Gentry culture and the politics of religion: Cheshire on the eve of civil war

Introduction

This book is an attempt to revisit the county study as a viable unit through which to analyse the politics of early modern England. After a period of something approaching dominance, for entirely explicable historiographic reasons this is a genre that has fallen out of favour since the 1990s. The rise and fall of the county study was tied to the fortunes of ‘localism’ as a key interpretative concept in the writing of early Stuart political history. The notion of localism and the connected idea of the ‘county community’ were first fully articulated in 1966, by Alan Everitt in his book The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640–60.¹ ‘Localism’ became a central conceptual building block in the early revisionism of Conrad Russell and John Morrill, exemplified in their books on Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 and The Revolt of the Provinces.² Indeed, in the mid-1970s Robert Ashton hailed the ‘emphasis on local and regional studies’ as ‘the most important single development in the historiography of the Civil War in the last quarter of a century’, and identified the publication of Morrill’s Revolt of the Provinces as ‘a sure indication of the coming of age of this approach’.³

As a term of art ‘localism’ did double duty as a description of a set of contemporary attitudes and a school of modern historical interpretation. It held that, as well as the basic governing unit of the kingdom, the county was the basic unit of the social and political lives of the gentry. Their social lives and marriage alliances were limited by the shire, just as their activities as governors and local magistrates were defined by it. The result was a social and political unit, and object of loyalty, that became known as the ‘county community’. It became axiomatic that when local gentlemen spoke of their ‘country’, they meant their county, and it was that which provided them with the prime locus of their social lives and object for their political and social loyalty. On this view the polity of early modern England was best viewed as an association of semi-autonomous county communities whose relations with the demands of the central government, and indeed the attractions of metropolitan culture, were essentially adversarial, with the gentry seeing their role as the protection of the interests of their counties or countries from the demands of the first and the corrupting influence of the second. Thus, the first thought of the gentry, confronted with the requirements of some national policy or fiscal innovation, was how to protect their own counties from the worst of its effects. The result was an inward-looking, conservative outlook, centred on the county and the patriarchal role of the gentry in protecting their native countries and social inferiors and dependents from the depredations of central authority.

The consequent view of the political attitudes – the culture of the landed ruling class, as we might call it now – played a central role in two aspects of early revisionism. Firstly, it helped to explain what Conrad Russell called the ‘functional breakdown’, the fiscal and administrative atrophy that prevented the early Stuart state from adapting to the changing realities produced by the effect of price inflation on the fixed revenues of the crown and the escalating costs of war. For, confronted by demands for national taxation, the localist gentry saw it as their duty to minimise the effects thereof not merely on their own pocket books but on their counties. There was more involved here than mere financial self-interest; for, given their essentially localist interests and perspectives, the gentry, and their representatives in parliament, tended to view the financial demands of the crown with scepticism, seeing them as evidence of royal extravagance and court corruption, rather than the expression of any fundamental shortfall in the finances of the crown or need for fundamental fiscal reform. If the failure of the Great Contract of 1610 was taken as proof positive of the dominance of such attitudes coming out of Elizabeth’s reign into the opening decade of James’s, then the refusal of successive parliaments adequately to fund the wars of the 1620s, and their easy, indeed almost immediate, recourse to the language of malfeasance and corruption, of evil counsel and popery, was taken to demonstrate the persistence of such attitudes into the reign of Charles I and beyond.

Secondly, localism, and the basic loyalty to the autonomy and stability of the county community that provided the gentry with their political bottom line, was taken to explain a good deal about the outbreak of the civil war. When the crown and elements in the parliament – the so-called ‘junto’ – failed to come to an accommodation based on the compromises and concessions of 1641, the provincial gentry found themselves on the receiving end of appeals for loyalty, and then allegiance, from two opposing sides. In these circumstances, their natural reaction was to fall back on the basic unit of their social and political lives, the county community, and seek to keep the intrusive forces of partisanship, and then violence, out of their own shires. Thus ‘localism’ became ‘neutralism’, and, ‘neutralism’ having failed in county after county to keep the war at bay, the initiative was handed to relatively small groups of engagés, enthusiastic adherents of king or parliament, most of whose zeal for their particular cause was rooted in religious rather than political principle. As Ronald Hutton observed, in a somewhat gruesome image conjured up in his account of The Royalist War Effort – a text best viewed as a sort of Revolt of the Provinces for royalists – the violence and partisanship necessary for a civil war to start had to be ‘artificially inseminated’ into the provinces from somewhere outside the boundaries of the relevant county.⁴

