ABSTRACT
William Dowsing, the ‘Iconoclast General’ for East Anglia, commissioned by parliament to the post in 1643-1644, was impressively assiduous in the records he kept of the thousands of images that he and his deputies managed to destroy. His journal is thorough, orderly and, in its sheer scope, remains shocking. For all that contemporary royalist accounts may have reported the iconoclasts as consumed with rage, there is little frantic about his operations; indeed they show a certain patience with local obstructions and the refusals of help from local clergy and parishioners. Dowsing merely commissions the work out to the local sheriffs. In the parish church of Clare, Suffolk, he reports that ‘We brake down a 1000 pictures superstitious; and brake down 200, 3 of God the Father, and 3 of Christ, and the Holy Lamb, and 3 of the Holy Ghost like a dove with wings; and the 12 Apostles were carved in wood, and on top of the roof, which we gave order [to] have taken down; and 20 cherubims to be taken down. And the sun and moon in the east window, by the King’s Arms, to be taken down’.1 At Brinkley, he tells us: ‘I took down two superstitious inscriptions in brass … and I brake 10 superstitious pictures, one of Christopher carrying Christ on his shoulders, and gave order for taking down 2 more in the chancell’. At Otley, ‘A Deputy brake down 50 superstitious pictures, a cross with a chancel; 2 brass inscriptions and Moses with a rod, and Aaron with his mitre taken down; and 20 cherubims to be taken down’. 2 Though largely a journal of fact, on occasion, Dowsing highlights the rationale for his actions, noting instances of evident idolatry, as when, at Frostenden on 8 April 1644, he records being told by ‘Mr Ellis, an high Constable of the town’ how ‘he saw an Irish man, within two months, bow to the cross on the steeple, and put off his hat to it’.3
