Puritan Ruins

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Busy is a former baker from Banbury - where local people famously pulled down a market cross in - who has given up his occupation because 'those cakes he made were served to bride-ales, maypoles, morrises, and such profane feasts and meetings'. Zeal, we are told,. The representation of Busy's iconoclastic zeal reaches its absurd climax in his dispute with a puppet in the fair, which he describes as a 'heathenish idol' and addresses as Dagon, the Philistine idol that fell in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant 1 Samuel 5.

The satirical power of Jonson's representation lies in its employment of real Puritan arguments in a setting which itself is realistic but which nonetheless renders those arguments ridiculous through the incongruity of situating the apocalypse in a puppet show. In the Baptist Samuel Loveday compared Cheapside Cross to Dagon, but it is doubtful the contemporary listener or reader found anything comic in his words: Cavendish, like Jonson, associates Puritan iconoclasm with ignorance of history and the desire to eradicate 'antiquity'.

By accusing Puritan iconoclasts of adoring 'innovation' Cavendish in fact reverses the argument advanced by the iconoclasts of the early sixteen-forties for the need to reform English churches and English devotional practice. Loveday welcomed the fall of Cheapside Cross as a proper consequence of the Protestation Oath, which the Commons decreed in must be taken by all males over eighteen and which included an undertaking to defend the 'true reformed Protestant religion as expressed in the doctrine of the Church of England, against all Popery and Popish innovations'.

Spraggon's narrative of the development of Puritan iconoclasm broadly confirms the now conventional historiographical position that there was widespread consensus in the Stuart church until the Laudian emphasis on the 'beauty of holiness' and devotional ceremony rapidly alienated the godly. The first phase of iconoclasm in encompassed not only images but communion rails, painted glass and rich furnishings, which were 'lumped together. This iconoclasm was obviously distinct from that of the Reformation 'in that its targets were within the Protestant church, a church which was already supposed to have been reformed of such things.

The reaction against Laudian innovation, officially sanctioned by Parliament in the Protestation Oath and the order of for the removal and abolition of idolatrous images from religious places, seems to have commanded broad popular support, although Spraggon emphasizes that the paucity of evidence for the enforcement of iconoclastic legislation in the localities forces her to speculate on this issue.

The most enthusiastically godly individual in Spraggon's book, alongside Robert Harley, is William Dowsing, the Parliamentary commander who was given by the Earl of Manchester the brief of enforcing the August ordinance against images in the Eastern counties.

Dowsing's journal, which has recently been expertly edited, records a campaign of iconoclastic reformation on a scale that does not appear to have been undertaken anywhere else in the country, including London. During Dowsing's activities in the chapels of Cambridge he was challenged by one of the Fellows of Pembroke about the legality of his commission from Manchester.

Technically the Fellow was in the right but there was little time for legal technicalities in a time of war, and the academics were hardly in a position to prevent the army taking matters into their own hands. The notorious assaults on cathedrals during the sixteen-forties by Parliamentary soldiers can, Spraggon argues, be variously interpreted: The ritualistic aspect of more radical forms of iconoclasm is evident in the stipulation of the August ordinance that offending religious images were not only to be removed but defaced: The new republican government could hardly pretend that it was not that dreaded thing, an 'innovation'; but it immediately sought to assert its power and permanence by ordering that Stuart symbols be treated in the same way as Laudian and popish idols: Thus a statue of Charles at the Royal Exchange was beheaded and the legend inscribed: The extension of the Parliamentary order concerning the defacing of idols from religious to royal symbols continued the polemical strategy of identifying the Stuart monarchy with popery that had driven the latter years of the civil war.

Just as the iconoclastic agenda had widened to include objects and images previously accepted as part of the Protestant church, so the conflict had widened to include the very existence of the monarchy. Yet Spraggon's book makes clear that Puritan iconoclasm was 'largely a phenomenon of the s'. The Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry disappears from view at the beginning of In reaction to the arguments of figures such as the Leveller Samuel Chidley and later sectarian groups such as the Quakers, Parliament made it clear that churches were not in themselves idolatrous and an ordinance was passed in , which required church buildings to be kept in a state of good repair.

Both the Commonwealth and Cromwellian governments seem to have taken a less zealous line on the issue of images. An interesting example cited by Spraggon is the treatment of the royal art collection. When the Duke of Buckingham's art had been sold off in , those pictures that depicted the Trinity or the Virgin Mary were removed and destroyed. However the list of former royal paintings assigned to Cromwell at Whitehall and Hampton Court included depictions of religious subjects, while Colonel John Hutchinson purchased paintings that had belonged to the king which featured Mary, Christ and St.

