoke ‘dangerous words against his majesty’ that witnesses believed ‘tend to high treason’. Report of Haberjohn’s utterance quickly reached the mayor and justices, who, moved by their ‘duty and loyalty to his majesty’s sacred person’, had the offender arrested and held in ‘close prison’ while awaiting further direction.¹⁷⁴

The affair, like so many others, began in a drinking establishment late one night, when Haberjohn bragged ‘that three of their soldiers could beat six’ of the city’s trained band. This prompted Richard Millard, milliner, to remonstrate, ‘I pray God you be true to the king and country,’ to which Haberjohn replied: ‘you have spoken a bloody word.’ Pressed to explain himself, Haberjohn repeatedly declared, ‘I am sworn against the king,’ adding, for Richard Millard’s ears only, ‘keep my counsel for there is treachery against the king’. It would be up to the Privy Council to determine whether they faced a plot against the monarch, or only a soldier who had too much to drink.

With greater danger, to himself as much as to the regime, a Salisbury tailor’s apprentice named John Stephens said or did something around New Year 1632 that looked or sounded like treason. Brought before the city’s mayor and justices, Stephens confessed ‘that he had a treasonable intention to take away the life of the king’s most excellent majesty’. Perhaps he said, as had others, that he wished the king dead, and was willing to undertake the task. The local magistrates took statements and examined witnesses, but, the case ‘being of so high a nature and so much concerning the whole state’, they sought advice from the Privy Council in London. The mayor wrote from Salisbury on 10 January 1632, and three days later the Council wrote back, ordering him to transfer all ‘papers and informations’ to Lord Chief Justice Richardson, and to have Stephens brought up to London ‘under safe guard… for the discovery of the truth’. The principal witnesses, three Salisbury men and one woman, were also summoned to London.¹⁷⁵ There the documentary record ends, at least in State Papers and records of the Privy Council. The manuscripts do not tell us the disposition of the case, and the papers collected by Sir Thomas Richardson seem not to have survived.

A remarkable printed ballad, however, sheds light on this episode. Titled The Godly End, and wofull lamentation of one Iohn Stevens, a youth, that was hang’d, drawne, and quartered for High-Treason, and sung ‘to the tune of Fortune my Foe’, it reports the downfall of the apprentice from Wiltshire who was executed in March 1633 for treasonous speech against the king. Crude woodcut illustrations show the young man on the gallows, and his severed head and quarters spiked on Salisbury’s city gates.¹⁷⁶

Although we still do not learn what Stephens said that caused his doom, the ballad renders his lamentation in sensational and sentimental terms:

Did ever any hear of one so young
That was so bad and had so vile a tongue?

It was the devil that wrought my overthrow,
It was the devil that brought me to this woe.

We hear how the young man was arrested in Salisbury for his ‘vile and base’ offence, taken to London for examination, held for almost a year in King’s Bench prison, then returned to Wiltshire for trial at the assizes, and there found guilty and sentenced to die. The ballad is a grim warning of the consequences of treasonous speech. Chastised and repentant, the John Stephens of the ballad counsels parents and children, echoing catechisms on the fifth commandment:

Oh do not suffer them to curse and swear.
But train them up the God of heaven to fear,
Teach them obedience to their sovereign king,
And their superiors, whence doth virtue spring.

Honour the king, for so the lord doth say,
And see the magistrate you do obey.
Unto your equals loving be and kind,
To your inferiors bear an humble mind’.

It concludes with a loyal prayer, that seeks to erase the treason:

Lord bless the king, and send him long to reign,
Preserve the queen, their issue and their train,
And God forgive me, and my prince I pray,
Whose laws and statutes I did disobey.

While John Stephens was under investigation, one Morgan, a priest in London, said in January 1633 that ‘the king had need look about him, that his crown and life be not brought to the stake’. Several who heard these words reported ‘divers more of worse nature’.¹⁷⁷ The scare prepared the ground for the case of Arthur Crohagan, an Irish Catholic who was executed in November 1633 after saying: ‘I would kill the king of England if I could come at him.’ Crohagan’s case is recorded in law reports, diaries, and correspondence, but is more complex than at first appears. Two English merchants, Wheeler and Elesey, testified that the Irishman spoke treason two years earlier in Lisbon, ‘in great heat of speech’, vaunting his animosity towards King Charles, ‘because he is an heretic’. By one account (in William Whiteway’s diary, which misidentifies the offender as ‘Patrick an Irish Jesuit’), the traitor ‘swore he would never come into England unless it were to kill the king’. By another (in John Flower’s letter to Viscount Scudamore) the Irishman’s motivation included revenge ‘for the blood of the martyrs’.¹⁷⁸

Then in August 1633, when Crohagan arrived in England, ‘for this purpose’, he was arrested at his lodgings in Drury Lane. Told by the arresting officer that he was now the king’s prisoner, Crohagan ‘most insolently put his finger into his mouth and scornfully bit his thumb, saying, I care not thus much for your king’. This was a derisive gesture, compounding his offence with the pantomime of seditious libel sine scriptis. The Attorney General observed ‘that in Spain the biting of the thumb is a token of scorn and disdain in the highest degree, and will bear an action of disgrace in Spain as spitting in one’s face will in England’. (Compare Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1, where Sampson, a retainer of the house of Capulet, offers, when Montague men appear: ‘I will bite my thumb of them, which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.’)

Crohagan pleaded not guilty, but confessed under pressure ‘that he was a Dominican friar and made priest in Spain. And although this, and his returning into England to seduce the liege people were treason by the statute of 23 Elizabeth, yet the king’s attorney said he would not proceed against him for that cause, but upon the statute of 25 Edward III’. As the lawyer Sir George Croke commented, ‘his traitorous intent and the imagination of his heart declared by these words it was… high treason, by the course of the common law and within the express words of the statute’. Convicted in King’s Bench, Crohagan was hanged, drawn, and quartered on 27 November 1633. His last words, according to the lawyer Justinian Pagitt, were that he ‘wished that he might never enter into the kingdom of heaven if he ever said those words for which he was condemned’.

