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).

As noted in previous blogs, the myth of tight and uniformly repressive puritan rule in the mid-seventeenth has proved hard to shift. Likewise, the blame for much iconoclasm – the destruction of church windows, statuary and other images and artefacts – continues to be laid primarily at the door of Oliver Cromwell and his austere East Anglian lieutenants when it should more often be attributed to a minority of his particularly austere contemporaries or, especially, to his distant kinsman more than a century earlier, Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell. In reality, religion in this period was a complex business. Ordinary people registered varied experiences of church and community life, while those in authority exhibited many shades of opinion. The kill-joy controversialist William Prynne was notable in this period for his extremism, while the contrasting lifestyles of the pious Sir Edward Hungerford and the adulterous Sir Edward Bayntun demonstrate that ‘puritans’ came in different shapes and sizes.

On 21 May a conference titled ‘Contesting the Church in England, 1640-1670’ will convene in Canterbury. It will bring together historians researching how various individuals and interest groups during this period of civil wars and reconstruction argued and acted for their vision of what the national church should be. The House of Commons 1640-1660 section will be represented. Since the Reformation, Parliament had been the place where religious change or religious settlements had been enacted, as well as the location of influential preaching. But in the 1640s it also became the place where policy was formulated. It abolished the bishops and their ecclesiastical courts. Its committees adjudicated on petitions from congregations, dismissed and appointed clergy, and launched preaching campaigns. It continued to debate religious questions, despite apparently delegating this function to its own creation, a synod of clergy meeting from 1643 as the Westminster Assembly. It outlawed use of the Book of Common Prayer and authorized the Assembly’s Directory for Worship (1645), only to turn a blind eye to some contraventions of the former and ignore the latter.

So who were the movers and shakers of religious policy in Parliament and what exactly were their views? For some of the just over 1,800 men who sat in the 1640s and 1650s, we have very little evidence: they made no revealing speeches, or are not visible in local church activities, or left no private papers or clue in their wills. At the other end of the scale were identifiable activists. For example, over his years as an MP the ubiquitous Francis Rous, scholar and Speaker of the Nominated Parliament, was a lay member of the Westminster Assembly, a member of the key central executive Committee for Preaching Ministers, a ‘trier and ejector’ regulating ministers in the localities, a commissioner for excluding unworthy persons from taking the sacrament of Holy Communion and a participant in preparing legislation for the selling off of bishops’ lands. Sir Henry Vane the elder, a former courtier and a leading figure at the fashionable church of St Martin in the Fields, had a similar profile, as did William Wheler, his equivalent at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in charge of arrangements for parliamentary fast days. But men of humbler origins were also prominent. Nathaniel Hallowes, a woollen draper and grandson of a labourer, was a churchwarden in his native Derby thirty years before he appeared on religious committees at Westminster, including for the regulation of universities. George Thomson, similarly high-profile, was an international merchant and disabled army veteran, who had spent his youth in Massachusetts.

Unsurprisingly, men of such different backgrounds had divergent perspectives on the church. In late 1640 and 1641, widespread resentment against the perceived encroachment of bishops into the realm of secular power swept MPs down the path of abolishing them altogether. Soon enough, however, some began to regret the sanctions and the popular unrest that had been unleashed. One such was Sir Edward Dering, who was excluded from Parliament early in 1642 for breaching privilege by printing his speech calling for a compromise position of ‘modified episcopacy’. In contrast stood the godly Herefordshire MP Sir Robert Harley, supporter of a firm alliance with the Presbyterian Scots, a keen iconoclast and, as time went on, an enthusiastic promoter of the Directory for Worship. But in 1648 his willingness to make peace with the king ensured he fell victim to the army’s purge of Parliament.

There was no religious unanimity among those who survived it, however – except inasmuch as many shared a distaste for a church still run by clergy. The Presbyterians, as John Milton put it, had simply proved to be ‘old priests writ large’ – worse than those who preceded them. A taste for ‘Erastianism’ or lay control was general, but differently interpreted. Some MPs, like veteran lawyer John Selden, appear to have had very little interest in the detail of theology and devotion. Others, like lawyer and memorialist Bulstrode Whitelocke and Speaker William Lenthall, quietly encouraged a reversion to earlier forms of worship. On the other hand, Miles Corbet and Oliver Cromwell were among those who moved towards a model of loosely-federated but largely autonomous congregational churches, while the Parliaments of the 1650s also recruited men like Samuel Hyland who belonged to sectarian groups and repudiated the notion of a national church.

The evolution of religious ideas and the context of experiment tested parliamentary control of the church in the later 1650s. MPs debated hotly, and concluded variously, how far they were authorised or competent to judge and punish the alleged blasphemy of James Naylor, the Quaker who rode into Bristol in what seemed like a parody of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, or the ‘Socianian’ heresy of John Biddle, who denied the Trinity. The limits of toleration were also challenged in differing views on the readmission of the Jews to England. In practice, diversity was the default, with Oliver Cromwell at the vanguard of those prepared to give almost everyone the benefit of the doubt – a disinclination to open a window into men’s souls that put him squarely in the tradition of Elizabeth I’s Church of England.

VL

Further reading:

A. Milton, England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England 1625-1662 (2021)

Biographies or further biographies of all the 17th-century MPs mentioned in this blog are being prepared for publication by the House of Commons 1640-1660 project.

