popular grievances and royalist propaganda in interregnum england
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This article was downloaded by: [New York University]On: 10 October 2014, At: 03:44Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
The Seventeenth CenturyPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsev20
Popular Grievances and RoyalistPropaganda in InterregnumEnglandCaroline Boswell aa Department of Humanistic Studies , University ofWisconsin-Green Bay , 2420 Nicolet Drive , Green Bay ,USA , WI 54311 E-mail:Published online: 11 Feb 2013.
To cite this article: Caroline Boswell (2012) Popular Grievances and Royalist Propaganda inInterregnum England, The Seventeenth Century, 27:3, 313-334
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/TSC.27.3.4
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In January 1650, the royalist pamphleteer John Crouch described a scuffle between a group of Londoners and a troop of soldiers in his scurrilous newsbook The Man in the Moon.1 Though Charles I’s execution had been carried out a year before, Crouch continued to employ tropes long drawn out by royalist pens in an attempt to undermine the nascent Commonwealth. Themes of subversion, sexual slander and humiliation pervade this anti-Puritan narrative. Crouch related how ‘two or three Companies’ of ‘Rebell’ soldiers had seized a group of stage players on St John’s Street. Having deprived the players of their garb, the troopers marched them to Westminster for breaking Parliament’s ordinance against stage-plays. One soldier stayed behind the crowd with design of gaining ‘some plunder’, at which time he happened across a ‘skimmington’ riding near Smithfield Market. This popular shaming ritual involved a man imitating the army’s Lord General Thomas Fairfax on horseback. The ‘General’ held a skimming ladle while ‘Baskets’ of Colonel Thomas Pride’s ‘Graines’ were held out in front of him. Fairfax’s ‘Doxie’ sat behind him, her face to the horse’s tail.
As the procession passed the baffled soldier, a performer tossed a ladle of grain into the trooper’s face. Enraged, he brandished his sword and ‘began to swear and vapour’ until a ‘Butchers Boy’ confiscated his weapon and compelled the trooper to ‘swallow his Graines and be thankfull’. Crouch ended his narrative, stating
if this Souldier scape ... there will questionlesse come forth an Act for a Thanks-giving for this wonderfull Victory over the poore Players, and the Souldiers deliverance, and a double Excise upon all Beefe and Mutton for the future; that Butchers hereafter may learne to keep their Apprentices, and not suffer them to beat Souldiers as they passe upon their occasions.2
Detailing the possible consequences of the audacious apprentice’s behaviour, Crouch concluded his account by linking Londoners’ frustration with the army to another widespread grievance – the despised excise tax placed on everyday consumer goods.
Popular Grievances and Royalist Propaganda in Interregnum England
The Seventeenth Century, Volume XXVII, No. 3 (Autumn 2012), published by Manchester University Presshttp://dx.doi.org/10.7227/TSC.27.3.4
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Often through the guise of reporting the news, authors such as John Crouch expounded upon popular grievances with Interregnum policies in vivid detail. Depicting people’s resentment of the army’s grip on politics – whether at Westminster or in the streets of London – Crouch presented a scene that would resonate not only with a broad royalist audience, but also amongst others who were merely hostile to any number of local and state policies. Furthermore, ‘royalism’ was no simple, unified ideology, particu-larly in the 1650s. As Jason McElligott and David L. Smith have recently argued, the royalist label allowed for various ‘political, religious and cultural positions’.3 Propagandists themselves held differing viewpoints, and with this understanding it becomes clear that certain propagandists such as Crouch chose to dwell on widespread grievances for their pervasiveness amongst a range of royalists and others alienated by the Interregnum state. By exploiting grievances that were held by a broad section of the populace, Crouch’s rhetoric could reach across vertical and horizontal divides in English society. These royalist authors painted disaffection with the state as ‘popular’ in the sense it emanated from the ‘people’ – the commons, the essence of English society.4 Crouch, facing his own financial difficulties in the 1650s, likely realised that even though the lower orders had common grievances with their social superiors, certain Interregnum policies had a more immediate and disruptive impact on their lives.5 Such rhetoric enabled authors to project royalists as those who truly understood and sympathized with the plight of industrious sort, whether poor or middling. This strain of rhetoric placed the micro-politics of everyday existence at the forefront of a national debate over the political settlement.
Beyond their sympathetic portrayal of popular grievances, authors such as Crouch drew weapons from the large arsenal of grassroots resistance.6 Not only did many propagandists champion manifestations of dissent, but further their language often attempted to link the survival of popular customs with the restoration of the monarchy. Meshing the royalist cause with grass-roots dissent, authors easily fused the ‘politics of the parish’ with partisan politics.7 In their narratives of localised resistance, royalist authors wrote of a united commonality protesting against the ruination of the English way of life. Notions of legitimate resistance, based on local customs, rights, and the law, provided a well worn weapon for royalist propagandists following the regicide. By blurring the distinction between royalist opposition and other categories of dissent, royalist accounts of localised resistance provided their audience with evidence of popular royalism.8
Whereas earlier studies of royalist propaganda have focused primarily on questions of its reception, its authors, and its language, this essay reveals how propagandists utilised grassroots dissent and refashioned its meaning within their texts. Several scholars have explored the use of popular metaphors within royalist writings, while other studies examine how royalist authors distanced themselves from the taint of ‘popular’ associations.9 Building upon
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these studies and the advances in the social history of politics, this essay tackles royalist propaganda from the bottom-up, examining the influence of the politics of custom and grassroots resistance within certain strands of royalist rhetoric. The first section will contextualise Crouch’s use of Pride’s ‘Graines’ in his narrative, arguing that royalist propagandists attempted to amplify and manipulate issues surrounding social and cultural reform that persisted in the London metropolis throughout the 1650s. These controver-sial policies heightened the appeal of anti-puritan rhetoric by demonising the excessive zeal of the Interregnum state. The second section addresses the subversive potential behind royalist pamphleteers’ representations of local-ised conflicts, such as the butcher’s boy’s ascendancy over the single trooper in the streets. By lauding grassroots resistance, such authors glorified protest while advocating future acts of defiance. Individual manifestations of popular opposition were extended beyond the local community through their publi-cation in royalist pamphlets, entering a national dialogue where grievances could be refashioned to reflect royalist desires. Approaching popular griev-ances and grassroots dissent as integral elements of larger discourses over the proper modes of governance at personal, local and national levels illuminates the dynamic nature of Interregnum politics and political culture.
‘Prides Graines’: Popular anti-puritanism and the royalist press
In the scene depicting the soldiers’ harsh treatment of the actors on St John’s Street, Crouch portrayed the troopers as arbitrary enforcers of the state’s cultural regulations. Two other newsbooks – one royalist and one licensed by the republican regime – also reported the confrontation between the troopers and the players, suggesting Crouch’s account was based on an actual conflict.10 However, Crouch used this opportunity to criticise the soldiers’ role in the social reform movement. Crouch was by no means merely relating the news: he was capitalizing on the anti-puritan, anti-regulatory, and anti-army fervour within the city. Furthermore, in his depictions of army officials as those spearheading the social reform movement, Crouch used this example of popular dissent to paint the zealous leaders of the new regime as hypocrites. By referring to the ladle full of Pride’s ‘Graines’, Crouch subtly reminded his audience of the Colonel’s personal stake in the drink trade.11 Situated within the context of political discourse during the Civil War and Interregnum England, Crouch’s account reveals how he and other royalist pamphleteers adopted, exploited and manipulated popular resentment towards strict social and cultural regulations in order to legitimate and amplify royalist opposition.