Crohagan, it turns out, was actually Arthur MacGeoghegan, scion of a prominent Irish family, indeed a Dominican, who became port chaplain at Lisbon around 1630. There he fell foul of an English captain Bask or Bust, who subsequently denounced him to the London authorities. Catholic sources emphasize the captain’s grudge rather than the Dominican’s words, which, in their version, were misconstrued and, of course, free of malice. Efforts by Henrietta Maria and Secretary of State Windebank to save him proved fruitless, and MacGeoghegan died a gruesome traitor’s death. However, contrary to custom, his quartered remains were not displayed on the gates of the city, but were retrieved by fellow Catholics for more honourable burial.¹⁷⁹ These cases undercut the assertion that ‘there was no single case of execution for treason or crimes of state’ in the 1630s—a claim that has gone from book to book, and perhaps into countless student essays.¹⁸⁰

Misconstrued or misheard words led to the investigation of another possible assassination plot in the autumn of 1636. After an evening drinking in their shared lodgings at Bagshot, John Bumstead, a messenger for Sir John Thimbleby, told his chamber companion John Jonson that he had information for the Earl of Holland, ‘who must speak with the queen before his business could be dispatched’. Though the inebriated messenger ‘spake somewhat thick’, Jonson thought he said something about ‘cutting off the king’s person’, and reported this to the authorities.¹⁸¹ Bumstead was sent to the Tower for his ‘evil words and purposes to the king’, and ‘for saying he would cut off the king, or the king must first be cut off’. The news writer Edward Rossingham described Bumstead as ‘a very poor silly fellow, but such language is not to go unpunished’. He was still in the Tower in March 1637 when Robert Reyce reported the incident to John Winthrop in New England.¹⁸²

Other threats to the king’s life emerged from casual rants against authority. John Wise, a husbandman of Rettendon, Essex, declared before witnesses in May 1636 that ‘if I were a pressed soldier the king should be the first that I would aim at’. He was indicted at the assize on charges of high treason, for conspiring to depose and kill his majesty, but the case collapsed and Wise was acquitted.¹⁸³ Two years later in Gloucestershire, labourers threshing grain at Compton Abdale moved on from grumbles about Ship Money to questions of allegiance. ‘The king must be served,’ said Thomas Welsh, to which Thomas Mace angrily replied, ‘if it be so that the king must have all, I would the king were dead’. Summoned before justices to answer for these words, Mace denied ‘that ever he used any such speech at all’, except to say dutifully ‘that God’s will must be done’. Not convinced, the justices referred the matter to the next assize.¹⁸⁴

Another controversial case that raised the possibility of regicide involved Roger Moore, a Protestant adventurer home from the Low Countries, who responded to the question ‘what news?’ by commending the Dutch resistance against the king of Spain. Asked by neighbours at Middleton, Westmorland, in 1636 whether subjects should resist a ruler who went against their religion, he replied that ‘if the king should command him to turn papist or do a thing contrary to his conscience he would rise up against the king and kill him’. The idea of regicide, or tyrannicide, was evidently not as unthinkable as some historians have warranted, and seeped into popular conversation. Another version of Moore’s remarks had him saying that ‘people might lawfully take arms against their prince in matters of conscience or religion’, and in certain circumstances ‘subjects might kill their king’.¹⁸⁵

Report of these remarks spread among villagers, but the authorities took no action until Thomas Layfield, a gentleman, presented a complaint, so he said, ‘out of my true subjection to his majesty’. When local magistrates examined witnesses in 1639, some two and a half years after the words had been uttered, the testimony proved contradictory. Some witnesses claimed no recollection of Moore’s treasonable remarks, others that they had been misrepresented. The principal accuser, Thomas Layfield, informed Secretary Windebank that Moore was so rich and oppressive ‘that almost no poor man dare speak the truth against him, for fear of an ill turn of him or his sons, who are the rudest, most drunken, desperate young men in the whole country’. Nonetheless, he urged Windebank ‘to lay open this hidden treason, so nearly concerning his majesty’s person’. When James Mansergh, an officer of the crown, attempted to arrest Roger Moore, his son James called the officer ‘a base fellow and a base stinking shitten sheriff, and used many threatening words to him’, preventing him from doing his duty. The case went to the High Court of Chivalry as well as the Privy Council.

Similarly hot-tempered, and furious at being called ‘a drunken rogue’, the Worcestershire gentleman John Blount swore in January 1640 that ‘he would burn the town, yea if he could all England, and if the king were there present he would stab or kill him with his knife if he had it in his hand’. His adversary, Edmund Woodford, quite properly responded, ‘Sir, take heed what you say,’ to which Blount replied: ‘I have spoken treason but I care not.’ His words, he claimed later, were spoken ‘more in passion than in drink’, though he had consumed a vast amount of sack. Woodward conceded that Blount never ‘meant the king any hurt’, but local magistrates sent copies of the examinations to London in case the Privy Council wished to take the matter further.¹⁸⁶

More dangerous to Charles I were the views of Thomas Stafford of Youlthorpe, Yorkshire, who ‘being high flown in drink’ one Sunday in January 1641 suggested that ‘such a king was worthy to be hanged’. He then expressed the wish that the Scottish commander Leslie would soon be king, ‘for he was a better man than any was in England’. Hauled before the northern assize, Stafford denied ‘that he ever spoke any such words against the king and queen’, but the evidence against him was overwhelming.¹⁸⁷ A Middlesex woman, Judith Castle, was also charged in January 1641 with urging her husband to go and kill the king, but confessed that ‘she wished the death of her husband, and is very sorry that she spoke such words’.¹⁸⁸ Some of the ‘rascal rabble’ who mobbed the streets of the capital later that year cried out ‘that the king was not fit to live, others that the prince would govern better’.¹⁸⁹

Madmen and Children

Casual or drunken remarks like these did not seriously endanger King Charles, whose life, until the Civil War, was singularly unthreatened. But no compassing or imagining of the king’s death could go unpunished. Even the blabberings of madmen and children would be monitored if they challenged royal authority.

