The Book of Books. Melvyn Bragg
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King’s treatment of Parliament was resented as unconstitutional. Economic forces worked through to reinforce the deepening sense of divisiveness between the luxuriant party of the King and the growing cohesion of the tax-paying party against him. The organisation of the New Model Army – based on the well-named ‘Ironsides’ – was a key factor.
The New Model Army won the war and the distinction between Cavaliers and Roundheads has been in our language ever since. It is possible to see the Parliamentary army as the outward and visible force of the revolution. It was a religious as much as a political and military force. Many of its soldiers went into battle with a pocket Bible in their breast pocket and myths tell us that this stopped many a bullet. It was an army that marched on its religion. An army of God. In its ranks were men who had been educated through sermons and interpretations of the Bible and their knowledge was said to challenge that of university men. God’s Word was their battle code.
The preachers began to predict victory against the King’s forces, although yet again they worked carefully through the Bible. The walls of Jericho fell ‘in God’s appointed time’. Christ once again came into the argument: ‘It is not for you to know the times and seasons.’ Job was called up: ‘All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come.’ Which it did at the Battles of Marston Moor and then Naseby in 1645 where the King’s army was smashed and slaughtered. Charles I surrendered a year later and there began three years of debate over what should be done with him.
The Bible would continue to be crucial in all this. The King used it to claim he was above the law, indeed on earth he was the law. The Parliamentarians, emboldened by victory, their arguments given such a telling voice in the wars, quoted law from the Bible and by law the King was judged. This was a departure from the traditional English method of changing unpopular monarchs – assassination. As such it had a lasting influence on the placing of law in the constitution in Britain and abroad.
The sermonisers were not squeamish. Edward Staunton invoked Isaiah: ‘pity to me may be cruelty to thousands,’ and he added: ‘Could I lift up my voice as a trumpet, had I the shrill cry of an angel . . . my note should be, execution of judgement, execution of judgement, execution of judgement.’ In April 1645, Thomas Case quoted from God’s instructions to Joshua in Deuteronomy: ‘thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.’ Nicholas Lockyer quoted God’s instructions to Ezekiel: ‘slay utterly old and young.’ In the following year, Christ was quoted, from Luke: ‘those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither and slay them before me.’
The country was ripped apart, and the Bible encouraged and even incited that bloody rupture. It was done in the pursuit of a better kingdom to follow, which in some ways it did.
There was rejoicing by the victors as they turned to the trial of Charles ‘The Man of Blood’. This phrase was frequently used of Charles in the months leading up to the trial. The Book of Numbers was cited: ‘Blood, it defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it,’ and Ezekiel: ‘if thou be but a man that executes judgement and seeks truth, I will pardon you, saith God, I will turn away my wrath.’ The impetus of the war fuelled the Presbyterians’ utter conviction of their righteousness and gave to the Presbyterian-Parliamentary forces, just (it was a close-run thing), the majority in court to declare the King guilty. This trial empowered the Bible to re-shape the constitution.
His execution in 1649 was thought to open up a time when the new Saints would rule the land, when there would be no more kings and when open debate through the Scriptures would peacefully settle all contentious matters. None of that happened.
After the execution of the King, the army followed Cromwell as he smashed centres of resistance, especially castles, the length and breadth of the country. As well as soldiers, the army nourished statesmen and scholars. Only the ebbing of its authority in the failure and muddle that followed the death of the ‘Protector’, Cromwell, ended the underpinning of the ‘children of the Covenant and the Saints’ who for a few years claimed that they inherited the earth.
The gravitational pull of the opposition party was Presbyterianism and its matter was concentrated in the Bible. And that outlasted Oliver Cromwell, the Commonwealth of the 1650s, most dramatically in America.
The Bible, and increasingly the King James Version, had shown its power. It had been used with deadly effect. It was to go on to assume many shapes, one of which was to become the language of the politics and the lawmaking of the day. Though it was in all the churches, in another sense it had left the Church. It was no longer chained to the lectern, it was out in the streets. It was a torch.
What has been quoted from the sermons and homilies is just a sliver of what was said and printed at the time. Not only were these messages hammered home in public oratory, they were alehouse talk, campfire talk, domestic conversation. Although the meat of it was scriptural, the disputatious and judgemental nature of it provided opportunities for wider and bolder discussion which succeeding generations were to build on. Those who learned to read through the Bible – about a million copies were sold in this period – would move on to other literature, wide reading, a shifted horizon of thought.
But the Bible drove the debates and provided the words for thought and the telling images. ‘Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low’ – Isaiah. The idea of levelling and raising bit deeply into the arguments. Certain places carried great meaning: Babylon above all which evoked all wickedness and temptation. Egypt a close second, from whose bondage the Chosen had to make their escape. These two place names, like the notion of the levelling of mountains or the image of the wilderness, occur again and again in the literature of militant Presbyterianism. ‘We are all wilderness brats by nature,’ wrote John Collinges in 1646.
And the wilderness was contrasted with the garden. ‘God Almighty first planted a garden,’ wrote Bacon. ‘It is the greatest refreshment of the spirits of man.’ And the notion of a garden recurs, fenced off from the wilderness, cultivated, protected by God, and on into reams of metaphor. ‘True religion and undefiled is to let everyone quietly have earth to manure, that they may live in freedom by their labours,’ wrote Gerrard Winstanley, one of the leading thinkers and activists, on what we might call ‘the left’. Winstanley, like others, also used the word ‘hedge’; in his case he saw hedges as enclosures, against the common good, oppressive to the peasantry, like the Norman yoke. And ‘yoke’ itself was sought out to be a key word.
These words, like certain names – Moses, Cain, Abel, Abraham, Isaac – drove into the vocabulary of the faith debate and some remain there today. Most have seen their resonance abate in the UK through the secularising of our history, but elsewhere still they carry the meanings drawn from the Bible. America and Nigeria are prime examples. But they were branded into this nation’s discussion with itself which began in earnest in the seventeenth century.
A version of the Bible that had only crept into the public light and stumbled its way to popularity and needed laws to help it gain acceptance, emerged out of the Civil Wars as the dictionary and encyclopaedia of a nation arguing with itself. Its words had aided and abetted massive slaughter. It had nurtured ideas of equality and justice for all. The fact that it was now widely accepted in English made it the nation’s book. It assumed a place as the mouth of England’s many tongues. It expressed its passion for coherence. It spoke of the country’s ancient and cruel divisions, its hopes for a better future, an earthly heaven.
Those Civil Wars and that act of regicide astonished the world. A divinely appointed king had been executed and it had been done through law and the words of the Bible had not only condoned it but urged it on. There was no knowing what might happen next.
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