While Parliament had first targeted stage plays in the early 1640s, it inten-sified regulations against these performances in February 1648. According to the new legislation, all actors were considered ‘rogues’ and punished as such. Those caught performing were to be whipped in their local marketplace and
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forced to enter into recognizance with two sureties or be imprisoned. Even spectators were to be fined five shillings.12 The ordinance further decreed that not only local officials but also soldiers were to ensure its thorough execu-tion. By focusing his satire on troopers, Crouch offered his readers an easily identifiable state agent as the recipient of both his, as well as Londoners’ hostility. The implications are clear: the traditional modes of governance by local officials had given way to stricter policing by state supported soldiers. Crouch’s version of the players’ arrest, while unverifiable, may well have been influenced by real experiences within the city. In November 1650, several months after Crouch published this news story, the Westminster barber Charles Cutts was arrested in costume while on his way to perform in a stage play. Other cases, particularly those with large audiences, occurred throughout the 1650s.13
Crouch’s scenario reflected prevailing hostilities towards soldiers’ involve-ment in politics, including the strict regulation of social activities. Troopers were often involved in upholding the 1644 ordinance ‘for the better observa-tion of the Lords-day’, which severely limited the recreational activities that could be practised legally on Sundays.14 In 1648, the presence of militia bands in Moorfields had resulted in unrest when the apprentices and other locals defended their use of these popular playing-grounds.15 The youths’ reaction to this disruption of their recreation not only indicates their frustration with the soldiers as a moral police force, but also with the city’s and state’s attempts to control the very limited free-time enjoyed by apprentices. The usefulness of the soldiers’ strict enforcement of the Sabbath was also called into question by Henry Walker’s licensed newsbook Perfect Occurrences of Every dayes journal in Parliament in June 1649. Having been ordered to patrol the Thames in search of watermen breaking the Sabbath, several troopers threatened to shoot those rowers who refused to comply. Defying the troop’s warning, a couple of watermen continued to row until the guards shot at their boats, injuring one passenger. Before the scuffle had ended ‘a most sad accident’ had occurred – a child who had been innocently walking to church on the other side of the river was shot and killed by one of the guards.16 The accounts of both events suggest that the soldiers’ overzealous enforcement of regulations had only provoked, rather than diminished, disorder.
Contestations over leisure time and activities became increasingly prob -lematic following the Rump’s additional act regulating the Sabbath in 1650. Travelling was officially forbidden, as were visits to taverns, inns, alehouses and victualling houses on Sundays.17 Within the London metropolis, Parlia-ment’s new legislation provoked hostile reactions. Mary Lucas called a local Justice of the Peace ‘Jackanapes’ when the latter enacted the ‘late Act of Parliament for preventing the prophanacon of the Lords day’. Phillip Carter, a victualler in Holborn, publicly declared that ‘they were rogues that would observe the Act of Parliament for keepeinge the Saboth and against drinkeinge’. When officers found Henry Kelsey drunk in an alehouse on
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Sunday, Kelsey abused the officials and condemned ‘the authoritye of Parlia-ment by which they Act[ed]’.18 Clearly the new legislation incited further hostility to intrusive social regulations, prompting disaffected individuals to abuse those that upheld the policies of the regime.
Although the regulation of alcohol and alehouses was not novel in the 1640s and 1650s, it took on new meanings within a changing political economy. To be sure, resentment toward the policing of drinking establishments had existed for decades, if not centuries.19 However, in the revolutionary context of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, resistance to local governance could easily be infused with larger criticisms of state policies associated with a new and potentially illegitimate regime.20 Following the political revolu-tion, the practice of social drinking ran counter to the reformist impetus of the state, thereby altering official perceptions of social drinking. Resistance to new restrictions of the drink trade – including the sabbatarian legisla-tion, the excise tax and a ban on French wine – further politicised drinking culture during the 1640s and 1650s.21 As a consequence, royalist rhetoric frequently aligned the survival of traditional cultural practices with the cause of the Stuarts. Crouch’s narrative provides just one example of this tendency. By ridiculing Colonel Pride’s doubling-dealing as a brewer turned social-regulator, Crouch and fellow royalist pamphleteers painted the state’s opposition to social drinking as both unpopular and disingenuous. Raising one’s glass became synonymous with loyalist sympathies.
This politicization of alcohol suggests that we should re-evaluate the signif-icance of ‘drink’ in royalist literature. Previously, scholars such as Lois Potter have viewed drinking and drunkenness in cavalier literature as metaphorical representations of the despair brought on by the disruption of the political and social order.22 More recently scholars have stressed how royalists effec-tively employed ‘drink’ to emphasize the subversion of the social order. In her study of ballads, Angela McShane Jones has argued that after 1649 royalist authors politicised drink by promoting wine as the proper beverage for loyalists versus beer or ale which was the drink of common ‘mechanics’ such as Cromwell.23 Besides celebrating wine as the appropriate drink for the traditional ruling classes, many royalist pamphleteers argued against beer and ale as lowly. Royalists printed several satires that depicted Cromwell as a brewer, associating beer with the new order of inferior officials.24 McShane has highlighted several ballads and songs, many printed in loyal compilations, which indicate royalists’ preference for wine over beer or ale – the drinks of the artisanal and lower classes.25 While such rhetoric certainly pervaded royalist ballads and poems, other strands of royalist propaganda promoted ‘popular’ beverages in an attempt to connect the plight of the royalist cause with the troubles of the underclasses.
