8
Revolutionary Seditions

The revolutionary crisis of 1640–2 and the Civil War that followed energized a thousand conversations. Fed by the newly freed press, and driven by extraordinary events, a politicized populus gorged on rumour and opinion. The arguments of pamphlet ‘paper bullets’ raged in alehouses and churches, as the nation tore itself apart. Printed texts sparked innumerable discussions, as did the standard greeting ‘what news?’ Vehement exchanges brought patrons close to violence in the Angel at Norwich, the Crown at Boston, the Three Trumpets at Dover, and drinking establishments throughout the country.¹ Preachers too stirred partisan opinion in pulpits from Cornwall to Cumberland, adding to the chorus of contention and complaint. There was plenty of work for ‘eaves-droppers, whisperers, or informers’, as the government of the day sought to manage the ‘turbulent humours of the people’.²

Royal authority was in tatters on the eve of the Civil War, but the emerging power of parliament commanded no greater respect. As the House of Commons swelled in ambition, it too became the target of derisory popular comment. As military leaders became public figures, they too attracted adulation or scorn. Popular royalism and popular support for parliament were both noisy and unstable, swelling and shifting as the crisis unfolded. Historical attention has focused on the major players, but a sub-current of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary ferment exposed dissensions among the multitude at large.

Our Dread Sovereign

In the face of Scottish insurrection, Puritan disturbances, and popular expressions of contempt, leaders of the established church reasserted the scriptural basis of divine right kingship. The new ecclesiastical Canons of 1640 insisted on the authority of ‘our dread sovereign lord, the king’s most excellent majesty’, and defined all resistance to his power as ‘treasonable against God as well as against the king’. Ministers in every parish were required four times a year to ‘exhort their people to obey, honour and serve their king’, though only the most diligent complied.³

The Laudian John Swan in Cambridgeshire spoke in 1640 of kings as ‘patres patriae, fathers of their country’, without whom there could be no safety or quiet. Kings were ‘God’s anointed ones, and may not… be touched with any virulent tongue nor invectives of a bitter pen’.⁴ The future bishop Henry King preached at St Paul’s that ‘the king is the state’s pilot, and his law the compass’. Without royal authority we are ‘sheep without a shepherd, and water without a bank, and a body without an head’.⁵ ‘Were it not for the binding force of sovereignty,’ preached Richard Gardyner in London, ‘our meetings would be mutinies, our pulpits cockpits… the honourable would be levelled with the base, the prudent with the child, all would be amassed and huddled up in an unjust parity, and the land overrun with inflexible generations’.⁶ The king, preached Robert Mossom in 1642, is ‘the defender of our faith … the preserver of our peace … the protector of our laws… cursed is he that despiseth him’.⁷ The king was the ‘keeper’ of the people’s ‘civil blessings’, declared another sermon of 1642. ‘We should not safely meet and converse together, had we not a gracious king over us to repress our mutual violences.’⁸ Urging obedience, an Essex vicar, Edward Jeffrey, allegedly preached in August 1642 that ‘the king hath not only power to command all your persons, but also power to take away your goods at his pleasure’.⁹ Never before had the English heard such sustained exposition of constitutional theory.

Crude and casual contempt for royal authority prompted a restatement of traditional protocols of loyalty. Conservative clerics reminded subjects of their duty, while opponents of royal policy were readying to fight their king. Royalist sermons of the early 1640s reiterated familiar phrases in support of ‘the powers that be’ and gave a new gloss to the injunction ‘touch not mine anointed’. Laudian clerics had previously cited this verse on behalf of the priesthood, but now they applied it directly to King Charles, along with the biblical injunction to ‘give Caesar his due’.¹⁰ Conservative magistrates tried to maintain conventional discipline by prosecuting people who spoke sedition, even if they had difficulty bringing offenders to court.