The dominance of the county study thus produced had roots other than mere scholarly fashion and the rise of revisionism. After all, the county was the basic unit of government in England and the records of that government provided a coherent body of sources through which to study county administration and politics. Moreover, by the early Stuart period the archives of particular gentry families were starting to survive in considerable numbers and density. This meant that county affairs could be studied from the local sources, sources as often as not housed in increasingly accessible and wellcatalogued county record offices. Moreover, since the localist model of the county community asserted the self-sufficiency of the shire as a basic unit of administrative, political and social life, and emphasised the distance between central and local politics, there was every reason to feel that an adequate account of local affairs could be constructed out of largely local sources. There therefore seemed relatively little reason to have systematic recourse to the records of the central government, and because few dioceses were contiguous with the boundaries of any one county, and the prime object of interest was the gentry, there seemed not much more reason to concern oneself with the records of the national church or with purely ecclesiastical structures or politics. Here it is worth mentioning that in the religious history of the period the diocesan study came in the late 1960s and early 1970s to play almost as ubiquitous a part as the county study did in the political sphere. These two streams of research, animated by much the same impulse to see what the newly available local sources had to say both about the causes, course and consequences of the English reformation, and about the causes and course of the English civil war, sprang up at much the same time, but for the most part ran in parallel but largely separate tracks through the historiography.⁵ There were, of course, some honourable exceptions, and here Diarmaid McCulloch’s study of Tudor Suffolk and Anthony Fletcher’s of early Stuart Sussex stand out. All of which meant that the county study provided the perfect template for the PhD thesis.

These limitations were compounded by the insistence on manuscript sources. Much of the force behind the dominance of the local study came from a reaction against a Marxist, or Marxisant, historiography obsessed with a social, indeed a class analysis, of allegiance in the English civil war, and dominated by the use of printed sources. Everitt-style localism was a reaction against that. In its place, the localist school constructed a vision of an organic social hierarchy overseen by a patriarchal gentry intensely aware of their responsibilities to their tenants and social inferiors; a vision which it insisted was based on the interpretation of manuscript local sources, rather than the printed ones privileged by the likes of Christopher Hill and Brian Manning.⁶ While they did not quite embrace Peter Laslett’s vision of early modern England as a society without class, the localists’ view of the matter was far closer to Laslett’s than to Christopher Hill’s.⁷ Certainly, the localist vision of politics and society, remained dominated by the gentry, and, perhaps with the exception of the Clubmen, left little room for anything like popular politics.

The difference between those two visions was very often read onto that between printed and manuscript sources. The latter were often taken uniquely to reveal what really happened, as opposed to the former, which merely told you what various contemporaries thought or claimed had happened. That shift of emphasis from printed to manuscript sources was often equated with a move from the factitious to the real, and then read onto the shift from the national to the local, inherent in the rise of the county study. There was a sense that in making that move historians were accessing, if not the history of the real England, then certainly the opinions and history of the ‘silent majority’, a phrase appropriated from Richard Nixon by John Morrill in the course of asserting the essentially provincial outlook of a minor Cheshire gentleman obsessed with the collection of manuscript separates about national news.⁸ Certainly, in relation to the civil war, there was a sense that this was a tragedy visited upon that ‘silent majority’ by the commitments and machinations of relatively small groups of elite politicians, pointy-headed intellectuals and religious engagés, and that, in turning away from the details of a national politics in Whitehall and Westminster, and a printed polemical literature, dominated by the manoeuvres of such people, the real nature of events would be revealed. The point was almost reached where it seemed that if enough county studies were piled on top of one another what would emerge would be a new form of national history.⁹

On the reformation side of the revisionist equation, the resort to the local records – which, it was assumed, would tell us if not what ‘what really happened’, then certainly what ‘the people’ really thought – was deemed to have revealed the innate conservatism, indeed the innate Catholicism, of the said ‘people’. This had the somewhat paradoxical effect of putting all the emphasis back on the highest of high politics, at court, as providing the only possible explanation for what actually did happen (i.e., the English reformation/s). Remarkably, this was the opposite of what transpired among civil war revisionists, who laid a great deal of their initial emphasis on versions of local history in order to explain what, in fact, had not happened – that is to say, the avoidance of the English civil war and the cancellation of the English revolution. When they returned to the question of why what happened had indeed happened, civil war revisionists like Russell and Morrill turned to events neither in the English localities nor indeed at Westminster, but, rather, in Scotland and Ireland. Hence, the so-called British problem.

On these foundations and assumptions the traditional county study was based and it proved, if not infinitely, then certainly almost serially, replicable. So intense was the hold exercised over the genre by the localist mode of analysis and the assumed localism of the major political players in each county that each succeeding study tended to replicate the assumptions and expectations laid down by Everitt. One of the paradoxes of Everittian localism was that while the political ties and allegiances of the gentry were presented as in some sense rooted in the soil of each individual shire, despite the very considerable differences between counties, in each and every instance localism was always the same.¹⁰ This was true even when the empirical findings produced by research into the shire in question did anything but support the localist thesis. Here the prime example is Anthony Fletcher’s beautifully researched study of Sussex, A County Community in Peace and War, which revealed that at the basic level of administration the county was divided into eastern and western rapes, with the gentry from the two sides of the county only occasionally engaging with each other. Fletcher’s researches also revealed that the social contacts and marriage alliances of even the major gentry were anything but county wide. Rather, they tended to be concentrated around the immediate environs of their own residences and estates, while some of the wealthier of them, most notably Sir Thomas Pelham, spent a good deal of time and money in London. Pelham’s kinship and social network also spread far and wide outside the shire, including close contacts with families in Lincolnshire, Kent, Cheshire and Northamptonshire. And yet, on Fletcher’s account, Sussex remained a ‘county community’ of the classic sort, and his book was organised around many of the central nostrums of the localist model.¹¹