In March 1634 a deeply disturbed Londoner announced himself as Henry, son of King James and Queen Anne and therefore the true king, but his claims were quietly ignored.¹⁹⁰ More threateningly, in September 1636 a mad man in Lincolnshire, Rochester Carr, ‘broke loose into the street and said in the audience of many people, that he would go to the court… only to kill the king, and then he would marry the queen. The people knocked him down for these speeches.’¹⁹¹ Early 1637 Morris Dunn, a London cobbler, startled drinkers at a house in King Street by saying: ‘I came to kill the king, but that he is so fast locked up that I cannot come at him.’ In this case the would-be assassin was aged almost 80 and had spent nine years in Bedlam, though he ‘hath been pretty well in his wits ever since’.¹⁹² Yet another mad man was Philip Stanley of Chichester, examined in August 1637 for ‘certain desperate and treasonable speeches’. On discovering him to be ‘distracted in his wits’, the authorities moved him to ‘the hospital and prison of Bethlehem’ in London. Although Stanley posed no serious threat to his majesty, the Council commended the mayor of Chichester ‘for his care and diligence herein, considering the words that were spoken were of so high a nature and importance that too much caution cannot safely be used for the preventing of danger and punishing offenders in this kind’.¹⁹³ Also apparently distracted was John Hammond alias Hendley, who claimed to have supernatural powers and said in 1639 ‘that he had the king’s life at an hour’s warning, and that if he pleased, he could put his crown upon his own head in despite of all the world’.¹⁹⁴

Technically, at least, insanity was no defence in a treason case, for ‘in our law crimen laesae majestatis is accounted so grievous an offence, to conspire against the breath of him who is the breath of our nostrils, that it is no plea for him that is non compos mentis, although it be for ordinary homicide’, so Thomas Hurste reminded judges in 1637.¹⁹⁵ In practice, however, as in earlier reigns, the courts took note of a defendant’s mental condition, and often preferred confinement to corporal punishment for offenders troubled in mind.

The words of children as well as madmen came under scrutiny by the ever-vigilant Caroline Privy Council. In a case from 1633, the Council sought help from Wiltshire justices ‘in discovering the bottom’ of alleged ‘treasonable speeches’ by a 6-year-old child. Based on information from the schoolmaster of Warminster, Mr Zouch,

it appeareth that one Richard Warren, the son of John Warren, a child of six years of age, standeth charged by the testimony of Drew Deadman and Francis Gooderide, children of like age, his schoolfellows, with uttering of certain desperate and treasonable speeches tending to the taking away of the life of his sacred majesty. Now forasmuch as this information containeth matter of a very tender and high nature, we have thought it meet to acquaint his majesty therewith, who thereupon declared his royal pleasure, that the said Richard Warren shall forthwith be sent up hither under the custody of Thomas Smith, one of the messengers of his majesty’s chamber. And because the boy is very young and under the years of discretion, and in all likelihood inapt of his own motion to utter such desperate and devilish speeches against his majesty, but hath received the impression from some other ill-affected persons of more years, we therefore think it fit and requisite that you inform yourselves tactfully of the qualities, dispositions and professions of his parents, friends, and such others with whom he doth use to converse, and from whom he may probably be encouraged to such malicious words and thoughts. It may be more important to discover the root from which this infection hath grown than the evil itself in a child of his years.

The letter was signed by Archbishop Laud and six other Privy Councillors, and one wonders how much time they invested in this effort.¹⁹⁶

In 1635 the government investigated another child offender in the same county. This time their target was 10-year-old Elizabeth Horne, servant to a village tailor, who was brought before Sir Francis Seymour and Sir Walter Smyth at Marlborough on 5 March, ‘for speaking of lewd words concerning his majesty’. The morning before, being rebuked by her master, she ‘wished herself hanged’, and said, ‘if any man would give her a hundred pounds she would kill the king’. When her master reproached her for this speech, which was heard by the whole household, ‘she presently fell on her knees and wept, saying she was heartily sorry for what she had said, and prayed heartily for the king and queen, and … hath remained heartily penitent ever since for her offence’.

Elizabeth Horne, it seems, was a child of the parish, a bastard or an orphan, kept at the public charge. She had served William and Margaret Evans for three years, and had previously served Annis Hulett. She was, she told the magistrates, ‘often frightened’, and suffered pains in her legs and feet. She did not deny her outburst, but said ‘she was extremely sorry’, prayed God for forgiveness, and claimed ‘that she had no ill intent in her heart’. But her master, William Evans of Great Bedwyn, felt obligated to report the matter to the magistrates, and they in turn took the utterance seriously, for, as they informed the council, ‘we could not do less in discharge of our duties’. They held the child in the local Bridewell pending further directions from the council.

We might think the outpourings of a miserable child a trivial matter, of no public consequence. But to speak of killing the king was to speak treason. William Evans could not allow such words in his house, especially if overheard by a neighbour, without doing his public duty of informing the authorities. Anything else might associate him with his servant’s sentiments. The justices responded according to their charge, by examining the parties concerned and making their report. The king himself took note of Elizabeth Horne’s ‘lewd words’ and decided on mercy. ‘Although the offence be of so high a nature, yet his majesty in his princely lenity, imputing the same rather to childish folly (she being so young) than inward malignity, doth hold it a sufficient chastisement that she be taught by a rod to have more care of her tongue hereafter.’ Elizabeth was to be whipped and dismissed, leaving the authorities to reflect on the pervasiveness of incivility and sin among the common people.¹⁹⁷

Two years later the ‘scolding differences’ of ‘beggarly and angry women’ at Ipswich led to investigation of the teenage Anne Dixon, who allegedly threatened the life of King Charles. Phillippa Smyth, a sailor’s wife, told magistrates in 1637 that, while her husband was at sea, she and her child lodged in the house of John Dixon, caulker, paying rent of three pence a week. One Friday in September they were in company with Dixon’s wife (not otherwise named), Dixon’s 14-year-old daughter Anne ‘who is very untoward of her tongue’, among others. Dixon’s wife, Phillippa recalled, ‘fell to speak concerning preaching, and wished they were in New England’. Then, ‘without any other body speaking any words of the king’s majesty’, young Anne Dixon ‘spake these words: Let the king be hanged.’ Phillippa reported that she instantly reproved the teenager (though that should surely have been the mother’s task), saying: ‘Fie, fie, let us have no more of these words, these are heinous words; upon which the said Anne said again, let the king be hanged if he would, what care I?’ There the matter rested until the following Sunday morning, when Phillippa encountered Anne ‘set lazing in the house’, and charged her, ‘you are a large girl, you set lazing there, and your mother’s business to do’. The girl responded, ‘be hanged if you will, and bad a turd in her teeth’. This prompted Phillippa to declare, ‘you know, I can hang you, if I will’, alluding to Anne’s earlier remarks about the king.¹⁹⁸

Examined by the authorities, young Anne related how the women had been gossiping at her mother’s sickbed. Goodwife Smyth, she said, ‘was telling the rest of the company of a woman who was in prison in the town for speaking of words, and [she] repeated the words that were reported to be spoken by the woman’. Anne, unimpressed, remarked, ‘that is nothing’. Phillippa Smyth then ‘fell on chiding’ her, and Anne retaliated, ‘hold your tongue and be hanged’, and claimed to have said no more.