Parliamentary authorities also upheld the dignity of the monarch whose policies they opposed, maintaining the fiction that ‘the king can do no wrong’. With reference to King Charles, a parliamentary gentlewoman assured her royalist kinsman in 1643 that ‘they esteem his person sacred, and pray heartily for his life, and desire and seek his honour and preservation’.¹¹ The royalist Richard Towgood conceded as much: though ‘they charge his majesty’s evil counsellors, they seldom ascend so high as to touch the throne’. Unfortunately, however, these principles had less purchase when the country turned from arguing to fighting. Not all on the parliamentary side were so scrupulous as their leaders, and some turned to ‘the vilifying and dishonouring of sacred majesty’ and ‘bitter discourse against sovereign authority’.¹²

Preaching at Bristol in January 1643, Towgood warned that ‘to speak bitterly and reproachfully of supreme authority, it is a very unfit, unwarrantable and unlawful thing’. Citing Job 34: 18, he asked rhetorically, ‘is it fit to say to a king, thou art wicked, and to princes, ye are ungodly?’ No, he answered, ‘it is not fit to tax an earthly king’. He quoted Exodus 22: 28, ‘Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people,’ and Ecclesiastes 10: 20, ‘Curse not the king, no not in thy thought.’ And he concluded with the rallying scriptures of 1 Peter 2: 17, ‘Fear God, honour the king,’ and Matthew 22: 21, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.’ It was unlawful, Towgood insisted, ‘for any of the subjects to speak evil of their king, no, though he be unjust, and do but weakly govern his kingdom’.¹³ ‘The king can do no wrong,’ another embattled royalist reminded the nation in 1647, ‘the king is God’s lieutenant, and is not able to do an unjust thing… The justices and ministers are to be questioned and punished if the laws be violated, and no reflection to be made on the king.’¹⁴

Curse the King

King Charles, however, could not please even his supporters. Thomas Elliot, who was vehement against parliament, despaired in May 1642: ‘a plague upon it, his majesty will not stand to anything he saith, for if he would we should have made an end of the business long since.’¹⁵ Even Henrietta Maria berated him in her letters from abroad.¹⁶

‘Poor king,’ wrote Thomas Knyvett from London in May 1642, ‘he grows still in more contempt and slight here every day … And no wonder, when the reverence and worship of the king of kings comes to be construed superstitious and idolatrous.’¹⁷ Referring to the biblical figure who threw stones at King David, the Herefordshire cleric Henry Rogers called on God to ‘confound all those Shimeites that curse the king and esteem no more of him than of a dead dog’.¹⁸ The majesty of monarchy was severely tarnished, as if the anti-authoritarian talk of previous decades was but a prelude. Local magistrates continued to police political discourse for as long as they could, and assizes and Quarter Sessions still sought to punish offenders. Parliament too attempted to preserve the honour of the crown as well as respect for established authority. Middlesex magistrates, in the parliamentarian heartland, sought to maintain order, propriety, and deference to traditional authority. But other courts ceased to function, or limped along with fewer judges and reduced competence. Their records, to the extent they survive, allow glimpses of popular partisan allegiance.

Many people, if pressed, would say on the eve of the Civil War that they were both ‘for the king and the parliament’. Others declared with equal vehemence that ‘they cared neither for king nor parliament’, or ‘would neither obey king nor parliament’.¹⁹ These were common positions in the summer of 1642 that became less tenable in the months that followed. Arguing against a neighbour at Grantham, Lincolnshire, in June 1642, the apothecary William Clarke protested: ‘thou hast a rotten, stinking heart within thee, for if thou wilt be for the king thou must be for the papists.’ Renouncing his allegiance to King Charles, Clarke suggested that the Prince of Wales or the Duke of York should be crowned in the king’s absence from London.²⁰

At Leicester in July 1642 the summer assizes fined George Knight £300 for ‘certain treasonous words’ and ‘slanderous words spoken against the king’, and indicted others on similar grounds.²¹ In October 1642 the Chester Sessions indicted Samuel Troughton ‘for speaking words against the king’s majesty tending to treason’.²² Matthew Haman, a sawyer at Dover, reportedly said of King Charles in October, ‘he is as nothing, if he were a king he would not murder his subjects’.²³ Seeing two sheep’s heads on a pole in London in 1643, Alice Jackson of St Andrew Holborn said that she ‘wished the king’s and Prince Rupert’s heads were there instead’. ‘The king was an evil and an unlawful king, and better to be without a king than to have him king,’ she declared.²⁴