It was not solely the cultural, but also the social and economic value of beer and ale which made these beverages particularly effective objects for political exploitation. Beer and ale had different ingredients, were made in
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different ways, originated in different places, and were popular in different areas. After having been introduced into England by Dutch brewers in the late fifteenth century, beer – a hopped malt beverage – had slowly become the staple drink in much of the south and east. Ale – the unhopped ‘ancient’ drink of England – remained popular in parts of the countryside during the first half of the seventeenth century, particularly in the north.26 The produc-tion and consumption of these beverages, which were primary components of the early-modern diet, was of interest to a majority of English society. When England experienced a relatively severe harvest failure during 1647–1650, the initial refusal of local magistrates to institute policies similar to the Elizabe-than and early Stuart dearth orders provoked hostility and resistance amongst broad sections of the populace.27 With grain scarce, many petitions to local magistrates bemoaned the continued existence of licensed malt makers and the large number of alehouses. Steve Hindle has shown that petitioners often employed language of ‘despair’ to legitimise their opposition, commenting on how hoarding and high prices harmed the poor.28
Despite the widespread desire for the regulation of grain prices, some propagandists suggested that the resulting decline in the production of strong ale and beer was also injurious to the industrious poor. In seventeenth-century England alcohol had become an increasingly important staple as bread prices increased more dramatically than the price of beer and ale. After all, malt beverages could be adulterated easily. Ale and beer were generally served ‘strong’ or ‘weak’, though there were gradations within both catego-ries. According to Peter Clark, ale tended to come in two forms - ‘strong’ or ‘good’ ale and ‘small’ or ‘weak’ ale. By the mid-seventeenth century beer had been divided into three categories – ‘double’ beer, ‘middle’ beer, and ‘small’ beer, with ‘middle’ beer being comparable in strength to ‘strong’ ale. Brewers could manipulate the alcohol content by adding more water to the wort or using substitute grains for barley. Typically ‘small’ ale and beer were brewed by reusing the wort after the first brew and allowing it to ferment.29 During the late 1640s the combination of grain shortages, the excise on alcohol, and the institution of new strictly-enforced price mandates had made the production of strong ale and beer less viable.30 In a petition to Parliament in 1647 written against these restrictions, the London brewers asserted that ‘Strong Beer and Ale itself is generally for the Service of the Poor’. Thus, they argued, the higher taxation on the stronger beverages – four shillings a barrel – not only stifled their trade, but it also adversely affected the diets of the poorer sort. Strong ale and beer, the brewers claimed, is ‘the cheapest Food and chiefest Nourishment’, which along with ‘Bread’ sustains the poor during ‘hard labor’.31 Taking their cause to the public, the printed versions of brewers’ petition further argued that strong beer and ale revives ‘poor wearied Labouring men’, lifts ‘drooping Spirits’, and cheers ‘the hearts of the sorrowfull and afflicted’.32 A ballad lamenting the excise suggests that the brewers were not alone in their regret over the declining production of strong
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beer and ale. The song, told from a ‘good fellows’ perspective, grumbles that:
The Brewer he must be paid,the Hostis she will not score,Yet drinke is smaller made,then’t was in times before.33
The relative absence of strong ale and beer must have had a significant social, cultural and economic impact throughout society. Estimates suggest that only one-third of ale and beer brewed was of the ‘small’ variety. People generally drank both strong and weak beverages depending on the time of day and their reason for imbibing. Those with strenuous jobs depended on the calories that strong beer and ale provided. Drinking socially regularly involved a pot or two of hearty drink as alehousekeepers served increasingly stronger beverages to attract customers away from an ever-growing number of other establishments.34 With the double-edged goal of alleviating dearth while ridding England of drunkenness, Parliament officials restricted the brewing of strong ale and beer despite the resulting loss of essential nutrients, sources of income, and powerful social lubricants.
The anonymous author of the 1649 pamphlet A Curse against Parlia-ment Ale attempted to exploit the restrictions on the production and sale of strong ale and beer to the royalists’ advantage. In championing ‘strong ale’ over ‘small beer’, this pamphleteer aligned the monarchy with the traditional drink of the English people – ale. Not only was ale native to England, but it was associated with the hard working and industrious poor ‘country-man’. Beer, however, was traditionally associated with a rising ‘foreign’ middling class of beer brewers whose costly trade replaced that of England’s traditional alesellers – poor widows.35 While the actual difference between ale and beer producers and drinkers had lessened significantly by the seventeenth century, the social distinctions between their stereotypical consumers were readily mocked in the satire Wine, Beere, Ale and Tobacco Contending for Authority reprinted in 1658.36 Even though the lower orders’ attachment to ale was in part a rhetorical construction – after all, Crouch’s Man in the Moon drank claret – the Curse exploited the traditional association of ale as the drink of the commonality and connected the survival of the crown with the English people’s ‘native’ drink.37 In its opening, the author declares: ‘Base Miscreants ... could ye not invent / Some other Plague in your damn’d PARLIAMENT, / To vex good-fellows, but you must put down / Strong-Ale, the chief upholder of the Crown?’38 In opposition to the monarchy’s relationship with strong ale, these authors coupled Parliament officials with ‘small’ beer. The ballad ‘A Hymne to CROMWELL’ mocked Cromwell’s policies that favoured the producing of small, weaker beer over strong ale. Malicious rumours claimed that Cromwell himself was a descendant of brewers, suggesting his role in politics was as ‘foreign’ and unnatural in England as his brew. Moreover, the Curse’s allusion to Cromwell’s production of watered-down ‘small’ beer
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was a direct reference to the crippling taxes and regulations placed on these essential beverages and the reformist desire to ban the brewing of strong drink. Thus the author craftily tied together the fate of the monarchy with the customary intoxicant and nourishment of the English people. The Curse alludes to happier times before the rise of ‘his small-beer Excellence’ when people drank their ale strong to ‘ease [their] mindes of Poverty and Care’.39 By aligning the monarchy with ‘strong’ ale and Cromwell to ‘small’ beer, the author claims that the crown not only safeguarded the ‘native’ traditions and products of England, but also the welfare of the industrious poorer sort.40 Even at a time when the Commonwealth regime was attempting to alleviate dearth, authors of pamphlets such as The Curse managed to craft a line of rhetoric that maintained it was royalists who truly understood the needs of the poor.
Whilst the Curse built upon rumours of Cromwell’s connection to the brewing trade, Crouch and others focused their satires on Colonel Thomas Pride in order to redirect popular hostility towards social reform and dislo-cation onto key Interregnum officials. Crouch’s discussion of grain subtly accused Pride of hoarding during a period of dearth, but the textual context of this tale – following the satire of the soldiers’ arrest of the players – reveals the double-meaning behind Crouch’s satire. Pride clearly had multiple uses as a rhetorical symbol for royalists, having been a brewer, an army officer, a social regulator, a politician and a regicide. Pride’s financial interests in the brewing industry made him a particularly easy target of satirists. Evidence suggests his interest in the victualling trade continued after his political rise following the civil wars. Not only had Pride signed a 1647 Brewers’ petition in favour of alleviating the excise on strong beer and ale, but in 1654 he and his associates were responsible for providing beer and ale to the navy. In that same year Pride attempted to evade payment of his excise arrears for victuals sold in the 1640s.41 Thus, Pride’s lucrative occupation as a brewer enabled royalist pamphleteers to portray his heavy-handed policies against tipplers and alehouse keepers as simultaneously ironic, hypocritical and smacking of self-serving motivations.
During 1649 and 1650, therefore, many royalist newsbooks capitalized on Pride’s involvement in the hunt for Sabbath breakers in and around London to illustrate the state’s hypocrisy. Crouch and other royalist newsbook authors eagerly proposed that Pride’s motivations for confiscating alehouse licenses were far from noble. One month after the satirical depiction of ‘Prides Graines’, The Man in the Moon remarked that Pride only enforced ‘the Cracks of Parliament concerning the Sabbath’ as a guise to shut down alehouses that did not serve his own brew. Crouch claimed that Pride’s actions forced people out of Islington and into Smithfield and Pye-corner, where they ‘might have drunke of his Brewing as long as they would without control’.42 After Pride had been elected to London’s Common Council, the newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus jeered that this brewer would institute a
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policy requiring that ‘Pride’s-Ale … run in each tap-house’ or else he would provide ‘no Licence to sell Ale on Sundaies’.43 When Parliament decided to levy the excise on home-brewed ale and beer in February 1650, The Royall Diurnall declared that this policy was ‘beget by that blockhead Pride’ in order to ‘get the sole Trade of brewing into his own hands’. Another royalist newsbook noted the irony of Pride’s ‘monopoly’ on ale and beer; Parliament had declared Charles I’s granting of patents and monopolies as ‘Tyrannical and Arbitrary’, yet ‘Prides Patent for Ale selling is a step to further grants’.44 All of these authors used the duplicitous figure of Pride to attack the legiti-macy of the Rump’s policies of social reform, placing widespread, but not necessarily royalist, hostility to regulations in a loyalist context.