Household relations deteriorated further a day or two later when Anne Dixon discovered that Goodwife Smyth possessed a key ‘that would open [her] father’s cupboard where he had lain his money’. She reported this finding to her mother, who, from her sickbed, ‘gave warning to the said Smyth’s wife to depart out of her house’. To this Phillippa allegedly responded, ‘if I depart out of the house I will make your daughter pay for it’. Leave she did, and evidently made good on her threat, telling the Ipswich justices that Anne Dixon had said, ‘Let the queen be hanged.’ Anne, however, ‘denied that she did speak any words either of the king or the queen’.

According to Amy Hudson, the wife of a ship carpenter, who had been present when the women quarrelled, Phillippa Smyth had reproved Anne ‘for being so bold in her speeches toward her, whereupon diverse words passed between the two’. Anne had said, ‘Hold your tongue, you would scold by and by’, adding the insult, ‘be hanged’. Crucially, however, Amy Hudson denied hearing anyone ‘speak any words of the king’s majesty or the queen’. When Phillippa asked, ‘did you overhear such a vild mauther [Suffolk dialect for ‘wicked young girl’], she spake treason against the queen?’ Amy responded: ‘do not call me for a witness, I heard no such words spoken.’ It was not even clear if the threat was to the king or his wife.

The exchange, so far as we can reconstruct it, was trivial, though in Phillippa’s version at least it veered onto dangerous ground. We seem to be glimpsing a spat within a household, a gathering of gossips, in which lines of authority and deference became tangled. Phillippa Smyth, a wife and mother herself but temporarily a paying guest, seems to have taken on the task of disciplining a sluttish teenager. The girl, appealing to her own mother, and defending her father’s household resources, managed to get the outsider ejected. The incident exposes some of the dynamics of domestic relations, hinging on age and gender, in a case where the men were absent. (All the females in the case made marks instead of signatures, indicating limited literacy.)

Why should the justices and bailiffs of Ipswich (William Cage, William Tyler, Robert Sparrow, and William Moysey) invest so much effort in examining this petty squabble and conveying their reports to the Privy Council? Part of the answer must be that for anyone to say ‘let the king be hanged’ was not petty at all but verged on treason. Such words could not be ignored, even if there was uncertainty that they had actually been spoken. The complaint ‘imported matter concerning his majesty’, no matter how paltry the source.¹⁹⁹

But other circumstances may have drawn official interest to Anne Dix-on’s dangerous words. Early Stuart Ipswich was an important port and a hotbed of Puritan activity. The celebrated Samuel Ward had been town preacher there since 1605 and had himself been imprisoned briefly in 1621 for ‘intermeddling with his majesty’s secret affairs’.²⁰⁰ Ward was under investigation again in 1634 when Matthew Wren, bishop of Norwich, cracked down heavily on Puritan irregularities, and in 1635 he was suspended from his ministry after a gruelling investigation by the Court of High Commission. Wren’s episcopal visitation was the spur for William Prynne’s attack on the bishops, the notorious Newes from Ipswich (secretly printed in 1636). The Council was always sensitive to disloyalty in East Anglia and watchful for linkages between Puritanism and sedition. Several groups of emigrants to New England set out from Ipswich, including those on the John and Dorothy in 1637.²⁰¹ Only two years earlier the Ipswich notary Henry Dade had declared that ‘the king and his Council would be glad that the thousands that went to New England were drowned in the sea’.²⁰² Goodwife Dixon’s apparent sympathy for the emigrants to New England may have identified her with the unruly godly, and her daughter’s undutiful sentiments may have been taken as an echo of her own.

The case took a new turn in January 1638 when John Dixon of Ipswich (now described as a labourer) petitioned for his daughter’s release after fourteen weeks in state custody. The accuser, Phillipa Smyth, had fled the area, leaving no reliable witness to a case that seemed driven by malice. A week later the Council ordered Anne Dixon to be set at liberty, and all proceedings against her were dropped.²⁰³

Undutiful Clerics

Some of the men charged with derogatory speech against Charles I were clergymen who should have known better. One of them, surprisingly, was the Arminian sacerdotalist John Cosin, whose table talk brought him legal difficulties. A rising star in the ecclesiastical firmament, Cosin had been master of religious ceremonies at the king’s coronation. But at dinner with Durham prebendaries at the end of April 1628, Cosin allegedly said that ‘King Charles is not supreme head of the Church of England next under Christ, nor hath he any more power of excommunication than my man that rubs my horse heels’. These were dangerous words that challenged the foundations of the post-Reformation confessional state. Though Cosin and his friends protested that no such words had been uttered, the charge brought him before Star Chamber, ‘for denying the Supremacy’, and dogged him for more than a decade. Correspondents could not resist retelling the story, and it passed into networks of news. One possible source of the story was Peter Smart, the Puritan-inclined Durham prebendary who was hostile to Cosin’s ceremonial innovations.²⁰⁴

Cosin, for his part, protested his ‘abused innocency’, and asserted his devotion to ‘the king’s most sacred power’. The charge, he said, was an ‘evil’ slander, an invention spread by ‘a son of Belial’. Rather, he had said no more than that the power of excommunication came from Christ to those in holy orders, and that no English monarch had taken such power upon him. As to the question of the king being head of the church, neither laws nor canons nor even the Act of Supremacy made that claim, for the king was but, under Christ, supreme governor. The ‘casual discourse’ that provided the setting for this conversation was among learned men, mostly clerics, who surely understood the distinction between the king’s jurisdiction over the church, and ecclesiastical spiritual power that derived only from Christ. Cosin vehemently denied speaking ‘any irreverent words of his majesty’, or anything to ‘derogate from the king’s majesty’s royal power’, and completely distanced himself from remarks about ‘horse heels’.²⁰⁵

The damage control was prompt and effective, and cleared the way for John Cosin’s future preferment. But a dozen years later people were still discussing his remark that ‘the king hath no more power in matters ecclesiastical than the boy that rubs his horse heels’ .²⁰⁶ The clash of memories in 1628 coincided with the storm over Peter Smart’s denunciation of John Cosin’s ceremonial excesses at Durham cathedral, Cosin’s notorious espousal of quasi-Catholic devotions, and his identification with the anti-Calvinist Arminians who were under attack in parliament. To Cosin’s enemies, including Joseph Mead at Cambridge, ‘a great part, if not the most of the evil in our church at this present is supposed to proceed from him’.²⁰⁷ Cosin was able to turn the tide from an attack on his own ceremonial practices to an attack on his enemies. Despite these controversies Cosin rose to become Master of Peterhouse (1635), Vice Chancellor of Cambridge (1639), Dean of Peterborough (1640), and, after the Restoration, Bishop of Durham.