Clearly this victory, if not of hope over experience, then certainly of dominant paradigm over evidence, could not be sustained indefinitely, and, as the localist model threatened to take over the national history of the early seventeenth century and civil war eras, it (inevitably) provoked a reaction. Ann Hughes and Clive Holmes produced detailed critiques of the county community, localist approach and then extended studies of counties – Warwickshire in Hughes’s case and Lincolnshire in Holmes’s – that did not fit the Everittian model at all. Counties which lacked Kent’s natural boundaries (provided by the sea to the south and east, and the Thames to the north), or which encompassed different sorts of terrain or farming regions, did not provide the natural framework for the social or economic lives of either the gentry or the social groups beneath them. The extent of marriage within a shire – which, according to Everitt, turned many counties into inbred networks of cousinage – varied enormously. In a county like Warwickshire marriage ties often did as much to encourage kinship and friendship with the gentry of neighbouring shires, or much further afield, as within the county itself. Everitt’s emphasis on long settlement in a shire – which he sees as encouraging moderation – has also been questioned. Hughes, Holmes and others point out that the extent of this varied enormously, often according to geographical proximity to London, or how much former monastic land had come onto the market in the mid-sixteenth century; and, anyway, some of the longest-established families, like the Barnardistons in Suffolk, were far from conservative in their political outlook. Other counties, in this just like Fletcher’s Sussex, were found to be broken up into smaller administrative units. Lincolnshire, for instance, was fragmented into as many as eight divisions. Again, whereas Everitt had compared the twice-yearly meetings of the county assizes to a ‘county parliament’, other historians started to see them as much ‘national’ as ‘local’ occasions, with assize judges coming down from Westminster to remind local justices that they were part of a national political and legal system and acting as ‘brokers’ between the privy council and local communities.¹²

Accordingly, people started to notice that when local gentry talked of their ‘country’, they were not referring exclusively to their county but, rather, to a range of allegiances and identities stretching from the most local household responsibilities up to their obligation to serve the commonwealth in both local and national capacities. Central here was the interaction between the local and national, with various forms of what passed as localism seen as the products of, and terms and tools to be deployed within, a series of dynamic interactions and negotiations between the centre and the locality, local and national forces and allegiances.¹³ Such interactions had been at the centre of Clive Holmes’s account of the Eastern Association, which in many ways reads in retrospect as a response to, indeed as, in some sense, a refutation of The Revolt of the Provinces, published some years before that latter work saw the light of day. And they were similarly central to Hughes’s account of Warwickshire in the civil war. In her Alexander Prize essay of 1981 Hughes showed radical parliamentarians using localist arguments to conduct a political struggle with both their local and national rivals in the parliamentarian cause.¹⁴

Nor were these interactions between the local and national limited to the domain of politics or administration. In a seminal article on ‘Cambridge university and the country’, Victor Morgan showed how the links between particular colleges and certain localities served to send young men into national institutions where they were exposed to unfamiliar ideological, religious and intellectual forces, not to mention people from areas of the country distinct from their own. They were then dispatched back, often to the areas whence they had come, with both their sense of belonging to a greater whole than their immediate neighbourhood or shire heightened, and their sense of local identity sharpened. Morgan’s study of the rise of the county map, and indeed of images of England as comprised of its constituent shires, served a similar purpose, demonstrating how national cultural trends, and indeed the needs of the central government, helped both to create and meet a demand for images of the nation as a unified polity comprised of distinct shires. In Morgan’s vision the national and local consciousness marched, if not in lock step, then certainly linked together in a series of dialectical interactions. Localism was emerging from studies like these not as something immemorial, rooted in the soil of the different counties of England but, rather, as a cultural and ideological construct.¹⁵

Two things were happening here. Firstly, the coherence of the county as the basic unit of analysis for local political history was being undercut. The full extent of that change can be seen in the work of David Underdown. His classic work Pride’s Purge, published in 1970 but a product of the historiographical world of the 1960s, had been suffused with Everittian localism, and his own exercise in the genre of the county study, Somerset, had displayed at least some of the characteristic features of the localist model. But fast-forward to 1986, and his Revel, Riot and Rebellion was organised around different farming regions which spread across county boundaries – boundaries which played little or no part in the analysis – and centred upon the impact of a national ideological formation – puritanism – on local social relations and politics.¹⁶