A different sensibility drove Edmund Rayner, a religious visionary of Lambeth, Surrey, who told his female followers early in 1643 ‘that he was as much the Lord’s anointed as the king was’. When report of this reached parliament, he was held for judgment at the Surrey assizes.²⁵ Thomas Aldberry, a London gunsmith (whose profession did well from the war), told listeners in July 1643 that ‘there is no king, and that he would acknowledge no king’. In his mind, at least, monarchy was already abolished, long before the revolutionary parliament struck it down.²⁶ Republican political theory was filtering down to these less tutored levels, blending with altered appreciations of an embattled crown.

Drinking at the Bell alehouse at Fincham, Norfolk, in November 1644, the glover Thomas Theodrick declared, ‘the king is no king, he is a bastard, and was crowned with a leaden crown’. Francis Hubbert, yeoman, told him ‘that those words were bloody words, wishing him to take heed what he spake’. Within days the exchange was reported to magistrates. Even if these Norfolk villagers were ‘Roundhead rogues’, as the knacker Miles Cushion called them, there could be no countenancing such seditious talk against his majesty.²⁷ In February 1645 the House of Lords committed one Churchman to Newgate pending trial ‘for speaking treasonable words against the king’.²⁸ Another Londoner, Ansell Poulten, faced indictment in 1646 for saying ‘that the king was run away from his parliament, and that he was no king’.²⁹

‘What was the king?’ asked John Bamforth in a public house at Barnsley, Yorkshire, in November 1645. ‘The king was just so and so,’ answered Thomas Beeves, making a derisory gesture. Beeves also offered to wager £10 that ‘the king’s ears was scoffed off within a month’, and gave his opinion that the queen ‘was gone over to Holland to play the whore’, and that ‘all the king’s issue were bastards’. ‘Roundheaded rogues’, cried one side of the room, and ‘cavalier rogues’ the other, though it did not stop them drinking together.³⁰ ‘The queen is a whore, and she left a bastard at Newark-upon-Trent,’ announced another drinker, who was fined 100 marks for his comment.³¹ Anne Smith of St Giles in the Fields was likewise fined 100 marks in 1648 for her remark that ‘the king’s children are bastards, and that the queen was delivered of a child at Oxford when the king had not been with her a twelvemonth before’.³²

For some Londoners it was not enough to fight the king on the battlefield, nor to belittle his authority. They wanted him dead, and expressed a willingness to assist in the task. Henry Sutton, for example, was indicted for treason in January 1643 for saying he would kill the king.³³ ‘His majesty is a stuttering fool,’ declared Joan Sherrard of St Dunstan in the West in 1644. ‘Is there never a Felton yet living? If I were a man, as I am a woman, I would help to pull him to pieces.’³⁴ Another vocally empowered London woman, Mary Giles, the wife of a lawyer, announced in 1645: ‘I will kill the king of England.’ She was called before the Middlesex sessions for ‘conspiring and designing to compass the said king’s death’, but it is unlikely that she paid dearly for her comments.³⁵

A Pox on the Parliament

Parliament, its supporters claimed, comprised ‘a select company of grave, wise, judicious and pious men’,³⁶ who represented the interests of the nation. Its enemies, by contrast, saw Pym and his fellows as ‘rogues and devils’. A competing tradition of popular commentary piled opprobrium on leaders at Westminster, especially when they began to exercise power. Being scornful of parliament, however, did not necessarily make one a royalist, any more than mocking the king made one a republican. It was possible to savour anti-parliamentary libels or verses about John Pym without taking a constitutional position.³⁷ It might be scandalum magnatum to dishonour a parliament man, and sedition to deride the institution, but the chaos of the time allowed little room for these issues to be tested. Parliamentarians themselves considered some speech against them to be ‘traitorous’, though such comments belonged more to rhetoric than to law.