Another prominent cleric whose table talk brought him trouble was John Williams, bishop of Lincoln and former Lord Keeper, whose fall from favour coincided with the rise of William Laud. Williams had fallen foul of Buckingham and Laud, and his enemies collected damaging reports about him. Their vindictiveness and backbiting made for a case of extraordinary complexity. Walking in an arbour at Bucdken, Huntingdonshire, in July 1627, in company with other clerics, Williams allegedly made remarks ‘to the great dishonour of his sacred majesty’. Even the gardener was pressed to give evidence.²⁰⁸ Later in July 1632, at a private dinner with Dr William Spicer at Westminster, Williams allegedly complained that ‘the king was made against him’ by his enemies, and warned that ‘should there come a parliament… both the king and they should have cause to repent of meddling with him’. These were dangerous remarks, though perhaps not so serious as other words the informant said ‘he durst not repeat’. Report of the conversation reached the royal chaplain Peter Heylyn, who felt duty bound to inform Secretary Coke that the bishop had spoken ‘to the dishonour of his majesty and to the prejudice of his affairs’. Tale bearing of this kind would not stand up in court, but it kept pressure on Williams and further ingratiated Heylyn as an instrument of his patron Laud. As John Cosin and Hugh Pyne had found to their cost, private words could easily come back to haunt them.²⁰⁹ In 1637 Williams was sentenced in Star Chamber for ‘words spoken by him publicly of the king’, including the ‘strange speech … that he held his bishopric by as good right as the king held his crown’.²¹⁰

Dozens more clergymen spoke rashly or disparagingly of royal authority during the 1630s. The same kind of process that allows us to eavesdrop on alehouse conversations also brings to light expressions that ministers would never have set down on paper. Despite their obligation to pray for the king, and their duty to teach obedience, these clerics clashed with state power and found themselves in trouble. Some objected to particular royal policies, like the promulgation of the Book of Sports or the war with the Scottish covenanters, while others were simply hot headed. Their stories illuminate some of the complexities of Caroline religious culture and the tensions that beset local communities.

Richard Carrier, vicar of Wirksworth and rector of Carsington, Derbyshire, was prosecuted in 1631 for ‘irreligious and profane speeches to the disgrace of the state and his majesty’s government’, among other outrages and offences. Speaking privately and casually, he allegedly said ‘that there was a double persecution in our kingdom, one against papists and another against protestants… that it was never good since there was so much preaching, and for the people, hang them, let us get what we can out of them and let them go to the devil’. He had also spoken controversially about purgatory and prayers for the dead. Such words might normally have brought the speaker before the episcopal courts or the Court of High Commission, but Carrier’s many enemies made this a Star Chamber matter.²¹¹ The case was the culmination of a series of suits and counter actions involving control of the mineral-rich Peak District.

Carrier was rich and well connected, and as Barmaster of the wapentake of Wirksworth rigorously collected his mining dues and tithes of ore and lead. One local gentleman described him as the ‘arch enemy of our parish’. On one occasion Carrier’s wife Jennet drew a knife against a parishioner and said, ‘if I should kill one of the rogues it were but an hanging matter’.²¹² The Star Chamber judges described Carrier’s words as ‘foul’ (Chancellor of the Exchequer Cottington), ‘heinous’ (Chief Justice Richardson), ‘scandalous’ (Secretary Coke), ‘ungodly’ (Sir Thomas Jermyn), ‘odious’ (Lord Keeper Coventry), and ‘malicious… and seditious’ (Lord Privy Seal Montague). But fortunately for the clergyman the witnesses ‘did not agree about the… scandalous words… the words were very uncertain’, and many of the complainants proceeded ‘out of malice’.²¹³

Several of the judges expressed concern about the private and domestic occasions of Carrier’s alleged ill-speaking. ‘It is objected these were but table talk, and at a feast, yet they are foul things and not fit to be concealed,’ observed Sir John Finch, asking ‘should treason spoken at tables be concealed?’ The recent judgment in Pyne’s case had shown how hard it was to prove such things. ‘It is hard I confess to call in question for all that is spoken at table,’ agreed Justice Heath, ‘and yet this should not have been a table argument.’ Chief Justice Richardson blamed Carrier’s host (and chief accuser), John Gell, ‘for making his cups a snare, and reporting what was discoursed at his table’, and complained of ‘the insolency of the times [when] people will teach divines divinity, judges the law, and some will teach statesmen to govern’.²¹⁴ There was no diner’s privilege, no excuse for seditious words in any setting, but no certainty either that report of these words would stand up in court.

Ultimately Star Chamber found Carrier guilty. His words alone did not condemn him, although they added weight and texture to other charges. He was fined £500, removed from the Barmote, stripped of his privileges in the lead mines, and briefly imprisoned. His wife Jennet was also imprisoned and fined £50. Carrier’s ruin was compounded by the loss of his ecclesiastical living. But a decade later, when civil war broke out, Carrier would take the king’s side when his old enemy Sir John Gell sided with the parliament.²¹⁵

While Carrier’s case was proceeding, two more clergymen found themselves in trouble for their words. Peter Simon, curate of Newland, Gloucestershire, ventured the levelling opinion ‘that setting the king’s place and quality aside, we were all equal in respect of manhood unto him’. He expressed this thought while counselling enclosure rioters in the Forest of Dean at Maytide 1631. Called before the bishop of Winchester, Simon wisely acknowledged ‘that he doth with all his soul detest all anabaptistical and Jesuitical opinions and positions that oppose the authority, power, dignity, preeminency, and safety of princes; and that he doth acknowledge that there is upon kings and princes God’s character which maketh their persons sacred as God’s anointed’. He further assured the bishop that not a day went by ‘in which he will not pray for his sacred majesty, and for the upholding of his royal dignity and preservation of his sacred person’. And, as to ‘the common condition of humanity’, far from espousing erroneous opinions, ‘his meaning was, though kings and princes did consist of soul and body as other men, yet the endowment of God’s grace and gifts of his holy spirit are greater and more abundant upon princes than inferior persons’. Suitably cowed and repentant, Simon was allowed back to his parish.²¹⁶