Secondly, this development was compounded by the renewed emphasis on interactions between the local and the national as being of the essence in the political history of the period, even in some of its most apparently local aspects. This prompted a move away from studies based on the administrative structures of local government and towards a more political concern with particular conjunctures, or moments of dynamic interaction between central and local interests. Ironically, this was itself a product of the revisionist emphasis on political process, narrative and contingency, which was now turned back onto the essentially static structural assumptions about localism upon which much of the early revisionist case had been based. The result was a form of histoire événementelle, organised around particular events or conjunctures. Richard Cust’s study of The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626–1628 was an early example of this approach. It featured a series of sources, issues and questions typical of conventional local history, but did not limit itself to evidence culled from one county. Rather, materials from several counties were integrated into an account of parliamentary and court politics, and national administration. The time-scale was short, limited to just under two years, but what was lost in terms of narrative sweep was gained in depth of analysis across a number of levels of activity and causation.¹⁷

The result of all this was that the county study all but evaporated. From being one of the more common genres of PhD thesis, and indeed of first book, it disappeared almost completely from the scholarly scene, with major presses declining to publish even rather innovative exercises in the genre because ‘no one was interested in local history’. Not that local history went away. Far from it. It merely became a vehicle for social rather than political history, with some of the seminal works in that mode since the late 1980s being based on studies firmly rooted in a particular time and place. One thinks here of Martin Ingram’s study of sexual regulation, which was based on an intensive use of the church court records in Wiltshire, or of Steven Hindle’s The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640, which started life as a local study of Cheshire, or of Craig Muldrew’s seminal account of The Economy of Obligation, which was based on a study of debt in King’s Lynn, than which one can scarcely think of a more local topic.¹⁸

But in political history, with the eclipse of the county study, what were required were alternative ways of studying the interaction between the local and the national, and a variety of approaches produced some outstanding results. Jackie Eales exploited the riches of the Harley papers to centre an analysis of the interaction between the national and the local on the study of a family. Tom Cogswell reinvented the county study as a way to trace the development of the local state. By focusing his account of early Stuart Leicestershire on the institution of the lieutenancy and the career of the earl of Huntingdon, and diving into the riches of the Hastings papers in the Huntington Library, he was able to tell a political and administrative story while also integrating the aristocracy back into the study of county affairs in a way which was unique among the extant county histories, remarkable for their exclusion of the peerage from their account of local politics and society.¹⁹

Other scholars, influenced in various ways by micro-history, sought to centre accounts of the inner workings of local society and their interaction with more national trends and institutions on particular events or individuals. However bizarre or unusual the event in question – a matricide in Shropshire, an infanticide in Northamptonshire, the eccentric career of a godly woman and near-hermit from the same county²⁰ – the use of such diverse persons and events, together with an intense scrutiny of the genres and sources in which their stories were told and retold, allowed insights to be gleaned into the tenor of local politics and religion, of a depth and intensity that a more general survey of county affairs over thirty or forty years might not have allowed. A feature of such studies was a willingness to use printed sources as a crucial element in the analysis, and to follow the particular sources in question wherever they led. This was a freedom that the generic constraints and expectations of the county study did not allow. But the resulting insights were fleeting, and often as not parasitic upon more systematic studies of the same county. Here a paradigmatic example is Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens’ study of the Barker affair in Northamptonshire, which would not have been possible but for the exhaustive researches into the religious life of the diocese of Peterborough in the early Stuart period undertaken by John Fielding, whose own work on Robert Woodford represents the pre-eminent example of this sort of research.²¹ On the cusp between social and political history one might also cite a number of articles by John Walter on various outbreaks of local iconoclasm, together with his work on the Protestation Oath, as a way into the dynamics of both popular and elite politics in 1640–41 that links high and low, national, parliamentary, local, and often popular, politics together.²²

Important and consequential though this sort of research can be, there can also be no doubt that there was a gap left in the historiography by the demise of the county study. For a number of issues were left, as it were, dangling in mid-air. If the classic localist rendition of the county community was no longer tenable, it was by no means simply made up; aspects of that case remained to be integrated into a new synthesis. Early Stuart gentlemen may not have simply equated their country with their county, but the term certainly encompassed loyalty to the county, and gentry politics and, indeed, public politics around the civil war resounded with claims to be protecting the interests of the county and about the need to unite in defence of those interests. What did such claims signify? How were they related to other aspects of political life and the self-identity of the local gentry? In many instances the county community may have been as much a cultural or ideological construct as a social reality, but the notion retained a certain hold over the political imaginary of contemporaries. How did that work, exactly?

In many respects, with the decline of the county study, those questions were put on hold. In others, they came to be discussed under a different set of headings or rubric. These stemmed from the rise of talk about England as a monarchical republic, which coincided almost exactly with the demise of the classic local study in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. (Collinson’s seminal essay on ‘The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ first saw the light of day in 1987, the same year in which Ann Hughes’s study of Warwickshire was published.)²³ At its inception, the notion of the monarchical republic was primarily concerned with contingency plans made by the Elizabethan regime to handle the event of the death of the queen with Mary Stuart still above ground. But from the outset, in an afterword about the anomalous hamlet of Swallowfield, Collinson stressed what he took to be the localist connotations or consequences of the concept, with self-governing communities, holding office under the crown, containing within themselves what Collinson described as citizens masquerading as subjects. And in a subsequent lecture he extended this approach to encompass what he called ‘gentry republics’. By this term he was describing the systems of self-government devised and put into practice by groups of active citizen-gentry within the shires whose hand had been strengthened by the numerous parliamentary statutes extending their administrative remit in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period. This description, he argued, could be applied most readily to those counties where groups of gentry took charge of local affairs unsupervised by any local magnate, such as Elizabethan Norfolk and Suffolk. But the implication was that self-government under the crown by virtuous and godly gentlemen was a feature of counties everywhere.²⁴