By late 1642, as the confrontation between king and Parliament escalated, personal rivalries between two leading local gentlemen threatened to undermine fatally the parliamentarian war effort in north Wiltshire. In early January 1643 one MP for Chippenham, Sir Edward Bayntun of Bromham, the designated commander of Parliament’s forces in the county, sent his lieutenant to arrest the other MP for Chippenham, Sir Edward Hungerford of Corsham, as the latter raised troops in Malmesbury for the defence of Cirencester. Despite an imminent threat from Prince Rupert’s royalists, that town sent a rescue party. Hungerford was liberated, while Bayntun and his lieutenant were taken into custody. Other Wiltshire MPs rallied round Hungerford, and on the 31st Parliament declared him the new local commander. But a disgruntled Bayntun did not go quietly and a feud between his family and Hungerford’s periodically re-erupted.

Superficially, the two MPs had much in common. Both had first entered the Commons as very young Members in 1614 and were now sitting in their seventh Parliament; both were wealthy, well-connected and at the pinnacle of local government. But in other respects they were complete opposites. Their contrasting characters played out in strikingly different private lives.

Having married into the godly Essex gentry, Bayntun had built up a record of defiance towards the crown, but he was otherwise an improbable puritan – not only quarrelsome, violent and a grasping landlord, but also abusive in his relationships. Already a frequenter of the law courts, in 1626 he brought an action in chancery against his uncle Sir John Danvers and numerous Danvers cousins. He alleged that in 1621 they had enticed his mother, Lucy Bayntun, then terminally ill, to move from his home to the house of her brother Sir John in St Martin in the Fields and then persuaded her to leave the bulk of her estate to them rather than to himself and his sister. Although Sir John did have a reputation for acquisitiveness, there were serious flaws in Bayntun’s case. Notably, it was entirely plausible that Lady Bayntun might wish to forsake his disordered household for the cultivated intellectual milieu of Sir John and the much older wife to whom he was devoted, Magdalen, mother of the poet George Herbert.

In 1629 charges were levelled against Bayntun that he had fathered children on two of his wife Elizabeth’s waiting gentlewomen, Katherine Gerard and Alice Hardy, and had promised Katherine that he would marry her when her sickly mistress died – an imminent eventuality, according to Elizabeth’s horoscope. Furthermore, he had committed adultery with other women of varied social status and boasted of his conquests. Supposedly, this was common knowledge in Wiltshire and London. Certainly, a pardon issued to Bayntun in 1630 for adulteries with Katherine ‘or any other person’ appeared to confirm gossip. It is doubtful that Bayntun mended his ways. When, as a widower from 1635, he married again in August 1640, it was to obscure Mary Bowells; although the wedding was entered in a London parish register, secrecy surrounding it later cast doubt on its authenticity.

In contrast, Sir Edward Hungerford was the archetypal puritan patriarch. His bride also came from the godly Essex gentry. Margaret Halliday was one of the two daughters and prospective heirs of William Halliday, a wealthy London mercer about to become governor of the East India Company. Unlike Bayntun, Hungerford had mostly cordial relations with his in-laws. Sir Henry Mildmay, husband of Margaret’s sister Anne, became a close associate; in a draft of his will, Hungerford requested burial ‘within the vault where the bodies of my dear and pious father-in-law and mother-in-law do rest’ [TNA, PROB11/205/497].  He was patron of the almshouses they had established at Corsham and perpetuated their charitable impulse with bequests to the poor of eight parishes. With his older half-brother Sir John St John of Lydiard Tregoze, he supported the interests of other family members, and took under his benevolent wing his younger half-brothers Henry Hungerford and Giles Hungerford. He and his wife were childless, but together they presided over an extended household of long-established servants and had many male and female friends. In designating Margaret his executrix, Hungerford referenced ‘my deare and loveing wife (whome god hath made both a comfort and an ornament unto me in the dayes of my labour and pilgrimage here)’ and commended his relatives to her ‘motherly care’ [ibid.].

Towards the Bayntuns, however, the Hungerfords were less amicable. In 1643, Hungerford proved no more effective a commander of local levies than Bayntun had been, thereby fuelling the latter’s sense of grievance. Following a series of confrontations over the summer Bayntun, his eldest son the red-headed ‘fiery spirit’ Edward Bayntun, and Hungerford were enjoined by the Speaker not to disturb the peace of Parliament or the kingdom with their private affairs. In June 1644 a select committee was instructed ‘to compose the differences, if they can, between [them]’ [Commons Journal iii. 517].  But the two MPs pursued divergent paths.

Hungerford remained a consistent Presbyterian in religion and politics to his death in 1648, leaving his wife and half-brothers to unite in petitioning Parliament for repayment of the large sums he had lent for the war effort. Bayntun continued to scandalise, issuing foul-mouthed accusations of treachery against John Pym, for instance, yet unexpectedly supporting the army and the republic in 1648-9. Visiting Bromham in 1654, diarist John Evelyn recorded with distaste Bayntun’s practice of making his guests’ servants drunk, while after his death in 1657 family divisions intensified and Edward Bayntun questioned not only his stepmother’s jointure rights but also the very fact of her marriage.

VL

Further reading

The Commonplace Book of Sir Edward Bayntun of Bromham ed. J. Freeman (Wiltshire Record Society, 1988)

Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 3 via https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol3

Further biographies of Sir Edward Bayntun, Edward Bayntun, Sir John Danvers, Sir Edward Hungerford, Henry Hungerford, Sir Henry Mildmay and John Pym are being prepared by the House of Commons 1640-1660 project.

Follow the research of our Civil War project through our James the I to Restoration blog series.