On 13 April 1646, a committee set up by the House of Commons to investigate an anonymously authored book ‘intituled, “Truth’s Manifest”’, reported on its findings. Passages of the book were read out by the committee’s chairperson, the political Independent and future regicide, John Lisle. He informed the House that the book was the work of ‘Mr. David Buchanon’, who ‘did avow it to be of his Writing’. It was resolved by the House that the book should be ‘forthwith burnt by the Hands of the common Hangman’ on account of the ‘many Matters false and scandalous’ contained within it. The serjeant-at-arms was instructed to locate Buchanan and summon him to the Bar of the House the following morning ‘as a Delinquent’. This was an extremely serious charge. It is little wonder that Buchanan’s response was to abscond before he could be apprehended. (CJ iv. 507).

The investigations into Truth its Manifest did more than reveal a ‘scandalous’ book. They exposed to public view a clandestine network of individuals who were using print to mobilise opinion within and beyond Parliament for partisan purposes. By the mid-1640s, Parliament was deeply divided over the conduct of the war, the terms on which peace negotiations should be pursued with the King, and perhaps most contentiously of all, the settlement of the Church of England. Although opinion on these issues remained fluid, two distinct parliamentary parties, referred to by contemporaries as the Presbyterians and the Independents, had come into existence. We can detect by this time the same people working together with a high degree of consistency, and across both Houses, in pursuit of relatively clearly defined objectives.

What had contributed much to the crystallisation of these parties was the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant in the early autumn of 1643. The Scottish government, led by the Covenanters (so called after the 1638 National Covenant), agreed to send an army to aid Parliament, supported at England’s expense once it was over the border. In return, the Scots were promised reform of the English and Irish churches along Scottish lines, meaning principally the establishment of Presbyterianism, and the strengthening of the union between England and Scotland. Some form of Presbyterian church was broadly acceptable to many parliamentarians, whether they identified with the Presbyterian or Independent parties, but the question of recognition for ‘liberty of conscience’ was far more problematic. The formal commitment of the Scottish government and its Kirk to religious unity and uniformity, as expressed in the Solemn League, caused bitter disagreements with those Independents for whom religious toleration was fundamental to any peace settlement worth the name.

Like other Presbyterian polemicists, Buchanan was outraged at the heresies and errors that he believed Independency promoted. The Independents claimed they wanted ‘to seek the Truth of God more than others’ but, opined Buchanan, ‘God knows, they seek themselves and to set up their Fancies’. Buchanan went further, by portraying the Independent party in Parliament as a corrupt faction whose leading individuals were manipulating its procedures to satisfy their own ‘ambition and avarice’. Their enthusiasm for pulling down tyranny, and their friendliness towards the Scots in the early days of the alliance, had been a ruse to bring in ‘confusion’ in religion and ‘Anarchy’ in the state. All was done to enrich and empower themselves. (Truth its Manifest (1645), pp. 81, 127).

What made these imputations so ‘scandalous’ was that they had the ring of truth about them. This conspiratorialist analysis appealed to people resentful of a tax burden far greater than that imposed by Charles I, and tired of the exactions of the war committees set up all over the country to coordinate the raising of men and supplies. To those in the know, the Independents really were masters of the committees now proliferating in Parliament, adept as they were at getting their friends appointed to them and managing votes in their favour. A particular sensitivity for the Scots and their Presbyterian allies was the way in which the Independents had first manipulated, and then sidelined, the committee that had been created to manage the Anglo-Scottish war effort, known as the Committee of Both Kingdoms. It seemed entirely plausible that certain individuals were benefiting directly from Parliament’s formidable machinery for extracting the nation’s resources on an unprecedented scale. Why else had a war that many thought would be over in months, dragged on from one year to the next, seemingly without end?

What Buchanan had written was controversial enough, but his offenses were compounded by how he had come by his information and transmitted it into the public domain. Investigations spearheaded by the Independents in the House of Commons soon truffled out Buchanan’s relationship to other publications revealing of his connections. Buchanan was a Scot by birth and a scholar. He had travelled on the Continent and his contacts there were useful to advocates of the Solemn League seeking international support. At some point, Buchanan came to the attention of Robert Baillie (1602-62), a politically active Scottish cleric. After the signing of the Solemn League, Baillie was posted to London to represent Scottish interests at the Westminster Assembly, set up by Parliament to reform the Church of England. Baillie and Buchanan both operated in Presbyterian circles that included George Thomason, bookseller and magpie collector of printed works, James Cranford, a London minister and licenser of the press, and Robert Bostock, a London stationer known for publishing Covenanter material. By early 1645, Buchanan was sufficiently trusted to be given papers for publication from the Scottish commissioners who sat on the Committee of Both Kingdoms. Over the course of about a year, it seems Buchanan moved from facilitating the publication of the commissioners’ papers, to adding in his own polemical material alongside them, to moulding them into the original composition that became Truth its Manifest. While the relationship between Buchanan and the commissioners remains shadowy, the polemicist was no mere mouthpiece simply parroting the views of more powerful men. 

