Signs and Wonders in Britain's Age of Revolution

A Sourcebook

Abigail Hartman, Timothy G. Fehler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351031325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Signs and Wonders in Britain's Age of Revolution is an original collection of primary sources from the era encompassing the political, religious, and social tumult of the English Civil War.

With a focus on Britain in the seventeenth century and covering topics such as astrology, scurrilous pamphlet wars, witch-hunts and trials, and the execution of King Charles I, Signs and Wonders investigates published "strange and true" accounts that existed alongside more traditionally studied historical events.

Including fully edited and annotated texts of carefully selected popular pamphlets, the sourcebook is accompanied by guided introductory essays for each of the thematically divided chapters. With more than two dozen woodcut images, Signs and Wonders enables students to pursue in-depth primary source analysis of this rich period of history, when the supernatural was woven into the lives of those participating in or viewing the tumultuous political and religious events of the mid-17th century.

In this collection of popular pamphlets, battles in the sky, witches, monstrous births, and apparitions stand side-by-side with the major political and religious events that make up the standard histories of the era, allowing a fuller perspective on these early modern narratives and their interpretation (and exploitation) by the heated presses of 17th-century Britain. Signs and Wonders in Britain's Age of Revolution is essential reading for all students of early modern Britain.

1 Warning-pieces

Introduction

Before God sends any Plague to a Nation, hee first gives them warning, sometimes by Apparitions, sometimes by Visions, sometimes by monsterous Births, sometimes by Sects, Schisms, and devisionns, sometimes by Thunder and Lightning, unnaturall Tides, &c. and innumerable ways that the LORD can use to forewarn us of an approaching Judgment. . .¹

Pamphleteers of the seventeenth century evocatively called them “warning-pieces,” employing the term for a signal gun fired to announce impending danger. More commonly they were known as “prodigies,” which encompassed any number of unusual events and departures from the natural order. By the time this anonymous pamphleteer published his account of one such wonder in 1655, readers could have been forgiven for finding them commonplace: “What unnaturall Tides have we had within these few years?” the author himself asked rhetorically. “What monstrous Fishes. . . What lamentable Fires. . . What unusuall stormes of Haile. . . What incessant showres of Raine, whereby some of our Plenty is already wash’d away?”² And this was but a small sampling of the wonders that had proliferated in Great Britain over the preceding fifteen years of social and political turmoil. In the two decades that saw the outbreak of civil war, the execution of a king and the abolition of monarchy, the establishment of a republican government and a protectorate, and ultimately the reinstatement of a Stuart on the English throne, God’s warning-pieces abounded through more than mere meteorological aberrations.

Although such providential signs were by no means an invention of the English Revolution, the British—and especially the London—press in the mid-1600s was admirably poised to both spread and exploit them. A society of increasing individual and communal literacy, in which the practices of reading aloud and of summarizing a work’s contents in woodcuts allowed even the technically illiterate to share in printed intelligence,³ generated a voracious appetite for news that was only made keener by political unrest. Unfortunately for would-be reporters, however, the Stuart government looked upon printed news with a suspicious eye—domestic especially, but also foreign, which could “reflect on British affairs, and comment unfavourably on the king’s policy of non-intervention [in the ongoing European wars].”⁴ James VI/I and his successor, Charles I, both sought to limit the circulation and content of the emergent periodicals of the 1620s–30s, first by an uneasy license to a single printing syndicate, then, when political pressures from abroad increased, by proscribing them altogether in October 1632.⁵ For the most part, eager publishers managed to get around even these fickle censorship policies by changing the format of their publications (for instance, they printed “modern histories” instead of short newsbooks), and readers continued to follow events with keen interest.⁶ Nevertheless, it was when the Star Chamber was abolished in 1641 and strictures were removed that printers were truly handed the ingredients for lucrative publishing ventures: a failure of official censorship, an eager audience, and political crises that offered intelligence worth reading. The “frantic hunger for news” was fed by a multitude of obliging printers and publishers, and 1641 to 1660 saw a dramatic rise in the number of both regular periodicals and cheap, often sensational ephemera.⁷ As one later news-serial put it in its first issue, with some exaggeration:

Wee had (some years agone) no Diurnals of our owne affairs in England. We did live then in so blessed a Time, that wee were onely curious, and desirous to heare forraigne Newes. . . And now by a strange alteration and vicissitude of Times, wee talke of nothing else, but of what is done in England: and perhaps once in a fortnight, we hearken after Newes out of Scotland.⁸

