ABSTRACT
On 23 July 1637 the congregation at St Giles’s Cathedral rioted in reaction to Charles I’s attempt at introducing a new Anglican prayer book in Scotland to enforce religious conformity. The move outraged the Scottish Presbyterians (Covenanters) and also Puritans in England. The same year saw the pillorying of William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick for ‘makinge, contriving, publishinge, divulginge’ libelous books, and the arrest of John Lilburne. The future spokesman for the Levellers had attended the public punishment of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s latest victims, and months later was himself charged with importing ‘scandalous’ books from the Continent. 1 Like their Scottish counterparts in 1637, the English who protested against Archbishop William Laud’s repressive measures took matters of justice to the streets. Laud, who revised and reissued the Book of Common Prayer, became a target of libellers because of the St Giles riot, the recent Star Chamber proceedings and the alleged rise of the ‘Popish Faction’, 2 for which the Archbishop was held responsible. Reviled in the numerous manuscript and printed libels that suddenly appeared, a very agitated Laud excuses an interruption in correspondence with the Earl of Strafford: ‘the Truth is, I have been so exercised with Libellings and Star-Chamber Business, and the Consequences which have followed upon them’; ‘a little more Quickness in the Government would cure this Itch of Libelling’. 3 But there would be no letup for years. At midnight, reports Laud on 11 May 1640, ‘my house at Lambeth was beset with 500 of these rascal routers …. Since [then] I have fortified my house as well as I can; and hope all may be safe.’ Still, he complains, ‘libels are continually set up in all places of note in the city.’ 4 Laud renders the riots and the declamatory writings – the textual revolts – synonymous as he documents his distress about the vexing and menacing nature of both. In some ways, the libels pose a greater threat than the ‘routers’ or common protesters, who presumably fail to penetrate the fortress; the ubiquitous defamatory literature would in fact help script Laud’s ‘doom,’ as William Prynne would call it in wake of the Archbishop’s decollation. 5