Less successfully, Richard Worsley, curate of St Bartholomew the Less, London, attempted to explain the ‘idle paper’ he had put up ‘in a public place upon a post’ denouncing his vicar, Mr Hinshaw, as a crypto-papist. In this he recklessly associated King Charles with popish doctrine, confirmed by ‘his going into Spain and afterward into France like a young ass for a wife’. Expecting reward rather then punishment for this libel, the writer signed his notice ‘Richard Worsley, curate of St Bart. but in great hope shortly to be vicar’. Instead of preferment, however, his tactics brought trouble and investigation. A London magistrate sent the offending text to Viscount Conway, who referred it to Bishop Laud. The curate’s only defence for likening his majesty to an ass was that he was ‘distracted’ and ‘distempered’.²¹⁷

In October 1632 a Dr Conyers of Braintree, Essex, was brought before King’s Bench and committed to prison for foolish comments about monarchs. Reviewing the condition of Christendom, he is alleged to have said ‘that as the Emperor is king of kings, the king of Spain king of men, and the French king king of asses, so the king of England is king of devils’. It sounds like a joke that went wrong, but words of this sort could not be tolerated. Conyers also railed at Gustavus Adolphus, and claimed that ‘whosoever prayed for the king of Sweden was ipso facto a traitor to the crown of England, and that none but the damned crew of puritans would do so’.²¹⁸

The London lecturer Nathaniel Bernard spoke ‘treasonable words’ in 1633 when he told a congregation at Cambridge that ‘treason against the commonwealth’ was worse than treason against the king, ‘so much the worse, by how much the body is better than a member, and the whole is better than a part’. His audience at St Mary’s included attentive note-takers, who reported the words to the High Commission.²¹⁹ George Preston, the long-serving vicar of Rothersthorpe, Northamptonshire, was cited in 1634 ‘for speaking scandalous words against the king and queen’, but what he said is not recorded.²²⁰ Likewise called before the High Commission for making ‘undutiful speeches’ against King Charles was Francis Doughty, minister of Sodbury, Gloucestershire, who said he was ‘heartily sorry’.²²¹

Another Cambridge scandal involved the Dublin-educated cleric Noah Rogers, who had recently returned from New England. Preaching at St Mary’s, Cambridge, in March 1634, Rogers reportedly said

that he hoped to die, and tread King Charles under his feet, and willed [his auditors] to go to the king and tell him so. He said he was Christ’s subject, and not the king’s, he was free born. He said the king was not legislator, but custos legorum. He said the king durst not call a parliament. He said he was above the king, and would not preach unto the king unless he would obey him. If he found not justice of the king’s majesty, was not the king a tyrant?

Challenged for these words, Rogers ‘said he was likely to be hanged already, and was ready to suffer in any place’. Examined later by the vice-chancellor, he denied most of the speech attributed to him and sensibly ‘acknowledge[d] the king to be his sovereign’. In mitigation, however, he confessed that ‘he is sometimes distempered, by reason of hard study and deep meditations and melancholy, and if he have at any time overshot himself, upon his knees he beggeth pardon for it’.²²²

The republication of the king’s Book of Sports drove several ministers to speak contemptuously of the crown.²²³ Some wondered aloud, ‘if the declaration be his majesty’s’, and said it seemed more the devil’s.²²⁴ One cleric who made ‘sundry scandalous and ignominious speeches… in contempt of the king’s most excellent majesty’ was Henry Page, the vicar of Ledbury, Herefordshire. For preaching with ‘derision and scorn’ against the king’s book, and for ‘opprobrious and disgraceful speeches’ against recreations on the Sabbath, Page was denounced to the High Commission.²²⁵ A more subtly outspoken critic was Edward Williams of Shafton, Dorset, who told his congregation in 1634, in the words of Joshua to the Israelites: ‘Choose ye whom ye will serve. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’²²⁶

Several clerics were charged in 1638 with seditious preaching or seditious conversation. Enoch Grey’s sermon at Maldon in July was only the most outrageous. In addition to associating Queen Henrietta Maria with the whore of Babylon, he commented on the sufferings of Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne (Puritan martyrs or seditious libellers, depending on point of view). Grey warned that any ‘goodman that makes profession in these times, he must look for slitting of noses, cutting of noses, and imprisonment’. However, he added, ‘there is a Star Chamber in heaven’ where comparable punishments would be meted out to God’s enemies. He concluded his sermon by praying: ‘God grant the king grace that he may be humbled, I pray God convert the queen’. A young graduate in the audience reported these ‘seditious and factious speeches’ to the authorities, and Chief Justice Bramston began an aggressive investigation. The state needed to know whether Grey had used ‘bitter disdainful words against the bishops’, had spoken ‘something in derogation of the house of peers’, and, above all, what else he had said ‘of the king or queen in some foul unbeseeming terms’. The government intended that anyone who preached against established law and religion ‘might be punished for their sauciness’. Grey, not surprisingly, became a fugitive, though he re-emerged in the revolutionary ferment of 1641.²²⁷

Sir John Bramston also pursued the East Anglian minister Jeremiah Burroughs, whose comments in August 1638 were said to be ‘full of danger’. In the course of an after-dinner stroll in the Earl of Warwick’s garden, Burroughs talked first ‘of the affairs of Scotland’, and then went on to espouse a radical political theory akin to that of the Covenanters. Arguing with John Michaelson, the conformist minister of Chelmsford, he asked, ‘what if the supreme magistrate refuse or neglect that which he ought to do and is necessary to be done, may not the people give power to some other to supply his neglect and defect?’ A shocked Michaelson, of course, answered ‘no … supreme power is in the supreme magistrate, not in the people’. But Burroughs persisted, demanding, ‘whence has he this power but from the people?’ Michaelson remonstrated that ‘this opinion was full of danger, against clear scripture and the tenet of all sound divines, both ancient and modern … the powers that be are ordained by God’. Burroughs then asked, ‘with a kind of indignation … does God say from heaven that King Charles shall be king of England or Scotland?’ Yes, of course, said Michaelson, ‘for the crowns or England and Scotland, like other inheritances, fall naturally and be by divine right to the next heir’. Burroughs then ‘fell again upon the point of the people’s power, that they did originally choose their kings and prescribe them conditions and limited their power by laws’. Not so, protested Michaelson, for kings of England and Scotland ‘were never elected by the people, but had their power to govern solely and wholly from God’.