Indeed, one might see monarchical republicanism as localism raised to the level of a self-conscious ideology, composed in part by traditional English notions of mixed monarchy and in part by classically infused ideas of political virtue and service of the commonwealth. In many ways, all of this was pure gain. Instead of a set of immemorial attitudes rooted in the soil of various English shires we have an ideological construct made up of various elements, with discernible histories, and put together to meet particular circumstances. It now became possible to write the intellectual and cultural histories of the public man, the patriot or servant of the commonweal, who combined in his person the discharge of local duty, the protection of local interests at the centre and the doing of the business of the crown in the locality. As Richard Cust and Markku Peltonnen have between them shown, the image of the public man, or patriot, was a composite, made up in part of classical notions of political virtue and the commonwealth and in part of Calvinist or puritan notions of calling, zeal and the preservation of a notion of the common good, to which the protection of true religion and the rejection of popery were central.²⁵

Questions remain, however, about the application of the notion of monarchical republicanism to the quotidian conduct of early Stuart government and politics, generally construed. Some proponents of the idea have taken it more or less literally, seeing in it a genuinely republican mode of thought and action, and even of government. Applied to county government, this might be thought to be a bridge too far. After all, the offices in and through which public men served the commonwealth – even if they conceived of themselves as the classically Ciceronian vir civilis – were in the gift of the crown. The authority being exercised stemmed from the crown, and the business being discharged was not merely that of the county, or even the commonwealth, but also the monarch’s. However much the assizes might, at times, have functioned as county parliaments, the assize judges served at the pleasure of the crown and it was the statutes of the realm, not to mention the latest emanations of royal policy, that they were executing and disseminating in the localities. Certainly, this was a system of government that enlisted the social clout, the local influence and authority of the landed class and depended upon the collaboration of a wide swathe of participants. It might thus be said to have depended ultimately on the active cooperation, in a certain sense of the word on the (implicit) consent, of a remarkably large section of those being notionally governed. But the peace being preserved was still the king’s peace, as well as that of ‘the country’, and, as James I repeatedly reminded his subjects, the defence of the commonweal depended ultimately on the exercise of royal authority, indeed, on some views of the matter, on the exercise of the royal prerogative.

Thus, another way to look at the operation of county and local government was as the operation of the local state. The work of Steven Hindle and Michael Braddick has shown that one perspective from which to view the whole range of developments running through the conduct of local government during this period is that provided by the notion of state formation.²⁶ It is thus not the least of the contributions made by Tom Cogswell’s study of Leicestershire to reposition the county study in relation to such concerns, showing in the process that the conduct of what we might think of as administration and the workings of the judicial system were always in this period also intensely political processes, dependent on the balance of local as well as central forces, and the priorities and capacities of a wide cast of characters.²⁷ In many of its aspects, then, monarchical republicanism might be thought to be the enabling ideology not so much of localist resistance to the demands of central authority as of the increasingly activist agenda of both the local and, hence, of course, the national state.

Here it is worth recalling that the agenda of that state was set not merely by royal command and proclamation but also by parliamentary statute, and that many of the great initiatives of the period, like the poor law, were codifications of existing local expedients and experiments, instantiated in statute and gradually spread through the localities by the initiative and perceived self-interest of myriad local elites. As Brian Quintrell has observed, even a centralising initiative as apparently intrusive, as the Book of Orders was in fact based on existing provincial best practice.²⁸ The result was a system of mixed government, based on myriad negotiations and trade-offs between a number of interests. As such, it was as capable of a ‘royalist’ (or even an absolutist) gloss as it was of a republican (or ‘parliamentarian’) one. Indeed, one might describe the Personal Rule as an attempt to realise the ‘absolutist’ or royalist potential of the system, enlisting, as Kevin Sharpe has shown, the rhetoric of the commonweal for purposes set by the crown and intended to serve a distinctly Caroline version of good government and civil peace.²⁹ That that experiment ultimately failed should not lead us to downplay the extent to which it was based on actual or latent potentials within the system itself, any more than the, if anything, even more definitive failure of English republicanism to take root in the early 1650s should lead us to deny the implicitly ‘republican’ assumptions underpinning much that went before or, indeed, came after. But all that being said, to call early Stuart government simply ‘republican’ (however unacknowledged its status as such is said to have been) seems not merely a mistake but, more seriously, an anachronistic prejudgement of issues which contemporaries had to fight a civil war (only imperfectly) to resolve.

Either way, that is the historiographical context into which this book seeks to insert itself. We want to return to the genre of the county study, to look again through the lens of the government and politics of one shire, at the political culture and practice, the self-image and ideology, of the early Stuart gentry as widely conceived. And we want to use the example of Cheshire c.1590–1642 to do it.