Beyond providing royalists with a symbol of the state’s strict regulation of drinking and recreation, Pride also represented the army’s dominance in affairs of state. By directing widespread hostility toward state policies onto important Interregnum officials, royalist authors more firmly connected popular grievances to royalist opposition. Pride remained involved in politics in the metropolitan area throughout his career. After 1650, he deepened his participation in the policing of recreational activities. During the reign of the Major Generals, Pride was High Sheriff of Surrey and closely connected with London’s deputy Major General Barkstead. Pride played a large role in the suppression of cock, bull and bear matches in both London and Southwark. Although the original order for their suppression came in May 1653, these activities continued with enough frequency that Pride had the bears from the ‘bear-garden’ in Southwark shot by his soldiers in February 1656. Pride’s notoriety and his established role as a social policeman made him the perfect target for propagandists.45
Explicitly solidifying the relationship between royalism and traditional cultural practices, royalist authors recycled the image of Pride as an oppres-sive social regulator in the chaotic months leading up to the Restoration – despite his death in 1658. Pamphleteers jeered at his ‘assassination’ of the bears alongside other unpopular Interregnum policies in order to reflect, focus and amplify generalized hostility to cultural regulations. A 1660 broad-side ballad entitled The Rump Ululant references the grievances of plunder, taxation and the eradication of cultural practices in one stanza: ‘We rob’d / The whole of food to pamper out the few, / Excis’d your wares, / And tax’s you round sixpence the pound, / And massacred your bears.’46 In another ballad, Pride allegedly murdered these beasts on account of their political allegiance, explicitly linking the bears with royalism: ‘The crime of the Bears, was, they were Cavaliers, / And had formerly fought for the King; / And pull’d by the Burrs, the Round-headed Currs, / That they made their ears toe ring.’47 A mock account of Pride’s final words presents a less overt association between Pride’s assault on animal-fighting and the war against royalism. In his confession, Pride declares ‘I thought it our interest to let nothing live that would fight: and therefore we made an Act against Cock matches’, a statement
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implying that these fighting animals were necessarily a threat to the state. He implicitly referred to the execution of Charles I, declaring that ‘others have kill’d far greater things with less Commission’. The author claims that Pride felt more remorse for the bears’ execution than for any of his other deeds. Pride confesses ‘’tis my Conscience speaks: And the first thing is that upon my spirit is the Killing of the Beares, for which the people bait me, and call me all the names in the Rain-bow’.48 Here, the puritan assault on tradi-tional recreations is yet again associated with an attack on royalism, carefully intertwining Pride’s interference with cultural practices with his political and martial exploits. Throughout the Interregnum, royalist authors had continued to forge a connection between the practice of traditional cultural pastimes and the cause of the Stuarts.
‘Butcher’s boy’: Popular protest and royalist propaganda
Looking back to our opening narrative, we remember that in Crouch’s description of the tussle between commonwealth soldiers and Londoners in the city’s streets, a lone butcher’s apprentice humiliated the trooper who stood angrily before the mock riding of Lord General Fairfax. While Crouch’s use of Fairfax as the object of the skimmington ritual focused hostility towards the army onto its General, the soldier on the street remains the dominant character in this narrative. In depicting the apprentice’s triumph over this single trooper, Crouch presented a realistic version of skirmishes between civilians and soldiers within London and other communities throughout the nation. His allusion to a possible double-excise on beef and mutton likely reminded his readers of the butchers’ riot against the excise at Smithfield market roughly three years before, after which the excise on meat was lifted.49
Moreover, in championing the ascendancy of the ‘Butchers Boy’ over the commonwealth soldier, Crouch was clearly channelling traditions of youth involvement in popular politics. In Britain as on the continent, youth groups and apprentices often acted collectively to enforce their conceptions of proper social and political order.50 In his portrayal of the triumph of appren-tices and the ‘common people’ as victors over their oppressors, Crouch not only presented the current regime as incapable of maintaining order, but also the people as engaging with politics in a reasonable manner considering the unreasonable nature of the times. Such accounts had a distinct duplicity: they depicted the dangers of the world turned upside down while simultane-ously championing active resistance as an effective means to promote change. Beyond inviting their audience to mimic such heroic actions, royalist writers encouraged their readers to participate in these mediated protests as sympa-thetic spectators. Placing acts of popular resistance within their newsbooks, Crouch and his fellow pamphleteers drew upon such acts to legitimise royalist opposition by relating its popular roots.
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One of the most obvious examples of the royalists’ exploitation of wide -spread social and economic disaffection is afforded by their depictions of assaults on excise-men. Since the inception of the excise in 1643, royalist authors had consistently reported the unrest surrounding the contentious tax – despite the fact that the King also levied the excise throughout the areas under his control. Following Charles’s defeat in 1646, their rhetoric strenuously emphasised the hostility that this tax and its collectors provoked amongst broad sections of the populace. In their violent and often ritual-istic assaults on the excise-man, protesters treated the excise collector as an intrusive and unwelcome outsider who drained the resources of local society without any benefit to its members.51 Along with ‘new’ excises on previ-ously levied manufactured goods such as soap, oil, and silk that provoked opposition, the truly novel tax on alcohol – an everyday necessity – repre-sented a threat to local custom and autonomy in the face of a centralising state.52 Although large scale riots against the excise-man decreased after their peak in the late 1640s, minor skirmishes between collectors and hostile individuals continued throughout the Interregnum despite consistent efforts to reform its collection. Whilst royalist authors depicted localised incidents against the excise-man as national concerns, hard-hit communities attempted to negotiate the implementation of policies which threatened their liveli-hoods and the precarious balance of power established between rulers and ruled. As the foreign and unsympathetic state officials attempted to imple-ment unpopular policies such as the excise in communities across the nation, royalist authors used accounts of resistance to conjure an image of a united ‘commons’ who would reveal the illegitimacy of the new regime, by force if necessary.53 Their rhetoric suggested that through its defence of custom, the English commons defended the paternalistic traditions of the monarchy against the foreign policies of the new regime. While some of the protestors may have been royalists, the excise often provoked the resentment of even the most ardent supporters of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. By placing accounts of these protests within royalist polemic, authors not only suggested that a return to monarchy would eliminate the threat posed by the excise and its collection, but they also insinuated that such events were in fact evidence of royalist activity.