Quarter Sessions records from 1642 contain scores of citations of ill-tempered speakers saying such ‘wicked and devilish words’ as ‘pox confound the parliament’ or ‘the devil take the parliament’. The House of Commons too collected reports of ‘words tending to treason and sedition’.³⁸ If such speakers could be apprehended, they were usually bound over to appear or held until the next sessions, though a surprising number were reported to be still ‘at large’. Often the matter went no further, once the authorities had expressed their disapprobation. If a case went to trial, a jury might well find the defendant ‘not guilty’. Scandalous and seditious speech rarely resulted in severe punishment at this time, though moderate doses of fining, pillorying, and short-term imprisonment were frequently recommended.³⁹

The table talk at a Kentish vicarage became matter for public discussion when one of those present, the curate Mr Minis, reported the conversation to the House of Commons. At dinner, said Minis, Dr Peake and his father-in-law made ‘base and scandalous speeches’ and ‘wicked and traitorous speeches’ against parliament, the City, and the godly. ‘A company of five hundred good soldiers out of Ireland would quickly vanquish them all and put them to flight,’ said Peake of the London-trained bands, adding ‘that it were a good deed to take the Lord Mayor, the Sheriffs, and some of the Aldermen, with others of good rank and quality, and hang them up at their own doors, the rest would soon be brought to subjection’. The conversation would seem to date from early 1642, after the king’s flight from London. A version of Minis’s report went into print, with hopes that ‘the parliament will take these invective aspersions of such railing Rabshakehs into their grave and judicious considerations’.⁴⁰

In May 1642 the House of Commons learned of Thomas Elliot’s brag ‘that he would kill any man whom his majesty should command or bid him, without questioning the cause’. As for the parliament, said Elliot, ‘hang them dogs…they have no more religion than a company of dogs’.⁴¹ In June 1642 they heard of Ellis Coleman’s ‘scandalous words’ in a London shop, reviling the parliament as ‘malignant’. Though parliament talked of making King Charles the most glorious king, he said, they ‘only meant to fetch the king by force and put him into the Tower a prisoner and make him only a titular king not having any power of his own’. Bidding ‘a turd on Pym’s teeth’, Coleman swore ‘he would go ten miles to see him hanged’.⁴²

The papermaker Henry Wheatley declared that summer that ‘they were all a company of fools that would not hold with the king’.⁴³ A Mr Riches, drinking at the Angel in Norwich in July, brandished his knife, so he said, ‘to cut all heresy into two, and to cut all the puritans’ and roundheads’ members off’. Others spoke of hanging or beheading the parliamentary leaders, or otherwise compassing their deaths.⁴⁴ An Essex clergyman, Edward Jeffrey of Southminster, declared in August 1642: ‘a pox on the parliament, by God, we will first cut the parliament’s throats.’⁴⁵

Norwich magistrates in August 1642 stayed judgment on ‘very foul and scandalous words’ of ‘delinquents’ until they had ‘acquainted the House therewith’. ‘A health to our gracious king, and confusion bring to factious Pym,’ offered John Coldham, calling anyone who would not join this health ‘rebels’. The alehouse conversation, as reported, revealed pockets of hostility to parliament and sympathy for the embattled monarch. William Symonds told John Andrews ‘that the parliament went about to take away his majesty’s sons, and did condemn the parliament for doing acts against the king’. John Balls told William Youngs that he could not be ‘for the king and the parliament. . . for they were severed. . . saying that the parliament was against the king, for if he should go to the parliament they would take away his prerogatives, and commit him to prison, and take off his head’. The discussion became abusive when one drinker called another ‘prickears, roundhead rascal and knave, and said he was a better man’.⁴⁶

In a similar conversation the same month at Sherston, Wiltshire, Abraham Haynes, a traveller from London, said he thought ‘this parliament should be overthrown… then he would warrant there should never be a parliament again while England was England’.⁴⁷ A company of ‘fiddlers and rogues’ at Chester sang ‘scandalous songs’ at a dinner for the Grand Jury men in which they ‘jeered’ and ‘scoffed further at the parliament, saying reformation would be perfected when the devil is blind’.⁴⁸ The same month a traveller from Leicestershire told a Hertfordshire innkeeper, ‘he did not care a pin for the parliament, and a plague take the parliament, God bless the king, and the devil take the parliament’.⁴⁹ Similar expressions could be heard all over England as the nation descended into civil war.