Why Cheshire, in particular? The reasons for this choice are partly substantive and partly contingent. Substantively, thanks to the path-breaking researches of John Morrill, along with Everitt’s Kent, Cheshire has a claim to be the county in and through the study of which the localist model established itself. In returning to some of the central themes of that model now, it seems appropriate to return too to Cheshire. Contingently, both of the authors have a long-standing interest in the county that dates back to work we did on the political ideology of Sir Richard Grosvenor and the collection of ship money in the late 1970s. Since then, prompted by his extensive work on the Grosvenor papers, Richard Cust has worked through his abiding interest in the political culture of the early Stuart gentry, in part though the study of Cheshire materials. Peter Lake has, since the late 1970s, when he first came upon him, had a long-standing interest in the works and career of John Ley, for him an archetypical moderate puritan negotiating his way through the various crises of the 1640s and 1650s. In addition, for anyone as interested in anti-puritanism as he is, Sir Thomas Aston must retain a certain fascination. Lake has also written about the petitioning campaigns of 1641. Those campaigns hold the real key to our choice of this county, since Cheshire has a uniquely rich deposit of evidence about the techniques of mass petitioning, of pressure group politics, of public pitch making and of the processes whereby large local constituencies were mobilised around different visions of the current conjuncture, in the run-in to the civil war.³⁰

In the course of making those pitches for wider support, notions of the county community, of the unity of the Cheshire gentry in the defence of the harmony and order of the county, were shaken almost to pieces. They became subject to very different glosses, and the interests of the county became identified with very different versions of the cause being contended for during the political crisis of 1640–42. The petitions themselves represent serial attempts to insert the local into the national, and the national into the local. As such, they present us with a speeded-up film, a suddenly accelerated rendition, of practices and manoeuvres that, over the course of the preceding decades, had started to come almost as second nature to the provincial gentry. As we shall see, in seeking to mediate between local and national concerns and authorities in his petitioning campaigns, Sir Thomas Aston was replicating the same oscillation between local concerns and his contacts at the centre that had characterised his conduct as ship money sheriff. Then he had managed to discharge his duties as sheriff to the great contentment of the privy council, while still succeeding in presenting himself before the county as the great protector of its interests in a show-down with the city of Chester.³¹ Again, the topics at stake during this petitioning campaign were not limited to issues of who spoke for Cheshire and how best to do so, but encompassed religious questions, narrowly construed about church government, but also, taken more broadly, about what to do about Laudianism and the question of further reformation opened up by its collapse. These quintessentially Cestrian events thus allow us to address what has become the rather vexed question of the relation between politics and religion as causes of the outbreak of the English civil war.

In addition to the Aston papers in the British Library and the petitions themselves in the Parliamentary Archives, we now have in the Staffordshire Record Office the (relatively recently) available papers of Bishop Bridgeman. This is perhaps the richest single episcopal archive surviving for the period, and a wonderful source of insights into how Laudianism came into the county and how Bishop Bridgeman dealt with the resulting strains. And, finally, there is a run of remarkable printed pamphlets, chiefly the work of John Ley and Sir Thomas Aston, which represented both direct interventions into the politics of the locality and sustained attempts to link those local politics to more national events and publics. Some of these sources had not been available when the last account Cheshire in the early seventeenth century was written by John Morrill, and certainly there has never been an attempt to integrate them into a coherent account. Anyway, the centre of gravity, and major scholarly contribution, of Professor Morrill’s pioneering study lay in its account of Cheshire politics and administration during the English civil wars and revolution, not in its analysis of the preceding period or, indeed, of the outbreak of the war in Cheshire. This study is intended therefore to develop, sometimes to critique, but mainly to supplement Professor Morrill’s book.

At one level, then, this book is an attempt first to flag up and then to explain the remarkable events of 1641–42, and to do so by setting them into the widest possible context. At another it is an attempt to revisit the county study, and some of the central organising concerns and claims of the localist school, and see where we are now. The quite remarkable collapse of the genre in the late 1980s and 1990s prevented this from happening at the time when those claims were first called into question. But we think that that agenda still has legs and justifies a return both to that mode of writing and research and to some of the old chestnuts of the previous debate, not to mention to Cheshire.

However, the aim is not merely to repeat the research techniques and revisit the same sources that underpinned the county study in its hey-day. Certainly we want to do some of that – patterns of office holding, the conduct of local government and administration, the prosopography of the gentry all play a central role in the following analysis – but we also want to bring an expanded range of sources and questions to bear on the study of the political culture and self-image of the early Stuart gentry, and to do so through a properly realised picture of a particular place and time; a specificity of context too often beyond a certain sort of cultural history. The point here is most definitely not to ignore or eschew the sources and approaches typical of cultural history but, rather, to use such sources and methods to answer questions central to the conduct of political history. Issues of gentry identity and self-image, together with the sort of generalisations about the county, its history and its essence used to project those images, are all central to the analysis. And in addressing those questions we want to use a range of visual, architectural and material as well as textual sources. Country houses and parish churches, funeral processions and funerary monuments, armorial glass, heraldic displays and pedigree rolls were all crucial to the ways in which the Cheshire gentry constructed their sense of themselves and made their bids for place and status, and, accordingly, they are central to our analysis as well. So too are the intellectual techniques and the antiquarian texts used to construct histories of the county, the (invented) traditions and norms that (allegedly) underlay its current practices.