Earlier studies of royalist literature often overlook how authors celebrated grassroots resistance and the politics of custom. These scholars tend to give primacy to the lines of royalist rhetoric lauding the traditional social order or to the agency of politicos and their influence on propaganda and the public.54 However, during the 1650s it was the state-sponsored newsbooks which demeaned popular violence and its perpetrators by using derogatory language in reference to the crowd, whilst royalist accounts shied away from terms like ‘the rabble’ in favour of less hostile phrases such as ‘the common people’. By referring to crowd activity as a rise of the commons, Crouch and other royalist authors were drawing upon the historic image of a broadly based but united
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commonality rising in resistance to policies that impoverished the industrious middling and poorer sort across the nation. In discourses of popular rebellion, the ‘commonality’ had often referenced the uniting of the prosperous middle classes with the poorer sort against the oppression of the nobles and the monarch’s ‘evil councillors’.55 Although the revolutions of the 1640s and the establishment of the English Commonwealth transformed ‘commonweal/th’ discourse, the traditions of popular rebellion and the legitimacy often granted to the grievances of the ‘commonality’ still presented royalist authors with discourse they could manipulate to serve their immediate needs.56 In their allusion to the ‘common people’ assaulting the excise collectors, Crouch and fellow royalist authors used real social complaints to fashion an imagined royalist commons united in opposition to the state. Such depictions of a unified commonality were often exaggerated; nevertheless, these authors continued to draw upon popular politics to suggest that grassroots royalist opposition, broad in its base, would eventually overthrow the new regime.
Royalists’ adoption of language describing an oppressed ‘commonality’ in their narratives of localised resistance to excise-men reveals that these authors were doing more than merely relating stories of popular resistance to this excise. Crouch and other royalist writers justified assaults on the collectors as committed in defence of the common good. Whilst the licensed newsbook, A Perfect Diurnall, recorded hostile accounts of actions committed by the ‘Rabble’ at Ormskirk, Lancashire in February 1650, Crouch’s The Man in the Moon offered a more generous description of the crowd. The Perfect Diurnall stated that it was a crowd of the ‘meaner sort’ which forced its way into excise-men’s lodgings at a local inn and held the collectors and the constable prisoner in February 1650. In his relation of this organized assault on the excise-men, Crouch applauded the fact that ‘the common people’ were beginning to ‘rise with one consent against the Excise Catterpillers’. Further describing the crowd’s actions, Crouch asserted that the people righteously confiscated the excise-men’s money, ‘pumped them soundly and let them goe’. He finished his narrative by remarking that these vigilantes set ‘a very good example for all other Countries’ and would ‘doe much good to the Common-wealth’, referring perhaps to the traditional meaning of ‘common-wealth’ as what is best for the commons. Leaving his readers with a warning, Crouch concluded that unless ‘these Vermin are destroyed, we must never looke to enjoy a peny in our purses, nor our goods and livelihoods in quiet’.57 Crouch, similar to other royalist authors, took the opportunity to suggest these events were symptomatic of the future uprising of the commons against the illegitimate new regime.
The Royall Diurnall and Crouch’s The Man in the Moon applauded the crowds’ assaults on the excise-men throughout the West Country in March 1650.58 Describing riots in Dorset, Crouch’s newsbook reported that several ‘common People’ had gathered to stone the excise-men. First, the crowd stripped the collectors not only of their money, but also their ‘Commissions’,
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the documents drawn up by the new regime which empowered the hated excise-men. After completing this symbolic task, the protesters pursued the collectors ‘with clubs and Prongs’ until a group of soldiers fired shots into the crowd. Crouch ended his account by noting how ‘odious’ the excise-men were to the ‘Countrys about them’. The Royall Diurnall was even more celebratory. ‘People in divers Countreys’, the author noted, had ‘pumped shaved and served’ the excise-men ‘as Catter-pillers should bee that devour their Brethern, so odious are they to God and man’. Further, he remarked that if only the people had ‘a visible Army to back them ... we should soon have these devourers devoured, that now make themselves rich out of the poor as well as the Rich, as well out of the meanest beggar as out of the lately most flourishing King’. Crouch and his fellow royalist pamphleteer not only lauded acts of popular violence but, by depicting the excise-man as a pest polluting different parts of the body politic, they presented the excise as a national issue affecting all members of society.59 Their rendition of the ‘commons’ of England revealed a broadly based popular royalism united through their defence of traditional customs and rights.
Another instance of popular resistance exploited in the royalist press involved physical and symbolic assaults on several regiments of troop and the infamous Colonel John Hewson during the last few months of the Inter-regnum in 1659–60. Following the collapse of the Protectorate and the rise of the army-controlled Committee of Safety there was a large outpouring of popular hostility to the new regime. From street libels to massive petitions against the Committee, the new leaders faced a public relations crisis. In the face of such resistance the Committee attempted to enforce compliance through stifling public opinion. When word spread of an impending procla-mation forbidding the formation of ‘dangerous’ petitions, London apprentices mobilised to impede this latest threat to their political voice. The confronta-tions between the apprentices and the army began on 5 December 1659 when several apprentices gathered near the Old Exchange under the pretence of playing football. The youths had heard rumours claiming that the sergeant-at-arms, Colonel Dendy, would be arriving to read the Committee of Safety’s proclamation. As Dendy and his guard approached the Exchange they were met first with taunts, and then with violence. Along with other discontents, the apprentices launched tiles from rooftops as well as ‘great pieces of ice from the gutters’ at the soldiers. Samuel Pepys noted that the ‘boys flung stones, tiles, [and] turnips’ while hooting at the troopers as they marched toward the Old Exchange. Eventually the soldiers turned on the crowds and began to shoot at those attacking their troop from the rear. Between four and seven apprentices were killed, with an additional twenty wounded.60
During the riot, but especially in its aftermath, the apprentices’ animosity towards the soldiers was concentrated on a specific figure: Colonel John Hewson. According to Thomas Rugg’s diary, the crowd specifically targeted their agitation at Hewson and his regiment:
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Hee was a cobbler (the colonel) by his trade ... and [once] the aprentises got [it] they very well employed theire mouths. Hee had but on[e] eye, but they called him blind cobler, blind Hewson, and did throw ould shewes and old slipers and turnapes topes, brick battes and stones and tiles att him and his souldiers.61
Colonel Hewson, the blind former cobbler, became the symbol of the inefficient and haphazard army-rule first in the streets of the metropolis, then in the royalist press. After the inquest of the dead apprentices ruled death by murder – a major political victory that underscored the existence of widespread hostility to the army – a grand jury targeted Hewson as the guilty party. The Rump absolved Hewson from the crime; however, the disaf-fected took to the streets of London to articulate their belief in his guilt and to display their resentment of the army.62 The apprentices and other discontents set up effigies of Hewson made of snow in Fleet Street and St Paul’s Church-yard. According to Thomas Rugg, the ‘younge men’ gave each snowman ‘one eye … an old face and a haulter or rope about his neck’. In addition, they placed ‘many old shewes’ at its feet, ‘a horne on [its] head’ and wrote on its chest ‘This is old Hewson, the cobbler’. Samuel Pepys also described a similar scene in Cheapside, in which ‘a gibblet [was] set up, and the picture of Hewson hung upon it in the middle of the street’.63
Following these symbolic convictions and executions of Hewson in the streets, royalist authors venerated the youths’ active resistance to the army and the unpopular Committee of Safety just as Crouch had celebrated the butcher’s apprentice assault almost ten years before. However, by the winter of 1659–60 royalist propagandists were printing within a far less hostile atmosphere. These royalist representations of popular politics contained a more calculated and explicit attempt to fashion the actions of the dissenting crowd as firmly anchored by royalist sympathies. Such efforts would add to the image of a popular Stuart Restoration and a unified nation in the spring of 1660.