The wars of the Stuart kingdoms, like all wars, put pressure on morale, allegiance, and opinion. Loyalists and royalists pledged themselves ‘for the king’, and spoke ‘scandalous words’ against the parliament. Some of the harshest antiparliamentary remarks come from within the parliamentary heartland. A conversation in the kitchen at the King’s Head in Ipswich in November 1642, for example, produced ‘opprobrious speeches in a scoffing way against the parliament’. A visitor from Cambridge, Edward Dawtry of King’s College, told the company that ‘they that fight against the king and his army fight against God’, and ‘there hath been a king when there was no parliament, but never a parliament without a king’. Out of their ‘tender respect and due regard’ for the honour of parliament, the bailiffs of Ipswich sent reports of this conversation to Westminster.⁵⁰

In 1643 John Draycott, a Clerkenwell yeoman, called the government ‘a parliament of rogues, for they have plundered all honest men and have not left above three or four honest men in the city’. A sympathetic Middlesex jury found him not guilty.⁵¹ Sarah Dennis of St Giles in the Fields, described by the court as ‘a mischievous and evil woman’, fared worse and faced a fine and imprisonment in December 1643 for saying ‘the parliament men are roundheaded rogues’, and singling out Lord Say, ‘a pox take him’.⁵² In Norfolk that year, ‘falling out with one of her neighbours’ and ‘railing with other women’, Rachel Mercy of Fakenham declared ‘that she cared not, for there is no king, no laws, nor no justice’. When her neighbour Elizabeth Percival questioned her, she explained that ‘there was no king… because the king was not where he should be’.⁵³

Two years later in 1645 Margaret Gardner of suburban Middlesex was fined 6s. 8d. for saying ‘that the parliament are roundheaded rogues and puritans’.⁵⁴ Speakers of similar seditions came before the Quarter Sessions in Essex for abusively naming ‘roundhead knaves’, ‘roundhead rogues’, or ‘parliament rogues’.⁵⁵

John Voysey, a Devonshire merchant visiting London in 1647, declared ‘that some of the parliament men had the pox and were whoremasters, and some of them were rogues and rebels’. These were ‘scandalous and disgraceful words’, according to Middlesex magistrates, but Voysey disowned them, saying he was ‘in his drink’.⁵⁶ More jeering references to ‘roundhead rogues’, ‘parliament dogs’, and ‘parliament whores’ can be found in the papers of the parliamentary Indemnity Commissioners of the 1640s and 1650s.⁵⁷

Treason without a King

The revolutionary justice of January 1649 transformed England’s legal and constitutional environment. Having executed the king and abolished kingship, the Rump republic sought to protect itself through new legislation. In 1649 it became treason to say ‘by writing, publishing, or openly declaring’ that the new commonwealth was ‘tyrannical, usurped or unlawful’, or to attempt its overthrow ‘by any open deed’.⁵⁸ Whether mere speech could constitute such a deed was unclear. New laws in 1654 and 1656 made it treason to ‘compass or imagine the death of the Lord Protector’, or ‘by writing, printing, openly declaring, preaching, teaching or otherwise’ to assail his authority. It was treason to declare the regime ‘tyrannical, usurped or unlawful’, treason to plot or raise force against the state or to promote the claims of the exiled Stuarts.⁵⁹ In effect, the laws that had protected Tudor and Stuart monarchs from treasonous subjects were adapted to the revolutionary regime. As a lawyer instructed an Exeter Grandjury in 1655, ‘by the word king’ in the statute of 25 Edward III ‘must be meant the chief officer, and the bearing of that office… let the name be whatsoever’.⁶⁰