Buchanan’s publications show us something of the way in which new political practices, necessitated by the expansion of the state’s infrastructure, were being subjected to intensified public scrutiny. Many contemporaries were horrified by these developments, as ideals of consensus and unity, and social deference and order, were tested to breaking point by partisan writings and publication strategies. The interrogations by the parliamentary committee chaired by Lisle revealed public men using secret means and private associates to publish opinions they could not express themselves. Buchanan the self-professed truth-teller had asserted that the only way of cleansing Parliament from its corruption by the Independents was to prevent them hiding behind ‘mysteries of state’: what concerned the public must be known to the public. (Truth its Manifest (1645), p. 9).Yet here was evidence of the Scottish commissioners and their Presbyterian friends using devious methods to blacken their rivals and, ultimately, put pressure on Parliament. Who needed enemies like the royalist newsbook, Mercurius Aulicus, when a self-proclaimed friend was printing slanderous accusations against people who were meant to be his brothers-in-arms?

It could be argued that Buchanan’s activities did most damage, not to the Independents, but to the Scottish Covenanters, by reinforcing existing hostility towards them, further alienating their Presbyterian allies in Parliament, and exposing their own weakened ability to achieve the ends of the Solemn League through legitimate channels. Arguably, too, the reputation of Parliament itself was undermined by these partisan rivalries, as revelations about murky doings on both sides raised the question of whether anybody could be trusted to put the public good ahead of the rewards of worldly power. Buchanan was amongst those writers who had opened the way to far more radical critiques of the proper relationship between ‘the people’ and the Parliament of England, one with profound consequences for all the peoples of the British union.

L.S.

Professor Laura Stewart of the University of York, is the Editorial Board member for the 1640-1660 House of Lords section.

Laura’s blog surveys her forthcoming chapter in Parliament and Politics in Revolutionary Britain and Ireland, edited by Dr Alex Beeton, Research Fellow for the House of Lords 1640-1660 section. This exciting collection of the latest research on parliamentary politics in the revolutionary period will be published by Manchester University Press in 2026.

Further Reading:

John Adamson, ‘The Triumph of Oligarchy: The Management of War and the Committee of Both Kingdoms, 1644-1645’, in Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey (eds), Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2002), 104-7.

Jason Peacey, ‘Print Culture, State Formation, and an Anglo-Scottish Public, 1640-1648’, Journal of British Studies 56:4 (2017), 816-35.

Valerie Pearl, ‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth Columnists’, in A. E. J. Hollaender and William Kellaway (eds), Studies in London History: Presented to Philip Edmund Jones (London, 1969).

David Scott, ‘Party Politics in the Long Parliament, 1640-8’, in George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell (eds), Revolutionary England, c.1630-c.1660: Essays for Clive Holmes (Abingdon, 2017).

By 1640 there had been no decrease in the independent spirit and propensity to disorder which had made the borough of Southwark so troublesome to the London authorities in the middle ages. Indeed, alongside a range of deep-seated problems from competing jurisdictions to the brothels attracting various ‘evil-doers’, there had emerged new challenges. Parks like the Bear Garden and playhouses like the Globe provided additional leisure facilities for the peers and country gentry who now flocked to the capital, but they were also seen as centres for the super-spreading of disease, the fomentation of social unrest or the encouragement of immorality. As discontent grew with the government of Charles I there was both rioting and religious dissent.

The borough had long had a strategic importance stemming from its command of the unique pedestrian crossing of the Thames, London Bridge, but it now also had the second largest population in England – over 25,000 people by the 1630s. It was still home to key industries, but traditional activities like leather processing and candle and soap manufacture were complemented by brewing, dyeing, glassmaking; new waves of immigrants produced luxury tin-glazed earthenware and felt goods. Some low-lying areas regularly flooded and there were great disparities in wealth. The richest parish of St Saviour’s, which included the ancient Borough Market, contained some prominent London citizens, while St Olave’s, the location of shipbuilding and the dirtier industries, held a disproportionate number of the poor; St Thomas’s had the famous hospital and St George’s had four of the borough’s five prisons and the fields where the militia drilled.