Although the royalist press would be quick to label these acts of opposi-tion against the Colonel and his regiment as evidence of popular royalism, the acts and petitions of the apprentices in December and January of 1659–60 did not clearly advocate a return to monarchy. According to the petition the apprentices defiantly presented to London’s Common Council on 5 December, their main grievance rested on the army’s unlawful monopoly of power. The apprentices demanded that either new elections be held or that those members purged from Parliament in 1648 be restored to their former seats.64 In a consequent petition, the freemen and apprentices of the city again urged the Council to ensure the meeting of a ‘universally desired Free Parlia-ment’ and bemoaned the army’s ‘barbarous Usage’ of the apprentices on 5 December.65 As Tim Harris has argued, these petitions and a remonstrance allegedly signed by 23,000 men contain no explicit royalist sympathies.66 Nevertheless, the absence of any reference to the monarchy in these petitions could be explained by the fact that such language would have resulted in
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charges of treason. In all likelihood the alienated apprentices were probably composed of a mixture of those who desired the immediate return of the monarchy, and those who remained sceptical of a Stuart restoration.
While some of the apprentices who taunted Hewson and his soldiers may have been motivated by loyalism, royalist authors crafted their accounts of the apprentices’ assaults on Hewson to promote a royalist agenda. The perversity of Hewson’s rise from a cobbler to a colonel, common councilman and MP was a persistent topic in royalist propaganda during the winter of 1659–60. Rugg noted that several ‘jeering books’ were dispersed during January 1660, including one satirizing Hewson.67 Throughout the 1640s royalist propagan-dists directed their scorn towards the ‘mechanic’ backgrounds of Parliamen-tarians, and therefore authors were able to recycle this tested trope in their critiques of Hewson.68 Satirizing Hewson’s former occupation, the ballad entitled ‘A Hyme to the Gentle-Craft or Hewson Lamentation’ asked its audience to: ‘Listen a while to what I shall say / Of a blind Cobler that’s gone astray / Out of the Parliaments High way, / Good people pity the blind ’. The balladeer taunted Hewson’s current predicament, stating ‘He’d now give all the Shooes in his shop / The Parliaments fury for to stop, / Whip Cobler like any Town-sop’. In a satirical pamphlet styled as Hewson’s confession, Hewson laments ‘[h]ad not I better have sticht my ambition to my in-sole & tackt them close to the Last, than thus at length to become my own hangman?’69 Both authors turned to the popularised caricature of ‘Hewson the cobbler’ to denigrate his actions in print, suggesting that the apprentices’ hostility to the Colonel also rested in the cobbler’s subversive rise to power. Other writers exploited the rumour that one of the young apprentices killed was a cobbler, thereby depicting Hewson as disloyal and drunk with his own power. In The Out-Cry of the London Prentices, the author writes purpose-fully from the perspective of the apprentices, who demand that justice be served upon Hewson for his actions. The apprentices argue that Hewson’s crimes are so heinous that he ‘spares no body, even as he killed his brother Cob’.70 Unlike the early petitions and remonstrance put forward by the apprentices in December 1659, these anonymous authors imbued these acts with a distinctly royalist agenda. Once again we see how certain royalist authors were able to piece together the various motivations of the appren-tices’ assault on Hewson and his fellow soldiers into a royalist mosaic.
Similar to royalist relations of assaults on excise-men, most of these satiric depictions of the ‘Cobbler’ emphasised the popular origins of the assault against Hewson. One pamphleteer devised a mock ‘Confession’ from Hewson, and presented him ‘in a melancholly posture with an Halter about his neck’, mimicking the apprentices actions in the streets of London.71 The author of The Out-Cry presented a satirical account of the apprentices’ ‘Arraignment and Execution’ of Hewson, highlighting their pivotal role in discerning Hewson’s guilt. In order to ‘humble his haughty spirit’, the apprentices charged Hewson with marching ‘up and down the streets’ and
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crying ‘old Shooes and Boots’. Following official procedures, the appren-tices also demanded that Hewson face public punishment within London for his crimes. They ordered him to stand in the pillory, where he was to remain until ‘he hath had as many rotten Eggs flung at him, as he hath sowed stiches in Shooes and Boots’. He was then to be whipped in a cart, placed in another pillory after having soldiers throw stones at him and have his tongue bored ‘for his wicked perjuries’. Finally, the apprentices declared that he be convicted and hanged at Tyburn, where he was to remain ‘as long as Shooe-making is used in London’.72 While these pamphlets condemned the actions of Hewson, their description presented the apprentices as the agents of polit-ical transformation. Using this grassroots movement to legitimise the old social order, authors of such pamphlets attempted to trace the popular origins of royalist resilience and resistance during the pivotal months surrounding Charles II’s Restoration in May 1660. This frequent use of popular political culture underscores the legitimacy some authors awarded to the actions and opinions of England’s industrious commonality.
As royalists continued to draw upon Hewson’s notoriety during the summer and autumn of 1660, they obscured the actual motivations of the apprentices in publications constructed to suit the new political climate of the Restoration. In addition to being a blind cobbler, Hewson manifested several additional grievances, such as his radical religious beliefs and his staunch defence of liberty of conscience. In The Lamentation of the Safe Committee, Hewson and Fleetwood discuss their decisions that have led to the ‘Hangmans-FAYRE’. After Fleetwood declared that the two of them had ‘Divilish failings’ in their alteration of the Church, Hewson replied, ‘Aye brother Fleetwood, so we had, but for good sums of money we would have endeavored too, to have altered the foundation of England’. Fleetwood also asked Hewson what type of ‘Churches’ he would have set up. Hewson retorted, ‘Churches, none at all’.73 One pamphleteer explicitly represented the apprentices’ anger toward Hewson as evidence of their support for the monarchy. In A Charge of High Treason, the author presents a list of the apprentices’ charges against Hewson which included the ‘most horrid and execrable Murder’ of Charles I, banishing the royal family and making it treason to proclaim Charles II. They also indicted him for selling crown and church lands, destroying the ‘Royal Arms’, and breaking the great seal of England. The pamphlet, printed in September 1660, manipulated its account of the apprentices’ hostility to Hewson to condemn his role in the regicide and the political revolution that followed. The apprentices’ grievances were thus completely restructured to suit the author’s purpose.74 Royalists depicted Hewson as a symbol of all the evil effects of the civil wars and Interregnum: tyranny, corruption, greed, the collapse of the Church and the reversal of the social order. To suggest that these were the motivations of the appren-tices’ hostility towards Hewson and the army more broadly represents a complete refashioning of their actions. Furthermore, their manipulation of
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popular grievances reflected the complex nature of the Stuart Restoration: a popular event widely celebrated by people with varied goals, beliefs, and ideologies. In the months following the Restoration, royalist propagandists would persistently churn out pamphlets that used the language and actions of popular political culture to solidify and legitimise their views for Charles II’s regime.