The new laws were primarily directed against royalist conspirators, but they also provided sanctions against activist dissidents, both cavalier and parliamentarian. They did not specifically re-enact treason by words, but they established a framework in which seditious, undutiful, or dangerous speech could be investigated and punished. The act of July 1650 ‘for settling of the militia’ specifically charged commissioners to search out and examine conspiracies against the state ‘by words or actions, spoken, printed, preached, written or published’, and to secure and disarm ‘all papists and other ill-affected persons’ who ‘shall declare themselves in their words or actions against this present parliament, or against the present government established’.⁶¹ In practice, as earlier, an offender might be threatened with a charge of treason, only to suffer the penalties of a lesser crime like sedition.

From the Regicide in 1649 to the Restoration in 1660, England’s revolutionary governments faced low-grade resistance that often took the form of nostalgia for King Charles or expressions of support for his son. Assize records of the 1650s are thick with indictments of commoners cursing the commonwealth and the protectorate. The spectre of royalist insurrection haunted each of the short-lived interregnum regimes. Stuart royalists had no love for Oliver Cromwell and sometimes said so, but disaffected parliamentarians and thwarted radicals could also be heard to excoriate the Lord General who became Lord Protector. So too could those English men and women who grumbled against authority of any kind, however constituted. Dissident speech in this period followed the pulse of public affairs, but seems not to have been severely punished.

The execution of King Charles in January 1649 elicited a groan from the crowd, but any spoken words that accompanied it have been lost. It did not take long, however, for the authorities to react to ‘seditious words and speeches’ from the pulpits and streets.⁶² In September 1649 a Yorkshire minister, Marmaduke Richardson, was summoned to the assizes ‘for praying publicly before his sermon in the parish church of Pocklington for Charles II, king of Scotland and heir apparent to this realm’.⁶³ William Mason of Newless, Yorkshire, a prophet though not a very good one, assured neighbours in January 1650 that ‘there should be a king in England… and that very shortly’.⁶⁴

Thomas Welsh of North Dalton, Yorkshire, drinking with soldiers of Colonel Bright’s regiment, caused trouble in February 1650 by declaring ‘that there is a king, and that England could never be governed aright without a king’. He then drank the king’s health, saying that ‘Prince Charles was crowned king of Scotland and would shortly be amongst us’. Called before the assizes, Welsh made the usual excuse of drunkenness, said he remembered nothing, and was fined £40.⁶⁵ Christopher Wright declared in a common inn at Whitby in August 1651 ‘that he was for King Charles, and that he would fight heartily for him so long as he did live, though he were hanged at the door cheek for it’.⁶⁶ William Bewick of Beverley, currier, declared in October 1651, ‘I will drink a health to Prince Charles, King of Scots, and to his good success into England, and to the confusion of all his enemies,’ then drank a silver beaker full of ale and demanded fellow drinkers to pledge likewise. Instead, they turned him in to local magistrates.⁶⁷

Charles II had been defeated at Worcester on 3 September, and his cause was in ruins. This did not stop other royalists from pledging the exiled monarch, like John Peacock of East Ayton , who hoped that ‘the sun will once again shine’, or the bailiff of Rydale who drank ‘to three of the best Englishmen which are out of the nation’, meaning the Stuart princes.⁶⁸ John Harvey, a Suffolk gentleman, was seen ‘drinking the king’s health and cursing and drinking to the confusion of parliament’ in April 1652, and when challenged by the magistrate told him ‘he was no justice of peace, for that there was no power to make him one’.⁶⁹ The dyer Simon Warrener of Knaresborough, Yorkshire, ‘made and penned a song… that he wished all gallant soldiers to display their banners and set King Charles in his right again’, for which he was examined before the northern assize in May 1653.⁷⁰ Hundreds more drank to the ‘confusion’ of the parliament or protector, and ‘healths’ to the exiled Stuart, suggesting there could be no lawful state without a lawful king.⁷¹ In April 1658 the Yorkshire cleric John Hitchinough was investigated for saying ‘that King Charles’s blood would be revenged, and that shortly’.⁷²