“What was done in England,” however, encompassed more than troop movements and Parliamentary deliberations: and narratives of “strange and true” wonders—from witchcraft to monsters to ghostly armies observed fighting in the sky—existed without paradox alongside these more prosaic reports. Both were passed along in letters and through private news networks; both were recorded in diaries alongside writers’ prayers and reflections on the state of the world. After all, wonders were “strange,” and yet at the same time nothing new: to borrow Alexandra Walsham’s comment regarding popular narratives of divine judgment, the prodigy genre had “a venerable heritage” that stretched back not only to the days of the early Church but to the classical pagan past as well.⁹ Writers of the seventeenth century pointed to the comets and strange births that had heralded the destruction of Jerusalem in ad 70 as effortlessly as they referenced contemporary occurrences of comets and rains of blood in war-torn Germany, and the historical argument of the 1655 pamphleteer was reiterated so frequently as to become a truism: when a political or religious crisis shook a nation, and especially a nation with claims to godliness, it would be accompanied by “morbid symptoms” in nature and direct, if often puzzling, signs from God.¹⁰

Despite this long history, historians continue to debate how much credence early modern readers gave to the tales that appeared in the cheap “pulp” pamphlets of the wars and Interregnum. Authors typically advertised their narratives as “strange and true,” stressing the number and respectability of those who had witnessed the prodigy and would even include directions to the place where readers might view it for themselves. And yet patently false reports still crept in,¹¹ and even the appearance of scrupulous reportage could be mere “sales talk,” not necessarily credited by the buyer.¹² Some readers, indeed, may have scoffed at the idea of storms or comets as signs of divine wrath, and private sources suggest that even those who kept an eye open for such events were not always comfortable with interpreting them: Sir Simonds d’Ewes, for example, recorded many strange things in his diary, but when a lightning strike at St. James caused dire political prognostications, he sniffily observed, “I omitt these fopperyes.”¹³ Certainly writers themselves were quick to decry the unbelief of those who lightly dismissed their warnings; the prodigy genre abounds with authorial and editorial complaints about the hard-heartedness of their audience, who, they grumbled, too easily dismissed so-called prodigies as mere natural occurrences and failed to see in them divine warnings.

Yet this recurring grievance flows from the pamphlets’ didactic purpose and must be taken with a grain of salt. It seems most probable that the majority of readers were neither entirely credulous nor wholly skeptical but, while acknowledging the validity of marvelous signs in principle, accepted the veracity of some stories and rejected that of others on a case-by-case basis. This was all the more necessary since there was no official body for the regulation and verification of prodigy accounts, and therefore truth and lies could both be published freely (a fact which writers and publishers acknowledged and occasionally denounced); it was thus down to the reader to decide for him- or herself which was which.¹⁴

Their credibility aside, signs from heaven abounded, and the literature surrounding them came to form a substantial portion of the 1641–1660 “print explosion.” The question for scholars of early modern culture has been what, if anything, is to be made of them. Were they sensational stories designed to entertain the average (poorly educated) Englishman or woman, or sermons disguised under popular trimmings? Do they reflect a complex worldview informed by a deep belief in divine providence, or are they the product of, as one historian has argued, “unsophisticated, enchanted views of life and society” that ignored religious niceties?¹⁵ Can they tell us anything about the intricacies of the English Revolution, or are they now, as pamphlets in general were sometimes regarded by contemporaries, “small, insignificant, ephemeral, disposable, untrustworthy, unruly, noisy, deceitful, poorly printed, addictive, a waste of time”?¹⁶ Scholars were long inclined toward the second opinion, meaning that the popular narratives were either ignored or else marginalized as delusions, gross sensationalism, and the precursor of modern-day tabloids. Under such a paradigm, accounts of monsters, comets, apparitions, witches, and rains of blood are treated within the context of a progression from superstition to science, from the marvelous to the mundane—or, conversely, as symptomatic of a deep-rooted irrationality common to men and women of the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries. A stage in the development of the scientific revolution, or a cousin of the magazines at the checkout counter: in either scenario, early-modern narratives of prodigies and astrological portents are not deeply studied on their own merits.

This scholarly approach has changed dramatically ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations and Abbreviation
• Preface
• Chronology
• 1 Warning-Pieces
• 2 Prelude to War: ‘Fore-Runners of Destruction’
• 3 Civil War: ‘These Troublesome and Distracted Times’
• 4 Cavaliers and Roundheads: ‘The Divells Agents Still’
• 5 Christian Astrology: ‘Amongst the Celestiall Hieroglyphicks’
• 6 Sectarians and Recusants: ‘Recant . . . Those Dangerous Errors’
• 7 The Removal of the King: ‘Innocent Blood Calls for Vengeance’
• List of Pamphlet Locations
• Index
• Index of Scriptural References