Similar to Crouch’s depiction of the butcher’s boy’s actions detailed at the opening of this essay, royalist authors clearly celebrated the triumph of the apprentices over Colonel Hewson during the winter of 1659–60. Despite their immediate exploitation of this event in ballads and other ‘street’ literature, ultimately it was the apprentices’ violent protest against the troops at the Old Exchange on 5 December that catalysed the propaganda campaign satirizing Hewson. As in earlier depictions of Colonel Thomas Pride, the pamphlet-eers depicted Hewson as a symbol of both the tyrannical power of the army and its crimes against the monarchy. The author of The Out-Cry also drew a connection between these two hated Colonels, noting that Hewson ‘had the same quarrel against the Prentices, as his Comrade Tom Pride against the Beares’ – namely that they were cavaliers.75 Detailing the unpopular actions of Hewson and Pride, such pamphlets not only attempted to legitimise resistance to the state, but to craft an image of a royalist commonality united through grievance. Crouch’s ridicule of Pride in his narrative of the symbolic rough riding of Fairfax was ultimately part of a larger dialogue over the state’s regulation of cultural and social practices. Royalist pamphleteers’ exploita-tion of Pride as an unpopular army official, a brewer, and a social regulator drew upon broad anti-state, anti-army, and anti-regulatory sentiments that did not necessarily reflect royalist sympathies. By expounding upon these grievances, royalist propagandists attempted to blur the lines between Pride’s crimes against the Stuarts – namely his role in the regicide – and his enforce-ment of policies that alienated a broader public from the Interregnum state. While undoubtedly there were intersections between popular grievances and royalist opposition, authors such as Crouch attempted to unite dissent to the Interregnum state under the umbrella of loyalism.
Although royalists were varied in their ideologies and came from all ranks of society, it is nonetheless significant that strands of royalist propa-ganda applauded and promoted an increase in political agency amongst these apprentices and other subordinate members of society. Furthermore, the positive reception and encouragement of popular resistance ultimately reflects the degree to which grassroots dissent influenced royalism as it developed throughout the Interregnum. In their newsbooks, broadsides, and ballads, not only did royalist authors such as Crouch attempt to politicise popular dissent by bringing it into a national discourse over proper govern-ance, but they attempted to elide royalist opposition and other forms of political resistance. Whilst popular dissent and royalist opposition frequently overlapped, propagandists manipulated popular grievances to meld hostility
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to the excise, to social regulation, and to the army together with royalist sympathies. Whether celebrating the pleasures and benefits of a cup of ale or demonising a tax which altered customary forms of collection, these strands of rhetoric promoted popular grievances as a means of restoring the Stuart monarchy. Examining the intersections between grassroots opposition and royalist propaganda not only deepens our understanding of political culture, but it also illuminates how the opinions, demands, and actions of ordinary people influenced the larger political struggles of the Interregnum period.
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay CAROLINE BOSWELL
Notes
I would like to express my gratitude to Jason McElligott for his insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
1 The Man in the Moon, no. 40, 23–31 January 1650. For Crouch’s position as author see Jason McElligott, ‘John Crouch: A Royalist Journalist in Cromwellian England’, Media History, 10:3 (2004), 139.
2 The Man in the Moon, no. 40, pp. 313–14. 3 Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Royalists and
Royalism’ in McElligott and Smith (eds), Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 12; McElli-gott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2007), p. 95.
4 David Rollison has argued that the phrase ‘the common people’ was increas-ingly used to reference the labouring poor in the 1640s. See David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolu-tion, 1066–1649 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 453.
5 For a discussion of Crouch’s social status, see McElligott, ‘John Crouch: A Royalist Journalist in Cromwellian England’, 140–1, 144–5. See also McElligott, ‘Edward Crouch (c.1622–1676): A Poor Printer in Seventeenth Century London’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, ns, 1 (2000), 49–73.
6 For an analysis of the significance of the traditions of ‘popular political culture’ during the English Revolution, see John Walter, ‘The English People and the English Revolution Revisited’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006), 171–82.
7 Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 10–46.
8 For the role of custom in popular political culture, see E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York, New Press, 1991), especially chapters 1 & 3; Andy Wood, ‘The Place of Custom in Plebian Political Culture: England, 1550–1800’, Social History, 22:1 (1997), 46–60; Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), particularly part II; David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People. For the idea that all derivations of royalism were ideologically conservative, see Underdown, Revel,
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Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985) and Lloyd Bowen, ‘Seditious Speech and Popular Royalism 1649–60’, in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds), Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 44–7.
9 See, for example, Underdown, ‘The Man in the Moon: Loyalty and Libel in Popular Politics, 1640–1660’, in David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 90–111; McElligott, ‘The Politics of Sexual Libel: Royalist Propaganda in the 1640s’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67 (March 2004), 75–99; Mark Jenner, ‘The Roasting of the Rump: Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration England’, Past and Present, 177: 1 (2002), 84–120; Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphlet-eers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004); Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989); Angela McShane Jones, ‘Roaring Royalists and Ranting Brewers’ in Adam Smyth (ed.), A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth Century England (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2004), pp. 69–88; Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘“Sing Old Noll the Brewer”: Royalist Satire and Social Inversion, 1648–64’, The Seventeenth Century, 15:1 (2000), 32–52.
10 Several Proceedings in Parliament, no. 17, 18–25 January 1650, pp. 227–8; Mercu-rius Pragmaticus (For King Charls II), pt. 2 no. 39, 22–29 January 1650.
11 For Pride’s profession as a brewer, see Ian J. Gentles, ‘Pride, Thomas, appointed Lord Pride under the protectorate (d. 1658)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22781]; Calendar of the State Papers, Domestic Series (hereafter CSPD) 1653–4, VI (London, 1879), 9; CSPD 1654, VII, 426.
12 Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum (hereafter A & O), eds C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (London, 1911), II, 1070–2.
13 London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), WJ/SR/1059 rec. 44. See also ibid, MJ/SR/1103 recs. 54 and 54, 22 February 1652/3; MJ/SR/1167 rec. 327, 27 May 1657. City of London Record Office, Session File 125, 8 Jan 1654/5; Session File 135, 26 December 1656.
14 A & O, I, 420–2.15 A Full Narration of the Late Riotous Tumult within the City of London (London
1648), Mercurius Elencticus no. 20 (5 – 12 April 1648); The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 255, 4 – 11 April 1648, pp. 902–3.
16 Perfect Occurrences of Every Dayes Journall, no. 127, 1–8 June 1649, p. 1088.17 A & O, II, 383–7.18 LMA, MJ/SR/1076 rec. 321, 3 December 1651; MJ/SR/1088 rec. 86, 18 June 1652;
MJ/SR/1085 rec. 144, 17 May 1652.19 Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the
English Civil War (Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 1994); David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion; Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002), pp. 130–2.
20 Bowen, ‘Seditious Speech and Popular Royalism’, p. 53. Bowen similarly argues that after the revolution, ‘challenges to local authority were thus altered in their political meaning and rendered distinct from earlier invective against king’s officials’.
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21 A & O, II, 239–40.22 Potter, Secret Rites, pp. 137–40. See also Jenner, ‘The Roasting of the Rump’.23 McShane Jones, ‘Roaring Royalists and Ranting Brewers’, pp.73–5.24 See Knoppers, ‘“Sing Old Noll the Brewer’”, 32–3 and passim.25 McShane Jones, ‘Roaring Royalists’, p. 73.26 Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a
Changing World, 1300–1600 (Oxford, Oxford University Press,1996), p. 77; Clark, The English Alehouse, p. 96.