The Devil Confound Cromwell

Without a Stuart monarch to demean, other disaffected Englishmen turned their spleen towards the governors of the commonwealth. Paul Williams and his wife, who kept an alehouse at Hammersmith, Middlesex, were indicted in December 1649 for calling the parliamentary grandees Lord Fairfax, General Cromwell, and Colonel Pride ‘sons of whores’, and hoping soon ‘to see their downfall’. They were each fined 500 marks, a sum well beyond their capacity. They were also alleged to have called the Council of State ‘rogues and murderers of the late king’, and wished they would soon be ‘cut off or hanged’, but on this charge the jury found them ‘not guilty’.⁷³

In April 1650 a London tailor, John Norris of St Botolph without Aldgate, declared ‘that the late king was illegally put to death, but he hoped that his persecutors would hereafter suffer for it’. He said too of parliament ‘that the power which they have is maintained only by the sword, and that they do seek to infringe the liberty of the subject, which they did formerly promise to maintain’.⁷⁴ This was plebeian political thinking, fuelled by indignation and nourished by pamphlets and conversations. Local judicial records allow us to hear more.

Early in 1650 the schoolmaster of Beeleby, Yorkshire, William Leng, told billeted soldiers ‘that he cared not a turd for them, and that Cromwell was the son of a whore, that the commons of England were fools, and that he scorned their government’.⁷⁵ Turned in by a Yorkshire parchment-maker, William Lazenby of Haxby said in January 1651 ‘that he hoped within a twelvemonth to see General Cromwell’s head off, and all the heads of all the parliament men in England that now is’.⁷⁶ Anne Watson, the wife of a Middlesex labourer, said in April 1651 that ‘they that sit at the parliament are all the sons of whores, and that she could find in her heart to blow them up with gunpowder’. A few years earlier disaffected voices had called for another Felton; now they were invoking the spirit of Guy Fawkes. Despite the specificity of her words, the jury found Anne Watson ‘not guilty’.⁷⁷

James Williams of Carlton, Yorkshire, said in September 1651 that Cromwell’s supporters ‘would all be hanged, and called traitors and rogues’.⁷⁸ The yeoman William Archer of Etton said in February 1652 that ‘the parliament were traitors and bloodsuckers, and that they had taken off the king’s head and intended to take off his son’s, but the Lord had blessed him out of their hand’.⁷⁹ In November 1653 an intelligencer warned Cromwell of more ‘harangues of sedition’, and ‘so many scandalous and scurrilous aspersions from the pulpit upon the parliament, army, Council of State, and all now in power’.⁸⁰

After Cromwell’s seizure of power a network of agents and supporters sought to stifle opposition and to keep the government informed. One of the Protector’s friends at Bristol assured Secretary of State Thurloe in February 1655 that ‘his highness may be confident, here are many godly people that do so love, honour, and pray for him… that if they saw the least tendency by words, gesture, or actions towards any villainy, his highness should quickly hear of us’.⁸¹ Always vulnerable, the Protectorate regime relied heavily on intelligence and information.

When a former parliament man, John Williams, denounced the Protector in a sermon in Radnorshire in February 1654, an account soon reached Westminster. ‘Railing much against the present times and government’, and associating the protectorate with ‘slavery and popery’, Williams asked his congregation: ‘what do you want now, a king? You have one, and that as great a tyrant as the former.’⁸² Another hostile preacher in March 1654 used ‘all the contemptible words that can be spoken’ against Protector Cromwell.⁸³ In August 1654 one Yorkshireman warned that Cromwell ‘will sell us all, as the Scots sold the king’. Another denounced the Lord Protector as ‘an idol’ and ‘a devil’, and his regime as ‘corrupt’ and ‘tyrannical’.⁸⁴

