ABSTRACT
In a bitter attack upon parliamentarian policies, personalities and practices, Bishop Griffith Williams not only recognised the importance placed upon propaganda, but also claimed to have identified those responsible. Naming the likes of William Prynne, Cornelius Burges and Stephen Marshall, Williams also professed to understand that parliamentarian polemic relied upon ‘trencher chaplains and parasitical preachers’, as well as upon ‘some busy lawyers, and pettyfoggers’.1 Williams was not alone in recognising the career trajectories of political and religious pamphleteers. In seeking to understand the nature of parliamentarian propaganda in the 1640s, a number of royalist authors pieced together evidence with which to contextualise particular authors. They certainly seem to have had the measure, for example, of Henry Parker. Contemporary commentators, as well as individual readers, recognised Parker’s role in a number of anonymous tracts, and they also appear to have been familiar with his personal history. Sir Edward Nicholas recognised him to be an intimate friend of Viscount Saye, and to have been involved in the latter’s political schemes, while the author of Sober Sadnes not only pieced together portions of Parker’s oeuvre, but also recognised that he was one of Parliament’s ‘great clerks’. Another author provided readers with a detailed account of Parker’s role as secretary to the Committee of Safety, and his tribulations therein.2 Such analysis ought to be standard practice for scholarly treatment of civil war literature.
