K King or Parliament?

King or Parliament?

The town of Marlborough had its share of upheaval during the conflict variously known as the English Civil War, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, or the English Revolution.

Perhaps the last designation is the preferred one in Marlborough, as the town was predominantly sympathetic to Parliament, an allegiance still emblazoned in the Commonwealth coats of arms engraved on the town’s silver ceremonial maces. The burning of 53 houses and looting of town property by Royalist troopers in December 1642 only hardened allegiance to the parliamentarian cause.

The College holds an extensive and important collection of original printed material from the decades before, during and after these turbulent events, ranging in scale from folio records of speeches made in Parliament before its dissolution by Charles I in 1642, to dozens of cheap, ephemeral pamphlets issued by unregulated printers arguing pro and contra king or Parliament. There are also retrospective histories of the era, written by those who had fought on the side of the king; dating from after the Restoration in 1660, these offer revisionist accounts of the wars, repudiating Cromwell and his experiment in republican rule. Two small publications carry local significance. Both are texts of sermons preached during the war, the first by John Sedgwick, vicar of St Alphage’s, Cripplegate, but a native of Marlborough. In 1642 he returned home to deliver a sermon from the pulpit of St Mary’s in which he likened the country’s travails to the afflictions visited upon the Old Testament patriarch, Jacob. Sedgwick had long been a critic of the king, and indeed had his thumb chopped off in 1633 for preaching a disloyal sermon. Travelling in the opposite direction was Nicolas Proffet, the vicar of St Peter’s, Marlborough, who went up to London to deliver the fiery homily England’s Impenitence under Smiting. Proffet was a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, a group characterised by Lord Clarendon, the Royalist apologist, as ‘infamous in their lives and conversation, and most of them of very mean parts, if not of scandalous ignorance’. Richard Baxter, a puritan theologian, took a different view, describing them as ‘men of eminent learning and godliness, ministerial ability and fidelity; and the Christian world, since the days of the apostles, has never had a synod of more excellent divines’. Among the most spectacular of the Civil War books is a 1687 copy of Eikon Basilike, an anthology of the writings of Charles I. ‘The King’s Book’ became enormously successful in the years after the Restoration, but its appearance in monumental folio during the reign of James II betrays the political tensions of those years. The magnificent fold-out plate shows the image of Charles the Martyr. Engraved by Anders Hertochs in Antwerp, it presents Charles kneeling before an altar, his attitude deliberately echoing Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. The king spurns with his foot the world and his earthly crown, and looks to the celestial diadem that awaits him. The king’s hapless political performance is explained away by emblems in the background: Charles has valiantly tried to keep the ship of state on course through turbulent seas; like a rock lashed by waves, Charles has remained ‘Unmoved, Triumphant’. This grace under pressure is also reflected by the palm tree straining under heavy weights: the palm, a tree of victory, was said to grow stronger under duress.