Signs of discontent were unmistakable in the summer of 1640 after the dissolution of the Short Parliament. Among local men of substance who refused to pay ‘coat and conduct money’ towards the king’s military campaign against the Scots were distiller and international trader George Snelling of St Olave’s and two churchwardens from St Thomas’s. But more disturbing to the privy council were the ‘rebellious assemblies’ directed partly at nearby Lambeth Palace, home of the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The ‘traitorous insolences lately practised by some base disorderly people’ also appeared to threaten the royal family at Richmond Palace and St James’s [TNA, SP16/452, f. 273; SP16/453, ff. 94-7, 193].

Once the Long Parliament assembled that autumn, Southwark was prominent in a barrage of petitioning. One of its MPs, Edward Bagshawe, a lawyer doubtless selected because he had crossed swords in court with the archbishop, was dismayed to be presented by some of his chief constituents with a document calling for ‘the total extirpation of Episcopacy, Root and Branch, as likewise of the Book of Common Prayer’. His attempt to suppress it was thwarted when the other Southwark Member, John White, later to gain notoriety as a scourge of ‘scandalous’ and inadequate clergy, ‘brought the petition into the House with 16,000 hands’ subscribing it [E. Bagshawe, A Just Vindication (1660), 3]. An ‘insupportable grievance’ was voiced in a Remonstrance … concerning … the transportation of leather (1641), which claimed that, because of recent price inflation, 2,800 of 3,600 or more poor working families in St Olave’s were deprived of raw materials for their trade and could not pay taxes. In an apparently unprecedented example of successful female lobbying, ‘the women of Southwark’ requested assistance for Protestant women suffering as a result of rebellion in Ireland and obtained concrete relief measures.

There was no unanimity in opposition to crown policies, but over the 1640s and 1650s radical inhabitants gained the upper hand in local politics and returned MPs in their own image. Cornelius Cooke, vintner and churchwarden of St Olave’s, who in June 1641 was briefly in the custody of the gentleman usher of the House of Lords because he had dismantled newly-introduced altar rails with the encouragement of ‘the godly party’, was a signatory to election indentures and a constant presence on local commissions. In 1645 voters chose George Snelling and George Thomson, disabled army veteran and international merchant; both were Independents and became prominent on the executive committees of the republic (1649-1653). In the meantime, perennial resentment at City authorities who still held sway in some borough matters translated into a fight to control the local militia. While the relatively conservative City forces supported the Presbyterian coup in the summer of 1647, those from Southwark helped the New Model army to cross London Bridge and crush it.

Whereas in some constituencies the advent of the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell saw a retreat from radicalism and the return of the traditional elite to Parliament, Southwark behaved differently. The poll in June 1654 ranged Baptist preacher Samuel Hyland and Robert Warcupp, nephew of controversial King’s Bench prisoner marshal, Sir John Lenthall, and of erstwhile Speaker William Lenthall, against the equally controversial Colonel John Hardwicke of the militia and Peter de Lannoy, a dyer of immigrant stock. According to objections lodged by partisans of the latter pairing, the presiding bailiff, Samuel Warcupp, used rainy weather and threats of violence to manipulate the result in favour of his son Robert (allegedly an atheist, tippler and gamester) and Hyland (a mendacious campaigner, over-indulgent magistrate and recipient of bribes including two lobsters). The result was upheld, although in 1656 voters achieved a compromise: the still vocal radical Hyland partnered by the merchants’ champion de Lannoy.

With the fall of the protectorate in 1659, Southwark was to the fore in lobbying Parliament. In May Cornelius Cooke headed a deputation presenting a petition of ‘well-affected inhabitants’ supporting the Rump and ‘the good old cause’. When in October dissident army commanders effected the ‘interruption of Parliament’, ‘the saints of Southwark’ were mobilised to resist. In December its militia forces under George Thomson played a crucial part in effecting Parliament’s return, when City forces proved limp. Thereafter, Thomson opted to facilitate a smooth restoration of the monarchy, but in Southwark contested elections and radical politics persisted and St George’s Fields remained a focus for subversive demonstrations.

VL

Further reading:

J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (1987)

D. J. Johnson, Southwark and the City (1969)

London and the Civil War, ed. S. Porter (1996)

V. Pearl, London and the Puritan Revolution (1961)

Biographies or further biographies of Edward Bagshawe, Oliver Cromwell, Peter de Lannoy, Samuel Hyland, William Lenthall, George Snelling, George Thomson, John White are being prepared by the Commons 1640-1660 section.

Click here for the first instalment of our Southwark exploration and find more local history blogs here.