This was not an argument that either party could win, but positions hardened as they continued their walk. Michaelson described Burroughs’s opinion as ‘absurd’ and ‘dangerous’, for, ‘if the people should once be persuaded that all power came from them’, and that they could give it ‘to whom they list and take it away when they pleased, we should have as many kings as months in the year’. Burroughs gave examples of the republic of Venice and the elective monarchy of Poland, and then argued again for resistance when a king ‘should exercise tyranny upon his people’. Was it not lawful, he asked, to resist such a king ‘by force, and to defend ourselves and liberties by arms?’ Charles I’s name had already been mentioned, though the conversation was framed in hypothetical terms. At this point, Michaelson writes, ‘our discourse broke off… because I retired myself from him’, and soon after the loyal minister reported the matter to magistrates. Resistance theory had been aired before, and would become common in the 1640s, but both secular and ecclesiastical authorities found it shocking in 1638.²²⁸

The Scottish crisis also sparked incautious comments in some pulpits. The requirement that ministers read the proclamation against the covenanter rebels led several into sedition. In London the preacher George Walker was arrested in November 1638 for ‘divers things tending to public faction and disobedience to authority’, including his remark ‘that we must not too much fear great men, kings and potentates’.²²⁹ A Norfolk minister preaching at Manchester in March 1639 ‘covertly insinuated to his auditors that they should pray for the good success of the Scotch rebels’.²³⁰

When another minister, John Kelly of Elstow, Bedfordshire, read aloud ‘a manuscript of the Scottish business’, which he acknowledged to be ‘a dangerous paper’, he was charged with ‘the moving and stirring up… of sedition and debate’. Found guilty at the Bedford assizes in 1639, he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, a fine of £500, and to stand twice in the pillory wearing a paper that described his crime. One of the magistrates, protective of ecclesiastical honour, proposed to Archbishop Laud that, if Kelly were pilloried, he should ‘not receive that ignominy in a clergyman’s habit, to the dishonour of the coat, but rather may (at least for that day) be habited as a lay man’.²³¹ This may have been the same Bedfordshire minister examined in 1639 for saying ‘that he loves the Scots much better than the king’. He was committed to Bedford gaol to await the assizes, but ‘whether for his life or for a notable misdemeanour, I know not’, wrote the news writer Edward Rossingham.²³²

One more minister vehemently exercised by the Scottish crisis was John Girtam alias Haydon, who pushed his way into a pulpit at Stockport, Cheshire, during a burial service at Easter 1639, and ranted about the condition of England. Among other ‘railing and unfitting speeches’, he said what many perhaps felt but few dared voice:

that if Prince Henry should have been living this day, he would never have suffered such popery and idolatry as now is in England, but would have taken Rome’s gate and pulled down the scarlet whore of Rome; nay, said he, if Prince Henry had been living, he would never have suffered such massacres in Germany, whereby many thousand were constrained to eat the flesh of their own arms, but would have defended the Christians from the cruelty of the Emperor; and further said, if Prince Henry had been alive at this day, there had been no rebellion in Scotland, neither durst the Scots so much as have opened their mouths against him.

Taken into custody for these words of sedition, he declared ‘that he cared not for 400 constables, four score justices, nor 500 captains’. When one of the officers asked him ‘if he cared for the king, yea or no’, Girtam answered, ‘that he cared not for all men in the world (not giving that dutiful respect as to except the king)’.²³³

As royal and ecclesiastical authority unravelled in 1641, more ministers were emboldened to speak against the crown. The Kentish minister Francis Cornewell was indicted at Maidstone in June 1641 for saying ‘that if the king enjoined the Book of Common Prayer or any other testimonies or discipline that were not expressly delivered in God’s words, we ought not to obey him’.²³⁴ Enoch Grey returned to the pulpit that year to denounce ‘the sins of the king’. Chief Justice Bramston planned to charge Grey with ‘sedition and treason’, but the king’s flight from London in January 1642 brought proceedings to a halt.²³⁵

Catholic Crimes

A final strand of seditious speech came from the Catholic subjects of Charles I. Most Catholics, of course, held their tongues, but a few spoke boldly against their Protestant monarch. We have already heard from James Farrell who wished the king dead, Henry Sawyer who predicted a deluge of blood, and Mary Cole who talked of hanging his majesty. Catholics were always subjects of suspicion, and their words carried extra danger.

John Trevelyan, a Cornish recusant gentleman, predicted in 1628 ‘the utter and speedy ruin of this whole state and church’, and warned his Protestant neighbours that they ‘must change or choose their religion within this month or their throats would be cut’. According to testimony before magistrates at Bodmin, Trevelyan had declared that the psalm sung in church was but ‘a Geneva gig’, that there was ‘knavery in our Bible’, and that ‘were it not for images we should all be atheists’. The evidence rested on a chain of hearsay, too slender to hang a suspected popish plotter. Trevelyan was a braggart and a nuisance, but the government had no real cause for alarm.²³⁶

The Catholic soldier John Langton, who was born in Lancashire and served in Denmark, caused consternation at an Oxford alehouse in September 1630 when he championed the Gunpowder Plot. ‘It was not treason,’ Langton declared, and ‘Catesby, Percy and the Winters that were in the Gunpowder Treason were no traitors’. A tailor named Francis Thornton, who had been drinking with Langton, told magistrates about this remarkable discourse. Methuselah Flower, a maker of bowstrings, reported Langton to say ‘that the king was a young king, and that he would serve under another king if the king would not pay him his pay’. There was no shortage of witnesses and little disagreement about the words in question. Under examination, Langton explained that had just arrived in Oxford when ‘he fell into company… and had conference with them concerning the Gunpowder Treason’. But he was so drunk at the time that he could not remember anything he said. The mayor of Oxford, however, found Langton to be ‘of comely personage, well spoken’, and ‘very penitient’, while his accusers were ‘such as are usually found in alehouses in suburbs’, and these factors bore in his favour.²³⁷

Within a week the details reached the Privy Council and came to the attention of the king. Secretary Conway wrote back to the magistrates at Oxford, thanking them for their ‘care in making stay of this Langton, whose unwary tongue durst meddle with the censure of things so much above him’. The king’s decision, ‘of his gracious clemency’, was that the soldier ‘hath endured a sufficient punishment for this time of his unadvisedness’, and that he should be released with a caution.²³⁸ What is striking about this story is not just Langton’s sympathy with the Gunpowder plotters, and the ease with which he got off the hook, but the evidence of tailors and bowstring-makers, tavern-keepers and travellers, casually engaged in political conversation. It illuminates once again the usually obscured exercise of citizenship, below the level of the elite, involving words that some deemed offensive.

