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Authors: Simon Schama
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light, the grip that the Howards appeared to have on the government of England seemed evidence of a Satanic conspiracy to subvert the godliness and manliness of the aristocracy, whose privileges were still conditional on its status as an exemplary warrior caste. To soldiers like Barnaby Rich, writing in 1617, the atrophy had gone devilishly far, as it had with the Romans. No wonder the evil genius behind the HowardâSomerset plot had been the fashion queen, Mrs Turner, since âour minds are effeminated, our martial exercises and disciplines of war are turned into womanish pleasures and delights . . . we are fitter for the coach than the campâ. As for the bishops, they too had also demonstrated the criminal worthlessness of their office by becoming party to infamy. (This was no surprise to Puritans, who made much of Mrs Overall, the notorious wife of the future Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, who had run off with one of her many lovers in 1608.) The king won some credit from the critics of the court for his evidently sincere determination to get to the bottom of the crime. But the fact that he had forborne from punishing the principal malefactors with the full severity of the law while condemning their minions to death seemed further proof that James was impotent to prevent the descent of England into a pit of pagan immorality.
In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, it became a received wisdom that the Puritans were, especially by the 1620s, no more than a small if very vocal minority in England. (It is much harder to minimize the significance of ardent Calvinism in Scotland, which, of course, knew as much about the Howard affair as England.) And it is not to be imagined that episodes like the Howard scandal suddenly brought a majority round to thinking of the court as somehow irreversibly corrupt. But what it did do was reinforce the conviction of those who were already committed to the cause of moral cleansing (and who were doing something about it in their own households and local towns and villages) that the band of the Elect would, by definition, be a select but zealous troop. For the moment, the godly had to concentrate on local purifications, beginning, as always, with themselves and their immediate family and extending outwards into their community. A few would come to the conclusion that England was so far gone in abomination that to create a Zion apart required putting the distance of the Atlantic between them and Albion-Gomorrah. There was, to be sure, no strategy about any of this. It was not âstage oneâ of some sort of timetable to create a true Jerusalem in England, but equally only the most myopic focus on the immediate circumstances of the outbreak of the civil war in 1641â2 could possibly write off the strength and spiritualintensity of the godly as of no consequence at all to the fate of Britain. Of course, the Puritans had no inkling whatsoever that the path ahead would involve an overthrow of the monarchy. But the agents of all such upheavals â in eighteenth-century France and early twentieth-century Russia, for example â are invariably zealous sects who believe themselves moved by some higher calling to a great and general scouring.
In the early years of the seventeenth century, the construction of Zion was a local business. But what the godly might achieve in places like the Dorset cloth town of Dorchester must have supplied for some, at least, practical evidence that with Godâs help his Faithful might yet prevail against the hosts of darkness. In 1613 â the year of the Howard-Somerset marriage â Dorchester, then a town of only 2000 souls, was ravaged by a terrifying fire, which destroyed 170 of its houses, miraculously taking just one life. To the Puritan rector of the Church of Holy Trinity, John White, who had been appointed to Dorchester in 1606, it was a communiqué from Sodom: a clear sign of Godâs wrath at the stiff-necked
In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, it became a received wisdom that the Puritans were, especially by the 1620s, no more than a small if very vocal minority in England. (It is much harder to minimize the significance of ardent Calvinism in Scotland, which, of course, knew as much about the Howard affair as England.) And it is not to be imagined that episodes like the Howard scandal suddenly brought a majority round to thinking of the court as somehow irreversibly corrupt. But what it did do was reinforce the conviction of those who were already committed to the cause of moral cleansing (and who were doing something about it in their own households and local towns and villages) that the band of the Elect would, by definition, be a select but zealous troop. For the moment, the godly had to concentrate on local purifications, beginning, as always, with themselves and their immediate family and extending outwards into their community. A few would come to the conclusion that England was so far gone in abomination that to create a Zion apart required putting the distance of the Atlantic between them and Albion-Gomorrah. There was, to be sure, no strategy about any of this. It was not âstage oneâ of some sort of timetable to create a true Jerusalem in England, but equally only the most myopic focus on the immediate circumstances of the outbreak of the civil war in 1641â2 could possibly write off the strength and spiritualintensity of the godly as of no consequence at all to the fate of Britain. Of course, the Puritans had no inkling whatsoever that the path ahead would involve an overthrow of the monarchy. But the agents of all such upheavals â in eighteenth-century France and early twentieth-century Russia, for example â are invariably zealous sects who believe themselves moved by some higher calling to a great and general scouring.
In the early years of the seventeenth century, the construction of Zion was a local business. But what the godly might achieve in places like the Dorset cloth town of Dorchester must have supplied for some, at least, practical evidence that with Godâs help his Faithful might yet prevail against the hosts of darkness. In 1613 â the year of the Howard-Somerset marriage â Dorchester, then a town of only 2000 souls, was ravaged by a terrifying fire, which destroyed 170 of its houses, miraculously taking just one life. To the Puritan rector of the Church of Holy Trinity, John White, who had been appointed to Dorchester in 1606, it was a communiqué from Sodom: a clear sign of Godâs wrath at the stiff-necked
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