Indeed much of the interest of Puritan Iconoclasm in the English Civil War lies in its unearthing of fascinating details and individuals, such as the glass painter Baptista Sutton, who worked on installing Laudian 'innovations' in the s such as the east windows in Peterhouse chapel and the New Chapel at St Margaret's Westminster.

Sutton reluctantly appeared as a witness at Laud's trial to give evidence concerning the restoration of 'idolatrous' windows on Laud's orders; he then went on to work for the London authorities in the early sixteen-forties removing and destroying stained glass, some of which was probably his own work. By the sixteen-fifties he was making windows containing Commonwealth arms pp. Spraggon also provides a real sense of the impact of historical process on the material fabric of English churches.

In Sutton was paid to assess the work required to 'reform' the east window in St. In the most offensive aspects of the window were removed.

However three weeks after the formation of Robert Harley's committee in , it was decided at a vestry meeting to remove all the coloured glass and replace it with clear glass - 'Protestant glass', as it was described by the Parliamentary newsbook Mercurius Britannicus. It would not be long before this image was itself regarded as another false idol.

Puritan Iconoclasm in the English Civil War | Reviews in History

Skip to main content. Puritan Iconoclasm in the English Civil War. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, laments the excesses of Puritan iconoclasm in her poem 'An antient Cross', first published in in Natures Pictures: Zeal, we are told, is of a most lunatic conscience and spleen, and affects the violence of singularity in all that he does. He lived in Hampton Court and had an apartment in Whitehall Palace where, as accounts of reveal, the Cromwells lived in some state. His determination to live in the manner of the Stuarts may have become slightly obsessional.

He had himself painted in court style notably Robert Walker's portrait, which makes Cromwell look every inch a Stuart monarch and lived with some of the finest surviving art from the royal collection, including the Raphael cartoons.

One of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit

He even appropriated the late king's red velvet-clad "close-stool" from Greenwich for his own use in Whitehall. Cromwell was not a great patron, but neither was he a frenzied revolutionary or iconoclast. He appreciated what was good in architecture and the visual arts and preserved it. He did not build during the s, but others did. What they produced was outstanding and, in certain senses, distinct to the decade.

Some aristocratic families who miraculously ended up on the winning side in continued long drawn-out building campaigns, as if nothing had happened. The Earl of Pembroke at Wilton, Wiltshire, for example, commissioned a spectacular range of state rooms in which were designed in the Italian Renaissance manner pioneered by the architect Inigo Jones in the very early 17th century, and which had become the house-style of the Stuart court and Royalist aristocracy before the Civil War.

The rooms were completed, probably to the design of de Caus acting with Jones's advice, and then destroyed by fire in By the rooms, which were richly decorated and of cubical proportion, had been recreated to form one of the most spectacular and influential classical interiors in Britain. Another design of great quality and influence created during the apparently bleak years of the Commonwealth was Coleshill House in Berkshire, designed in by Sir Roger Pratt for his cousin Sir George Pratt.

Its cool classical simplicity, bold and appropriate detail, subtle proportions, and rationally organised interior, became the model for countless country houses built in England and America during the later 17th century and throughout the 18th. But most intriguing are those houses built by Cromwell's leading lieutenants, for these hint at the evolution of a national style suitable for the new English Protestant republic.

Oliver St John was not only one of Cromwell's staunch supporters - he became chief justice during the Commonwealth - but was also his cousin. And in he began to build in the Cromwell heartland around Peterborough. Unlike Coleshill, which was destroyed in , Thorpe Hall survives, and is superb.

A London master builder, Peter Mills, was responsible for the design which possesses some of the bold simplicity, vigour and rational planning of Coleshill. But the direct influence of Jones and the traditions of Italian and Catholic court architecture apparent at Coleshill, where the aged Jones acted as an adviser are kept at bay with, instead, details introduced from the north European Protestant classical tradition.

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John Thurloe, Cromwell's Secretary to the Council of State, developed these ideas in his splendid and alas now long-demolished "castle" which stood in the centre of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. Built in around , probably with Mills as architect, the castle had much in common with Thorpe Hall and suggested the further evolution of a sombre north European Protestant classicism. Neither Cromwell nor his captains went in for church building, which is odd given the religious nature of the Commonwealth and the fact that many churches had suffered serious battle damage.

No doubt one of the problems was to find an architectural language which could reconcile the traditions of the Church of England with the more Puritanical tendencies of the age. The most interesting church built during the decade was Holy Trinity, Staunton Harold, Leicestershire.

It was a private initiative and, as if to avoid the necessity to evolve a correct new style for a Commonwealth church, was designed entirely in the old-fashioned Perpendicular Gothic manner.

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