Another alcohol-fuelled argument in Leicestershire developed into a brawl when John Belgrave declared that ‘it was pity the Gunpowder Plot was not effected’, and that ‘they had done God good service if the Gunpowder Treason had gone forward’. The afternoon drinkers at North Kilworth in November 1633 had already tackled such topics as papist knavery and whether purgatory existed. Belgrave, if not a Catholic, was evidently a Catholic sympathizer. He also had local enemies, who may have sought to entrap him. According to Henry Cherry, husbandman, his accuser John Abbot called Belgrave ‘scurvy fellow … keep you from my house … and keep not my wife company when I am gone’, before announcing that he ‘speaketh treason’. Reviewing the case in March 1634, Attorney General Noy found ‘no proof… of words supposed by him to be spoken’, and allowed the matter to rest.²³⁹

A potentially more serious case in 1635 concerned James Nugent, an Irish Catholic merchant based at Ostend, who allegedly spoke ‘lewd and pernicious words against his majesty’ while visiting Dover. He was drinking in company in the house of the widow Katherine Daniel when her son-in-law Matthew Bennett, mariner, remarked of the fleet setting out: ‘I pray God send them a prosperous voyage.’ According to the hostess, Nugent then said: ‘I will go with the king to hell gate and there leave him.’ To which Ralph Mitchell, a merchant from Taunton, told Nugent ‘his tongue was too big for his mouth’.²⁴⁰

Pending investigation by magistrates, Nugent was held in Dover gaol ‘for speaking words of a high and dangerous nature against his sacred majesty’. These were not treasonous words, of the sort that got Crohagan killed, but they could be construed as seditious. Under examination Nugent denied speaking the words quoted. He did say, however, that several months before some English captains at Ostend had found fault with his religion, prompting him to ask, ‘what have you to do with my religion, I am a true subject to my king, and if he go to hell I will go to the door with him’. Matthew Bennett, however, corroborated the hostess’s account of Nugent’s words, though he could not remember who else was present at the time. It could be that all were befuddled by alcohol, and that Nugent’s Irish diction, idiom, or accent caused confusion. When the Somerset merchant Mitchell claimed not to have heard Nugent’s dangerous words, the widow Daniel called him ‘base rogue’.

James Nugent spent more than a month in prison while the authorities pondered his case. Petitioning for release, he again denied speaking anything against King Charles, although he acknowledged that ‘the country phrase where he lives’—about going to the doors of hell—might be used by his enemies against him, and for this he apologised. His adversaries, he told the Council, were trying to ruin him ‘out of malice’. Solicitor General Littleton observed in July 1635 that, if Nugent’s word were ‘wilful or of an ill intent, they are crimes of an high nature and deserve exemplary punishment’; but, if the defendant was to be believed, ‘they merit the less correction after divers weeks imprisonment’. The Irishman offered to take the oath of allegiance, though not the oath of supremacy, for ‘he knows not what that means’. Littleton was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and the Council evidently concurred in this judgment.²⁴¹

Finally, we have the case of William Pickering, a Shropshire Catholic, who faced charges in Star Chamber and High Commission in December 1635 for speeches against the king and ‘scandalous speeches’ against religion. ‘I am a papist, and the queen a papist, and the king a papist in heart and conscience,’ he boasted to Francis Huberly, yeoman. Assuring a local minister that ‘all protestants were damned heretics and devils’, Pickering exempted King Charles from this category, asserting ‘that the king’s majesty that now is is reconciled to the bishop and church of Rome’. He was also said to have declared that ‘it had been a fine thing to have seen six or seven hundred heretics to have danced the morris in the air [that is, to be hanged] upon the fifth of November in their scarlet gowns’.²⁴²

Pickering, we learn, was prosecuted for these words, ‘not in an ordinary way but by the king’s own… direction’.²⁴³ He and his wife Ursula were both held in prison (he in the Fleet, she in the Gatehouse), but were freed after eighteen weeks ‘at the instance of the queen’s majesty’. Their case continued until May 1638, when William Pickering was sentenced to stand in the pillory with a paper on his head, to be fined £10,000, to suffer a whipping, and to lose both his ears. The Lord Privy Seal recommended Pickering to be ‘stigmatized with a letter L’ or have his tongue bored with awl, and Archbishop Laud agreed he should have ‘the highest sentence’. News of this case spread into the general stream of information, with correspondents reporting in June 1638 that ‘one Pickering, a recusant, is censured in the Star Chamber to lose his ears and be bored through the tongue for saying the king was a papist in his heart and that all protestants were heretics, and making a hog sty of the churchyard’.²⁴⁴ It was ‘discoursing touching the censure of Mr Pickering’ that summer that led the Essex servant Mary Cole to seditious speech of her own.²⁴⁵

The recurrence of cases of this nature showed that respect for the monarch could not be taken for granted. They underscore the fragility of conventional assumptions about the king commanding the people’s love. They also demonstrate the impossibility of restraining ordinary subjects from meddling in matters that did not concern them. The evidence is overwhelming that commoners of all sorts, in private, domestic, or convivial settings, took a lively interest in the affairs of the crown, and were sometimes reckless in speaking their mind. By Charles I’s reign such practices had been exercised for a hundred years, though never with official condonement.

Charles I’s councillors encountered scores of subjects who harboured contempt for their monarch, and, because they brought certain cases to his attention, the king became aware of them too. Though much of the commentary was crude and thoughtless, and saturated in drink, it was also tinged with commonwealth theory. Some people expressed the opinion that they were as good as any monarch; some said that kings could be deposed if they failed in their duties; and some espoused a vision of elective kingship, in which there might be choice of a successor. A running motif across his reign was that King Charles was deficient—a boy, a child, not fit to govern.

At the beginning of his reign King Charles observed that it was ‘more honour for a king to be invaded and almost destroyed by a foreign enemy than to be despised by his own subjects’.²⁴⁶ He repeatedly invoked the politics of love, deeming ‘the love of our people’ amongst his ‘greatest riches’.²⁴⁷ William Laud told him that ‘the strength of a people is in the honour and renown of their king; his very name is their shield among the nations’.²⁴⁸ The Duke of Buckingham assured him that he was ‘a glorious king, loved at home and.. .feared abroad’.²⁴⁹ By the time his kingdom plunged into civil war, however, King Charles had endured a barrage of seditious despite. ‘Poor king,’ remarked one of his supporters in May 1642, ‘he grows still in more contempt and slight here every day’.²⁵⁰ ‘There was never any king so much insulted,’ observed another subject on the brink of civil war. Though addressed to recent actions by the Scottish Covenanters, the comment could serve as the epitaph for a troubled reign.