27 Steve Hindle, ‘Dearth and the English Revolution: The Harvest Crisis of 1647–1650’, Economic History Review, Special Issue (2007), 1–34.
28 Hindle, ‘Dearth and the English Revolution’, 21–5.29 Clark, The English Alehouse, pp. 96–8. A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender
in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York, Palgrave, 1992), pp. 32–3.30 A & O, I, 274–83; ibid, II, 244–5.31 ‘House of Lords Journal Volume 9: 24 August 1647’, Journal of the House of
Lords: volume 9: 1646, British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=37111.
32 A Vindication of STRONG-BEERE and ALE (London, 1647), pp. 1, 4. See also The Brewers Plea (London, 1647).
33 Cavalier and Puritan: Ballads and Broadsides Illustrating the Period of the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (New York, The New York University Press, 1923), pp. 211–12.
34 Clark, The English Alehouse, p. 109; Martin, Alcohol, Sex and Gender, p. 33.35 Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters, pp. 77–8, 82.36 Gallobelgicus, Wine, Beer, Ale, and Tobacco, Contending for Superiority: A
Dialogue (London, 1658). The pamphlet was published in 1629 originally.37 Crouch’s use of ‘the man in the moon’ and his attachment to claret references a
widely known poem from the medieval period. See McElligott, ‘John Crouch: A Royalist Journalist’, 140.
38 A Curse Against Parliament Ale (London, October 1649), p. 3.39 Ibid., pp. 7–8; ‘A Hymne to Cromwell,’ in A Curse Against Parliament Ale, p. 4;
Knoppers, ‘“Sing old Noll the Brewer”’, 33.40 A Curse against Parliament Ale, p. 3.41 Gentles, ‘Pride, Thomas’, pp. 401–5; CSPD 1653–4, VI, 9; CSPD 1654, VII, 426.42 The Man in the Moon, no. 44, 20–27 February 1650, p. 349.43 Mercurius Pragmaticus (For King Charls II), pt. 2 no. 47, 19–26 March 1650.44 The Royall Diurnal, no. 2, 25 February-6 March 1650; Mercurius Pragmaticus
(For King Charls II), pt. 2 no. 47, 19–26 March 1650.45 CSPD 1653–4, VI, 233. Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals
(Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 157.46 The Rump Ululant (London, February 1660).47 Alexander Brome, The Rump, or, An Exact Collection of the Choycest Poems
(London, 1662), p. 302.48 The Last WORDS of THOMAS Lord PRIDE (London, 1659?), p. 1.49 For a discussion of the 1647 Smithfield riot and other developments leading to
the revocation of the excise on beef, see Michael J. Braddick, ‘Popular Politics and Public Policy: The Excise Riot at Smithfield in 1647 and its aftermath’, Historical Journal, 34:3 (1991), 597–626.
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50 See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Reasons for Misrule’, in Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1975); Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experi-ences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996); Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 82–91; Paul Slack (ed.), Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984); Steven R. Smith, ‘Almost Revolutionaries: Apprentices during the Civil Wars’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 42 (1979), 313–28.
51 John Morrill and John Walter, ‘Order and Disorder in the English Revolution’, in Fletcher and Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 157. For a more general discussion of the excise, see Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Boydell, 1994), chapter 4; D’Maris Coffman, ‘The Earl of Southampton and Interregnum Finance’, in Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum, pp. 235–56.
52 Coffman, ‘Interregnum Finance’, pp. 245–6.Coffman notes that the excise on manufactured commodities and imports merely replaced earlier subsidies and duties; however, the tax on alcohol was new and relatively profitable.
53 For a discussion of the discourse of the ‘commonality’ in pre-revolutionary England, see David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People, pp. 13–15; Rollison, ‘The Specter of the Commonalty: Class Struggle and the Commonweal in England before the Atlantic World’, William and Mary Quarterly, 63:2 (2006), 221–52.
54 See, for example, Jerome de Groot, Royalist Identities (New York, Palgrave, 2004), p. xv; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, pp. 31,62–3 and passim; Lois Potter, Secret Rites.
55 Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People, pp. 11–2; Rollison, ‘The Specter of the Commonalty’, 225–31.
56 The Levellers also drew upon the language of a united commonalty in their rhetoric. See Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, p. 171.
57 A Perfect Diurnall, no. 12, 25 February-4 March 1650, p. 104; The Man in the Moon, no. 45, 27 February-6 March 1650, p. 359.
58 The Man in the Moon, no. 48, 13–20 March 1650, p. 373; The Royall Diurnall (For King Charls the II), no. 4, 11–19 March 1650; Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, p. 216.
59 McElligott, ‘The Politics of Sexual Libel’, p. 91.60 The Clarke Papers, ed. C.H. Firth, IV (London, 1891), 165; The Weekly Post, no.
3, 29 November-6 December 1659; The Diurnall of Thomas Rugg, 1659–1661, ed. William Sachse, Camden Third Series, XCI (London, 1961), pp. 13–14; Pepys quoted in Harris, London Crowds, p. 43.
61 Rugg, pp. 13–14.62 Harris, London Crowds, p. 45.63 Rugg, p. 27; Harris, London Crowds, p. 45; Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel
Pepys, eds Robert Latham and William Matthews, I (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1970), 28.
64 To the Right Honourable, our right VVorthy and Grave Senatours, the Lord Mayor. The Most Humble Petition and Address of Divers Young Men, on the Behalf of Themselves and the Apprentices in and about This Honourable City (London, 1659).
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65 To the Right Honourable our Worthy and Grave Senators the Lord Mayor. . . The Further Humble Petition and Remonstrance of the Free-men and Prentices of the City of London (London, 1659).
66 Harris, London Crowds, pp. 44–5.67 Rugg, p. 26. The work Rugg refers to is Colonel Huson’s (or the Cobler’s) Confes-
sion (London, 1660).68 See, for example, Mercurius Elencticus, no. 45, 27 September–4 October 1648;
Mercurius Elencticus, no. 52, 15–22 November 1648, p. 503.69 A Hymne to the Gentle-Craft, or Hewsons Lamentation (London, January 1660).
Colonel Huson’s (or the Cobler’s) Confession, p. 3. See also Neil Durkin, ‘His Praeludiary Weapons: Mocking Colonel Hewson Before and After the Restora-tion’, in Dermot Cavanagh and Tim Kirk (eds), Subversion and Scurrility: Popular Discourse in Europe From 1500 to the Present (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001), pp. 106–25.
70 The Out-Cry of the London Prentices for Justice to be Executed Upon John Lord Hewson (London, January 1660), p. 6.
71 Colonel Huson’s (or the Cobler’s) Confession, p. 3.72 The Out-Cry, p. 5.73 The Lamentation of the Safe Committee. Or, Fleetwood’s Teares, Hewson’s Last,
Desborough’s Cart, Met Together at Hangmans-FAYRE (London, 1660), pp. 3–4. Thomason dates the pamphlet from August 1660.
74 A Charge of High-Treason Prepared by the London-Apprentices, pp. 2–5.75 The Out-Cry, p. 3.
Address for Correspondence
Dr Caroline Boswell, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Department of Humanistic Studies, 2420 Nicolet Drive, Green Bay, WI 54311, USA, email: [email protected]
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