But, if versions of history, and the construction of various legitimating lineages or narratives out of the county’s past or the pasts of particular families, had a central part to play, so too did the appropriation of classicising discourses concerned with the active political virtue of the public man, and the Calvinist sense of calling of the magistrate active in the defence of true religion and the cause of the gospel. These distinct but mutually reinforcing imperatives found expression not merely in textual forms but also in the iconography of funeral monuments and the decoration of country houses.

It would be tempting to draw a contrast here between discourses seemingly based in the medieval past, centred on notions of lineage and given expression in largely heraldic form, which produced hierarchies based on birth and noble blood, and other, more ‘modern’ classicising and godly norms, which produced claims to status and authority based on active virtue, godliness and the service of the commonweal. But such hard and fast distinctions are best resisted. As we shall see, the claims to status founded on ancient lineage and asserted by heraldic means were being actively constructed throughout the period, and the resulting hierarchies were remarkably open to change in the face of the shifting fortunes of individual families. Given the emergent concern with matters heraldic and historical during this very period, there was nothing antique or backward looking about this way of asserting the importance of one’s ancestry or current position in the gentry pecking order, which was arguably just as ‘modern’ as arguments based on virtuous discharge of one’s duties as a magistrate or obligations as a public man.

We might say the same about the claims of Calvinist godliness and classical virtue, which, in the hands of an active servant of his country and the commonwealth, and man on the make, like Sir Richard Grosvenor, could be combined into a relatively seamless legitimation of his own career as a public man and rise up the pecking order of the Cheshire gentry. Indeed, Grosvenor’s career is perhaps the best example that we are dealing here not with a timeless hierarchy of long-established families, each taking their turn to serve the county in a variety of roles, but with a more volatile and competitive situation, in which some individuals and families rose and others fell, for a variety of personal, financial and demographic reasons. The fortunes of some ancient families declined, other lines died out and others still forced their way to the forefront through a combination of personal ambition and the careful acquisition and exercise of all the cultural attributes and competencies of the public man. Perhaps the most extreme example of the forces in play here was John Bruen. At one point his indebtedness forced him to shut down his domestic establishment at Bruen Stapleford and move into hired digs in Chester; but his zealous godliness enabled him to play a role in county affairs among the godly, and wannabe-godly, gentry far in excess of anything his material circumstances would otherwise have allowed.³²

The first part of the book constitutes an analytic account of gentry mores, political culture and government. The second part is concerned with Cheshire during the Personal Rule and moves towards a more narrative mode. Here as well we introduce an account of the tenor of ecclesiastical affairs in the county. This entails a move away from the gentry, in order to recount the relations between the more puritan elements in the clergy and the local bishops – chiefly Morton and his successor Bridgeman – and the impact thereon of Laudianism. This shift of focus is necessary in order to introduce the context for, and the major players in, the third part, which is an account of the politics of 1640–42 and, in particular, of the petitioning campaigns that are such a marked feature of county politics during this period. The attempt here is to set events in Cheshire within the context of national, that is to say both parliamentary and court, politics with which they were continuously in dialogue and reaction; the petitions themselves constituting not merely the expression of local opinions and tensions, but also attempts to intervene, sometimes definitively, in the course of national politics.

In this account attention is paid both to circulating manuscript and printed pamphlets – of the sort not merely ignored but often actively written off by conventional county studies and by revisionist historiography more generally as inherently unrepresentative of genuinely local opinion. The texts in question were produced by Cheshire political agents, often expressing local tensions and reflecting intensely local events (a tiff among the Chester clergy about the Sabbath, or the erection by Bishop Bridgeman of an altar in Chester cathedral). But, for all that local focus, these authors were always already concerned with topics of national ideological significance, in this case with the two big-ticket issues of ecclesiastical dispute during the 1630s: the Sabbath and the altar. In their original form as open letters, circulated locally in manuscript, such texts were intensely local and ad hominem in their focus and purpose; but, when later expanded, printed and thus inserted into wider national debates, they represented attempts to forge links between such local concerns and wider forces and arguments.

We contend that without these broader contexts events in Cheshire, as reconstructed out of the local, manuscript sources, would be virtually unintelligible; or, rather, they would appear to be almost wholly a product of local interpersonal tensions and rivalries – which, of course, in part they were – rather than attempts to interpellate local divisions and claims into the wider national narrative, which they also were. Not that this represents a flight from the manuscript to the printed, or from the local to the national. Rather, the very richness of the manuscript sources produced in and around the petitioning campaigns allows us to adopt a narrative mode, usually reserved for the analysis of high politics, to recount these often most local of events. Crucial here, as throughout, is the dynamic interaction between events at the centre and events in the localities. The aim is to accord primacy to neither, but, rather, to gain a sense of the way in which they interacted, thus moving away from the almost entirely local focus of the conventional county study – exemplified in this case by John Morrill’s path-breaking book on Cheshire – and the almost entirely parliamentary focus of Russellian revisionism.³³ This explains the switch-back structure of the last section of the book, which alternates between passages of political analysis and narrative – based largely on manuscript sources, derived both from the centre and the locality – and passages of analysis of the ideological context and content of these exchanges, based on a range of printed sources.