Rumours of plots abounded, and those who talked them up, like the button-maker Jasper Mottershed, spoke ‘many dangerous words of most evil consequence against the government and public peace’. Mottershed was arrested in June 1654 after reckless talk in the Star inn at Maldon, Essex, about an imminent royalist uprising.⁸⁵ Also in 1654 the widow Ellen Wande of Selby hoped to see Cromwell ‘come to an evil end, then clapping her hands together in a rage and passion, said, let the rogue look to himself, for there are rods in piss for him’.⁸⁶ Others described the Protector as ‘a traitor’ and his followers as ‘rogues and thieves’. ‘Cromwell is the son of a whore,’ said one Yorkshireman; ‘the devil confound Cromwell,’ said another.⁸⁷ ‘The Lord Protector was a traitor,’ said the Westmorland cleric Charles Kiplin, who hoped that Cromwell ‘and all that took his part would come to a shameful end’.⁸⁸ In the metropolis too there were both men and women who called the Lord Protector a ‘rogue’ or a ‘rascal’, and ‘hoped to see him hanged’.⁸⁹

Comprehensively damning his highness, one Christopher Emerson said before witnesses in September 1655

that the Lord Protector was a rogue and a rascal and blood-sucker, and that he should have his throat cut and his head cleft ere long; and that he was a cowardly rogue, and wore two pistols in his pocket, and was afraid of every dog that barked; and that he should have his throat cut by Michaelmas day, and named weapons to that purpose.⁹⁰

Samuel Baxter, the preacher at Dibden, Hampshire, also ‘cast base unworthy aspersions on his highness the Lord Protector’ in 1655, calling him ‘a countenancer and maintainer of all the sects and errors that were in the kingdom’. Baxter also sang ‘ranting, filthy and unsavoury songs’, so his enemies charged, including one ‘that it would never be well until the king had his own again’.⁹¹

The Westmorland countryman Richard Browne of Cleaburne was so incensed against the Protector’s regime in June 1655 that he ‘wished that he had them all in a hot burning oven, he did swear again, God confound him if he would not set up the stone and burn them all to death’. Cromwell was ‘a murderer’, he said, who ‘deserved to be either hanged or headed’. The regime dealt with Browne relatively lightly, fining him £10, then reducing it to £5, but holding him in prison till the money was paid.⁹² A Kentish man, Thomas Bennett, said in 1656 ‘that the land is governed now by none but rogues, knaves and thieves, for want of a king, and that the justices of peace are fools’. Not stopping there, he called Oliver Cromwell ‘a fool’, named his dog after the Lord Protector, and threatened to kill him if he came near him.⁹³

At Maidstone assizes in March 1656 Isaac Atkinson of Wichling, Kent, clerk, was indicted for saying: ‘The Lord Protector is a rogue, a robber, and a thief… Within a year and half he will have a bullet in his arse, or else I will give the ears from my head.’⁹⁴ A Middlesex labourer, Morris Seiston of Stepney, drank to the confusion of Cromwell in June 1656, saying ‘he the said Morris was more fit to be a Protector than his highness’.⁹⁵ Anne White, wife of William White of Stepney, was indicted at the Middlesex sessions in May 1657 for saying ‘that she cared not for the Lord Protector, and would that Cromwell and all his soldiers were hanged’.⁹⁶ Her neighbour Jane Neviston said in 1658 ‘that the Lord Protector was a base rascal-like fellow, and that she hoped to see him hanged’.⁹⁷ Even more gruesome was the declaration of Christopher Flower of North Couton, Yorkshire, in 1658, who ‘hoped to see the day to wash his hands in my Lord Protector’s blood, and that shortly too’.⁹⁸ After the Protector’s death in September 1658, John Simpson of Clerkenwell said that Oliver Cromwell was a rogue and that he died of the pox. Gabriel Benfield of Mile End said that Cromwell’s soul was in hell.⁹⁹

Few of these offenders faced more severe punishment than the pillory and a brief spell in prison. Some remained ‘at large’ and could not be brought to justice; juries found others ‘not guilty’. Several were simply bound over to keep the peace. As the English revolution unravelled, the collapsing regime issued proclamations ‘against all disturbers of the present government and against agitators’,¹⁰⁰ but were no more successful than their predecessors in silencing dangerous talk.