This last part represents the culmination of the book, to which what precedes it has been tending and has, indeed, in some sense, been designed to explain. We do not accept that this means that we have written a teleological book. Certainly, there is no sense in which the situations, forces and tensions outlined in the first two parts of the book rendered the events recounted in the third necessary or inevitable. Those events could have led to other outcomes. Throughout, those contingencies, most notably choices made by a number of political actors, ranging from Calvin Bruen to Charles I and Sir Thomas Aston and his gentry critics in the county, played a crucial role. But it is the case that what happened between 1640 and 1642 is what makes the political history of Cheshire stand out. It is these events that make this book something more than an attempt to test out the viability of the county study and to get a handle on the ‘political culture’ of the early Stuart gentry through an in-depth study of another county. If that were the aim, then sources from more than one shire would be required. Rather, what we want to do here is to make these events properly intelligible, and that is what the first two parts of the book have been designed to do. For in that last part we see a cast of characters, and a range of attitudes and structures, introduced and analysed in the first two parts, as it were in sudden motion. They were rapidly reacting to and helping to shape, indeed at crucial moments to create, a political narrative over which none of the actors involved here had anything like control, or even intellectual command, but within which they were deeply embroiled, and out of which they were all trying to find their way, by bringing to bear on events their understandings of how the world worked, or, rather, had until recently worked, and ought to work now and in the future. In so doing they were seeking to deploy, within a range of both local and national, political and ideological arenas, whatever cultural credit and ideological understanding their previous careers had conferred on them. A variety of political actors were making bets that they understood how the world worked, that commitments to certain ways of doing things, to certain constellations of values and expectation formed over the course of the preceding decades, would continue to operate even in a time of deep crisis. This meant that men of even the most ‘conservative’ cast of mind or intent were forced to innovate even as they strove to keep things much the same as they had always been. Others had agendas for change, agendas based on their previous commitments, experience and opinions to be sure, but for change nonetheless. Still others sought to intervene in events to bend them to their own and their political allies’ and masters’ purposes.

We are dealing here with men with scores to settle and careers to make, but also men with a variety of ideological commitments and agendas. The fact that those agendas were framed and canvassed in terms of the nostrums and shibboleths, the seemingly consensual common rhetorical and ideological currency of the preceding fifty years or so, did not mean that they all agreed with one another. Rather, it meant that a common language and set of assumptions were being appropriated and bent to justify and further courses of action and projected settlements of the crisis with which everyone was confronted and in which everyone was acting, but which were simply not the same. As will become clear, some of the participants in these events were more clear eyed about, and in that sense self-consciously manipulative of, what was happening than were others; but everyone had skin in essentially the same game.

The existence of a county community was a given throughout these disputes. So too were the nature of Cheshireness and the centrality of the gentry in embodying its values and protecting its unity and integrity. Central too was the increasingly controversial and contested question of who got to speak for Cheshire, defend its interests, express its essence. But in the course of these events those settled points of common assumption and shared aspiration became attached to very different versions of the current conjuncture and what to do about it. We get to watch, in fact, as the common currency represented by those shared terms and aspirations got shaken pretty much to pieces by the ways in which they were appealed to and appropriated in order to go back to what rapidly became very different ideological positions, political allegiances and preferences. Not that these nostrums and sound bites were rendered meaningless or useless. Rather, they had ceased to operate as constraints upon, or blocks to the development of, very different views of the current situation, and sharply divergent opinions of how best to get out of it. Indeed, the less such symbols and battle cries worked as they had in the past, the more desperately various political actors both clung to and invoked them in order to justify their view of the matter, and the more desperately even some of the most engagé participants to these controversies strove to present themselves as ‘moderates’.

What we have here is not political and ideological conflict being introjected into a hitherto peaceful and unified shire from outside, nor even the best instincts of a moderate middle being frustrated by the activities of various extremists or engagés. Rather, we have a political process in which all the participants were called upon to take sides, not in the crude sense of choosing to support either king or parliament but, rather, in that of taking up a position about what to do next, about which authority or entity – the king, the parliament, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, ‘the people’ – to appeal to in the search for one way or another out of the current conjuncture. The choice was between projected settlements, none of which, until the very end, included civil war, but all of which were inflected towards the cause of either the king or the parliament, as those causes were variously construed by their supporters. This was as much a local as it was a national process, although it really took place in and through the often very rapid interactions between those two spheres of operation and modes of political consciousness. That is to say, we are in a situation in which every attempt to protect the interests of Cheshire, however they were construed, was attached explicitly or implicitly